As she sat in the airport with a one-way ticket in her hand, Tiffany Filler wondered how she would pick up the pieces of her life, with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt and nothing to show for it. A day earlier, she was expelled from Tufts University veterinary school. As a Canadian,…
Mobike is cutting its international department after a period of aggressive growth. In a telling sign of the state of bike sharing, Mobike, a once red-hot startup that attracted billions in investment capital, is closing down all international operations and putting its sole focus on China. On Friday, Mobike laid off its operations teams in…
PolyAI, a London startup founded by experts in the field of “conversational AI” — including CEO Nikola Mrkšić who was previously the first engineer at Apple-acquired VocalIQ — has raised $12 million in Series A funding to deploy its tech in customer support contact centres. The round was led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from…
The next phase of social media is about hanging out together while apart. Rather than performing on a live stream or engaging with a video chat, Instagram may allow you to chill and watch videos together with a friend. Facebook already has Watch Party for group co-viewing, and in November we broke the news that…
It’s the FCC’s official duty to promote connectivity throughout the U.S., and as part of that it issues a yearly report on improvements to broadband deployment. The latest report, however, seems to contain an error large enough to throw its numbers completely off what Chairman Ajit Pai has already claimed. His office says that they…
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Mark Zuckerberg discovers privacy In a long post published yesterday, the Facebook CEO laid out his vision for making Facebook’s products…
Playfair Capital, the U.K. seed investor, has raised a new $32 million fund to continue investing in promising early-stage tech startups. The VC firm, founded in 2013 by Federico Pirzio-Biroli, who is fund II’s sole LP, is an early investor in the likes of Stripe, Ravelin, Thought Machine, CryptoFacilities and Mapillary. Pirzio-Biroli recently re-located to…
Taxify, the ride-hailing company from Estonia backed by Didi and Daimler and now active in 30 countries, is making a key shift in its business today as it gears up for its next stage of growth. The company is removing “taxi” from its name and rebranding as Bolt, the same name that it has been…
With the swelling confidence of a colonial power happening upon a long-settled distant land, today Mark Zuckerberg discovered the concept of privacy. In a ballooning 3,225 words — a roughly average word count for the terminally verbose Facebook founder — Zuckerberg informed his miserably loyal 2.3 billion plus subjects that his company has happened upon…
No moment wowed the audience at last year’s I/O more than Duplex. The demo of the artificial intelligence restaurant and appointment booking program left many in the audience wondering whether Google had just pulled a fast one over on them. Turns out, it’s real. Over the summer, I got a chance to test drive Duplex…
