In just six years, UPI has become the most popular way Indians transact online. The mobile electronics payments system was used for over 6.57 billion transactions in the world’s second largest internet market last month. Now, it’s taking steps to supercharge its growth. The payments network, which was built by a coalition of banks, is … Read more
African capital markets exist in silos, as various exchanges within the continent are often inaccessible to investors outside their home countries. For instance, a South African investor who wants to diversify their portfolio outside the Johannesburg Stock Exchange may find investing in the Nigerian Stock Exchange difficult. Not only does this limit investors’ access to … Read more
From healthcare to manufacturing, traditional industries have been getting a digital makeover over the past decade. But some sectors have been left behind. Maritime shipping, argued Fabian Fussek, CEO and co-founder of Kaiko Systems, is the “last frontier of digitzation.” Kaiko Systems is a Berlin-based startup trying to digitize operations on commercial vessels. Around 90% … Read more
Ivorian payments-led fintech startup Julaya has extended its pre-Series A round by $5 million. The company, which facilitates B2B payments for businesses in Francophone West Africa, mainly via mobile money channels, has raised a total of $7 million in the financing round. In 2019, West Africa reported the most live mobile money services in any … Read more
In its latest step of the app cleanup drive, Google is folding in Assistant and Calendar reminders in its Tasks app. The company wants to make it easier to manage your tasks and reminders from any of these three apps by unifying its to-do systems. Currently, Google Tasks — which was first launched as a … Read more
Managing cap tables and equity at high-growth companies can be a complicated (and sometimes messy) business, a fact that founders and employees often discover too late. That’s given rise to a wave of companies building software to help, and today a European leader in that pack is announcing some funding to fuel its own growth. … Read more
Meet Immortal Game, a startup that wants to turn chess into a web3 game with NFTs, play-to-earn rewards, quests, a marketplace and more. Online chess has never been so popular and Immortal Game wants to take advantage of that trend to modernize the game. The company has raised $15.5 million across two rounds, including a … Read more
Synthetic speech tech startup Murf gives a voice, literally, to content creators of all sizes. Murf, which now has a library of more than 120 human-parity AI voices across 20 languages, announced today it has raised $10 million Series A funding led by Matrix partners. Participation came from returning investors Elevation Capital and several prominent … Read more
Meet Loctax, a company that wants to change how tax teams work in multinational companies. There are still many departments that rely on outdated tools and processes to get something done. According to this startup founded in 2020, tax reporting is currently a fragmented and error-prone process that could benefit from a software upgrade. Loctax … Read more
Twitch is cracking down on some gambling sites after a streamer scammed his peers out of tens of thousands of dollars to fuel a betting habit, kicking off a firestorm about how the platform should handle games of chance in the process. Over the weekend, ItsSliker, a U.K.-based streamer who gained some popularity back in … Read more
Nearly three years ago, a special purpose acquisition vehicle (SPAC) spearheaded by investor Chamath Palihapitiya took the space tourism company Virgin Galactic public. It was the first human spaceflight company to trade on the NYSE — or any exchange, for that matter — and it was so successful that it almost immediately kicked off a … Read more
The race to bring China-made goods to Western consumers via online stores is heating up. Pinduoduo, the Chinese e-commerce giant known for offering hard-to-believe deals, has quickly gained momentum for its first international endeavor in the U.S. The company’s overseas shopping app, called Temu, briefly claimed the top spot of Android shopping apps in the … Read more
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. Hey there, you deep-fried morsels of delight. Deep fried, because that’s the thing that made you crunchy. No? Because this is the Daily Crunch? The TechCrunch team got so competitive in this … Read more
In the early hours on Monday, a Tesla Megapack battery caught fire at a key California power storage facility, the state’s largest utility said in a statement to TechCrunch. According to PG&E, the utility “became aware of a fire in one Tesla Megapack at its Elkhorn Battery Storage facility” at around 1:30 AM in Moss … Read more
SpinLaunch’s technique for sending payload to orbit, which uses centrifugal force to fling mass to space, has solicited its fair share of skeptics. But at least some of those skeptics are likely a little quieter today, as the company announced a notable new funding round to accelerate the commercialization of its kinetic launch system. The … Read more
