Embark Trucks, the autonomous trucking company that went public in 2021 via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, is cutting its workforce in an effort to reduce costs and preserve cash. And the pain may not be over. The company said in a regulatory filing that about 230 employees were laid off Friday.…
Japanese marketing tech firm Geniee, part of the SoftBank Group, has paid about $70 million in cash to acquire the revenue optimization platform Zelto (formerly known as AdPushup), a person familiar with the matter said, delivering 40 times return to a number of angel investors in the startup that began its journey in India. The…
Twitter’s paid plan Twitter Blue is now available to more than 20 new countries in Europe. These countries include Netherlands, Poland, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, Romania, Czech Republic, Finland, Denmark, Greece, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Croatia, Luxembourg, Malta, and Cyprus. This expansion makes the social network’s subscription service available in more than…
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Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Ed Markey (D-MA) wrote a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging him to halt Meta’s plans to open Horizon Worlds to teens. Per a leaked memo, Meta may open access to its social VR platform for users aged 13 to 17 as early as this month. “Any strategy to…
While a partner at a VC firm, Nicolas Sharp took on the project of finding customer relationship management (CRM) software for the firm. The process, he says, was “a nightmare,” leading him to build a CRM platform that could meet his — and his company’s — needs. “I became a developer by night and a…
Robinhood announced Wednesday that its self-custodial crypto wallet app is now for all users on iOS. The wallet first debuted last September in beta with 10,000 users and no network charges for swapping Polygon’s MATIC tokens. In January, the company rolled it out to over 1 million users on the waitlist. While the app first…
Android was, predictably, everywhere at Mobile World Congress. At a show where Apple has no public-facing presence, Google’s mobile operating system is almost entirely ubiquitous. As in past years, the company also set up a sprawling outdoor booth between halls. This time, the focus was on interoperability and ecosystem. You’d be hard-pressed to find a…
To coincide with the rollout of the ChatGPT API, OpenAI today launched the Whisper API, a hosted version of the open source Whisper speech-to-text model that the company released in September. Priced at $0.006 per minute, Whisper is an automatic speech recognition system that OpenAI claims enables “robust” transcription in multiple languages as well as…
Every year, about 35% of the food supply in the U.S. is wasted. About half of that’s because of picky eaters or outsize restaurant portions, but the rest happens further upstream, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with about 6% to 13% occurring at grocery stores. For grocery stores, which operate on very thin…
