Author: TechCrunch News

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. Betting on upcoming startup markets This…

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. Our thanks to everyone who wrote in this week about the format changes to the newsletter! Feedback largely sorted into two themes: Some people really like the more narrative format, and some…

What Tesla CEO Elon Musk says publicly about the company’s progress on a fully autonomous driving system doesn’t match up with “engineering reality,” according to a memo that summarizes a meeting between California regulators and employees at the automaker. The memo, which transparency site Plainsite obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and subsequently…

SoftBank has picked its bet in China’s flourishing industrial robotics space. Youibot, a four-year-old startup that makes autonomous mobile robots for a range of scenarios, said it has notched close to 100 million yuan ($15.47 million) in its latest funding round led by SoftBank Ventures Asia, the Seoul-based early-stage arm of the global investment behemoth.…

SpaceX flew the 15th prototype of its Starship fully reusable next-generation rocket today, with a test flight that included a successful climb to around 30,000 feet, as well as a controlled flip, descent and soft landing upright as planned. A very small fire appeared to break out at the base of the rocket shortly after…

The creators behind CryptoPunks, one of the most popular NFT projects on the web, just revealed their latest project, called Meebits. The project boasts 20,000 procedurally generated 3D characters that are tradeable on the Ethereum blockchain. There have been hundreds of 3D avatar NFT platforms popping up over the past several months hoping to gain…

We’ve been hearing how “data is the new oil” for more than a decade now, and in certain sectors, it’s a maxim that has more than panned out. From marketing and logistics to finance and product, decision-making is now dominated by data at all levels of most big private orgs (and if it isn’t, I’d…

Two years ago, we talked with Lior Susan, the founder of now six-year-old Eclipse Ventures in Palo Alto, California. At the time, the outfit believed that the next big thing wasn’t another social network but instead the remaking of old-line industries through full-tech stacks — including hardware, software and data — capable of bringing them…

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. Are startup valuations about to fall? Hello, friends! Alex here to talk to you for a hot second about money. Then we’ll get into startups, venture capital, what Big Tech is up…

Earlier today recent dog-parent Alex Konrad and fellow Forbes staffer Eliza Haverstock broke the news that Divvy, a Utah-based corporate spend unicorn, is considering selling itself to Bill.com for a price that could top $2 billion. For the fintech sector, it’s big news. Corporate spend startups including Ramp and Brex are raising rapid-fired rounds at…