TechCrunch Industry News

Twitter staff must really be wishing for a quiet life… Elon Musk, the gadfly billionaire who recently decided he wants to add the social media platform to his collection of tech firms, has just tweeted that his $43BN bid to buy the company is “on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stock-outs, unpredictable prices of farm produce and a lack of working capital are among the challenges that plague small restaurants and food vendors in emerging markets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

African payments company Interswitch has secured a $110 million joint investment from LeapFrog Investments and Tana Africa Capital to scale its digital payment services across the continent, the two private investment firms said in a statement Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

VC firm Educapital recently announced that it has reached the first close of its second fund. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While (former) startups like Lemonade came along to attack the tired world of insurance, the travel insurance market is now coming in for the same treatment from the likes of Safetywing (covered by TC here) and Battleface. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Automating customer service tasks, particularly those that require agents to speak with customers on the phone, is something of a holy grail in the enterprise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Israeli trip-planning app Moovit is integrating with Orlando-based autonomous shuttle startup Beep, which will allow riders to view options for taking Beep shuttles alongside other forms of transit, like buses or trains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cloudflare today announced that it’s collaborating with Deno, the development company behind the eponymous Deno runtime, and individual contributors of the Node.js open source project to create standards that enable developers to write code between Deno, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Atma, an Indonesian startup that wants to make job hunting less painful, announced today it has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding led by AC Ventures, with participation from Global Founders Capital. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft is throwing its weight behind Epic Games in the fight against Apple — and bringing Fortnite back to iOS in the process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In February, Peloton CEO John Foley stepped down as the connected fitness pioneer cut 2,800 jobs. No one could say the news was unexpected. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Porsche has read the room. With its first electric vehicle now outselling the quintessential 911 sports car, the German automaker is responding by upping its bet on EVs, in part via a hefty investment in lithium-silicon battery developer Group14 Technologies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pinterest on Monday launched a new app aimed at making it easier for creators to live stream to its platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amberdata, an institutionally-focused digital asset data provider, has raised $30 million in its Series B, its CEO Shawn Douglass exclusively told TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hundreds of rocket engines manufactured by startup Ursa Major will be going to space company Phantom Space over the next few years, part of a massive order that reflects Phantom’s bullish stance on the small launch market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AccelByte, a platform that helps game creators build backend services and tools, has raised $60 million in Series B led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from Sony Interactive Entertainment and returning backers Galaxy Interactive and NetEase. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NFTs are being used for far more than just proving you own a JPEG on the internet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Union Square Ventures (USV), the 19-year-old, New York-based venture firm, has raised $275 million for its eighth early-stage fund and $350 million for its fourth opportunity fund, the firm announced in a blog post yesterday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okra Solar walked away with the trophy and a giant check at our 2019 Shenzhen Hardware Battlefield event. It’s a moment happily eternalized in a new press release announcing the renewable energy startup’s $2.1 million new round (it’s a nice photo. I used it on this post, too). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Airbnb is going all in on the “live anywhere, work anywhere” philosophy that much of the business world has been forced to adopt, committing to full-time remote work for most employees and a handful of perks like 90 days of international work/travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was last year that we covered the $11.2M fundraise for Sienna Network, the ‘privacy decentralized’ startup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks to the explosion of low- and no-code development tools, building web apps from scratch has become easier — and cheaper — than it once was. But sophisticated search and navigation functions can complicate the process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Smallstep founder and CEO Mike Malone calls big, distributed systems his happy place, but these systems involve a lot of machine-to-machine communications, an area identity vendors haven’t been able to solve. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I’ve been covering Apple in various capacities for a long time now. Over the years, I don’t know that I’ve seen an announcement from the company as unexpected and warmly received as Self Service Repair. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

General Motors expects full-year 2022 expenses at Cruise, the automaker’s autonomous driving subsidiary, to be approximately $2 billion, according to GM’s chief financial officer Paul Jacobson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices