レベル2 (500〜1,000語)

Bacterial secretions might dye your future wardrobe, and that’d be an improvement. That’s because textiles usually get their hues from toxic chemicals, and the resulting wastewater—laden with dyes, acids and formaldehyde—destroys rivers, such as those surrounding Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Wastewater treatment, when it happens, is just one of the energy-intensive (read: carbon-spewing) […]

The cannabis industry is doing well in the United States: over 75% of the population lives in a state where access is permitted, and the legal market is expected to generate $33 billion this year.

Joywell uses a proprietary microbial fermentation process to produce sweet proteins that are nearly identical to those found in exotic fruits and berries.

Much of the world’s attention around blockchain is on the highs and lows of cryptocurrency values. Startups like FlexID remind us that distributed ledger technology has the potential to play other roles, including offering trusted records of identities without the need for a centralized authority. One of the startups working toward this vision is Zimbabwe’s […]

Substack, the five-year-old newsletter platform that has aggressively positioned itself as a disruptive force in media, has abandoned efforts to raise a Series C round, the New York Times is reporting today.  According to its sources, Substack held discussions with potential investors in recent months about raising $75 million to $100 million at a valuation […]

The excitement around web3 and the metaverse have pulled plenty of entrepreneurs who defined the first generation of native mobile apps to begin questioning what’s next. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley is on the co-founding team of a new startup called LivingCities, alongside Matt Miesnieks, who sold his most recent startup 6D.ai to Niantic for an […]

More than 80% of food delivery orders in Latin America are still made over phone calls and settled with cash. OlaClick, a young startup that is helping these restaurants sell online and collect money digitally, announced on Thursday it has received backing from scores of investors, including Gradient, Meta and Delivery Hero. Gradient Ventures, Google’s […]

We tear down the deck Lumigo used to land a $29 million Series A round led by Redline Capital last year.

In a new court filing, Epic Games challenges Apple’s position that third-party app stores would compromise the iPhone’s security. And it points to Apple’s macOS as an example of how the process of “sideloading” apps — installing apps outside of Apple’s own App Store, that is — doesn’t have to be the threat Apple describes […]

Companies use its emissions reductions engine during the product development phase to understand how to create products with lower carbon footprints.

Humble Bee Bio is on a mission to create a biodegradable alternative to plastics by synthesizing the biology of bees. While the New Zealand-based company is still at an early stage – it’s about halfway through its proof of concept – if Humble Bee is successful, its bioplastics are likely to make it into the […]

Early-stage proptech startups have a potential new source of capital in 1Sharpe Ventures, which recently closed its $90 million inaugural fund. Roofstock co-founder and chairman Gregor Watson and real estate investor Rob Bloemker started the venture firm in 2021, and had their first close last year. The pair say the fund was “oversubscribed.” For the […]

Over the last decade, the rate at which organizations create data has accelerated as it becomes cheaper to store, access, and process data. But as data continues to grow in scale and complexity, it’s becoming scattered across apps and platforms — often leading to problems where it concerns data quality. According to a 2020 O’Reilly […]

Joby Aviation — the publicly-traded electric air vehicle company with a current market cap of $3.1 billion — has received the necessary certification from the Federal Aviation Administration to begin on-demand commercial air taxi operations, the company said on Thursday. While it’s a significant milestone that puts Joby closer to its stated goal of launching […]

Although we’ve long understood that asteroids are not simply the rubble of the universe, but potentially profitable stores of precious minerals, humanity has never been able to unlock this value. Y Combinator startup Astroforge wants to succeed where other companies have failed, by becoming the first to mine an asteroid and bring the material back […]

Wale Ayeni, one of Africa’s well-known investors, has a new role as the head of Helios Digital Ventures, the venture capital strategy of private equity firm Helios Investment Partners, TechCrunch has learned. This appointment comes a month after Ayeni left the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, where […]

A group of former executives from Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges globally, has created a $100 million venture fund, the team told TechCrunch on Thursday. Old Fashion Research (OFR) – whose name is derived from the classic cocktail – was founded in late 2021 by managing partners Ling Zhang, who was previously the […]

Republican lawmakers are facing growing anger over the deadliest mass shooting at an American school in nearly a decade yesterday, with many of their constituents expressing frustration over their repeated votes against even modest gun control reforms. Social media can’t solve the problem. Indigov, a three-year-old, 70-person New York-based startup, can’t solve it either, but […]

Unacademy, one of the high-profile Indian startups, has urged its employees to learn how to work under constraint and focus on reaching profitability as the SoftBank and Tiger Global-backed online learning platform predicts a dry funding spell across the industry for as long as 18 months. The online learning platform, which has raised over $800 […]

Maryland residents will now be able to store their driver’s license or state ID in the Apple Wallet app, Apple announced today. The state is now the second in the U.S. to support the new feature, following the launch in Arizona in March. Once loaded into Apple Wallet, Marylanders will be able to present their […]

Google is starting to gradually roll out ads in YouTube Shorts around the world, the company announced at its Marketing Live event this week. The official launch comes as the company has been experimenting with ads in YouTube Shorts since last year. Starting this week, video action campaigns and app campaigns will automatically scale to […]

More venture capital keeps trooping into Africa’s B2B e-commerce retail, a space where startups are digitizing informal trade to get thousands of merchants to operate more efficiently. This time, it’s a startup that was in the news this January: Namibia-based JABU, whose $3.2 million seed round we covered. Now, the last-mile distribution e-commerce company has […]

It's nice to see an investing group put their dollars where their vision is even when the market is trash, instead of merely shouting on Twitter that they, or their firm, are still doing deals.

It continues to be a very rough week for e-commerce companies in Europe. In the latest development, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Getir — the $12 billion quick commerce upstart that provides grocery essentials and sundries and promises delivery of them in minutes — is cutting 14% of its staff globally. It’s been estimated that […]

As app store legislation targeting tech giants Apple and Google moves forward in Congress, Apple today is out with two more new reports meant to demonstrate how successful the app economy has been under its reign. The company commissioned outside firms to produce analyses related to job growth and earnings in the iOS developer community. […]

Government tends to struggle when it comes to keeping up with tech innovation. The past U.S. tax season that just wrapped up in April was particularly stressful for investors and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) alike, as both struggled with the implications of 2021’s crypto investing boom. The IRS, for its part, turned to Seattle, […]

As the demand for AI-powered apps grows, startups developing dedicated chips to accelerate AI workloads on-premises are reaping the benefits. A recent ZDNet piece reaffirms that the AI edge chip market is booming, fueled by “staggering” venture capital financing in the hundreds of millions of dollars. EdgeQ, Kneron, and Hailo are among the dozens of […]

In sales, a win/loss analysis is the process of determining why deals are ultimately won or lost. That’s relatively self-explanatory, but more specifically, a win/loss review aims to contrast a sales organization’s performance with an industry or competitors and figure out why an outcome occurred. This involves gathering data including sales notes and customer feedback, […]

Affordability is one of the biggest impediments for insurance penetration in Kenya. Often, policy holders are required to make one-off payments for long-term covers, and the quoted sums are usually beyond the reach of most people. It is this gap that Kenyan insurtech MotiSure is working to seal. The startup, which targets motorcycle taxi (boda […]

Some of buywith's unique features include a “Shop With Me" screen-sharing component and that it does not require an app download or code integration.