Roku’s newest venture goes beyond your TV screen: The hardware company just announced Roku Smart Home, a new lineup of devices including security cameras, video doorbells, smart lights, and voice-enabled smart plugs. The company also launched a Roku Smart Home mobile app and a security camera subscription service. Roku building out its home technologies is significant … Read more
Ntropy, a company offering an API that enriches transaction data for financial services businesses, today announced that it raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Lakestar with participation from QED Investors and January Investors. CEO Nare Vardanyan says that the funding will be put toward growing the company’s team, specifically in the … Read more
Indian edtech giant Byju’s said on Wednesday it has eliminated 5% of its workforce, or about 2,500 roles, across multiple departments as it looks to improve its finances and achieve profitability by end of the current financial year, it said. This the second significant layoff step the startup, valued at $22 billion, has undertaken in … Read more
Vista Equity Partners has agreed a $4.6 billion all-cash deal to acquire KnowBe4, a publicly-traded cybersecurity company specializing in helping enterprise workers avoid phishing attacks. “Under Vista’s ownership, we will have access to additional resources and support, which will help us achieve our goals and deliver enhanced value to our customers,” KnowBe4 founder and CEO … Read more
Greenlight Financial Technology, a venture-backed fintech company focused on providing a debit card, banking app and financial education to children, added another layer to its subscription plan with the introduction of family safety features. Greenlight Infinity, priced at $14.98 per month for the whole family, includes location sharing to see where anyone in the family … Read more
Some seven years after selling his previous company to Google, Jacob Bank is preparing to launch his next project, this time with a focus on automating mundane, repetitive tasks. Bank was previously cofounder and CEO at Timeful, a smart scheduling app that helped users make better use of their time through automatically prioritizing their various … Read more
Africa’s $45 billion pharmaceuticals market is expected to grow 10% CAGR to $100 billion by 2030. Yet, the sector struggles with highly fragmented and undercapitalized supply chains rife with fake medications, which cause the death of thousands of patients yearly; in Nigeria, 20-40% of drugs are counterfeit. A handful of healthtech companies bring efficiency to … Read more
Recent research suggests that the e-commerce market in Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt account for a combined $21.4 billion and is projected to grow by more than 50% to $33.3 billion in the next three years. And as MENA shoppers increase their commerce spending, it is increasingly becoming imperative for online stores to position themselves … Read more
Net Purpose, a platform for sustainable investors, has raised $11 million in a Series A round led by ETF Partners, funding which will be used to expand its product and team, says the company. The company is benefitting from a shift to investing in sustainable products. According to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment, $120 … Read more
Spherics, a UK-based carbon accounting platform for SMEs to understand and reduce their environmental impact, has been acquired by accounting giant Sage. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but it’s understood Spherics had raised £1.25m in equity financing from angel investors and £300,000 in grants. Spherics was a smaller startup playing in a similar … Read more
Uber is scaling back its operations in Pakistan, the latest in a series of efforts from the ride-hailing firm as it looks to improve its financial performance. The company says its marquee app is ceasing operations in five of the six cities where Uber had launched and expanded to over the years. The eponymous service … Read more
Apple and Google said Wednesday they will roll out software updates to enable 5G support on their respective handsets in India, the world’s second largest wireless market, just days after local bureaucrats began pushing the phonemakers to expedite their efforts. Reliance Jio and Airtel, India’s two largest carriers, have started to offer 5G services in … Read more
Tiger Global’s latest investment in India is Vecmocon, a startup building solutions to bring safety and reliability alongside intelligence and health monitoring to light electric vehicles (EVs), addressing concerns that are curtailing the sales of electric scooters in the South Asian market. Unlike traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles that have existed for more than … Read more
French startup Homa has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. Quadrille Capital and Headline are leading the round. Homa partners with indie mobile game studios so that their games are perfectly optimized to become a hit game on the App Store and Google Play. In other words, Homa builds tools that help third-party … Read more
