The Latest

In a public letter addressed to Ford boss Jim Farley, House Republicans Mike Gallagher and Jason Smith announced that two congressional committees are investigating the automaker’s licensing deal with Chinese…

Congress probes Ford’s big battery deal with China’s CATL

Three years after her big streaming moment, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will make her return to Twitch. The lawmaker and cultural icon turned occasional Twitch personality announced on Twitter that she…

AOC will stream on Twitch again this weekend

Like Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors,” deal flow is an insatiable beast — but without the bloodshed. Investors need to keep their pipelines primed, and the best place…

Investor opportunities abound at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023

If you only tracked American insurtech companies that went public recently, you might think insurtech is in its flop era. Thankfully, that’s not true.

European insurtech is showing strength that venture data doesn’t fully detail

As someone who has worked extensively on solutions for expanding reproductive health access, I know that telehealth is perfectly suited for abortion care.

Suspending access to medication abortions will threaten telehealth access

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. It seems like the fizzle has gone out of the VR conversation altogether, as every…

Goodbye VR, hello AR, and can AI be more human, plz?

Featured Article

Leave sex workers out of your NPC TikTok discourse

Every time a woman monetizes the absurd, she’s accused of making fetish content. It’s a symptom of the anti-sex moral panic sweeping pop culture — and this time, it’s coming for TikTok’s NPC creators.  Snippets of these creators’ livestreams keep going viral, and because the internet loves to hate on women, the nonsensical mannerisms that…

10:50 am PDT • July 21, 2023
Leave sex workers out of your NPC TikTok discourse

AMC Theaters has announced that it’s dropping plans to charge more for preferred seats and less for front-row ones through a tiered pricing system. The plan, called “Sightline,” was being…

AMC scraps plan to charge more for better seats

The U.S. government’s instant payment system, FedNow Service, went live this week.  Here’s a quick refresher on what that is: FedNow is an instant payment infrastructure for transferring money that…

FedNow is finally live in the US

There’s a lot of performative behavior in startup land, such as foosball tables in reception areas and kitchens with kombucha taps.

TechCrunch+ Roundup: Generative AI marketing, European edtech report, falling fintech valuations

Where we’ll be next

Tesla’s stock price took a hit after it reported decreased Q2 margins and problems that are unique to automakers, not tech companies.

Tesla’s margins remind us that it’s an automaker, not a tech company

Amazon will spend $120 million on a new satellite processing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC), as the company gears up to launch the first batch of Project Kuiper…

Amazon is building a $120M facility in Florida for Project Kuiper satellite processing

Featured Article

Red Hat saved IBM’s bacon this quarter

IBM reported earnings this week, which weren’t exactly stellar, but without Red Hat’s revenue, it could have been far worse.

8:56 am PDT • July 21, 2023
Red Hat saved IBM’s bacon this quarter

The developers of the popular iPhone app Camera+, LateNiteSoft, have launched a new iOS app called Photon. This new app is focused on pro image shooting. The developers are banking…

The makers of Camera+ release Photon, a new image capture app for pros

Space-based internet startup Astranis said Friday that its first commercial internet satellite will be unable to provide continuous coverage to Alaska due to a malfunction with both spacecraft’s solar panels.…

Astranis moves to Plan B after first commercial internet satellite malfunctions on orbit

CB Insights released its Q2 State of Fintech report last week, and unsurprisingly, global funding in the space was down — plunging by nearly half to $7.8 billion, its lowest…

Q2 fintech funding: LatAm, Caribbean more than doubles while payments takes a big hit

Despite current culture wars turning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies into a political punching bag, most business leaders understand that they’re very good for business. Yet in a more…

Paradigm’s CEO dives into diversity on the Builder Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023

Plastic in ocean bad. Plastic not in ocean good. That’s, in a nutshell, the pitch for CleanHub. The company has designed a whole business model and a track-and-trace model around…

Pitch Deck Teardown: CleanHub’s $7M seed deck

Telegram is rolling out its Stories feature to Premium users, the company confirmed in a tweet on Friday. The official rollout for Premium users comes a month after Telegram CEO…

Telegram rolls out its Stories feature to Premium users
Startups

That’s capitalism, baby

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our…

That’s capitalism, baby