The European Commission has endorsed a risk mitigation approach to managing 5G rollouts across the bloc — meaning there will be no pan-EU ban on Huawei. Rather it’s calling for Member States to coordinate and implement a package of “mitigating measures” in a 5G toolbox it announced last October and has endorsed today. “Through the
Animal-like, four-legged robots have been a crowd pleaser since Boston Dynamics’ BigDog, and Stanford’s Doggo shows how the technology can be made open source, accessible, and educational. Doggo’s creators will bring the diminutive robot, plus its smaller and larger siblings Pupper and Woofer, to TC Sessions: Robotics+AI on March 3. P.S. Early bird ticket sales
Facebook beat Wall Street estimates in Q4 but slowing profit growth beat up the share price. Facebook reached 2.5 billion monthly users, up 2%, from 2.45 billion in Q3 2019 when it grew 1.65%, and it now has 1.66 billion daily active users, up 2.4% from 1.62 billion last quarter when it grew 2%. Facebook
French startup Bankin’ has introduced Bridge Pay this week, an API that lets you initiate payments using bank transfers from your app. Think about it as a sort of Stripe, but for bank transfers. The API currently covers 12 major French banks, which represent around 90% of retail bank accounts in France. Bankin’ is both
Y Combinator graduate OpenPhone is raising a $2 million funding round led by Slow Ventures. The company is working on an app that lets you seamlessly get a business phone number without a second phone or a second SIM card. Y Combinator, Kindred Ventures, Garage Capital, 122WEST Ventures and others are also participating in today’s
As we spend more and more time on our phones, working busier and busier jobs, and leading more and more overwhelming lives, personal connection with others is harder and harder to come by. HeyMama wants to change that. The premium social network is aimed squarely at working mothers, looking to give them a space to
Cooks Venture, the agtech company looking to revolutionize the chicken industry, has today announced the close of a $4 million funding round led by Golden West Food Group. Cooks Venture has been working in stealth for many years, but launched onto the scene in 2018 with a plan to reshape agriculture from the ground up.
Ophelia Brown’s Blossom Capital just raised a new $185 million fund Steve O’Hear @sohear / 9 hours Blossom Capital, the venture capital firm co-founded by ex-Index Ventures and LocalGlobe VC Ophelia Brown, just raised a new $185 million fund. The firm’s remit remains broadly the same: to be the lead investor in European tech startups
I need a new phone. A big chunk of my time on the iPhone was spent taking pictures, so I’m heavily basing the next smartphone on its camera capabilities. After playing around with the Pixel 4 for Brian’s review, I’m considering switching teams. Price-wise, it would make sense to compare the iPhone 11 with the
Less than six months after it announced $40 million in funding, Attentive has raised another $70 million, this time in Series C funding. The new round was led by Sequoia and IVP, two firms that were already part of the Series B. Previous investors Eniac Ventures and NextView Ventures also participated. CEO Brian Long (who, along with
Jeff Bezos’ phone was hacked. And if the richest person in the world is vulnerable, chances are good that your startup could get hacked, too. The good news is that, as a tiny company, you’re not a big target. But as soon as you hire your first employee, it’s time to think about adopting basic
ServiceNow announced this morning that it has acquired Passage AI, a startup that helps customers build chatbots in multiple languages, something that should come in handy as ServiceNow continues to modernize its digital service platform. The companies did not share terms of the deal. With Passage AI, ServiceNow gets a bushel of AI talent, which
Research presented at the ACM FAT 2020 conference in Barcelona today supports the notion that YouTube’s platform is playing a role in radicalizing users via exposure to far-right ideologies. The study, carried out by researchers at Switzerland’s Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, found evidence that users
Bringing a startup from idea to IPO isn’t an easy task, but if you can build something successful, one major milestone is to go public. Before your Nasdaq debut, however, there’s a major step — building a deck and taking it on the road for investors. Cloud computing company Nutanix went public in 2016, so
“They’re idiots, they’re really naive,” is how Stevie Graham, the co-founder of fintech Teller, once described Open Banking Limited, the body charged with delivering open banking in the U.K. His view back in 2017 — which now looks somewhat prophetic — was that open banking wouldn’t be the competition driver it was hyped up to
Apple’s much-awaited online store in India will be operational starting Q3 this year, a little longer than previously expected, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The iPhone-maker said in August last year that it was “eager to serve [customers of India] online and in-store with the same experience and care that Apple customers
Flipboard, the personalized news aggregation app used by 145 million users per month, is today launching a new feature aimed at bringing local news coverage to 23 cities across the U.S. and Canada, including major metros like New York, L.A, San Francisco, Seattle, D.C., Boston, Dallas, Chicago, and many others. The goal with the new
The team behind Product Hunt is launching a new social network called YourStack, a platform aiming to connect people that are passionate about products and help them discover what things their friends love. “It’s super simple, you just search through and create a stack of products you love.” Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover tells TechCrunch.
