For a CEO who insists his electric vehicle startup doesn’t want to be Tesla, Rivian founder RJ Scaringe can sound a lot like Elon Musk. Just weeks before unveiling Rivian’s first vehicles — an all-electric pickup and a seven-seater SUV — at the LA Auto Show last month, Scaringe promised an impressive new battery technology…
Boosted has scored some serious cash as it looks to move beyond the world of electric skateboards to conquer new forms of personal transportation. The startup announced today that it has closed a $60 million round of Series B funding co-led by Khosla Ventures and iNovia Capital. Stanford’s StartX and Bay Meadows also participated in the round.…
The digital revolution has spawned ‘challenger’ banks that operate entirely online, with no high street presence. That phenomenon has taken off in Europe — particularly the UK — but over in Hong Kong, one of the world’s key financial hubs, the digital-only push is coming to the insurance industry. Bowtie, a Hong Kong-based digital insurer, just…
In the city, we’re constantly saturated with the radio waves from 10 or 20 different routers, cell towers and other wireless infrastructure. But in rural communities there might only be one internet connection for a whole village. LibreRouter is a hardware and software project that looks to let those communities build their own modern, robust…
Microsoft today announced a new Office app that’s now available to Windows Insiders and that will soon roll out to all Windows 10 users. The new Office app will replace the existing My Office app (yeah, those names…). While the existing app was mostly about managing Office 365 subscriptions, the new app provides significantly more…
Elementary Robotics has raised $3.6 million in seed funding to begin building a manufacturing facility and expand its presence in Los Angeles as the city continues to grow as a hub for robotics and automation. Earlier this year, Embodied announced a $22 million round for its personal robotics platform focused on healthcare and wellness, while InVia Robotics…
As Facebook continues to grasp the severity of the situation in Myanmar, where the UN has concluded that its social network plays “determining role” in inciting genocide, the U.S. tech giant has completed a third sweep in recent months to remove bad actors from its platform. Facebook said late Tuesday U.S. time that it has…
Uber has been granted permission by the state of Pennsylvania to reinstate tests of its autonomous vehicles, as first reported by Reuters. A spokesperson for Uber confirmed to TechCrunch that the ride-hailing giant received a letter of authorization from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and clarified that the company has not yet resumed self-driving operations. Uber…
Developers and hipsters, it’s time to join together and ditch your web browser to read this article. Kosuke Yoshimura developed a fun little project and shared it on Product Hunt today. TechCrunch-CLI is a command line interface that lets you read TechCrunch articles in text mode. As my colleague Devin Coldewey suggested, TextCrunch would also…
Seismic has been helping companies create and manage their sales and marketing collateral since 2010. Today the company announced a $100 million Series E investment on a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and T Rowe Price. Existing investors General Atlantic, JMI Equity and Jackson Square Ventures also participated in…
