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TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco and — if you don’t already know — it’s the startup world’s big tent. It draws founders, investors, CEOs, tech professionals, scientists, policy makers, researchers and entrepreneurs. It’s where you’ll find inspiration, gain knowledge, forge new relationships and discover tools to help you build your business. Shameless, but helpful, plug: Buy your pass now for significant savings. Prices increase on May 12 at 11:59 p.m. PDT . Who doesn’t like to save money? Pivotal partners at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 We’re fortunate to partner with some of the startup world’s leading companies to help make magic at Disrupt. We say fortunate because they’re passionate, thoroughly engaged and hands-on. They consistently deliver highly relevant content, educational expertise, resources and connection to the event. Their participation elevates, engages and supports early-stage founders. Our partners also come to Disrupt to conne...

The Wall Street Journal went under the hood of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultivated or cell-cultured meat, and the struggles within. The Journal particularly homed in on what’s going on at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration related to its process for making cultivated chicken, essentially saying it was safe to eat and making it the first company to receive this approval. Eat Just, which has been selling its product in Singapore, the first nation to approve the sale of cultivated meat, followed , getting its “thumbs-up” from the FDA in March. WSJ’s story pays particular attention to UPSIDE Foods’ success at making small batches of its chicken product, as well as its lack of being able to produce large amounts of product at a low cost, or at even price parity with traditional meat — and to be fair, most cultivated meat companies struggle with this too. “Initially our chicken will be sold at a price premium,” UPSIDE fou...

There are oodles of advantages to having a diverse workforce, but, as inBeta founder James Nash points out , you can’t simply take your homogenous workforce, add diversity, stir and hope for the best. Often, something subtle gets in the way of diversity at startups: Companies depend on employee referrals in the beginning, but if a startup’s makeup is already not diverse, referrals aren’t going to change that. That’s for startups. In the world of venture capital, things are more pronounced: A warm introduction is the only way to get in front of investors at many VC funds. That’s great for people who are already hooked into the startup ecosystem, but you don’t have to look for very long to realize that this is not a very diverse group of people. “We’d love to hear from you. The best way to reach us is through someone we mutually know.” A VC firm's website For many companies, employee referrals are one of the main ways to attract new talent. That’s all good until you stop to thi...

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, we’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s our job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know.  About a year ago, it seemed like myself and other colleagues were writing story after story about spend management companies raising tranches of venture capital — remember Mary Ann’s roundup story from basically this same time last year? On Friday, PitchBook’s Q1 2023 B2B fintech investment report showed that investment into enterprise fintech was $11.8 billion. Though it is a decrease from ...

Kim Keenan Contributor Share on Twitter The first female co-chair of the DC-based Internet Innovation Alliance , Kim Keenan has fought for digital equity for more than a decade, previously serving as president and CEO of the Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council (MMTC) and as general counsel and secretary of the NAACP. The finish line is within sight. “Internet for All,” as the Biden administration put it, will soon be a reality if America keeps its priorities straight. During his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden set a high bar, “We’re going to buy American,” as the U.S. spends billions of dollars on new broadband connections. This is a smart strategy to create American jobs and boost the U.S. economy, but our leaders must not sacrifice speed in the race to close the digital divide in cases where “Buy American” isn’t yet a realistic option. Strengthened during the pandemic when all finally understood that broadband is a necessity, bipartisan...

Hey, TechCrunch people. If you’re looking for a recap of the week’s news in tech, you’ve come to the right place. It’s Week in Review (WiR) , TechCrunch’s regular recap column. Glad to have you. Before we get on with the meat of it, a PSA that tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 are available now. Disrupt, of course, is TechCrunch’s flagship in-person event, focused on founders, investors and the future of tech year after year. In San Francisco on September 19–21, expect to hear from thought leaders in the fields of AI, fintech, hardware, sustainability, SaaS, security and more. It’ll be well worth the trip. In the nearer term, tune into the next TechCrunch Live show, which will spotlight Cambrian BioPharma, a startup billing itself as a pharmaceutical outfit with a revolutionary approach to managing drug development. Founder James Peyer will be joined by Maryanna Saenko of Future Ventures, who invested in Cambrian’s Series A, B and C rounds. Now, without further ado! most read E...

On a balmy day in mid-April, thousands of people queued in line to enter the Hong Kong Convention Center where the city’s inaugural web3 festival was underway. Most had flown in from mainland China, but many others had trekked from Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand and even the U.S. to see what the city had to offer to crypto ventures at a time regulation over digital assets is intensifying in the U.S. In February, Hong Kong proposed a set of welcoming rules to regulate crypto-related activities. Under the new legal regime, retail investors will be allowed to trade certain digital assets on licensed exchanges, replacing a 2018 framework that restricted trading to only accredited investors . The city is also paving the way to legalize stablecoins. One startup, which is backed by popular exchange KuCoin and USDC issuer Circle , recently launched an offshore Chinese yuan (CNH)-pegged stablecoin, the first of its kind in Greater China. To create a favorable environment for web3 bu...

