Tech

Ahead of the official relaunch of subscription-based movie ticketing service MoviePass, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a complaint against three of its former executives, claiming they lied to investors and the public. The SEC filing targeted former MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth, the former CEO of parent company Helios and Matheson

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. At TechCrunch, we love being a conduit for everything that happens in the startup ecosystem. This year, there’s been a lot of layoffs, and we got to thinking, how can we help

Ido Wiesenberg Contributor The rise in customer acquisition costs (CAC) is creating quite the dent in marketing budgets, placing marketing teams in a position where they have to do more with less. When it comes to user acquisition campaigns, a few small fires need to be put out first. Many organizations’ issues stem from major

With a month of hindsight, we’re getting a better picture of what the Inflation Reduction Act will mean for the American economy and the climate tech sector itself. The new law caught many by surprise, both in the climate tech space and elsewhere. Few had thought sweeping climate legislation was possible. The final bill is

Disperse, a U.K.-based construction tech company that offers an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform to help project managers track work and capture data from building sites, has raised $16 million in funding. Founded out of London in 2015, Disperse effectively creates a digital version of an entire construction site, including visual snapshots that track the progress

We posted a pair of Apple Watch reviews this time last week. Both the Series 8 and second-gen SE received high marks for their categories — flagship and budget, respectively. Were Apple to stick to those two products, it’s easy to imagine the company maintaining roughly a third of the smartwatch market share it currently

Apple TV+’s original programming has received a major boost with the company landing a deal with “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” creator Vince Gilligan. Apple signed a two-season deal for his new project — dubbed as a grounded drama — that will be unrelated to the two hit series. Deadline, which first reported the

The growing market for sales tools has given rise to a curious cottage industry: DevOps startups specifically targeting the software used in sales and marketing functions. (Here, “DevOps,” refers to tools that automate processes between software development and IT teams.) It’s become a blossoming sector all its own, with vendors selling DevOps platforms for software

Welcome back to Found, the podcast where we get the stories behind the startups. After graduating college, co-founders Amar Shah and Sonia Nigam were bored with their first ”real jobs,” so through trial and error they came up with the idea to develop an API that processes donations, called Change. They talk with Darrell and

If my PR inbox is anything to go by (trust me, it is), companies, and especially stock-market listed megacorps, are scrambling to out-green each other with tales of how the planet will be taking breaths of relief because of what glorious stewardship they provide for our slowly heating planet. Environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals

Days ahead of the Italian general election, the country’s privacy watchdog has sent Facebook’s parent (Meta) an urgent request for information, asking the social media giant to clarify measures it’s taking around Sunday’s election. The risk of election interference via social media continues to be a major concern for regulators after years of rising awareness

When Nothing was unveiled early last year, founder Carl Pei promised that the hardware startup had a full road map. Early stories about the London-based firm alluded to a pitch deck full of Pokémon characters, each representing a different product in the pipeline. Roughly a year and a half later, Nothing has delivered two major

The first exclusive “Thursday Night Football” game on Amazon Prime Video was a win for the streaming service, with 15.3 million viewers, the company announced today. Amazon’s successful “TNF” game underscores the value that live sports bring to streaming services. On average, “TNF” games usually earn about 12.84 million viewers across Amazon, Fox and the

SoftBank, the largest investor in Oyo, has cut the Indian hotel chain’s valuation to $2.7 billion at a time when the startup is months away from going public, a source familiar with the matter said. An Oyo spokesperson said the startup has improved its finances in recent months, and it believes the speculation about a

French startup Bump has signed a multi-year financing partnership with DIF Capital Partners in order to roll out more charging stations for electric vehicles and double down on growth in general. It is an equity and quasi-equity $180 million deal that will be progressively unlocked from 2022 to 2030. Yesterday, ZePlug also announced a significant

