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. […]
Waymo, Google’s former self-driving project that is now a business unit under Alphabet, said Wednesday it raised $2.5 billion in its second outside funding round. The company said in a blog post it will use the funds to continue growing Waymo Driver, its autonomous driving platform, and growing its team. The round saw participation from […]
Extra Crunch Live is all about helping founders build better venture-backed businesses. Naturally, we do this by having candid conversations with founders and their investors. On an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live, we’ll sit down with MaC Venture Capital founding managing partner Marlon Nichols and Wonderschool co-founder and CEO Chris Bennett. REGISTER HERE FOR […]
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, Natasha and Danny unpacked the Expensify EC-1, which includes a ton of surprises, building tips and, as we discuss in the show, some life lessons as well. This is our largest EC-1 […]
When Richard Joffe moved his family to Australia in 2019, he said applying for home insurance “was like traveling back in time 30 years.” “I found the sign-up process painful, the fine print was confusing and the insurance company was totally reactive, not proactive. They never contacted me aside from my renewal,” he told TechCrunch. […]
Hybrid event platform Brella has raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Connected Capital. Normally used as an offline networking app, Brella pivoted from live events into a virtual event platform after the pandemic hit. The company counts Informa, Marcus Evans, Questex and IQPC as customers Markus Kauppinen, CEO and founder of […]
Berlin-based cannabis and digital health startup Sanity Group has closed a $44.2 million Series A financing round led by Swiss VC Redalpine along with U.S.-based Navy Capital and SOJE Capital. GMPVC also participated in the round. This appears to be the largest round of cannabis funding in Europe to date and brings total investment in […]
In March, Spotify announced it was acquiring the company behind the sports-focused audio app Locker Room to help speed its entry into the live audio market. Today, the company is making good on that deal with the launch of Spotify Greenroom, a new mobile app that allows Spotify users worldwide to join or host live […]
Apple’s recent Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote was packed with new features for iPhones, Macs and iPads — and like it has done pretty consistently since the debut of its original ‘Health’ app in 2014, those included updates focused on personal health and wellness. Often, it’s impossible to assess the impact of the work Apple […]
With many consumers making the switch to online shopping in the last year due to Covid-19 and largely staying active on those platforms even after physical shops and the freedom to move about them have been restored, companies that are enabling those services are continuing to see a lot of business and attention. In the […]
Yet another SaaS startup, which began its journey in India, has attained the much coveted unicorn status. BrowserStack, a startup that operates a giant software testing platform, said on Wednesday it has raised $200 million in a new financing round that valued the 10-year-old firm at $4 billion. BOND led the Dublin and San Francisco-headquartered startup’s Series […]
For the past 18 months, employees have enjoyed increased flexibility, and ultimately a better work-life balance, as a result of the mass shift to remote working necessitated by the pandemic. Most don’t want this arrangement, which brought an end to extensive commutes and superfluous meetings, to end: Buffer’s 2021 State of Remote Work report shows […]
Small businesses have traditionally been underserved when it comes to IT — they are too big and have too many requirements that can’t be met by consumer products, yet are much too small to afford, implement or thoroughly need apps and other IT build for larger enterprises. But when it comes to neobanks, it feels […]
New York-based IAB Tech Labs, a standards body for the digital advertising industry, is being taken to court in Germany by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) in a piece of privacy litigation that’s targeted at the high speed online ad auction process known as real-time bidding (RTB). While that may sound pretty obscure […]
A lot of the focus in recruitment these days has been on better technology to connect people to job opportunities at new organizations, but that also leaves a wide opening to focus on one of the other big funnels for finding work: internal transfers. Today, a startup that is building tools to improve that experience […]
Polestar, Volvo Car Group’s standalone electric performance brand, will manufacture its first all-electric SUV in the United States. The automaker said Wednesday that the Polestar 3 will be assembled at a plant shared with Volvo Cars at a factory in Ridgeville, South Carolina. The Polestar 3 follows the all-electric Polestar 2 sedan and the hybrid […]
Templafy, a Denmark-born B2B SaaS platform that does business document creation, has raised a $60 million D round of funding led by Blue Cloud Ventures. All previous investors also participated, including Insight Partners, Seed Capital, Dawn Capital and Damgaard Company. Templafy has now raised a total of $125 million. To some extent, Templafy competes with […]
While Amazon continues to expand its self-service, computer-vision-based grocery checkout technology by bringing it to bigger stores, an AI startup out of Israel that’s built something to rival it has picked up funding and a new strategic investor as a customer. Trigo, which has produced a computer vision system that includes both camera hardware and […]
Volvo Cars wants to be climate-neutral by 2040, and it has set its sights on a major vehicle component that’s notoriously difficult to decarbonize: steel. The automaker has partnered with Swedish company SSAB, which manufactures “fossil-free” steel, for a limited amount of the material to be used in a concept car as early as 2025. […]
The Fund, the early-stage investment firm focused on pre-seed and seed startups, is going Down Under for its latest expansion. The Fund was founded in New York in 2018, before launching in Los Angeles, London, the Rockies and the Midwest, too. Co-founder Jenny Fielding, who is also managing director at Techstars New York, said The […]
