The right people to solve the trillion-dollar student debt crisis might be the ones who are suffering from it the hardest. If you’re a recent college graduate, there’s a 50% chance you took on debt when you moved off campus. If you’re like the average student borrower, you graduated with $29,800 of loan debt, and…
Is there room for another social media platform? ShareChat, a four-year-old social network in India that serves tens of million of people in regional languages, just answered that question with a $100 million financing round led by global giant Twitter . Other than Twitter, TrustBridge Partners, and existing investors Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF…
Navin Chaddha Contributor Navin Chaddha leads Mayfield. The firm invests in early-stage consumer and enterprise technology companies and currently has $2.7 billion under management. More posts by this contributor A people-first view of investing in innovation or entrepreneurs who take people for granted will fail Jason Kilar on founding Vessel and the wonderful world of…
Earlier this summer, YouTube announced its plans for a new AR feature for virtual makeup try-on that works directly in the YouTube app. Today, the first official campaign to use the “Beauty Try-On” feature has now launched, allowing viewers to try on and shop lipsticks from MAC Cosmetics from YouTube creator Roxette Arisa’s makeup tutorial…
Eden Farm is a startup with the ambitious goal of building a food distribution network for Indonesia, where many restaurants currently rely on markets for fresh ingredients. But this means high markups and unreliable supplies for restaurant owners and lower profits for farmers, co-founder and CEO David Gunawan tells TechCrunch. The company, part of Y…
Understanding what makes something offensive or hurtful is difficult enough that many people can’t figure it out, let alone AI systems. And people of color are frequently left out of AI training sets. So it’s little surprise that Alphabet/Google -spawned Jigsaw manages to trip over both of these issues at once, flagging slang used by…
Sleeper is looking to take on fantasy league apps from major players like ESPN and has amassed venture funding from Silicon Valley investors to take down them down. The Bay Area startup is aiming to treat a fantasy football league more like a social platform than a loose jumble of league mechanics, distinguishing itself as…
Two major U.S. carriers, AT&T and T-Mobile, announced this morning a plan to team up to protect their respective customer bases from the scourge of scam robocalls. The two companies will today begin to roll out new cross-network call authentication technology based on the SHAKEN/STIR standards — a sort of universal caller ID system designed…
Nigerian freight logistics startup Kobo360 has raised a $20 million Series A round led by Goldman Sachs and $10 million in working capital financing from Nigerian commercial banks. The company — with an Uber -like app that connects truckers and companies to delivery services — will use the funds to upgrade its platform and expand…
As part of new efforts toward accessibility, Google announced Project Euphonia at I/O in May: An attempt to make speech recognition capable of understanding people with non-standard speaking voices or impediments. The company has just published a post and its paper explaining some of the AI work enabling the new capability. The problem is simple…
