Europe’s cookie consent reckoning is coming

Cookie pop-ups getting you down? Complaints that the web is ‘unusable’ in Europe because of frustrating and confusing ‘data choices’ notifications that get in the way of what you’re trying to do online certainly aren’t hard to find. What is hard to find is the ‘reject all’ button that lets you opt out of non-essential […]
https://tcrn.ch/2TvT1Ex

SVB-led $100M investment makes Chipper Cash Africa’s ‘most valuable startup’

Fintech in Africa is a goldmine. Investors are betting big on startups offering a plethora of services from payments and lending to neobanks, remittances and cross-border transfers, and rightfully so. Each of these services solves unique sets of challenges. For cross-border payments, it’s the outrageous rates and regulatory hassles involved with completing transactions from one African […]
https://tcrn.ch/34MCzlP

Intel announces two new 11th-gen chips and a 5G M.2 laptop module at Computex

Intel kicked off this year’s virtual Computex by announcing two new 11th Gen U-Series chips for use in thin, lightweight laptops. It also unveiled its first 5G M.2 module for laptops, designed in a partnership with MediaTek (Intel sold its smartphone modem business to Apple in 2019). Both of Intel’s new chips have Intel Irix […]
https://tcrn.ch/3yQQhlj

Indian logistics giant Delhivery raises $277 million ahead of IPO

Delhivery, India’s largest independent e-commerce logistics startup, has raised $277 million in what is expected to be the final funding round before the firm files for an IPO later this year. In a regulatory filing, the Gurgaon-headquartered startup disclosed it had raised $277 million in a round led by Boston-headquartered investment firm Fidelity. Singapore’s sovereign […]
https://tcrn.ch/2SAPtAl

For startups, trustworthy security means going above and beyond compliance standards

Compliance means that a company meets a minimum set of controls. Security encompasses a broad range of best practices and software that help address risks associated with the company’s operations.
https://tcrn.ch/3fxteEk

So, you want to democratize venture capital

A venture capitalist once told me candidly that whenever you see the phrase “democratization” in tech marketing material, think of it as a red flag. Democracy, generally speaking, often comes with an ironic caveat: It disproportionately benefits white and male participants. Now, you know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t start off your […]
https://tcrn.ch/34vSnsT

Daily Crunch: Tesla switches on camera-based driver monitoring for Autopilot users

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
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Once a buzzword, digital transformation is reshaping markets

What follows is a digest of notes concerning the recent earnings results from Box, Sprout Social, Yext, Snowflake and Salesforce.
https://tcrn.ch/3fTWrse

Extra Crunch roundup: first-check myths, Miami relocation checklist, standout SaaSy startups

We're off on Monday, May 31 in observance of Memorial Day; I hope you have a relaxing weekend!
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Doximity’s S-1 may explain why healthcare exits are heating up

By generating lots of cash and profit, Doximity hasn't raised a round since 2014.
https://tcrn.ch/3hXV6mH

The SPAC trash ticker is counting down

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week had the whole crew aboard to record: Grace and Chris making us sound good, Danny to provide levity, Natasha to actually recall facts and Alex to divert us from staying on topic. It’s teamwork, people — […]
https://tcrn.ch/34tb0Oe

Goldman Sachs leads $45M investment into auto fintech startup MotoRefi

MotoRefi has raised another $45 million in a round led by Goldman Sachs just five months after investors poured $10 million into the fintech startup to help turbocharge its auto refinancing business. The startup developed an auto refinancing platform that handles the entire loan process, including finding the best rates, paying off the old lender […]
https://tcrn.ch/3fsUQuf

Breinify announces $11M seed to bring data science to the marketing team

Breinify is a startup working to apply data science to personalization, and do it in a way that makes it accessible to nontechnical marketing employees to build more meaningful customer experiences. Today the company announced a funding round totaling $11 million. The investment was led by Gutbrain Ventures and PBJ Capital with participation from Streamlined […]
https://tcrn.ch/3hZzFSu

Coda’s Shishir Mehrotra and Madrona’s S. Somasegar to talk taking on Google on Extra Crunch Live

