Tech

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week.

Rapid grocery deliver startups like Getir, Gopuff and Gorillas, once heralded as the next big thing in on-demand ordering, are running up against logistical challenges that might very well be insurmountable. Even faced with competition and sky-high operating costs, though, they’re taking what steps they can to stick around. Case in point, Gopuff today launched

Let’s face it: Most people aren’t early adopters, especially when it comes to their homes. Take the kitchen, for example, where many people still buy gas cooktops despite induction’s superiority. It’s not because everyone’s busy charring peppers over an open flame — it’s because they’re slow to adopt changes. When it comes to heating and

Electric vehicle startup Nio is accelerating its expansion in Europe. The premium EV maker just launched its first power-swapping station in Varberg, Sweden, the company said in a LinkedIn post. When it comes to charging, Nio differentiates itself from its rivals by offering swappable batteries, which are upgradable and charge a monthly subscription fee, on

It’s that time of year again. It can drop 20 degrees on any given day, and we’re stuck indoors watching people watch Qualcomm announce new chips and reference designs in sunny Hawaii. The Snapdragon Summit is the component-maker’s annual opportunity to map out its big plans for the next year, ahead of the holiday scrum

When Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI developed by startup Stability AI, was open sourced earlier this year, it didn’t take long for the internet to wield it for porn-creating purposes. Communities across Reddit and 4chan tapped the AI system to generate realistic and anime-style images of nude characters, mostly women, as well as non-consensual fake

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello! You’ve got one more day of just me before I take a well-deserved Friday off and Kyle fills in, so I have decided to make an extra-large version of Daily Crunch.

If someone offers you a seat on a rocket, you don’t ask which seat. So goes one of Silicon Valley’s favorite platitudes, one that you can trace back (at a minimum) to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. The idea is that if you are given a shot at working

Alternative meat, seafood and dairy products are all the rage in startup land, with countless companies raising bucketloads of cash and showcasing their first products throughout 2022. There are two broad categories within the meat-substitute space specifically: plant-based foods that strive to mimic the texture, look and feel of real meat, and “lab-grown” cultivated meat that’s

Algorithmiq, a Helsinki-based quantum computing startup, has pulled in a deal with IBM to super-charge its exploration of quantum algorithms applied to the life sciences. The collaboration will attempt to dramatically cut the time and cost of drug discovery and development. The widely accepted maxim is that it takes around a decade and $1 billion

Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and small-batch production for the win Haje Jan Kamps 3 days If you are running R&D at a large appliance manufacturer, you have a challenge. You typically make products in enormous quantities at pretty slim margins. In order to recoup your development, tooling and launch marketing costs, you need to create and sell

Descript, the audio and video editing platform founded in 2017 by former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, has raised $50 million in a Series C round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which OpenAI and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage companies. Descript is the second startup to receive a cash

Silkhaus, a Dubai-based platform for short-term rentals coming out of stealth, has raised $7.75 million in seed funding, money it plans to use for expansion across South Asia, Southeast Asia and the MENA region.  Venture capital firms that participated in the round include Nuwa Capital, Nordstar, Global Founders Capital, Yuj Ventures, Whiteboard Capital and VentureSouq.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello, and welcome to the beginning of another week. As mentioned last Friday, Haje is off scuba diving, leaving the rest of us to pick up the Twitter and FTX pieces. No

California voters shot down a plan to make electric vehicles more affordable for some residents, dealing a blow to Lyft and the EV industry alike. Proposition 30 would have taxed residents making more than $2 million a year to subsidize electric cars and public charging stations as well as funded wildfire prevention programs. Even with

Walk through any public park these days and you will see a hell of a lot more dogs than you might have three years ago. The loneliness of the pandemic lockdowns led to an explosion in pet ownership. Plus, The demographic of pet ownership has shifted. Whereas previously it was Granny or Grandpa who tended

The Echo business has always looked like Amazon playing the long game from the outside. Above all, the company’s home consumer hardware is a convenient vessel for getting Alexa into millions of homes. But when a corporation is doing some serious belt tightening amid broader economic headwinds, no divisions are safe from cost cutting —

Hey, friends! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we recap the top TechCrunch headlines from the past seven days. Get it in your inbox every Saturday AM by signing up here. Ready? Let’s go. most read Twitter had a week so strange that it could easily make up this entire newsletter, so

According to layoffs.fyi, more than 23,000 tech workers have been laid off so far this month. For comparison, the site tracked 12,463 layoffs in October. Facebook’s parent company Meta announced the first major job cuts in its history this week, eliminating 11,000 jobs. Like Twitter, Stripe, Brex, Lyft, Netflix and other tech firms based in

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hoooo boy. As Alex would say: This week has been a long year. You just know it has been a pretty wild ride when Meta can lay off 13% of its staff,

Clean-tech startup Airly wants to help communities around the world improve air quality with affordable sensors and software that provides actionable insights. Based in London and Krakow, the startup announced today it has raised $5.5 million. The round was led by firstminute capital and Pi Labs, with participation from returning investors like the Sir Richard

Twitter’s painstakingly layered infosphere looks to be light-speeding back to chaotic noise under new owner Elon Musk. The billionaire is no fan of meritocratic signals nor, it seems, a friend to genuine information — preferring anyone pay him $8/m to have their account on his microblogging social network badged with a check-mark that looks like

When the pandemic slammed into our shores a couple of years ago, many of us were shoo-ed inside, doomed to endless Zoom meetings. At the time, Canon released a beta of its EOS Webcam Utility, and then seemed to pretty much forget about it. Until today. In a ‘geez, Canon, this would have been helpful

Peacock announced that on November 30, its Premium Plus subscribers will get 24/7 access to their local NBC station in all of NBC’s 210 markets, including live TV programming like local news, sports, weather and entertainment. Subscribers will soon be able to livestream popular programs like “The TODAY Show,” “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon”

Twitter’s new CEO and owner Elon Musk is rattling the cage at his social network and ruffling a lot of feathers both inside and outside of the company. But while some in the tech world describe that kind of chaos as a garbage fire, others see it as something very different: an opportunity. Years-old federated

Equals, a New York-based startup ambitiously aiming to challenge Excel’s dominance with a supercharged spreadsheet, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Craft Ventures, Box Group, Worklife and Combine. Co-founded by Ben McRedmond and Bobby Pinero, two former Intercom employees, Equals

Ten years after a cap-and-trade scheme championed in part by John Kerry was unceremoniously killed by one of his colleagues across the aisle, the former senator turned climate envoy is once again pitching the policy as a solution to climate change. As an idea, cap and trade isn’t bad! It works by having governments cap

The European Commission has put forward proposed rules for short term rental platforms focused on boosting transparency and mandatory data-sharing — in what looks like a ‘softly does it’ approach to addressing concerns attached to the rise of vacation rentals on platforms like Airbnb. While P2P vacation rental platforms remain popular options for European citizens