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NEAR Protocol raises $21.6M from A16Z and launches its MainNet, beating Ethereum 2.0

It was only the other week that Andreesen Horowitz announced their second blockchain-focused fund of $515 million. In the announcement, they said: “We are still early in this Web 3 build-out. High-performance programmable blockchains will make decentralized network development much more accessible. After years of R&D, we are excited that a number of next-gen programmable […]




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Instabug raises $5M Series A round led by Accel, as mobile app usage surges

There are some startups that behave like sprinters, and others that run a marathon. I came across Instabug when I was in Cairo in 2013. Born during the chaotic era of the Arab Spring, this plucky startup managed to make it to TechCrunch Disrupt, then Y Combinator in 2016, then a $1.7 million in seed […]




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Cuckoo Internet closes seed funding to disrupt UK broadband market

Cuckoo Internet is a new U.K. startup that aims to disrupt the U.K. broadband market. It has now raised £470,000 in seed funding, which includes funding from work.fund, a new Silicon Valley fund operator fund led by Bart Macdonald (Sapling founder). Other investors include Lorin van Nuland (early investor in Betterment), Edward Campbell-Harris (Bulb early […]




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Axios’ Dan Primack on ‘the most polarizing startup that exists’

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.




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The portrait of an avatar as a young artist

In this episode of Flux I talk with LaTurbo Avedon, an online avatar who has been active as an artist and curator since 2008.





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HuffPost is reportedly on the auction block

Late last night the Financial Times reported that HuffPost, arguably one of the crown jewels of Verizon Media Group’s remaining network of media properties (which includes TechCrunch), is up for sale. Verizon has been shedding media properties in a retreat from the strategy that it had begun to execute with the acquisition of AOL for […]




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St. Louis-based Summersalt raises $17.3 million for its direct-to-consumer clothing line

The Midwest may not be known as the fashion capital of the world (or even the U.S.), but its place in the consumer retail firmament is secure through L Brands and its Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works subsidiaries. Now, venture investors are investing $17.3 million to establish another tent-pole clothing brand in the […]




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Extra Crunch Live: Join Precursor’s Charles Hudson for a Q&A this Thursday

The new Extra Crunch Live series is taking flight this week. Today we’re talking to Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee and Ted Wang. This Thursday we’re keeping the parade of well-known investors coming, when Charles Hudson will join Natasha Mascarenhas and I for a deep-dive into all things pre-seed and seed. Extra Crunch Live Episode 2: […]




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Have investment funds averted a liquidity crisis?

The $55tn industry has emerged scared and shrunken but largely intact




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Warburg to raise stake in Chinese car rental company

US private equity firm plans further share in group shaken by fallout from Luckin Coffee scandal




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LCF compensation decision looms

FSCS could compensate some investors in collapsed mini-bond issuer London Capital Finance




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Latest Isa rates

Up-to-date tax-efficient savings deals




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UK PLC cuts dividends by £24bn in face of crisis

Investors braced for years of lower payouts by some of the most reliable dividend-paying stocks




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Thyssenkrupp raises possibility of giving away factory unit

German conglomerate hopes to offload lossmaking division to focus on steel




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Jingye tries to save British Steel rescue deal

Chinese group writes to French government as it seeks to reassure over the future of Hayange plant




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PSA and BMW lead race to cut emissions in Europe

Early winners and losers emerge as carmakers scramble to hit tough new targets




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Chinese buyer of British Steel to pursue French arm

Jingye to keep close contact with Paris as it completes takeover and saves 3,200 jobs




is

European car plants close as industry crisis deepens

PSA and Fiat Chrysler to shut factories as demand tumbles and supply chains disrupted




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Ferguson sticks with main listing in UK after sounding out investors

FTSE 100 plumbing supplier runs into opposition from shareholders over switch to US




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Co-founder of Chinese carmaker Qoros sells half his stake

Idan Ofer’s Kenon offloads shares to majority owner Baoneng in $237m deal




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Diet autopilot Thistle raises $5M for health food subscriptions

What if it was easier to eat salad than junk food? Most diet routines take a ton of time, whether you’re cooking from scratch, making a meal kit or seeking a nutritious restaurant. But on-demand prepared food delivery companies like Sprig that tried to eliminate that work have gone bankrupt from poor unit economics. Thistle […]




