Tech

Lightyear, a Dutch startup developing a long-range solar-powered car, today announced that it has raised €86 million ($85 million) as it prepares to begin production of its first vehicle in the coming months. While recent history is littered with examples of prototype solar-powered vehicles, the burgeoning electric car movement has so far been mostly limited

Hello and welcome back to Max Q. Happy Labor Day! Due to the scheduling of the newsletter, I’ll have finished writing this by the time NASA makes the second launch attempt of the Artemis I mission. By now, you probably already know how it all went down anyway! In this issue: SpaceX lands more astronaut

More games and more NFTs pose questions for the gaming industry Karan Bhasin 3 days There has been stiff backlash against NFTs in video games since they first started popping up. In general, both gamers as well as industry professionals have disapproved blockchain implementations in video games, mostly over concerns over the environmental impact that

Indonesia’s credit bureaus currently have about 92 million credit records, but the founders of SkorLife say many people have trouble accessing their own data. That’s why they built the app, which not only lets people see their credit histories for free, but also gives personalized advice on how to improve data. The Jakarta-based startup announced

The U.K. could be gearing up to hit a handful of tech firms with enforcement orders (and potentially fines) related to a children’s online privacy and safety Code which has been in force for a year. “The ICO are currently looking into how over 50 different online services are conforming with the code, with four

India is planning to speed up testing and safety approvals of electronic devices, including smartphones and earbuds, to reduce their time to market. Currently, it can take as long as 20 weeks to for consumer electronics to pass safety tests — but the new approvals could bring that down to as little as three days.

A red-headed woman stands on the moon, her face obscured. Her naked body looks like it belongs on a poster you’d find on a hormonal teenager’s bedroom wall — that is, until you reach her torso, where three arms spit out of her shoulders. AI-powered systems like Stable Diffusion, which translate text prompts into pictures,

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. In recent weeks, several companies tweaked the free tiers of their products, from Slack and Otter.ai to Google Meet and Heroku. This ties back

India’s financial crime fighting agency searched the offices of fintech unicorns Paytm and Razorpay as well as Cashfree on Friday as part of an ongoing investigation into fraudulent Chinese loan apps, it said Saturday, the latest in a series of probes in recent months. The Enforcement Directorate said its searches at high profile Indian firms

Truth Social isn’t allowed in Google’s app store yet, but another ostensibly anything-goes social network in the same orbit just made a comeback there. Parler, a social app designed to appeal to pro-Trump social media users turned off of mainstream platforms, has returned to the Google Play Store more than a year after getting the

As a brutal heat wave cooks the West in the run-up to Labor Day, California’s power grid manager is calling on electric vehicle owners to avoid charging at peak times. The request is part of a broader effort to keep the state’s grid up and running, while locals crank their air conditioners to outlast a

What’s better than saving some coin in your wallet? Saving coin AND getting something for free! Book your TC Sessions: Crypto general admission Launch pass today and get a second pass for free! One general admission Launch pass typically costs $199, but our Labor Day sale gets you two Launch passes for the price of one

Snapchat’s parent Snap became the latest tech company to announce a huge round of layoffs, confirming ongoing rumors yesterday that it was cutting 20% of its global workforce, affecting at least 1,200 people. The reasons for Snap’s massive scaling back exercise are perhaps obvious, as it’s the same economic reasons why countless other businesses have

Amazon today announced the addition of Ring Intercom to its list of smartphone offerings. The product is designed to be an add-on to existing apartment intercom systems. The company has created a quick online questionnaire to determine whether your existing system will work with the new product. It’s a rare addition targeted specifically at apartment

It’s happening — Paramount+ now has an in-app Showtime bundle. Previously announced back in February, the company is offering a new bundle to U.S. subscribers that brings all the content from Showtime to its flagship streaming service. The two services were already available in a discounted streaming bundle, but now U.S. subscribers can upgrade in-app

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. Midweek? More like mid-weak! Okay, terrible pun, but we’re a little low energy in this heat wave today, so it kinda made sense. Oh! And good news, btw, we’re offering 15% off

Two weeks ago, longtime venture capitalist Chris Olsen, a general partner and cofounder of Drive Capital in Columbus, Ohio, settled into his seat for a portfolio company’s board meeting. It turned out to be a maddening exercise. “Two of the board members didn’t show up, and the company had a resolution on the agenda to

Ticketmaster will now let event organizers issue NFTs (non-fungible tokens) tied to tickets on Flow, a blockchain operated by a16z-backed Dapper Labs. The Live Nation subsidiary said that event organizers can make these NFTs available before, during, or after the event and even enable special experiences like loyalty rewards or celebrity meet-and-greets — or simply

A new company is looking to do for B2B hardware sales what a growing number of companies have been doing in the consumer sphere, by making it easier for businesses to pay for equipment in instalments through rentals and subscriptions. While companies such as Klarna and Affirm have been pushing payment services that help consumers

After SpaceX announced its Starlink Maritime service last month, it was only a matter of time before some household name in boat world went all-in on the satellite service. Sure enough, today Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines announced it will be adding the service to its whole fleet, after a pilot service on one of its

More than three years in the making, the UK government today announced a new, sweeping set of rules it will be imposing on broadband and mobile carriers to tighten up their network security against cyber attacks — aimed at being “among the strongest in the world” when they are rolled out, said the Department for

Don’t you hate it when, after going just five or 10 meters underwater, you lose signal completely? Now this vexing limitation of modern technology is being addressed by researchers at the University of Washington, who have made an underwater communication app that uses sonic signals to pass messages to your other submerged friends. It may

Al Yankovic, the 62-year-old parody artist known as Weird Al, is getting his own equally weird biopic this fall. The trailer for “WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story” gives a first look at the movie, exploring the wacky world of Weird Al, his hilarious cover songs and his Polka obsession. “WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story” premieres

Mermade Seafoods is out to disrupt the $8 billion global scallops market with its circular cellular agriculture technology approach for producing cultivated scallops. The Israeli company was founded in July 2021 by CEO Daniel Einhorn, CTO Dr. Rotem Kadir and COO Dr. Tomer Halevy. Einhorn, who has Navy — which explains his love of the

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

Here’s what investors are looking for when writing the first check into a fledgling startup Haje Jan Kamps 9 hours Covering Five Flute’s fundraising and tearing down the deck the company used to raise its $1.2 million seed round had me wondering: How the hell do investors decide whether to invest in a company at the

For years, observers have thought that consumers would be better off leasing EV batteries than buying them outright — because the batteries are prone to degradation, because new technology will turn the old ones obsolete, because someday you might be able to upgrade your car’s battery with a better one and so on. Thing is,

Hello, hello! We’re back with another edition of Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly break down the top stories to hit TC in the last seven days. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here. Our most read story this week was about Stable Diffusion, a “new open source AI image generator capable

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. Central and Eastern Europe have had less venture capital at their disposal than their GDP or population could warrant. But with new funds lured

The first pitching machine dates back well over 100 years. Obviously things have come a long way since that injury-inducing, gunpowder-fueled machine made its debut at Princeton University, but most modern systems are more or less the same. A ball is manually or mechanically dropped into a spinning wheel or wheels, which propel it toward