Social

Cruise is making good on its promise to launch an autonomous driving service in Dubai. Just a few weeks after the General Motors-backed AV company officially launched its commercial driverless operations in San Francisco, Cruise has sent two of its autonomous Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles to Dubai to begin mapping the city in preparation for

When I spoke to Roblox in 2020, the company was in the midst of rebuilding its entire underlying infrastructure. It had been running into issues with downtime due to insufficient resources to meet demand and needed to build a modern, cloud-native system to handle its growing user base. But beyond the nuts and bolts of

Hey, friends! It’s that time again. Another week has passed us by, which means another issue of Week in Review — the newsletter where we recap the top stories to hit TechCrunch’s front page in the past seven days. Sign up here! The top story this week was about a new set of documents detailing

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. We love a counternarrative angle these days, and this week’s choice is a look into why lower valuations may actually be a good thing for startups these days. In the past few

Yesterday was a big day for the crypto industry. A former Coinbase product manager was arrested alongside his brother and a friend, and charged with running a cryptocurrency insider trading scheme by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). At the same time, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a separate document on the

Disney+ made its debut at San Diego Comic-Con 2022 (SDCC) and gave Marvel fans a whole bunch of shows to look forward to. This marked Marvel Studios’ first appearance at the event in three years, and boy did they deliver. Marvel Studios officially revealed the first looks for all the new original animated series coming

A year ago, Instacart co-founder Apoorva Mehta left his role as chief executive of the grocery delivery unicorn and took on an executive chairman position. Now, as the company he started nearly a decade ago prepares to IPO, Mehta says that he will be stepping down as Executive Chairman and transitioning off the board of

In April, startup accelerator Techstars, in partnership with ARM Labs, a Lagos-based innovation program focusing on fintech startups, announced the launch of ARM Labs Lagos Techstars Accelerator Program.  As Techstars’ newest accelerator program in Africa, the announcement re-emphasized the expansion plans Techstars touted when it hired Maëlle Gavet as CEO last January. The Lagos accelerator adds to

Tesla suppliers traveling from Nuevo León, Mexico, to Texas now have their very own dedicated border patrol lane. Elon Musk’s electric car company, which recently relocated its headquarters from Fremont, California, to Austin, has struck a deal with the “pro-business” Mexican state to allow express access for Tesla and its suppliers at the Colombia Solidarity

On Tuesday, I covered Arkive’s $9.7 million funding round, a startup that is trying to answer the question: “What if the Smithsonian was owned and curated by the internet?” The company’s founder and CEO Tom McLeod was gracious enough to let me take a closer look at the pitch deck he used to raise their

After spending years in London, matching Kenyans in the diaspora with investment opportunities back home, and later on as a credit portfolio manager at Barclays bank, Njeri Muhia sought a greater challenge within Africa. Already aware of the growing startup ecosystem in the continent and the funding gaps that local founders face, she teamed up

Tesla plans to increase the price of its branded “full self-driving” beta software, the advanced driver assistance system that CEO Elon Musk has said will mean the difference between the company “being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.” Tesla vehicles today come standard with its driver assistance system called Autopilot. For an

Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: Questions about green cards

Google is expanding its photo and canvas prints service to Europe and Canada. Google has offered printed photo books in the U.S. since 2017, a service that started rolling out in Europe the following year. And then in 2019, Google started offering photo prints and canvas prints in the U.S. Starting today, these two additional

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. It’s hot all over the world, and even hotter in today’s newsletter. We’ve procured a steaming pile of TechCrunch deliciousness for you to devour. If you can believe it, it is only

As the crypto industry continues to grow, regulators across the world are looking for operational and legal frameworks to guide their actions to more effectively monitor the industry. The U.S. government in particular, which has been criticized for moving slowly on crypto rule-making in the past, has been looking at the sector with a renewed

Bloom, a Sudan-based fintech that offers a high-yield savings account and adjacent digital banking services, has raised a $6.5 million seed round. This investment is coming after the startup’s undisclosed pre-seed round last year. This financing welcomed participation from fintech giant Visa, Y Combinator, U.S.-based VCs Global Founders Capital (GFC) and Goodwater Capital and UAE-based

Robotic learning has quickly become of automation’s most vibrant categories — and understandably so. Programming a robot has traditionally required a lot of technical know-how, but what if there was a simpler way for non-programmers/roboticists to teach these systems to do what we want? Imitation and reinforcement learning are two of the most popular methods

Denmark is effectively banning Google’s services in schools, after officials in the municipality of Helsingør were last year ordered to carry out a risk assessment around the processing of personal data by Google. In a verdict published last week, Denmark’s data protection agency, Datatilsynet, revealed that data processing involving students using Google’s cloud-based Workspace software

Complicated supply chains mean that consumers in Tier 1 and Tier 2 Indonesian cities often end up paying more for goods than their peers in large cities, like Jakarta. KitaBeli is on a mission to change that, with its own distribution network and a direct-to-consumer social commerce app. Today the startup announced that it has

As NFTs work to retain mainstream attention, one founder predicts the digital asset sector will pivot in a new direction. “I think NFT collections will evolve as media companies [into something] like Disney,” Alex Salnikov, co-founder and head of product at NFT marketplace Rarible, said to TechCrunch. In recent months, major “blue-chip” NFT projects like Bored

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Spotting new trends is one of my favorite parts of my job. But I like it even more when several trends converge into a

Hello and welcome to a special edition of Equity! Today, Alex sat down Brian Heater, a long-tenured TechCrunch denizen, our hardware editor, podcast extraordinaire, and genial chap. He also put together a really neat robotics-focused event that we’re hosting next week. The event is online, and free, which means that everyone can come and hang

Big tech companies are facing increased scrutiny in South Africa for dominance abuse and anti-competitive behavior, just months after the country’s competition regulator, the Competition Commission (CompCom), started an inquiry into the conduct of online intermediation (b2c) platforms. In its initial findings, the regulator has established that Apple, Google, UberEats, Airbnb, Booking.com, and South Africa’s

Is it really written in the stars? This week, Bumble launched weekly customized astrology content in-app, with astrologer Aliza Kelly taking on the task of helping you find a star-crossed soulmate. Dubbed “Astrology Tuesdays,” Bumble users in the U.S. can go to the new astrology channel within the conversations screen in Bumble’s Date mode. There

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. Time to do the Friday dance! We’ve mentioned our virtual TC Sessions: Robotics event a few times, but we’ve got some good news for events fans. Hang on to your blockchains and

We’re fired up and ready to connect with the global robotics and AI community at TC Sessions: Robotics on July 21. The agenda for this online event is packed with presentations, interviews and robot demos, and our speaker lineup features the brightest minds and makers in the business. If for some reason you haven’t yet

Hyundai said Thursday it will begin building electric vehicles under its high-performance N brand created to compete with luxury sports cars from Mercedes-Benz and BMW. The automaker said the Ioniq 5 N, high-performance version of its battery-electric SUV, will launch in 2023. Hyundai also premiered Thursday two high-performance concepts — RN22e and N Vision 74

Meta today released its first annual human rights report, which — in the company’s words — includes “insights and actions from [Meta’s] human rights due diligence on products, countries, and responses to emerging crises.” The 83-page report, covering the years 2020 and 2021, strikes a largely self-congratulatory tone, defending Meta’s misinformation strategy while failing to