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Virtual dates and video speed dating: Dating.com Group launches a $50 million corporate venture fund 

The dating startup world is notorious for few exits, and a similarly slim number of buyers. There’s Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid, and there’s Spark Networks, which owns Christian Mingle, JSwipe, Jdate and Zoosk. Dating.com Group also owns a slew of dating brands, like Dil Mil, a dating app for South Asians. […]




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Amazon, Apple and Microsoft CEOs detail their companies’ efforts to combat coronavirus pandemic

The tech industry is mobilizing its considerable resources to attempt to support efforts against the growing global coronavirus pandemic. Over the weekend, the CEOs of Amazon, Apple and Microsoft all shared updates regarding some aspects of their company’s ongoing contributions, which range from donations of medical supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline healthcare […]




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Y Combinator graduate H1 closes on $12.9 million for its professional healthcare database

Just months after graduating from Y Combinator, H1 Insights, the LinkedIn for the healthcare industry, has raised $12.9 million in a new round of funding. “It’s a better way to connect the ecosystem,” says co-founder Ariel Katz. The company already has more than 8 million profiles for healthcare professionals in its database and is generating […]




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GoPro lays off 200 employees representing 20% of the company

Action camera manufacturer GoPro has announced some massive organizational changes at the company. In particular, the company is laying off more than 200 employees — which represents a 20% staff reduction. GoPro plans “office space reductions in five geographies” as well as a reduction in operating expenses. The company expects a “$100 million reduction in […]




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Xiaomi launches Mi Commerce in India to boost sales amid lockdown

Xiaomi today launched a new e-commerce service in India that allows people in the nation to easily browse and order its handsets and other products from nearby physical retail stores as the Chinese giant rushes to kickstart its sales in its biggest overseas market. Dubbed Mi Commerce, the service allows people to locate nearby stores […]




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Amazon Q1 beats on net sales of $75.5B but posts net income of $2.5B, down $1B on a year ago

Amazon has been one of the biggest names synonymous with how the consumer masses are experiencing life under lockdown: its site lets you buy anything from soup to nuts, from books to baking pans for all your sourdough; and via its streaming services, it gives you many ways to stay entertained. But it can also […]




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Powerful House committee demands Jeff Bezos testify after ‘misleading’ statements

Amazon is in hot water with a powerful congressional committee interested in the company’s potentially anticompetitive business practices. In a bipartisan letter sent Friday to Jeff Bezos, the House Judiciary committee demanded that the Amazon CEO explain discrepancies between his own prior statements and recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal. Specifically, the letter addressed […]




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Africa Roundup: Visa connects to M-Pesa, Flutterwave enters e-commerce

It seems the demand for Safaricom’s M-Pesa payment product never eases. Since its 2007 launch in Kenya, the fintech app has commanded over 70% of the mobile money market in that country. When COVID-19 hit the East African nation of 53 million in March, the Kenyan Central Bank turned to M-Pesa as a public health […]




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Backblaze challenges AWS by making its cloud storage S3 compatible

Backblaze today announced that its B2 Cloud Storage service is now API-compatible with Amazon’s S3 storage service. Backblaze started as an affordable cloud backup service, but over the last few years, the company has also taken its storage expertise and launched the developer-centric B2 Cloud Storage service, which promises to be significantly cheaper than similar […]




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Xiaomi launches Mi Commerce in India to boost sales amid lockdown

Xiaomi today launched a new e-commerce service in India that allows people in the nation to easily browse and order its handsets and other products from nearby physical retail stores as the Chinese giant rushes to kickstart its sales in its biggest overseas market. Dubbed Mi Commerce, the service allows people to locate nearby stores […]




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Deep Render raises £1.6M for image compression tech that mimics ‘neural processes of the human eye’

Deep Render, a London startup and spin-out of Imperial College that is applying machine learning to image compression, has raised £1.6 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Pentech, with participation from Speedinvest. Founded in mid-2017 by Arsalan Zafar and Chri Besenbruch, who met while studying Computer Science at Imperial College London, Deep Render […]




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YouTube TV to gain 14 more ViacomCBS channels in expanded distribution deal

YouTube TV is expanding its lineup of channels thanks to a new, multi-year distribution agreement with ViacomCBS, announced this morning. The Google-owned streaming TV service is gaining 14 new ViacomCBS channels as a result of the deal, including news, sports, and entertainment offerings. It will also continue to carry CBS broadcast stations, CBS Sports Network, […]




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Australian companies head to stock market in biggest rush since ’09

Companies lean heavily on equity in effort to dent blow from coronavirus




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Saudi sitcom breaks taboos on homosexuality and Israel

Popular programme is sparking debate about social change during holy month of Ramadan




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Enterprise companies find MLOps critical for reliability and performance

Machine learning ops focuses on the ML model and datasets, as opposed to code. Data engineers run MLOps, but it’s likely that the specialized role of MLOps engineer will come about soon.




