Tech News

Substack, the five-year-old newsletter platform that has aggressively positioned itself as a disruptive force in media, has abandoned efforts to raise a Series C round, the New York Times is reporting today.  According to its sources, Substack held discussions with potential investors in recent months about raising $75 million to $100 million at a valuation

It’s a common problem among the superwealthy. Sure they can buy fancy clothes, jewelry and fast cars, but at the end of the day, they’re stuck using the same boring gadgets as the rest of us. How can they possibly extend their expensive and flashy taste to consumer electronics? Fortunately, from the bedazzled Nokias of

Republican lawmakers are facing growing anger over the deadliest mass shooting at an American school in nearly a decade yesterday, with many of their constituents expressing frustration over their repeated votes against even modest gun control reforms. Social media can’t solve the problem. Indigov, a three-year-old, 70-person New York-based startup, can’t solve it either, but

The process to make any purchase within a business can be long and cumbersome, involving multiple departments and lots of back and forth. A pair of Airbnb alums have teamed up to build a software business aimed at dramatically simplifying that process, or being, in their words, a “concierge for procurement.” That startup, Zip, has

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. It’s the 24th of May, 2022, and today Amanda made us laugh with her “Welcome to Hell, we all drive Teslas,” subhead to her story about Everything you wanted to know about

When DigitialOcean bought Nimbella last year, you knew it intended to go deeper into serverless technologies, and sure enough the company announced a new feature called DigitalOcean Functions today, based on Nimbella technology. DigitalOcean offers cloud infrastructure services at a price point below that of the Big 3, making it popular with developers. Gabe Monroy,

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in an internal memo that the company will miss its revenue goals for this quarter. Snap will also slow its pace of hiring, a tactic that companies like Meta and Uber have employed as a way to cut costs. Though Snap continues to grow year over year, Spiegel says the

The UK’s data protection watchdog has confirmed a penalty for the controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI — announcing a fine of just over £7.5 million today for a string of breaches of local privacy laws. The watchdog has also issued an enforcement notice, ordering Clearview to stop obtaining and using the personal data of

Recent product news from Stripe and Plaid indicate the two private companies are gunning for one another as the market for B2B financial technology matures, expands and individual players increasingly overlap. It might sound silly that Stripe, best known for its payments technology, and Plaid, best known for its API that connects consumer bank accounts

Welcome to the very first episode of The TechCrunch Podcast! Every week, the new TC podcast will dive into the biggest stories in tech, as told by the writers who penned them. We’ve been developing and iterating on the concept for many months now, so we’re thrilled to finally be able to deliver our first

Hi all! Welcome back to Week in Review, our newsletter where we wrap up many of the top stories to hit TechCrunch over the last seven days. The big thing this week, based on what people were reading most, were the details of a memo sent from Y Combinator to its portfolio founders. As the

“You can often pick up significant market share in an economic downturn by just staying alive,” top startup accelerator Y Combinator wrote in an internal email to its founders this week. The advice was one of 10 bullet points in a memo meant to help its companies navigate the economic downturn crushing tech. Other standout

Founders have gotten the memo that the ground is shifting under their feet right now. What to do about it is the question. Already, teams are making plans to scale back their spending to preserve capital. They’re making painful staff cuts toward that same end — or else instituting hiring freezes. But they should also

CleverTap, a retention marketing platform which has raised $76.6M to date, is to fully acquire Bulgarian-originated but San Francisco-based Leanplum, a customer engagement platform which has raised $131.2M, for an undisclosed amount. The news was broken by South Eastern European startup news site The Recursive. Sunil Thomas, CleverTap Cofounder and Executive Chairman said: “Like many

Thursday May 19, 2022, and it’s the last day of our in-person Mobility event. Tomorrow we take the journey to the mean streets of the world wide web, and you can still join us virtually! — Haje and Christine The TechCrunch Top 3 Tl;dr: We know you don’t have 32 minutes to read Meta global

Oishii made waves last year for its wildly expensive strawberries, fetching $50 for a box of eight to 11 berries. Based in the bastion of vertical farming that is Kearny, New Jersey, the company began supplying fruit to Michelin-starred restaurants (whose chefs clearly believed the product was worth the price). They’ve since rolled out to

A U.S. federal agency is investigating a crash involving a 2022 Tesla Model S that may have been operating in Autopilot during a crash that killed three people. Autopilot is Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) that performs automated functions such as steering, accelerating and automatic braking. Bloomberg first reported on the news. The accident, which

At its KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference this week, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced a new program that aims to help communication service providers and telcos adopt Kubernetes and other cloud native tools. Going forward, the CNCF will provide a new certification, the Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) Certification Program for Network Equipment Providers

While valuations of public software-as-a-service businesses have been taking a hammering of late, as investors cool on the sector amid a wider, post-pandemic tech stock sell off, SaaS startups still need to raise funding to scale their budding businesses — or, well, they hope they’ll be able to do so on reasonable terms despite these

In a new tweet fired at Twitter before market open, Elon Musk has reiterated that his $44BN deal to buy the social media platform is on hold over the issue of spambots. But now he’s tacitly accusing the company of lying over the proportion of fake/spam accounts on the platform, claiming its CEO “publicly refused

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. It’s Monday the 16th of May, and I’m back once again, like a renegade master. I’m fantastically over-caffeinated and at a standing desk today, so for the occasion, it’s a dancing desk.

African merchants encounter many challenges when it comes to international shipping ranging from logistics and customs to hidden and excessive charges. Digital freight forwarders on the continent have grown to tackle these supply chain issues. In some way, they are taking after the likeness of an $8 billion company and a market leader in the

Curious Thing founders Dr. Han Xu, Sam Zheng and David Mckeague Sydney-based Curious Thing is an aptly-named startup. The voice AI communication platform can call people and ask them questions like “How are you feeling today?” and then follow up with “how does it feel compared to yesterday?” Used primarily by health and financial companies,

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Hey Jane, a digital health startup that scales access to abortion pills, makes sense. It’s a direct-to-consumer pharmacy that aims to meet consumers where they are, which is especially important as the

Hi friends! Welcome back to Week In Review, the newsletter where we wrap up many of the top stories to cross TechCrunch’s front page over the last seven days. The big thing this week — at least based on what our backend suggests readers cared about most — was the crypto market plunging hard and

Twitter is testing a new “Liked by Author” label that appears when the creator of a tweet likes your reply. A reporter on the TechCrunch team spotted the new label in the Twitter Android app. A spokesperson from Twitter confirmed to TechCrunch that the company has been testing different labels to help give people context

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, is moving to put a stop to trading of Terraform Labs’ Terra (Luna) and TerraUSD (UST) tokens on its platform following one of the industry’s biggest meltdowns. The exchange indefinitely suspended the trading of Luna and UST across most of its spot pairs Thursday evening after the tokens lost

Section4, an upskilling startup launched by prominent NYU professor Scott Galloway, has laid off a quarter of staff sources say. The layoffs, which occurred last week, affected employees across all levels of seniority and teams, but specifically targeted a majority of the product team. The startup first splashed onto the scene in 2019 with a

SoftBank, which invested over $46 billion in startups last fiscal year, may slash the investment amount to half or even a quarter of that this year, chief executive Masayoshi Son said on the earnings call Thursday, the latest high-profile investor to become vocally cautious about opportunities in the private markets amid a global slowdown.   The