Foxglove, a startup building an infrastructure stack for robotics, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Eclipse with participation from Amplify Partners and angel investors including Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt. The proceeds bring Foxglove’s total raised to $18.7 million, which CEO Adrian Macneil says is being put
Elenas estimates that 11 million women in Latin America sell consumer items via catalogs and door-to-door sales methods. It is digitizing that process so they can more easily sell from home. Founder and CEO Zach Oschin started the Colombia-based social commerce company in 2018 (and participated in our Latin American Startup Battlefield that year) to
Shortly after the COVID pandemic hit, inspiration struck Ryan Abernathey and Joe Hamman. The pair had been watching the “mass mobilization” of the epidemiology research community, Abernathey said. “Joe and I were both thinking at the time, ‘We wanted to be part of something with that level of intensity and urgency around climate change.’” Abernathey
Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft startup Joby Aviation is partnering with Delta Airlines to deliver “home-to-airport” transportation services to Delta customers starting in New York and Los Angeles — although it might be more accurate to call it a “neighborhood-to-airport” service, one that will rely on a network of local vertiports to fly
It’s been barely a few weeks since Google announced that it is shutting down its cloud gaming service Stadia next year. And now, the company has a new cloud gaming announcement: it is launching Chromebooks tuned for cloud gaming made by different manufacturers. The search giant has also partnered with cloud gaming services like Nvidia
Companies like Instagram are getting heavily fined (and dragged through the publicity coals) over how they have mishandled children’s privacy on their platforms. But if a recent report from Ofcom is accurate, maybe they are getting off lightly. The U.K. media watchdog is publishing research today that found that one-third of all children between the
Workmate, a Singapore-based on-demand staffing platform, has been acquired by Persol Asia Pacific, one of the region’s largest HR service providers. Workmate focuses on frontline and essential workers, and the acquisition will allow it to expand its HR solutions throughout the Asia Pacific. Workmate currently operates in Thailand and Indonesia and is expanding operations into
Founded 10 years ago, Konvy is now Thailand’s top beauty e-commerce platform. It plans to accelerate its omnichannel and international distribution with a new Series A of $10 million from Insignia Ventures Partners. Konvy was launched in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur QingGui Huang, who previously managed fashion e-commerce platforms in China. It now works with
While studying at the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford, a group of graduates noticed how difficult it was to get data and information on Africa’s largest economy and their home country, Nigeria. Each had different yet complementary skills — Michael Famoroti, an economist; Bode Ogunlana, a software engineer; Abdul Abdulrahim, a
Jul.17 — Elon Musk has had a lot to show off over the past 25 years, including an early online bank, solar roof tiles, a tunnel-digging machine, an electric car, a reusable rocket, and even the occasional electric car riding a rocket. He may have just topped them all with the help of a tubby brown-and-white
We’re on the home stretch, startup fans. TechCrunch Disrupt kicks off in less than 10 days and runs from October 18–20. This message goes out to all the last-minute decision-makers. It’s the final week you can save serious cheddar on a Disrupt pass. It’s go time. Buy your pass before October 14 at 11:59 p.m.
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. Beep boop, here we go again with another exciting week in tech. Next week is Disrupt, so the TechCrunch Slack watercooler is full of sartorial advice, much to our surprise and confusion.
