Author: TechCrunch News

African financial institutions typically scale their solutions using a mix of local and foreign tech. Appzone is one of the standout local fintech software providers for banks and fintechs, providing better pricing and flexibility. For over a decade, the Nigeria-based Appzone has functioned as an enabler (at payment rails and core infrastructure) within banking and…

Box began life almost 20 years ago in a dorm room at USC when Aaron Levie conceived of an online file storage and sharing system. A few years later, Levie’s original idea was becoming commoditized, and he switched gears to enterprise content management in the cloud. It was a radical notion at the time in…

Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter recapping noteworthy happenings in tech over the past few days. This week, TechCrunch viewed leaked documents out of SpaceX showing some questionable practices related to employee stock options. X CEO Elon Musk announced that he would open source Grok, X’s AI-powered chatbot meant to…

SpaceX requires employees to agree to some unusual terms related to their stock awards, which have a chilling effect on staff, according to sources and internal documents viewed by TechCrunch. That includes a provision that allows SpaceX the right to purchase back vested shares within a six-month period following an employee leaving the company for…

Update: Starbucks announced Friday that it’s discontinuing its NFT program, which was in beta, to “prepare for what comes next as we continue to evolve the program,” according to an FAQ page.    We spoke with Steve Kaczynski, the program’s lead, on the Chain Reaction podcast last month. On Friday, he tweeted that his future…

India is walking back on a recent AI advisory after receiving criticism from many local and global entrepreneurs and investors. The Ministry of Electronics and IT shared an updated AI advisory with industry stakeholders on Friday that no longer asked them to take the government approval before launching or deploying an AI model to users…

The sun is peeking out behind the clouds and the birds are singing. That can only mean one thing: developer season is nearly upon us. While the rest of you are out there touching the proverbial and literal grass, the world’s developers are jamming into conference halls to find out what the next year holds…

Zscaler, a cloud security company with headquarters in San Jose, California, has acquired cybersecurity startup Avalor 26 months after its founding, reportedly for $310 million in cash and equity. In a press release announcing the news, Zscaler founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry said that the deal would expand Zscaler’s platform with capabilities including streamlined reporting of…

Apple has added another AI startup to its acquisition list with Canada-based DarwinAI, which specializes in vision-based tech to observe components during manufacturing to improve efficiency, Bloomberg reported. While Apple or DarwinAI haven’t announced this deal, several members of the startup’s team joined Apple’s machine learning teams in January, as per their LinkedIn profiles. DarwinAI…

India’s Paytm has secured a vital license it needed to survive and maintain continuity of several core features of its eponymous payments app, a day before the firm’s banking unit is scheduled to cease operations because of regulatory clampdown. The National Payments Corporation of India, the firm that built the eponymous UPI rail in the…