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Hello again! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly recap the top stories to cross TechCrunch dot-com over the past seven days. Want it in your inbox? Get it here. The most read story this week is kind of a wild one: Bolt Mobility, an on-demand bike/scooter rental company co-founded by

Project Solar doesn’t make solar panels, nor does it employ crews to plop them on roofs, but the startup argues it can shake up the residential solar business by steering clear of sales reps and automating parts of the ordering, design and installation process. Backed by $23 million in fresh Series A funding led by

Gumroad’s Sahil Lavingia broke into the venture world as one of the early testers of the rolling fund, an AngelList product that allows investors to raise capital on a subscription-like basis. That was in 2020. Fast-forward to 2022 and a lot has changed. One of those changes? The number of pitches from founders looking to

Last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the economy is “in a period of transition,” on the grounds that “we have a very strong labor market. When you are creating almost 400,000 jobs a month, that is not a recession.” Today, we learned that the U.S. added 528,000 new jobs last month and the

With the shift to working from home becoming permanent for many, it’s important to upgrade more than just your desk chair. A good keyboard is not only more pleasant to work on but can help you avoid pain or even change the way you work entirely. Here are a few that stray from the beaten

A popular anonymous social app that was misleading its users with fake messages has been forced to change. The top-ranked app NGL, which became the No. 1 app on the U.S. App Store in June, quietly rolled out an update yesterday that sees it now informing users when they receive messages that aren’t from their

Swathy Prithivi started Found with the goal of improving the journey of weight loss. The company quickly discovered a huge demand and rapidly scaled its operations and expanded throughout the United States. The company’s story started in an Atomic incubator. On this episode of TechCrunch Live, we hear from Found’s co-founder and COO Swathy Prithivi

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate-focused VC firm linked to some of Earth’s wealthiest individuals, has joined a $44 million bet on solar startup Terabase Energy. Terabase aims to rapidly build new solar farms “at the terawatt scale,” CEO Matt Campbell said in a statement. The startup claims its automated, on-site factory can already speed up

Pony.ai, a Chinese autonomous vehicle company valued at $8.5 billion as of late, has sued two former employees over alleged trade secret infringement. The lawsuit is arriving months after Frank (Zhenhao) Pan and Youhan Sun, two former technical leaders at Pony’s autonomous trucking business in the U.S., resigned to start a competitor called Qingtian Truck.

Barely a day goes by without news of layoffs emerging from the tech world — from cybersecurity to gaming, no industry is impervious. It’s not limited to any particular size of company, either — everything from fledgling startups and scaleups, to billion-dollar public entities such as Netflix have all “downsized” or put their hiring plans on

News that private equity group Thoma Bravo is buying Ping Identity for $2.8 billion in cash broke earlier today, marking the beginning of the end of Ping’s life as a public company (at least for now). Thoma Bravo will pay $28.50 per share in an all-cash transaction, a price that TechCrunch noted is a roughly

An innovative new medical startup in Romania helped doctors from three countries collaborate to treat Ukrainian cancer patients made refugees after Russia’s brutal invasion. The “Tumor Board” project was initiated by doctors from the US, Romania and Moldova to provide life saving treatments for displaced Ukrainians with cancer. A collaboration of Heal 21 Association and

Factors like latency, bandwidth, security and privacy are driving the adoption of edge computing, which aims to process data closer to where it’s being generated. Consider a temperature sensor in a shipyard or a fleet of cameras in a fulfillment center. Normally, the data from them might have to be relayed to a server for

Instagram may be worried about TikTok’s threat to its business, but in the near-term, it’s still far ahead when it comes to the influencer marketing dollars spent on its platform in the U.S. According to a new analyst report, Instagram is on track to capture nearly 3x the amount of influencer marketing spend compared to

Malvern, Pennsylvania–based Savana, a company building financial software products for legacy banks, today announced that it raised $45 million. A portion of the capital — $10 million — was debt, while the rest was a Series A equity tranche led by Georgian Capital Partners. CEO Michael Sanchez told TechCrunch that the proceeds will be put

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Last week we said that you needed to pay attention to the public markets, and we weren’t kidding. It was a huge week for earnings — with notes from all over, including the

A large-scale study of Facebook data sheds new light on the ties between Americans — and how those relationships in turn shape economic outcomes. A research team led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty published the results today across two papers in the journal Nature, exploring how social connections lead to economic opportunity. The researchers examined

The regulatory environment surrounding crypto is shifting stateside as the SEC takes aim at major players in the web3 world, promising to shake up business as usual with aggressive action. This week on Chain Reaction, we sat down with David Nage. Nage is a Principal at Arca overseeing their early stage fund with a primary

The healthcare crisis — more evident now as summer heatwaves put pressure on hospitals — is resulting in a staffing boom. But healthcare professionals in Europe can end up with bad terms and pay due to the many hiring agencies offering medical staff on short-term contracts. As you can imagine, this means this area is

About a year ago, Keychron launched its Q-series of custom mechanical keyboards that now spans the gamut from small 60% boards to full-size options, with everything in between. Whatever your preference, Keychron clearly wants to be in the running for your money. Now, the company is launching the Q8, a rare 65% Alice-style board with

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. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by

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. Several startups want to make it easier and friendlier for individuals to buy stocks. But isn’t pandemic-era stock picking just a bad habit that’d

Like a groundhog and its shadow, many venture capitalists see a shrinking economy and burrow away, resting their check-signing hand for better days. But climate-focused VCs are on a tear lately, pumping well over a billion dollars per quarter into startups that strive to mitigate emissions as the Earth bakes. Buoyant Ventures is one such firm

All is not well with the proposed acquisition of U.K. start bus platform Zeelo by Mass transit group Swvl. Back in April, we covered how a possible $100 million acquisition was on the cards, and, indeed, both companies confirmed it was, though not the price. Swvl, an Egyptian-born startup that provides shared transportation services for

Volkswagen dropped a bombshell announcement late last week: Herbert Diess was out as CEO. As a manager, Diess was controversial, with a style that chafed both executives and labor leaders alike. But as a strategist, he was on firmer ground, deftly steering Volkswagen out of the Dieselgate scandal and setting it on a path toward

Umba, a US-based digital bank with a focus on emerging markets, has acquired a majority shareholding of Daraja, a Kenyan deposit-taking microfinance bank, for an undisclosed amount. Kenya’s monetary authority, the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), said Umba had taken up 66.6% shareholding, an acquisition that is expected to fast-track Daraja’s digitization. This comes after

Jumping into a flatpacked, chipboard room wasn’t my usual experience of the U.K.’s legendary Glastonbury Music Festival. But here I was, doing my best to dance around and test out this crazy new way of putting myself into the so-called Metaverse. It turned out to be a legit experience, as Bristol, U.K.-based startup Condense, showed

Fresh fish isn’t really that fresh — even straight off the boat, the way they’re caught and killed is not only inhumane but detrimental to the resulting meat. There’s a far superior alternative, but it’s time-consuming and manual — but Shinkei Systems has figured out a way to automate it, even on the deck of

Google is again delaying plans to phase out Chrome’s use of third-party cookies — the files websites use to remember preferences and track online activity. In a blog post, Anthony Chavez, Google’s VP of Privacy Sandbox, said that the company is now targeting the “second half of 2024” as the timeframe for adopting an alternative