Tech

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. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone.

Outsourcing engineering has become more common in recent years, so we’re starting a new initiative to profile the software consultants who startups love to work with the most. Founders and other startup leaders, just fill out this quick survey with a few more details to help us find the right ones. For our first profile,

Dave Mullen Contributor Dave Mullen is an investor at SVB Capital, where he focuses largely on fintech, proptech and insurtech. Dave was previously an investor with Wells Fargo’s principal investment arm and is currently the proptech vertical lead for the EVCA. Venture-backed fintechs raised a record $30.8 billion in the second quarter of this year,

Pinterest is launching a new “Pinterest Havens” mental health support initiative in honor of World Mental Health Day, which is October 10th. In a blog post, the company called the initiative “an online and offline space for community-driven inspiration.” Pinterest notes that it’s essentially creating space on its platform to explore the relationship between mental

For the last decade, battery chemistry company Sila has been working to replace the graphite anode in lithium-ion batteries with silicon, a material that’s easier to come by, more environmentally friendly and allows for a battery cell that’s denser and cheaper. In September, the company shipped its first commercial product with Whoop wearables. Now, Sila

Mike McGill Contributor Kevin Jolley Contributor The outlook for managed services providers (MSPs) remains positive, as increasing complexity and security concerns — driven by the work-from-anywhere environment and high-profile hacking incidents — have moved IT management from being a cost center to a core strategic priority for the C-suite. A key driver of the growth

Meet Graneet, a French startup that just raised a $2.8 million seed round (€2.4 million) led by Point Nine and Fondamental. Graneet is a vertical software-as-a-service startup focused on the construction industry and the myriad of small and medium companies in this industry specifically. It wants to build the definitive financial management solution so that

Move over, precision agriculture — precision apiculture is what’s on the minds of all future-focused farmers. BeeHero has been growing fast since its debut and seed round last year, and $19M in new funding means it can scale beyond its initial markets and find more uses for its one-of-a-kind collection of data collected from thousands

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, whose high-profile antitrust lawsuit against Apple is now under appeal, is today calling out the iPhone maker for giving itself access to an advertising slot its competitors don’t have: the iPhone’s Settings screen. Some iOS 15 users noticed Apple is now advertising its own services at the top of their

When you think about service meshes, a somewhat esoteric cloud native tool designed to stitch different microservices together, you might not think it’s the most lucrative side of the Kubernetes led cloud native market, but you would be wrong. Today, Solo.io, a Cambridge, Massachusetts service mesh startup, announced a $135 million Series C at a

Getsafe has extended its Series B round that it previously announced in December 2020. In addition to its original Series B round of $30 million, the company is adding another $63 million in fresh capital. Overall, Getsafe has raised a $93 million Series B round. Investors in today’s funding round include unnamed family offices as

Video sharing platforms that offer a service in the UK have to comply with new regulations intended to protect users and under 18s from harmful content such as hate speech and videos/ads likely to incite violence again protected groups. Ofcom, the country’s comms, broadcast and — in an expanding role — Internet content regulator, has

Berlin-based climate tech startup, ‘Made of Air‘, has closed a €5 million (~$5.8M) seed funding round, led by Norwegian sustainability-focused family fund, TD Veen. Also participating are Patrick Pichette (former CFO of Google & chairman of the Board of Twitter), EQT Group, Thomas Von Koch (CEO & cofounder of EQT Group), Tuesday Capital, the co-founders

I have worked in startups for more than half of my life, and for most of that time, I was the only Black person in the room. As a result, the lack of representation in tech isn’t abstract to me. Besides my experience, I read and talk about diversity in tech every day, so when

Both Anchor and Descript have made their names as being among the most significant Podcast creation platforms of recent times, but hoving into the rear-view mirror recently has been Podcastle, an all-in-one platform that can cover off recording, production and publishing, all on the one platform. It’s now raised $7 million in an early-stage funding

