Tech News

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is leaving Initialized Capital, the investment firm he co-founded in 2011 with Garry Tan, as first reported by Axios and confirmed by TechCrunch. The move comes weeks after Ohanian publicly stepped down from the Reddit board of directors, with Y Combinator president Michael Seibel taking his spot. Ohanian launched Initialized Capital

With the game industry booming, more entrepreneurs are evaluating where to base their new startup or open a new office for their existing company. The U.S. government’s block on H1-B and L-1 visas will encourage American game startups to add an office abroad much sooner than they otherwise would have. But where? This spring, I

Indian online learning startup Byju’s has added one more high-profile name to the list of its backers: Bond. In a statement on Friday, Bangalore-based Byju’s said it had raised an undisclosed amount from the VC fund co-founded by Mary Meeker. The first-female founded VC firm’s check valued the nine-year-old Indian startup at $10.5 billion, according

Waymo’s self-driving software footprint is expanding — this time in a partnership with Volvo Car Group. The two companies announced Thursday an “exclusive” partnership to integrate Waymo’s self-driving software into a new electric vehicle designed for ride-hailing. Volvo and Waymo provided just a few details on the partnership and what this might actually look like

TikTok is announcing to advertisers that it’s open for business. The company is today officially introducing a new brand and platform called “TikTok For Business” that will serve as the home for all its current and future marketing solutions for brands. At launch, the site will include access to TikTok ad formats, including its marque

Think you’ve found a way to consistently brick someone’s PS4, or make it run code that it shouldn’t? Sony wants to know — and now they’re willing to pay. This morning Sony announced that it’s opening its bug bounty program to the public, and will pay for newly discovered bugs and exploits that impact either

Flipkart on Wednesday added support for three more local languages as the Indian e-commerce giant looks to widen its foothold in smaller cities and towns across the country where fewer people speak English and Hindi. The Walmart -owned firm said its online marketplace now has interfaces in Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, three languages that are

Twitter took its latest action on content from President Trump Tuesday, again hiding a threat of state violence behind a warning label and appending it with a notice. Trump’s latest offending tweet declared “There will never be an ‘Autonomous Zone’ in Washington, D.C., as long as I’m your President. If they try they will be

French startup Swile, the startup formerly known as Lunchr, raised a $78.7 million (€70 million) Series C round a few months ago. The startup wants to manage all your corporate benefits and improve team building in general. Index Ventures is leading the round, Bpifrance and Idinvest are also participating. Index Ventures already led the company’s

Apple is holding a keynote today on the first day of its developer conference, and the company is expected to talk about a ton of software updates. WWDC is a virtual event this year, but you can expect the same amount of news, in a different format. At 10 AM PT (1 PM in New

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. This week, we have several heavy-hitting rumors swirling around, from Huawei’s chips for cars to Tencent’s potential buyout of its video rival iQiyi. China tech

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here. Which startups investors are actually first to backing the best companies? If you know this information before fundraising, you can avoid pitching investors who were always going to tell you that you’re “too

Ford has changed the debut of its 2021 Bronco once again because its planned July 9 reveal falls on the birthday of O.J. Simpson, one of the iconic SUV’s most infamous passengers The automaker tweeted Friday that it has moved the unveiling to July 13. The reveal of the all-new Bronco lineup will now happen

Apple today confirmed earlier rumors that it plans to shut down re-opened stores in four states.  Impacted locations include six stores in Arizona, two in Florida, another two in North Carolina and one in South Carolina. “We take this step with an abundance of caution as we closely monitor the situation and we look forward

Brandon Byrne Contributor Brandon Byrne is the CEO and co-founder of Opera Event, a technology platform that connects content creators, teams and sponsors to one another programmatically and at scale. He was previously the CFO of Team Liquid and VP of Finance and Administration at Curse. I recently sat on a panel for gaming website

Investor Chamath Palihapitiya made part of his fortune at Facebook, where he was a vice president for more than four years, leaving one year before its 2012 IPO. Though he has voiced concerns numerous times since about his former employer, he also believes it has played an active role in enabling users to report and

Alfred Chuang Contributor As I was wrapping up a Zoom meeting with my business partners, I could hear my son joking with his classmates in his online chemistry class. I have to say this is a very strange time for me: As much as I love my family, in normal times, we never spend this

African cross-border fintech startup Chipper Cash has closed a $13.8 million Series A funding round led by Deciens Capital and plans to hire 30 new staff globally. The raise caps an event filled run for the San Francisco based payments company, founded two years ago by Ugandan Ham Serunjogi and Ghanaian Maijid Moujaled. The two came

Pale Blue Dot, a newly outed European venture capital firm focused on climate tech, announced this week the first closing of its debut fund at €53 million. Targeting pre-seed and seed stage startups, the firm says it will consider software and technology investments with a strong positive climate impact. Current areas of focus include food/agriculture,

BYD Co., the Chinese auto giant backed by Warren Buffett, is rushing to make China self-sufficient in the production of electric vehicles. On Monday, the firm said in a filing it has secured 800 million yuan ($113 million) in a Series A+ round for its chipmaking arm, BYD Semiconductor. At stake is the race to make

How do you give your brand a voice that feels authentic and unique? How can you communicate with users in a way that helps and engages without feeling weird or forced? We’re thrilled to announce that Anna Pickard, Head of Brand Communications at Slack, will be joining us at TC Early Stage to teach us

Chinese internet giant ByteDance has announced plans to discontinue two of its apps in India, its biggest overseas market, and urged its users to move to TikTok. Vigo Video and Vigo Lite, two apps that allow users to create and share short-form sketches and lip-syncing to Bollywood songs, posted a message early Monday (local time)

Rajat Bhageria Contributor We were promised robots everywhere — fully autonomous robots that will drive our cars end-to-end, clean our dishes, drive our freight, make our food, pipette and do our lab work, write our legal documents, mow the lawn, balance our books and even clean our houses. And yet instead of Terminator or WALL-E

Tesla Model 3 vehicles produced at its Fremont, Calif. factory will reportedly come standard with a wireless charging pad and USB-C ports, upgrades that were first spotted by Drive Tesla Canada. Electrek also reported on the changes. The upgrades now put U.S.-made Model 3s on par with the same vehicles made at Tesla’s factory in

“A lot of people denigrate the value of talking about race and racism in technological spaces,” said Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race, which has surged to the top of the New York Times best sellers list in paperback nonfiction, two and a half years after its initial January 2018

Last week, we suggested that for a truly diverse venture industry, the limited partners who provide investing capital to VCs — institutions like universities and hospital systems — need to start incorporating diversity mandates into their work. Say a venture firm wanted to secure a commitment from the University of Texas System; it would first

Over the past few years, Snapchat has been building up an increasingly complex weave of partnerships. They have their advertising partners that power the vast majority of their monetization efforts. They have app developers on Snap Kit that they are also selling new features like CameraKit and Minis too. They’re bringing game developers on board

Tom Hanks’ “Greyhound” is the latest movie to skip theaters and head straight to streaming — in this case, to Apple TV+. Deadline reported last month that Apple had picked up the film, which now has a release date of July 10. Sony had previously pushed back the movie’s release multiple times, most recently settling

Before June each year, content and media platforms in China anxiously anticipate a new round of censorship as the government tightens access to information in the lead-up to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. This year, Chinese users lost access to two podcast apps — Pocket Casts and Castro Podcasts. Neither app is searchable