W elcome 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. Are VCs really sitting on record amounts of cash waiting to be deployed into new startups? I wish. But if it sounds too
Jio Platforms said on Wednesday it has rolled out 5G to 101 cities in just as many days as the Indian telecom giant looks to court customers aggressively with faster data speeds. The firm said on Wednesday that its 5G network is now live across at least one city each in 18 Indian states. Bharti
We spend a lot of time praising tech investors and entrepreneurs for their risk appetite. But why don’t we put startup workers on the same pedestal? Who’s taking on more risk: A Stanford grad who leveraged their network to raise a seed round or an immigrant worker who relocates to an expensive city for a
Carlos Antequera Contributor The facts are clear: Startups are finding funding increasingly difficult to secure, and even unicorns appear cornered, with many lacking both capital and a clear exit. But equity rounds aren’t the only way for a company to raise money — alternative and other non-dilutive financing options are often overlooked. Taking on debt
Kano Computing (“Kano”), the venture-backed company best known for its DIY computer kits and software for teaching coding and STEM skills to kids, is spinning out its creative software suite and online community platform as an independent business. The move comes as the U.K. company has been shifting its focus away from its build-your-own PC roots
Investment giant BlackRock announced Friday it is taking a minority stake in venture-backed fintech startup Human Interest. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Human Interest’s digital retirement benefits platform allows users “to launch a retirement plan in minutes and put it on autopilot,” according to the company. It also touts that it has eliminated
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. The team who went to CES is back at their desks. If you missed the barrage of stories — or simply couldn’t stay on top of them — Brian wrote up an
Sealed built a business around predicting energy use and getting homeowners to ditch fossil fuels. So, naturally, the company’s first acquisition is a startup that tracks energy on a granular level. Sealed did not disclose the terms of the deal, but said in a statement that scooping up Burlington, Vermont-based InfiSense would help it “cut
A meeting between TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, and senior European Union lawmakers that took place today saw the video sharing platform’s chief executive quizzed on a range of topics — including its preparations to comply with incoming pan-EU rules focused on content governance and safety (aka the Digital Services Act; or DSA), and its
I vividly remember my first Vive experience. It was many CESes ago. I was managing a different site. Budgets were tight and I had the most on-the-ground experience, so I went solo. I had a different kind of fire back then, writing 100 stories over five days and walking every possible inch of the show
This weekend, HBO and HBO Max will premiere the first episode of “The Last of Us,” a post-apocalyptic thriller based on the popular video game. On Sunday, January 15, it will debut on HBO at 9:00 p.m. ET and stream in 4K on HBO Max. The series will have nine episodes in total and follows
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Venture capital funding continued its slump through the end of 2022, and there aren’t any real signs things are going to pick back up for a while. That means more doom and gloom ahead for startups looking to fundraise. Many startups that tried to avoid raising a regular round in 2022 — or turned to
Jeremy Abelson Contributor More posts by this contributor Investors are sitting on mountains of cash: Where will it be deployed? What am I worth now? Jacob Sonnenberg Contributor Jacob Sonnenberg is a portfolio manager at Irving Investors and runs Irving’s Technology and Consumer Crossover Fund. More posts by this contributor Investors are sitting on mountains
What is going to happen to the 15,000 colorful electric scooters that currently spill across the streets of Paris? On March 23rd, their fate could drastically change as the French capital weighs up whether or not to renew licenses for the three scooter companies currently operating in the city. And this isn’t just going to
TikTok is making it easier for brands to work with its “megastar” creators with an update to its Creator Marketplace that now invites talent managers to oversee, execute and analyze the brand opportunities and campaigns being presented to their clients. This week, the video entertainment platform introduced a new Talent Manager Portal as a part
Life has been pretty brutal in hospitality over the past couple of years, but that hasn’t stopped Mint House from bubbling to the top with a series of tech-forward apartments. Under the slogan of “The comfort of home. The luxury of a hotel. Tech-enabled and tailored to you,” the company is trying to make being
Africa seemed to defy the global venture funding decline in the first half of 2022 after its startups raised $3 billion, double the amount secured over a similar period the previous year. However, the VC market correction caught up with the continent in the back half of last year, when ticket sizes fell and fewer
With our mysterious, unsustainable and psychological attachment to pets, combined with a boom in pet ownership since those lonely pandemic times, veterinary practices have come under increasing pressure. Pet ownership has increased (56 to 70% U.S. household penetration in the last 35 years). But, there are not enough vets. To meet demand, a vet currently
Are you thinking about getting a mechanical keyboard and asked a friend which one to get? Chances are, they said: get a Keychron. It’s basically a meme at this point. After making its name with affordable mechanical keyboards (with a bit of a focus for Mac users) — the company now has something on offer
DirecTV plans to lay off approximately 10% of its management staff, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. The layoffs will be in effect next Friday, January 20. The staff reduction comes as DirecTV, among other pay-TV companies, grapple with the continuous loss of consumers moving away from linear television and shifting over to streaming. DirecTV no
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), or integrated circuits sold off-the-shelf, are a hot topic in tech. Because they’re relatively affordable and can be programmed for a range of use cases, they’ve caught on particularly in the AI and machine learning space where they’ve been used to accelerate the training of AI systems. The global FPGA market
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello, dear readers! We’re back once again (like a renegade master) with a wall of great tech news stories. Plug in some headphones and bop your head to that song while you
TikTok is the latest tech giant to be schooled by France’s data protection watchdog for breaking rules on cookie consent. The €5 million penalty announced today by the CNIL relates to a cookie-consent flow TikTok had used on its website (tiktok.com) until early last year — in which the regulator found it was not as
It’s a strange week. Strange and strangely familiar. You stay at the same hotel in a nearly identical room to the one you stayed in for the last 10 years or so. You see friends and colleagues you’ve not seen in a while. Everyone is three years older and a bit worse for wear. A
There’s still nothing quite like thumbing the pages of a real-life print magazine, but the latest evolution of E Ink’s color tech is creeping tantalizingly close — at least as far as my eyes are concerned. You’ve heard it all before: A lifetime of staring at screens has worn out my eyes, leading me down
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai discusses his company’s $2 trillion valuation and how the tech giant will gain its next trillion. He also talks about the flexibility of Google’s Return-to-Office policy. He speaks with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Studio 1.0.” ——– Like this video? Subscribe to Bloomberg Technology on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrM7B7SL_g1edFOnmj-SDKg Watch the latest full episodes
Emerging markets tend to go in and out of vogue. First, Austin was the next biggest thing, then Atlanta and, more recently, Miami. Pittsburgh has yet to have its moment, but all the signs are there that it could be next. Having local expertise in the category every VC wants to invest in right now
Product folks and engineers know what they are doing, and by and large, they — and the companies they work for — have a disproportionate amount of power about how the world is shaped. Over a 13-week course called Logic School (delivered free, with support from the Omidyar Network), the school aims to teach tech
Elon Musk should take note of a recent major privacy fine for Meta before forging ahead with any plan to force behavioral ads on Twitter users in the European Union. To wit: In remarks today, following the publication of two final decisions against Meta by EU privacy regulators applying the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)