On the one hand, you’ve got Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey lamenting the “like” button’s existence, and threatening to just kill the thing off entirely for incentivizing the wrong kind of behavior. On the other hand, you have twttr — Twitter’s prototype app where the company is testing new concepts including, most recently, a way to…
Uber’s announcement of its IPO pricing earlier today came with a $500 million belated Easter egg. The payments giant PayPal is making a half-billion-dollar investment in the company, paying $47 per share, which gives the company a valuation of $78.8 billion (in the middle of the range of Uber’s IPO pricing of $44-$50 per share).…
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Kate and Alex are back (again), bringing you the latest on the IPO front. As Friday is coming to a close, we’ll keep this post short to leave plenty of room for you to dig into the audio.…
If free nations demand companies store data locally, it legitimizes that practice for authoritarian nations which can then steal that data for their own nefarious purposes, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He laid out the threat in a new 93-minute video of a discussion with Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari released today as part…
London-based startup Wheely has raised a $15 million Series B round led by Concentric with Oleg Tscheltzoff, Misha Sokolov and other investors also participating. The company wants to build an Uber competitor focused on the luxury market. It’s a bit ironic when you think about it as Uber started as a luxury company. But everybody…
The never-ending quest to kill Comcast is poised to receive some renewed investment as an ambitious startup readies to secure some new cash. Starry, a Boston-based wireless broadband internet startup, has filed to raise up to $125 million in Series D funding according to a Delaware stock authorization filing uncovered by Pitchbook. If Starry closes…
Third time lucky — unless you’re Facebook . The social networking giant was hit Thursday by a trio of investigations over its privacy practices following a particularly tumultuous month of security lapses and privacy violations — the latest in a string of embarrassing and damaging breaches at the company, much of its own doing. First…
Huawei’s controversial status in North America and Europe stems from a lot of different factors. At the heart of most of them, however, is the hardware maker’s alleged ties to the Chinese government. The notion of government control has been enough to cause something approaching an outright ban on its products in the States, over…
Labster, the Denmark headquartered startup building virtual laboratory simulations for STEM students, has raised $21 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is Owl Ventures, with participation from Balderton Capital, Northzone and Swisscom Ventures. Previous backers Nordic Makers, David Helgason, EduCapital and Entangled Group also followed on, bringing the total raised by the company…
Tesla reported Wednesday wider-than-expected loss of $702 million, or $4.10 a share, in the first quarter after disappointing delivery numbers, costs and pricing adjustments to its vehicles threw the automaker off of its profitability track. The loss included $188 million of non-recurring charges. When adjusted for one-time losses, Tesla lost $494 million, or $2.90 a…
