Want to start a DAO? It’s not that hard. Want to join a DAO? It’s even easier, but there are several steps to get connected. Some of those steps are daunting. That’s why Alex Taub started Upstream, which attempts to make starting and onboarding for a DAO much easier. Tune in to the next TechCrunch
Month: November 2022
Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. As much as I like spotting new trends, it is just as important to get confirmation on previous predictions we made or heard. This
As rumors rumbled that the U.S. Federal Reserve would hike rates once more — and when it followed through earlier this week — another round of layoffs hit the tech sector. Stripe, Opendoor, Chime, Zillow, Cerebral, Brex, and of course Twitter, among others, have already cut or are about to eliminate thousands of jobs. That’s
Dropit, a retail technology platform that bridges the digital divide by unifying merchants’ online and in-store inventories, has raised $25 million in a Series C round of funding. Founded in 2014, London-based Dropit counts retail brands including L’Occitane, Abercrombie & Fitch and Estée Lauder as customers, in addition to shopping malls. At its core, Dropit
YouTube is gearing up to roll out a new feature that will allow select creators to invite a guest to go live with them, the company announced on its Creator Insider channel and in a blog post. At launch, creators will only be able to co-stream via a phone, as the feature won’t be available
Education options during and after incarceration have never been particularly extensive, despite the best intentions of educators. Emerge Career is working on changing that, and its early success in putting formerly incarcerated folks to work is attracting investment from both VCs and government programs. It was only August when Emerge first appeared as it came
Many big companies in the fintech world cut jobs in the past month. And yet Stripe’s announcement it would lay off 14% of its workforce still made a splash, proving that unicorns and decacorns are not immune to the challenging economic and fundraising conditions. The Stripe news closely follows Chime confirming this week that 12%
Danish startup Pleo has announced that it plans to lay off around 15% of the company’s workforce. As the company currently has nearly 1,000 employees, it could affect up to 150 people. Pleo develops expense management tools for SMBs around Europe. “I’ll be honest. Pleo today, at the point of almost 1,000 employees and with
In a series of cancellations, HBO has managed to disappoint many viewers as of late. Now, “Westworld” fans will be among them. The network announced today that it is canceling the sci-fi drama after four seasons. The show just aired its season four finale in August. HBO, in a prepared statement, said, “Over the past
Stability AI, the venture-backed startup behind the text-to-image AI system Stable Diffusion, is funding a wide-ranging effort to apply AI to the frontiers of biotech. Called OpenBioML, the endeavor’s first projects will focus on machine learning-based approaches to DNA sequencing, protein folding and computational biochemistry. The company’s founders describe OpenBioML as an “open research laboratory”
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. Friday, and all eyes are on the vast number of Twitter employees who were given the boot, unceremoniously, with many of ’em finding out they’d lost their job because they were unable
A lot of problems worth solving aren’t ones that you can solve in a year or two or even 10. For founders and investors alike, such long timelines can seem daunting. But for Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO of battery tech startup Sila, hard tech problems are also some of the most tantalizing. “It’s always
A recently presented European Union plan to update long-standing product liability rules for the digital age — including addressing rising use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation — took some instant flak from European consumer organization, BEUC, which framed the update as something of a downgrade by arguing EU consumers will be left less well
Apple’s new and improved Apple TV 4K launches this week, going on sale online and in stores on Friday, November 4. After spending just under a week with the Wi-Fi + Ethernet version, I can say that it’s definitely a nice improvement over the existing version, delivering a couple of clutch forward-looking features that will
After Warner Bros. Discovery reported its third-quarter earnings results yesterday, the company told investors and analysts in a call that the forthcoming combined HBO Max/Discovery+ streaming service will now launch in the U.S. earlier than previously announced. CEO David Zaslav said the yet-to-be-named service is now getting a spring 2023 launch instead of in the
We’re encouraged to think of pitch meetings as a trial by fire: If an entrepreneur can negotiate deadly traps and slay the doubt monsters that bedevil tech investors, they’ll be rewarded with a golden SAFE note at the end of their quest. Particularly for first-timers, the pitch has become an existential drama, which can lead
You’d be forgiven for expecting public fintech companies that facilitate consumer trading to be under pressure this week. And yet, after reporting earnings, the share prices of two pandemic-era highfliers gained ground. Coinbase and Robinhood up? In this economy? Yes. Of the out-of-fashion tech sectors, consumer trading has to be among the most out of
While there are differing perspectives on the degree to which no-code and low-code development tools could eventually supplant human software developers, it’s clear that any software that takes care of the technical “heavy lifting” is having a huge impact within businesses — in terms of opening app-building to more personnel, plugging the talent gap and
New computing paradigms are never not going to be weird, but such uncomfortability dramatically intensifies when the human body enters into the picture. There’s a sense in which the smart contact lens feels like something of an inevitability (whether it’s produced by Mojo Vision or someone is another question altogether), but that doesn’t mean each
At long last, DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s image-generating AI system, is available as an API, meaning developers can build the system into their apps, websites and services. In a blog post today, OpenAI announced that any developer can start tapping the power of DALL-E 2 — which more than three million people are now using to
Benjamin Döpfner has been building companies since he was a teenager. One of his more recent ventures was based in Berlin, and at the time of its founding in 2019, Germany actually had negative interest rates — meaning that the company was paying back 50 basis points, or half a percent for each euro that
Guru Hariharan Contributor Guru Hariharan is CEO and founder of CommerceIQ, an e-commerce management company. For consumers, the holiday season means indulging in gifts, family traditions and festive celebrations. But for retail businesses, it’s the most critical time of the year. We’re seeing a gathering storm of economic conditions — inflation, inventory and supply chain
A lot of things might spring to mind when you hear “fashion,” but taking care of the planet generally isn’t on that list. Smartex just raised a couple of bolts’ worth of cash, sowing up a round of funding to bring smart tech to fabric manufacturing. The hope is to be able to detect textile
An incoming privacy policy change announced by TikTok yesterday for users in Europe — which, for the first time, names China as one of several third countries where user data can be remotely accessed by “certain” company employees to perform what it claims are “important” functions — has landed months ahead of expected movement on
Following last year’s $205 million acquisition of AirTag competitor Tile by family locator service Life360, the two companies today will now integrate their products and services. With an update arriving soon to Life360’s app, members will be able to see the location of the Tile Bluetooth trackers on the same in-app map where they also
Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) reported its fiscal quarterly earnings this afternoon — its last one before the company is set to launch a new streaming service next year that combines HBO Max and Discovery+ content. Since Netflix reported decent Q3 results, the market likely anticipated an okay turnout for WBD. However, it’s clear the company
Over the last six months, I’ve written up 25 Pitch Deck Teardowns — the popular series of articles where I review a pitch deck in detail, celebrating the wins and gently (and sometimes not-so-gently) suggesting improvements. We’ve seen 74-slide decks (yes, really), decks that are riddled with spelling mistakes and bogged down by hideous design
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. Oh heeeey! How are you doing today? We’ve had a pretty busy day on the site today, with a veritable cornucopia of news spilling all over the internet. We’ve selected some of
Kicking things off with a big funding round for AMP Robotics this week for a couple of reasons, but when push comes to shove, it comes down to something really simple: There are a lot of great reasons to be bullish on automation and there are a lot of equally great reasons to be bullish
Commercial electric vehicle company Arrival has gotten a warning from the Nasdaq Stock Market because its stock price is trading too low. The company issued a press release Thursday saying it received a notification at the start of the week that it was not in compliance with the Nasdaq’s requirement to trade ordinary shares above