India said on Wednesday it plans to spend nearly $6 billion to revive loss-making state-funded telecom operators Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL). In a press conference, telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said today the Narendra Modi government has given its in-principle approval to the merger of BSNL and MTNL
Congress grilled Facebook’s CEO today, unleashing critiques of his approach to cryptocurrency, privacy, encryption, and running a giant corporation. Mark Zuckerberg tried to assuage their fears while stoking concerns that if Facebook doesn’t build Libra, then the world will end up using China’s version. Yet Facebook won’t stop shaking up society, with Zuckerberg saying its
Bill McDermott has landed. Two weeks ago, he stepped down as CEO at SAP after a decade leading the company. Today, ServiceNow announced that he will be its new CEO. It’s unclear how quickly the move came together but the plan for him is clear: to scale revenue like he did in his last job.
Jared Verzello Contributor Jared Verzello is a startup and venture capital lawyer and GM of Atrium Seed where he guides companies through formation, fundraising, hiring, and managing board meetings. More posts by this contributor Pre- and Post-Money SAFEs: Choosing the right one for your startup Founders start a company because they have an idea they
Personal finance startup Truebill announced today that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding. The new funding was led by Eldridge Industries, with participation from Evolution VC previous investors including Cota Capital, Lucas Venture Group and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. When the Y Combinator-backed startup raised seed funding back in 2016, it was focused
Tesla will debut a new, third iteration of its solar roof tile this week – with an official debut tomorrow afternoon. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday that it’ll make an official announcement detailing the differences in generation three on Thursday afternoon. Tesla originally unveiled its solar roof tile
London-based fintech startup Revolut has two pieces of news to announe this week. First, Revolut is expanding to Singapore after a long beta period. The company already has 30,000 customers over there and anyone can open an account now. Singapore residents will be able to take advantage of all of Revolut’s core features. You can
Law enforcement tech outfitter Axon has announced that it will include automated license plate recognition in its next generation of dash cams. But its independent ethics board has simultaneously released a report warning of the dire consequences should this technology be deployed irresponsibly. Axon makes body and dash cams for law enforcement, the platform on
OnePlus’ 5G strategy has marked something of a shift for a company that has traditionally prided itself in a slow and steady approach to new features. Following the arrival of the OnePlus 7 Pro 5G this summer, the company is announcing its second 5G device for the U.S. market. This time, it’s opted for its
A small number of prolific U.S. Twitter users create the majority of tweets, and that extends to Twitter discussions around politics, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center out today. Building on an earlier study which discovered that 10% of users created 80% of tweets from U.S. adults, the organization today says
Demodesk, an early stage startup that wants to change how sales meetings are conducted online, announced a $2.3 million seed investment today. Investors included GFC, FundersClub, Y Combinator, Kleiner Perkins and an unnamed group of angel investors. The company was a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 cohort. CEO and co-founder Veronika Riederle says
There’s no shortage of lidar solutions available for autonomous vehicles, drones, and robots — theoretically, anyway. But getting a lidar unit from theory to mass production might be harder than coming up with the theory in the first place. Sense Photonics appears to have made it past that part of the journey, and is now
Raydiant, a startup promising to turn TVs into interactive digital signs, is making several announcements today — a new company name, a new CEO, new partners and $7 million in new funding. Until today, the company was known as Mira, and it was founded by Tuan Ho (who previously founded internet TV company Philo), along
The third annual review of the EU-US Privacy Shield data transfer mechanism has once again been nodded through by Europe’s executive. This despite the EU parliament calling last year for the mechanism to be suspended. The European Commission also issued US counterparts with a compliance deadline last December — saying the US must appoint a
Electric-bike maker Cowboy recently let me spend a couple of weeks with one of their e-bikes. It’s a well-designed e-bike that makes biking effortless, even if you’re going uphill. Cowboy is a Brussels-based startup. The company raised a $3 million seed round a couple of years ago and an $11.1 million (€10 million) Series A
