Tech

Last week we saw some major backing of the Secret Network blockchain, as significant blockchain players Arrington Capital and Blocktower Capital invested in the privacy-first smart contract platform. What this is signaling is the rise of privacy-oriented financial blockchain projects, which are crucial if “DeFi” (decentralized finance) is to have any kind of future. We

AI is fundamental to many products and services today, but its hunger for data and computing cycles is bottomless. Lightmatter plans to leapfrog Moore’s law with its ultra-fast photonic chips specialized for AI work, and with a new $80M round the company is poised to take its light-powered computing to market. We first covered Lightmatter

The internet is now our nervous system. We are constantly streaming and buying and watching and liking, our brains locked into the global information matrix as one universal and coruscating emanation of thought and emotion. What happens when the machine stops though? It’s a question that E.M. Forster was intensely focused on more than a

At the heart of Duolingo is its mission: to scale free education and increase income potential through language learning. However, the same mission that has helped it grow to a business valued at $2.4 billion with over 500 million registered learners, has led to tensions that continue to define the business. How do you survive

This morning Metafy, a distributed startup building a marketplace to match gamers with instructors, announced that it has closed an additional $5.5 million to its $3.15 million seed round. Call it a seed-2, seed-extension or merely a baby Series A; Forerunner Ventures, DCM and Seven Seven Six led the round as a trio. Metafy’s model

It’s safe to say WhatsApp didn’t have the ideal start to 2021. Less than a week into the new year, the Facebook-owned instant messaging app had already annoyed hundreds of thousands of users with its scary-worded notification about a planned policy update. The backlash grew fast and millions of people, including several high-profile figures, started

Restoring and preserving the world’s forests has long been considered one of the easiest, lowest-cost and simplest ways to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It’s by far the most popular method for corporations looking to take an easy first step on the long road to decarbonizing or offsetting their industrial operations.

Robotic process automation (RPA) has certainly been getting a lot of attention in the last year, with startups, acquisitions and IPOs all coming together in a flurry of market activity. It all seemed to culminate with UiPath’s IPO last month. The company that appeared to come out of nowhere in 2017 eventually had a final

Inspired by his own problems with skin ailments, tech founder Daniel Jensen decided there had to be a better way. So, using an in-house tech platform, his Copenhagen-based startup Nøie developed its own database of skin profiles, to better care for sensitive skin. Nøie has now raised $12m in a Series A funding round led

Apple’s new AirTag item trackers are pretty small, but not quite small enough to slip into most wallets without adding an obvious bit of bulk. Fortunately, as one talented AirTag owner has found, that’s nothing you can’t fix with a heat gun, a bit of soldering and an understanding that you could totally fry your

Months after Apple’s App Store introduced privacy labels for apps, Google announced its own mobile app marketplace, Google Play, will follow suit. The company today pre-announced its plans to introduce a new “safety” section in Google Play, rolling out next year, which will require app developers to share what sort of data their apps collect,

TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield is one of the most popular parts of our annual TechCrunch Disrupt conference which is happening on September 21-23 this year. Now we’re very excited to reveal one of the fine people who will be judging Startup Battlefield at this year’s all-virtual event in September: Shauntel Garvey, a general partner at Reach Capital,

Autonomous vehicles rely on many sensors to perceive the world around them, and while cameras and lidar get a lot of the attention, good old radar is an important piece of the puzzle — though it has some fundamental limitations. Oculii, which just raised a $55M round, aims to minimize those limitations and make radar

Facebook’s controversial policy-setting supergroup issued its verdict on Trump’s fate Wednesday, and it wasn’t quite what most of us were expecting. We’ll dig into the decision to tease out what it really means, not just for Trump, but also for Facebook’s broader experiment in outsourcing difficult content moderation decisions and for just how independent the

Competitors Volvo AB and Daimler Trucks are teaming up to produce hydrogen fuel cells for long-haul trucks, which the companies say will lower development costs and boost production volumes. The joint venture, which is called cellcentric, aims to bring large-scale “gigafactory” production levels of hydrogen fuel cells to Europe by 2025. While the two companies

