Over the weekend, rumors began flying that chipmaker Broadcom was interested in acquiring VMware, the company best known for commercializing the virtual machine concept that gave birth to cloud computing. Bloomberg first reported the potential deal on Sunday. VMware will not come cheap. It had a market capitalization in the neighborhood of $40 billion before
Swedish payment giant Klarna is going to cut hundreds of jobs in the coming days. Today’s news comes a few days after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company was going to cut its valuation in order to raise fresh capital. The company currently employs around 7,000 people. Cutting 10% of the company’s workforce
If I were to make a list of things that I didn’t think needed to get smarter, bike pedals would be somewhere near the top of the list. And yet, when Redshift Sports showed me its shiny (literally!) new pedals, I had one of those “omg this makes so much sense” moments. In a nutshell,
Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi’s shareholders have voted to delist the company from the NYSE. The decision is a long-expected result of the company finding itself in hot water with the Chinese government after a rushed and later troubled public-market debut in the United States. Didi went public in the middle of 2021 in an offering
Weeks after laying off about 30% of its staff, MainStreet is said to be raising another round of funding at a $200 million valuation, sources tell TechCrunch. The news is significant in that MainStreet, which helps other startups uncover tax credits, raised $60 million in March of 2021 at a post-money valuation of $500 million.
The District of Columbia has just announced fresh litigation targeting Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for his role in the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data misuse episode — alleging it has evidence the Facebook founder was personally involved in the failures that led to the incident. The District is alleging breaches of the Consumer Protection Procedures Act
E-commerce is an $85 billion business in Latin America, and as that market is poised to essentially double in three years, the current consumer demands to receive orders on time and packaged correctly will only increase. For decades, e-commerce giants, like Amazon and MercadoLibre, have perfected the logistics and delivery technology for their marketplaces, but
The UK’s data protection watchdog has confirmed a penalty for the controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI — announcing a fine of just over £7.5 million today for a string of breaches of local privacy laws. The watchdog has also issued an enforcement notice, ordering Clearview to stop obtaining and using the personal data of
Epic Games isn’t just fighting the app stores over the right to process its own in-app payments in its popular game Fortnite, it’s also taken up its antitrust legal battle with the tech giants via Bandcamp, the internet music company Epic acquired in March. The following month, Epic filed an injunction asking for the right
Egypt is home to one of Africa’s largest vehicle fleets, with over 6 million cars (80% are passenger cars) on its roads. According to this finding, most are used cars; their ratio to new vehicles is 3:1. But the used cars market isn’t only enormous in Egypt; it is in almost every country with a
BUD, a nascent app taking a shot at creating a metaverse for Gen Z to play and interact with each other, has raised another round of funding in three months. The Singapore-based startup told TechCrunch that it has closed $36.8 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital India, not long after it
Airbnb says it’s making the “biggest change in a decade.” It’s offering a new user interface, the ability to search for special listings and a 24-hour customer service help line. CEO Brian Chesky speaks to Bloomberg’s Emily Chang.
Recent product news from Stripe and Plaid indicate the two private companies are gunning for one another as the market for B2B financial technology matures, expands and individual players increasingly overlap. It might sound silly that Stripe, best known for its payments technology, and Plaid, best known for its API that connects consumer bank accounts
The good news? Well-run companies can still thrive Ron Miller 7 hours The inevitable physics of economics is upon us — what goes up must come down — and we appear to be headed for the down part of the equation. But all is not lost. If you need a reminder, Venmo, Instagram, Uber and
Welcome back to The Interchange, the weekly TechCrunch series that looks at the latest — and what’s ahead — in the global fintech industry. It’s an incredible time to be a financial technology journalist. Besides the fact that over 20% of all venture dollars last year went into fintech startups, I am particularly excited about
On the Chain Reaction podcast this week, we dove into a topic that tends to stir up strong emotions, even from those outside the crypto space — the metaverse. Mercedes Bent, an investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners who focuses on consumer investments in crypto, joined us to unpack this loaded term and explain why she
Xendit, a payments infrastructure platform for Southeast Asia, has raised $300 million in fresh funding. The company’s new valuation wasn’t disclosed, but it hit unicorn status in its last round of funding in September 2021. The new round brings its total raised to $538 million and was led by Coatue and Insight Partners, with participation
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. “You can often pick up significant market share in an economic downturn by just staying alive,” top startup accelerator Y Combinator wrote in an internal e-mail to its founders this week. The
While we had the chance to be at home more over the past few years, you may have spruced up a home office or replaced a couch. However, once the new item was in your home, you may have had some buyer’s remorse or the item didn’t live up to its website photo. In any
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. Deep tech has become a hot topic in Europe, with hopes that the region can have an edge over the rest of the world
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
But it could lead to more balance later this year Ron Miller 8 hours As bad economic news piles up seemingly on a daily basis, we don’t know what the future holds except that change is on the way. Although we are seeing layoffs and hiring freezes at some companies, it doesn’t necessarily mean the
Time is a flat circle, and all that was once old is new again. For example, back in the venture days of yore, inside rounds were considered a poor market signal; if a startup could not attract a new lead investor for its next round, what did that say about the company? Last year, that
Founders have gotten the memo that the ground is shifting under their feet right now. What to do about it is the question. Already, teams are making plans to scale back their spending to preserve capital. They’re making painful staff cuts toward that same end — or else instituting hiring freezes. But they should also
Unless you live near a port, you probably don’t think much of the tens of thousands of container ships tearing through the seas, hauling some 1.8 billion metric tons of stuff each year. Yet these vessels run on some of the dirtiest fuel there is, spewing more greenhouse gases than airplanes do in the process.
As with many skilled professions these days, there is a gap between demand and supply when it comes to IT pros. As more people turn to Apple devices at work, whether computers, phones or tablets, the need for people who can service and manage these devices has increased. While we may find ourselves in an
CleverTap, a retention marketing platform which has raised $76.6M to date, is to fully acquire Bulgarian-originated but San Francisco-based Leanplum, a customer engagement platform which has raised $131.2M, for an undisclosed amount. The news was broken by South Eastern European startup news site The Recursive. Sunil Thomas, CleverTap Cofounder and Executive Chairman said: “Like many
Walker Drewett founded NuBrakes in May 2019. According to Mike Ghaffary, GP at Canvas Ventures, Drewett is building a high-growth business powered by a marketplace model, which is why Ghaffary led the company’s Series A. The product is simple: On-demand vehicle brake repair services. Join this episode to hear how Drewett raised capital and built
The technological advances we’ve made over the last few thousand years are stunning, but the construction industry still relies on centuries-old technology. Configuring a robot to mix cement is easy, but delivering a CementTron 3000 to a job site, training employees on its use, and keeping it maintained are not the kinds of disruptions builders
TikTok announced today that it’s launching a new ad product called “Branded Mission” that will allow creators to connect with brands and possibly receive rewards for videos. With the new ad product, advertisers can crowdsource content from creators and turn top-performing videos into ads. Advertisers can launch branded campaigns and encourage creators to take part