Author: TechCrunch News

Few missions more acutely embody the maxim “space is hard” than Atomos Space’s first demonstration mission, which the company has managed to pull back from the brink of disaster — more than once. That demonstration mission, dubbed Mission-1, launched to orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 4. The objectives of the mission…

Steve Burns, the ousted founder, chairman and CEO of bankrupt EV startup Lordstown Motors, has settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over misleading investors about demand for the company’s flagship all-electric Endurance pickup truck. Burns was ordered to pay a civil fine of $175,000 and cannot serve as an officer or director of…

Crafting the perfect venture capital pitch is so simple that there’s an industry of consultants to help founders get their decks in order. TechCrunch has a long-running series of Pitch Deck Teardowns to help founders, and you can find an infinite number of Twitter threads on the subject. Easy, right? If only it were so.…

Exactly how much Microsoft is paying all the investors of Inflection AI as part its oddly structured deal to abscond with the co-founders, much of the staff and the rights to use the tech hasn’t been publicly revealed. And Microsoft declined comment when asked. But unnamed sources tell The Information that it’s plunking out approximately…

The U.S. Department of Justice sued Apple Thursday over monopolistic practices. The complaint accuses Apple of moulding its privacy and security practices in ways that benefits the company financially. One quote particularly jumps out where the DOJ calls Apple’s privacy and security justification an “elastic shield”: “Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic…

WhatsApp announced Thursday that users can now pin up to three messages in a chat to access them easily. Until now, users could pin only one message on top of a conversation with a contact or a group. Both Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and WhatsApp head Will Cathcart announced this feature on their respective WhatsApp…

Chances are you may have noticed that many commercial vehicles are now electric vehicles — think about delivery vans, telecom minivans, utility maintenance trucks, etc. But there are still many diesel-powered commercial vehicles because it’s simply too expensive and too complicated to switch to an all electric vehicle fleet overnight. That’s why Pelikan Mobility has been…

Sameer Brij Verma, a high-profile investor at the venture firm Nexus, will be leaving the fund later this year, he confirmed to TechCrunch, in a move that has sent shockwaves through the Indian VC industry. Verma plans to launch his own venture firm in India, with the inaugural fund expected to have a corpus of…

Crypto exchange OKX is ceasing services for users in India, it said in an email to customers Thursday, advising them to withdraw their funds by April-end. The move follows Apple and Google pulling the eponymous app of OKX in the country after an Indian government agency said many crypto exchanges were operating illegally in the…

Startups in Europe, faced with an ongoing economic slowdown in the region, continue to struggle on the fundraising front. Meanwhile, European VCs that are hedging their bets by growing their focus on startups that either have a global/U.S. play in mind — or are in the U.S. already — are seeing a lot of interest…