Koio, the high-end sneakers brand led by Chris Wichert and Johannes Quodt, has today raised an additional $6 million in Series A funding, bringing total Series A funding to $9 million. The round was led by Founders Fund, with participation from existing investors Acton Capital Partners and Brand Foundry, among others. The direct-to-consumer product was…
Lilium, the Munich-based startup developing an on-demand “air taxi” service, has released its latest flight video — this time demonstrating a successful transition from vertical flight (liftoff) to horizontal flight. The company is also announcing the completion of its first manufacturing facility and plans for a much larger second factory in preparation for a 2025…
Heaven forbid a political candidate’s Facebook account gets hacked. They might spread disinformation…like they’re already allowed to do in Facebook ads… Today Facebook made a slew of announcements designed to stop 2020 election interference. “The bottom line here is that elections have changed significantly since 2016,” and so has Facebook in response, CEO Mark Zuckerberg…
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Pixel 4 review: Google ups its camera game Brian Heater was impressed by the improvements in Google’s latest smartphone, including camera…
For the second time this year, Netflix is offering $2 billion in debt to fund its investment in content, including original programming, content acquisitions, investments, and more. The news was announced on Monday morning, and was followed by a slight dip in Netflix’s stock price. The decision to increase its investment in content production follows…
Thousands of ransomware victims may finally get some long-awaited relief. New Zealand-based security company Emsisoft has built a set of decryption tools for Stop, a family of ransomware that includes Djvu and Puma, which they say could help victims recover some of their files. Stop is believed to be the most active ransomware in the…
Tilting Point announced yesterday that it has acquired Gondola, a company that aims to increase game monetization by optimizing in-game offers and video ads. Tilting Point CEO Kevin Segalla described his company’s model as “progressive publishing” — usually, mobile game developers start working with Tilting Point because they need help with user acquisition, and then…
With about 278 million cars globally, the stakes are high. Autonomous vehicles are often painted as a utopian-like technology that will transform parking lots into parks and eliminate traffic fatalities — a number that reached 1.35 million globally in 2018. Even if, as many predict, autonomous vehicles are deployed en masse, the road to that…
Japan has officially announced that it will participate with NASA’s Lunar Gateway project (via NHK), which will seek to establish an orbital research and staging station around the Moon. The Lunar Gateway is a key component of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to land the first American woman and the next American man on the…
Safaricom’s Nairobi based Alpha innovation incubator may have an uncertain future, according to sources. With two high-level departures, and the passing of Safaricom’s CEO Bob Collymore, there are questions on how or if Alpha will continue to operate. The space was established in 2017 to spur new product development for Safaricom, which is Kenya’s largest…
