Startups

As college tuition increases and the student loan debt crisis continues, three former executives from language learning app Duolingo are building a new startup aimed at making college education more affordable and accessible. The company, tentatively named Outsmart Education (the name is not final yet), is headed by co-founders Daniel Falabella (CPO), former senior director

Partiful, the New York-based event-planning app that’s taking on older solutions like Evite, Eventbrite, and Facebook Events, has been named Google’s app of the year, the tech giant announced on Monday as part of its “best apps and games of 2024” list. The list also highlighted the top game, AFK Journey, alongside other category winners

AI agents are all the rage, a trend driven by the generative AI and large language model (LLM) boom these past few years. Getting people to agree on what exactly AI agents are is a challenge, but most contend they are software programs that can be assigned tasks and given decisions to make — with

Significant changes are coming to ABL Space Systems. The leader of the 7-year-old startup took to social media last night to make a big announcement: The company will no longer be focusing on the commercial launch market but will be turning instead to missile defense.  ABL had been developing a small launch vehicle called RS1

Last summer, a twin-propeller plane touched down on the gray-cratered terrain of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. A 28-year-old deboarded, ready to march into the Nordic parliament building with a bold proposition: “I went to Greenland to try to buy it,” Praxis founder Dryden Brown wrote in a viral tweet later.  On the phone with

Global travel continues to gain ground, with the World Travel and Tourism Council predicting the industry will cross $11 trillion in revenues this year. Consumers are evolving from the so-called “revenge travel” of the post-COVID-19 years, dedicating a growing share of their budget to a wider array of experiences away from home. Add AI to

Pony AI is inching closer to its initial public offering in the U.S., but as it does so, it continues to drop its minimum target for what it hopes to raise in the transaction.   Pony operates a fleet of 190 “robotrucks” in Beijing and Guangzhou and more than 250 robotaxis in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and

To stay competitive, some companies are scrambling to adopt AI, but they are sometimes unsure of the best way to integrate AI into their business. Illiya Valchanvov, co-founder and CEO of Team-GPT, thinks he has an answer to their worries.  In 2023, Valchanvov and Ilko Kacharvo, Yavor Belakov, Katya Vaptsarova, and Maria Valchanova launched Team-GPT

Starfish Space has closed a new tranche of funding led by a major defense tech investor as it looks to launch three full-size satellite servicing and inspection spacecraft in 2026.  The Washington-based startup’s Otter spacecraft is designed for two primary missions: extending the operational life of expensive satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) and disposing of

Carl Madi spent a chunk of the last decade working for Uber and Handy, an online marketplace for cleaners. “I spent a lot of time convincing drivers, handyman and cleaners, to join the gig economy,” he told TechCrunch. But when the pandemic struck, he saw many people lose their jobs overnight. He noticed that there

Netherlands-based food delivery company Just Eat Takeaway.com said on Wednesday that it is selling its U.S. business Grubhub to New York-based Wonder Group in a deal valued at $650 million — a stark 91% less than the $7.3 billion Just Eat Takeaway paid for the company just four years ago. The deal is expected to close in

Knowing how your cloud application will behave in production usually requires significant development and testing in the environment in which it will be deployed, be that AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or wherever. But this can be a resource-intensive endeavor, particularly with issues relating to latency (the time it takes to constantly send data) and the

The media industry today may not have a very favorable view of AI — a technology that’s already been used to replace reporters with AI-written copy, while other AI companies have scooped up journalists’ work to feed their chatbots’ data demands, but without returning traffic to the publisher as search engines once did. However, one

On average, Agicap’s clients manage 15 different bank accounts each. So the chief financial officers (CFOs) working for these companies sometimes struggle to make sure that there will be enough money in the right bank account to pay employees and suppliers across different subsidiaries, countries and currencies. That’s also why they turn to Agicap to

The majority of the aging population in Japan still prefers using cash for transactions, according to a recent report citing government data. In 2023, cashless transactions in Japan totaled 126.7 trillion yen ($885 billion), accounting for 39.3 percent of all spending in the country, said the Japanese government. The government hopes that number reaches 40

