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. Welcome to the weekend! We have a lot of ground to cover today, so pour some coffee, settle in, and roll with me. The great selloff? Remember when Amplitude
It’s getting harder these days to get your buyer’s attention. It used to be that you paid for some ads and threw up some blog posts and you were pretty much good to go, but as these channels become less effective, SaaS companies are looking to more sophisticated kinds of media production to reach their
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
Alexandre Robicquet Contributor Alexandre Robicquet is co-founder and CEO of Crossing Minds, an AI-powered recommendation platform for e-commerce and content. An experienced Stanford AI scholar, he holds three Master’s degrees in mathematics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Four years ago, my team set an ambitious goal: build the smartest recommendation platform on the market. Since
Infrastructure startups continue to attract venture dollars across the globe, especially in the case of payments infrastructure providers. No-code too also remains a draw. A startup that is a blend of the two can be found in Bogota, Colombia-based Simetrik, which just raised $20 million in a Series A funding round at a valuation “north
In a previous era, startups that gained influence with CIOs could skate through the procurement process and start planning seminars for new customers as soon as contracts were finalized. Today, a decade or more into the End User Era, consumers have become the tail that wags the dog. Product-led growth models have been widely embraced:
The European Union has just announced reaching an agreement in principle with the US on a revived transatlantic data flows deal — potentially signalling an end to the many months of legal uncertainty that has dogged cloud services after a landmark court ruling in July 2020 which struck down the EU-US Privacy Shield. “We have
Lost-item tracker and AirTag competitor Tile is today introducing its first anti-stalking safety feature, called “Scan and Secure.” The technology was first announced in October with a promised arrival date of sometime in early 2022. Using Tile’s mobile app, users will now be able to scan for unknown Tiles or Tile-enabled devices that may be
Tesla officially opened its plant outside Berlin on Tuesday and rolled out 30 Model Ys to customers. CEO Elon Musk followed through on his promise to dance as he did when Tesla opened its Shanghai factory two years ago. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was on hand for the festivities.
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. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Friday, March 25, 2022! This is one of the last Daily Crunch intros that I will write for you. I will miss our daily chats
Historically, only institutions have been able to be part of REITs (real estate investment trust), which are made up of companies that own or finance income-producing real estate across a range of property sectors. A startup called Flock Homes wants to give landlords a similar ability to own shares of a portfolio that is made
Jeff Kukowski Contributor Jeff Kukowski is CEO at CloudBolt, which helps companies automate easily, optimize continuously and govern at scale in hybrid and multicloud, multitool environments. With data centers alone consuming around 1% of global electricity demand, IT departments have substantial influence on their organization’s sustainability goals. Significantly reducing the amount of energy used to
The European Union’s co-legislators reached political agreement on a major reform of digital competition rules late yesterday, which will introduce up-front obligations and restrictions (literally a list of “dos and don’ts”) on the most powerful internet giants — enforced by the threat of substantial fines and other types of penalties if they fail to meet
Braille is widely used by people with vision impairments, but despite widespread improvements to accessibility on the web and smart devices, innovation for braille-reader hardware has essentially been stalled. Dot has taken a huge step forward with a smart braille device that not only allows for easy display of text, but tactile representations of imagery,
Android development these days runs on a monthly cadence, so it’s no surprise that about a month after Google announced the first developer preview of Android 13 (code-named “Tiramisu,” as Google occasionally calls it in its developer documentation) it has now launched the second developer preview. These previews typically still have a lot of rough
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It was a live recording this week, which was good fun. Our co-host Natasha was off, so Mary Ann and Alex teamed up with Grace to hammer our way through the news of the week live, with
Instacart is not done making news. Earlier this week, the well-known grocery delivery unicorn announced a software suite as part of a self-described third act. Today, Bloomberg reported that Instacart reduced its valuation from around $39 billion to $24 billion, representing a roughly 38.5% reduction in the company’s worth. Commentary indicates that the company’s new
Twitter has started testing a new clipping tool for Spaces, the company announced this week. Select hosts on iOS are now able to clip 30 seconds of audio from recorded Spaces to share them with others on Twitter. All iOS users can now see and listen to the clips on their timelines, while Android and
Engineers, coders and product designers, lend us your ears! TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 goes big, live and in-person on May 18-19 in San Mateo, California. This two-day deep dive — dedicated to mobility tech, early-stage startups and the investors who fund them — is a prime networking opportunity you don’t want to miss. Looking for
ServiceNow introduced a new overall application design today, and while they were at it, launched Automation Engine, a tool developed to help companies speed up the creation of automations, including native RPA (robotic process automation) integration. They are both part of the new San Diego release available today. Dave Wright, chief innovation officer at ServiceNow,
French startup Bigblue has raised a $15 million Series A funding round. The company operates an order fulfillment platform for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. In other words, a D2C brand can outsource all things related to logistics to Bigblue so that they can focus on product and marketing. Runa Capital is leading the round, with LPV
Among the challenges of growing up with a visual impairment is learning and participating in the social and conversational body language used by sighted people. PeopleLens is a research project at Microsoft that helps the user stay aware of the locations and identities of the people around them, promoting richer and more spontaneous interactions. A
After a bullied teen died by suicide, a grieving mother last year sued the platform where the abuse had taken place — Snapchat — for not doing enough to protect its younger users. Another lawsuit, related to another suicide, followed last month. In response to the former, Snap banned the anonymous messaging apps that had
Lahore-based coworking space startup, Colabs, is set to roll-out a SaaS product to enable businesses meet back-office needs including company registration, talent sourcing and management, payroll processing and legal and tax compliance. It also plans to hire more staff, which will include increasing the product team for its SaaS workspace business service that is emerging
Glance has acquired India’s Gambit as the Google-backed firm looks to supercharge its mobile games offerings and introduce NFTs to its Gen-Z users, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed. Piyush Shah, co-founder of InMobi Group and COO of Glance, confirmed the acquisition but declined to share the financial terms of the deal. In an interview with
A pair of former TikTok content reviewers is suing the company, alleging that it failed to adequately support them as they engaged in the deeply disturbing work of removing objectionable videos from the social network. NPR first reported the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in federal court. Plaintiffs Ashley Velez and Reece Young both did
Agtech startup SupPlant‘s flagship product is, essentially, a Babel fish for plants: leveraging a set of hardware sensors, the plants can tell you whether they’ve been drinking enough water, or whether they could do with an additional sip or two. In a world where under-watering has far more damaging results than over-watering, a non-tech-enabled farmer
Digits, the startup that is building a new take on accounting software through an approach that it describes as building a “Living Model” of a company’s financial activity, has brought in some money of its own to double down on growing its business. The company has raised $65 million, a Series C that CEO and
Late Thursday the European Union secured agreement on the detail of a major competition reform that will see the most powerful, intermediating tech platforms subject to a set of up-front rules on how they can and cannot operate — with the threat of fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover should they breach
At Apple’s March event, the company announced the Studio Display, a new, 27-inch external monitor that starts at $1,599 — a huge step down in price from the company’s only other monitor, the Pro Display XDR, which starts at $5,000. The announcement of the Studio Display is big news for many who have been waiting