Noom, a health coaching platform valued at $3.7 billion last year, is laying off a portion of staff for the second time in a matter of months, TechCrunch has learned from sources. Noom has laid off 10% of its staff, or around 500 people, which is a reduction that mostly impacts its coaching team. It’s … Read more
Moments before Meta’s big annual developer conference was set to begin, TechCrunch’s staff scrambled to see who had a charged Meta Quest headset, which it turned out was nobody. But because I knew what corner of the closet mine was in (upper left), here I am. After merging my work Facebook account (Taylor Linguini) with … 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. Hello, humans, and the hundreds of AIs that are probably reading this as well. May your day be full of joy. If you can’t feel joy today, be kind to yourself. Perhaps … Read more
The demise of a spacecraft is usually something rather poignant. But two weeks ago, NASA celebrated one’s destruction. On September 26, NASA executed the final stage of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), in which a spacecraft intentionally crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos to investigate whether such an impact could deflect an Earth-bound stellar object. … Read more
Last year at Meta Connect, the company then known as Facebook dropped a bombshell: it would now be known as Meta and focus on building the “metaverse.” After investing billions of dollars into the future of virtual reality, the rebranded Meta came back this year for its next big announcement: legs. Yes, avatars are going … Read more
Apple’s 30% tech tax on developers has not just antagonized consumer tech giants like Epic Games and Spotify but is also turning web3 startups against it. Major NFT marketplaces OpenSea and Magic Eden noticeably only let users browse listings on their iPhone apps without enabling trading to avoid the steep fees. But doing so bars … Read more
The stock prices of Uber, Lyft and DoorDash slid on Tuesday after the Department of Labor announced proposed changes to how workers should be classified. The prospective guidance is intended to “combat employee misclassification,” the federal agency said. In response, investors drove Uber’s share price down by more than 10% to $24.61, while Lyft’s tanked … Read more
Neobanks are wagers that modern, digitally native services can supplant the traditional banking landscape. Founders flocked to the idea, investors wrote myriad checks, and despite how far along we are in the neobanking boom, startups are still being formed today to attack the problem space. Lately, we’ve seen neobanks focused on targeted niches, often segmented … Read more
Jesse Powell is stepping down from the CEO role at U.S.-based crypto exchange Kraken, The Wall Street Journal reported last month. Co-founded by Powell and Thanh Luu in 2011, Kraken is now the fourth-largest crypto exchange by volume, according to CoinMarketCap. It’s a critical inflection point for the company, which was valued at $10 billion … Read more
Meta keeps saying VR is the future, but everything it shows us is an inferior rehash of the things we already have. Its event today was, between assurances that everything is great in the Metaverse, a collection of tacit admissions that the best they can hope to do is ape a reality we are all … Read more
TechCrunch Disrupt — taking place October 18–20 in San Francisco — is the world-class tech conference where startups go to grow. Building a startup is no easy task — not exactly a newsflash, we know. And it’s why we want to direct your attention to the companies we partner with to make it happen. One … Read more
Venture capital deal flow into cryptocurrency startups is going in the same direction as the cryptocurrency market cap: down. The total crypto market cap has fallen almost 59% from about $2.25 trillion at the beginning of the year to $923 billion at the time of publication, according to CoinMarketCap data. “Deal activity tracks very closely … Read more
Many Americans feel comfortable treating their advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), which partially automate certain driving functions, as full self-driving systems, according to a study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). The survey explored habits, expectations and attitudes among regular users of General Motors Super Cruise, Nissan/Infiniti ProPILOT Assist and Tesla Autopilot. A … Read more
What happens when you’re working away from your office, so you don’t have your big desk and multiple large monitors with you? You could just use your laptop and make do. Or, you could buy a $1,499 Quest Pro, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says is built with work specifically in mind. Today, in Horizon … Read more
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Darrell and Jordan talk with Scott Gravelle, the CEO and co-founder of Attabotics, a robotics company that specializes in distribution and supply chain. Scott talks about how he was inspired by the Cutter Ants to design a vertical warehouse and create … Read more
Corporate spend management startup Brex has laid off 136 people, or 11% of its staff, across all departments as part of a restructuring, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively. After the layoffs, Brex has just over 1,150 employees. It’s been a tumultuous year for Brex, which announced in April that it was leaning into the … Read more