Waymo, the autonomous driving arm of Alphabet, was granted a win on Tuesday when a California court ruled it could keep certain details regarding its AV technology secret. The company filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Motor Vehicles in late January in order to keep some information about its autonomous vehicle deployment permit,…
Tesla has agreed to pay a $275,000 fine in a settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for violating the federal Clean Air Act at its electric vehicle manufacturing plant in Fremont, California. The penalty is next to nothing for a company that generated a net income of $2.32 billion in the fourth quarter of…
Before anyone ever heard of COVID-19, recruiting and hiring the best people to help build a successful startup was challenging enough. Now consider the pandemic and the seismic shift it caused in the U.S. job market. As a result, millions of people quit working — in a phenomenon known as The Great Resignation — effectively…
Luxembourg-based Leko Labs, a construction startup that’s developing sustainable wood-based building materials as an alternative to steel and concrete and applying automation to construction methods, has closed a $21 million Series A round of funding. The raise is led by urban sustainability-focused fund 2150 with participation from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Tencent, AMAVI, Rise PropTech…
MarketForce, the retail B2B and end-to-end distribution platform founded in Kenya, has raised $40 million in Series A funding for its merchant inventory financing and expansion across Africa. MarketForce, which was launched in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda last year after growing beyond Kenya and Nigeria, plans to introduce buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) options to help merchants access…
The Netherlands’ competition authority has once again increased a fine levied against Apple for failing to comply with an antitrust order related to payment tech and dating apps. The fifth penalty payment of €5 million issued today means the tech giant is now on the hook for €25M (out of a possible total of €50M)…
RIP Mark Zuckerberg’s “time well spent“? In a move that appears to coincide with Facebook/Meta reporting slowing growth, photo-sharing app Instagram appears to have quietly removed the ability for mobile users to set a lower daily time limit reminder than 30 minutes. Indeed, the app’s UX design nudges people to choose a three hour ‘limit’…
Volta Trucks — the Swedish electric vehicle startup that believes it can build better urban delivery vehicles and other trucks that are safer and take up a smaller carbon footprint than their gas-guzzling, more clumsy, existing counterparts — has closed a big round of funding to help it through that last mile of work before…
PayMongo founders (from left to right): Jaime Hing III, Chief Technology Officer, Francis Plaza, Chief Executive Officer and Luis Sia, Chief Commercial Officer Philippines-based fintech PayMongo, which enables merchants to accept digital payments, announced today it has raised $31 million in Series B funding with an eye on regional expansion. Investors include Justin Mateen’s JAM…
Welcome to my new weekly fintech focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it turns into a…