Jeffrey Katzenberg’s mobile-only streaming service Quibi hasn’t even launched, but it’s already sold out of its $150 million first-year advertising inventory, the company announced this morning. The service, which officially debuts in April 2020, added new advertisers Discover, General Mills, T-Mobile, and Taco Bell, who join Quibi’s existing lineup of ad partners, Procter & Gamble,
New York Attorney General Letitia James is turning up the heat on the state’s antitrust investigation into Facebook, which is seeking “to determine whether Facebook’s actions may have endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, or increased the price of advertising.” Her coalition previously consisted of attorneys general from a total of eight
Databricks is a SaaS business built on top of a bunch of open source tools, and apparently it’s been going pretty well on the business side of things. In fact, the company claims to be one of the fastest growing enterprise cloud companies ever. Today the company announced a massive $400 million Series F funding
As access to top deals becomes more competitive, venture capital firms are creating new roles to attract top entrepreneurs. Now, in addition to recruiting top dealmakers, firms are bringing in culture experts and allocating roles to individuals who better understand and empathize with the founder journey. In keeping with this trend, Redpoint Ventures, a venture
New Scientist has obtained a legal agreement between Google’s health division and the UK National Health Service (NHS) that includes provision to pass five years’ worth of patient data in bulk as part of a contract novation process. If you’re feeling a sense of deja vu that’s quite right: Back in 2016 it emerged —
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. New Facebook features fight election lies everywhere but ads Facebook made a slew of announcements designed to stop 2020 election interference
The JEDI drama never stops. The $10 billion, decade long cloud contract has produced a series of twists and turns since the project was announced in 2018. These include everything from court challenges to the president getting involved to accusations of bias and conflict of interest. It has had all this and more. Today, in
Why do serial entrepreneurs keep jumping back in? What things might you learn the third, fourth, or fifth time around? To find out, Extra Crunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon spoke to Drift CEO and founder David Cancel at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco. Cancel has spent more than 20 years founding SaaS companies, with exits including
Over the past year or two, Squarespace has been expanding beyond website-building with new products like email marketing and its first acquisition (of an online scheduling tool) . Today, it’s announcing a move into social media content creation with the acquisition of Unfold, which offers templates for creating stories on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat — you
EV Connect, the Los Angeles-based company that sells software to manage electric vehicle charging, has raised $12 million in a Series B round led by investors Mitsui & Co. and Ecosystem Integrity Fund. The company has raised $25 million to date. EV Connect’s cloud-based platform has an open standard architecture that is designed to be
LabGenius, a London-based startup applying AI and “robotic automation” to protein drug discovery, has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Lux Capital and Obvious Ventures, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Inovia Capital, Air Street Capital and existing investors. Also investing is Recursion Pharmaceuticals’ founder and CEO Chris Gibson, as
The Snap-back continues. Snapchat blew past earnings expectations for a big beat in Q3, as it added 7 million daily active users this quarter to hit 210 million, up 13% year-over-year. Snap also beat on revenue, notching $446 million, which is up a whopping 50% year-over-year, at a loss of $0.04 EPS. That flew past
When Bill McDermott announced he was stepping down as CEO at SAP a couple of weeks ago, it certainly felt like a curious move — but he landed on his feet pretty quickly. ServiceNow announced he would be taking over as CEO there. The transition will take place at year-end. If you’re wondering what happened to
Medium is announcing significant changes to its Partner Program, where subscribers pay for access to exclusive content, and the revenue gets split with writers. The biggest change is that writers will now be compensated based “primarily” on reading time, rather than claps. In a post, Medium’s Emma Smith describes reading time as “a closer measure
Startup founders have a million things to worry about every day. Finding product-market fit, great talent and and a sustainable plan for constant growth are top of mind, but perhaps most importantly, they need to keep the lights on, whether it’s by raising venture capital or managing cash flows while bootstrapping. The flip side to