Apple has had support for eSIM since the iPhone Xs/XR, but this year it is going all in by ditching the physical SIM card slot for all iPhone 14 versions sold in the U.S. While models sold in other countries will have support for both physical and virtual SIM, Apple could eventually remove the SIM
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There’s never a dull moment in the cryptoverse. Blockchain, DeFi and web3 technologies continue to evolve rapidly in a world of wild extremes. How extreme? Consider these two examples. The Terra ecosystem disappears in a multi-billion-dollar crash-and-burn while traditional investment firm Andreessen Horowitz closes a $4.5 billion crypto megafund. Then you have crypto’s ongoing regulatory
Michael Seibel is synonymous with Y Combinator’s growth over the past decade. He has opinions on bigger batch sizes, a growing standard deal, competition, the power of venture capital and why startup founders should be prioritizing more than just a check after Demo Day. Seibel spoke to TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, co-hosted by Natasha Mascarenhas and
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
Investors don’t care about your product. Not really. Haje Jan Kamps 8 hours Investors think a great deal about a great number of things when considering an investment: How big is the market? How good is the founder-market fit? Is it venture-scale? It’s natural for founders to live and breathe for their customers and product,
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. Too many subscriptions? Many of us are feeling this way, and so are companies: In a downturn, cutting unnecessary expenses is more important than
Hello, friends! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly sum up the most read TechCrunch stories from the last sevenish days. The goal? Even if you’ve had a busy week, a quick skim of WiR should keep you in the (tech) loop. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up
Getting a bunch of bananas and avocados from your favorite 15-minute grocery delivery company at 3 a.m. might be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but some of these companies are finding themselves in somewhat of a cost-related pickle in such a low-margin business. While covering the recent news of Misfits Market acquiring Imperfect Foods,
This ETH merge, are you a baker, shaker, staker or maker? If you are into web3, the biggest news of the week in tech was not the massive Figma-Adobe deal. No, the leading story of the last few days — arguably even the last few weeks — has been the Ethereum Merge. The Merge, an
Meet Prediko, a new startup that sits at the intersection of e-commerce, fintech and software as a service. If you’re manufacturing items or even just buying and reselling finished goods, chances are inventory management is one of the biggest pain points when it comes to running your business. For instance, when you launch a new
Let’s pretend, for a minute, that you’re Apple. You didn’t create the smartwatch market, but you currently control more than one-third of it. You’re caught up in a yearly refresh cycle (of your own design). It’s not easy, but you’re used to it. That’s how your hardware — and pretty much everyone else’s — operates.
The biggest open secret in short form video has nothing to do with the algorithm. The secret is that you can’t get rich on TikTok, because even the most viral creators earn a negligible portion of their income from the platform itself. TikTok remains hugely dominant over the copycat short form video feeds that competing
Video of a sidewalk delivery robot crossing yellow caution tape and rolling through a crime scene in Los Angeles went viral this week, amassing more than 650,000 views on Twitter and sparking debate about whether the technology is ready for prime time. It turns out the robot’s error, at least in this case, was caused
One could probably argue that Floodgate, the Bay Area-based seed-stage venture firm, punches above its weight. The roughly 15-year-old firm has just around $500 million in assets under management — including a $150 million fund that it quietly closed in January — and it makes just a handful of new investments each year. Yet with
First Star, backer of deep tech startups like Plus One and Fyto, aims to raise as much as $40 million for its third venture fund, TechCrunch has learned. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, First Star typically backs robotics, blockchain, AI and machine learning-focused startups at the early stage. The firm has not disclosed a first close
Tech-talent marketplace MVP Match has raised €5 million ($5 million) seed funding from Stage 2 Capital to double down its strategy for pairing companies with talent from across the globe. The Germany-based startup plans to use the funding to build new hubs in Africa and Europe, grow its team, and relaunch its proprietary platform to
Escend is a U.K.-based startup that must have figured that scooters were too big, instead deciding to shrink micromobility even further (what are we calling this — picomobility?), adding a battery pack and motors to rollerblades. The company started selling its ‘blades today. The blades use regenerative braking, and have been designed to last; between
“Blade Runner” is getting its own limited series on Prime Video. Amazon confirmed to TechCrunch that the streaming service announced today it greenlit “Blade Runner 2099,” the first time the sci-fi franchise is getting a live-action TV show. Last year, Adult Swim made an anime series called “Blade Runner: Black Lotus.” The Hollywood Reporter initially
Last month, Varo Bank celebrated the two-year anniversary of obtaining its national bank charter. The move made Varo the first-ever all-digital nationally chartered U.S. consumer bank. The startup launched its banking services aimed at younger consumers comfortable doing all their banking online in 2017. It has raised nearly $1 billion since its 2015 inception and
In a town hall with some members of their community, Launch House addressed the harassment and assault allegations surfaced by a Vox Investigation earlier this week. The startup, backed by A16z and Flybridge as well as a bevy of top investors, said that an independent investigation is underway. “We’ll let the investigation speak for itself,
The voluntary carbon market remains a Wild West. There are few standards, a myriad of approaches, while buyers and sellers are crying out for clarity. And there are lots of different approaches. In tokenization there are startups like Single.Earth and Flow Carbon. In marketplaces there is CarbonXchange, Aircarbon. In afforestation there is Land Life Company
SpaceX and T-Mobile may have hogged the headlines with their flashy pre-announcement about Starlink connectivity last month, and Apple last week, but Lynk has been putting in the work and may very well steal their lunch with a satellite-to-phone connection that already works — with any device out there. In fact, they just got FCC
Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp is stepping into the film business. Earlier this week, WhatsApp announced its first original short film “Naija Odyssey,” which tells the story of NBA player Giannis Antetokounmpo, who was born in Athens, Greece to Nigerian parents. “Naija Odyssey” will premiere on Prime Video on September 21, 2022. The short film signifies
Will Ross and William Steenbergen were AI researchers at Stanford working on climate and atmospheric modeling and reinforcement learning, respectively, when they began to collaborate on wildfire modeling and hurricane modeling initiatives for the insurance industry. They were surprised to learn how big of a difference there was between what the data told insurers to
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Alex, Natasha and Mary Ann jumped on the mic, with Theresa on backup, to talk through the biggest headlines. We started with a look at the Figma-Adobe deal, worth some $20 billion. TechCrunch’s news coverage is here,
NeoCarbon, a Berlin-based climate tech startup that’s taking a retrofitting approach to scaling direct air capture (DAC) devices for uptake of CO2 emissions has nabbed pre-seed funding. Its focus is on developing DAC kits that can be installed (retrofitted) inside working cooling towers in the industrial sector — thereby, its pitch runs, slashing the cost
Autonomous and electric truck maker Einride is rolling into Germany, representing its first new market in Europe outside its native Sweden. Founded out of Stockholm in 2016, Einride has raised some $150 million in funding to commercialize a cab-less autonomous cargo truck, one that can be controlled remotely if required by human operators. It’s a
It may surprise the casual reader to learn that I don’t run a trillion-dollar multinational corporation. Like any decent tech writer, however, I’m more than happy to offer all my opinions on the matter in a very public forum. Having most closely followed hardware makers over the years, I’m often struck by one specific subject
Rephrase.ai, a self-described synthetic media production platform, today announced that it raised $10.6 million in a Series A round led by Red Ventures with participation from Silver Lake and 8VC. CEO Ashray Malhotra says that the plan is to put the new cash toward expanding headcount with a particular focus on Rephrase’s engineering, data science,