Author: TechCrunch News

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to data.ai’s “State of…

Updated to note that the Microsoft investment closed in January. The money from VCs reported here, part of a tender offer, is separate to that. OpenAI, the startup behind the widely used conversational AI model ChatGPT, has picked up new backers, TechCrunch has learned. VC firms including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and…

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. On today’s episode of our Equity podcast, the team dives in to ponder whether First Republic’s share tumble is a victim of SVB’s collapse, or whether there’s something else in the water.…

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Thursday is here — how in the world did that happen? Those days, they just keep on coming. If you’re still on the fence about whether you want to come along to…

Amazon omitted India updates in Thursday’s earnings call and release, a notable change for the e-commerce giant that has consistently highlighted rapid growth in the South Asian market. The absence of India in the quarterly earnings, the first since early 2014, follows Amazon’s shutdown of multiple services, including food delivery and wholesale distribution, in the…

Founded in 2014, Blossom Finance was first intended for Muslim entrepreneurs in the United States. The microfinancing platform connects investors with small businesses using mudarabah, a shariah-compliant profit-sharing agreement. But founder Matthew Joseph Martin soon realized that the startup, backed by investors like Boost VC and Tim Draper, was serving a relatively niche market in…

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hi, folks! It’s Wednesday, and we’re running around like crazy, so let’s get to it! Wooooo! — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Can you see it?: Enterprise security company Lookout…

Meta shared some updated engagement info around its platforms on its Q1 2023 quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, with Meta CFO Susan Li joining CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg to field questions from analysts about its results. Zuckerberg shared that time spent on Instagram has grown more than 24% since the company launched Reels on…

Meet Bastion, a French startup that was created in October 2022 to help small companies tackle cybersecurity risks without too many complexities. Created by former Palantir employees, the company has already raised $2.8 million. What makes Bastion different from other cybersecurity startups is that it wants to be your first and last cybersecurity subscription. It…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk might be ordered to testify under oath in a lawsuit that blames Autopilot, Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system, for a fatal crash in 2018. The tentative ruling, issued by a California judge Wednesday and first reported by Reuters, came in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Walter Huang…