There’s a lot of value in waste; just ask metals processing company Nth Cycle, which has developed a technology to help mining and recycling companies recover every bit of critical minerals from their operations. The company calls its technology “electro-extraction,” and Nth Cycle’s founder and CEO Megan O’Connor likened it to a water filter in
Design software startup Canva has been making news of late. The company just raised $200 million at a $40 billion valuation, and co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht gave the vast majority of their equity (around $13 billion) to charity through the Canva Foundation. We sat down with Perkins at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 to talk
LG Electronics, the Korean tech giant that once was a leading player in mobile phones but is now winding down that business, is making an acquisition that points to its ambitions in another, emerging area: next-generation automotive hardware and services. Today the company announced that it will be snapping up Cybellum, an Israeli automotive cybersecurity
Cobo, a Singapore-based crypto asset management platform, raised a $40 million Series B to accelerate the development of decentralized finance as a service (DFaaS). The round was co-led by DST Global, A&T Capital and IMO Ventures. The company will use its proceeds for the development of DeFi as a service (DFaaS) infrastructure and its existing
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today we got the gang together — Natasha and Danny and Alex — to chat about the most recent IPOs in tech-land, namely debuts from Freshworks and Toast. TechCrunch has covered their pair of firms somewhat closely during their IPO run, as
The amount of plastic pouring into our oceans is set to triple by 2040, and the bulk of the un-recycled plastic in the world is generated by an enormous industry: consumer packaged goods (CPG). The world is rife with waste from such goods, but as people become more aware and look to minimize the waste
Julio Vasconcellos Contributor Julio Vasconcellos is the managing partner of Atlantico, a venture capital fund focused on Latin America. He was previously the founder of Canary and Peixe Urbano, and was Facebook’s first employee in Brazil. More posts by this contributor Latin America’s digital transformation is making up for lost time Over the past year,
Synergy Research released some seemingly paradoxical numbers from the European cloud market this week. The good news was that the firm found for the period beginning in 2017 through the second quarter of this year, the market grew fourfold, to €7.3 billion ($8.8 billion USD), while European cloud vendor revenue doubled. The bad news? Those
Pollutants pouring from smokestacks around the world may be bad news for the atmosphere, but if you catch them before they get out there, you could reduce emissions and collect some valuable materials at the same time. That’s what Carbix aims to do with its carbon-sequestering reactor, which would extract minerals from emissions while staying
Cellino, a company developing a platform to automate stem cell production, presented today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 to detail how its system, which combines A.I. technology, machine learning, hardware, software — and yes, lasers! — could eventually democratize access to cell therapies. It aims to bring down costs associated with the manufacturing of human cells,
News that Klarna is waiting for more favorable market conditions before going public felt a little odd yesterday. Today, hesitation to go public feels downright strange. New pricing information from U.S. tech unicorn Toast and Indian tech unicorn Freshworks indicate that the IPO market is more than welcoming. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Facebook today provided an update on how Apple’s privacy changes have impacted its ad business. The company had already warned investors during its second quarter earnings that it expected to feel an even more significant impact in its ad targeting business by Q3. This morning, it reiterated that point, but also noted that it had
Our world is drowning in human-generated microplastics. And while these tiny fragments of non-biodegradable plastic — floating in the sea, embedded in the soil — are hard to see with the naked eye they pose a gigantic threat to life. Inexorably, plastic pollution is finding its way into the human food chain, with unknown implications
Weather forecasting is a notoriously challenging field, but it’s an endeavor that is becoming ever more vital to the daily functioning of our planet. Climate change is intensifying the scale and devastation of natural disasters, from wildfires and typhoons to floods and cyclones. Knowing precisely when and where a disaster strikes (or, even, just getting
Cloudsmith, a cloud platform for software supply chain management, has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global, which it claims is the largest ever Series A funding round in Northern Ireland since 2005 (according to PitchBook data). The company plans to use the new funding to hire 60 new employees
