Automation Anywhere, one of the best-funded RPA providers with over $1 billion capital raised to date, went the debt route this week, securing a $200 million loan from Silicon Valley Bank, SVB Capital and Hercules Capital. Debt raises aren’t necessarily a bad thing — they’re a useful tool, particularly for companies with high annual recurring … Read more
Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. … Read more
Hi all! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly sum up some of the most read TechCrunch stories from the past seven days. The goal? Even when you’re swamped, a quick skim of WiR on Saturday morning should give you a pretty good understanding of what happened in tech this week. Want … Read more
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by … Read more
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. I think it took maybe three days after I roasted our rather dry M&A season for the news cycle to prove me wrong. This week we saw Naver acquire Poshmark, Duolingo buy … Read more
Hello and welcome back to The Exchange’s weekend missive. If you are reading this on TechCrunch and want to get the letter in your inbox, head here. Your regular host Anna Heim is off this week on a much-deserved vacation, so I’m stepping back into my old role as newsletter scribe. It’s good fun to … Read more
As Elon Musk again nears a deal to buy Twitter, speculation is resurfacing around how the billionaire plans to transform the social network. Musk’s tweet this week offered a clue: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” While Musk didn’t elaborate on what X would look like, many reckon he’s aspiring … Read more
Cloudflare last week announced a $1.25 billion funding program for startups that build on its software, Cloudflare Workers. But this isn’t a corporate venture fund and that sum is not company money. Rather, it’s an initiative in which the cloud infrastructure company curates a group of its startup customers and presents them to venture capitalists, … Read more
In a world filled with bad actors and snooping governments, surveillance is the one factor that affects almost every business across the globe. While companies like Apple, Signal and LastPass fight against surveillance using end-to-end encryption and by shunning mass data collection — you can’t hand over data you don’t have — too many companies, … Read more
Huobi Global, once China’s top crypto exchange, has been retooling itself since exiting from the home market following Beijing’s crypto ban. Now the company is nearing a takeover by an investment firm. Huobi Global announced today that its controlling shareholder has completed the transaction to sell its entire stake to About Capital, a Hong Kong-based … Read more
Rivian informed customers Friday that it is conducting a voluntary recall of all 13,000 vehicles it has delivered so far due to a loose fastener. The fastener, which may not have been sufficiently torqued on a small percentage of vehicles, connects the front upper control arm and steering knuckle. This can cause loose and vibrating tires. … 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. Friday! How’s that for brevity in newsletter introductions? Let’s get to it so we can crack open a Liquid Death and let the week sag off into the murky distance of memory … Read more
What constitutes a big phone in 2022? It’s been a moving target for a number of years now — albeit a target that has been steadily moving in a single direction. It’s tough to determine the exact average display size, but most flagship smartphone screens generally fall somewhere between six and seven inches. In 2010, … Read more
Rocket Lab successfully launched an Electron rocket this afternoon with a new satellite for the Argos program, which provides connectivity to a number of scientific endeavors. It’s a milestone for the company, but more importantly marks — easily — the worst pun ever launched into space. The mission was called “It Argos Up From Here.” … Read more
Fintor, a fintech startup making it easier for non-accredited investors to invest in real estate properties, has just launched its mobile app for both iOS and Android. It also just raised a $6.2 million extension funding round from its existing investors, including Public.com, Hustle Fund, 500 Global, VU Ventures, Graphene Ventures and angel investors such … Read more
It’s a rote story by now that many populations around the world are facing rapid decline. Birth rates in many countries are falling, leading to concerns about graying populations engendering imbalanced economies. That’s true when we consider nation-level populations. It’s also true when we consider the rate at which new unicorns are born, measured by the … Read more
To state the (painfully) obvious: The fates of agriculture and climate change are inextricably linked. The weather dictates what grows where and when, but as the Earth warms beneath a wool blanket of excess carbon, agriculture is especially vulnerable in ways you might not expect. Record-setting heat and droughts fry grasses that farmers depend on … Read more
Pakistan’s central bank revoked the in-principle approval and permit to conduct pilot operations of fintech Tag and has ordered the startup to close all customers’ wallet accounts and pull its apps from the app stores in a move that poses existential threat to the firm. State Bank of Pakistan said in an order that it … Read more
This week on The TechCrunch Podcast we talked with Dom about how conservative VCs are using their dollars to shape the world, and we spoke with Taylor about how the Musk train just keeps on rumbling along. On the topic of billionaires… “A big chunk of the conversation that is missing is just that it’s … Read more
Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff has been preaching for years about the importance of corporate social responsibility, the idea that companies need to worry about not only making money for investors but also contributing positively to the wider community in which they operate. He could be onto something. Increasingly, consumers and some investors want to do … Read more
For the first time, a Netflix movie is getting a one-week theatrical sneak preview event across 600 AMC, Regal and Cinemark theaters in the U.S. The historic deal marks the first time all three major theater chains have agreed to show a big-budget Netflix movie. Viewers will get a chance to watch “Glass Onion: A … Read more
Shopify has agreed to make changes linked to shopper safety and combating fakes after a regulatory intervention in the European Union following a number of complaints, the Commission said today. The changes agreed to include a commitment to create a “fast and effective” ‘notice and action’ procedure for national consumer authorities to report problems they … Read more
Eric L. Sophir Contributor Eric L. Sophir is an IP partner at law firm Foley & Lardner LLP where he counsels clients in AI, digital health, manufacturing and other industries. Matthew Horton Contributor Share on Twitter Matthew Horton is a senior counsel and IP lawyer at law firm Foley & Lardner LLP where he focuses … Read more
In the early days of a startup, everyone is on the same page. But there’s no way to know how well a founding team will get along by the time a company reaches maturity. Set aside the romantic notion that startup teams consist of visionary mavericks who are building the future in real time; they’re … Read more
US president Joe Biden has signed an Executive Order attached to reupping a flagship data transfer agreement with the European Union — with the goal of making life easier for businesses that need to export EU user-data to the US for processing. The White House announced the development in a statement today — saying that … Read more
FlyFeed claims it signed more than $10 million worth of contracts and closed a $3 million round of investment to launch its first insect farm in Vietnam, in its push to produce low-cost, high-nutrient protein for human consumption. The company was founded less than a year ago and is targeting the three billion people who … Read more
It was only five years ago that electronic punk band YACHT entered the recording studio with a daunting task: they would train an AI on fourteen years of their music, then synthesize the results into the album “Chain Tripping.” “I’m not interested in being a reactionary,” YACHT member and tech writer Claire L. Evans said … Read more
Premiering on October 8, entertainment studio BlackBox TV is releasing a short-form series exclusive to Meta Quest TV and in Meta Horizon Worlds with the Meta Quest 2 headset. The 360° VR experience “Scream Park” takes users on a virtual reality horror rollercoaster ride just in time for spooky season. Meta Quest TV is the … Read more
There’s one issue I have started to see more and more often: Startup founders, in their desperation to show how big their markets are, overstep the mark significantly, claiming numbers for their TAM/SAM/SOM that are unobtainable and absurd. I get it: You want to seem like you’re building a very valuable company. But in the … Read more
When Russia invaded her home country of Ukraine, UK-based tech entrepreneur Irra Ariella Khi, cofounder of Zamna — set up a fundraising page to directly support people inside Ukraine. Khi’s father (aged 70) and godmother (aged 82) are both in Ukraine, as are her stepsister and her children. Khi then temporarily stepped back from her … Read more