Author: TechCrunch News

New York City-based vertical farming startup Bowery Farming this week has announced a $300 million Series C. The round, which brings its total funding north of $472 million, values the company at $2.3 billion. Fidelity Management & Research Company led the beefy round, with participation from existing investors GV (formerly Google Ventures), General Catalyst, GGV…

In February, Nigerian fintech startup Mono announced its acceptance into Y Combinator and, at the time, it wanted to build the Plaid for Africa. Three months later, the startup has a different mission: to power the internet economy in Africa and has closed $2 million in seed investment towards that goal. The investment comes nine…

British artificial intelligence (AI) company, Faculty has raised £30 million ($42.5M) in growth funding from the Apax Digital Fund (ADF). The startup has now raised a total of £40m ($56.6M) to date. In April this year, the company announced it had won a contract to work with the UK’s NHS to better predict its future…

For this morning’s edition of The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm studied information recently released by mobile gaming studio Jam City as it prepares to go public in a $1.2 billion blank-check deal with DPCM Capital. “Jam City is a bit like Zynga, but unless you are a mobile-gaming aficionado, you might not have heard of it,”…

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. Welcome to Daily Crunch for May 21, 2021. Closing out the week, bitcoin dropped sharply today on (more?) news from China about possible restrictions on cryptocurrencies more broadly. Depending on your priors,…

Chinese robotaxi startup Pony.ai has been given permission by California regulators to pilot its autonomous vehicles without a human safety driver behind the wheel in three cities. While dozens of companies — 55 in all — have active permits to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver, it’s far less common to receive permission for…

Gustavo Parés Contributor Share on Twitter Gustavo Parés is CEO of NDS Cognitive Labs, a leader in cognitive computing and AI business solutions. A professor at Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), he’s partnered with Microsoft, IBM and Google to deliver digital transformation and cognitive technology services. More posts by this contributor…

It doesn’t feel like a week goes by at the moment that another startup doesn’t emerge armed with a huge wallet of cash to pursue a strategy of consolidating and then scaling promising brands that have built a business selling on marketplaces like Amazon’s. In the latest development, a startup called factory14 is coming out…

Telemedicine, in its original form of the phone call, has been around for decades. For people in remote or rural areas without easy access to in-person care, consulting a doctor over the phone has often been the go-to approach. But for a large swath of the world used to taking half a day off work…

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. It’s Thursday, everyone, and the technology and startup worlds were a mixed bag today. We learned about the final death of Internet Explorer (RIP), new AR glasses from Snap, fresh cryptocurrency rules…