Tech

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

Amazon wants Alexa owners to buy more things. That’s the clear impetus behind the new Alexa feature announced today at Amazon’s Accelerate conference, called Customers Ask Alexa, which lets brands submit answers to common questions like “How can I remove pet hair from my carpet?” and “How to eliminate odor from soil stains?” Previously, Alexa

Yet another round of layoffs at Netflix has unfortunately affected 30 Netflix Animation employees. Deadline first reported the news, and Netflix confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is downsizing the department.  Earlier this year, Netflix brought on Karen Toliver as Vice President of Animation Film Content and Traci Balthazor as Vice President of Animation Film

EV charging company Monta has been building out EV charging solutions to make it easier to charge electric vehicles everywhere. It started in Europe, but it just raised an additional $30 million from Energize Ventures, at a $155 million valuation, to expand into the U.S. market. The company tackles one of the biggest bottlenecks to

AC Ventures (ACV), a venture firm focused on early-stage startups in Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia, has reached the first close of its fifth investment fund (Fund V). The fund is targeting $250 million and has raised 65% of that capital so far, mostly from limited partners who invested in ACV’s previous funds.

At Tesla, the company’s stock price apparently isn’t the only thing that’s climbing lately. Powerwall sales are also poised to rise, now that the automaker’s big batteries are reportedly a prerequisite for Solar Roof installations. The requirement is new as of September, and it comes as Tesla ramps up Powerwall production at its Nevada factory,

A series of commitments offered by Amazon in the EU, where regulators are investigating competition concerns linked to its use of third party data, has been dubbed “weak, vague and full of loopholes” in a critical submission signed by a dozen civil society and digital rights groups, non-governmental organizations and trade unions. The submission, which

This week on The TechCrunch Podcast we talked with Natasha about the Y Combinator Demo Day for the Summer 2022 cohort; the highs, the lows, the new management and whether the accelerator moving to be more in-person-focused is a help or a hindrance to its further-flung participants. Then, ever a crypto-sceptic at heart, I was

YouTube TV announced on Twitter yesterday that it now supports 5.1 audio on Apple TVs and Amazon Fire TV devices. With the update, users can enjoy a movie theater-like experience in their homes. Surround sound is only available on compatible YouTube TV programs, and the feature is free for all subscribers. Note that you need

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

Happy Saturday, friends. Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we very quickly sum up the most read TechCrunch stories from the past week. Want it in your inbox every Saturday AM? Get it here. This week saw two big events running in parallel: an Apple hardware announcement and Y Combinator’s Demo Day.

Despite whispers of a downturn earlier this year, investors continue to express confidence in climate tech. Though numbers are down compared with 2021, a year that many agree is an outlier in the VC world, they’re on track to beat 2020 as the second hottest year for investment. What’s more, deal counts and values were

Amazon has made a string of startup acquisitions over the years to build out its robotics business; now, the e-commerce leviathan is taking an interesting turn in that strategy as it expands its industrial warehouse capabilities. Amazon is acquiring Cloostermans, a company out of Belgium that is a specialist in mechatronics. It’s been building technology to

GPS in its many regional flavors has become a ubiquitous feature in phones, smart watches, cars and other connected devices, but for all the location-based features that it helps enable (mapping being the most obvious) it has a lot of shortcomings: it can be slow and inaccurate, it can contribute to faster battery drain and,

Today is Disney+ Day, and, as part of its perks, the company is offering Disney+ subscribers a new AR experience in conjunction with the short film “Remembering,” starring and produced by “Captain Marvel” Brie Larson and directed and written by filmmaker Elijah Allan-Blitz. The eight-minute-long movie features a companion augmented reality app that allows users

And we’re back! Yes, today was the second day of pitches from Y Combinator, a U.S. startup accelerator with global outreach that conducts demo days twice a year. This year’s Summer 2022 cohort gave us hundreds of batch companies to consider. For participating founders, it’s a critical day; for investors, it’s a buffet; for us

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. Helloooo! Since our last Daily Crunch, our adrenaline-fueled TechCrunch team has added more than 70 stories to the site. We’re picking out some of the best below, but we’ll almost certainly miss

When it comes to consumer-facing climate tech, electric vehicles and solar panels may get all the attention, but every home has some even lower-hanging fruit — HVAC, or heating, ventilation and air conditioning. Residential and commercial buildings produce about a third of the carbon emissions in the U.S., and much of that comes from heating

French startup Sorare originally launched a fantasy football (soccer) game. This year, the company is expanding to new sports. After partnering with Major League Baseball earlier this year, the company is announcing a new partnership with the National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Basketball Players Association (NBPA). Thanks to this multi-year partnership, Sorare will launch

On August 9, Joe Biden signed into law the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. The move marked a victory for a presidential administration in dire need of a win and the culmination of a hard-fought, months-long battle that ended with broad bipartisan support. Among the chief criticism leading up to the bill’s passage were

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. Hey, hey, hey! It’s going to be a busy week for the TC crew this week. We’re excited about the Apple event, and Y Combinator has its demo day. Alex welcomes you

Sam DeBrule Contributor Sam DeBrule is co-founder and head of marketing of Heyday, the AI-powered research assistant that helps you retain more of what you learn. Whether you’re building a product at an early-stage startup or fine-tuning an already built-out product at a larger company, there is a straightforward process that can help you improve

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