There are several plastic clamshells sitting in front of me on a conference room table — around 20 or so boxes, labels facing forward, with a plate of turnips and a tub of those R&D strawberries we saw back in part two. It’s a nice photo opportunity, backdropped by Bowery Farming’s impressive grow system and
The Big 3 cloud infrastructure vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — all reported earnings this week. As you might expect, they did just fine with a growing market that passed $45 billion worldwide, good for a mind-boggling $180 billion run rate and trailing 12 month revenue of $164 billion. Revenue grew 37% overall in
Zeit Medical, which makes an early warning system for strokes during sleep, has raised $2 million in a seed round just after leaving Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 cohort. The company’s work suggests the brain-monitoring headband could save lives by alerting people to possible strokes hours before they might otherwise be noticed, and the new funding
Amit Anand Contributor Amit Anand is a founding partner of Jungle Ventures and an early pioneer and leader in the development of Southeast Asia’s venture capital industry. More posts by this contributor Investors are doubling down on Southeast Asia’s digital economy With Grab’s announcement of its imminent Nasdaq listing and GoJek merging with Tokopedia to
Allbirds is a tech-enabled shoe company that raised a series of venture capital rounds since mid-2015, per Crunchbase data. And it’s going public. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. The company’s IPO would be something we’d cover regardless of how it
Well, it’s official. After 17 years of being called Facebook, the social networking parent company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus has a new name. Facebook’s corporate entity is now Meta. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg announced the change at the company’s AR/VR-focused Connect event, sharing that the new title captured more of the company’s core
Agriculture has a 10,000-year history, and it’s predominantly a history of technology. Developments from the plow and wheel to enclosures and the modern mechanical miracles of gas-powered tractors and sorters have consistently improved crop yields, allowing humanity to expand from tens of millions of people to a global population projected to top 10 billion this
When brands sell through social media and other third-parties, they often spend millions of dollars to advertise on those platforms, yet have little or no knowledge of who their customers actually are. Social commerce startup Social Chat is out to change that. Frost Li, the former head of growth at Wish, founded the company in
Google and top Indian telecom network Jio Platforms said on Friday that their much-anticipated budget smartphone, JioPhone Next, will go on sale in the world’s second largest smartphone market on November 4 (coinciding with the big Indian festival of Diwali.) The firms said the JioPhone Next will cost 6,499 Indian rupees ($87), and can also
Terran Orbital, a leading manufacturer of small satellites, is going public in a merger with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Tailwind Two Acquisition Corp. The deal has a post-transaction enterprise value of $1.58 billion and will furnish the company with around $470 million. Of those funds, $345 million will come from Tailwind Two’s contribution, plus
Swap, a São Paulo-based BaaS startup, announced today it has raised $25 million in a Series A led by Tiger Global Management. The financing was “heavily oversubscribed,” according to the company, which has now raised $28 million since its October 2018 inception. Endeavor, Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen, partners of DST Global, ONEVC, Global Founders Capital
TikTok is testing a new in-app tipping feature on its platform that would allow creators to accept money from fans outside of TikTok LIVE streams, where gifting is already supported. The company confirmed the feature is part of a limited test for the time being and is not yet broadly available. TikTok creator Jera Bean
“The first thing you notice is just the smell,” chief science officer of Bowery Farming Henry Sztul says excitedly. “It’s got that smell, right?” There’s a kind of visceral sense memory that hits you as you enter Farm Zero, a Proustian moment that overtakes the senses after years of living in a major city. It
Hinge Health, the San Francisco-based company that offers a digital solution to treat chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, like back and joint pain, closed on $400 million in Series E funding to give the company a $6.2 billion valuation. Tiger Global and Coatue Management, which co-led the company’s $300 million Series D round back in January,
International travel is slowly opening up again, but that also means business and leisure travelers alike will once again have to think about visa restrictions as they take to the air. Nobody has ever enjoyed the process of applying for a visa, but Atlys promises to take the hassle out of the process. The company
