MobileCoin, the startup known for building Signal’s crypto payments feature, has appointed a new CEO as it works on expanding its encrypted money transfer service to global users in need of a more modern remittance solution. Sara Drakeley is taking the helm as MobileCoin’s new chief executive officer. Replacing her previous role as the firm’s […]

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Square said there was “no evidence” a cyberattack caused an outage that left customers and small businesses unable to use the payment giant’s technology on Thursday through early-Friday. The payments technology giant said in a post-mortem of the daylong outage that the outage was caused by a DNS issue. DNS, or domain name system, is […]

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Fintech giant Square says its services are coming back online after a daylong outage left small business owners unable to process payments. The Block-owned company had, up until Friday morning on the U.S. West Coast, been battling a prolonged outage that had downed its services since Thursday afternoon. In a new posting on its status […]

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A plan which would see a corporate entity trademark the term “Web5” has been put to rest after much backlash. Late Tuesday night, TBD, the Bitcoin-focused division of Jack Dorsey’s payments company Block (formerly Square), announced an ill-thought-out plan to trademark the term, which refers to its vision for a decentralized, privacy-focused iteration of the […]

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Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, now supports Apple’s Tap to Pay for iPhone feature for merchants. Existing Square users or new businesses wanting to use Square can now use their iPhones to receive payments while using the fintech company’s financial management software. The Jack Dorsey-led company said that merchants can open the […]

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Mandolin, the digital fan engagement platform, launched two new products today with the aim of assisting artists with turning fans into superfans and maximizing revenue. Fan Navigator helps artists collect fan data and teaches them how to engage fans with digital experiences. Mandolin’s Fan Pages also drive fan engagement with a page for the artist […]

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How will all of these BNPL-focused providers fare with Apple pounding its way into their market?

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In 2010, Bastian Gotter invested up to $200,000 into IROKOtv, an African video-on-demand company Jason Njoku, his friend and co-founder, launched in Lagos, Nigeria. For the next couple of years, Gotter, as CFO, was instrumental in turning IROKO — after raising over $30 million from VCs, including Tiger Global — into a household name in […]

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Companies across the board are fighting to recruit and retain employees as the war for talent rages on. Employee benefits are no longer viewed as a cookie-cutter, standard set of offerings — rather, they are valuable tools employers can use to differentiate themselves from competitors and attract top candidates. Forma, which just changed its name […]

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Late last year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down from his position in order to give his full attention to his other company, Square (now called Block), which had become increasingly invested in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency — just like Dorsey himself. Now we’re starting to see the results of Block’s embrace of crypto, as […]

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The NFT auction marketplace OpenSea had a blockbuster 2021 and as a result is seeing its private valuation grow more quickly than almost any other startup. The crypto firm announced late Tuesday that it closed a $300 million Series C round led by Paradigm and Coatue. The raise valued the startup at a massive $13.3 […]

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Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review! Last week, we took a break from contextualization for some guides to consumption. This week, we’re looking at what’s happening in the mind of one Jack Dorsey. You can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny. the big thing While […]

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It’s Friday, which means the whole crew was aboard for this particular episode. We had Grace and Chris behind the scenes, and Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex on the mics. And, frankly, we […]

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The fintech giant Square is changing its name to Block, effective December 10. The name change, which has been in the works for over a year, is intended to house the company’s various products — including music streaming service Tidal, Cash App, TBD, and of course, Square — under one brand. This announcement comes just […]

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The service will launch in both the U.S. and Australia beginning early in 2022 and will be free for customers who pay on time.

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UNest, a fintech startup that provides financial planning tools for parents saving on behalf of their children, announced today that it raised $26 million in Series B funding led by The Artemis Fund. Existing investor Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures participated alongside new investors including Franklin Templeton, Launchpad Capital, AltaIR Capital, OneWay Ventures, Unlock Venture Partners […]

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The company captures real-time customer behavior so companies can see who is genuine, and who is fraudulent, and identify the root cause of customer friction.

