It seems like every company making lidar has a new and clever approach, but Baraja takes the cake. Its method is not only elegant and powerful, but fundamentally avoids many issues that nag other lidar technologies. But it’ll need more than smart tech to make headway in this complex and evolving industry. To understand how
AppsFlyer has raised a massive Series D of $210 million, led by General Atlantic. Founded in 2011, the company is best known for mobile ad attribution — allowing advertisers to see which campaigns are driving results. At the same time, AppsFlyer has expanded into other areas, like fraud prevention. And in the funding announcement, General
As the number of drones proliferates in cities and towns across America, government agencies are scrambling to find ways to manage the oncoming traffic that’s expected to clog up their airspace. Companies like Airmap and KittyHawk have raised tens of millions to develop technologies that can help cities manage congestion in the friendly skies, and
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re digging into One Medical’s updated IPO filing released this week. The document contains directional pricing information that will help us understand where the tech-enabled medical care startup expects the market to value itself
Wikipedia has surpassed a notable milestone today: The English version of the world’s largest online encyclopedia now has more than six million articles. The feat, which comes roughly 19 years after the website was founded, is a testament of “what humans can do together,” said Ryan Merkley, chief of staff at Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization
In Xerox’s latest effort to get HP to bend to its will and combine the two companies, it announced its intent today to try and replace the entire HP Board of Directors at the company’s stockholder’s meeting in April. That would be the same board that unanimously rejected Xerox’s takeover bid. Xerox and HP have
Language-learning platform Busuu, which has fast expanded to take on traditional giants like Duolingo, says it has acquired the live video tutoring company Verbling for an undisclosed amount, other than calling it a “double-digit million dollar acquisition.” As a result, Busuu will now use the Verbling platform to expand into the live video tutoring space
Samsung, which once led India’s smartphone market, is investing $500 million in its India operations to set up a manufacturing plant on the outskirts of New Delhi to produce displays. The company disclosed the investment and its plan in a filing to the local regulator earlier this month. The South Korean giant said the plant
Video advertising company Eyeview shut down in December, but its technology will live on thanks to an acquisition by Aki Technologies. Aki CEO Scott Swanson told me that he’s anticipating serious growth in the demand for ad personalization, particularly as consumers see personalization everywhere else online. Swanson argued that Eyeview’s technology is particularly strong thanks
It’s one thing to develop a working machine learning model, it’s another to put it to work in an application. Cortex Labs is an early stage startup with some open source tooling designed to help data scientists take that last step. The company’s founders were students at Berkeley when they observed that one of the
Layoffs in the technology and venture-backed worlds continued today, as 23andMe confirmed to CNBC that it laid off around 100 people, or about 14% of its formerly 700-person staff. The cuts would be notable by themselves, but given how many other reductions have recently been announced, they indicate that a rolling round of belt-tightening amongst
Time is supposed to make technology better. The idea is simple: With more time, humans make newer, better technology and our lives improve. Except for when the opposite happens. Google is a good example of this. I’ve been harping on the matter for a while now. Google mobile search, in case you haven’t used it
The food industry may be the biggest industry in the world, but it’s also one of the least efficient. BCG says 1.6 billions tons of food, worth $1.2 trillion, is wasted in food every year and those numbers are only expected to go up. A number of players have stepped up to try and solve
TikTok, the fast-growing user-generated video app from China’s Bytedance, has been building a new music streaming service to compete against the likes of Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. And today it’s announcing a deal that helps pave the way for a global launch of it. It has inked a licensing deal with Merlin, the
Lidar sensors are likely to be essential to autonomous vehicles, but if there are none of the latter, how can you make money with the former? Among the industry executives I spoke with, the outlook is optimistic as they unhitch their wagons from the sputtering star of self-driving cars. As it turns out, a few
