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Lightyear, a Dutch startup developing a long-range hybrid solar-powered car, today announced that it has raised €81 million ($81 million) as it prepares to begin production of its first vehicle in the coming months. While recent history is littered with examples of prototype solar-powered vehicles, the burgeoning electric car movement has so far been mostly

Hello and welcome back to Max Q. Happy Labor Day! Due to the scheduling of the newsletter, I’ll have finished writing this by the time NASA makes the second launch attempt of the Artemis I mission. By now, you probably already know how it all went down anyway! In this issue: SpaceX lands more astronaut

This February, Africa and emerging market-focused Nestcoin raised a pre-seed round to build, operate and invest in its web3 applications, including crypto content platform Breach Club and gaming guild Metaverse Magna (MVM). Nine months after its launch last December, the latter has completed a seed sale token round of $3.2 million at a $30M fully

A call between doctors can save lives. That’s what Docquity co-founder Indranil Roychowdhury learned when his father was hospitalized with a life-threatening condition in India. An emergency room doctor initially told him that there was no chance of survival, but then another doctor called one of his peers in the United States, and they came

What’s better than saving some coin in your wallet? Saving coin AND getting something for free! Book your TC Sessions: Crypto general admission Launch pass today and get a second pass for free! One general admission Launch pass typically costs $199, but our Labor Day sale gets you two Launch passes for the price of one

When it comes to touchscreens and in-car entertainment, Aston Martin has not only lagged behind ultra-luxury rivals such as Lamborghini and Bentley, it has trailed lower priced tech-forward models as well. Now, the automaker is preparing to catch up with a modern infotainment system that will be rolled out across its portfolio, starting this spring

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by

As the new school year starts, a fresh cohort of students will soon be hard at work finding ways to avoid writing papers and watching lectures they slept through, and just generally finding ways to waste the hours as effectively as possible. Fortunately the Switch is currently an absolute treasure trove of time sinks of

The chief executive of autonomous vehicle developer Aurora Innovation presented a swath of cost-cutting and cash-generating options to its board, ranging from a hiring freeze and spinning out assets to a small capital raise, going private and even selling itself to high-profile tech companies Apple and Microsoft. The ideas, all aimed at shoring up its

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Happy Friday! For those of you excited to see us in your inbox for your daily dose of tech news, unfortunately, you will have to wait until Tuesday to hear from us

Plus Snapchat layoffs, Clearco’s departure and big changes at Y Combinator Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This was a Live Week, meaning that Alex, Natasha and Mary Ann recorded the show on Twitter Spaces, hanging out with a bunch of the

Google’s decision to block the Truth Social app’s launch on the Play Store over content moderation issues raises the question as to why Apple hasn’t taken similar action over the iOS version of the app that’s been live on the App Store since February. According to a report by Axios, Google found numerous posts that

We’re nearly at the stopping point ahead of a long weekend here in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that the tech market has given up on making news. And the news is not good. In the wake of Snap’s layoffs and startup staff-cutting galore, you are likely not surprised that there is some bad

Six months after announcing $30 million in equity and debt, Boopos, a Miami-based lending platform for business acquisitions and growth, is back with an even bigger round, a $58 million Series A, again in a mix of equity and debt. The latest round includes $8 million in equity and $50 million in debt, Boopos founder

While the overall crypto markets have been in a rough spot lately, web3 venture capitalists have never had more conviction — or more funding at their disposal — to back startups and teams building in the space. The big question on their minds is whether tokens and startup valuations have bottomed out, or if they

NASA has finalized an agreement with SpaceX to purchase five more astronaut transportation missions to and from the International Space Station, further entrenching the space company’s position as the prime services vendor for the space agency. The new contract — for the Crew-10, Crew-11, Crew-12, Crew-13 and Crew-14 missions — is valued at $1.4 billion.

Few areas in tech today are as polarized as the blockchain gaming space. Legacy developers and gamers are calling play-to-earn games Ponzi schemes, while crypto-believers say games that incorporate “tokenomics” are the future for empowering players and creators. Before the debate is settled, the ecosystem around blockchain games is already getting built and funded. Los

California lawmakers have passed a bill that seeks to make apps and other online spaces safer for kids in the absence of robust federal standards. The bill, if signed into law, would impose a set of new protections for people under the age of 18 in California, potentially punishing tech companies with thousands in fines

Populus, the San Francisco-based transportation data startup, got its start as shared scooter mania took hold and cities tried to make sense of how infrastructure was being used by fleets of tiny vehicles. Now, Populus co-founder and CEO Regina Clewlow is positioning the company, which collects data on transportation fleets and shares it with cities,

Keyboard tech licensing startup Fleksy has expanded its SDK offering with an eye on winning over indie devs and app makers with an accessible, SaaS-like platform entry-point to its software licensing business. CEO Olivier Plante says Fleksy now has a dozen enterprise customers for its keyboard SDK — which offers a suite of features like

A Pakistani startup, which has taken inspiration from China’s JD.com and India’s Flipkart to build a managed marketplace of electronics products, said on Tuesday it has raised seed funding from scores of investors including PayPal founder Peter Thiel. Launched in March 2020 — just two weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the world — the

Initialized Capital was venture capitalist Garry Tan’s answer to a need first highlighted by Y Combinator. As a partner at the accelerator from 2010 to 2015, Tan spent time working with companies to better understand what they needed from investors after they graduated. “I literally built the seed fund that I wanted to exist for

Tahem Verma Contributor Tahem Verma is the co-founder and CEO of Mesha, a smart management tool for web3 startups and DAOs. The crypto bear market shows no signs of letting up, and it has already taken its pound of flesh from more than a few emerging web3 and crypto projects, not counting the ones it

Aston Martin is using its upcoming Valhalla high-performance plug-in hybrid to develop a playbook for its future EVs. Executives said that the 937-horsepower Valhalla supercar exhibited at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance on Sunday showcases lessons in driver engagement, visual effects and sound that could surface in its first EV in 2025. “If we get

Life is too short to listen to a 3-hour conversation between successful normal human Mark Zuckerberg and the farcically neutral Joe Rogan, so I’m taking a different tack: scrolling very fast through an extremely long transcript and picking nuggets more or less at random. Here’s what Zuckerberg thinks about various things. (These quotes have been

Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the keycaps on their keyboards. Chances are, they are white with black text or black with white text and that’s about it. Like with all things (mechanical) keyboards, though, there are seemingly endless choices. For a long time, the most sought-after keycaps were those manufactured

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. The bets are no longer just on Wall Street — they’re in your group chats, book clubs and that awkward shuffle that happens when everyone’s trying to get out of the door

Today is Women’s Equality Day, otherwise known as the day women were granted the right to vote. There’s nuance to the date, of course, as Indigenous women weren’t guaranteed that right in every state until 1962 and Black women weren’t allowed to vote until 1965. This story of delayed progress is still seen in every

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Is it Friday again? All week we long for this day, and when it’s here, you remember all the stuff you didn’t get done while you were busy daydreaming about Friday. Oh

Jack Dorsey might be out of the picture at Twitter these days, but he’s still waxing philosophical about the company. In a reply to a tweet asking about his biggest regrets (paired with, sigh, anecdotal claims about political bias on the platform) the company’s co-founder and former CEO offered the grand observation that he wishes