When people think of NFTs, the first use case most of them likely think of is visual art. From Beeple’s $69 million sale of a digital collage at Christie’s to the Bored Apes Yacht Club collection, visual art has seemed to be most prominent use case for NFTs due to close similarities with traditional fine
Prior to launching Dassana, CEO and co-founder Gaurav Kumar was involved in a fair number of startups. His most recent one prior to Dassana was RedLock, a cloud security company he sold to Palo Alto Networks for $173 million in 2018. He said that everywhere he went, he used logging software and it almost invariably
In the small hours local time, European Union lawmakers secured a provisional deal on a landmark update to rules for digital services operating in the region — grabbing political agreement after a final late night/early morning of compromise talks on the detail of what is a major retooling of the bloc’s existing ecommerce rulebook. The
Twitter announced today that it’s beginning to test a “CC” button that will let users turn video captions on or off. The feature is rolling out to some iOS users and will be coming to Android users soon, Twitter notes. A video posted by the social media shows that the CC button will appear in
Bitso, a Mexico City-based crypto exchange, is pledging to buy carbon offsets for every bitcoin transaction on its platform to compensate for the cryptocurrency’s environmental toll. It may sound great in theory, but the idea also deserves a heaping dose of skepticism, given the sketchy reputation carbon offset efforts have earned over the years. Bitcoin’s
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 Earth Day, also known as April 22, 2022, and we are beyond grateful that the sun sets on another week. We love our TechCrunch Live events, but we realize we don’t
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week was a good week because we had the full team back together. Natasha Mascarenhas was on hand, Mary Ann Azevedo was on the mic, and Alex Wilhelm was around as well.
The internet is full of mysteries. Who really wrote “My Immortal,” and was it supposed to be a satire? Who is behind the group of hackers known as Anonymous? And why can’t Elon Musk just log off? But a new question arose about two and a half months ago, when writer and reverse engineer Steve
A multi-year, $100 million Xprize competition for startups trying to remove or reverse carbon emissions has its first crop of big winners. Though the bulk of this Musk money won’t be given away until 2025, these 15 companies are each getting $1M today to keep the lights on til then. The Carbon Removal Xprize, funded
Jarvis ML, a platform offering an AI-powered personalization engine to brands selling products, services and experiences, today announced that it raised $16 million in a seed round led by Dell Technologies Capital. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Rakesh Yadav said that the new capital will be used to grow Jarvis ML’s R&D and sales
A new report has peeled back the curtain on big tech’s frenzied lobbying of European Union lawmakers as they finalize a major series of updates to the bloc’s digital rulebook. It reveals some of the arguments used by tech giants including Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta (Facebook) and Spotify to press their interests behind the scenes
William Wilson Contributor William Wilson is a partner in Goodwin’s technology group and intellectual property practice. His practice focuses on technology transactions, including counseling, structuring and negotiating deals across industries with a particular focus on the fintech, healthcare and technology sectors. Last year saw investors throwing record amounts of dollars into startups, but recent geopolitical
Asia had more IPOs than other regions in Q1 2022, but its tally dropped from Q4 2021 Anna Heim 7 hours Sometime in 2021, the world passed the 1,000-unicorn milestone. This was captured by Crunchbase’s private unicorn board, which is dedicated to tracking startups with valuations above $1 billion; the list kept on increasing and
An app called BeReal, founded by former GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat along with Kévin Perreau, launched in December 2019 with its idea of asking users to post an unedited photo once per day after receiving a push notification. Upon receiving the alert, the user has up to 2 minutes to share what they’re up to
Databases are an essential part of doing business in the digital world, but not every organization is achieving success with them. In a 2019 Vanson Bourne survey, enterprises said that they’ve been held back by legacy database technologies — specifically relational databases systems. Relational databases weren’t designed with newer apps or the cloud in mind,
Google has shared a screenshot of its new cookie consent popup. At first, the new popup will be available on YouTube in France. But the company says it plans to roll out the new design across Google services in Europe. This updated design comes a few months after the CNIL, France’s data watchdog, fined Google
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. On this fine day of April 21, 2022, we celebrate a shiny new podcast from our crypto team: Chain Reaction. Q: Why is the podcast so loud? A: Because it’s immutable. This
MadEats, Y Combinator alum, claims to be the first “‘full-stack’ delivery-only startup in the Philippines,” with their own virtual storefront, ghost kitchens and fleet of drivers. More than that, they also conceptualize and launch their own brands, making them a delivery-only restaurant group. The company announced today it has raised $1.7 million in seed funding
In an SEC filing today, Elon Musk indicated that Twitter has yet to respond to his offer to buy the company, and that he is “exploring whether to commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares.” Recall that Twitter has itself adopted a poison-pill defense of its equity in light of Musk’s
Change is afoot in the non-stop world of data collection and application, and if you’re a data-driven startup — or on your way to becoming one — TechCrunch and Cloudera have joined forces for an event you won’t want to miss. Data and the Culture Transformation, an online event presented by Cloudera, takes place on
French startup Greenly has raised a $23 million Series A round. The company has built a software-as-a-service platform that lets you calculate your company’s carbon emissions, store and track them in one place, generate a certified report of your carbon footprint and get some insights about ways to reduce your emissions. Energy Impact Partners (EIP)
Zenly has always felt like the small social app that could become the next big thing. But it turns it Zenly is quietly becoming a social giant without anyone paying much attention — at least until now. Originally designed in Paris, the app was acquired by Snap back in 2017. But that acquisition was just the
Luke Hutchison didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do as a graduate of West Point — only that he wanted to serve his country, graduating as he did two years after the 9/11 attack in New York. Certainly, he never imagined launching a private event management platform for restaurants and venues, but that’s what
Amazon may be attempting to take on Shopify in the west, but in India, it is gearing up to explore social commerce. Amazon India has acquired the social commerce startup GlowRoad as the e-commerce giant makes a bigger push into one of its key overseas markets, a source directly familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
After an era of open affection for Silicon Valley followed by an era of relative quiet, former President Barack Obama is tearing into tech. The former president spoke Thursday at an event co-hosted by Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and the Obama Foundation, and this time he didn’t mince words about the toll that social media
As the global startup market digests a changing valuation environment and climate for venture investment, not every sector is taking the same amount of damage. One is indeed faring better than the rest. It’s not the flashiest sector in startupland. Instead, it’s the tried-and-true software-as-a-service (SaaS) category that appears to be in the best shape
From the department of Tit for Tat, on the heels of a cascade of sanctions against Russia, Russian organizations and Russian individuals over Russia’s aggressive war in Ukraine, the Russian Foreign Ministry now has issued a list of U.S. figures that are now prohibited from entering Russia — and will be indefinitely. The list includes
TechCrunch Startup Battlefield is expanding. The tech ecosystem has grown exponentially in size and possibility since the early days of Startup Battlefield and it’s time that we grow along with it. That’s why we’re proud to announce TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200, a new era of our exciting startup community competition. Showcasing global founders This October,
Construct Capital co-founders and general partners Dayna Grayson and Rachel Holt continue to dive into innovation that some investors may not think is so sexy, but actually runs behind the scenes so that our food gets to grocery stores every week and our packages arrive when they say they will. And this time, they have
Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is now facing “internal scrutiny” at the company after pressuring U.K. tabloid the Daily Mail to kill a story about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. The revelations come in an explosive new report from the Wall Street Journal detailing a coordinated campaign to discourage the tabloid