Hinge is rolling out a new ‘Voice Prompts’ feature to give its users a new way to connect with their matches. Voice Prompts will allow users to answer a prompt through a 30-second voice recording. The new feature is rolling out globally starting today. Hinge says the new feature allows people to give others a
Farming is the most fundamental activity of civilization. Efficient, reliable and abundant food allows the great majority of people today to eschew cultivating plants and raising livestock and instead pursue every other activity that makes up an economy. It’s also an enterprise that has seen extensive innovation over the millennia, and farming has never been
LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned platform for those connecting with others in their fields of work and those looking for work, has been known best in recruitment for sourcing candidates and advertising job openings for permanent work. Now, to complement that, LinkedIn is opening up a new front in the job market for freelancers. Today it is
Spain’s on-demand delivery platform Glovo has announced what it’s calling “The Couriers Pledge” — an initiative which commits its business to setting a new — “fairer” — social rights standard for its gigging couriers. The self-defined “standard” covers earnings, safety, communication and support for development opportunities. Glovo says the commitments will (eventually) apply to couriers
Google today announced a preview of Android 12L, which may sound like a new version of Android, but Google calls it “a special feature drop that makes Android 12 even better on large screens.” The idea here is to provide users on tablets, foldables and Chrome OS laptops — anything with a screen above 600
Gringo, a Brazilian startup that has built an app aimed at supporting drivers in a variety of ways, has raised $8 million in a new round of funding. Kaszek led the financing, which also included participation from GFC and OneVC. Kaszek also led the company’s seed round in 2020. The latest investment brings its total
It’s early in the Wednesday trading session, meaning that we’re waiting on the first trades of Rent the Runway stock on the public markets. But what we do know is that the company priced at $21 per share, giving it a valuation of $1.33 billion using a simple share count, and around $1.47 billion on
Instagram announced on Wednesday that all users now have access to its Link Sticker feature in Instagram Stories. The expansion comes as the company recently ditched the “swipe-up” link in Instagram Stories in favor of the new Link Stickers. Both the previous “swipe-up” link and new Link Sticker feature have been historically limited to businesses
Daring Foods closed on $65 million in Series C funding Wednesday as the plant-based chicken startup launches its products into 3,000 Walmart stores nationally. Daring offers four plant-based chicken products, including Original, Lemon & Herb, Cajun and Breaded, that looks, cooks and tastes like its chicken counterpart. CEO Ross Mackay told TechCrunch that the goal
Abacus.ai wants to build an AI platform that simplifies machine learning model creation, while still leaving room for power users. Today the company announced a $50 million Series C. At the same time, it announced that the platform was expanding to include computer vision use cases. Tiger Global led the round with participation from Coatue,
Earlier this year European startup Sundayraised $100 million in a Series A raise led by US investors Coatue and DST Global, just five months after launching. The proposition was relatively simple and pretty much tailor-made for the Covid-19 era: diners scan a QR code to download an app, and then split the bill between friends
In September, analysts at eMarketer predicted Spotify was poised to overtake Apple Podcasts in U.S. listenership sometime this year. Today, Spotify announced for the first time it may have succeeded on that front. During the company’s Q3 2021 earnings call, the company said that according to Edison Research and its own internal sources, it “recently
Union54, the first Zambian startup backed by Y Combinator, has gotten another major venture capital firm on its term sheet: Tiger Global. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that the VC juggernaut led its just-completed $3 million seed round, coming only two months after graduating from Y Combinator’s summer batch. San Francisco-based venture capital firm Runa
Based in Hong Kong, Finverse’s ambitious goal is to enable open banking throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The startup recently came out of stealth mode with $1.8 million in seed funding, and is now live in four markets (Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam) with connections to 30 banks. Founder and chief executive officer Stephane
Fallout from revelations around teen mental health on Instagram continues — and not just for Facebook. On Tuesday, policy reps from YouTube, Snap and TikTok faced Congress to talk about kids and online safety, marking the first time the latter two companies appeared in a major tech hearing. The hearing, held by the Senate Subcommittee