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Lawsuits against X (formerly Twitter) will soon be heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The shift was first announced last month as part of a broader set of changes to X’s terms of service and privacy policy. Now, with the changes set to take effect on November 15, The […]

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After a chip manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) was found inside a Huawei processor, the U.S. Department of Commerce has ordered the company to halt shipments of advanced chips to Chinese customers, according to a report in Reuters. Huawei faces significant trade restrictions from the U.S., so the pause on shipments is supposed […]

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Bankrupt cryptocurrency company FTX filed 23 lawsuits Friday against Anthony Scaramucci (pictured above), his hedge fund SkyBridge Capital, and other organizations, including Crypto.com and the Mark Zuckerberg-backed lobbying group Fwd.us. These lawsuits are an attempt to claw back money for FTX’s creditors following the company’s collapse. FTX claims that the money targeted in these suits […]

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OpenAI’s next flagship model might not represent as big a leap forward as its predecessors, according to a new report in The Information. Employees who tested the new model, code-named Orion, reportedly found that even though its performance exceeds OpenAI’s existing models, there was less improvement than they’d seen in the jump from GPT-3 to […]

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New code introduced in the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system could make it more difficult for both police and thieves to unlock iPhones. 404 Media reported Thursday that law enforcement officials were warning each other that phones being stored for forensic examination seemed to be rebooting themselves — something that security experts confirmed […]

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Over the last three days, 20 startups participated in the incredibly competitive Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. These 20 companies were selected as the best of the Startup Battlefield 200 and competed for a chance to take home the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000. After three days of intense pitching, we have a winner. The […]

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For its most recent Camp, VC and accelerator Betaworks was on the lookout for startups building native applications made possible by AI. The program was first announced in May. To explain this focus, managing partner John Borthwick wrote at the time that while things like AI chatbots and writing assistants exist, “we aren’t yet living […]

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The time has finally come to announce the five finalists of the Startup Battlefield. It all started earlier this year when the TechCrunch editorial team selected 200 companies from thousands that applied. From there, the team then chose the 20 finalists who pitched this week onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 to investor judges and packed […]

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The popularity of an Instagram video can affect its actual video quality: According to Adam Mosseri (the Meta executive who leads Instagram and Threads), videos that are more popular get shown in higher quality, while less popular videos get shown in lower quality. In a video (via The Verge), Mosseri said Instagram tries to show […]

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The Mac mini will be getting an upgrade this week, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The mini is Apple’s desktop computer (really just a small gray box) positioned between the consumer iMac and the company’s professional-grade desktops. The new mini is reportedly getting smaller — nearly the size of an Apple TV set-top box. It […]

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Software engineers, developers, and academic researchers have serious concerns about transcriptions from OpenAI’s Whisper, according to a report in the Associated Press. While there’s been no shortage of discussion around generative AI’s tendency to hallucinate — basically, to make stuff up — it’s a bit surprising that this is an issue in transcription, where you’d […]

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A federal jury ruled Friday that Masimo smartwatches infringed Apple patents, but Apple isn’t getting a big payday. Bloomberg Law reports that the company was only seeking the statutory minimum of $250, and that’s all it was awarded. Apple’s attorney John Desmarais reportedly told jurors, “We’re not here for the money.” Instead, he said the […]

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AI search engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to raise around $500 million at an $8 billion valuation, according to The Wall Street Journal. If a deal happens with those terms, it would more than double Perplexity’s valuation from its $3 billion valuation when it raised from SoftBank over the summer. The WSJ […]

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Uber and Lyft need to do more to support disabled passengers, especially those who are blind or visually impaired, according to protesters who gathered outside the companies’ headquarters on October 15. Wired spoke to protesters who shared stories about drivers passing them by or refusing to let them bring their guide dogs on a ride. […]

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As founders plan for an increasingly AI-centric future, Gusto co-founder and head of technology Edward Kim said that cutting existing teams and hiring a bunch of specially trained AI engineers is “the wrong way to go.” Instead, he argued that nontechnical team members can “actually have a much deeper understanding than an average engineer on […]

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Mira Murati, the OpenAI CTO who announced her departure last month, is raising VC funding for a new AI startup, according to Reuters. This startup will reportedly focus on building AI products based on proprietary models and could raise more than $100 million in this round. When she left, Murati wrote on X that OpenAI […]

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Drone-maker DJI filed a lawsuit Friday against the U.S. Department of Defense over its inclusion on a DoD list of “Chinese military companies.” A DJI spokesperson said the company filed the suit after “attempting to engage with the DoD for more than sixteen months” and deciding “it had no alternative other than to seek relief […]