Owners of Alexa devices will soon be able to use OnStar’s emergency services from their homes, under an expanded partnership between OnStar’s parent company General Motors and Amazon. OnStar already expanded OnStar Guardian earlier this year with the introduction of the Guardian app, which lets customers access the service via their mobile device. This latest
If your house has a wooden deck, keeping it in good shape is costly and time consuming. If you don’t keep up with the regular maintenance, it becomes even more costly and time consuming to fix — or, eventually, it all just starts to rot and fall apart. We’ve got robots that can clean our
Kavak, a Mexico City-based startup that operates a pre-owned car marketplace in Latin America, announced today that it has raised a massive $700 million in a Series E round that more than doubles the company’s valuation to $8.7 billion. This news is notable for a few reasons. For one, it’s a staggering sum for any
Shelf Engine’s mission to eliminate food waste in grocery retailers now has some additional celebrity backers. The company brought in a $2 million extension to its $41 million Series B announced in March. Ellen DeGeneres, Portia de Rossi, Shaun White and Shawn Mendes are the new backers, who came in through a strategic round of
Bilt Rewards, a loyalty program for property renters to earn points on rent with no fees and build a path toward homeownership, announced Tuesday a round of $60 million in growth funding that values the company at $350 million. The investment comes from Wells Fargo and Mastercard and a group of the nation’s largest real
A number of sexual health startups have spun up in recent years offering men discreet help with the awkward issue of erectile dysfunction. Companies like Numan and Roman. But ‘help’ in this context usually means making it easier to get hold of drugs like Viagra. UK-based startup Mojo has been taking a different tack. It’s
We’ve all been there — you’re watching a horror movie, and you know that the main character definitely shouldn’t go into that creepy house, but no matter how much you yell at your TV, you can’t change his fate. But what if you told the guy on screen to steer clear of the house, and
Evermos’ founding team (l to r): Arip Tirta, Ghufron Mustaqim, Iqbal Muslimin and Ilham Taufiq. Image Credits: Evermos Evermos is an Indonesian social commerce startup with two goals: to let people earn extra income by opening online stores without spending capital and to help small brands grow into household names. The company, which focuses on
Traditional meat production is about as far from a sustainable process as we’ve got, but our chances of getting everyone to give up “real” meat are lean. Animal Alternative is one of several companies looking to make meat indistinguishable from the animal-based kind using bioreactors and cultured cells, and it aims to empower local producers
Salesforce has often preached about responsible capitalism, and today at Dreamforce, the company’s annual customer extravaganza, it announced a notable achievement in the battle against global climate change. The company said that it has achieved effective Net Zero energy usage across its entire value chain with 100% renewable energy, while purchasing carbon offsets when that’s
French startup Alan is better known for its health insurance products — they now insure 200,000 people. But it has been slowly building a superapp for your health and expanding with new services. Today, the company announced its first acquisition ever with the acquisition of Jour for $20 million. This is going to be the
Smart fitness gear is often limited by being static and non-portable. (And, well, eye-wateringly expensive.) Think Peloton‘s stationary bike for spin classes or wall-mounted strength training rig Tonal. Great if you’re at home and can afford to shell out thousands on a fancy home gym, but what if you want to take your workout with
Sep.15 — Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon speaks to Emily Chang on the latest edition of “Bloomberg Studio 1.0” about the chip shortage and it’s impact on everything from electronics to autos.
BioNTech’s founding story dates back to the late 1990s, when CEO and co-founder Uğur Şahin, his wife and co-founder Özlem Türeci, and the rest of the seven-person founding team began their research. Focused specifically on an area dubbed “New Technologies,” mRNA stood out as one area with tremendous potential to deliver the team’s ultimate goal:
Just Insure, a pay-per-mile insurance technology company, has raised $8 million in a funding round. CrossCut Ventures, ManchesterStory and Western Technology Investments co-led the investment, which brings its total raised to $15.3 million since its January 2019 inception. Los Angeles-based Just says it uses telematics “to reward safe drivers and reduce insurer bias” by looking