A pair of new e-readers from Kobo iterate on the company’s high-end options, adding Bluetooth audiobook and stylus support to the now familiar asymmetrical design of its larger devices. The Sage and Libra 2 also gain a new charging cover so you only have to plug the device in every few months rather than every

Pioneered by Snapchat and cloned by Instagram, the “Stories” feature has become a staple for modern-day mobile apps from Google search to Pinterest to streaming apps and more. And while the addition doesn’t work for everyone — LinkedIn and Twitter recently shuttered their Stories features, for example — there’s enough demand for Stories out there

Informatica filed to go public late last week, some six years after it was taken private by two private equity teams for $5.3 billion. The data-focused company used its passage through the private markets to execute a move to the cloud, work that came to a head in early 2021, when Informatica announced its dive

The Philippines is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, with geography that makes it vulnerable to typhoons, floods, volcanos, earthquakes and droughts. While working in IT, Felix Ayque began compiling cyclone reports and sending them as email alerts to communities. His work evolved into environmental intelligence platform Komunidad, which collects data from

“We believe that a thriving community is a company’s most valuable asset,” Community-led writes in its Declaration. “Community scales your business, resources and presence in ways that traditional marketing or advertising channels can’t. When done right, community enables and improves customer acquisition, streamlines support and success, bolsters retention, and provides crucial product insights. Community is

Before Gene Berdichevsky became the co-founder and CEO of battery chemistry company Sila Nano, he was the seventh employee at Tesla Motors. As principal engineer on the Roadster battery, Berdichevsky was one of the first people crazy enough to experiment with shoving a lithium-ion battery pack into a combustion engine vehicle. The result? The Roadster

Nine months after announcing a $5 million seed round, Toronto auto repair software company AutoLeap is back with $18 million in Series A funding, this time led by Bain Capital Ventures. Joining Bain in the round is existing investor Threshold Ventures, which led the seed round, to give the company $23 million in total funding.

Audio social network Clubhouse, video sharing platform Vimeo and anti-ad fraud startup DoubleVerify are among a clutch of tech companies and organzations preparing to sign up to a beefed-up version of the European Union’s Code of Practice on Online Disinformation, the Commission said today. Back in May the EU’s executive said it would be strengthening

No one knows exactly how drone delivery will fit into the future of logistics, but one thing is for sure: the aircraft aren’t going to drop off important payloads directly onto someone’s lawn. Matternet’s Station, an automated landing space and payload control tower, may be the solution, and the flower-like structure has finally made the

Twitter really can’t go a day without releasing new products. But if you’re running an account for a business or a public figure, its latest addition might capture your interest. Soon, businesses and creators will be able to opt into “professional accounts,” giving them additional tools to distinguish their profile, quickly promote content through ads,

Rivian, the electric automaker backed by Amazon, Ford and a cornucopia of heavy-hitting institutional investors like T. Rowe Price Associates and Coatue, finally made its once-confidential IPO filing public.  The company, which started in 2009 as Mainstream Motors before adopting the Rivian name two years later, has exploded in terms of people, backers and partners

Some big brands spend millions of dollars on marketing each year and may only drive thousands of dollars in sales as a result. At the same time, influencers are steering thousands, or even millions, of their followers to certain brands. ProductWind aims to connect brands with influencers in one click. The company is building a

The future of office work, post-COVID-19, is driving plenty of startup activity. Not just around core business needs like comms (Zoom, Slack et al) — but entrepreneurs are also competing to come up with the perfect tool to recreate the social serendipity of office life in order to make dispersed workers feel a bit more

In 2019, Rivian showed up at the Overland Expo West in Flagstaff, Arizona with a prototype of what is now known as the camp kitchen. Now, with production ready 2022 Rivian R1T electric pickup trucks coming off the assembly line, the final version of the kitchen is ready for prime time. The automaker has made

Silicon Valley-based venture capital (VC) firm Benhamou Global Ventures, known as BGV, closed its fourth fund with $110 million to support global enterprise companies. The new fund is 60% larger than its third fund and will be invested similarly, in seed and Series A startups focused on what general partner Anik Bose said the firm