Month: December 2022

On the secondary market, shares are discounted 40% on average, says industry pro

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Earlier today, we talked with Phil Haslett, the cofounder and now chief strategy officer of EquityZen, a 10-year-old, New York-based secondary marketplace that connects accredited buyers with privately held company shares that their owners — including founders, employees, and VCs — are looking to sell. It’s a tough business to be running right now, competing … Read more

Rocket Lab carves off defense-focused subsidiary for national security customers

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Launch provider Rocket Lab is establishing a subsidiary to handle its sensitive U.S. government business, like launching spysats and experimental military spacecraft. Rocket Lab National Security LLC will handle most of the Defense Department stuff going forward to save the rest of the company a bit of grief. The main arm of Rocket Lab, or … Read more

What’s a Twitter user to do?

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In the older days of the web, an app called Trillian emerged to solve the problem of allowing users to connect to their friends across multiple messaging services, like AIM, Jabber, Yahoo! Messenger, IRC and others. Lately, I’ve been longing for a Trillian-like service that would allow me to keep up with Twitter’s fleeing user … Read more

Meet the early-stage startups exhibiting at TC Sessions: Space

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The technological advances happening within the space industry are nothing short of dramatic — from propulsion systems, heavy-lift rockets and increased payload capabilities to building commercial space stations to fill the gap when the International Space Station ceases operations in 2030. These are thrilling times, and TC Sessions: Space 2022, which takes place on December … Read more

Illustrative notebooks in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart

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Amazon SageMaker JumpStart is the Machine Learning (ML) hub of SageMaker providing pre-trained, publicly available models for a wide range of problem types to help you get started with machine learning. JumpStart also offers example notebooks that use Amazon SageMaker features like spot instance training and experiments over a large variety of model types and … Read more

Daily Crunch: SBF says he’s ‘had a bad month,’ but is he really giving us the full story?

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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. There is officially only 8.3% left of the year. You know what that means! Holidays, cheer, and daydreaming about what shenanigans we’ll get ourselves into in 2024. Yes, 2024, because clearly we’re … Read more

Hyundai-backed AV startup Motional cuts workforce

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Motional, the Aptiv-Hyundai joint venture developing autonomous vehicle technology, cut its workforce this week — the latest example of layoffs in the AV industry and more broadly in the tech sector. Employees were told of the layoffs Wednesday, according to sources who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak for … Read more

Monarch delivers its first robot tractor

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Monarch Tractor this morning announced the delivery of its first MK-V unit. The “smart tractor” is electric and what the Bay Area-based company refers to as “driver optional” (terms like “autonomous” and “self-driving” come with their own unique baggage). We’ll just refer to it as a “robot tractor” from here on. The system was unveiled … Read more