Tech

As climate change continues to be a forefront issue globally, many are petitioning for change and finding unique solutions to solving this issue. Twelve, a self proclaimed “carbon transformation company” is attempting to be part of the solution by turning captured CO2 into products usually made from fossil fuels. According to co-founder and CEO Nicholas

AlgiKnit is on a mission to offer more environmentally conscious materials for the heavily polluting fashion and textile industries. The startup is developing materials from seaweeds such as Macrocystis Pyrifera, one of the planet’s most renewable and regenerative organisms, creating yarns and fibers that don’t rely on petroleum or toxic chemicals. Aleks Gosiewski, Aaron Nesser

Y Combinator has announced Launch YC, a platform where people can sort accelerator startups by industry, batch and launch date to discover new products. The famed accelerator, which has seeded the likes of Instacart, Coinbase, OpenSea and Dropbox, invites users to vote for newly launched startups “to help them climb up the leaderboard, try out

Snežana Gebauer Contributor Snežana Gebauer, a partner with StoneTurn, has 20 years of experience in managing complex international investigations for major law firms, Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies and sovereign nations. The economic sanctions that have been imposed following the war in Ukraine pose an intricate set of challenges for private equity (PE). Sanctions are

Few consumer electronics categories matured as quickly as wireless earbuds. We went from the first good implementation of the technology to near ubiquity, seemingly overnight. Suddenly a good pair is cheap and they seem to be everywhere. It’s precisely for this reason that it’s become nearly impossible to distinguish yourself from the masses of companies

LG officially pulled the plug on its smartphone division in April of last year. It was another signpost in a dramatically changing mobile market that had left the electronics giant behind. HTC tends to be lumped into that conversation, though the Taiwanese manufacture has – in spite of everything – continued to press on, even

Selling your company — or not selling your company — is a complicated decision. Price, timing, pride, and a host of other factors play into the decision. Hell, you might simply enjoy running the business, be it a startup, unicorn, or public-market behemoth. Sometimes the decision is made for a company’s leadership team. Zendesk’s work

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest, boldest and baddest technology news. This week we are not recording on a Tuesday as it’s a regular week. Though we would add that Equity will

Edtech up-skilling platform Degreed has acquired Learn In, which creates talent resource hubs for employers to better spin up education services for their teams. While we’d nearly always cover a notable acquisition in a relevant tech sector, the extra interesting bit here is a personnel one: both companies were co-founded by the same entrepreneur, David

When it comes to moving the transportation sector over to EVs, commercial fleets are probably some of the lowest hanging fruit. More often than not, they have consistent routes, reserved off-hour parking, and cost a lot less to drive and maintain. But for many commercial operators, EVs are still a wildcard. Gagan Dhillon and Andrew

LG Electronics has acquired AppleMango, a South Korean electric vehicle battery charger developer, as the race to produce everything related to EVs ramps up globally. The acquisition, which was made jointly with GS Energy, an EV charging station operator, and GS Neotek, an IT provider, will allow LG to take advantage of future business opportunities,

As Google works on reconfiguring its adtech stack to move away from cookie-based ad targeting to something else that’s not yet fixed but which it claims will be better for individual web users’ privacy — and after Apple’s move last year to lock down third party tracking of app users on iOS, also on a

Cashify, a marketplace for gadgets trade-ins and buybacks in India, has raised $90 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its business in the world’s second-largest smartphone market. Prosus Ventures and NewQuest Capital Partners led the seven-year-old Indian startup’s Series E funding, Cashify said on Thursday. Paramark Ventures and existing backers

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the

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. My home country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, wants to have 100 French unicorns by 2030. Economy minister Bruno Le Maire, 10 homegrown decacorns. But shouldn’t

Hello from America, where we are digesting some pretty big news. Given the portent and weight of what’s going on today, it may feel a bit weird to sit down and read about billions of dollars of someone else’s money. But this is a technology startup and financial news site. So, to work. Just know

A federal appeals court froze the FDA’s ban on Juul products Friday after the company sought an emergency administrative stay. On Thursday, the U.S. regulator took sweeping action against the e-cigarette maker, effectively killing its access to the U.S. market. The temporary stay will be in place essentially to buy time until the case can

Vibrant Planet — which is creating an “operating system for forest restoration” — comes as a pleasant surprise, and not one I expected. Climate tech, while relatively new, has settled into two camps: hardware and software. And while Vibrant Planet is definitely a software play — from its cloud focus to its per-seat licenses, it’s

The era of commercial autonomous robotaxi service is here — Cruise officially became the first company to offer faired rides to the general public in a major city as of late Wednesday. The milestone comes after Cruise received official approval from the California Public Utilities Commission in early June to operate driverless in a commercial

Another strike against use of Google Analytics in Europe: The Italian data protection authority has found a local web publisher’s use of the popular analytics tool to be non-compliant with EU data protection rules owing to user data being transferred to the U.S. — a country that lacks an equivalent legal framework to protect the

The axe has fallen for e-cigarette maker Juul. The FDA ordered the company to stop selling and distributing its ubiquitous vaping devices in the U.S. Thursday, a dramatic end for a company that dominated the e-cigarette market and was valued at $38 billion at the top of its game. Juul will no longer be able

As video-led podcasts become highly favored by listeners, Podcastle, which was primarily an audio recording and editing studio, is introducing a new feature that enables podcasters to conduct high-resolution video interviews or solo recordings. Now, Podcastle will allow users to invite and video record up to ten guests through the Chrome browser or the Podcastle mobile

Florence Healthcare, which creates software that connects clinical trial sites, sponsors and contract research organizations, announced today that it has raised a $27 million Series C-1 led by Insight Partners. Insight Partners is known for its ScaleUp program that helps its portfolio companies grow rapidly. Florence Healthcare, which has now raised $114.1 million to date,

The buy now, pay later (BNPL) market, estimated to be worth $120 billion in 2021, has grown significantly over the last few years. But for most of its rise to virtual checkout prominence, BNPL largely targeted everyday consumer goods like clothes from Urban Outfitters or a Peloton. Now, the credit method is moving beyond its

Google announced today that Fitbit is introducing a new premium feature called “Sleep Profile,” which will offer users a new longitudinal analysis of sleep patterns while making sleep data easier to interpret. The new Sleep Profile feature will analyze sleep across 10 key metrics, including new data points like bedtime consistency, the time before sound

Google News is refreshing its desktop site with a new design that allows you to track global and local news on one screen. The redesign puts Your Briefing, Local news, and Top Picks section on a single page in different columns so it’s easier to catch up with news on topics and regions you care

Barack and Michelle Obama are heading to Audible. On Tuesday, the Amazon-owned company announced an exclusive multiyear first-look production deal with the former first couple’s Higher Ground media company. The deal comes after it came out that the Obamas and Spotify had decided not to extend their exclusive podcast partnership beyond the end of 2022.

It’s pretty annoying to go through CAPTCHA verification where you have to identify weird squiggly letters or click on images of the boat till there are none left — just to prove that you’re not a robot. Apple might be getting rid of this problem with a new feature in the upcoming iOS 16 and

Vahak is not only an open marketplace for truckers, but it also provides drivers with services like healthcare and discounted fuel cards. The Bangalore-based company announced today it has raised a $14 million Series A. The round was led by Nexus Partners, with participation from Foundamental, iSeed Ventures, Leo Capital, RTP Global and Tital Capital.