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Penguin Random House, the trade publisher, is adding language to the copyright pages of its books to prohibit the use of those books to train AI. The Bookseller reports that new books and reprints of older titles from the publisher will now include the statement, “No part of this book may be used or reproduced […]

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One of the most attention-grabbing aspects of “Roadrunner,” the Morgan Neville-directed documentary about Anthony Bourdain, was Neville’s use of generative AI to replicate Bourdain’s voice. Looking back now, Neville told Wired that he saw this as a “fun” way to “keep [Bourdain’s] voice going in the film.” But his approach drew intense criticism — while […]

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Apple’s Vision Pro hasn’t exactly reshaped the market, but the company isn’t giving up on headsets that combine the digital and real worlds. A new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that Apple’s next big mixed reality release could come as early as next year, with the launch of a Vision headset costing around $2,000 […]

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The hackers who reportedly hit more than 130 organizations last year and stole the credentials of almost 10,000 employees are still targeting several tech and video game companies, according to a report obtained by TechCrunch. The report, prepared by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, calls the hackers “Scattered Spider.” In a previous publicly available report, the company […]

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TikTok wants to determine its users’ appetite for mobile gaming with the launch of “mini-games” that can be played inside the social video app and discovered through creators’ videos. TechCrunch learned and has now confirmed TikTok’s new gaming pilot quietly launched just weeks ago with a variety of new partners, including game developers Vodoo, Nitro […]

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Hey all. Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we recap some of the top stories to cross TC’s front page over the last 7 days. The most read story on our site this week was about Flowcarbon — a new company and “blockchain-based redemption story” (as Anita put it) launched by WeWork […]

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Roblox has picked up a key hire to help grow its ecosystem of user-generated content for the metaverse. Nick Tornow is joining the company as VP of Engineering for its developer team, leaving his former post as Twitter Platform Lead. Tornow also spent a decade at Zynga and served as the company’s CTO from 2013 […]

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Take-Two has completed its $12.7 billion acquisition of mobile games giant Zynga, the company announced on Monday. Under the terms of the merger agreement, Zynga shareholders received $3.50 in cash and 0.0406 shares of Take-Two common stock per share of Zynga common stock. The deal, which was first announced in January, will bring Zynga’s popular […]

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TikTok is already one of the world’s fastest-growing social media platforms, where it’s even overtaken YouTube on watch time in select markets and sports over 1 billion monthly active users. Now, the company is looking to expand the range of activities its users can do when they tire of flipping through short videos. A report […]

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Andreessen Horowitz is launching a new vertical fund exclusively focused on opportunities in the games industry. The new $600 million fund brings a pool of dedicated capital and a new internal structure dedicated to sourcing deals inside the games vertical. The new vehicle, called Games Fund One, joins other industry-specific arms at a16z, including its […]

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Dating app giant Match is getting a new CEO. Just over two years after assuming the top exec position, Match CEO and 16-year employee Shar Dubey is stepping down. The company announced today, alongside its first-quarter earnings, Shar Dubey will resign as an officer of Match Group but will remain on the company’s board and […]

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There’s no shortage of digital banks in Nigeria and, in general, in Africa. As the region continues to experience rapid growth in mobile usage and the corresponding growing young population, these fintechs think this is the right time to provide financial services to every market category, from the banked to the unbanked. We’ve covered a […]

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The Russian App Store has lost 6,982 mobile apps since the start of the Ukraine invasion, as numerous companies have now pulled their apps and games from Apple’s iPhone and iPad App Stores in the country, according to data shared with TechCrunch by app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. To date, those apps had been downloaded […]

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Online language learning continues to be a huge opportunity for startups, with the most engaging experiences meeting a surge of interest from consumers looking for more productivity out of the hours that they spend on their smartphones. In one of the more recent developments, a language learning app called EWA — which has built a […]

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Casual mobile games have reached a fever pitch of interest with consumers, and so too with investors, who are rushing to back the biggest and most promising startups building these quick hits of engagement and diversion. In the latest development, a startup out of London called Tripledot — the company behind a popular Solitaire app, […]

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Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

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