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Robots To Eat All The Jobs? Hackers, Policy Wonks Collaborate On A Basic Income Createathon This Weekend

In the face of rising U.S. income inequality and concerns about job loss to automation, some of Silicon Valley’s best-known names including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman have spoken up in favor of a universal basic income that would give people a baseline standard of living in an economy that may not be able to produce […]




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Airbnb Pledges Transparency, Education To Fight Commercial Hosting, But Provides Little Detail

In response to calls for stronger action on hosts that aren’t casual users, Airbnb said it would start sharing some data with governments and getting hosts to agree to a policy of listing only their permanent homes. Here’s what Brian Chesky said in a post today: Today, we’re taking the next step to turn these principles into […]




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Bucket, A Travel Planner That Automatically Creates Recommendation Lists, Expands Nationwide

Early Facebook employee and longtime travel aficionado Julia Lam began studying consumer travel habits over a year ago to see how people planned their vacations and business trips. What she found was that people were often using a mess of Chrome tabs and text files. So she started Bucket with former Facebook engineer John Sichi […]




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With voter verification, Brigade becomes a more legitimate platform for political debate

Kim-Mai Cutler Contributor Kim-Mai Cutler is an operating partner for Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture firm and was previously a journalist covering technology, finance and policy issues at TechCrunch -- best-known for her long-form work on the Bay Area. More posts by this contributor The outlook for Bay Area startup space in 2017 OpenVote launches […]




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Always detached, UK has now forced a complete break from Brussels

Past prime ministers put head before heart on Europe. Not any more




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Companies ramp up orders for kit to protect workers

Manufacturers say they will struggle to provide equipment sought by business




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The real work of helping companies bounce back from coronavirus hasn’t even begun

Government loans a start but not the end; Pendragon takes a pop at Lookers; insurers and honey badgers




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EU industrial supply lines need strengthening, commissioner warns

Thierry Breton says coronavirus crisis shows vital supplies are vulnerable to disruption




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Runa Capital closes Fund III at $157M, with an added focus on quantum computing

VC fund Runa Capital was launched with $135 million in 2010, and is perhaps best known for its investment into NGINX, which powers many web sites today. In more recent years it has participated or led investments into startups such as Zipdrug ($10.8 million); Rollbar this year ($11 million); and Monedo (for €20 million). HQ’d […]




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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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Private-equity backed companies dominate lowest depths of junk

Two-thirds of companies with lowly ratings from Moody’s were bought by PE groups




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Can companies still afford to care about sustainability?

Will environmental and social initiatives survive Covid-19? Our specialists answered your questions




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Companies’ supply chains vulnerable to coronavirus shocks

Shortages of components likely to be far worse than expected, warn experts




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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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Microsoft’s new ‘Planetary Computer’ project will use global environmental data to support sustainability

Microsoft is embarking on a new sustainability initiative as part of its overall approach to support environmental protection measures, with a project it calls the “Planetary Computer.” This will actually be a computing endeavor that uses aggregated global environmental data collected from a number of sources as its input, and that will seek to employ […]




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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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California turns to vote-by-mail to keep residents safe come November

California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Friday that his state would issue a mail-in ballot to every registered voter for November’s election. Newsom issued the decision as an executive order in coordination with other California officials. The order will require all county election officials to provide mail-in ballots to voters, but it also provisions for in-person […]




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Investor survey results: Upcoming trends in social startups

Voice-based social networks and gaming as a new form of identity were among the top emerging trends in consumer social startups, according to an Extra Crunch survey of top social tech investors. Meanwhile, anonymity and dating apps with a superfluous twist were spaces where investors were most pessimistic. Extra Crunch assembled a list of the […]




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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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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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EIA's view of the effects of the upcoming IMO 2020 regulations




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WTO report looks at role of e-commerce during the COVID-19 pandemic

The WTO Secretariat has published a new information note looking at how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected e-commerce, including the implications for cross-border trade. It notes the increased use of e-commerce as consumers adapt to lockdowns and social distancing measures and draws attention to several challenges, such as the need to bridge the digital divide within and across countries.




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Groupon axes CEO and COO as company looks to mount a recovery during a crisis

While plenty of tech stocks have seen their market caps dive in the past month, Groupon has taken a harder hit than most. The company’s share price has dropped more than 70% in the past five weeks. The reckoning came for Groupon’s leadership today with both CEO Rich Williams and COO Steve Krenzer ousted. In […]




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Australian National Committee for UN Women welcomes partnership with PwC Australia - 17 Feb

PwC Australia is delighted to announce a partnership with The Australian National Committee for UN Women in a joint effort to promote gender equality.




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Global Mine 2015: gloves come off as top 40 prepare for brawl - 5 Jun

The global mining industry's fight for value and free cash flow has descended into a brawl, after 2014 saw the world's 40 largest miners ramp up production, slash capital spending, and rein in costs.




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PwC Welcomes 64 New Partners - 29 Jun

PwC today announced their new partners from 1 July 2015. A total of 64 individuals will be admitted to the partnership across all of the firm's businesses and most of its geographies.




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Company Tax Cuts Help The Economy and Real Incomes Grow - 24 Nov

If the company tax rate was reduced from 30 to 25 per cent over the next five years gross domestic product (GDP) would grow $291 billion and income tax revenues would generate $4 billion up to the year 2025, PwC modelling released today shows.




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Global market for commercial applications of drone technology valued at over US$127bn - 11 May

The emerging global market for business services using drone technology is valued at over US$127 billion with the drone revolution disrupting industries ranging from agriculture to filmmaking.




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Backblaze challenges AWS by making its cloud storage S3 compatible

Backblaze today announced that its B2 Cloud Storage service is now API-compatible with Amazon’s S3 storage service. Backblaze started as an affordable cloud backup service, but over the last few years, the company has also taken its storage expertise and launched the developer-centric B2 Cloud Storage service, which promises to be significantly cheaper than similar […]




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Facebook to add gift cards, jobs and donation tools to its COVID-19 Community Help hub

Facebook is expanding its Community Help hub to better serve local communities amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The hub has already seen significant usage by those requesting food, supplies and information about local resources, as well as use by volunteers and groups willing to lend a hand. Now, Facebook is adding more features to the hub […]