With vaccination rates slowing in the U.S., the White House is getting creative about getting shots in arms. Beyond protecting yourself and others from from a deadly disease, the latest incentive to get vaccinated could help you find love (or get laid). The White House COVID-19 response team announced Friday that a number of popular…
European Union lawmakers are facing further pressure to step in and do something about lackadaisical enforcement of the bloc’s flagship data protection regime after the European Parliament voted yesterday to back a call urging the Commission to start an infringement proceeding against Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) for not “properly enforcing” the regulation. The Commission…
TaniHub Group, an Indonesian startup that helps farmers get better prices and more customers for their crops, has raised a $65.5 million Series B. The funding was led by MDI Ventures, the investment arm of Telkom Group, one of Indonesia’s largest telecoms, with participation from Add Ventures, BRI Ventures, Flourish Ventures, Intudo Ventures, Openspace Ventures,…
Vietnam has one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, but many major platforms still focus on large cities. This means people in smaller cities or rural areas need to deal with longer wait times for deliveries. Social commerce company Mio is taking advantage of that gap by building a reseller network and logistics…
Watching construction tech software company Procore go public today after pricing above its range makes the IPO slowdown look like the deceleration that wasn’t. Investors quickly bid up the company’s value in trading, giving Procore a higher valuation than it might have anticipated, along with a boost of confidence for the IPO market in general.…
So, true story. Over the weekend I was talking to someone about restaurant robotics. It’s a concept people often have trouble visualizing — and understandably so. Among other things, there’s really no commonly accepted form factor in a category that sometimes is literally a robot arm flipping hamburgers. My short response was, “they’re large kiosks…
Digital payments are going mainstream around the world. By the end of 2020, there were more than 300 mobile money providers with over 100,000 active users, according to a report published by GSMA, an industry association for mobile network operators. Altogether, over 300 million mobile money accounts were active every month around the world. Mobile…
Zhang Yiming, the storied co-founder of ByteDance, is stepping down from his role as the CEO and passing the torch to Liang Rubo, another co-founder of the TikTok parent and one of the world’s most valuable internet juggernauts. In an internal letter to employees, 38-year-old age Zhang said he is making the transition to spend…
Electric aviation company Wisk Aero filed a motion for a preliminary injunction Wednesday in its ongoing lawsuit with rival electric air travel startup Archer Aviation. The injunction could put a serious wrench in Archer’s operations should the courts approve it. Wisk has asked the court to immediately prohibit Archer from using 52 trade secrets that…
Ro, a digital elective care and telemedicine provider last valued at $5 billion, announced today that it has acquired Modern Fertility, a reproductive health company founded in 2017. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Axios estimates it sold for $225 million in a majority-stock deal. The company did not immediately respond to a…