In the early hours on Monday, a Tesla Megapack battery caught fire at a key California power storage facility, the state’s largest utility said in a statement to TechCrunch. According to PG&E, the utility “became aware of a fire in one Tesla Megapack at its Elkhorn Battery Storage facility” at around 1:30 a.m. in Moss

Meet Nilos, a startup that wants to bridge the gap between crypto wallets and traditional business bank accounts. The company provides a dashboard that displays all your transactions — whether those are fiat transactions or crypto payments. From this platform, you can initiate payments and reconcile operations across multiple accounts. The startup raised a $5.2

The Peloton Row hasn’t been a particularly well-kept secret over the last couple of years. After long-standing rumors, the connected fitness firm teased the rowing machine in a member’s video back in May. Today it’s finally back with some firm details on the latest major addition to its home fitness offerings. The Row goes up

After initially disabling the capability, OpenAI today announced that customers with access to DALL-E 2 can upload people’s faces to edit them using the AI-powered image-generating system. Previously, OpenAI only allowed users to work with and share photorealistic faces and banned the uploading of any photo that might depict a real person, including photos of

There’s never a dull moment in the cryptoverse. Blockchain, DeFi and web3 technologies continue to evolve rapidly in a world of wild extremes. How extreme? Consider these two examples. The Terra ecosystem disappears in a multi-billion-dollar crash-and-burn while traditional investment firm Andreessen Horowitz closes a $4.5 billion crypto megafund. Then you have crypto’s ongoing regulatory

SoftBank-backed Ola plans to eliminate about 200 jobs across its engineering teams over the next few days, on track to shrink its workforce by over 1,200 this year, as the ride-hailing giant streamlines its operations to improve finances. The company has kickstarted the new wave of layoffs, which affects the engineering teams at its food

First Star, backer of deep tech startups like Plus One and Fyto, aims to raise as much as $40 million for its third venture fund, TechCrunch has learned. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, First Star typically backs robotics, blockchain, AI and machine learning-focused startups at the early stage. The firm has not disclosed a first close

Autonomous and electric truck maker Einride is rolling into Germany, representing its first new market in Europe outside its native Sweden. Founded out of Stockholm in 2016, Einride has raised some $150 million in funding to commercialize a cab-less autonomous cargo truck, one that can be controlled remotely, if required, by human operators. It’s a

SpaceX and T-Mobile may have hogged the headlines with their flashy pre-announcement about Starlink connectivity last month, and Apple last week, but Lynk has been putting in the work and may very well steal their lunch with a satellite-to-phone connection that already works — with any device out there. In fact, they just got FCC

Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp is stepping into the film business. Earlier this week, WhatsApp announced its first original short film “Naija Odyssey,” which tells the story of NBA player Giannis Antetokounmpo, who was born in Athens, Greece to Nigerian parents. “Naija Odyssey” will premiere on Prime Video on September 21, 2022. The short film signifies

One could probably argue that Floodgate, the Bay Area-based seed-stage venture firm, punches above its weight. The roughly 15-year-old firm has just around $500 million in assets under management — including a $150 million fund that it quietly closed in January — and it makes just a handful of new investments each year. Yet with

Getting a bunch of bananas and avocados from your favorite 15-minute grocery delivery company at 3 a.m. might be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but some of these companies are finding themselves in somewhat of a cost-related pickle in such a low-margin business. While covering the recent news of Misfits Market acquiring Imperfect Foods,

The sneaker world has a dirty secret — the carbon footprint of just about every shoe out there weighs more than the shoe itself. Then there’s the extensive use of plastics and polyesters, foam and rubber, nearly all of which is derived from fossil fuels. Those clean kicks might not be so clean after all.

HICX, a supplier experience management platform designed to give companies visibility into their supply chain, has raised $30 million in a round of funding led by U.S. private equity firm Wavecrest Growth Partners and Canada’s Espresso Capital. The funding constituted a mixture of $22 million equity and $8 million in debt. Founded in 2004, London-based HICX