Author: TechCrunch News

Rebellyous, a startup that’s striving to build “a better chicken,” has raised at least $20 million in fresh funding, TechCrunch has learned. Based in Seattle, the venture-backed company calls its production tech the “most advanced plant-based meat manufacturing system on the planet.” Rebellyous aims to raise as much as $30.7 million in total, according to…

Five years ago, Google backed away from a Pentagon government contract because thousands of employees protested that its tech might be used for lethal drone targeting. Today, however, Silicon Valley has far fewer qualms about developing tech for the U.S. Department of Defense. So said four investors — Trae Stephens of Founders Fund, Bilal Zuberi…

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. On the one hand, we could be upset that Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, but the sun hasn’t come out where Christine lives for several days, so she’s pretty stoked that wherever…

Apple has thus far been lauded for a deliberate hiring approach that saved the company from the mass layoffs conducted by top competitors like Alphabet and Amazon. But not even the iPhone maker is immune from economic headwinds. In quarterly earnings posted today, the company notched its first year-over-year loss since before the pandemic. The…

Common wisdom in digital photography says that megapixels aren’t everything. They matter to an extent, but smartphone makers have a long history of leaning too heavily on those numbers as a kind of shorthand for camera quality. In other words, they play an important role but need to work in concert with a number of…

Digs, a Vancouver, Washington-based startup that is developing a collaboration tool for homebuilders and their vendors, is coming out of stealth today and announcing a $7 million seed funding round from Fuse, Flying Fish, Betaworks, Legacy, PSF, GFR, and others. The company was co-founded by Ryan Fink and Ty Frackiewicz. For Fink, this is his second attempt at a home-centric…

Groupon has laid off another 500 employees in a bid to cut costs, the company said in an SEC filing last week. The e-commerce company had cut 500 jobs — nearly 15% of its workforce then — previously in August 2022. The company said that this new set of layoffs will be spread across the…

This January, Germany’s largest vaccine maker BioNTech announced that it had agreed to acquire Tunisian-born and London-headquartered AI startup InstaDeep for up to £562 million, including a performance-tied £200 million tranche investment. InstaDeep’s deal — subject to regulatory approval and expected to close in the first half of this year — is quite intriguing, for…

Even if insects don’t sound appealing to you, black soldier flies could play an essential role in the food chain in the coming years. In particular, these flies’ larvae can become an important source of proteins for livestock and fish. That’s why Entocycle is raising another $5 million in a Series A funding round led…

Much hope remains after the crypto winter almost froze the sector: the Luna crash, the bankruptcy of Celsius and the arrest of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried for alleged fraud. Then there was the venture pullback amid an economic downturn. In 2021, web3 startups globally raised a record $29.2 billion. By 2022, that number dipped to $21.5…