TechCrunch Industry News
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American Express launches its first all-digital consumer checking account
American Express has launched its first all-digital consumer checking account, the company announced on Tuesday. The new offering, American Express Rewards Checking, is currently available for eligible U.S. Consumer Card Members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Joby Aviation to launch air taxi service in South Korea
California-based electric vertical takeoff and landing startup Joby Aviation plans to offer an air taxi service in South Korea in partnership with SK Telecom (SKT), one of the country’s largest telecommunication companies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
A Twitter slap fight goes wrong
Certain VCs who tweet a lot have grown a little vituperative of late, with some of the most powerful people in the industry lashing out in unprecedented ways. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Apple to charge 27% fee for Dutch dating apps using alternative payment options
Following a court order, developers working on dating apps don’t have to use Apple’s in-app purchase system in the Netherlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In Ford’s transition to EVs, cost-cutting takes center stage
Ford has made cost-cutting a key piece of its EV strategy as the company works to improve profit margins while meeting what CEO Jim Farley has called “incredible demand” of its new electric vehicle models. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Blockchain bridge Wormhole confirms that exploiter stole $320 million worth of crypto assets
Wormhole, a popular cryptocurrency platform that offers bridges between multiple blockchains, announced on Twitter that it noticed an exploit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Travel booking app Hopper upgrades its valuation to $5B on secondary sale
Hopper, the mobile travel booking startup and app that lets users book flights, hotels, cars, and — most recently — short-term home rentals a la Airbnb and VRBO, has been on a fast pace of growth in the wake of Covid-19 travel restrictions loosening up in the last year, with 70 million downloads to date. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
SpaceX reveals $500 monthly ‘Premium’ Starlink service with speeds up to 500 Mbps
SpaceX has a new tier for its Starlink satellite internet service with higher performance but pricing that might make your eyes water, called Starlink Premium, with speeds between 150 and 500Mbps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
GM’s Chevy Silverado EV already has 110,000 reservations
General Motors said it has secured more than 110,000 reservations for its new all-electric Chevrolet Silverado, which includes reservations from more than 240 fleet operators, Chair and CEO Mary Barra said in the company’s full-year and fourth quarter earnings letter to shareholders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Tesla recalls Full Self Driving feature that lets cars roll through stop signs
Tesla is issuing an over-the-air update to recall a "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) beta feature that allowed cars to roll through stop signs, which appeared in FSD 10.3. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Superpedestrian gets $125M to expand tech that corrects unsafe scooter riding
Shared e-scooter company Superpedestrian is gearing up to deploy its Pedestrian Defense safety system at scale, a feature that allows the company’s e-scooters to detect and correct unsafe riding behaviors, like riding on sidewalks or the wrong way down a one-way street, in real time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
AllSpice thinks hardware developers lack their own ‘GitHub,’ so it is building one
The idea behind the company was to get engineers back to spending the majority of their time designing and building hardware products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Joni Mitchell joins Neil Young, pulls her music from Spotify over vaccine misinformation
Spotify’s Joe Rogan headache is about to get a lot worse. Earlier this week, musician Neil Young announced that he would pull his music from the streaming service to protest Spotify’s relationship with Joe Rogan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Google will let legacy G Suite users migrate to free Google accounts
Earlier this month, Google announced that it would kill free Google Workspace accounts that were using the G Suite legacy free edition. As spotted by Ars Technica and following customer backlash, Google has updated its support page and says that it plans to offer more options to existing users. Google Workspace as it exists today […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Amazon must pay $2M and end program after price-fixing investigation by Washington AG
Amazon must pay $2.25 million and permanently shut down a previously suspended sales program, following an investigation and lawsuit by the Attorney General of Washington alleging it was essentially price-fixing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Compound aims to be a one-stop-shop for tech employees to manage their finances
Jordan Gonen and Jacob Schein had both worked in the tech industry for a few years when they realized they lacked a clear understanding of their own finances. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Apple will reportedly allow iPhones to accept contactless payments
