Alibaba has always aspired to bring its e-commerce service to customers outside China. Its strategy is multi-thronged. The giant’s house-developed AliExpress has found success in Russia in recent years. In 2016, it bought Lazada, which came out of the Rocket Internet empire, and has helped the Southeast Asia-focused marketplace compete. Lazada grew 80% to hit…
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, December 16! A small note that Greg is taking over this newsletter tomorrow, as I am burning through a spare personal day that I…
Instant grocery — where urban-dwelling consumers buy food and other essentials and can get them delivered in 15 minutes or less — continues to be a big business, and one of the juggernauts in the space is now raising a big round of funding to meet that opportunity: GoPuff is in the process of raising…
Enterprise SaaS for measuring company carbon emission is hot. Only recently Planetly was acquired by OneTrust for an undisclosed amount. And there are plenty of other startups in the space such as Plan A, Watershed, and Emitwise, all with their own take on the market. Now France-based Sweep, which targets carbon management in large enterprises…
Two years into a worldwide pandemic, outfits around the globe are wrestling with how to resume their in-person operations safely. Consider that Apple just scrapped its office-return deadline, while Google, which plans to require its workforce to return to its offices three times a week at some point next year, made it clear to employees…
Electric vehicle startup Canoo is ending its deal with Dutch automotive manufacturing company VDL Nedcar to serve as its contract manufacturer in Europe, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Wednesday. A separate filing reveals that Canoo will also be exploring a new deal with VDL Groep, another Dutch auto manufacturing company, to…
The odds are against San Francisco-based electric vehicle battery swapping company Ample. Other companies have tried to build a business on exchanging dead batteries for fresh ones to solve the problem of long EV charge times: Fourteen years ago, Better Place raised nearly a billion dollars to do what Ample’s doing, and it ended up…
Signal AI, an artificial intelligence startup that trawls the vast sea of internet and other publicly available data to provide organizations with sentiment insights and other information to make better business decisions, has raised $50 million. It plans to use the funds to continue building out its AI platform to bring in more diversified data…
Kenyan startup Wowzi has secured new funding to expand the reach of its platform, which turns social media users into brand influencers, to West and Southern Africa — as it taps the increasing usage of social sites across the continent driven by the proliferation of smartphones and a deepening internet penetration. Wowzi, which connects social…
The Oversight Board, a group Facebook created to review its policy decisions, weighed in on a case of misinformation in war-torn Ethiopia Tuesday, warning the company about the risks of allowing hate speech and unverified information to spread freely in conflict zones. The Oversight Board reviewed a post in Amharic from an Ethiopia-based Facebook user…
