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Adani Group said Tuesday it will buy a majority stake in NDTV, a high-profile Indian news organization, in an apparent hostile takeover as the billionaire Gautam Adani looks to expand his media ambitions. AMG Media Networks, Adani’s unit, has indirectly taken control of about 29.18% stake in New Delhi Television by executing options from a

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. Goood [time of day] dear [name]. You know what we’re psyched about? The agenda for TC Disrupt just dropped, and it’s going to be an absolute corker of an event. Aaaah. Check

Jonathan Naymark Contributor Jonathan Naymark is the general manager of Codecademy for Business at Codecademy, an online learning platform that offers courses across web development, data science, cybersecurity and more. Launching a B2B product within a B2C company presents distinct challenges as you attempt to strike a balance between successfully establishing a new product and

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg was roundly mocked for the bad graphics in his preview of a new expansion of Horizon Worlds, Meta’s metaverse effort. His quick response promising better avatars for the actual launch speaks to just how much appearances do matter in these situations. Now, in a spot of perfect timing, a startup out

“Build it or else.” That was the gist of U.S. Senator Joe Manchin’s discussions with the automotive industry regarding EV tax credits. Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, had grown increasingly concerned about China’s dominance of the lithium-ion battery market, and he told car companies that they needed to move vast swaths of the global

Late-stage rounds seem to be hitting the gym this year. A new report from Carta — a dataset that TechCrunch got a preview of earlier in August — indicates that late-stage rounds are seeing their heft rapidly shrink as 2022 continues. The cap table management company sits atop a regular inflow of startup information, from

European food ordering and delivery giant Just Eat Takeaway has revealed that it’s selling its stake in Brazil’s iFood for up to €1.8 billion ($1.8 billion) to Prosus. The initial deal will amount to €1.5 billion in cash, plus another €300 million depending on the performance of iFood over the next 12 months. News of the

One doubts Samsung’s convictions at their own peril. The company will be the first to point to the O.G. Note phablet as the ultimate expression of this phenomenon. The line may be gone, having been absorbed into the flagship Galaxy S product, but its influence on the industry is still being felt a decade after

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. Reading recently about Germany’s €30 billion plan for its startups, I was intrigued. Did the country start to envy La French Tech? Is it

Hello hello! We’re back with another edition of Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly recap the top stories to hit TechCrunch across the last seven days. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here.  other stuff a16z backs WeWork founder’s new thing: When a company implodes hard enough that it inspires a miniseries,

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. It’s been a week of people trying to make sense of what’s happening in tech. If you’ve been compartmentalizing: Cheers! Now let me walk you through what’s been going on. On Monday,

Zūm’s mission is simple — to introduce student transportation that is reliable, efficient, sustainable and transparent. To achieve the feat of modernizing an incredibly outdated, stuck-in-the-mud system, Zūm relies on cloud-based analytics software to create an agile bus routing system with real-time visibility for schools and parents. The startup also uses a diverse fleet that

John Carmack, the game developer who co-founded id Software and served as Oculus’s CTO, is working on a new venture — and has already attracted capital from some big names. Carmack said Friday his new artificial general intelligence startup, called Keen Technologies, has raised $20 million in a financing round from former GitHub CEO Nat

A new company from the creators of the Godot game engine is setting out to grab a piece of the $200 billion global video game market — and to do so, it’s taking a cue from commercial open source software giant Red Hat. Godot, for the uninitiated, is a cross-platform game engine first released under

I have been carrying both of Samsung’s new foldables on my person when I leave the house for the last few days. It’s mostly for testing purposes, of course, but there’s also a fun game I like to play when I see people I know. I pull them both out, stick them in front of

Facebook this year has been struggling to maintain its position among the Top 10 apps on the U.S. App Store, according to an analysis of iPhone App Store data. As younger consumers shift to newer social networking experiences like TikTok and now BeReal, the tech giant’s big blue app has lost traction in the App

Sofy, a startup developing a testing platform for mobile app devs it claims is used by Microsoft, today closed a $7.75 million seed round that brings its total capital raised to $9.5 million. Voyager Capital led the tranche with participation from PSL Ventures, GTMFund and Revolution, providing cash that CEO Syed Hamid says will be

The power grid supply in Africa is erratic and inconsistent, affecting rural and urban households and businesses. For restaurants or neighborhood stores dealing with perishables, frozen foods and beverages, having intermittent electricity inhibits the growth of their businesses. Some of them turn to diesel-fueled generators, which are expensive and toxic, to provide electricity. Companies such

In the U.S., most electric vehicle owners say that public chargers are easy to use. That is, when they actually work. A new J.D. Power survey finds that, while public charging stations are a tad easier to come by these days, faulty chargers are souring the experience and hampering EV adoption. That’s no good, because

Bangalore-based Exponent Energy might have come up with a way to deliver 15-minute rapid charging for electric vehicles. The startup, which just raised a $13 million Series A, relies on a combination of its proprietary battery pack and charging infrastructure to achieve such a feat. Exponent Energy’s business model is geared towards OEMs building commercial

After permanently banning parties and events on all Airbnb listings in June, the company is hardening its anti-party stance by launching new screening tools in the U.S. and Canada. The firm’s “anti-party” tech is an algorithm to identify potential rule-breakers by looking at signals like the history of positive reviews, how long the user has

If you ask me, climate tech investor Contrarian Ventures isn’t so contrarian anymore. The five-year-old firm is targeting $100 million for its second seed-stage fund, and it’s doing so smack in the middle of a climate-tech dealmaking boom. So, if anything, it’s trendy. But when the seed-stage VC — a backer of e-bike maker Zoomo

This is the sort of thing I definitely would have been all over when I still traveled a bunch for work. Twelve South has long been the go-to for MacBook stands and the like, and today the company introduced a clever addition to the family: the collapsible/portable Curve Flex. The stand collapses fully flat so

After testing new in-app podcast recording tools for users in New Zealand, Spotify is now trialing a new audio feature in Vietnam, one that’s designed to encourage users to record voice reactions to playlists. A Reddit user posted screenshots of the feature, showing how they received a prompt to react to a playlist with a

Helbiz started out as a shared micromobility company but has since expanded to include ghost kitchens, media streaming and, most recently, a taxi service. The company reported its second-quarter earnings Monday after the bell. The startup was the first scooter operator to go public via the SPAC route, and many in the industry wish it wasn’t

Jenny Q. Ta Contributor The financial market crash this year has had a unique effect on the web3 industry. Web3 companies are the newest members of the fintech ecosystem, and the current downturn marks the first major “hit” for the industry. Fundraising can be hugely challenging in times like these, and it’s an essential lifeline

There’s no end to digitizing the operations of small and medium businesses (SMBs) in the traditional retail sector across sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria alone, this industry, worth more than $200 billion, consists of over 40 million businesses of varying sizes, according to reports. Traditional retail in the country comprises small kiosks and open-air markets selling

If there is ever going to be a national hydrogen economy, we’re going to need to change a few things. One of them is how we produce hydrogen itself, the vast majority of which comes from fossil fuels. SunGreenH2 brings a nanotech-level advance to green hydrogen production, supercharging electrolysis so orders of magnitude more hydrogen

Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we talked about a hack that gave new, ironic meaning to the word “trustless.” This week, we’ll get into one of the most polarizing aspects of crypto — privacy. If someone forwarded you this message, you can subscribe on TechCrunch’s newsletter page. all mixed up A weekly window