Small businesses might soon be able to accept payments using their iPhones without extra hardware. Apple could start rolling out the feature through a software update in the next few months. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Paack pulls in a $225M Series D led by SoftBank to scale its E-commerce delivery platform
By now, many of us are familiar with the warehouse robots which populate those vast spaces occupied by the likes of Amazon and others. In particular, Amazon was very much a pioneer of the technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
FTC fines online shop $4M for hiding reviews below 4 stars
We all know online reviews must be taken with a grain of salt, but generally you’d like to think that a product with a 4.5-star average is better than one with a 3.5-star average. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Twitter’s experimental ‘Flock’ feature will let you share tweets with your closest friends
Twitter is still working on a feature that will give you a way to blast tweets that can only be seen by the friends you choose first revealed in July last year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Starship Technologies picks up €50M from the EU’s investment arm to expand its fleet of autonomous delivery robots
Starship Technologies, one of the bigger names in the world of autonomous delivery robots — those little caboose-like, boxy delivery vehicles that self-drive around cities — has been on a roll during Covid-19. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Ola Electric valued at $5 billion in new funding
Ola Electric said on Monday it has raised $200 million in a new financing round even as the Indian ride-hailing giant’s spin off struggles to deliver its maiden electric scooter to customers and questions about its work culture are being raised. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
FarmRaise aims to become a financial services giant, starting with farm grants
You have to start somewhere. So when Jayce Hafner and Sami Tellatin bonded as Stanford MBA classmates over their shared belief that making U.S. farms more efficient would be good for farmers, good for the country, and a great business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Peloton CEO acknowledges corrective actions, denies ‘halting all production’ of bikes and treadmills
Ahead of the company’s upcoming earnings, Peloton CEO John Foley took a break from a “quiet period” to address a number of reports related to poor device sales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Netflix had its lowest year of subscriber growth since 2015
Despite producing global hits like “Squid Game” in 2021, Netflix’s fourth quarter returns show the streaming giant struggling to maintain a lead over its competitors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Clench your jaw to skip a track: That’s the magic of Wisear
By adding some electrodes and some electronics to your earbuds, Wisear can make your music experience a lot more hands-free than before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
French robotic exoskeleton maker Wandercraft eyes US expansion courtesy of a $45M Series C
Wandercraft was founded in 2012, with the vision of improving mobility of wheelchair users. The company’s solution comes by way of exoskeletons, which can offer wearers the ability to walk with robotic assistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Wrangle secures $2M to automate company workflows
The company’s no-code software can automate any kind of process: employee onboarding, contract approvals, help tickets or any other recurring work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Harness releases open version of continuous delivery product with access to source code
Harness, a startup from AppDynamics founder Jyoti Bansal, has been building a platform of developer tools over the last five years. In 2020, the company made its first foray into open source when it bought continuous integration tool Drone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Castiron serves up a $6M seed round to support ‘food artisans’
The pandemic hasn’t been easy for anyone, but the food service industry has been hit particularly hard. More than 90,000 restaurants and bars have closed, leaving workers unemployed in an already precarious industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Wayve raises $200M Series B led by Eclipse for its AI for autonomous delivery vehicles
British autonomous vehicle startup Wayve has raised a $200 million Series B funding round from investors to scale its technology and expand its partnerships with commercial fleets. Wayve is aiming to be a major player in the arena of Robo-deliveries and logistics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Animoca, Galaxy Interactive and Polygon back gaming firm nCore in web3 push
nCore Games has raised $10 million in a new financing round as the top Indian gaming firm gears up to launch web3 offerings, its top executives said Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
InFlow, a science-based app for ADHD, raises $2.3M Seed led by Hoxton Ventures
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms can include anxiety, chronic boredom, impulsiveness, trouble concentrating, controlling anger, and even depression. But ADHD suffers can face lengthy waiting periods for assessment and prohibitively expensive treatments. Now a startup, which launched in 2020, hopes to address this by luring the knowledge of a team of clinicians and coaches […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