Leoparda Electric, a São Paolo–based startup, wants to be the Gogoro of Latin America. In other words, it’s looking to build out a network of battery swapping stations that should help spread adoption of electric two-wheelers in the region. While LatAm is the second largest two-wheeler market after Southeast Asia, electrification in the region has … Read more
Earlier this summer, a Google exec admitted that TikTok was eating into its core Search business, particularly among younger users. But that’s not all TikTok is now being used for, a new Pew Research Center study indicates. According to the findings from a report that examined Americans’ use of social media for news consumption, 33% … Read more
In a sign that national security tech is a safe bet even during troubled economic times, defense- and security-focused VC firm Razor’s Edge Ventures today announced the closing of its third startup investment fund at just under $340 million. It exceeded the initial target of $250 million, the firm notes, and will target companies developing … Read more
About five months after raising $15 million, PassiveLogic, which provides a platform to autonomously control building systems, has secured an additional $15 million in an “off-round” strategic investment from Nvidia’s venture arm, nVentures. The new cash brings PassiveLogic’s total raised to over $80 million, and CEO Troy Harvey tells TechCrunch it’ll be put toward expanding … Read more
Facebook is introducing new Pages features that are designed to help creators get discovered and connect with their followers, the company announced on Tuesday. Most notably, the social network is rolling out a new setting for creators that makes content exclusively available to top fans and subscribers. Creators can select the option by going into … Read more
The venture and startup industries have long had a problem with transparency. Theranos could have likely saved itself from a future fraud trial if it was honest about the shortcomings of its blood testing device. Nikola founder Trevor Milton probably wouldn’t be on trial right now if he hadn’t allegedly lied to investors in a … Read more
You can’t cut what you can’t measure. For many companies, carbon emissions are something of a black box. Energy goes in, products and emissions come out. The first two are simple enough to monitor and understand, but without an expert on hand, the emissions profile is harder to pin down. “If people can’t access this … Read more
Tinder announced today that it is partnering with dog rescue shelters across the U.S. to celebrate National Dog Week and give Tinder users the ability to add a shelter dog to their profile photo. Unfortunately, this new addition is only around for a short time, however. National Dog Week is over on September 24, but … Read more
Eco-conscious vehicle renters can soon expect to see EVs from GM brands Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC and even commercial delivery unit BrightDrop at Hertz rental locations. The car rental giant said Tuesday it plans to order up to 175,000 electric vehicles from General Motors over the next five years, with first deliveries of Chevy Bolt … Read more
Its 2015 acquisition of Aldebaran didn’t go as smoothly as SoftBank hoped. At the time, the French robotics startup was best known for its Nao, which had become a fairly ubiquitous presence in research facilities across the globe. The small humanoid robot formed the foundation for the rebranded SoftBank Robotics’ best-known creation, Pepper. Nao mostly … Read more
As you can tell from the Mickey Mouse-shaped disco ball in the photo above, Season 31 of “Dancing with the Stars” (DWTS) premiered on Disney+ last night. This marked the first time the streaming service livestreamed a TV show. With instances of live TV apps crashing across the sports streaming space (looking at you DirecTV!), … Read more
Nvidia has announced its new generation of graphics cards, the RTX 4-series, including the $1599 flagship RTX 4090 and slightly more affordable 4080. The upgrade comes at an interesting time for PC users, who have been starved out of the GPU market by crypto miners for years, and now have their choice of their long-awaited … Read more
In addition to the groundbreaking news that YouTube would begin to monetize Shorts videos and revamp its Partner Program, the company today also announced a new offering for creators who leverage music to back their videos: Creator Music, now in beta testing. This new destination will introduce a large catalog of songs that creators can … Read more
Last week, we ran an article by Gaetano Crupi, a partner at VC firm Prime Movers Lab, identifying three pillars required to support a Series B data room: a strategy memo, a pitch deck and a forecast model. In a follow-up, he explains the next step: packaging this information for prospective investors to “create the … Read more
Yet more strikes against general and indiscriminate data retention in the EU: The bloc’s top court has issued a couple of rulings on joined cases today — one related to a German law on telecoms data retention which had been challenged by Deutsche Telekom and ISP SpaceNet; and another finding fault with the French state’s … Read more