TechCrunch Industry News

Dukaan, a one-year-old Bangalore-based startup that enables merchants to set up online stores and sell products digitally, said on Monday it has raised $11 million in a new financing round as it looks to broaden its offerings and deepen footprints in the South Asian market. The new financing round, a Pre-Series A, was led by […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rivian announced Friday that the first edition version of its all-electric R1T pickup truck has an official EPA range of 314 miles, while its R1T SUV comes in a skosh higher at 316 miles. The official range and fuel economy values have been posted on the U.S. EPA website. The official numbers align with Rivian’s […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Add the Roadster to the list of delayed Tesla vehicles. On Wednesday, CEO Elon Musk said the performance EV wouldn’t make its previously announced 2022 shipment date. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Challenger bank Point has raised a $46.5 million Series B funding round. The company offers an account associated with a debit card. And the startup positions itself as a premium debit card company and tries to offer credit card rewards with debit cards. Existing investor Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures is investing more money in the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adch...

Beleaguered electric truck developer Nikola Corp. has inked a new agreement with Bosch for its hydrogen fuel cell modules. The modules will be used to power two of Nikola’s hydrogen-fueled semi-trucks, the short-haul Nikola Tre and Nikola Two sleeper. “This announcement is the result of a multi-year working relationship with Bosch,” Nikola CEO Mark Russell said […] Learn more about your ad choice...

The FAA is looking into an anomaly on the Virgin Galactic flight that carried Richard Branson to space. Virgin's spacecraft went off-course during descent, triggering an "entry glide-cone warning." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Private equity firm Apollo Global Management this morning announced that it has completed its acquisition of Yahoo (formerly known as Verizon Media Group, itself formerly known as Oath) from Verizon. The deal is worth $5 billion, with $4.25 billion in cash, plus preferred interests of $750 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If the world is to reach NetZero, and avoid climate disaster it needs to make every product sustainable and that means every purchase. But to do that you need a lot more transparency, so that means more data on suppliers to improve sourcing and benchmarking companies. While companies are often doing their best, the problem […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies is getting into the NFT game. Larva Labs, the creator of CryptoPunks, just signed with United Talent Agency (UTA) in a representation deal that will bring one of the earliest and most iconic NFT projects into the entertainment and branding worlds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft offered a broad “Holiday 2021” release date when it announced Windows 11, back in June. Of course, it didn’t specify precisely which holiday. Perhaps the company was aiming for World Teachers’ Day, a belated Sukkot or an extremely early Halloween. After strongly implying a late-October release a few months back (which some pointing to […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...

China’s National Press and Publication Administration has released a notice imposing limits on online gaming for minors. On September 1st, video game companies will have to restrict gaming time to three hours a week — from 8 PM to 9 PM on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Astra, now a public company, ran into a problem during its first commercial launch (the mission carried a test payload contracted by the U.S. Space Force as part of its Space Test Program) that meant the rocket never made it to orbit. On Saturday, the rocket ignited all its engines at liftoff time on the […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

India has a fascination for gold. The households in the South Asian market are estimated to have a stash of over 25,000 tons of the precious metal, whose value today is about half of the country’s nominal GDP. But much of this gold has been sitting idly in lockers in big metal wardrobes for generations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Can an old Terminal learn new tricks? Fig, a company out of Y Combinator’s S20 class, has raised a $2.2M seed round to prove that it can. Their goal: augment (but don’t try to replace) the command line terminal that so many people use every day and make it more powerful and easy to use […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It isn’t only tech giants that are struggling to fill open roles with talented individuals, it’s your local Jamba Juice, too. Since 2017, San Francisco-based Workstream has been working on an answer to recruitment for the hourly worker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Canalys released its quarterly U.S. PC sales today, and while the news was quite good with sales overall up 17% YoY, the growth slowed significantly from the prior quarter when sales soared to 74% pushed by the pandemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last year, Instagram unveiled Shops as part of Facebook’s larger pivot toward e-commerce. Shops is front-and-almost-center on the app’s bottom navigation bar, even more readily accessible than the button to upload a new photo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

During a banner year for connected fitness, Peloton stumbled, as its two treadmills – the Tread+ and Tread – drew the scrutiny of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The two eventually collaborated for the planned recall of 125,000 Tread+ units, while offering fixes to 6,450 Treads. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft is moving into the next phase of its plan to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to as many devices as possible, bringing it to Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One consoles this holiday season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

American automaker General Motors expanded its recall of Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles on Friday due to fire risks from battery manufacturing defects. The automaker said it would seek reimbursement from LG Chem, its battery cell manufacturing partner, for what it expects to be $1 billion worth of losses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cities like New York City, San Francisco and New Orleans are moving to enact COVID-19 vaccination requirements for indoor dining. So OpenTable, the online restaurant reservation service, is rolling out features to help restaurants streamline vaccination checks. Today, OpenTable announced a partnership with the biometric security company CLEAR, which allows users to create a digital […] Learn more...

An Indian startup that operates a business-to-business marketplace for manufacturing items is the latest to attain the coveted unicorn status in the South Asian market. Bangalore-based Zetwerk said on Monday it has raised $150 million in a Series E financing round led by New York based D1 Capital Partners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If Spotify is still a growth-focused company, shouldn't it preserve its capital to invest in exclusive podcasts and the like — efforts that may grant it pricing power in the future? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Remember that weird Will Smith movie about robots? Yeah, neither do we. But Elon Musk does. Tesla is developing a 5’8” Tesla Bot, with a prototype expected sometime next year. The news comes during Tesla’s inaugural AI Day, which was streamed on the company’s website Thursday night. The bot is being proposed as a non-automotive […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoic...

Databricks, the open-source data lake and data management powerhouse has been on quite a financial run lately. Today Bloomberg reported the company could be raising a new round worth at least $1.5 billion at an otherworldly $38 billion valuation. That price tag is up $10 billion from its last fundraise in February when it snagged […] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adcho...