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
An older, cheaper and safer battery technology already dominating China’s electric vehicle industry is now poised to reshape battery manufacturing worldwide and boost EV sales in the United States — if the global lithium supply remains stable. A slew of patents for lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) chemistries due to expire in 2022 could shift the face of
Frederik Mijnhardt Contributor Frederik Mijnhardt is the CEO of Secfi, an equity planning platform for startup executives and employees. Last year was a great one for startups. It was a record year for companies going public, valuations for pre-IPO companies were skyrocketing, and fundraising also shattered records. But 2022 is going to be quite different.
This week on the TechCrunch Podcast I talk with Jacquelyn Melinek about the power and pitfalls of crypto communities and Devin Coldewey about why Pornhub’s COO and CEO have unceremoniously stepped down. And as always, you’ll get a rundown of the week’s top news on TechCrunch. Articles from the episode: Other news from the week:
Payments giants and fintech startups in India on Saturday requested the central bank to treat widely used prepaid payment instruments on par with bank accounts for customers who have undertaken certain verifications, days after the monetary authority signalled industry-wide crackdown. The Payments Council of India, a unit of influential industry body IAMAI, said in a
Spotify is introducing a new feature that will allow users to better discover nearby events and concerts. The streaming service today announced it’s replacing its in-app Concert Hub with a new Live Events Feed that will allow you to find favorite artists’ events in your area in a way that’s personalized to your own interests.
Hello and welcome back to Week in Review, your one-stop spot for the biggest stories from the week. Greg Kumparak is off enjoying the beginning of summer and has entrusted me to keep you updated in his absence. If you want this in your inbox every Saturday, sign up here. And while you’re at it,
Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we talked about infinite pessimism in the crypto markets. This week, we’re talking about parties and tattoos and booze and fun. If you want to get this in your inbox every Thursday, you can subscribe on TechCrunch’s newsletter page. Exit opportunity It’s no secret at this point that
Just as one company’s success shouldn’t cast a halo on its vertical’s brethren, one company’s layoffs don’t quite mean that its competitors are equally screwed. Instead, I think that changes within a particular startup can be used as benchmark questions for their larger market; in other words, we can use the micro to better understand
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. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the
The startup, valued at $2.2B, has sights set on an IPO — but certainly not a SPAC Jaclyn Trop 9 hours Rimac Group made headlines in June after it raised €500 million ($537 million) in a Series D round led by Goldman Sachs and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The deal valued the Croatian startup at
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. Just as one company’s success shouldn’t cast a halo on its vertical’s brethren, one company’s layoffs don’t quite mean that its competitors are equally screwed. Instead, I think that changes within a
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. My home country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, wants to have 100 French unicorns by 2030. Economy minister Bruno Le Maire, 10 homegrown decacorns. But shouldn’t
As video-led podcasts become highly favored by listeners, Podcastle, which was primarily an audio recording and editing studio, is introducing a new feature that enables podcasters to conduct high-resolution video interviews or solo recordings. Now, Podcastle will allow users to invite and video record up to ten guests through the Chrome browser or the Podcastle mobile
Jan.22 — Tesla Inc.’s market value has climbed above Volkswagen AG’s for the first time to more than $100 billion, a threshold that will trigger a huge payout for Elon Musk if he can sustain the feat for months. Bloomberg’s Craig Trudell has more on “Bloomberg Markets.”
Scooter and micro-mobility company Bird has to fly at a slightly higher altitude — at least if it wants to keep its New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) listing. The company issued a press release on Friday noting that it had received word from the NYSE that its share price was “not in compliance” with the
The testing campaign for NASA’s super big, super expensive Space Launch System is now complete, the agency declared on Friday. All that’s left now for the rocket is launch the Artemis I demonstration mission to the moon, the first in a long line of planned missions to eventually return humans to the lunar surface by
The news that funding for Black founders is falling was no shock to the Black community, much of which was raised with the aphorism, “when white America catches a cold, Black America gets pneumonia.” U.S. startups received VC funding of around $75 billion in Q1 and about $50 billion so far in Q2, despite investors pulling back and
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) products have become incredibly popular with users, and both startups and tech behemoths such as Apple have taken notice. But BNPL companies have attracted some controversy, too, for encouraging people who are less financially secure to take on debt without fully explaining the associated risks. Kasheesh, a fintech startup that’s
The co-founder and CEO of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko, had a Steve Jobs moment when he stood in front of an auditorium in New York City and announced the launch of Saga, an Android web3-focused smartphone. “This is something that I fundamentally believe the industry needs to do,” Yakovenko said. “We didn’t see a single crypto
As a veteran startup worker who has been laid off during economic downturns, it’s dissonant to hear investors say this is a good time to launch a software company. They’re not wrong, however. An analogy: In California, nearly 10,000 wildfires burned more than 4 million acres two years ago, causing billions of economic damage and
A federal appeals court froze the FDA’s ban on Juul products Friday after the company sought an emergency administrative stay. On Thursday, the U.S. regulator took sweeping action against the e-cigarette maker, effectively killing its access to the U.S. market. The temporary stay will be in place essentially to buy time until the case can
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. Hey, folks, and welcome to the Friday edition of Daily Crunch. As you might’ve seen, the Supreme Court issued a major decision on abortion today, effectively overturning Roe v. Wade in declaring
Zomato has acquired Blinkit, a struggling 10-minute grocery delivery startup, in a $568.1 million all-stock deal as the loss-making food delivery firm looks to broaden its offerings at a time when its shares are trading far below last year’s debut price and less than half of the all-time highs. The Gurgaon-headquartered firm — which reached
OSOM and Nothing have quickly become two of the most fascinating companies operating the smartphone space in recent years. Nothing is the latest project from OnePlus cofounder, Carl Pei, while OSOM is largely composed of former Essential employees looking to launch their own own thing in the wake the company’s messy dissolution. That Pei purchased
Zendesk this morning agreed to sell itself to an investor consortium for $10.2 billion in cash, or $77.50 per share. The deal comes months after the U.S. software company declined a $17 billion offer. The Zendesk saga of 2021 and 2022 has been complicated, full of twists and turns. That it is closing out its
Hello from America, where we are digesting some pretty big news. Given the portent and weight of what’s going on today, it may feel a bit weird to sit down and read about billions of dollars of someone else’s money. But this is a technology startup and financial news site. So, to work. Just know
Deon Nicholas is the CEO and co-founder of Forethought, the AI company whose mission is to transform customer experiences with human-centered AI. Forethought has raised over $100 million in venture capital, including from NEA, which led Forethought’s $9.52 million Series A. Hear from NEA’s Vanessa Larco on what convinced the firm to invest in Forethought,
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today Natasha and Alex were on the mics, kicking back and riffing through the biggest technology stories of the week. Our dear Mary Ann was off this week, but will be back in short order. What did we
Vibrant Planet — which is creating an “operating system for forest restoration” — comes as a pleasant surprise, and not one I expected. Climate tech, while relatively new, has settled into two camps: hardware and software. And while Vibrant Planet is definitely a software play — from its cloud focus to its per-seat licenses, it’s