The premiere of the “Game of Thrones“ prequel “House of the Dragon” on Sunday made history for HBO and HBO Max and drew the largest audience for any new HBO original series, with 9.986 million viewers across linear and streaming in the U.S. Warner Bros. Discovery announced the news on Monday, citing that the premiere
Dubai-based Zywa, a neobank for Gen Z, plans to fuel its growth in the United Arabs Emirates (U.A.E), and to kick-start its expansion to Saudi Arabia and Egypt after raising $3 million seed funding at over $30 million (110 million AED) valuation. The new funding follows the $1 million pre-seed backing it secured in February
Indian crypto exchange WazirX’s co-founder Nischal Shetty is in advanced stages of talks to raise a maiden funding round for his new venture, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Shetty is raising $20 million to $30 million in a seed financing round for his blockchain startup Shardeum, sources said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations
Telegram founder Pavel Durov said Monday that he wants to integrate web3 into the messaging app. Durov said on his Telegram channel that he was impressed by the TON project — an independent project not affiliated with Telegram — and how it is used for domain name/wallet auctions. He noted that Telegram can replicate TON’s
More funding for sustainability reporting: Sweden’s Worldfavor, an early mover platform focused on building digital infrastructure to support supply chain transparency and cater to organizations’ ESG (environmental, social, governance) reporting needs, has bagged €10.2 million in Series A funding to step on the growth gas. The Series A was led by SEB Private Equity, which
Dutchie today is announcing a new cannabis point of sale platform, including a dual-screen terminal for dispensaries. Called Dutchie POS, this comes just weeks after the company announced a new payment platform, Dutchie Pay. With Dutchie POS and Dutchie Pay, the cannabis tech company is now offering cannabis operators one of the most comprehensive platforms
Russian search giant Yandex has finalized the sale of its two flagship media properties to local rival VK, owner of the eponymous social network. The deal to sell the products, Yandex’s algorithmically sorted news aggregator (News) and blogging recommender platform (Zen), was inked back in April. But today’s binding agreement goes further than that —
Maju Kuruvilla Contributor Maju Kuruvilla is the CEO of Bolt. Prior to Bolt, Maju was the VP and GM for Amazon’s Global Logistics, managing its business unit spanning business, product, engineering and operations. What is the biggest and most obvious problem facing e-commerce retailers? Checkout. By that, I mean customers who find their way to
Imagine building some of the most sophisticated hardware-driven technologies in the world — spacecraft, drones or autonomous vehicles. Then imagine being unable to easily share your data to different teams, having to use clunky user interfaces and relying on a single person manually inputting data in an Excel spreadsheet to bottom-line your project. “You’d be
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. Hello, Crunch Bunch! Have you remembered to drink water today? You can’t live off coffee and Red Bull alone. Look after yourself, you good-looking but dehydrated startup nerds. We care about you,
“Build it or else.” That was the gist of U.S. Senator Joe Manchin’s discussions with the automotive industry regarding EV tax credits. Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, had grown increasingly concerned about China’s dominance of the lithium-ion battery market, and he told car companies that they needed to move vast swaths of the global
Black Girls Code filed a lawsuit Monday alleging its founder Kimberly Bryant, who was ousted from her role as a board member and chief executive earlier this month, has “hijacked” the nonprofit’s website. The heart of the complaint, which was filed with the U.S District Court for the Northern District of California, is over control
Apple is introducing a handful of new ways to support U.S. National Parks. The company announced today it’s continuing its annual National Park donation initiative that allows Apple customers to send money to the National Park Foundation in several ways. Starting today, August 21 and running through August 28, the company will donate $10 to
For early-stage startups looking to hire new talent, it’s not enough to make one-off decisions about pay as each new employee comes on board. Constructing a coherent philosophy around compensation is crucial for a company to stay consistent in the long term and provide transparency to employees — essentially, coming up with the “why” and
Over the weekend, CNBC reported a set of revenue and profit figures from FTX, a global cryptocurrency exchange that raised a mountain of capital in the last year and is currently expanding its product remit. Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been a key player in the crypto market in recent months, involved in several deals
This week on the TechCrunch Podcast Anita Ramaswamy is back to talk about Adam Neumann’s latest Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup and Amanda Silberling joins us to talk about teens flocking away from Facebook. And as always, we’ll catch you up on the tech news you may have missed this week. Articles from the episode: Other news from
Fresh produce is an important cornerstone of a healthy diet, and if Click & Grow gets a say, it wants to make that easier by inviting you to grow your own food, right at home. The company today launches the Click & Grow 25, which the company says is designed “to provide a farmers’ market
Ryan Neu Contributor Ryan Neu is the founder and CEO of Vendr, a SaaS purchase platform. Previously, he was a B2B SaaS sales leader at both InVision and HubSpot. Companies are hitting a considerable inflection point when it comes to how they assemble and manage their software tech stack. On one hand, the storm of
It looks like Miko’s participation in the Disney Accelerator is paying off in a big way, as the company is bringing Disney and Pixar characters to its Miko 3 robot for kids. The company launched its Disney collaboration today, available to customers in more than 140 countries. The funky little robot can play animated story
Earlier this year, reports emerged that YouTube would soon add a dedicated podcasts homepage — a signal the company was getting more serious about its investments in podcasts and the potential ad revenue they could deliver. Today, YouTube confirmed to TechCrunch the new podcasts destination is now live for U.S. users, after the URL was
An Indian upstart, co-founded by a group of journalists, that seeks to disrupt how people follow news and what they consume has raised funds as it prepares to accelerate its growth and broaden its offering. The Signal is aiming to serve a need for the modern pace of life where everybody is busy, said Dinesh
Socar, South Korea’s largest car-sharing startup, tumbled in its Seoul stock market debut Monday even after pricing shares below the bottom end of a marketed range. Shares of Socar rose 1.25% from its IPO price of 28,000 won ($21.10) in the initial minutes of the debut, before tumbling to 26,300 won and giving the firm
Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia disclosed 15 early-stage startups it has selected for the seventh cohort of its accelerator program Surge, pushing ahead with new investments even as the deal activity has considerably slowed in the region. Since its launch in March 2019, the accelerator has helped its participating startups collectively raise over $1.7
A nonexhaustive list of why Marc Andreessen and Adam Neumann have misread America’s housing problems When Marc Andreessen announced that he was sinking $350 million of a16z investors’ money into a new venture by WeWork co-founder and former CEO Adam Neumann, plenty of jaws dropped. For one, there was the massive sum and equally massive
Tesla will increase the price of its “full self-driving” beta software, the automaker’s advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), in North America to $15,000 on September 5, CEO Elon Musk tweeted Sunday. The celebrity executive said the current price of $12,000 will be honored for orders made before September 5, but delivered later. Musk also tweeted
YouTube removed two videos from its platform showing Tesla drivers using their own children to conduct vehicle safety tests. The tests were meant to prove that Tesla’s Autopilot and “full self-driving” (FSD) beta software — the automaker’s advanced driver assistance systems which have automated driving features but do not enable the cars to drive themselves
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 the previous
In its five years as a standalone automaker, Polestar has placed into production two vehicles and announced the delivery schedule of four additional vehicles. The latest, the Polestar 6, is an electric roadster that’s due to hit the road in 2026. It’s an impressive pace for a new company. While some of that success can
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by
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. It’s been a week of people trying to make sense of what’s happening in tech. If you’ve been compartmentalizing: Cheers! Now let me walk you through what’s been going on. On Monday,