Only Products and Other Stuff

The VCs who long ran GGV Capital, the 24-year-old cross-border firm that helped serve as a bridge between the U.S. and China, have settled on two new brands roughly six months after announcing they would split their U.S. and Asia operations. Veteran investors Jenny Lee and Jixun Foo just rebranded their Singapore-based operation as Granite […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Remember in the last edition of TechCrunch […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As a number of factors come into play, like the reality of a multi-cloud world and a stricter regulatory environment, companies are beginning to see the error in their ways. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’re looking at Robinhood’s new Gold Card, challenges in the BaaS space and how a tiny startup caught Stripe’s eye. To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Sunday at 7:30 a.m. PT, subscribe here.  The big […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the notable happenings in tech over the past few days. This week, TC’s auto reporter Sean O’Kane revealed how EV startup Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it scaled up deliveries, leading to an internal audit that started […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Demis Hassabis, CEO and one of three founders of Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary DeepMind, has been awarded a knighthood in the U.K. for “services to artificial intelligence.” Ian Hogarth, chair of the U.K. government’s recently launched AI Safety Institute and previously founder of music startup Songkick, was awarded Commander of the Order of the British […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The government's reward for information now extends to ALPHV's affiliates, which claimed responsibility for a massive weekslong healthcare cyberattack. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek on Tuesday signed Senate Bill 1596 into law, joining California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts and Minnesota in a growing list of states embracing a right to repair for citizens. The law is set to go into effect January 1. The bill’s coauthors Janeen Sollman and Representative Courtney Neron took inspiration from California’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

UK officials unveiled a hologram statue and threw a big party to celebrate the UK as the third $1 trillion tech economy. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it scaled up deliveries, leading to an internal audit that started in December and took months to complete, TechCrunch has learned. The EV startup was ultimately able to track down a majority of those payments or request new ones from customers whose payment […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As the planet warms due to human-caused climate change, damage from wildfires has increased with it. The amount of forest area burned by wildfires increased 320% from 1996 to 2021, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System. While building tech to slow the progression and impacts of climate change would be ideal, it’s a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Banking-as-a-service startup (BaaS) Synctera has conducted a restructuring that has resulted in a staff reduction, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. While Synctera did not share how many employees were impacted, a report in Fintech Business Weekly pegs the number to be about 17 people, or about 15% of the company. Doing the math, that means […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

There are countless reasons why home robots have found little success post-Roomba. Pricing, practicality, form factor and mapping have all contributed to failure after failure. Even when some or all of those are addressed, there remains the question of what happens when a system makes an inevitable mistake. This has been a point of friction […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Global Screening Services (GSS), a London-based regulatory compliance platform that helps financial institutions meet their global sanctions obligations, has raised $47 million in a round of funding. The raise comes amid a spike in economic sanctions, with the U.S. issuing trade restrictions and asset blocking against states including Russia, China, Iran and more. Enforcement GSS […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

