Author: TechCrunch News

Facial recognition has been one of the more conflicted applications of artificial intelligence in the wider world: using computer vision to detect faces and subsequent identities of people has raised numerous questions about privacy, data protection, and the ethics underpinning the purposes of the work, and even the systems themselves. But on the other hand,…

Whether you are part of the accounting department, or just any employee at an organization, managing expenses can be a time-consuming and error-filled, yet also quite mundane, part of your job. Today, a startup called Pleo — which has built a platform that can help some of that work more smoothly, by way of a…

Croatian electric supercar startup Rimac Automobili is taking over Bugatti. Rimac will own a controlling 55% share in the new company, Bugatti-Rimac, with VW’s Porsche owning the remaining 45%, according to reports by the Financial Times. “Rimac and Bugatti are a perfect match in terms of what we each bring to the table,” said founder…

China has ordered app-store operators to remove the app of Didi from their stores, the latest as tension escalates between the nation’s largest ride-hailing giant and local regulators. The app has disappeared from several stores including Apple’s App Store in China, TechCrunch can confirm. The nation’s cyberspace administration, which unveiled the order on Sunday, said…

Furlenco, a Bangalore-based startup that operates an eponymous furniture and appliance rental service, said today it has raised $140 million in a financing round as it looks to scale its operations in the South Asian market and explore international market expansion. The new $140 million financing round, a Series D, comprises $120 million debt raise…

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 industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices…

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. Hey! It’s going to be a…

For a brief moment, earlier this week, it seemed as though Pittsburgh might be the center of the tech universe. Just as Carnegie Mellon alum Duolingo was announcing its IPO. Senators Bob Casey and Pat Toomey were in town, as Vice President Kamala Harris paid a visit to the City of Bridges to talk infrastructure.…

Tiger Global is in advanced stages of talks to back Indian embedded finance startup Yap, according to more than half a dozen people familiar with the matter. The New York-headquartered firm is in talks to lead a $35 million financing round in Yap — also known as YapPay and M2P — that values the Bangalore-headquartered…

Karin Tsai joined Duolingo in 2012 and is now the director of engineering. Yesterday, at TechCrunch’s City Spotlight: Pittsburgh, she spoke on the company’s extensive development process and unique culture.  This interview was pre-recorded and aired a day after the company filed its SEC Form S-1 ahead of its initial public offering. As per SEC…