Kim Kardashian charged by SEC for pushing crypto, reaches $1.26M settlement

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is charging Kim Kardashian for “unlawfully touting” a “crypto security,” the agency announced on Monday morning. The SEC says that Kardashian was in violation of its rules when she promoted a “crypto asset security offered and sold by EthereumMax” without the necessary disclosure that she was paid to … Read more

With $17M in funding, Immerok launches cloud service for real-time streaming data

In 2011, the Apache Software Foundation released Flink, a high-throughput, low-latency engine for streaming various data types. A decade later, a startup called Immerok — founded by David Moravek, Holger Temme, Johannes Moser, Konstantin Knauf, Piotr Nowojski and Timo Walther — has developed an Apache Flink cloud service called Immerok Cloud, which is serverless — … Read more

Geely’s Europe expansion continues, Argo robotaxis on the Lyft app and Tesla AI Day takeaways

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. This is a shorter version of The Station newsletter that is emailed to subscribers. Want all the deals, news roundups and commentary? Subscribe … Read more

South African startup Talk360’s seed funding hits $7M after new backing

Months after the initial close of its seed round, Talk360, a South African Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) startup, has raised an additional $3 million, bringing the total investment raised in the round to $7 million. Talk360’s latest investors include Allan Gray E2 Ventures (AGEV), Kalon Venture Partners, E4E Africa, Endeavor, existing lead investor HAVAÍC, … Read more

TikTok said to be launching live shopping in the US

TikTok is hunting for partners to launch its live shopping offering in the US as it is looking to outsource operations for these features. According to a report from Financial Times, the short video app has been talking with California-based TalkShopLive to provide infrastructure for live shopping features on TikTok. This tech will allow creators … Read more

Prosus terminates $4.7 billion BillDesk acquisition

Prosus Ventures and its subsidiary payments giant PayU have called off the $4.7 billion merger of BillDesk they announced last year, saying “certain conditions precedent” were not fulfilled by the deadline in a surprising development a month after the proposed acquisition received approval from the local antitrust watchdog. “Certain conditions precedent were not fulfilled by … Read more

Tesla delivered a record 343,830 vehicles in Q3, but still missed Wall Street’s forecasts

Tesla reported Sunday it delivered 343,830 vehicles in the third quarter, a new record and a turnaround from earlier this year when a shutdown at its China factory and challenges around opening factories in Berlin and Austin affected how many vehicles it was able to get into customers’ driveways. Despite the rebound and record number, … Read more

Welcome to spooky season in startups

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. A multibillion dollar acquisition, IPO projections and some good ol’ VC and billionaire drama? It would be unfair to say that this week in tech and startups felt like 2021’s boom cycle; especially … Read more

The rise of product-led growth is creating opportunities for startups

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. More companies are adopting product-led growth (PLG), in which the product itself does most of the selling, and usage-based pricing (UBP) — meaning users … Read more

Build for the future now with Mammoth Biosciences and Mayfield

Trevor Martin’s Mammoth Biosciences aims to use CRISPR technology to democratize disease detection. Join this TechCrunch Live event to hear from Trevor Martin and Mayfield investor Ursheet Parikh on how Mammoth Biosciences positioned itself to achieve the lofty goal. Spoiler: Trevor Martin spent time putting the basics in place to ensure future success. This TechCrunch … Read more

Web3 banking platform Juno raises $18 million, launches tokenized loyalty program

Juno, a startup that provides checking accounts to crypto enthusiasts and allows them to take their paychecks in digital tokens, has raised a new funding round as it expands its offerings to include a tokenized loyalty program. The one-and-a-half-year old startup has amassed over 75,000 customers in the U.S. who take their salaries (some in … Read more

Firefly Aerospace reaches orbit for the first time

There’s another space-proven private launch company in the club — Firefly Aerospace. The company’s small payload Alpha rocket reached orbit successfully early on Saturday morning after taking of from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This is a major achievement for Firefly, which has been a lot to get here: The company originally began operations … Read more

Google appears to have disabled Google Translate in parts of China

Google appears to have disabled access to Google Translate in parts of China, redirecting visitors to the Hong Kong domain — which isn’t accessible from the mainland. According to users on Reddit and site archives viewed by TechCrunch, Google swapped the Google Translate interface at translate.google.cn with a generic Google Search page at some point … Read more

Apply to pitch your startup at TC Sessions: Crypto

Crypto has evolved from a niche product into a critical piece of the infrastructure underpinning an entirely new vision for the internet — web3. Startups are at the core of this innovation, and despite volatility in the crypto markets, builders in the space have remained steady in their efforts to leverage blockchain technology to reshape … Read more