TechCrunch Industry News

When DigitialOcean bought Nimbella last year, you knew it intended to go deeper into serverless technologies, and sure enough the company announced a new feature called DigitalOcean Functions today, based on Nimbella technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve been following Netflix lately, then you’d know the streamer is on shaky ground at the moment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

BUD, a nascent app taking a shot at creating a metaverse for Gen Z to play and interact with each other, has raised another round of funding in three months. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Technology turned out to be a boon for pets during the pandemic. Without ready access to vets, pet owners turned to mobile apps to keep track on their pet’s health, often via educational content, and in some cases that was linked to insurance providers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CleverTap, a retention marketing platform which has raised $76.6M to date, is to fully acquire Bulgarian-originated but San Francisco-based Leanplum, a customer engagement platform which has raised $131.2M, for an undisclosed amount. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Everstream Analytics, a supply chain insights and risk analytics startup, today announced that it raised $24 million in a Series A round led by Morgan Stanley Investment Management with participation from Columbia Capital, StepStone Group, and DHL. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There may be some irony in upgrading a laptop designed around the principles of user repairability/upgradeability. Though certainly Framework isn’t expecting too many folks who purchased last year’s model to replace their system with the latest and greatest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

India is pushing ahead with its new cybersecurity rules that will require cloud service providers and VPN operators to maintain names of their customers and their IP addresses despite many players threatening to leave the world’s second largest internet market over the new guidelines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon said it will help neighborhood stores across India launch their own digital storefronts to better serve their customers, the latest effort by the e-commerce giant as it attempts to leverage the dense network of offline stores in the key overseas market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Unit, a banking-as-a-service startup, has closed on a $100 million Series C round of funding led by Insight Partners. Existing backers Accel, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Aleph, and Flourish Ventures also participated in the financing, which values the company at $1.2 billion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last January, Red Hat announced that it was acquiring Kubernetes security startup StackRox, a company that had raised over $65 million since it was founded in 2014. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sydney-based Curious Thing is an aptly-named startup. The voice AI communication platform can call people and ask them questions like “How are you feeling today?” and then follow up with “how does it feel compared to yesterday?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tech giants including Amazon, Google and Microsoft have pledged millions of dollars to bolster the security of open source software. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, has suspended trading of Terraform Labs’ Terra (Luna) and TerraUSD (UST) tokens across most of its spot pairs, and for Luna, additionally across all of cross margins and isolated margins pairs following one of the biggest meltdowns in the history of cryptocurrencies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Twitter staff must really be wishing for a quiet life… Elon Musk, the gadfly billionaire who recently decided he wants to add the social media platform to his collection of tech firms, has just tweeted that his $43BN bid to buy the company is “on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stock-outs, unpredictable prices of farm produce and a lack of working capital are among the challenges that plague small restaurants and food vendors in emerging markets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

African payments company Interswitch has secured a $110 million joint investment from LeapFrog Investments and Tana Africa Capital to scale its digital payment services across the continent, the two private investment firms said in a statement Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