What’s the collective noun for investigations on Big Tech? Because the European Union has just announced a pile of probes on gatekeepers designated under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Alphabet/Google, Apple and Meta are facing the first formal non-compliance investigations under the bloc’s rebooted ex ante competition rulebook. Alphabet/Google’s rules on steering in Google Play […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In a market that no longer favors growth at all costs, GoStudent's €3 billion valuation and global expansion may belong to the past. However, the Austrian tutoring platform reshaped quickly. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Spotify has carved out a business for itself in music streaming, podcast entertainment and audiobooks. Now, in its ongoing efforts to get its 600 million+ users to spend more time and money on its platform, Spotify is spinning up a new line of content: e-learning. Starting with a rollout in the U.K., Spotify is testing […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Before we jump into the startup and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The question is whether Nvidia can sustain that growth to become a long-term revenue powerhouse like AWS has become for Amazon. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’re looking at some hot fintech startups in Africa, how Mint’s closure has been Copilot’s gain and why VCs have doubled down on a particular expense management startup. To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Sunday […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In this edition of Week in Review, we have big news on the latest Apple antitrust lawsuit. Microsoft’s AI ambitions dominated the news as well, so let’s dive right in.… Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here to receive the Week in Review newsletter in your inboxes. The U.S. joined international regulators in accusing […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Customers say their leaked AT&T customer data — names, addresses, phone numbers and Social Security numbers — is accurate. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Threads has officially entered the fediverse. Meta announced on Thursday that its beta experience of sharing Threads accounts to the fediverse is now open to users ages 18 and up with public profiles. The integration is only available in three countries to start, including the U.S., Canada, and Japan. The company previously announced in December […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Electric boat maker Candela is approaching cruising speed with $25 million in new funding and the first commercial deployment of its new P-12 ferry, in New Zealand. The company has global ambitions for its highly efficient boats, and has completed and delivered dozens of them — which is a lot in this industry! Candela has […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Astera Labs started its life as a public company trading at $52.56 per share, up 46% when the bell rang. The company priced its IPO last night at $36 per share, above its raised price range. Astera’s debut marks the first material technology offering this year that TechCrunch is tracking. Reddit, the well-known social forum […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is rolling out its “trending now” feature widely to all users in the U.S. The official rollout comes a month after the app started testing the feature with a select number of users in the country. Trending topics are available on the search page and in the app’s For […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nvidia benefits tremendously if it can persuade companies to think of data centers and AI tools in a different way. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to TechCrunch Space. This is an uncommonly SpaceX-heavy issue. Apologies (or you're welcome). © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Users of Elon Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter) continue complaining the platform is engaging in shadowbanning — aka restricting the visibility of posts by applying a “temporary” label to accounts that can limit the reach/visibility of content — without providing clarity over why it’s imposed the sanctions. Running a search on X for the phrase “temporary […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elon Musk’s xAI released its Grok large language model as “open source” over the weekend. The billionaire clearly hopes to set his company at odds with rival OpenAI, which, despite its name, is not particularly open. But does releasing the code for something like Grok actually contribute to the AI development community? Yes and no. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Poseidona is a Barcelona-based developer of sustainable food technology. It takes invasive seaweed and algal side-streams to make proteins. In this case, it's a soy protein alternative. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elon Musk’s xAI has open-sourced the base code of Grok AI model, but without any training code. The company described it as the “314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Expert model” on GitHub. In a blog post, xAI said that the model wasn’t tuned for any particular application such as using it for conversations. The company noted that […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. I spent a few days in Austin […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Arjun Sethi speaks with the confidence of someone who knows more than other people, or else who knows that sounding highly confident can shape perception. Either way, when he tells me over Zoom that “in five years, I’ll have 50% of the world’s private data” at his fingertips, and that it will be “impossible to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! I’m filling in for Mary Ann, who is on a much deserved break. This week, we look at Griffin Bank getting its license ahead of some heavy hitters, and we go inside Stripe’s annual letter, some funding rounds, and more! The big story A top story for this […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter recapping noteworthy happenings in tech over the past few days. This week, TechCrunch viewed leaked documents out of SpaceX showing some questionable practices related to employee stock options. X CEO Elon Musk announced that he would open source Grok, X’s AI-powered chatbot meant to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Starbucks launched Starbucks Odyssey in 2022 as its initial foray into the web3 world. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Pornhub has been playing a game of chicken with a bunch of state legislatures for a while now. Last year, the smut-peddler blocked access to users […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A bill threatening to ban an app beloved by half of the American population just rocketed through the House of Representatives in a week’s time. But in the other chamber of Congress, things are likely to be much more complicated. TikTok the company and TikTok the chaotic community of creators and their followers are rightfully […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction -- it was an eventful week in the crypto world. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

You might’ve heard of Grok, X’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s a chatbot and, in that sense, behaves as you’d expect — answering questions about current events, pop culture and so on. But unlike other chatbots, Grok has “a bit of wit,” as X owner Elon Musk puts it, and “a rebellious streak.” Long story […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The company says it was cash flow positive in 2023, and plans to be again in 2024. With $8.7 billion in venture capital it likely means it has little to no need to raise more before it goes public. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Nigeria is actively seeking information from Binance regarding its top 100 users in the country and all transaction history spanning the past six months, according to a Financial Times report. This news overlaps with the revelation of the names of the two executives from the cryptocurrency exchange who were detained two weeks ago: Tigran Gambaryan, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS), usage-based pricing, a pricing model in which customers are charged only when they use a product or service, is gaining ground. According to a report from VC firm OpenView, ~60% of SaaS businesses offer some form of usage-based pricing today. Recently, Apigee, Google Cloud’s API management platform, made the shift, as […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Lucid Motors is at risk of losing the trademark for the name of its Gravity SUV, just months before the company is supposed to start production. Google Ventures-backed EV charging company Gravity Inc. filed a “petition for cancellation” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) in December asking for […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

After frenzied speculation that a recent photo of Kate Middleton and her children was AI generated, the Duchess of Cambridge herself had to address the controversy. “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” Middleton wrote in a statement. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