Collaborative software is so hot right now, but the space is also incredibly crowded. It can be hard to rise above the noise, but Coda has managed to do so with $140 million in funding and a valuation topping $600 million. So it should go without saying that we’re excited to hear from Coda CEO […]
https://tcrn.ch/3oW2qka

Dapper Labs backs art hardware startup Infinite Objects in $6 million seed raise

The NFT world is all about reshaping the idea of digital ownership, but art hardware startup Infinite Objects sees a big opportunity in making physical copies of those assets as it looks to reshape digital art and collectibles. The startup makes screens that show a single video from a single artist and don’t do anything […]
https://tcrn.ch/3oUJn9Y

NASA’s new lunar vehicle could be built by GM and Lockheed Martin

The last time humans visited the moon in 1972, they got around on a relatively simple battery-powered vehicle. As NASA prepares for the next crewed mission to the moon, it’s looking to give the lunar rover an upgrade. Lockheed Martin and General Motors said Wednesday they’re working together to develop a next-generation lunar vehicle designed […]
https://tcrn.ch/2QVrbkb

Prismic raises $20 million for its headless CMS

Prismic, a company building a content management system, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round. While the startup has been profitable since 2016, it wants to unlock the full potential of its headless CMS by iterating more quickly on its product. Aglaé Ventures and Eurazeo are co-leading today’s funding round. Headless content management […]
https://tcrn.ch/3bVScLH

Merlin Labs emerges from stealth to bring autonomy to 55-King Air fleet

When Merlin Labs founder Matt George was learning to fly in Vermont, he had a close call with a Jet Blue aircraft that was coming into Burlington airport. It was “an unsettling experience,” he told TechCrunch, but one that stuck with him. A few years later, after the transportation company he founded Bridgj was acquired […]
https://tcrn.ch/3vr42F1

How Expensify shed Silicon Valley arrogance to realize its global ambitions

Expensify may be the most ambitious software company ever to mostly abandon the Bay Area as the center of its operations. The startup’s history is tied to places representative of San Francisco: The founding team worked out of Peet’s Coffee on Mission Street for a few months, then crashed at a penthouse lounge near the […]
https://tcrn.ch/3oLPz4c

Brian Chesky describes a faster, nimbler post-pandemic Airbnb

TechCrunch sat down with Brian Chesky, Airbnb co-founder and CEO, to discuss the future of travel and what it was like leading the world's biggest travel startup during a global pandemic.
https://tcrn.ch/2T9caf8

Microsoft Azure launches enterprise support for PyTorch

Microsoft today announced PyTorch Enterprise, a new Azure service that provides developers with additional support when using PyTorch on Azure. It’s basically Microsoft’s commercial support offering for PyTorch. PyTorch is a Python-centric open-source machine learning framework with a focus on computer vision and natural language processing. It was originally developed by Facebook and is, at […]
https://tcrn.ch/2QPxcyD

TC: Sessions Space is returning in December

Last year, we held our first dedicated space startup event, TC Sessions: Space, featuring some of the industry’s top founders and leaders, including Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck, Lockheed Martin’s Lisa Callahan, Amazon’s Dave Limp, NASA’s Kathy Leuders and many more. This year, we’re excited to announce we’re doing it again with TC Sessions: Space 2021, […]
https://tcrn.ch/3oNzJGo

Fireflies.ai raises $14M for its meeting transcription and automation service

The Fireflies.ai project is a good reminder that not every startup project goes from idea to unicorn-status in 48 minutes. Instead, the startup’s CEO Krish Ramineni told TechCrunch about how a period of interest in natural language processing (NLP), tinkering with a friend, a stint at Microsoft, and even working on Slack bots led him […]
https://tcrn.ch/3feP27C

SiriusXM partners with TikTok on a new music channel, Pandora Playlists, and more

SiriusXM is leaning into TikTok. The satellite radio company and Pandora parent today announced a partnership with the social video platform to power several new initiatives, including a TikTok channel on SiriusXM, hosted TikTok playlists on Pandora, and re-airings of Pandora LIVE events on TikTok. The hosted playlists on Pandora are the first of the […]
https://tcrn.ch/3bSJxtn

Billboards? Nah, just buy a media company instead

Startups used to be obsessed with billboards. It was the first thing I noticed when I moved to San Francisco: venture-backed companies including Eaze, Airbnb, and notoriously, Brex, would post large billboard advertisements all over the city to grab attention and eyeballs. When I dug into it more, I learned this type of old school, […]
https://tcrn.ch/2SiueTJ

Watching startups eat markets is good fun

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment.
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This Week in Apps: Google I/O hits and misses, Snap goes shopping, Parler returns to App Store

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. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices […]
https://tcrn.ch/3udfYcm

5 predictions for the future of e-commerce

The direct-to-consumer wave is a critical enabler for the e-commerce progress we expect to see over the next decade as we strive toward inevitable 50% penetration.
https://tcrn.ch/3vc5yLk

Decentralized Komorebi Collective launches to back female and nonbinary crypto founders

As decentralized currencies have taken off in recent months, there’s been renewed attention around DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, as a means of bringing together groups of investors who can deploy capital as a unit while voting collectively on those investments. In the spirit of blockchain, they aim to bring greater transparency to investment decision-making. […]
https://tcrn.ch/3u8JzU4

India objects to ‘manipulated’ label on politicians tweets; asks removal of reference to ‘Indian variant’ of coronavirus

The Indian government has expressed strong objection to Twitter for classifying tweets by Indian politicians as “manipulated media,” and separately asked social media firms to remove posts that refers to an “Indian variant” of the coronavirus. The first notice comes two days after Twitter labeled a tweet from Sambit Patra, the spokesperson of India’s ruling […]
https://tcrn.ch/3f8xj1F

Snap emphasizes commerce in updates to its camera and AR platforms

At Snap’s Partner Summit, the company announced a number of updates to the company’s developer tools and AR-focused Lens Studio, including several focused on bringing shopping deeper into the Snapchat experience. One of the cooler updates involved the company’s computer vision Scan product, which analyzes content in a user’s camera feed to quickly bring up […]
https://tcrn.ch/3whAxFG

Geospatial startup Unfolded.ai acquired by Foursquare

Well, that was fast. Just a few months after raising its seed round, Unfolded.ai announced today that it is being acquired by Foursquare. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The startup had raised a total of about $6 million when we last checked in with them. The company, founded by a group of ex-Uber […]
https://tcrn.ch/3oyD6AJ

Don’t tweet about $ASS

I am not a smart man. Earlier today I tweeted about $ASS, a cryptocurrency named after a dog. In this case, Australian Shepherds. And after doing that obviously stupid thing, my Twitter feed became chock-full of ass-related imagery, memes, and $ASS coin stans breathing on me. It’s all very annoying as I run Tweetdeck on […]
https://tcrn.ch/3vbu676

A new tip line invites anyone to name and shame companies for dark pattern designs

You may not be familiar with the term “dark patterns” but the manipulative design phenomenon is ubiquitous in the apps and services we use every day. Dark patterns nudge consumers to make choices that enrich companies, usually at their own expense. That can look like misleading wording that leads someone to sign their personal data […]
https://tcrn.ch/3fuXbnw

Netlify snags YC alum FeaturePeek to add design review capabilities

Netlify, the startup that’s bringing a micro services approach to building websites, announced today that it has acquired YC alum FeaturePeek. The two companies did not share the purchase price. With FeaturePeek, the company gets a major upgrade in its design review capability. While Netlify has had a previewing capability called Deploy Previews in the […]
https://tcrn.ch/3tX0CZ7

Can Squarespace dodge the direct-listing value trap?

This morning, we're going over Squarespace's recently disclosed Q2 and full-2021 guidance. Then we'll ask how its expectations compare to its reference price-defined pre-trading valuation.
https://tcrn.ch/3v1Ye4P

WalkMe is going public: Let’s stroll through its numbers

This afternoon, we're parsing the WalkMe IPO filing, the second Israel-based tech company to file to go public this week.
https://tcrn.ch/3ywZpLQ

Watch Google I/O keynote live right here

After skipping a year, Google is holding a keynote for its developer conference Google I/O. While it’s going to be an all-virtual event, there should be plenty of announcements, new products and new features for Google’s ecosystem. The conference starts at 10 AM Pacific Time (1 PM on the East Cost, 6 PM in London, […]
https://tcrn.ch/3bBm2oe

Finary wants to create the wealth management dashboard for the next generation

Meet Finary, a new French startup that wants to change how you manage your savings, investments, mortgage, real estate assets and cryptocurrencies. The company lets you aggregate all your accounts across various banks and financial institutions so that you can track your wealth comprehensively over time. After attending Y Combinator, the startup has just closed […]
https://tcrn.ch/2QsGosC

Industrial automation startup Bright Machines hauls in $435M by going public via SPAC

After the transaction is consummated, the startup will sport an anticipated equity valuation of $1.6 billion.
https://tcrn.ch/3tZOmqS

The Station: Exits at Waymo and Bird’s SPAC reveals its scooter-nomics

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hello and welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and packages move (today and in the future) from Point A to […]
https://tcrn.ch/33STxy9

Flash Sale: Buy an Extra Crunch annual plan, get a free Disrupt pass

From today until midnight on May 18 (PT), we’re offering a free Disrupt Innovator pass (a $99 value) to anyone who purchases an annual or two-year Extra Crunch membership. Grab an annual or two-year Extra Crunch membership here.  TechCrunch Disrupt is a three-day virtual event with founders and investors shaping the future of disruptive technology […]
https://tcrn.ch/2RpZFvh

Elon Musk giveth and taketh away

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review! Last week, I wrote about Facebook’s never-ending Trump problem. This week, I’m looking at Elon Musk’s wild week of whipping crypto markets. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny. […]
https://tcrn.ch/3tTRzrQ

Clubhouse to launch Android app worldwide in a week

Voice social network Clubhouse said on Sunday it will expand its Android app worldwide in a week, days after launching a beta version of its service on Google-owned mobile operating system for users in the U.S. The startup — backed by A16z, Tiger Global and DST Global and valued at about $4 billion — said it will […]
https://tcrn.ch/3hviN5S

Crypto and blockchain must accept they have a problem, then lead in sustainability

As cryptocurrencies become increasingly mainstream, the industry’s expanding carbon footprint becomes harder to ignore. The industry needs to address sustainability now or risk hindering innovation.
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Dear Startups: Don’t repaint, reinvent

I feel hungover. No, not in the traditional sense, but in the dizzying way you feel when half of your world is celebrating double vaccinations and no masks, and the other half, across the world, is mourning death and not a shred of light at the end of the tunnel. The privilege of watching this […]
https://tcrn.ch/3oiENCh

Google’s ‘DVD Screensaver’ Easter egg makes the logo bounce around your screen accordingly

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a good Easter egg out of Google. Not too long ago it felt like someone would discover a new hidden gag in Google’s products every few weeks. The company cranked them out like it was their job. While we haven’t seen as many new ones pop up lately, […]
https://tcrn.ch/3uUj0TR

Opportunity knocks: Exhibit at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

No matter what slice of the mobility market you’ve claimed as your own — AVs, EVs, data mining, AI, dockless scooters, robotics or the batteries that will charge and change the world — you won’t find a better place to showcase your extraordinary tech and talent than TC Sessions: Mobility 2021. Buy a Startup Exhibitor […]
https://tcrn.ch/3w6g4DN

Every early-stage startup must identify and evaluate a strategic advantage

Regardless of industry, a successful startup without a strategic advantage is just a validated business model vulnerable to copycat companies looking for a market entry point.
https://tcrn.ch/3fdy4W4

Hundreds of SPACs waiting in the woods

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. The fully vaxxed and officially fully immune took over the podcast this week, with Natasha and Danny co-hosting the show while the inimitable Alex is out from Shot No. 2. Grace and Chris, as always, were behind the […]
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PayPal acquires returns logistics business, Happy Returns

PayPal announced today it’s acquiring Happy Returns, a returns solution provider that offers online shoppers access to easier ways to send back unwanted merchandise to retailers without having to box it up and ship it themselves. The company today offers a network of more than 2,600 drop-off returns locations in the U.S., including those in […]
https://tcrn.ch/3tFthSB