Author: TechCrunch News

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. The question for the tech news cycle in China these days has become: Who is Beijing’s next target? Regulatory clampdowns are common in China’s tech industry…

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 alone.…

Thanks for reading Startups Weekly. Want the weekly digest in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.  I spoke to my editor this week about the usual: upcoming stories, the future of the podcast and the existential dread of imposter syndrome amid a year-and-a-half of extreme change. The last bit took up the majority of…

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 6, 2021. We made it to Friday. High-fives all around. If you own stocks or cryptos, you are wrapping up the week on a…

Assembling a startup team is harder than assembling 10 IKEA dressers, and the stakes are much, much higher. Starting with the assumption that 90% of startups will fail and the most successful ones take an average of six years to IPO, founders must make careful decisions about whom they invite to join the core team.…

Kenny Small is vice president SAP and Enterprise at Qualitest Group, the world’s leading AI-powered quality engineering company. Brick-and-mortar stores forced to close due to pandemic lockdowns had to quickly pivot to an online-only model. Understandably, newcomers to the digital retail scene found themselves behind the curve in attracting online buyers, particularly in the face…

Micromobility startup Voi has raised $45 million, funds it says will be used to research and develop technology that will improve safety, keep users from riding on sidewalks and ensure scooters are properly parked. The funding comes a month after Voi launched a pilot in Northhampton, UK with Irish startup Luna to test how computer…

More than 40 African startups from a handful of countries have gone through YC over the past decade. Zambia joins that list today, and its entrant, Union54, is a worthy first entry. Union54 (54 is a nod to the number of African countries) is a fintech company founded by Perseus Mlambo and Alessandra Martini. The…

UK-based open banking bulk payment startup Comma has raised £4.34 million ($6m) in a Seed round of funding led by Octopus Ventures and Connect Ventures. They were joined by investors Village Global, and the founders of Wagestream, Peter Briffet and Portman Wills. The company says it enables small and micro businesses to bulk pay bills,…

This past decade, Nigeria has seen several companies cater to the development and growth of software engineers and tech talent in general. It’s a space many in the Nigerian ecosystem like to think is budding yet overcrowded. So when Chika Nwobi started Decagon in 2018, the perception was generally “here comes another tech talent accelerator.”…