If investors agree to pay its high-end range, Reddit's valuation should hit around $5.4 billion. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Block Party, a startup developed by software engineer and tech diversity advocate Tracy Chou, was among the victims of Twitter’s (now X’s) API changes earlier this year, forcing it to pivot its business. At the SXSW conference in Austin this weekend, Chou presented a glimpse of what Block Party is now up to with its […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In the last 12 months, reader apps have adopted AI to change how users consume news. Instagram co-founders’ now discontinued Artifact introduced AI-powered summaries and headlines. Newer apps like Bulletin and former Twitter engineer’s Particle are taking similar approaches. However, developer Nate Parrott’s app Feeeed (it’s four Es), which is available for iPhones and iPads, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI will open-source Grok, its chatbot rivaling ChatGPT, this week, he said, days after suing OpenAI and complaining that the Microsoft-backed startup had deviated from its open source roots. xAI released Grok last year, arming it with features including access to “real-time” information. The service is available to customers paying for X’s […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Founded by former Silicon Valley engineers, UK-based Griffin Bank bills itself as an API-driven ‘Banking as a Service’ platform. After raising $28.1 million, it has now raised another $24 million (£19 million) in a fresh, extended Series A, funding round led by MassMutual Ventures, NordicNinja and Breega, with participation from existing investors Notion Capital and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. This week, it was all about Rivian […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Looking to leave your mark at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024? Our Side Events initiative offers a prime opportunity to connect with Boston’s vibrant tech scene in an unforgettable way. And the best part? We’ll help promote your event for free! Submit your event by March 20 to be part of the excitement. Host your own […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TikTok faces an uncertain fate in the U.S. once again. After a surprise flurry of activity in the House this week, TikTok is the target of a new government push to separate the company from its Chinese ownership or force it out of the country. TikTok is based in Los Angeles and Singapore, but is […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter covering all of — or at least the bulk of! — noteworthy happenings around the tech-o-sphere. This week, Roku played hardball with its customers, requiring them to consent to new dispute resolution terms. This means users can’t use their Roku devices until agreeing to the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

After terminating Epic Games’ developer account on Wednesday, Apple said it will reinstate the Fortnite maker’s access to publish iOS apps in Europe. This means that Epic can move forward with its plans for an Epic Games Store, and it can bring Fortnite back to iOS in Europe. Last month, Epic announced it would be […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

While the world waits for Databricks to IPO, the data lakehouse company just keeps raking in the dough, reporting $1.6 billion over the last year. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Web3-enabled fantasy sports platform Sorare laid off 22 employees based in its New York office in February. The move comes as the startup wants certain teams to be concentrated at the company’s Paris headquarters to improve communication and efficiency, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. “As we plan for our next stage of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In an unexpected move, Miles Grimshaw announced today that he is rejoining Thrive Capital after working as a general partner at Benchmark for the past three years. Grimshaw first joined Thrive, a New York-based venture firm that Joshua Kushner founded, in 2013. He is returning as a general partner. In a post on X, Grimshaw […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Stellantis introduced Tuesday two all-electric versions of the Dodge Charger packed with the kind of features muscle car fans have come to expect — right down to a system that tries to mimic the rumble of a Hemi V-8 engine. The two new Dodge Charger EV coupes — the 2024 Charger Daytona Scat Pack and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Adding usernames to a messaging app may seem like a standard feature, but for Signal, such identifiers were anathema to its mission of total privacy and security — until now. The upcoming 7.0 version adds usernames, but the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker, explained that this was nowhere near as simple a decision as it may […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AI startup Anthropic, backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital (and perhaps soon hundreds of millions more), today announced the latest version of its GenAI tech, Claude. And the company claims that it rivals OpenAI’s GPT-4 in terms of performance. Claude 3, as Anthropic’s new GenAI is called, is a family of models — […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The problem here is that the company has given up more than two-thirds of its equity to raise $3.3 million. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Wagely, a fintech out of Indonesia, made a name for itself with earned wage access: a way for workers in Southeast Asian countries to get advances on their salaries without resorting to higher-interest loans. With half a million people now using the platform, the startup has expanded that business into a wider “financial wellness” platform, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

India has waded into global AI debate by issuing an advisory that requires tech firms to get government permission before launching new models. India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT issued the advisory to firms on Friday. The advisory, not published on public domain but a copy of which TechCrunch has reviewed, also asks tech firms […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. I was in Los Angeles earlier this […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! Apologies for being out last week — a cold got the best of me, but I’m back and here to talk about the fact that shutting down startups is big business, Stripe’s new valuation, Klarna’s latest AI update and more. To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch has launched a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hello, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry. This week, investment firm KKR announced that it would acquire VMware’s end-user computing business from Broadcom for $4 billion. As Ron explains, that business included VMware Workspace One and VMware Horizon — two remote desktop apps that had […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Epic Games, Spotify, Proton, 37signals and other developers had already signaled their displeasure with how Apple has chosen to adapt its rules to meet the requirements of the new EU regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), calling it “extortion” and “bad-faith” compliance, among other things. Now those companies have formalized their complaints in a letter […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.