With cybercrime on course to be a $6 trillion problem this year, organizations are throwing ever more resources at the issue to avoid being a target. Now, a startup that’s built a platform to help them stress-test the investments that they have made into their security IT is announcing some funding on the back of

In March 2020, Tame had a digital event suite for offline corporate events. But with the pandemic hitting, it did a hard pivot into providing a highly customizable virtual events platform, primarily used by companies for their sales events. The result is that it has now raised a seed round of $5.5m, a large round

Of the many frustrations of having a severe motor impairment, the difficulty of communicating must surely be among the worst. The tech world has not offered much succor to those affected by things like locked-in syndrome, ALS, and severe strokes, but startup Cognixion aims to with a novel form of brain monitoring that, combined with

Amazon’s free, ad-supported streaming service IMDb TV is getting its own mobile app. The company announced the news today at its first-ever NewFronts presentation to advertisers, where it also shared that its over-the-top streaming businesses combined — meaning, IMDb TV, Twitch, live sports like Thursday Night Football, Amazon’s News app, and others — have now

A Solid Power manufacturing engineer holds two 20 ampere hour (Ah) all solid state battery cells for the BMW Group and Ford Motor Company. The 20 ampere hour (Ah) all solid state battery cells were produced on Solid Power’s Colorado-based pilot production line. Source: Solid Power. Solid state battery systems have long been considered the

It’s a big morning for fintech startups today: Flywire, a Boston-based magnet for venture capital, has filed to go public. Flywire is a global payments company that attracted more than $300 million as a startup, according to Crunchbase, most recently raising a $60 million Series F last month. We don’t have its most recent valuation,

Machine learning is capable of doing all sorts of things as long as you have the data to teach it how. That’s not always easy, and researchers are always looking for a way to add a bit of “common sense” to AI so you don’t have to show it 500 pictures of a cat before

Tapping the geothermal energy stored beneath the Earth’s surface as a way to generate renewable power is one of the new visions for the future that’s captured the attention of environmentalists and oil and gas engineers alike. That’s because it’s not only a way to generate power that doesn’t rely on greenhouse gas emitting hydrocarbons,

Joey Lei Contributor Joey Lei is director of service management at Synoptek. With more than 14 years of experience in engineering and product management, Lei is responsible for the development and growth of the Synoptek service portfolio and solution development with strategic technology alliance partners. More posts by this contributor How startups can leverage elastic

Blade, the French startup behind cloud gaming service Shadow, has been acquired by Octave Klaba’s fund following a commercial court order. Klaba is better known as the founder of OVHcloud, a French cloud hosting company. He’s acquiring Blade (and Shadow) through his investment fund Jezby Ventures — not OVHcloud. Shadow is a cloud computing service for

After a steady stream of studio acquisitions in late 2019 and early 2020, Facebook has been a little quieter in recent months when its came to bulking up its VR content arm. Today, the social media giant breaks that stream, announcing their acquisition of Downpour Interactive, the developer of the popular VR first-person shooter Onward.

R.I.P. Madefire, a startup that recruited high-profile artists to reinvent comics for new formats and platforms. An announcement on the Madefire website states the company entered into “an assignment of benefit for creditors” (explained as “a state-level insolvency proceeding similar to bankruptcy”) earlier this month, which was then reported this morning in The Beat. As

Tech companies in Silicon Valley, the geography, have had an incredible year. But one indicator points to longer-term changes. The internal rate of return (IRR) for companies in other startup hub cities has been even better. A big new analysis by AngelList showed aggregate IRR of 19.4% per year on syndicated deals elsewhere versus 17.5%

TechCrunch recently caught up with recent Y Combinator graduate Uiflow, a startup that is building a no-code enterprise app creation service. If you are thinking wait, don’t a number of companies already do that?, the answer is yes. But what Quickbase, Smartsheet and others are working on isn’t quite the same thing, at least from the

Eight months after former TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer quit in the midst of a full-court press from the Trump administration against the Chinese-owned social media giant, TikTok finally has a new permanent leader. ByteDance’s recently-hired CFO Shouzi Chew will be assuming the role as TikTok CEO while still holding the CFO role at its parent