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. […]
Writing our way out of the place we’re in is tricky. The words come easily enough, each measured for its emotional weight in the stream of issues we face. It’s possible this paragraph will disappear as I find my ground. Mandates, Cuomo, Olympic mental gymnastics, where we were two weeks ago and how it relates […]
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 […]
Industry veteran Jitendra Gupta’s neobank for consumers in India has raised $45 million in a new financing round as the Bangalore and Mumbai-based startup gears up for Jupiter’s public launch in a month. The new financing round, a Series B, was co-led by Brazil-based Nubank, Global Founders Capital, Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners. Mirae Assets Venture […]
Karan Bajaj, the founder and chief executive of WhiteHat Jr, is leaving the firm a year after selling the startup for $300 million to Indian edtech giant Byju’s. In an email to employees on Wednesday, Bajaj and Byju’s founder and chief executive Byju Raveendran said the departure follows a “mutually decided” decision made at the […]
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 Monday, August 2, 2021. What a day. Square kicked off this week’s news cycle with a megadeal, Google popped up with new hardware, and there […]
Indian online insurance aggregator PolicyBazaar has filed for an initial public offering in which it is seeking to raise $809 million, becoming the fourth startup in the past two months from the South Asian market to explore public markets. In papers submitted to the market regulator in India, PolicyBazaar said it is looking to raise […]
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by what the weekday Exchange column digs into, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Our work this week kicked off in China, dug into African startup activity, dealt with China once […]
Pharmacies in Africa struggle with access to finance, but inventory management is really what bogs them down. How do pharmaceutical retailers know how much stock they need? How do they know which products to stock at a given time? How do they know what products aren’t selling? At the moment, there’s not enough data to […]
Tencent’s WeChat said on Tuesday it is temporarily suspending registration of new users in China as it works to comply with “relevant laws and regulations,” the latest Chinese firm to face regulatory scrutiny in the world’s largest internet market. In a social media post, Tencent said it is “upgrading” its security technology to align with […]