EVage raises $28M to be a driving force in India’s commercial EV revolution
A congruence of factors in India — notably, climate change policies, fuel costs and skyrocketing demand for e-commerce — has set up ideal conditions for startups like all-electric commercial vehicle startup EVage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Google’s loss to Sonos settles it: Big Tech has an IP piracy problem
Simply put, Big Tech benefits from stealing IP. The legal costs and potential damages, if ever issued after years of litigation, are paltry by comparison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Swell takes in $20M to develop more adaptable headless commerce infrastructure
Starting an e-commerce business is large marketplaces can be an easy process, but what the team at Swell began to notice was that the model could only take a business so far. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Seel secures $17M round to infuse AI in customer product returns
Merchants can add “return assurance” to an order, if it is returned in the next 30 days, Seel, instead of the merchant, will pay for the refund. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Newcomer aggregator Ecommerce Brands snags $40M in equity, debt to deploy eCaaS model
Ecommerce Brands aims to differentiate itself from the crowded aggregator space by being the technology force for DTC brands to scale while operators focus on running their businesses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
BigPanda gets its horn after securing $190M in fresh capital
The company’s technology transforms huge volumes of IT data into actionable insight and automates incident management so IT operations teams can be proactive about their response processes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Roku adds a new ‘Live TV Zone’ to its homescreen
Roku is furthering its investment in its Live TV platform with today’s introduction of a new “Live TV Zone” that will roll out to the main, left-side navigation on Roku devices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
GoStudent Raises $340M Series D funding round as it pushes into international markets
Fresh from raising a $244 million Series C (that valued the company then $1.7 billion) back in June, K12 online tutoring marketplace GoStudent has now raised a $340 million Series D round led by new investor Prosus, an Amsterdam-based investment firm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
GM finally agrees California can set vehicle emissions rules as it preps to scale EVs
In what appears to be a politically and economically savvy move by General Motors, the automaker said Sunday it recognized California’s authority under the Clean Air Act to set its own vehicle emissions standards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Ankorstore reaches $2 billion valuation two years after launching its wholesale marketplace
French startup Ankorstore has raised a $283 million Series C funding round (€250 million). Founded in November 2019, it took Ankorstore around two years to reach a post-money valuation of $2 billion (€1.75 billion). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Apple Fitness+ introduces new ‘Collections’ feature and ‘Time to Run’ series
Apple Fitness+ is introducing a new “Collections” feature along with a new “Time to Run” series starting on January 10th. Collections are a curated series of workouts and meditations from the Fitness+ library organized to help users reach a goal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
At CES 2022, metaverses metaversed the metaverse
In the lead up to CES, I wrote a piece reflecting on top tech of CES 2012. It was an interesting exercise for a number of reasons — not the least of which was recalling the buzzwords from 10 years ago. That year, LTE and ultrabooks topped the list. One had a great run. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Mosqitter’s machine murders mosquitos with much mirth
After ridiculing one mosquito-fighting product, I figured it’d be only right to highlight another piece of buzz-reducing tech that was showing off its products at CES this year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Canada’s Assent Compliance lands $350M from Vista Equity for supply chain data management
Never before has the importance of a smooth-flowing supply chain been as clear as it has been in the COVID-19 pandemic era. For manufacturers in particular, managing intricate supply chains can be particularly challenging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
BMW wants to turn your car into a rolling cinema
After fitting some of its cars with comfy lounge chairs at CES 2020, BMW today unveiled the next step in its in-car entertainment story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Stellantis to transform Chrysler into an all-electric brand by 2028
Chrysler, the 96-year-old brand owned by Stellantis that is best known today for its minivans, will become an all-electric brand by 2028. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Labrador set to deliver a robotic helping hand to homes in 2023
Back at CES 2020, Labrador Systems co-founder/CEO Mike Dooley told me, “I think there are fewer fake robots [at the show] this year.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices