Yesterday, fintech startup Lydia unveiled a brand new design for its financial super app. And it’s an opinionated take on mobile payments — not just a fresh coat of paint. I sat down with the company’s founders to discuss the thinking and vision for the future of Lydia. In many ways, Lydia isn’t standing still
Airbnb is going all in on the “live anywhere, work anywhere” philosophy that much of the business world has been forced to adopt, committing to full-time remote work for most employees and a handful of perks like 90 days of international work/travel. It’s a strong, simple policy that so few large companies have had the
“Investors are pouring money into Latin America’s logistics and shipping businesses,” our former colleague Jon Shieber wrote in 2019. But a pandemic later, amid unrest over gasoline prices across the globe, it’s time for a revisit. Nowports (YC W19) is a good starting point for comparison. In February 2019, the Mexican startup was just graduating
Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold around 4.4 million shares of the company on Tuesday, according to regulatory filings published on Thursday. Musk, via Aaron Beckman, his power of attorney, filed a total of five Form 4s with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to cover all 138 individual transactions. The value of the sales in
Natural language processing (NLP), the field of AI that involves parsing text for tasks including summarization and generation, is a fast-growing technology. According to a 2021 survey from John Snow Labs and Gradient Flow, 60% of tech leaders indicated that their NLP budgets grew by at least 10% compared to 2020, while a third said
It was last year that we covered the $11.2M fundraise for Sienna Network, the ‘privacy decentralized’ startup. The network is built on the Secret Network, which allows asset holders to switch to privacy-oriented tokens. Privacy-based financial blockchain projects are crucial if “DeFi” is to work properly, otherwise normal financial transactions – which are normally private
Boston- and San Francisco-based Mode Designs may not be a mainstream brand, but the company has made quite a name for itself in the mechanical keyboard world in recent years. The company’s previous releases, the high-end custom Mode Eighty tenkeyless (TKL), which you can easily configure to cost over $600 — without keycaps and switches
Snap isn’t just the company behind popular social app Snapchat. It has also built a powerful augmented reality developer platform called Snap AR — it spreads beyond Snapchat thanks to Camera Kit, an SDK solution that lets you integrate Snap’s camera capabilities in other apps. In Snap jargon, Lenses are essentially augmented reality apps that
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. It’s Thursday, April 28, 2022, and Haje’s blood pressure is slowly returning to what passes for normal after raging about Social Security numbers for a few minutes. Look, it’s hard to get
Glorang, a Seoul-based edtech startup that offers after-school classes and extracurricular activities via online for students between the ages of 3 and 18, said Friday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding co-led by Korea Investment Partners and Murex Partners, along with Japan’s Pksha Capital. The new funding, which brings its total raised
Snap is partnering with Live Nation to enhance the experience of going to concerts and festivals via its AR technology. The company says the multiyear partnership with Live Nation will “elevate performances beyond stages and screens.” The goal of the partnership is to create a deeper connection between artists and fans via immersive AR created
Smallstep founder and CEO Mike Malone calls big, distributed systems his happy place, but these systems involve a lot of machine-to-machine communications, an area identity vendors haven’t been able to solve. The central issue is that when there are no humans involved, how do you authenticate the hand-off between machines to ensure it’s going to
Vercom, a cloud communication platform (CPaaS – ‘Communications Platform as a Service’) has acquired marketing automation startup MailerLite – based out of Lithuania – for $90 million. MailerLite only took in private, non-institutional funding. MailerLite says is had 1.4m users and subsidiary products MailerSend and MailerCheck. The $90MM+ merger gives MailerLite and Vercom a more
Meet Pixy, Snap’s little flying companion. Pixy is a mini drone that can act as a camera sidekick when you can’t ask someone to take a video of you. It’s yellow, it’s cute and it’ll be available in the U.S. and in France for $229.99. “Today, we’re taking the power and magic of the Snap
Pinterest may have beat on revenue and earnings in the first quarter, but the company is not out of the woods yet when it comes to carving out a place for its service in today’s competitive landscape. In particular, Pinterest is up against a credible threat with the rise of TikTok when it comes to
Last month, I wrote about Minut and its $14 million Series B round, an investment that closed in December. Today, we are sharing the pitch deck the company used to raise the round, led by Almaz Capital. What does Minut do? The startup has built a privacy-forward hardware solution that helps Airbnb hosts “keep an
Over on TC+, I just launched a new series called Pitch Deck Teardowns! Astute readers may already have figured out what that is all about: You submit a pitch deck and we share it with our readers, highlighting things that are awesome, making suggestions for improvements, and celebrating the fun, innovative, and surprising things that
Good morning, team! We’re working toward the end (?) of the Musk-Twitter saga now that the deal is loosely settled and the social media company’s earnings are out. But the latest round of numerical disclosures from Twitter revealed just how dependent the company is on advertising revenues, which highlights a potential weak spot in the
BlocPower founder Donnel Baird grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 1980s. The area was so poor that buildings often lacked decent heating systems. People would turn on the stove or use electric heaters to compensate for ineffective central heating. It wasn’t safe or efficient, but it was reality for many families,
The most sophisticated AI systems today are capable of impressive feats, from directing cars through city streets to writing human-like prose. But they share a common bottleneck: hardware. Developing systems on the bleeding edge often requires a huge amount of computing power. For example, creating DeepMind’s protein structure-predicting AlphaFold took a cluster of hundreds of
A ruling by the European Union’s top court today is set to unblock a raft of litigation brought by consumer protection organizations seeking to apply the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standard against tech giants such as Facebook and Twitter over issues like whether they gather properly informed consent to process people’s data. In
Fleet, a startup offering a service that helps to track and manage enterprise devices like laptops, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by CRV with participation from angel investors including GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij. Fleet CEO Mike McNeil says that the new capital — which values the company
Raquel Urtasun founded Waabi in 2021 after spending nearly three years as Uber’s R&D head of Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Waabi’s mission is to develop an AI-first approach to speed up the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles, starting with long-haul trucks. To do so, her company raised an $83.5 million Series A with Khosla Venture’s
Oware co-founders Raza Kasmi and Adil Nasar Managing goods as they make their way through multiple warehouses and logistics providers is one of the biggest headaches that businesses in the supply chain face. After leaving his job at Careem, Adil Nasar founded a company that sources, manufacturers and distributes lights in Pakistan, and experienced those
Do you hear that? It’s the sound of every Meta executive breathing a deep sigh of relief, because unlike last quarter, Facebook’s daily active users (DAUs) are up… a little. For the second time since its rebrand from Facebook, Meta has reported its quarterly earnings. Last time, the Facebook platform reported its first decline in
ARMO, the Tel Aviv-based company behind Kubescape, the popular open source Kubernetes security platform, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global. New investor Hyperwise Ventures as well as existing investors Pitango First and Peled Ventures also participated in this round. Kubescape, which developers can access
Ben Franklin once famously said that in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. But that doesn’t make dealing with either particularly natural and easy. Tech is rushing in to fill that gap, and today a Berlin-based startup called Taxfix, which has built a popular mobile assistant to address
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. It’s April 27, 2022, and here’s a thing we didn’t see coming: May. What the hell happened to this month, this year? As the summer equinox draws closer, the weather warms up
While working as the head of treasury at Braintree, Boris de Souza once discovered a $90 million payment that went “missing” for over two weeks because of poor payments infrastructure. “It was my first week on the job, and I received an email from a client saying ‘I think you shorted us $90 million,’” he
Meta announced during its Q1 2022 earnings call that Reels, its short-form video feature and TikTok rival, now makes up more than 20% of the time that people spend on Instagram. The company also noted that video, overall, makes up 50% of the time that users spend on Facebook. Although Meta didn’t specify how much