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over whether the world will get its act together enough to prevent catastrophic warming. There’s certainly a case to be made there — we’ve spent the last several decades kicking the can down the road at every opportunity. Well, here we are again, with the can again before us
AgriWebb is on a mission to help livestock producers feed the world efficiently, profitably and sustainably by providing its comprehensive, ground-truth database for beef production worldwide. The Australian startup, which builds a livestock management platform for ranchers and farmers, wants to digitize farm records and the meat production process from the cow to the consumer
YouTube is making it easier for creators to direct viewers to their channels. The company today announced “handles,” a new way for creators to identify their channel with an @username format in order to interact with their viewers across YouTube Shorts, channel pages, in video descriptions, in comments and more. These handles will be made
An increasing percentage of the code that companies use to develop software is open source. In a 2018 survey by Tidelift, a software supply chain management platform, 92% of professional software developers said that their apps contained open source libraries. While that’s a positive trend — open source confers a wealth of benefits, not least
Jonathan Martinez Contributor Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who’s helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups. More posts by this contributor Why growth activation matters To optimize for growth, study your down-funnel metrics Who knew that “growth hacking,” a term coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis,
Clerkenwell Health, a psychedelic-specialist clinical research organisation, has raised £2.1m in seed funding, bringing the total to date up to £2.5m, which will be used to get the London startup-based fully operational. Investors include Lionheart Ventures, Convergence Partners, and Exceptional Ventures, which was co-founded by Paolo Pio (former MD Europe at Joyance Partners) and Matt
Samsung has confirmed the first third-party smart TV makers to ship with its Tizen operating system (OS), with several manufacturers preparing to launch Tizen-powered TVs this year across Europe and Australasia. Tizen, for the uninitiated, is a Linux-based OS hosted by the Linux Foundation for more than a decade, though Samsung has been the primary
When Florida-based Chetu hired a telemarketer in the Netherlands, the company demanded the employee turn on his webcam. The employee wasn’t happy with being monitored “for 9 hours per day,” in a program that included screen-sharing and streaming his webcam. When he refused, he was fired, according to public court documents (in Dutch), for what
Automation Anywhere, one of the best-funded RPA providers with over $1 billion capital raised to date, went the debt route this week, securing a $200 million loan from Silicon Valley Bank, SVB Capital and Hercules Capital. Debt raises aren’t necessarily a bad thing — they’re a useful tool, particularly for companies with high annual recurring
In February, I received a letter from Chrysler saying that our 2017 Pacifica Hybrid was subject to a new recall. Several of the minivans had inexplicably caught fire and, given the evidence, the automaker suspected it might have to do with the high-voltage battery pack. The recall notice told us not to recharge the vehicle
Square Off charmed us at CES 2019, when the startup showed off its robotic chess board at our Hardware Battlefield event. Watching the pieces move on their own, courtesy of underlying AI, grabbed the attention of a jaded crowd of showgoers. This morning, it takes the next step in the startup lifecycle, as Bay Area-based
Cloudflare last week announced a $1.25 billion funding program for startups that build on its software, Cloudflare Workers. But this isn’t a corporate venture fund and that sum is not company money. Rather, it’s an initiative in which the cloud infrastructure company curates a group of its startup customers and presents them to venture capitalists,
Hello and welcome back to The Exchange’s weekend missive. If you are reading this on TechCrunch and want to get the letter in your inbox, head here. Your regular host Anna Heim is off this week on a much-deserved vacation, so I’m stepping back into my old role as newsletter scribe. It’s good fun to
Google gets into the smartwatch game for real with the $350 Wear OS device Brian Heater @bheater / 3 days 2021 was the Pixel’s year. The Pixel 6 saw Google finally getting its act together and introducing a flagship that could rival the likes of Samsung and Apple. But while the line is getting a
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. I think it took maybe three days after I roasted our rather dry M&A season for the news cycle to prove me wrong. This week we saw Naver acquire Poshmark, Duolingo buy
Hi all! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly sum up some of the most read TechCrunch stories from the past seven days. The goal? Even when you’re swamped, a quick skim of WiR on Saturday morning should give you a pretty good understanding of what happened in tech this week. Want
The Pixel 6 represented a rebirth for Google. After several generations of trying — and mostly failing — to distinguish itself as a late-comer to the smartphone game, the device finally had a breakout season. Under a new guard, Google’s longstanding attempts to cut corners were out, and the company had finally delivered a premium
In the early days of a startup, everyone is on the same page. But there’s no way to know how well a founding team will get along by the time a company reaches maturity. Set aside the romantic notion that startup teams consist of visionary mavericks who are building the future in real time; they’re