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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.

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 […]

What, exactly, are investors looking for?

Pony.ai, the robotaxi startup that operates in China and the United States, has started testing driverless vehicles on public roads in California ahead of plans to launch a commercial service there in 2022. The company said the driverless vehicle testing, which means the autonomous vehicles operate without human safety drivers behind the wheel, is happening […]

Mental health startup Ksana Health has received $2 million in seed funding led by re:Mind Capital, the mental health VC arm of Christian Angermayer and Apeiron Investment Group. It’s a move informed by two trends: passive data collection, and a burgeoning mental health crisis in teens and young adults.  Ksana Health is an Oregon-based company […]

EV sales are driving demand for services and startups that fulfill the new needs of drivers, charging station operators and others.

Subscribers of MTN, the largest telecom provider in Nigeria, may soon face service disruption in the West African nation, according to a notice seen by some journalists and outlets.  A rise in insecurity challenges in Nigeria is likely to disrupt MTN’s service, Reuters and others said, citing an alert from customer service reps. Throughout this […]

The easiest traits to recognize as an investor is the founder’s ability to ace the fundraising process, crucial to which is the ability to think strategically and influence, inspire and persuade.

In April, Facebook announced a slew of new audio products, including its Clubhouse clone, called Live Audio Rooms, which will be available across both Facebook and Messenger. Since May, Facebook has been publicly testing the audio rooms feature in Taiwan with public figures, but today the company hosted its first public test of Live Audio […]

Sunlight is a great source of energy, but it rarely gets hot enough to fry an egg, let alone melt steel. Heliogen aims to change that with its high-tech concentrated solar technique, and has raised more than a hundred million dollars to test its 1,000-degree solar furnace at a few participating mines and refineries. We […]

The Senate confirmed Big Tech critic and prominent antitrust scholar Lina Khan as FTC Commissioner Tuesday. In a strong and surprising signal that the tech industry is overdue for some intense regulatory scrutiny, Biden elevated the newly-confirmed Khan to chair the agency the same day. Khan was confirmed in a 69-28 vote, with Republicans joining […]

A group of 200 startup founders, investors, associations and government members are backing a manifesto and a set of recommendations in order to create the next wave of tech giants in Europe. Today, French President Emmanuel Macron is hosting an event in Paris with some of the members of this group called Scale-Up Europe. Companies, […]

Nintendo defied expectations today with an E3-timed Direct showing off not the hoped-for new Switch hardware but a dozen or so new games — as well as a general release window for the much-anticipated next Zelda game. And to celebrate the original’s 35th anniversary, it will sell a new Game & Watch featuring the first […]

Android shared information today about six features that will roll out this summer. Some of these are just quality of life upgrades, like starring text messages to easily find them later, or getting contextual Emoji Kitchen suggestions depending on what you’re typing. But other aspects of this update emphasize security, safety and accessibility. Last summer, […]

Refraction AI calls itself the Goldilocks of robotic delivery. The Ann Arbor-based company recently raised a $4.2-million seed round and expanded operations to Austin.

Elisity, a self-styled innovator that provides behavior-based enterprise cybersecurity, has raised $26 million in Series A funding. The funding round was co-led by Two Bear Capital and AllegisCyber Capital, the latter of which has invested in a number of cybersecurity startups, including Panaseer, with previous seed investor Atlantic Bridge also participating. Elisity, which is led […]

Ever toured an apartment and fell in love with the model unit? You’re not alone. Harvard Business School grad Cameron Johnson is a former institutional real estate investor and Greystar exec turned startup founder who realized that very often, “renters would try to rent the model apartment.” This got him thinking. People would love to […]

Last week word got out that Facebook was taking another big step into first-party hardware with the planned launch of its own smartwatch. The most intriguing part of the report was the inclusion of not one but two watches. Other wearable makers have flirted with video and images on wrist-worn devices, but the feature is […]

We are amidst a sprawling renegotiation between employers and employees as to the very nature of work, and no one has more leverage than skilled technologists, many of whom feel unmoored.