Persistent Energy has raised $10 million Series C funding to grow its clean-tech venture building business in Africa, in a round led by Kyuden International Corporation, a subsidiary of the Japanese Kyushu Electric Power Group, and Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Africa Investments. The equity round also saw the participation of six new private investors, high
TikTok’s attempt to switch legal basis for targeting advertising at users in Europe looks to be in trouble after Italy’s data protection watchdog stepped in and issued a warning of legal inadequacy just days ahead of the planned privacy policy change. The user-generated video sharing platform attracted attention from privacy experts last month when it
Google has responded to dating app maker Match Group’s antitrust lawsuit in a scathing new court filing which refers to Match’s original complaint as a “cynical attempt” to take advantage of Google Play’s distribution platform and other tools while attempting to sidestep Google’s fees. The two tech giants have been battling it out in court
Despite the venture capital asset class sitting on historic levels of dry powder, many investors aren’t deploying it, leaving their portfolio companies scrambling for financing. Venture funding has been declining across the board this year, but the tone of how this temporary pullback could impact companies is starting to change. The mood at the beginning
As the market swoons, venture capital firms continue to announce new funds. TechCrunch reporters covered five of these more in-depth Tuesday, as you will see below. Meanwhile, I corresponded with three firms about their funds and any concerns that limited partners had brought up during the fundraising stage. Haris Khurshid, general partner at Chalo Ventures,
The $2.5 million Rimac Nevera all-electric hypercar has begun rolling off the assembly line, launching on the world stage as the fastest production car and an emblem of the Croatian EV maker’s advanced battery technology. The sleek, low-slung 1,914-horsepower two-seater is the first model to test the strength of the November merger between French supercar
The fashion industry has come under fire of late for its outsize impact on the environment. From cradle to grave, it accounts for between 4% and 10% of the world’s carbon emissions and around 20% of the world’s wastewater. Only about 15% of the clothes in the U.S. are recycled, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates.
Twitter followed through on its promise to force Elon Musk to buy the company on Tuesday, suing the SpaceX and Tesla CEO in a Delaware court. The company’s board doubled down last week after Musk’s legal team sent Twitter a letter stating his intentions to withdraw from the deal. Twitter board chairman Bret Taylor tweeted
Global venture capital firm Cathay Innovation has announced its third fund, targeting €1 billion ($1.05 billion) at a broad gamut of companies and technologies around the world. With Fund III, Cathay Innovation launches what will surely be one of the largest multi-stage VC funds to emerge from Europe once it closes, encompassing series A, B, and
“They told me it’s the kanji character for ‘love,’” Carl Pei explains, “but I call bullshit on that. I can’t see it.” The Gliph design is — by far — the most striking element of the Phone (1)’s design. It’s a series of 900 LEDs spread out and overlaid with a diffuser to create a
The enterprise is bullish on AI systems that can understand and generate text, known as language models. According to a survey by John Snow Labs, 60% of tech leaders’ budgets for AI language technologies increased by at least 10% in 2020. And one vendor, OpenAI, says that its premiere language model, GPT-3, is being used
C2 Ventures doesn’t invest in crypto, Web 3 or consumer companies, and it stays away from Silicon Valley startups. Instead, the New York City-based venture firm focuses on disruption in legacy industries. For example, one of its portfolio companies is a robotics startup that cleans commercial bathrooms. The firm announced today it has closed its
Industrial robots are big, hulking things. They are, at once, designed to operate alongside humans, while also posing potential bodily risk to our soft, fleshy exterior. It’s precisely for this reason that vibrant world of human-robot interaction has sprung up around the industry. With human workers remaining an integral part of the robotic workplace, how
Ariana Thacker likes to say that science was her first love and startups were her second. Now, she gets to combine the two into a thesis for her new venture firm, Conscience VC. Thacker’s passion for science started back when she was taking college-level chemistry courses in middle school. Her interest in startups came years
Last year we covered how Barcelona-based startup Impress had digitalized the area of orthodontics, raising a $50 million Series A in the process, somewhat aping U.S.-based startups such as SmileDirect. Usually, consumers can only access cosmetic teeth alignment or orthodontic medical treatments in conventional clinics. This new wave of technology involves 3D scans and panoramic
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Mental health startup Intellect’s ambitious goal is to be available across the Asia-Pacific, but ensure localized, culturally-competent care in each of the many markets it serves. Today it announced it has added $10 million to its war chest in a Series A extension led by Tiger Global, bringing the round’s total to $20 million. The
Linktree announced today that it’s launching a new mobile app on iOS and Android to make it easier for users to access its service. The new app will allow users to create a Linktree, add and manage links, customize their design and more from their phones. The goal of the app is to make it
Research examining default settings and terms & conditions offered to minors by social media giants TikTok, WhatsApp and Instagram across 14 different countries — including the US, Brazil, Indonesia and the UK — has found the three platforms do not offer same level of privacy and safety protections for children across all the markets where
European insurance tech startup Wefox has raised $400 million in a series D round of funding, giving the German company a post-money valuation of $4.5 billion. This represents a 50% increase on last year’s $3 billion valuation at its series C round. Founded out of Berlin in 2015, Wefox sells various insurance products through a
Klarna’s announcement that its long-expected funding round has come to a close brought with it one of the steepest valuation resets in memory, at least as far as operating businesses are concerned. Now worth $6.7 billion after raising $800 million, the European BNPL provider is worth a fraction of its self just last year, though
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest, boldest and baddest technology news. After some holiday weeks, we are back on an actual Monday! What a treat. Here’s what we got into: Equity
In a letter to Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Senators Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren expressed alarm that abortion-related content is receiving strange treatment on Meta’s platforms. Just after the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade, Motherboard found that posts offering to provide abortion pills were being removed
Back at WWDC, Apple promised to make the public beta of macOS Ventura available in July. The company stuck to its word, releasing lucky number macOS 13 this morning (alongside the rest) for everyone who likes to live life very slightly on the edge, after rounds and rounds of bug testing. We’ve been fiddling around
Pensions, by just about any estimation, are a good thing. Ever since the U.K. government introduced auto-enrolment to the national workforce back in 2012, forcing employers to provide a workplace pension scheme by default (i.e. opt-out), this has led to more people saving toward their retirement. This policy change, however, means that millions of people
Neji Tawo, the founder of boutique software development company Wiscount Corporation, says he was inspired by his dad to become an engineer. When Tawo was a kid, his dad tasked him with coming up with a formula to calculate the gas in the fuel tanks at his family’s station. Tawo then created an app for
Companies from across the industrial spectrum often rely on a migrant workforce, with data from the International Labour Organization indicating that some 169 million workers travel abroad for employment. But being away from their domestic jurisdiction and financial infrastructure presents a host of challenges, including what is probably the most important part for the worker
Crypto owners tend to be more generous when donating to charity than other investors, research shows. Whether that’s because of their strong sense of community or because of the lucrative tax benefits of doing so is anyone’s guess, but nonetheless, savvy charities have taken note of the trend and sought to leverage it. That’s part
Quiltt is wrapping its warm low-code fintech infrastructure blanket around startups and small businesses that want to create financial services for their customers, but don’t have the budget resources for a big engineering team. Ruben Izmailyan and Mark Bechhofer came up with the idea for Dallas-based Quiltt about five years ago while working together on
Despite multiple overtures by the British government to woo tech companies and keep the largest ones from defecting to the US, the latest example of the failure of this policy comes with the news that Australian software giant Atlassian is to move its HQ to Delaware, USA, in its search for what it calls a