FlexClub, a South African startup that matches investors and drivers to cars for ride-hailing services, closed a $1.2 million seed round led by CRE Venture Capital. The company will use the financing to add team members and expand off the continent through a partnership with Uber Mexico. The move comes as Africa’s tech-transit space continues…
Elon Musk’s shoes — a custom pair of Nikes with a Tesla logo emblazoned above the toe box — were the belle of the company’s Model Y unveiling last week. The reaction, during the event and later on the Tesla forums and social media, not only shot the company behind the custom kicks into the…
Atlassian today announced that it has acquired AgileCraft, a service that aims to give enterprises plan their strategic projects and workstreams. The service provides business leaders with additional insights into the current status of technical projects and gives them insights into the bottlenecks, risks and dependencies of these projects. Indeed, the focus of AgileCraft is…
Album exclusives are nothing new in the age of Tidal, of course. But Moby’s latest is taking a kind of circuitous route to the world’s mobile devices. The electronic artist has released his latest, Long Ambients 2, as an exclusive through the Calm meditation app. The album dropped over the weekend in celebration of World…
In the name of getting big quick, it seems like some of the most valuable private tech companies are turning to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as a way to accelerate business growth. So-called “unicorns”—privately-held technology companies which achieve billion-dollar valuations sometime before (or as a direct result of) going public or exiting via M&A—are chomping…
Benjamin Fernandes, the Tanzanian co-founder chief executive of Nala, spent hundreds of hours talking to local Tanzanians about their frustrations with mobile money payment services before he launched his new payment platform. While at least a hundred million Africans hold mobile money accounts, the process of transacting over the services is difficult, so Tala made…
Welcome back to this week’s transcribed edition of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast that unpacks the numbers behind the headlines. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts the words of our wildly popular venture capital podcast, Equity, in your eyes instead of your ears. This week, along with guest Anu Duggal, the…
Lots of news and interesting tidbits to wrap up the week. Apple kerfuffles Apple has been vindicated (for a brief moment anyway) in its long-standing dispute with Qualcomm. From Stephen Nellis at Reuters: A U.S. federal judge has issued a preliminary ruling that Qualcomm Inc owes Apple Inc nearly $1 billion in patent royalty rebate…
In a rare turn, director James Gunn is once again heading up up the third installment of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy series. Gunn, who directed the previous two films, was fired over the summer when offensive tweets dating from between 2008 and 2011 resurfaced after being promoted by right-wing personalities like Jack Posobiec and…
As healthcare moves toward genetically tailored treatments, one of the biggest hurdles to truly personalized medicine is the lack of fast, low-cost genetic testing. And few people are more familiar with the problems of today’s genetic diagnostics tools than Kalim Mir, the 52-year-old founder of XGenomes, who has spent his entire professional career studying the…