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Tesla Model 3 makes Consumer Reports ‘Top Picks’ list for 2020

Tesla’s Model 3 is among the top 10 choices for car buyers in 2020, according to Consumer Reports. The nonprofit organization released its “Top Picks” of the year on Thursday, and it included Tesla’s most affordable vehicle alongside cars from automakers including Toyota, Subaru, Honda, Kia and Lexus. The Model 3 was chosen as one […]




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EV fleet management gets another venture-backed contender as Electriphi raises $3.5 million

Electriphi, a provider of charging management and fleet monitoring software for electric vehicles, has joined the scrum of startups looking to provide services to the growing number of electric vehicle fleets in the U.S. The San Francisco-based company has just raised $3.5 million in seed funding from investors, including Wireframe Ventures, the Urban Innovation Fund […]




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Panasonic is ending its solar cell partnership with Tesla

Panasonic said it will stop producing solar cells and modules at Tesla’s factory in Buffalo, N.Y., ending a four-year joint venture with the electric automaker.  Nikkei Asian Review was the first to report that Panasonic planned to end its production agreement with Tesla . Panasonic has since issued an announcement to explain its decision. Tesla […]




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YC graduate Genecis Bioindustries turns food waste into compostable plastics

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t have a constant quantity of problems, and while governments and most private businesses are focused on tackling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, companies like Genecis Bioindustries are working on technologies to solve another major problem: climate change. For over a decade, sustainability advocates and entrepreneurs have been searching for a way to […]




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Vericool raises $19.1 million for its plant-based packaging replacement for plastic coolers

Vericool, a Livermore, Calif.-based startup that’s replacing plastic coolers and packaging with plant-based products, has raised $19.1 million in a new round of financing. The company’s stated goal is to replace traditional packaging materials like polystyrene with plant-based insulating packaging materials. Its technology uses 100% recycled paper fibers and other plant-based materials, according to the […]




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Our love of the cloud is making a green energy future impossible

Mark Mills Contributor Share on Twitter Mark Mills is the author of the book, “Digital Cathedrals: The Information Infrastructure Era,” and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, and a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund. An epic number of citizens […]




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Is it better to be a private or public company right now?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Every week we write this post with some opening line akin to wow, what a week, huh? This is yet another one of those weeks. Perhaps this is just life now, and every week will stretch before us, similar to […]




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Microsoft and AWS exchange poisoned pen blog posts in latest Pentagon JEDI contract spat

Microsoft and Amazon are at it again as the fight for the Defense Department JEDI contract continues. In a recent series of increasingly acerbic pronouncements, the two companies continue their ongoing spat over the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract spoils. As you may recall (or not), last fall in a surprise move, the DoD selected […]




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Boston Dynamics’ Spot is patrolling a Singapore park to encourage social distancing

Since announcing the commercial availability of Spot, Boston Dynamics has presented a range of different gigs for the robot, from construction to telepresence. Last month, the company announced it was partnering with local hospitals interested in using the platform to perform remote visits for COVID-19 victims. Turns out the global pandemic has spurred all manner […]




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US Marshals says prisoners’ personal information taken in data breach

A data breach at the U.S. Marshals Service exposed the personal information of current and former prisoners, TechCrunch has learned. A letter sent to those affected, and obtained by TechCrunch, said the Justice Department notified the U.S. Marshals on December 30, 2019 of a data breach affecting a public-facing server storing personal information on current […]




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UK privacy and security experts warn over coronavirus app mission creep

A number of UK computer security and privacy experts have signed an open letter raising transparency and mission creep concerns about the national approach to develop a coronavirus contacts tracing app. The letter, signed by 177 academics, follows a similar letter earlier this month signed by around 300 academics from across the world, who urged […]





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Discover is Facebook’s new effort to help people access websites for free — but with limits

Facebook has a new connectivity app called Discover to help those who can’t afford to get online access information on the web. The service, available through mobile web and Android app, allows users to visit any website in text format (no video, images, audio and other elements that eat up large amounts of data) and […]




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Facebook deletes Brazil president’s coronavirus misinfo post

Facebook has diverted from its policy of not fact-checking politicians in order to prevent the spread of potentially harmful coronavirus misinformation from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Facebook made the decisive choice to remove a video shared by Bolsonaro on Sunday where he claimed that “hydroxychloroquine is working in all places.” That’s despite the drug still […]




