Tech

You know the old saying: If you don’t like Amazon Echo’s form factors, just wait a few minutes. The company has seemingly attempted everything when it comes to getting Alexa into more homes. Some stood the test of time, while others have been lost to the sands of time. Remember the Amazon Tap? The Echo

Amazon has reached a deal with Embracer Group, the company that holds the IP rights for “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit,” to release a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. The upcoming game will be an open-world MMO adventure set in Middle-earth, featuring the stories of

Christian Owens Contributor Christian Owens is executive chairman and co-founder of Paddle, a payments infrastructure provider for SaaS businesses. Following the valuation collapse of the last 12 months, the phrase “efficient growth” is reverberating around SaaS boardrooms worldwide. Every software leader is seeking to boost revenues, cut costs, and demonstrate a clear path to profitability.

Normally in the music industry, it’s more or less impossible for ordinary investors to buy music rights. Thus, Web3 startups saw an opportunity to tokenise music assets, allowing fans access to music rights in a wholly new fashion. Of course, this garnered a lot of interest during the Crypto boom a couple of years ago.

The venture community has realized several things in recent years: Climate change isn’t going away, and there is a huge opportunity to invest in companies that promise to define entire segments of the future economy. With a few hiccups along the way, venture dollars have begun to flow with increasing volume and regularity to climate

Building and maintaining relationships is hard, and COVID-19 definitely didn’t help. Multiple studies have shown that adults have gotten even more lonely since the start of the pandemic. Founders are trying to find tech solutions. There are many startups looking to combat loneliness — some formed years before the pandemic — including senior-focused ElliQ and

I’m back in the South Bay this week, banging away at an introduction in the hotel lobby a few minutes before our crew heads to Shoreline for Google I/O. There’s a guy behind in a business suit and sockless loafers, taking a loud business meeting on his AirPods. It’s good to be home. I’ve got

Netflix is planning to cut its spending by $300 million this year, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The report indicates that part of the reason why the streaming giant is looking to cut costs is because it delayed its plans to crackdown on password sharing in the U.S. and elsewhere

Welcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. This week, I look into three topics that don’t have to be an “either/or” situation: France or the U.K.; product-led or sales-led; psychedelics medicine

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior reporter Natasha Mascarenhas.  Startups Weekly readers know I love a pivot story, and now I have one of my own: I’m leaving TechCrunch! This is my last Startups Weekly issue, a newsletter that I’ve written every week for over

Sweden-based VC fund Pale Blue Dot bounced onto the scene in 2020 with a €53 million fund to help climate-focused startups. This fund grew again by €34 million in April 2021, and after deploying investments into 28 climate-forward companies, the investor this week announced it has officially closed its second fund. This one is valued

The U.K.’s floundering National Health Service (NHS) is not in the best of shapes by just about any estimation, the victim of chronic underfunding and understaffing that has led to excruciatingly long waiting times and health care professionals striking en masse. But in the midst of chaos, opportunity often lingers. A growing number of startups

The kooky geniuses at Teenage Engineering are back with a new gadget that is guaranteed to make you salivate until its price tag smacks you back to reality. The maker of drool-worthy synthesizers just announced the TP-7, a teeny portable recorder that features a “motorized tape reel,” which spins as it captures audio and also

Video game consultant Rami Ismail was a bit sleepy in an early morning meeting, until his client said something particularly strange: “I’m really just looking for a way to get my game its Bigolas Dickolas moment.” “I had to absolutely wake up very fast to politely find a way to explain I had no idea

People in the U.S. reported $8.8 billion of financial fraud in 2022 to the Federal Trade Commission, and while the FTC received fewer reports, 2.4 million versus 2.9 million in 2021, the overall monetary figure is 30% higher than 2021. Bank transfer or payment fraud amounted to $1.6 billion in 2022. When you expand this

TechCrunch Disrupt is a global event, and the Startup Battlefield 200 cohort reflects the rich geographic genius the world has to offer. Although we’ve never had a startup from Antarctica, that’s probably just a matter of time. Right now, however, we’re looking at the countries that make up APAC and Oceania. APAC and Oceania: Join

Dutch startup Farmless has today announced that it has raised a €1.2 million pre-seed equity round at an undisclosed valuation to bring to our tables proteins created without the need for traditional farming operations. The climate crisis means that it has never been more pressing to develop alternative food sources in order to both protect

Last year we covered how late-stage tech backer Liquidity Group had raised $775M for its fintech platform from Apollo (private equity) and MUFG (a Japanese bank). Liquidity is part tech platform and part lender, using its technology to make decisions on deploying debt facilities and other financial solutions from $5M to 100M relatively quickly compared

This week, ten-year-old drone company ACSL announced plans to enter the U.S. commercial drone market. The firm has already taken a sizable bite out of the market in its native Japan, with a certification from the country’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, as well as a deal to provide disaster support for the

Amazon announced Monday the launch of its new unit Amazon MGM Studios Distribution, which will allow the company to license Amazon Originals and other titles to third-party media companies, which could include streaming services (free, ad-supported or subscription), cable TV as well as pay TV distribution. For the first time, titles such as “The Marvelous

We can all agree that data brokers are creepy and bad, and that in this age they have feasted upon our personal information like never before. Opting out is hard enough — which is why Optery is there to help — but as the data economy continues to evolve, we may want a more proactive

Invesco, which led Swiggy’s previous round, has marked down the Indian food delivery giant’s valuation in its holding to about $5.5 billion, according to a filing. This revised valuation, as of January 31, 2023, represents a striking 48.6% decrease from the $10.7 billion valuation Invesco had previously attributed to the startup during a funding round

Frontline is the latest startup grabbing VC dollars with a $6.4 million seed round Rebecca Szkutak 7 hours Wildfires, and the damage they cause, are a growing problem. The U.S. saw more than 66,000 wildfires in 2022 alone, and while many think of these natural disasters as largely a California problem, they burn all across

Netherlands-based Instruqt has a product allowing companies to more easily test how a new software would run inside their organization. After bootstrapping its way to growth, it has now raised €15 million in a Series A round led entirely by Blossom Capital. It’s much easier to sell a software product into a company if they

Look, I’m not going to sit here and pretend like the entire world didn’t know this was happening next week, but is a bit of theatrics too much to ask? Google learned a few years back that the best way to juice a product hype cycle is to “leak” the thing yourself, and here here

Warner Bros. Discovery announced Friday that its streaming business will turn a profit in 2023. The company previously said it expected to break even by 2024 and become profitable in 2025. “It is an important time for Warner Bros. Discovery. We’ve come through some major restructurings and have repositioned our businesses with greater precision and