India’s crime-fighting agency searched three premises of edtech giant Byju’s and its founder Byju Raveendran, it said Saturday, and seized various “incriminating” documents and digital data. The Enforcement Directorate said it conducted the searches under the provisions of the nation’s anti-money laundering law, but declined to elaborate. The agency has conducted several similar probes in recent months, including at crypto firms WazirX and CoinSwitch Kuber , phonemaker Vivo and news broadcaster the BBC. The agency said “various” complaints from private individuals prompted the investigation. As part of the probe into Byju’s, which is ongoing, ED said it summoned Raveendran “several” times but the founder “remained evasive and never appeared during the investigation.” The probe has so far found that Byju’s raised about $3.4 billion in foreign direct investment during the period of 2011 to 2023. During this period, the startup remitted about $1.1 billion to foreign entities and label...

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 . On today’s episode of our Equity podcast, the team dives in to ponder whether First Republic’s share tumble is a victim of SVB’s collapse , or whether there’s something else in the water. It’s well worth a listen — as ever! Another not-to-miss today is Jacquelyn ’s Chain Reaction newsletter, where she picks apart what’s coming down the pike now that Binance.US sailed away from its $1.3 billion deal with Voyager . Happy weekend, kids. Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do. Although we’re pretty weird, so that leaves you with quite a few options, to be fair. And actually, you should do tons of things we wouldn’t do. Like, er, go parasailing, listen to the world’s most annoying sound, or spend all day baking a cake. Or maybe create a new bluegrass/funk/j-pop fusion band, written by ChatGPT . — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 The beginning of th...

States have taxed motorists at the pump for more than a century . Yet, as electric cars gain ground, what happens when folks stop refueling altogether? State lawmakers are increasingly imposing annual fees on EV owners, arguing they should pay up because they still rely on public infrastructure to get around. Texas is on track to become the latest state to levy such a tax, following more than a dozen others , including Georgia, Michigan and Ohio. The Texas Senate passed SB 505 at the end of March. This week, the state’s House has cleared a similar bill, sending it on to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. The latest version of the bill lays out a $200 yearly registration fee for electric vehicles, with exceptions carved out for slow “ Neighborhood Electric Vehicles ,” as well as autocycles, mopeds and motorcycles. The bill states that the resulting fees “must be deposited to the credit of the state highway fund.” Though Texas is certainly not alone in moving forward with such a bill, its $200...

A refrain I hear from a lot of startups is that there’s “no need to rethink the gripper.” It’s something I appreciate from an economic standpoint. It’s expensive, resource intensive and both your time and money are probably best spent elsewhere when there are already so many effectors on the market. I also recently made an analogy to a claw machine during an interview — and got some pushback. I understand a bit better now why that’s the case — at least in part. Discussing its new approach to robotic gripping, MIT invokes the perennial arcade favorite, noting, “When manipulating an arcade claw, a player can plan all she wants. But once she presses the joystick button, it’s a game of wait-and-see. If the claw misses its target, she’ll have to start from scratch for another chance at a prize.” Image Credits: MIT If you think about that for a moment, you realize that you’re suddenly faced with something that comes up over and over again in this field of study: That’s not how humans a...

Snapchat Rolled out their generative AI chatbot, My AI to their 750 million monthly users so it feels like the right time to pause and ask whether we’re ready for the real thing – and ready or not, whether anybody wants one. This week on the TechCrunch Podcast , we’re talking to TechCrunch reporter Amanda Silberling about making robot friends on the internet. Articles from the episode: Snapchat’s AI chatbot is now free for all global us Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature, calling for its removal Missouri trans ‘snitch form’ down after people spammed it with the ‘Bee Movie’ script SpaceX’s successful failure is a wake-up call for Starship’s timeline Google’s Bard AI chatbot can now generate and debug code Apple wins antitrust court battle with Epic Games, appeals court rules #NotMyAI and other TC news by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, has seen its stock tumble 20% in after-hours trading after reporting first-quarter earnings Thursday. The company missed Wall Street revenue estimates of $1 billion, closing out the quarter with $989 million. That’s down 7% from the same period last year, and it represents the first time since Snap went public that revenue fell. Snap attributed this downgrade to a “disrupted” demand for ads after making upgrades to the platform on which it sells ads. It might also have something to do with the privacy changes Apple has made, which make it more difficult for advertisers to collect data and target ads. The company is not the only one experiencing the impact of reduced digital ad revenue. Ad revenue for YouTube, for example, dropped 3% in the first quarter. And as a smaller company that’s popular among Gen Z users, Snap faces competition from TikTok. Larger companies like Meta are starting to see ad revenue rebound. The Facebook-parent compan...