Author: TechCrunch News

Seven Waymo robotaxis blocked traffic moving onto the Potrero Avenue 101 on-ramp in San Francisco on Tuesday at 9:30 p.m., according to video of the incident posted to Reddit and confirmation from Waymo. While routing back to Waymo’s city depot that evening, the first robotaxi in the lineup came across a road closure with traffic…

The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said in an order on Tuesday that BloomTech, the for-profit coding bootcamp previously known as the Lambda School, deceived students about the cost of loans, made false claims about graduates’ hiring rates and engaged in illegal lending masked as “income sharing” agreements with high fees. The order marks…

The lack of charging infrastructure is a major barrier to entry for those looking to convert gas-powered vehicles to electric. This process is an essential component of fighting climate change, and luckily, it’s becoming easier to do. As of July 2023, the U.S. installed more than 160,000 charging stations throughout the nation, many of which…

Former senior SpaceX executive Tom Ochinero is teaming up with SpaceX alum-turned-VC Achal Upadhyaya and one of Sequoia’s top finance leaders, Spencer Hemphill, on a new venture called Interlagos Capital, TechCrunch has learned. There is little public information available about Interlagos, and the trio did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. The company was…

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the governing body overseeing the country’s widely used Unified Payments Interface (UPI) mobile payment system, is set to engage with various fintech startups this month to develop a strategy to address the growing market dominance of PhonePe and Google Pay in the UPI ecosystem. NPCI executives plan to…

As the world waits for $65 billion payments tech giant Stripe to go public, a wave of smaller startups continues to roll into the market to pick up more payments business. In one of the latest developments, Danish company Flatpay, which builds payment solutions for small and medium physical merchants like shops, restaurants and salons,…

Google Wallet will finally launch in India — nearly two years after its relaunch as a digital wallet platform in the U.S. — according to a preview of the app that the company accidentally posted on the Google Play store in the country. After TechCrunch spotted the listing for the app — which will let…

Heat pumps are having a bit of a moment. They outsold gas furnaces for the second year running, and homeowners who install them are eligible for thousands in incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act. But they’re not growing quite as fast as they perhaps could be. Getting consumers to adopt new technology isn’t always easy,…

When Alex Katz founded Two Chairs in 2017, he firmly believed that in-person therapy is the most effective for behavioral health. Two Chairs used technology — a proprietary matching algorithm — to find the best possible therapists for its clients, but treatments took place primarily inside one of the startup’s half a dozen stylishly designed…

The Oversight Board, Meta’s semi-independent policy council, is turning its attention to how the company’s social platforms are handling explicit, AI-generated images. Tuesday, it announced investigations into two separate cases over how Instagram in India and Facebook in the U.S. handled AI-generated images of public figures after Meta’s systems fell short on detecting and responding…