Running payroll is hard in any country, but perhaps especially so in Brazil thanks to consistently changing laws and extremely influential unions that make it significantly harder to get it right. Fernando Gadotti struggled with this as the co-founder and CEO of DogHero, LatAm’s version of Rover. When Gadotti left the company in 2022, after

President-elect Donald Trump has made a slew of “day one” pledges, including dismantling President Biden’s AI policies. While we’re not sure exactly if Trump will take action the first day he takes office in January, it’s clear that a tech regulation shakeup is on the way.  Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Devin

Monarch Tractor has laid off around 10% of its workforce as part of a restructuring that will see it prioritize non-agricultural customers, license its autonomous technology, and boost sales of its AI-powered farm management software, TechCrunch has learned. Around 35 employees were cut this week by the Livermore, California-based autonomous electric tractor startup that has

Exosonic, a startup developing supersonic commercial air travel and UAV tech, is winding down after five years of operation. In an update posted to its website, Exosonic said it was unable to find the traction necessary to continue operations.  “Although the founders and team still believe in the need/desire for quiet supersonic flight and supersonic

Seagrass punches above its weight. The marine plant only occupies 0.1% of the ocean floor but can be credited with supporting marine ecosystems of plants and fish, filtering ocean water, and capturing quite a bit of carbon. Seagrass is also being destroyed, due to climate change and other factors, with meadows reducing 7% globally each

Renting in Latin America is restrictive. Most landlords require three months of rent as a deposit and a guarantor that owns property in the same city to co-sign the lease. Santiago Morales, the co-founder and CEO of proptech MoradaUno, said this dynamic makes 40% of prospective renters ineligible. His company wants to get more tenants

By now, there’s hardly a coder in the world who isn’t using an AI copilot in some way. But using GitHub Copilot or Cursor.AI to ask technical questions and get debugging help could be just the beginning. AI coding may one day involve agents that can write the programs themselves based on a natural language

Swiggy has raised around $606 million from a set of more than 75 anchor investors as part of its $1.35 billion initial public offering, as the Indian food delivery and quick commerce startup prepares for the country’s second-largest listing of the year next week. The Bengaluru-based startup, which is seeking an $11.3 billion valuation in

EV startup Canoo has lost its chief financial officer and its head lawyer, the latest in a string of executive departures as the company continues to struggle to find mass adoption of its electric work vans. CFO Greg Ethridge and general counsel Hector Ruiz both resigned from Canoo on October 31, the company announced Tuesday

Symbiotic Security, which is announcing a $3 million seed round today, watches over developers as they code and points out potential security issues in real time. Other companies do this, but Symbiotic also emphasizes the next step: teaching developers to avoid these bugs in the first place. Ideally, this means developers will fix security bugs

Last week, OpenAI released its highly anticipated search product, ChatGPT Search, to take on Google. The industry has been bracing for this moment for months, prompting Google to inject AI-generated answers into its core product earlier this year, and producing some embarrassing hallucinations in the process. That mishap led many people to believe that OpenAI’s

Agtech unicorn Bowery Farming is shutting down, according to PitchBook, which cited internal documents and multiple company employees. The New York-based agtech company was known for building vertical farms that could produce crops including lettuces, herbs, and berries. Per Pitchbook, Bowery Farming has raised more than $700 million in funding from First Round Capital, General

DeepRoute.ai, a Shenzhen-based autonomous driving technology startup, raised $100 million from an unidentified Chinese automaker. The company aims to get its automated driving systems into as many vehicles in China before Tesla takes off next year, according to a Reuters report. China lifted certain restrictions on Tesla vehicles in April, clearing a path for the

National interest technology can show up in a lot of ways, like in data analysis and cybersecurity, as well as satellites and weapons. Many startups with dual-use applications are increasingly looking at the government as an attractive customer due to its wide range of use cases and the amount of federal dollars available.  And while

CoffeeSpace is on a mission to help people find partners for their startup ideas online. The startup, which exhibited as part of the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, has launched a social networking app that matches people exploring startup ideas and looking for co-founders.  The startup’s algorithm only matches candidates who meet each