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. While the IPO cycle reprices former unicorns and concern imbues the private market with profit warnings, it turns out that there is still appetite for scooter startups. Even more, there’s hunger for both combinations in
Facebook’s internal “Supreme Court” can’t set precedents, can’t make decisions about Facebook Dating or Marketplace, and can’t oversee WhatsApp, Oculus, or any messaging feature, according to the bylaws Facebook proposed today for its Oversight Board. It’s designed to provide an independent appeals process for content moderation rulings. But it will only be able to challenge
RealityEngines.AI, an AI and machine learning startup founded by a number of former Google executives and engineers, is coming out of stealth today and announcing its first set of products. When the company first announced its $5.25 million seed round last year, CEO Bindu Reddy wasn’t quite ready to disclose RealityEngines’ mission beyond saying that
WholyMe, a London startup that makes and markets ‘natural relief’ products to manage chronic pain, has closed a £500,000 Seed round from investors Financière Saint James, V1 Capital, Guibor and business angels. The round also includes Joyance Partners, a New York-based VC concentrating on the new science emerging around ‘health and happiness’ which recently expanded
Growing up with blindness or low vision can be difficult for kids, not just because they can’t read the same books or play the same games as their sighted peers; Vision is also a big part of social interaction and conversation. This Microsoft research project uses augmented reality to help kids with vision impairment “see”
Last year saw global smartphone sales decline for the first time since analysts started tracking such things. In Gartner’s case, that comprises a full 11 years, as figures dropped 2% for 2019. Following on last week’s global device forecast, the firm is drilling down on smartphone figures with some slightly rosier results. According to the
Shipamax, the London-based startup and YC graduate that is helping freight forwarders and other logistics companies automate their back-office processes, has raised $7 million. Leading the round is Mosaic Ventures, with participation from Crane Venture Partners, Y Combinator, and other existing investors. Shipamax says it will use the funding to double in size over the
The value of tech-enabled companies is coming into focus as several American unicorns test the public markets. The data show that some venture-backed companies often grouped with technology companies are worth just a fraction of their tech-first cousins. By tech-enabled business, we mean a company that has a technology element to its operations but doesn’t
Marketing and sales automation — tools that leverage the advances and data of our digital age to better identify and then interact with customers — is big business, with the whole market expected to generate some $6.6 billion in revenues for related companies by 2025. But “companies” is the operative word here: it’s a very
The UK government will allow Chinese tech giant Huawei to play a limited role in supplying the country’s 5G networks, it has been announced today. The government said the package of restrictions being announced on “high risk” 5G vendors will allow it to “mitigate the potential risk posed by the supply chain and to combat
NASA has selected Houston-based Axiom Space, a startup founded in 2016, to build the first commercial habitat module for the International Space Station (ISS). This module will be used as a destination for future commercial spaceflight missions, potentially housing experiments, technology development and more performed by commercial space travellers taking rides up to the ISS
Berlin-based Merantix, a venture studio which specifically concentrates on building ‘AI companies’, says it has raised a new €25M fund ($27M). Anchor investors include Trusted Insight, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, as well as further family offices from Europe. Co-founder Adrian Locher said in a statement that the successful fundraising “underpins