Author: TechCrunch News

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. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 20, 2021. The week is finished, but our work to catch up with the torrent of technology, startup and venture capital news is not.…

Disrupt is right around the corner, and this year the show is packed to the brim with incredible panels and conversations, an absolutely stacked Startup Battlefield cohort of companies launching on our stage, investor insights and a virtual expo hall full of exciting new products and services in the Startup Alley. We can’t wait! Literally.…

Remember that weird Will Smith movie about robots? Yeah, neither do we. But Elon Musk does. Tesla is developing a 5’8” Tesla Bot, with a prototype expected sometime next year. The news comes during Tesla’s inaugural AI Day, which was streamed on the company’s website Thursday night. The bot is being proposed as a non-automotive…

Elon Musk wants Tesla to be seen as “much more than an electric car company.” On Thursday’s Tesla AI Day, the CEO described Tesla as a company with “deep AI activity in hardware on the inference level and on the training level” that can be used down the line for applications beyond self-driving cars, including…

The process of digitizing the operations of mom and pop stores in Nigeria is serious business right now. In fact, it might be the second-best thing after fintech at the moment. Today’s news is from Alerzo, a little-known B2B e-commerce retail startup based in Ibadan, Nigeria. The company is announcing a $10.5 million Series A…

Microsoft has invested $5 million in Indian budget hotel chain Oyo, according to a regulatory filing this week. The investment confirms a TechCrunch scoop from last month. The new investment values Oyo at $9.6 billion, only slightly below the $10 billion implied valuation from the Indian startup’s previous financing round in 2019. The startup, which…

Every country has its own bundle of laws, rules and regulations, and they change on a regular basis making it an enormous challenge to keep up with it all. That usually requires large staffs filling in spreadsheets and unwieldy processes, but Regology, an early stage startup wants to change that by putting some automation to…

Bay Area-based Diamond Age this week announced that it has raised $8 million. The seed round is led by Prime Movers Lab and Alpaca VC and features a slew of additional firms, including Dolby Family Ventures, Calm Ventures, Gaingels, Towerview Ventures, GFA Venture Partners and Suffolk Construction. The startup looks to put a slew of…

Eric Crowley is executive director in the San Francisco office of global investment bank GP Bullhound. The pandemic has been extremely painful for many. But as lockdowns lifted and people began resuming their outdoor hobbies, mobile-first businesses have seen growth accelerate as consumers turned to digital tools to improve their time outdoors. The Dyrt, for…

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. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 17, 2021. Today we have what struck us as the most interesting collection of startup news in some time. And we’re keeping an international…