TechCrunch Startup News

When Refraction AI was founded in 2019, its goal was to use robotics to bring down the cost of last-mile delivery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Peer-to-peer car sharing company Turo is expanding to New York State and France in June, the company said on Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Whether to power translation to document summarization, enterprises are increasing their investments in natural language processing (NLP) technologies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Strong Compute, a Sydney, Australia-based startup that helps developers remove the bottlenecks in their machine learning training pipelines, today announced that it has raised a $7.8 million seed round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

More than 80% of food delivery orders in Latin America are still made over phone calls and settled with cash. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

About 80% of household retail in sub-Saharan Africa is delivered through informal channels, which perennially face several challenges like stockouts, leading to an instability in earnings, and a lack of attractiveness to financiers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mintlify, a startup developing software to automate software documentation tasks, today announced that it raised $2.8 million in a seed round led by by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from TwentyTwo Ventures and Quinn Slack, Sourcegraph’s co-founder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The excitement around web3 and the metaverse have pulled plenty of entrepreneurs who defined the first generation of native mobile apps to begin questioning what’s next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Firework provides tools for retailers and consumer brands to tap into their own customer data to build engaging video experiences across their own digital properties and social channels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fresh off a $100 million funding round, Hugging Face, which provides hosted AI services and a community-driven portal for AI tools and data sets, today announced a new product in collaboration with Microsoft. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I wrote my big TC1 on Bowery Farming late last year, there was a lot of talk of the company’s third commercial farming site in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Although we’ve long understood that asteroids are not simply the rubble of the universe, but potentially profitable stores of precious minerals, humanity has never been able to unlock this value. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Weeks after laying off about 30% of its staff, MainStreet is said to be raising another round of funding at a $200 million valuation, sources tell TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Swedish payment giant Klarna is going to cut hundreds of jobs in the coming days. Today’s news comes a few days after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company was going to cut its valuation in order to raise fresh capital. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Unless you live near a port, you probably don’t think much of the tens of thousands of container ships tearing through the seas, hauling some 1.8 billion metric tons of stuff each year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What makes FloorFound stand out from its competitors is its approach to putting retailers, which often struggle with how to effectively do returns, at the center of recommerce. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dig, a Tel Aviv-based cloud data security startup, has emerged from stealth with an $11 million investment to help organizations protect data stored in public cloud environments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

ChargeLab, a Toronto-based startup that builds software to operate and optimize electric vehicle charging equipment for fleets and commercial customers, has raised a $15 million Series A round. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joby Aviation, a California-based company developing electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOL) for commercial passenger service, announced the acquisition of Avionyx, an aerospace software engineering firm, on the TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility stage on Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Singapore-based venture firm Jungle Ventures is digging deeper into Southeast Asia and India with the close of its fourth fund. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Palette, a software-as-a-service startup that is going to be particularly interesting if you’re also running a software-as-a-service startup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The pandemic has majorly affected the global supply chain, with 60% of U.S. adults in an August 2021 Gallup survey saying that they’ve been unable to get a product they wanted in the past two months because of shortages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The gig economy has, to use a well-worn word, disrupted industries from ride-hailing to quick-service restaurants. Contract work has its downsides, namely on the pay and benefits side of the equation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uber Eats is launching two autonomous delivery pilots in Los Angeles on Monday with Serve Robotics, a robotic sidewalk delivery startup, and Motional, an autonomous vehicle technology company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tel Aviv-based Classiq, a startup that wants to make it easier for developers to build quantum algorithms and applications, today announced that it has raised additional funding for its service by adding HSBC, NTT Finance, and Intesa Sanpaolo as new investors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices