TechCrunch

Many studies claim that millions of jobs are going unfilled because there aren’t enough qualified candidates available for hire. I don’t buy it.

Apple this morning announced a sweeping plan to invest north of $430 billion over the next five years. The company says the deal involves “economic benefits” in all 50 states and would create, all told, 20,000 additional jobs in the United States over that time period. The plan is an extension of one it announced […]

Main Sequence, the venture firm founded by Australia’s national science agency, announced today a new $250 million AUD (about $194.3 million USD) fund to invest in deep-tech startups. This is Main Sequence’s second fund and its oversubscribed raised included returning investors Horizons Ventures, Hostplus, Lockheed Martin, Temasek, private investors from Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and […]

Facebook announced last week an expanded partnership with streaming music service Spotify that would bring a new way to listen to music or podcasts directly within Facebook’s app, which it called Project Boombox. Today, the companies are rolling out this integration via a new “miniplayer” experience that will allow Facebook users to stream from Spotify […]

More M&A activity is underway in the red-hot field of cybersecurity. In the latest development, private equity giant Thoma Bravo is buying Proofpoint, the SaaS security vendor, for $12.3 billion in cash. Proofpoint is traded publicly on the Nasdaq exchange and as of its closing price on Friday, it had a market cap of $7.5 […]

Signal Advisors is building a specialized financial platform for financial advisors, and the company is announcing it raised a $10 million Series A led by Brian Ru and Hemant Taneja at General Catalyst. This funding is on top of the $6 million seed round it raised in 2020 from Detroit Venture Partners, Ludlow Ventures, General […]

Orbillion Bio’s plans to make high end meats in a lab have investors lining up for a seat at the company’s cap table. Mere weeks after launching from Y Combinator’s famous accelerator program, the Silicon Valley-based potential purveyor of premium lamb loins, elk steaks, bison burgers and more has managed to haul in $5 million […]

Mighty Networks, a platform designed to give creators and brands a dedicated place to start and grow communities, has closed on $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Owl Ventures. Ziff Capital Partners and LionTree Partners also participated in the financing, along with existing backers Intel Capital, Marie Forleo, Gretchen Rubin, Dan […]

Cuckoo Internet, which is aiming to be an insurgent startup in the broadband provider space in the UK, has closed a $6 million investment round led by RTP Global, along with participation from JamJar Investments. It will also launch on price-comparison site uSwitch. RTP Global was an early backer of Yandex, Delivery Hero, and Datadog. […]

Faculty, a VC-backed artificial intelligence start-up, has won a tender to work with the NHS to make better predictions about its future requirements for patients, based on data drawn from how it handled the COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2019, Faculty raised a $10.5M Series A funding round from UK-based VCs Local Globe, GMG Ventures, and, […]

China’s plan to introduce its digital currency is getting a lot of help from its tech conglomerates. JD.com, a major Chinese online retailer that competes with Alibaba, said Monday that it has started paying some staff in digital yuan since January, the virtual version of the country’s physical currency. China has been busy experimenting with […]

An Indian startup that is helping digitize and transform affordable private schools to better serve students from middle and low-income groups of families said on Monday it has raised $30 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its efforts in the world’s second most populous nation. GSV Ventures and WestBridge led […]

A database of about 20 million alleged BigBasket users has leaked on a well-known cybercrime forum, months after the Indian grocery delivery startup confirmed it had faced a data breach. The database includes users’ email address, phone number, address, scrambled password, date of birth, and scores of interactions they had with the service. TechCrunch confirmed […]

In public schools across Africa, classrooms are often overcrowded and this affects how teachers and students interact. The large classroom creates too much work for teachers leaving students’ individual problems unattended. Private schools are modeled to fix these issues, but they can be expensive for the average African middle-class professional with kids. Kidato, an online […]

Investment app StashAway has raised a $25 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital India, with participation from returning investors Eight Roads Ventures and Square Peg. After regulatory approvals for the funding are completed, Sequoia Capital India managing director Abheek Anand will join StashAway’s board of directors as part of the round. StashAway does not […]

Earth Day may have come and gone, but with apps like #8meals from the non-profit Habits of Waste, anyone can try and do their part to help reduce deforestation and rising greenhouse gas emissions by cutting meat out of their diets for just 8 meals a week. The app, which was created by Habits of […]

Vera Kutsenko and Hayley Leibson have incredible tech pedigrees, but their latest venture involves as much digging in dirt as it does digging through lines of code. The two women have founded Neverland, a startup for the home gardener that aims to be a marketplace connecting mom and pop gardening shops with the explosion of […]

When the third minute of Apple’s first product event of 2021 ticked over and they had already made 3 announcements we knew it was going to be a packed one. In a tight single hour this week, Apple launched a ton of new product including AirTags, new Apple Card family sharing, a new Apple TV, […]

The current rave about newsletters and so-called or social audio is just the latest version of the story of podcasting. Take the idea that podcasting is experiencing a new wave of popularity and scaffolding. Are you sure? Apple is bent on turning the space into a subscription model, and we’re all going to twist again […]

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading.  A week ago TechCrunch covered Pico’s $6.5 million funding round and described it as “a New York startup that helps online creators and media companies […]