Tech

Startups need capital and often fundraise from investors. This requires pitching, numbers, stats and a story. And the time has to be correct. The key to timing is easy, according to this CEO: Fundraise when your confidence is high. Each week on TechCrunch Live, investors and entrepreneurs share lessons learned from personal experiences. And Front

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.  When you start a project, it’s easy to get caught up in it. Then time passes and suddenly it’s been a half decade. Equity, a podcast I got

A federal judge in California dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Twitter Friday, dimming at least one avenue the former president and prolific tweeter might have used to get back to his platform of choice. Trump’s argument that the social media company and its then-chief executive Jack Dorsey violated his right to free speech failed to

We’re less than two weeks away from kicking off TC Sessions: Mobility 2022. Our first in-person mobility event since 2019 — holy cats! — takes place on May 18-19 in San Mateo, California, followed by an online event on May 20.  Don’t miss this opportunity to connect with hundreds of your peers and hear about,

Codenotary, the company behind the immutable immudb open source database and a software supply chain security service built on top of it, today announced that it is also adding a full-stack Kubernetes and VMware vSphere monitoring service for operations and DevOps teams on top of that. Basically, while the company’s previous offering — Codenotary Cloud

Folk, the next-generation CRM started by European startup studio eFounders, is going live today. If you’ve paid attention to TechCrunch, I’ve already covered Folk in the past. Since then, the product has evolved a bit and is now ready for prime time. “The biggest SaaS [software-as-a-service] category is CRM. The highest valuation in the SaaS

Google has announced a package of additional controls for users of its productivity suite, Google Workspace (neé G Suite), in Europe — which it’s rolling out by the end of this year and next. It says these extra control will enable organizations — both public and private sector — to “control, limit, and monitor transfers

Facebook’s rebranded parent, Meta, has become the next tech giant to be confirmed as subject to a special competition abuse control regime in Germany, following a 2021 update to its digital competition rules that are focused on large digital companies which are considered to be of “paramount significance for competition across markets”, as the law

The food delivery business, and tech companies leading the charge, were hot commodities at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic as people stayed indoors and turned to apps to fill their bellies with pre-made meals. Now with that trend cooling off, those companies are feeling the chill. In the latest development, big changes and drama

Germany-based rental car giant Sixt has confirmed it’s been hit by a cyberattack that has caused widespread disruption to its global operations. According to a statement from Sixt, which has more than 2,000 locations across more than 110 countries, the company first detected “IT irregularities” on April 29, before subsequently confirming the cyberattack and containing

Keyboard startup Fleksy has launched a new self-serve SDK to expand its reach for indie developers wanting to add custom keyboard software to their apps. The Barcelona-based mobile keyboard software maker has been pursuing a white label licensing approach to selling its customizable keyboard tech for several years but it’s now looking to expand its

Digital therapeutics plus pills? Iceland’s Sidekick Health has developed a gamified digital care platform that’s designed to support healthcare outcomes by applying personalized behavioral lifestyle nudges, including alongside clinical treatments like drugs, to augment, extend and support patient care for a range of chronic diseases and conditions from cancer to cardiovascular health, diabetes and arthritis

French startup Alan has raised a new €183 million funding round ($193 million at today’s exchange rate). The company sells its own health insurance products and has expanded to other medical products and services. In other words, Alan wants to build a healthcare super app and a one-stop shop for all your questions and needs

The European Union’s flagship reform for tackling Big Tech platform power, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), will come into force in early 2023, Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager has said — rowing back from an earlier suggested timeframe of this fall. But she also implied that enforcements against unruly Internet “gatekeepers” could flow soon after the

Just over a year after launching a dedicated unit focused on digital markets inside the national competition watchdog, the UK government has put some meat on the bones of what this new Big Tech regulator will focus on — including confirming it will have the ability to levy fines of up to 10% of global

Meet Pixy, Snap’s little flying companion. Pixy is a mini drone that can act as a camera sidekick when you can’t ask someone to take a video of you. It’s yellow, it’s cute and it’ll be available in the U.S. and in France for $229.99. “Today, we’re taking the power and magic of the Snap

Airbnb today announced that it will soon no longer offer refunds for COVID-19-related circumstances, including cases where a guest or host becomes sick with COVID-19 — reflecting an update to the company’s extenuating circumstances policy. Beginning May 31, Airbnb hosts’ cancellation terms will apply “as usual,” Airbnb said, although certain reservations made before May 31

Yesterday, fintech startup Lydia unveiled a brand new design for its financial super app. And it’s an opinionated take on mobile payments — not just a fresh coat of paint. I sat down with the company’s founders to discuss the thinking and vision for the future of Lydia. In many ways, Lydia isn’t standing still

Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold around 4.4 million shares of the company on Tuesday, according to regulatory filings published on Thursday. Musk, via Aaron Beckman, his power of attorney, filed a total of five Form 4s with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to cover all 138 individual transactions. The value of the sales in

BlocPower founder Donnel Baird grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 1980s. The area was so poor that buildings often lacked decent heating systems. People would turn on the stove or use electric heaters to compensate for ineffective central heating. It wasn’t safe or efficient, but it was reality for many families,

Smallstep founder and CEO Mike Malone calls big, distributed systems his happy place, but these systems involve a lot of machine-to-machine communications, an area identity vendors haven’t been able to solve. The central issue is that when there are no humans involved, how do you authenticate the hand-off between machines to ensure it’s going to

Ben Franklin once famously said that in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. But that doesn’t make dealing with either particularly natural and easy. Tech is rushing in to fill that gap, and today a Berlin-based startup called Taxfix, which has built a popular mobile assistant to address

Luis Severino cupped the glove around his ear in frustration. The Yankee Stadium two-strike Death Star siren was blaring over the PA, the announcers reasoned. The pitcher signaled frustration with a new piece of technology that’s quickly been rolled out on baseball’s biggest stage. Manager Aaron Boone walked out to the mound, handing Severino a

We already suspected that the controversy surrounding the Joe Rogan podcast on Spotify was doing little to actually prompt users to leave the streaming service, based on app store data. Now, Spotify’s first-quarter earnings have confirmed it. Despite losing 1.5 million users in Russia, Spotify’s premium subscribers grew 15% year-over-year in the first quarter to

Shared micromobility company Voi is deploying e-scooters in Oslo, Norway with Drover AI’s computer vision tech that can identify whether a scooter is on the pavement, road or cycle lane in order to help prevent sidewalk riding. As the micromobility industry consolidates around a few key players and cities become more discerning about which operators

Don’t call it a pivot, exactly — but it’s a fascinating journey, nonetheless. Umaro Foods, which is set to release a seaweed-based bacon replacement, entered the world as Trophic. The firm, which is now technically a subsidiary of the former, was formed to compete for the $100 million Carbon Removal XPrize. The organization managed to

A McKinsey and Co. study suggests that while sub-Saharan Africa has the potential to increase (even triple) its agricultural output and overall contribution to the economy, the sector remains untapped largely due to lack of access to quality farm inputs, up to par infrastructure like warehousing and market. This is in an economy that derives

Bitso, a Mexico City-based crypto exchange, is pledging to buy carbon offsets for every bitcoin transaction on its platform to compensate for the cryptocurrency’s environmental toll. It may sound great in theory, but the idea also deserves a heaping dose of skepticism, given the sketchy reputation carbon offset efforts have earned over the years. Bitcoin’s

This has been a long time coming: Google today announced that it is submitting its Istio service mesh project for consideration as an incubating project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Google’s Kubernetes has long been the flagship project for the CNCF and the company recently also brought Knative, a project that aims to

The fishing market globally was worth $253 billion in 2021, and despite the controversy that swirls around the industry, that figure continues to grow. Today a startup that has built a platform to make the business of fishing more efficient — and thus the process overall more traceable and less prone to waste — is