Author: TechCrunch News

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. If this newsletter comes across as a deranged delirium of barely coherent words, then blame TechCrunch Disrupt. This week, the TechCrunch team descended on San Francisco’s Moscone Center to celebrate one of the biggest to-dos in the startup world: TechCrunch…

The era of e-commerce has brought choice, convenience, and cardboard boxes. Oh, so many cardboard boxes. “Everything goes in packaging these days,” said Chantal Emmanuel, co-founder and CTO of LimeLoop, which is a participant in the TechCrunch 2023 Battlefield 200 startup competition. For many consumers, the sight of so much waste can be distressing. And…

Can software work alongside human physicists and engineers in R&D labs to develop new quantum computers? That’s the question Qruise, a startup in TechCrunch’s Battlefield 200 competition at Disrupt 2023, is attempting to answer. Qruise, a spinoff of Forschungszentrum Jülich, a national research institute based in Germany, is building what its founders describe as a…

Roblox, the community-focused gaming platform popular amongst kids, has downsized a substantial portion of its talent acquisition team, signaling a shift in the company’s focus from expansion to the bottom line. In a statement to TechCrunch, Roblox confirmed that about 30 employees in its talent acquisition organization were let go on Monday. No other teams…

Google-backed audio content platform Kuku FM has raised $25 million in a new funding round as it looks to make deeper inroads with its audiobook offerings in the South Asian market. Indian billionaire and technologist Nandan Nilekani’s Fundamentum Partnership led the Series C funding in Kuku FM with International Finance Corporation, part of the World…

When HashiCorp announced it was changing its Terraform license in August, it set off a firestorm in the open source community, and actually represented an existential threat to startups who were built on top of the popular open source project. The community went into action and within weeks they had written a manifesto, and soon…

French startup Stoïk offers a cyber insurance product to small and medium companies — a bit like Coalition in the U.S. And things have been working well in France. So the company just announced that it plans to expand to Germany as its second country with Franziska Geier heading the team there. The company also raised…

I love to read books located in cities I am about to visit. But when it comes to San Francisco and the Bay Area, I was really impressed with the wealth of choices available. My colleague Walter Thompson confirmed this: “I’ve lived in San Francisco for most of my adult life, and while I don’t…

Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This week, we take a look at one startup layoff, another offering an employee ownership buyout option, and much more. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign…

Hey, friendly people, and welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that aggregates the top tech news over the past few days. It’s our humble opinion that there’s no better place to get caught up on the industry’s happenings, whether you’re a news junkie or simply among the tech-curious. In this edition of…