Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Y Combinator’s new era, with smaller batches, a refocus only on early-stage investing and a new chief executive, is in full swing. As The TechCrunch team sat through…
That will be VC’s biggest fundraising question in 2023 One of the biggest venture capital trends of the last few years was early-stage firms raising “opportunity” funds to make follow-on investments into their most successful bets. But amid a tougher fundraising market that impacts both VCs and startups, muted exit environment and slowdown in late-stage…
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. Hello, and welcome to your Friday. Did the week drag on, or did it go by quickly for you? Or maybe you had today off. No matter, I’m here to bring you…
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. Hello, and welcome to your Friday. Did the week drag on, or did it go by quickly for you? Or maybe you had today off. No matter, I’m here to bring you…
Insurance is one of the few industries that have remained largely unchanged over the past few decades at a low level: You suffer losses as a direct result of something going south, and you get paid by your insurer. But that old model doesn’t always work. For example, a construction company in a region regularly…
The app strikes a great resemblance to Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media platform with 260M MAUs Amid a wave of heated debate over whether TikTok should be banned, another ByteDance product, Lemon8, has popped up and quickly climbed into the top 10 on America’s app stores. Lemon8’s sudden rise is reminiscent of TikTok’s early-day growth.…
India’s central bank has halted its plans for a high-profile project intended to rival the nation’s dominant payment system, Unified Payments Interface. The project had attracted significant interest from a variety of major conglomerates, tech giants, and financial institutions, including Amazon, Reliance, Facebook, Tata Group, Google, HDFC, and ICICI. The Reserve Bank of India had…
Tesla has nominated JB Straubel, the company’s former CTO who is now running his own startup Redwood Materials, as its next independent board member. The company said in a regulatory filing Thursday that Straubel, if elected by shareholders (which is almost a certainty) would take over the spot vacated by Hiromichi Mizuno, the former chief…
The tech world’s hottest new toy may find itself in legal hot water as AI’s tendency to invent news articles and events comes up against defamation laws. Can an AI model like ChatGPT even commit libel? Like so much surrounding the technology, it’s unknown and unprecedented — but upcoming legal challenges may change that. Defamation…
Cows are a significant source of methane emissions, primarily due to their unique digestive system. Milk and beef cows are ruminants, which means they have a specialized stomach chamber (called the rumen), which houses billions of microbes that facilitate the breakdown of fibrous plant material. The process is called “enteric fermentation,” and as these microbes…