If you make some software and sell it online, you can make lots of money. Thanks to low-cost distribution, it’s possible to write one bit of code and sell it many times, generating fat margins in the process. Throw in a larger industry trend toward recurring pricing as opposed to single-shot sales, and you have
Facebook (aka “Meta”) CEO Mark Zuckerberg today took several thinly veiled shots at Apple and the overall app ecosystem when detailing his plans for the metaverse during today’s keynote speech at the company’s Facebook Connect 2021 event. Specifically, he called out app platforms and their associated fees for “stifling innovation,” while simultaneously justifying Facebook’s plans
Marc and Lynne Benioff announced a $200 million donation this morning to combat climate change and encourage others to take action. Marc Benioff’s company, Salesforce, threw in $100 million more for a total donation of $300 million. The Benioffs’ portion is divided into two tranches, with $100 million going to the Benioff Time Tree Fund
As companies gather ever-growing sets of data, finding issues with that data that could impact the viability of a machine learning model becomes increasingly important. Anomalo is putting machine learning to work to help solve the data viability issue automatically. Today the company announced a $33 million Series A investment led by Norwest Venture Partners
Companies like Slack and Asana stormed into the world of tech to steal a march on incumbents like Microsoft in providing a new wave of point solutions to make it easier for workers respectively to chat with each other, plan projects and more. Now another startup is announcing a massive round of funding for a
Apple has now launched a beta version of its “App Privacy Report,” a new feature that aims to provide iOS users with details about how often their everyday apps are requesting access to sensitive information, and where that information is being shared. The feature was first introduced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June, amid
Biotech startup Immunai has been on a roll when it comes to funding. The company that set out to create an atlas of the human immune system in 2018 had raised about $80 million by February 2021. On Wednesday, the company announced another significantly larger round: a $215 million series B. Immunai has been building
Wavemaker Impact’s founders: (from left to right) Quentin Vaquette, Doug Parker, Marie Cheong, Paul Santos, and Steve Melhuish Wavemaker Partners doesn’t just want to invest in climate tech and sustainability startups. It also wants to help build them. Today, the Singapore-based firm announced the launch of Wavemaker Impact, a venture builder that identifies potential business
TikTok announced today it’s expanding its Video Kit offering for developers to include those building apps for the web, desktop, and consoles, in addition to its previous support for mobile platforms. Alongside the news, the company unveiled a host of new third-party apps that would now integrate with TikTok, including Clipchamp, Combo, Grabyo, Kapwing, Mobcrush,
Food is the very nourishment of life, but it’s also becoming increasingly challenging to grow at scale. A combination of explosive and unsustainable population growth, human-made climate change and depleted sources of clean water is contributing to overcultivation across the world. For its many advocates, vertical farming is a critical piece to solving that puzzle,
Groopit, an early stage startup from a 20-year Microsoft veteran, wants to help companies crowdsource data from information supplied by employees working in the field. Today, the company announced a $2 million pre-seed round led by Ascend.vc with participation from a group of investors that includes Voyager Capital and Vulcan Capital. The startup has raised
It’s fairly simply: Softwood grows a lot faster – in ‘sustainable’ forests – than hardwood. The latter is often found in bio-diverse old-growth forests like, um, the Amazon. So if you could make softwood behave like hardwood, you’d not only access more sustainable wood for construction, you’d also protect hardwood forests from destruction. Plus, you
Estonian on-demand transport firm Bolt is set to roll out electric taxi options in South Africa four months after introducing e-bike food delivery services in the country. Bolt’s plan follows the introduction of a ‘green category’ – which lets riders hail an electric or a hybrid vehicle. This comes as the company expands its services
Chris Legg Contributor Chris Legg serves as a senior managing director at Progress Partners and as a general partner at Progress Ventures, the firm’s venture capital arm. Mergers and acquisitions activity is at an all-time high — global mergers and acquisitions have already broken 2020 levels with about $4.4 trillion worth of deals as of
Paytm, one of India’s most valuable startups, is seeking to raise as much as $2.4 billion in what is shaping to be the biggest initial public offering in the country at a valuation of $20 billion, according to two people familiar with the matter and internal documents seen by TechCrunch. Paytm filed the paperworks for