VC firm Educapital recently announced that it has reached the first close of its second fund. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While (former) startups like Lemonade came along to attack the tired world of insurance, the travel insurance market is now coming in for the same treatment from the likes of Safetywing (covered by TCÂ here) and Battleface. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Automating customer service tasks, particularly those that require agents to speak with customers on the phone, is something of a holy grail in the enterprise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Israeli trip-planning app Moovit is integrating with Orlando-based autonomous shuttle startup Beep, which will allow riders to view options for taking Beep shuttles alongside other forms of transit, like buses or trains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cloudflare today announced that it’s collaborating with Deno, the development company behind the eponymous Deno runtime, and individual contributors of the Node.js open source project to create standards that enable developers to write code between Deno, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Atma, an Indonesian startup that wants to make job hunting less painful, announced today it has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding led by AC Ventures, with participation from Global Founders Capital. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft is throwing its weight behind Epic Games in the fight against Apple — and bringing Fortnite back to iOS in the process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In February, Peloton CEO John Foley stepped down as the connected fitness pioneer cut 2,800 jobs. No one could say the news was unexpected. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Porsche has read the room. With its first electric vehicle now outselling the quintessential 911 sports car, the German automaker is responding by upping its bet on EVs, in part via a hefty investment in lithium-silicon battery developer Group14 Technologies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pinterest on Monday launched a new app aimed at making it easier for creators to live stream to its platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amberdata, an institutionally-focused digital asset data provider, has raised $30 million in its Series B, its CEO Shawn Douglass exclusively told TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hundreds of rocket engines manufactured by startup Ursa Major will be going to space company Phantom Space over the next few years, part of a massive order that reflects Phantom’s bullish stance on the small launch market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AccelByte, a platform that helps game creators build backend services and tools, has raised $60 million in Series B led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from Sony Interactive Entertainment and returning backers Galaxy Interactive and NetEase. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NFTs are being used for far more than just proving you own a JPEG on the internet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Union Square Ventures (USV), the 19-year-old, New York-based venture firm, has raised $275 million for its eighth early-stage fund and $350 million for its fourth opportunity fund, the firm announced in a blog post yesterday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okra Solar walked away with the trophy and a giant check at our 2019 Shenzhen Hardware Battlefield event. It’s a moment happily eternalized in a new press release announcing the renewable energy startup’s $2.1 million new round (it’s a nice photo. I used it on this post, too). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Airbnb is going all in on the “live anywhere, work anywhere” philosophy that much of the business world has been forced to adopt, committing to full-time remote work for most employees and a handful of perks like 90 days of international work/travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was last year that we covered the $11.2M fundraise for Sienna Network, the ‘privacy decentralized’ startup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks to the explosion of low- and no-code development tools, building web apps from scratch has become easier — and cheaper — than it once was. But sophisticated search and navigation functions can complicate the process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Smallstep founder and CEO Mike Malone calls big, distributed systems his happy place, but these systems involve a lot of machine-to-machine communications, an area identity vendors haven’t been able to solve. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I’ve been covering Apple in various capacities for a long time now. Over the years, I don’t know that I’ve seen an announcement from the company as unexpected and warmly received as Self Service Repair. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

General Motors expects full-year 2022 expenses at Cruise, the automaker’s autonomous driving subsidiary, to be approximately $2 billion, according to GM’s chief financial officer Paul Jacobson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Online payment methods can be expensive for merchants, who have to pay between 2% and 8% of every sale to debit and credit card, ewallet and BNPL facilitators. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You’ve got to hand it to Miso — the company knows how to sell the sizzle, as they say in the meat-cooking business. The robotics firm has been striking high-profile deals with some of the U.S.’s biggest fast food chains, from White Castle to Panera Bread. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Reliance Industries “cannot implement” its $3.4 billion deal to acquire several parts of retail chain Future Group after secured creditors rejected the offer earlier this week, India’s most valuable firm said in a stock exchange filing on Saturday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As unlikely as it may have once seemed, reports indicate Elon Musk may actually end up the owner of a newly-private Twitter after all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Months after cutting half its staff, edtech startup Flockjay has landed on a new vision for how to disrupt tech sales: start from the inside, out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Snap released its first quarter financial results for 2022 today, affirming that it’s growing faster than its fellow US-based competitors Facebook (now Meta) and Twitter. Meta reported its first loss in daily active users (DAUs) last quarter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Immigrants to a new country can often be cash-rich. The problem is, is that they have no credit history in their new country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Drones can be dangerous, and we’ve seen consumer-grade drones used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s been a wild few years for the home fitness industry. Few consumer technologies were better positioned to ride the pandemic to new heights. There’s been some leveling off of late, of course. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After months of teasers and a slow drip of information, BMW today announced its new i7 xDrive60, the first all-electric version of its full-size luxury sedan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last April, Facebook announced a suite of new audio products, including new support for podcasts and a Clubhouse live audio competitor, which was an indication that it was taking the threat from other audio platforms more seriously. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices