Volvo Cars sets the tone for its next-gen vehicles with ‘Concept Recharge’ EV

Volvo Cars wants to completely electrify its lineup by 2030 and on Wednesday offered a glimpse into how it plans to get there and what its next generation of vehicles might look like. But it’s not going to do it alone. Although the automaker plans on developing its own in-car operating system and other parts […]
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Google tightens UK policy on financial ads after watchdog pressure over scams

The UK’s more expansive, post-Brexit role in digital regulation continues to be felt today via a policy change by Google which has announced that it will, in the near future, only run ads for financial products and services when the advertiser in question has been verified by the financial watchdog, the FCA. The Google Ads […]
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Indian tech startup exposed Byju’s student data

India-based technology startup Salesken.ai has secured an exposed server that was spilling private and sensitive data on one of its customers, Byju’s, an education technology giant and India’s most valuable startup. The server was left unprotected since at least June 14, according to historical data provided by Shodan, a search engine for exposed devices and […]
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Facebook’s newsletter platform Bulletin is now live

The cool new thing on Facebook is for Mark Zuckerberg to drop product news in live audio rooms. So today, Zuckerberg took to his brand’s Clubhouse competitor to announce its next new thing: Bulletin, a newsletter platform. Bulletin is built on a separate platform from Facebook — on its website, the FAQ states that this is […]
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ShipBob nabs $200M at a $1B+ valuation to help e-commerce companies run logistics like Amazon’s

E-commerce saw a massive surge of activity and growth in 2020; and while we may hear a lot about how big companies like Amazon got even bigger during the Covid-19 pandemic, that rising tide also lifted a lot of smaller boats. And that, in turn, has had a big impact on the wider e-commerce ecosystem. […]
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Ghana’s Jetstream lands $3M to build the digital infrastructure for Africa’s trade corridors

The share of exports from Africa to the rest of the world ranged from 80% to 90% between 2000 and 2017. This has created a growing demand for Africa to be less dependent on commodity exports and focus on regional commerce. Not only does this decrease export dependence, but it also forms new markets for […]
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FTC’s antitrust case against Facebook falters but doesn’t quite fall in federal court

An antitrust suit against Facebook by the FTC and several states had the wind taken out of its sails today by a federal judge, who ruled that the plaintiffs don’t provide enough evidence that the company exerts monopoly control over social media. The court was more receptive, however, to revisiting the acquisitions of Instagram and […]
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Jiji acquires Cars45 as it looks to build a future outside classifieds

Once heralded as disruptive marketplaces, classifieds are giving way to transactional marketplaces. Yet, some classifieds in the West like eBay have evolved with time, acquiring competition operating both models. In Africa, this occurrence is happening in part, at least for the classifieds businesses that haven’t fizzled out. Jiji, one of the largest marketplaces for classifieds […]
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Vietnamese investment app Infina lands $2M seed round

The pandemic has spurred interest in saving and investment apps around the world, especially ones geared toward newer investors. In Southeast Asia, startups in this space that have raised funding over the past few months include Ajaib, Bibit and Stashaway—and that’s just a (very) partial list. Now Infina, which calls itself the “Robinhood of Vietnam,” […]
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Slice raises $20 million to go after the credit card industry in India

Slice, an Indian fintech startup that has built a “super card” for millennials in India, said on Monday it has raised $20 million in a new financing round and is adding new features to change how people engage with their credit cards. Existing investors Gunosy, Blume Ventures and others financed the new round in the […]
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Egypt’s Minly raises $3.6M to connect celebrities and fans through personalized experiences

In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a growing trend of creators adopting digital and social media, not just as a supplement to their media presence but also as a cornerstone of their personal brand. The pandemic has surely accelerated creator economy trends. Many popular artists and figures have had to postpone concerts and […]
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8 founders, leaders highlight fintech and deep tech as Bristol’s top sectors

Bristol proved especially popular among tech investors last year — local businesses raked in an impressive $414 million in 2020, making it the third-largest U.K. city for tech investment.
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To end cyberterrorism, the government should extend a hand to the private sector

The reality is that while companies can get smarter about cyber defenses and users can get more vigilant in their cyber hygiene practices, only the government has the power to end this behavior.
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Deep Science: Keeping AI honest in medicine, climate science and vision

This week, we'll explore a number of projects aimed at identifying or confirming bias or cheating behaviors in machine learning systems, or failures in the data that support them.
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Equity Live: This is what leadership smells like

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we did something fun and different and good: a live show! A good number of people came, and asked questions, and altogether, it was a blast. Danny, Natasha, and Alex had a lovely time with the […]
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Instagram may soon let you post from desktop

After years of solely focusing on its mobile product, Instagram is at long last thinking about letting users post from their computers. A number of Twitter uses noticed that the test feature had gone live Thursday, and Instagram confirmed the test to TechCrunch. “We know that many people access Instagram from their computer,” an Instagram […]
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Psychedelic VR meditation startup Tripp raises $11 million Series A

As an increasing number of startups sell investors on mobile apps that help consumers prioritize well-being and mindfulness, other startups are looking for a more immersive take that allows users to fully disconnect from the world around them. Tripp has been building immersive relaxation exercises that seek to blend some of the experiences users may […]
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Happs raises $4.7 million for a multicast livestream platform creator community

Happs, an app that lets creators stream live video simultaneously across social platforms, has raised $4.7 million in a post-seed round. The product originally began as a platform for independent journalists, but expanded its mission last year to offer tools to all online creators while connecting them through a new social network. The funding was […]
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Practice agile, iterative change to refine products and build company culture

A company, however its incorporation papers may define it, is really just a set of people. If your principles don’t reflect those people’s values, do those principles really represent the company?
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This QR code startup just raised $5 million co-led by Coatue and Seven Seven Six

Amazon revolutionized one-click shopping, and it has a nearly $2 trillion market cap to show for the effort. Now, a 10-person startup founded by JD Maresco, who previously cofounded the public safety app Citizen, says it plans to make it a lot easier for retailers who sell directly to their customers to make re-ordering their […]
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Acryl Data, commercializing LinkedIn’s metadata tool DataHub, emerges from stealth with $9M from 8VC, LinkedIn and Insight

In 2019, LinkedIn’s engineering team announced DataHub, a metadata tool it had built to help it organise, search and discover insights from its vast data trove. In 2020, LinkedIn open sourced it. Now, a startup co-founded by one of the creators of DataHub and by a former senior engineer from Airbnb who helped build the […]
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Viva Republica, developer of Korean financial super app Toss, raises $410M at a $7.4B valuation

Viva Republica, the Seoul-based fintech company behind Toss, a super app with more than 40 financial services, announced today it has raised $410 million at a post-money valuation of $7.4 billion. The new funding was led by Alkeon Capital, an American investment firm, and included participation from new investors like Korea Development Bank, and returning […]
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Inside GM’s startup incubator strategy

GM has launched a series of new subsidiaries tackling electrification, connectivity and even insurance — all part of the automaker's aim to find value beyond its traditional business.
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How much to pay yourself as a SaaS founder

The conversation on founder pay is changing for the better. We've gathered insights from founders and VCs and narrowed down the most important factors and benchmarks to guide your decision.
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Facebook’s entry into VR advertising isn’t going too well

Facebook’s efforts to bring advertising to the Oculus virtual reality platform it has spent billions of dollars building out doesn’t seem to be off to a great start. The company announced last week that they were planning to roll out their first in-game ads inside the title “Blaston” from the prolific VR game developer Resolution […]
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Daily Crunch: Facebook rolls out podcasts and Live Audio Rooms for US listeners

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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Buy now, pay later startup Kredivo doubles its debt facility from Victory Park Capital to $200M

Kredivo announced today it has secured another $100 million debt facility from Victory Park Capital (VPC). This doubles the Indonesian digital lending and credit platform’s total warehouse financing facility from VPC to $200 million. The first round was closed in July 2020. Kredivo is operated by Singapore-based fintech FinAccel. This is the largest loan facility […]
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GrowSari, a B2B platform for small stores in the Philippines, adds investors like Temasek’s Pavilion Capital and Tencent

Sari-sari stores are neighborhood stores in the Philippines that usually sell daily necessities and sometimes serve as community hubs, too. Today GrowSari, a startup that is digitizing sari-sari stores with features like pricing tools, inventory management and working capital loans, announced it has raised a Series B from several notable investors that brings its total […]
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Crypto finance startup Amber Group raises $100M at $1B valuation

More mainstream venture capital firms are jumping on the crypto bandwagon as investors increasingly consider bitcoin an investable asset, despite the recent massive price drops of a few major cryptocurrencies. Amber Group, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency trading startup, said on Monday it has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round at a pre-money […]
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Dollars, deals and the importance of nondilutive capital

Today, on Juneteenth, we recognize the efforts this nation still needs to put toward addressing structural racism and disparities, including in the world of tech. This week, HBCUvc, a nonprofit that aims to diversify the world of venture capital, launched a million-dollar fund. Founder Hadiyah Mujhid told me that the capital would provide nondilutive financing […]
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Investors say Eindhoven poised to become Netherlands’ No. 2 tech hub

Our survey respondents said Eindhoven might not immediately spring to mind as a high-tech hub, but the Netherlands city is keen to position itself as a center for deep tech in Europe.
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Extra Crunch roundup: influencer marketing 101, spotting future unicorns, Apple AirTags teardown

We're off today to celebrate the Juneteenth holiday in the United States. I hope you have a safe and relaxing weekend.
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Perspectives on tackling Big Tech’s market power

The need for markets-focused competition watchdogs and consumer-centric privacy regulators to think outside their respective ‘legal silos’ and find creative ways to work together to tackle the challenge of big tech market power was the impetus for a couple of fascinating panel discussions organized by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), which were livestreamed […]
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UK’s ICO warns over ‘big data’ surveillance threat of live facial recognition in public

The UK’s chief data protection regulator has warned over reckless and inappropriate use of live facial recognition (LFR) in public places. Publishing an opinion today on the use of this biometric surveillance in public — to set out what is dubbed as the “rules of engagement” — the information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, also noted that […]
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US lawmakers want to restrict police use of ‘Stingray’ cell tower simulators

Igor Bonifacic Contributor Share on Twitter Igor Bonifacic is a contributing writer at Engadget. According to BuzzFeed News, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Ted Lieu will introduce legislation later today that seeks to restrict police use of international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) catchers. More commonly known as Stingrays, police frequently use IMSI catchers and cell-site simulators […]
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Following lawsuits, Snapchat pulls its controversial speed filter

Lately, Snapchat’s 3D Cartoon lens has been all the buzz, making all of our friends look like Pixar characters. But since 2013, a staple filter on the ephemeral photo-sharing app has been the speed filter, which shows how fast a phone is moving when it takes a photo or video. Today, Snapchat confirmed that it […]
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Deep reinforcement learning will transform manufacturing as we know it

Reinforcement learning and simulation are essential to solving the constraints and novel challenges that take place in factories and supply chains.
https://tcrn.ch/3zvR0bU

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 leads $140M funding in Vishal Sikka’s Vianai

Vianai Systems, an AI startup founded by Vishal Sikka, former chief executive of Indian IT services giant Infosys, said on Wednesday it has raised $140 million in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The two-year-old startup said a number of industry luminaries also participated in the new round, which brings its total to-date […]
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Facebook will begin beaming advertisements into virtual reality

Well, it was only a matter of time. Advertising giant Facebook announced Wednesday that they’re going to begin testing advertising inside virtual reality titles on its Oculus platform soon. The first roll-out is limited enough, with Facebook testing ads inside a single gaming shooter title: Blaston from Resolution Games. They are interestingly not rolling this out with […]
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Self-driving trucks startup Kodiak Robotics snags investment, partnership from Bridgestone

Tire-making giant Bridgestone has taken a minority stake in Kodiak Robotics, the Silicon Valley-based startup developing autonomous trucks, as part of a broader partnership to test and develop smart tire technology. While the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, Kodiak Robotics co-founder and CEO Don Burnette told TechCrunch that this is a direct financial investment. […]
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Scale AI CEO Alex Wang weighs in on software bugs and what will make AV tech good enough

Scale CEO Alex Wang joined us at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility 2021 to discuss his company's role in the autonomous driving industry and how it's changed in the five years since its founding.
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Uberall raises $115M, acquires MomentFeed to scale up its location marketing services

Location-based services may have had their day as a salient category for hot apps or innovative tech leveraging the arrival of smartphones, but that’s largely because they are now part of the unspoken fabric of how we interact with digital services every day: We rely on location-specific information when we are on search engines, when […]
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BMW and Ford-backed Solid Power will go public via SPAC merger in $1.2B deal

Solid Power, a solid-state battery developer backed by Ford and BMW, is going public. The company said Tuesday it would head to the NASDAQ via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Decarbonization Plus Acquisition Corp III at a post-deal implied market valuation of $1.2 billion. The transaction is expected to generate around $600 million […]
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Waabi’s Raquel Urtasun explains why it was the right time to launch an AV technology startup

Autonomous vehicle startup Waabi's Raquel Urtasun joined Mobility 2021 to talk about her new venture and the challenges facing the self-driving vehicle industry.
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Supreme Court revives LinkedIn case to protect user data from web scrapers

The Supreme Court has given LinkedIn another chance to stop a rival company from scraping personal information from users’ public profiles, a practice LinkedIn says should be illegal but one that could have broad ramifications for internet researchers and archivists. LinkedIn lost its case against Hiq Labs in 2019 after the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court […]
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Beats Studio Buds offer a compact design, noise-canceling and Android/iOS fast pairing at $150

When they were released in 2019, Powerbeats Pro were standouts. Two-plus years later, they remain one of the more well-rounded wireless earbuds on the market. There are things I would change, of course. Even in 2019, that charging case was ridiculously large. In 2021, the original case is all the more absurd. And, of course, […]
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Cyber security training platform Immersive Labs closes $75M Series C led by Insight Partners

Immersive Labs, a platform which teaches cyber security skills corporate employees by using real, up-to-date threat intelligence in a “gamified” way, has closed a $75 million Series C funding round led by new investors Insight Partners alongside Menlo Ventures, Citi Ventures and existing investor Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The investment will be used to scale […]
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Gillmor Gang: Déjà Vu

The Gang or a subset did a Clubhouse, longer than a regular show by a good third. The audio only structure lacked the visual cues that distinguish between irony and bad manners, but otherwise it felt familiar if not comfortable. I can’t remember what we talked about, only that I seemed a little more emphatic […]
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Nuclear waste recycling is a critical avenue of energy innovation

Tristan Abbey Contributor Share on Twitter Tristan Abbey is President of Comarus Analytics LLC. He served as senior policy advisor at the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and as director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. No single question bedevils American energy and environmental policy more than nuclear waste. No, […]
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SOSV, the global venture firm, just closed a $100 million fund to back its maturing startups

Sean O’Sullivan, the founder of the global venture outfit SOSV, has slowly but steadily built up a sizable operation over the years. SOSV started off as a family office, investing the capital of O’Sullivan after he cofounded two companies, including MapInfo, an outfit that went public in 1994 before Pitney Bowes acquired it years later, […]
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