Snapchat and NBC Olympics are again teaming up to produce customized Olympics content for users in the U.S. — this time, for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics this summer. The companies had previously worked together during the Rio 2016 and PyeongChang 2018 Olympics. The PyeongChang Olympic Winter Games in 2018 reached over 40 million U.S. users,
Back in September, Betaworks put out a call for startups to participate in its latest “camp,” this one focused on audio. Danika Laszuk, the head of Betaworks Camp, told me at the time that the startup studio was looking for companies that are trying to build “audio-first” experiences for smart speakers and wireless headphones, or
TriggerMesh, a startup building on top of the open source Kubernetes software to help enterprises go “serverless” across apps running in the cloud and traditional data centers, has raised $3 million in seed funding. The round is led Index Ventures and Crane Venture Partners. TriggerMesh says the investment will be used to scale the company
Facebook spying on teens, Twitter accounts hijacked by terrorists, and sexual abuse imagery found on Bing and Giphy were amongst the ugly truths revealed by TechCrunch’s investigating reporting in 2019. The tech industry needs more watchdogs than ever as its size enlargens the impact of safety failures and the abuse of power. Whether through malice,
If you’ve ever entered a company’s office as a visitor or contractor, you probably know the routine: check in with a receptionist, figure out who invited you, print out a badge and get on your merry way. Brussels, Belgium- and New York-based Proxyclick aims to streamline this process, while also helping businesses keep their people
When Dfinity raised $102 million in funding in 2018 at a $2 billion valuation in a round jointly led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital, it was thought of as a step change in the world of blockchain technology. In an area that was synonymous generating a lot of headlines around cryptocurrency speculation, this was
Smart speaker manufacturer Sonos has announced that the company is going to drop support for some of its products. Sonos stopped selling these devices a few years ago. While nothing lasts forever, dropping support is going to have a lot of implications and shows once again that the connected home isn’t as future-proof as expected.
Losing access to Google software and services understandably threw Huawei for a loop. The Chinese hardware giant has clearly been working on a contingency plan to deal with the loss of access to things like Android and the Play Store, but Google’s offering formed so much of the devices’ software core — as they do
[embedded content] Memphis Meats, a developer of technologies to manufacture meat, seafood and poultry from animal cells, has raised $161 million in financing from investors, including Softbank Group, Norwest and Temasek, the investment fund backed by the government of Singapore. The investment brings the company’s total financing to $180 million. Previous investors include individual and
Lately, the venture community’s relationship with advertising tech has been a rocky one. Advertising is no longer the venture oasis it was in the past, with the flow of VC dollars in the space dropping dramatically in recent years. According to data from Crunchbase, adtech deal flow has fallen at a roughly 10% compounded annual
Spotify is testing a new Stories feature that will allow select influencers to incorporate video elements into their public playlists, TechCrunch has learned and Spotify confirmed. The first influencer to test the feature is makeup and fashion YouTube star Summer Mckeen, who currently has a social media fan base that includes 2.33 million YouTube subscribers,
The last few years have seen many cities ban plastic bags, plastic straws and other common forms of waste, giving environmentally conscious alternatives a huge boost — among them Loliware, purveyor of fine disposable goods created from kelp. Huge demand and smart sourcing has attracted a big first funding round. I covered Loliware early on
Google Cloud today announced Secret Manager, a new tool that helps its users securely store their API keys, passwords, certificates and other data. With this, Google Cloud is giving its users a single tool to manage this kind of data and a centralized source of truth, something that even sophisticated enterprise organizations often lack. “Many
Boeing has signed a new agreement with Israel-based Tactical Robotics, an exploratory deal that will see the two companies work together jointly on “developing, producing and marketing” aircraft with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capabilities based on Tactical Robotics’ ‘Fancraft’ enclosed rotor technology. Already, the Urban Areonautics-owned Tactical Robotics has developed ‘Cormorant,’ an autonomous flying
If robots are to help out in places like hospitals and phone repair shops, they’re going to need a light touch. And what’s lighter than not touching at all? Researchers have created a gripper that uses ultrasonics to suspend an object in midair, potentially making it suitable for the most delicate tasks. It’s done with