AI and big data are an important part of most enterprise-scale companies now, but that very scale can make it difficult to employ them safely and ethically. Kathy Baxter at Salesforce and Nashlie Sephus at AWS have made ethical AI and data collection their business over the last few years, both sounding the alarm on
Surveys have long been used by marketing teams and other business decision makers to learn how customers tick. But they can be costly to put together, hard to run at scale, and, at the end of the day, are only as credible as the data that gets put into them. Today, a London startup called
mPharma, a Ghanaian health startup, has taken a controlling stake in Uganda’s Vine Pharmacy for an undisclosed amount, marking the firm’s entry into its latest market in Africa. mPharma disclosed to TechCrunch that it has acquired a 55 percent stake previously held by the Abraaj Group, a private equity firm that collapsed after investors, including
Zolve, a neobanking startup that aims to help immigrants in the U.S. gain access to financial services, said on Wednesday it has raised $40 million in a new financing round as it begins to roll out its offerings. Partners of DST Global led the Bangalore-headquartered startup’s Series A financing round. The round, which values the
It felt like something of a coming-of-age party for the Chicago startup scene, a city that has long held a leading position in the larger Midwest market, when Sprout Social went public. The company would go on to become a breakout IPO success, pricing at $17 per share in the closing days of 2019 to
Representatives from TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security today to discuss how to protect kids online. This hearing follows Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen‘s document leaks to the Wall Street Journal, which — among many things — exposed Facebook’s knowledge that Instagram is toxic for
Healthcare spending accounts for almost 18% of U.S. GDP, so it’s no surprise that digital health is attracting record levels of investment. This year, VCs have flowed $14.7 billion to health tech startups, compared to $14.6 billion in all of 2020. Given the high cost of care in the United States compared to other nations,
Last year we covered Adtech startup Admix’s $7 million Series A funding. The London-based company brings ads to games, e-sports, virtual reality, and augmented reality. In-game advertising at scale, where advertisers can bid programmatically through traditional ad-buying platforms, rather than relying on an ad agency model, remains an enormous area, largely under-exploited. Today Admix is
YouTube and Snapchat were asked by lawmakers to defend whether or not their respective social media apps were appropriately rated on the U.S. app stores, given the nature of the content they hosted. In a line of questioning led by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), Snap was given specific examples of the types of content found
Bridgit, a “workforce intelligence” technology company that is focused on the construction industry, announced today that it has raised $24 million in Series B funding. Camber Creek and Storm Ventures co-led the financing, which brings the Toronto-based startup’s total raised to more than $35 million. Nine Four Ventures also put money in the round, along
Rent the Runway is expected to price its IPO later today and trade tomorrow morning, provided that all things go as planned. Udemy is also on the way to the public markets. Allbirds, too. And this week, Sweetgreen threw its hat into the ring. Sweetgreen is a food chain best known for salads that are popular
After dragging in the same companies and their reticent, overtrained executives time and time again, Congress is turning its attention to two of the tech industry’s fresh but important faces: TikTok and Snap. On Tuesday, lawmakers on the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security will question policy leads from those two
Logicbroker, a Connecticut-based e-commerce company focused on cloud fulfillment, secured a $135 million growth round from K1 Investment Management. Its software provides drop ship and marketplace automation capabilities to brands, retailers, suppliers and third-party logistics providers. As CEO Peyman Zamani explained it, “drop ship” is a way that packages get from the seller to the
While software development frameworks make developing software faster and easier than ever, pre-deployment testing gets more and more complex by the day. Over the past decade, Testlio has grown exponentially and positioned itself as an “Elance for Software Testing.” In addition to its own team of 150 or so, the company now commands an army
NYSE-listed e-commerce platform Jumia experienced a shift in shopping habits across its markets in Africa last year, as more shoppers bought everyday products as opposed to electronics. Shopping for essentials such as foodstuff, fashion and beauty products, saw Jumia’s total sales value of Fast-Moving Consumer Goods grow by 13 percentage points last year from 44%