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Quibi is the anti-TikTok (that’s a bad thing)

It takes either audacious self-confidence or reckless hubris to build a completely asocial video app in 2020. You can decide which best describes Quibi, Hollywood’s $1.75 billion-funded attempt at a mobile-only Netflix of six to 10-minute micro-TV show episodes. Quibi manages to miss every trend and tactic that could help make its app popular. The […]




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Moshi, a sleep and mindfulness app for kids, raises $12M Series B led by Accel

“If your kids aren’t sleeping, you aren’t sleeping,” says Moshi founder and CEO Ian Chambers. As mindfulness apps grow increasingly popular among adults, Moshi is looking to bring mindfulness and meditative techniques to children. The app today announced the close of a $12 million Series B financing led by Accel, with participation from Latitude Ventures […]




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Human Capital is an engineering talent agency and a VC fund all in one

Michael Ovitz didn’t invent the idea of a talent agency, but one might argue that he perfected it. He founded the CAA in 1975, and grew it into the world’s leading talent agency, serving as chairman for 20 years. Now, Ovitz is investing in a brand new type of talent agency called Human Capital. Human […]




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Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes is coming to Disrupt SF 2020

Atlassian is about as ubiquitous to software engineers as Google is to the rest of us. The Sydney-based company, which launched in 2002, develops tools and services for enterprise collaboration and marched efficiently to a public offering in 2015. So it goes without saying that we’re thrilled to have Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes […]




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Material Bank, a logistics platform for sourcing architectural and design samples, raises $28M

Material Bank, a logistics platform for the architectural and design industry, has announced the close of a $28 million Series B financing today, led by Bain Capital Ventures. Bain’s Merritt Hummer led the round on behalf of the firm and will join the board of directors at Material Bank, along with Jeff Sine, cofounder and […]




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Figma raises $50 million Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz

Figma, the design platform that lets folks work collaboratively and in the cloud, has today announced the close of a $50 million Series D financing. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with partner Peter Levine and cofounding partner Marc Andreessen managing the deal for the firm. New angel investors, including Henry Ellenbogen from Durable […]




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Mark Cuban: ‘Raising money isn’t an accomplishment, it’s an obligation’

Mark Cuban isn’t impressed that you’ve raised money. “If you think the accomplishment is raising money first, we’re probably not gonna get along,” said Cuban in an Extra Crunch Live interview. “If your orientation is ‘I got to raise the money first,’ you don’t really have a company yet, and you really haven’t accomplished anything […]




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Hydrant raises $5.7 million Series A to help consumers hydrate faster

Eight glasses of water a day. That’s the old recommendation you and I have heard growing up. And while we all know the importance of hydration to our health, some methods of hydration are more efficient than others. At least, that’s the premise that Hydrant was built on. The company, a wellness brand that launched […]




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nextmv picks up $2.7M to optimize and test decision models for the logistics industry

Optimization. Efficiency. Data-driven decisions. If I had a nickel for every time I hear these words from founders I’d be long retired. And yet, the process involved in achieving resource optimization, efficiency and making truly data-driven decisions is laborious to say the least, and usually involves an immense amount of talent and resources. And then […]




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Original Content podcast: ‘Waco’ offers a surprising look at a real-world tragedy

“Waco,” a Paramount Network series that recently started streaming on Netflix, dramatizes the tragic real-life standoff between the FBI, the ATF and the Branch Davidians. A couple of your Original Content podcast hosts only had a fuzzy idea of what actually went down in Waco, Texas in 1993. And all of us were surprised by […]




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Industry Economist (Direct Hire) - GS 11-13

Announcement Number: TN-20-EI-00899-DH
Closing Date: 09 April 2021




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Mathematical Statistician (Direct Hire) - GS 11-13

Announcement Number: TN-19-DOE-1529-OCDH
Closing Date: 16 September 2020




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Statistician (Direct Hire) - GS 11-13

Announcement Number: TN-19-DOE-1530-OCDH
Closing Date: 16 September 2020




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WTO issues new report on treatment of medical products in regional trade agreements

The WTO Secretariat has published a new report on the treatment of medical products in regional trade agreements (RTAs) amid current supply shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The report examines the extent medical products are traded among preferential partners and the difference in liberalization rates within and outside these trade agreements.