Tech

The FCC has sent out the first checks from its Emergency Connectivity Fund, an effort to help close the “homework gap” at schools by covering the cost of computers and internet services. Thousands of school districts, in every state plus D.C., Guam and Puerto Rico, will split this first $1.2 billion distribution, and there’s still

Amazon has launched Prime Video Channels in India, allowing its customers to subscribe to eight streaming services including Discovery+ and Mubi from one hub, the latest in a series of efforts by the U.S. giant to win customers in the South Asian nation. The new offering makes it easier for users to login and pay

We started this competition with 20 impressive startups. After three days of fierce pitching in the virtual yet incredibly competitive Startup Battlefield arena, we have a winner. The startups taking part in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. Like last year, we reproduced the nail-biting excitement

Fintech startups are having one hell of a week. On the heels of Boston-based software-and-payments company Toast’s strong IPO pricing, Remitly priced shares in its own debut above its proposed range yesterday evening. The Seattle-based fintech company sold 12,162,777 shares (7,000,000 primary) at $43 apiece. The company had previously targeted a $42 per-share max price

Facebook today provided an update on how Apple’s privacy changes have impacted its ad business. The company had already warned investors during its second quarter earnings that it expected to feel an even more significant impact in its ad targeting business by Q3. This morning, it reiterated that point, but also noted that it had

There’s a lot of value in waste; just ask metals processing company Nth Cycle, which has developed a technology to help mining and recycling companies recover every bit of critical minerals from their operations. The company calls its technology “electro-extraction,” and Nth Cycle’s founder and CEO Megan O’Connor likened it to a water filter in

Intuit, the business and financial tools company best known for its TurboTax software, made news last week for its acquisition of Mailchimp, and is now announcing a corporate venture capital arm, Intuit Ventures, to identify growth opportunities and trends beneficial for its key customers — small businesses and consumers. The company is the latest to

Back in July, British “axial-flux” electric motor startup YASA was acquired by Mercedes-Benz for an undisclosed amount. YASA’s electric motors generated considerable EV industry interest because of their efficiency, high power density, small size and low weight. Indeed, Rolls-Royce, best known in aviation for its jet engines, employed YASA engines in its all-electric airplane “Spirit

Smart fitness gear is often limited by being static and non-portable. (And, well, eye-wateringly expensive.) Think Peloton‘s stationary bike for spin classes or wall-mounted strength training rig Tonal. Great if you’re at home and can afford to shell out thousands on a fancy home gym, but what if you want to take your workout with

PayPal has been talking about its “super app” plans for some time, having recently told investors its upcoming digital wallet and payments app had been given a go for launch. Today, the first version of that app is officially being introduced, offering a combination of financial tools including direct deposit, bill pay, a digital wallet,

Year-old startup Capiter announced last week that it raised a $33 million Series A to digitize Egypt’s traditional offline retail market. It’s looking to take a large pie in the budding e-commerce and retail play, where multiple startups are pulling their weight including Cartona, also a year-old startup out of Egypt. Today, Cartona is announcing that

Fivetran, the data connectivity startup, had a big day today. For starters it announced a $565 million investment on $5.6 billion valuation, but it didn’t stop there. It also announced its second acquisition this year, snagging HVR, a data integration competitor that had raised over $50M, for $700 million in cash and stock. The company

Twitter’s creator platform Super Follows is off to an inauspicious start, having contributed to somewhere around $6,000 in U.S. iOS revenue in the first two weeks the feature has been live, according to app intelligence data provided by Sensor Tower. And it’s made only around $600 or so in Canada. A small portion of that

The climate crisis is creating massive demand for data capture as industries grapple with how to decarbonize. Put simply, you can’t cut your carbon emissions if don’t know what they are in the first place. This need to gather data is a big opportunity for startups — and a wave of early companies have already

It’s been a heady 12-18 months for Zoom, the decade-old company that experienced monster 2020 growth and more recently, a mega acquisition with the $14.7 billion Five9 deal in July. That addition is part of a broader strategy the company has been undertaking the last couple of years to move beyond its core video conferencing

