Payments giant Stripe has acquired a four-year-old competitor, Lemon Squeezy, the latter company announced Friday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. As a self-proclaimed “merchant of record,” Lemon Squeezy calculates and pays global sales tax for digital products, handling legal processing and fees in every country. It primarily serves SaaS and software businesses. In … Read more
iCloud Private Relay has not been working for some Apple users across major markets, including the U.S., Europe, India and Japan. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. To get Startups Weekly in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. This week we are talking about Wiz’s bold decision, VC’s public feud, legal tech’s new capital and a16z’s close call. Let’s go! Most interesting startup stories … Read more
Apple joins 15 other tech companies — including Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI — that committed to the White House’s rules for developing generative AI. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The language is ambiguous, so it’s not clear whether X is helping itself to all user data for training Grok or whether this processing refers only to user interactions with the chatbot. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sound Search on TikTok is somewhat similar to YouTube Music’s song detection tool that lets you find the name of a song by singing, humming or playing it. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Skip exited stealth this week to announce a partnership with outdoor clothing specialist Arc’teryx. The deal is the first to bring Skip’s MO/GO technology to market: “powered pants” that utilize a soft exoskeleton technology, developed in-house at Alphabet’s X Labs moonshot factory. MO/GO, short for “mountain goat,” is a hybrid soft/rigid exoskeleton system designed to … Read more
Bing is the latest search engine to introduce generative AI into its results, with Microsoft announcing that it’s making Bing generative search available to a small percentage of users. The goal is to give those users the answers they want right in their search results, potentially synthesizing information that they’d otherwise have to click through … Read more
Ledger, a French startup mostly known for its secure crypto hardware wallets, has launched a new mid-range device, the Ledger Flex. Available now, priced at $249, the dinky hardware wallet features an E-Ink display to navigate the interface and approve transactions with a tap. Like all of Ledger’s wallets, the Ledger Flex is built around … Read more
The good news is that you can switch off the new data-sharing setting and also delete your conversation history with the AI. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Regulators gave SpaceX the all-clear to return to launch two weeks after the Falcon 9 rocket experienced an anomaly on orbit. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Madison Long and Simone May founded Clutch in 2020 to help connect people to businesses looking for marketing and content creation. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With the CrowdStrike update continuing to cause havoc across the planet, a startup has raised $13.5 million to at least improve some level of security for the kinds of devices that have been affected. California-based ZeroTier raised the Series A in a funding round led by Battery Ventures. While legacy companies like Cisco or Palo … Read more
Apple has reduced prices of its iPhone models in India by 3-4% following a cut in import duties in the South Asian market. The price cuts range from 3000 rupees ($36) for models like the iPhone 13, 14 and 15, and to up to 6,000 rupees ($72) for the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max … Read more
MNT-Halan, a fintech unicorn out of Egypt, is on a consolidation march. The microfinance and payments startup has raised $157.5 million in funding and is using the money in part to fund the acquisition of another fintech, Tam Finans, to expand into Turkey. Tam Finans provides financing to micro-enterprises and SMEs. It currently operates 39 … Read more
The energy transition is a marathon, not a sprint. But opportunities for acceleration are growing. Swedish startup Greenely* has just spotted one. It’s closing an €8 million Series A funding round to expand its energy management platform into neighbouring Nordic countries (so around $8.7M at current exchange rates). The energy tech startup is serving around … Read more
The Floorr offers tools for conducting sales, hosting tailored styling sessions, creating mood boards, and engaging in text or voice chats with clients, all in one place. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A decade-old drama involving VC David Sacks and Rippling founder Parker Conrad has blown up on X with many among the Silicon Valley elite taking sides. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Autonomous vehicle software startup Applied Intuition has raised $300 million just four months after closing a $250 million Series E round, yet another sign of how white-hot the investment scene is for artificial intelligence companies. The secondary round adds Fidelity Management & Research Company to an already-stacked lineup of investors in the automotive AI startup, … Read more
OpenAI may have designs to get into the search game — challenging not only upstarts like Perplexity, but Google and Bing, too. The company on Thursday unveiled SearchGPT, a search feature designed to give “timely answers” to questions, drawing from web sources. UI-wise, SearchGPT isn’t too far off from OpenAI’s chatbot platform ChatGPT. You type … Read more
WhatsApp has recently ramped up its marketing push in the U.S. In the past few years, WhatsApp has placed ad campaigns, placements in Times Square and TV spots emphasizing privacy and end-to-end encryption protection. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Proposition 22 – the ballot measure that passed in November 2020 and classified app-based gig workers as independent contractors rather than employees – is here to stay. The decision is a win for app-based companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Instacart, which have fought hard to maintain their … Read more
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! I don’t know about you, but for me, the past few days have offered up even more evidence that our world is vulnerable to software bugs. Yep, … Read more
In addition to insured commitments, Archera provides consulting services to help build purchasing strategies for customers to optimize their cloud usage. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In its bid to maintain pace with generative AI rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, Google is rolling out updates to the no-fee tier of Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot. The updates are focused on making the platform more performant — and more widely available. Starting Thursday, Gemini 1.5 Flash — a lightweight multimodal model Google announced … Read more
Meta’s AI integrations into apps like Instagram and Facebook have felt pretty useless so far. If I’m just trying to find my friend’s Instagram, why do I have to navigate around a Meta AI interface that is desperately trying to tell me the top five vegetarian protein sources? But with the release of Meta’s new … Read more
Disrupt 2024 is the premier event where tech careers are launched, connections are forged, and the future of technology talent takes center stage. The Disrupt Career Fair is the perfect opportunity to showcase your company and attract the best candidates. That’s because it has a diverse array of companies, from tech giants to nimble startups, … Read more
Substack is rolling out the ability for writers to draft and publish new posts directly from their phone via its iOS app, the company announced on Thursday. Until now, users have only been read content through the app. With this update, Substack is catching up with Medium and WordPress’ mobile apps, both of which allow … Read more
Until a year ago, Arjun Pillai had the comfortable yet important role of chief data officer at ZoomInfo, a B2B database company. But the serial entrepreneur was getting antsy. He had already founded and sold two startups, including Insent, which ZoomInfo bought in 2021. “Once you start a startup, you always have that bug,” he … Read more
Venture capital has become a more global industry as the tech sector slowly decentralizes. In 2022, more than 50% of VC deployed globally was invested in startups outside the U.S., according to data available from the National Science Foundation (NSF) — a stark contrast to 20 years ago, when nearly 80% of the world’s venture … Read more