TechCrunch

A majority of retail workers at the Apple Store at Penn Square in Oklahoma City have voted to unionize. The second Apple Store to win union representation in the U.S., the workers voted 56-32 in favor of forming a union, and will be represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Per National Labor Relations … Read more

There’s no one who knows a company’s inner workings like a chief financial officer. So, when three high-profile CFOs leave their jobs at richly valued, late-stage startups in quick succession, we notice it. This week, OpenSea CFO Brian Roberts left the web3 company less than a year after taking the job. Days later, Brex CFO … Read more

Everyrealm, a metaverse real estate company that spun out of Republic’s crypto arm in February, is facing two lawsuits first filed in August from former directors at the company who allege they each faced numerous, separate instances of discrimination and harassment while working there. In addition to the company itself, multiple Everyrealm executives are also … Read more

Around late-September/early-October each year, I get a Slack message from Greg asking whether I’m interested in writing a gift guide (or two). “Sure,” I say, never anticipating just how much of a slog the next two months are going to be for hardware news/reviews. Putting together a roundup like that has the decided benefit of … Read more

Tata Power, a leading power generation company in India, has confirmed it was hit by a cyberattack. In a brief statement released on Friday, the Mumbai-based company said that the attack impacted some of its I.T. systems. “The company has taken steps to retrieve and restore the systems. All critical operational systems are functioning; however, … Read more

Perhaps unsurprisingly, new PitchBook data found that U.S. companies with all female founders are raising less capital this year than the last amid current economic woes. Last year, women raised around 2.4% of all venture capital allocated, a figure that stands at 1.9% through Q3 of this year. That number becomes even lower and even … Read more

Opeyemi Awoyemi, one of Nigeria’s well-known serial founders, is back with another outfit. It’s not a tech company this time — Awoyemi co-founded online jobs site Jobberman (which was acquired by ROAM Africa in 2016) and Whogohost, a bootstrapped hosting platform — but instead, a venture studio: Fast Forward Venture Studio. Awoyemi choosing this route … Read more

“The 2022 venture capital market” is nearly a misnomer, as each quarter that passes seems to bring with it a new normal for startup investment. The pace of quarterly change in how venture investors are disbursing capital is making full-year numbers almost misleading. The change inside of 2022, in other words, may at times mask … Read more

Clear Capital, a real estate valuation technology company and firm, is laying off 27% of its staff months after freezing mass hiring, TechCrunch has learned from sources. A spokesperson for Clear Capital confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch but did not share the specific number of employees impacted. Last November, the company announced they had 1,400 … Read more

A ‘Prevention of Future Deaths’ report following a U.K. coroner’s inquest into the suicide of British schoolgirl, Molly Russell, who killed herself almost five years ago after viewing content on social media websites that promoted self harm, has recommended the government looks at requiring age verification on sign-up to social platforms to ensure the separation … Read more

Momentive Global, the parent of the web-survey portal SurveyMonkey, laid off 11% of its workforce this week. Multiple people across divisions — including those handling the business development, customer support, recruitment and sales at the San Mateo, California-headquartered company — have been impacted, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed. “In an 8-K filed on October 13, … Read more

It’s time for procrastination to stop here. Well, it is if you’ve put off buying your pass to TechCrunch Disrupt. Today is your final opportunity to avoid paying full freight. Nobody likes full freight, just sayin’. You can still save $700 if…and only if…you buy your pass before the deal expires precisely at 11:59 p.m. … Read more

There’s no better way to show you have high conviction in yourself as an investor than being the biggest LP in your $101 million fund, right? Especially if you name your firm Conviction, as Sarah Guo did after leaving Greylock following a decade of investing for the well-known venture group. Last week, she announced that … Read more

Beyond Meat plans to lay off about 200 employees, or 19% of its workforce, according to a regulatory filing disclosed Friday. The company cited declining sales and said the layoffs are “based on cost-reduction initiatives intended to reduce operating expenses…and target cash flow positive operations within the second half of 2023.” Beyond Meat expects the … Read more

Members of the European Parliament have lodged complaints against three tech giants, Amazon, Google and Meta, with the EU’s Transparency Register — aka, the oversight process that’s intended to track lobbying activity aimed at the bloc’s lawmakers — accusing the trio of breaching the lobbying transparency rules by using smaller front organizations to press their … Read more

Christian Owens Contributor Share on Twitter Christian Owens is CEO and co-founder of Paddle, a payments infrastructure provider for SaaS businesses. Scaling a SaaS company is tougher today than in the past few years. Whatever stage your company is at, a near 70% drop in the value of public SaaS stocks, increasingly limited access to … Read more

Twitter is developing a feature that has the potential to curb harassment and bullying on the social network. App engineer Jane Manchun Wong discovered that the company is developing a way for users to control who can mention them on Twitter. According to a screenshot posted by Wong, the new controls would give users the … Read more

TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 kicks off in just four days, startup fans. We can’t wait to greet you. Here’s a handy how-to guide for everything you can expect at TechCrunch Disrupt presented by AT&T on October 18-20 in San Francisco at Moscone West (Oct. 21 online). All times listed here are Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). p.s. … Read more

Meta’s Connect conference held earlier this week had announcements ranging from the new $1,500 Quest Pro headset to the company’s partnership with Microsoft to bring productivity tools to VR. However, probably one of the most discussed updates was that Meta is finally bringing legs to its virtual avatars. Until now, Horizon Worlds users — which … Read more

Although real estate is the world’s biggest asset class, it is largely inaccessible to non-institutional investors. The large sums of capital often required for an individual to purchase property combined with the industry’s reliance on manual, antiquated processes pose substantial barriers to entry for individual investors looking to gain exposure to real estate. These challenges … Read more

Uganda’s controversial Computer Misuse (Amendment) Bill 2022, which rights groups say will likely be used to silence dissenting voices online, has come into force after the country’s president Yoweri Kaguta Museveni signed it into law yesterday. The country’s legislators had passed amendments to the 2011 Computer Misuse Act early September limiting writing or sharing of … Read more

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Before we get into this week’s show notes, some programming items: First up, use code “EQUITY” for a special listener discount for Disrupt tickets. We’re mere days away, and you should come hang out … Read more

Ori Mor Contributor Share on Twitter Ori Mor is chief business officer and co-founder of Wi-Charge. Creating a disruptive hardware components startup can be quite exciting. Few things can compare to the joy of physically interacting with your creation as you design and build it from scratch. But hardware startups are challenging. Think of it … Read more

Armed with $6.3 million in new pre-seed capital, Synonym Biotechnologies has begun the development phase for its first productized bio-manufacturing facilities for non-pharmaceutical applications. Edward Shenderovich and Joshua Lachter started the company in January 2022 to develop, finance and build commercial-scale bio-manufacturing facilities to provide synthetic biology producers of all size with flexible production capacity … Read more