Apple and Google have removed a tactical voting app created by the organization of jailed Kremlin critic, Alexei Navalny, from their respective mobile app stores in Russia. Earlier this week Reuters reported that the Russian state had been amping up the pressure on foreign tech giants ahead of federal elections — appropriating the language of

Way back in 2015 we covered the launch of the Atmotube, a small, innovative, portable air quality monitor which went on to receive a number of awards after its CES debut. Since rebranding as ATMO, the company, co-founded by Vera Kozyr, is now launching the Atmocube, an indoor air quality monitoring system for businesses and

Tile, the maker of Bluetooth-powered lost item finder beacons and, more recently, a staunch Apple critic, announced today it has raised $40 million in non-dilutive debt financing from Capital IP. The funding will be put towards investment in Tile’s finding technologies, ahead of the company’s plan to unveil a new slate of products and features

Rhys Spence Contributor Rhys Spence is head of research at Brighteye Ventures, a European edtech-focused fund, where he works with portfolio companies to help address priorities, with a focus on internationalization. More posts by this contributor The 2021 edtech avalanche has just begun It’s a story common to all sectors today: investors only want to

While the technology and business world worked towards the weekend, developer operations (DevOps) firm GitLab filed to go public. Before we get into our time off, we need to pause, digest the company’s S-1 filing, and come to some early conclusions. GitLab competes with GitHub, which Microsoft purchased for $7.5 billion back in 2018. The

Facebook is in the hot seat again. The Wall Street Journal published a powerful multi-part series on the company this week, drawing from internal documents on everything from the company’s secretive practice of whitelisting celebrities to its knowledge that Instagram is taking a serious toll on the mental health of teen girls. The flurry of

Ford said Thursday it will invest another $250 million and add 450 jobs to increase production capacity of its upcoming F-150 Lightning to 80,000 all-electric trucks annually. The announcement comes after receiving more than 150,000 pre-orders for the all-electric pickup truck. The additional funds and jobs will be spread out across its new Rouge Electric

Mirantis has been around the block, starting way back as an OpenStack startup, but a few years ago the company began to embrace cloud-native development technologies like containers, microservices and Kubernetes. Today, it announced Mirantis Flow, a fully managed open source set of services designed to help companies manage a cloud-native data center environment, whether

APIs are the grease turning the gears and wheels for many organizations’ IT systems today, but as APIs grow in number and use, tracking how they work (or don’t work) together can become complex and potentially critical if something goes awry. Now, a startup that has built an innovative way to help with this is

GoPro today announced a new flagship action camera for its lineup, the HERO10 Black. The main update for the camera is a brand new processor inside, called the GP2, which enables big improvements to image quality and video captures, including recording at 5.3K revolution at up to 60 frames per second, 4K video capture bumped

SmartNews, a Tokyo-headquartered news aggregation website and app that’s grown in popularity despite hefty competition from built-in aggregators like Apple News, today announced it has closed on $230 million in Series F funding. The round brings SmartNews’ total raise to date to over $400 million and values the business at $2 billion — or as

Ash Fontana Contributor Ash Fontana, a managing director at Zetta Ventures, is the author of “The AI-First Company: How to Compete and Win with Artificial Intelligence.” More posts by this contributor Growing up in the intelligence era Investors in AI-first technology companies serving the defense industry, such as Palantir, Primer and Anduril, are doing well.

Building credit history can be difficult if you are a consumer that is having trouble getting access to credit in the first place. Enter TomoCredit, which has developed a credit card focused on building credit history for first-time borrowers. The San Francisco-based startup is announcing today that it has raised $10 million in a Series

Eric Schwartzman Contributor A U.S. federal judge last week struck down Apple rules restricting app developers from selling directly to customers outside the App Store. Apple’s stock fell 3% on the news, which is being regarded as a win for small and midsize app developers because they’ll be able to build direct billing relationships with

Mayors have the toughest job in the world, and leading a city is only getting harder. Even as populations swell in urban cores across the world, climate change is constraining the geographies where that growth can happen. Coastal communities which are popular with residents are also taking a gamble when it comes to rising sea