For small and mid-sized restaurants in Nigeria and most of Africa, food procurement can be a complex process to manage. The system is such that a business can easily run out of money or have considerable savings. Most restaurants don’t have access to deal directly with farms to get better deals because they lack the […]
Across the street from Suzhou North, a high-speed railway station in a historic city near Shanghai, a futuristic M-shaped building easily catches the eye of anyone passing by. It houses the headquarters of the five-year-old Chinese autonomous driving startup, Momenta. Like other major Chinese cities, Suzhou, which is famous for its serene canals and classical […]
Let’s stipulate the storm of user media (social audio, newsletters, live streaming) is evidence of something real and lasting. When this citizen media migrates to small business and the enterprise, we see that as confirmation, validation. Most of these efforts are in the investment phase, where startups and platforms consolidate ecosystems around the various disruptions. […]
There’s been quite a bit of movement in the additive manufacturing space in recent months. If I had to pinpoint a reason, I would say that — much like robotics (another space I follow fairly closely) — the category has gotten a boost in interest from the pandemic. Medical applications are understandably of interest lately, […]
Ford said Thursday that some Ford F-150 pickup trucks and Edge crossovers will be built without certain electronic modules due to a twofold punch of a global semiconductor shortage and a lack of parts caused by a winter storm. Ford said it will build and hold the vehicles for a number of weeks, then ship […]
Fort Robotics today announced a $13 million raise. Led by Prime Movers Lab, the round also features Prologis Ventures, Quiet Capital, Lemnos Labs, Creative Ventures, Ahoy Capital, Compound, FundersClub and Mark Cuban. The Philadelphia-based company was founded in 2018 by Samuel Reeves, who previous headed up Humanistic Robotics. That fellow Pennsylvania startup is focused on […]
MrBeast’s management company is getting into the venture business. Night Media, the six-year-old, Dallas-based multimedia talent management company, is closing a debut fund with $20 million in capital commitments from the powerful family-friendly online influencers it manages, along with other social media stars. The idea, says Night Media CEO Reed Duchscher, is to write initial […]
YouTube Shorts comes to the U.S., Amazon starts testing electric delivery vans in San Francisco and new data suggests the impact of Google Play’s recent changes. This is your Daily Crunch for March 18, 2021. The big story: YouTube’s TikTok rival launches in the US The YouTube Shorts product allows users to record, edit and […]
Substack has attracted a number of high-profile writers to its newsletter platform — and it’s not a secret that the venture-backed startup has lured some of them with sizable payments. For example, a New Yorker article late last year identified several writers (Anne Helen Petersen, Matthew Yglesias) who’d accepted “substantial” advances, and others (Robert Christgau, […]
Why would Snowflake give up such a powerful tool a mere six months after it went public? We decided to look at the notion of dual-class shares and why Snowflake may have been willing to let them go.
NASA doesn’t just let anyone launch whatever they want to space without checking in with the agency about potential impacts to its own assets on orbit, including the International Space Station (ISS). The agency has a standard set of guidelines around so-called “Conjunction Assessment,” which is basically to determine the risk that a close approach […]
OpenSea has been one of a handful of NFT marketplaces to explode in popularity in recent weeks as collectors wade into the trading of nonfungible tokens on the blockchain. While new startups have been popping up everyday, platforms that launched in crypto’s earlier times are receiving rampant attention from investors who see this wave of […]
Rivian, the EV startup backed by Amazon, Cox Automotive and T. Rowe Price, plans to install more than 10,000 chargers by the end of 2023. The network will have a dual purpose: quickly power its electric vehicle models with fast chargers installed along highways and provide Level 2 chargers at further afield locations next to […]
Determined early-stage startup founders (are there really any other kind?) always keep a sharp eye out for advantages that help them build better and faster. Well, heads up folks because this is a brand-new opportunity like no other, and it takes place at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23. We’re talking about Startup Alley+, a […]
An artificial retina would be an enormous boon to the many people with visual impairments, and the possibility is creeping closer to reality year by year. One of the latest advancements takes a different and very promising approach, using tiny dots that convert light to electricity, and virtual reality has helped show that it could […]
Google this week announced its was cutting the commissions it charges Android app developers who publish on its Google Play marketplace, following a similar move by Apple last year aimed at fending off antitrust claims. According to Google’s own estimates, 99% of its developers who sell goods and services would see their fees cut in […]
Whether it's bundling bookings, payments or just trip planning, startups are offering new mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) products intended to make transit agencies the backbone of urban mobility.
The explosion in productivity software amid a broader remote work boom has been one of the pandemic’s clearest tech impacts. But learning to use a dozen new programs while having to decipher which data is hosted where can sometimes seem to have an adverse effect on worker productivity. It’s all time that users can take […]
Shortly after Twitter announced it would begin testing a better way to display images on its app, it’s now doing the same for YouTube videos. According to a new post on Twitter’s Support account, the company will today start testing a way to watch YouTube videos directly from your home timeline within the Twitter iOS […]
Challenger banks continue to make significant advances in attracting customers away from the big incumbents by providing more modern, user-friendly tools to manage their money. Today, one of the trailblazers in this area, Kuda Technologies, is announcing funding to continue building out its specific ambition: to provide a modern banking service for Africans and the […]
