COVID-19

Silicon Valley’s surreal weekend

As Silicon Valley Bank collapsed before our eyes on Thursday, a founder told me that the world felt like it did when COVID-19 first bared its teeth. I scoffed at his analogy at first: Are we really us

‘Pan-variant’ COVID vaccine could defang future strains thanks to machine learning

A new approach to vaccines with a machine learning twist could put an end to boosters and seasonal variant shots, according to MIT researchers. This “pan-variant” vaccine would ignore the

AI does a poor job of diagnosing COVID-19 from coughs, study finds

Early in the pandemic, a number of researchers, startups and institutions developed AI systems that they claimed could diagnose COVID-19 from the sound of a person’s cough. At the time, we ourse

Virtual research institute battles Long COVID with backing from Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin

A new nonprofit “startup” is emerging from stealth today with $15 million in funding from Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin, with a focus squarely on studying and treating Long COVID. Wh

It’s the era of at-home health diagnostics and Senzo is finding its flow

Biotech company Senzo just raised a $2 million round at a $20 million pre-money valuation to further extend options for lateral flow diagnostics. “Lateral flow,” in this case, is the same

Meta weighs downgrading COVID-19 misinfo policy to labels and demotion instead of removal

Facebook, no stranger to misinformation on its platform, attempted an uncharacteristically bold move as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold around the world: instead of merely labelling posts that discour

FDA won’t require lengthy clinical trials for COVID-19 boosters

Future COVID-19 vaccine boosters won’t have to go through a traditional, lengthy clinical trial process to attain emergency use authorization in the U.S., according to a report in Reuters. An ag

Startups keep laying off swaths of employees as the downturn continues

It’s nearly been two months since we started this accidental weekly column about layoffs happening within startups. Workforce reductions have impacted startup employees in every massive sector, from

Canada sunsets its COVID Alert app based on the iOS and Android exposure notification API

The government of Canada today announced that it is ending use of the app it commissioned based on the COVID-19 exposure alert API developed jointly by Google and Apple as a measure to help combat the

FDA clears COVID-19 vaccines for children under 5

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized use of the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and BioNTech, and from Moderna, for kids between six months and five years of age. The FDA’s decisio

Caught COVID-19 abroad? Good luck, you might get stuck

The idea of being stranded on a Caribbean island might not sound like the worst thing in the world after two years of a pandemic, but speaking from experience, it’s not as fun as it sounds. I ca

The early signs of startup layoffs to come

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 Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single to

For mental health startups, happiness is in niches

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here

How femtech startup Inne rebooted its hardware launch after COVID-19 chaos

It’s been a tough few years for Berlin-based femtech hardware startup Inne, which came out of stealth R&D in the fall of 2019, shortly before COVID-19 hit Europe. By January 2020, founder an

How will tech companies cope with an office-free future?

Depending on your business, your job and your living situation, the pandemic showed that many workers didn't need to be sitting in a cubby farm inside a big building to get their jobs done.

Airbnb will no longer offer COVID-19-related refunds beginning May 31

Airbnb today announced that it will soon no longer offer refunds for COVID-19-related circumstances, including cases where a guest or host becomes sick with COVID-19 — reflecting an update to th

Pandemic-fueled companies are finding the new reality hard to swallow

Could it be that companies that fell out of favor due to COVID-induced shifts in the economy are best prepared to excel this year?

COVID rapid tests available on e-commerce in China for the first time

China is allowing the public to take COVID-19 rapid antigen self-tests for the first time as infection numbers hit a two-year high in recent days. Online marketplaces including JD.com and Meituan are

Welcome to the it’s-so-subtle pivot season

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. As late-stage tech startups face the changing environment in t

Spotify must be more transparent about its rules of the road

Companies once believed they could rely on algorithms to catch inappropriate content and intervene with public relations in high-profile cases. Today, the challenges are bigger and more complicated.
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