Last week, we suggested that for a truly diverse venture industry, the limited partners who provide investing capital to VCs — institutions like universities and hospital systems — need to start incorporating diversity mandates into their work. Say a venture firm wanted to secure a commitment from the University of Texas System; it would first
Technology
The digitally face-swapped videos known as deepfakes aren’t going anywhere, but if platforms want to be able to keep an eye on them, they need to find them first. Doing so was the object of Facebook’s “Deepfake Detection Challenge,” launched last year. After months of competition the winners have emerged, and they’re… better than guessing.
Over the past few years, Snapchat has been building up an increasingly complex weave of partnerships. They have their advertising partners that power the vast majority of their monetization efforts. They have app developers on Snap Kit that they are also selling new features like CameraKit and Minis too. They’re bringing game developers on board
After teasing the series’ arrival for some months, Quibi is finally ready to launch its take on 60 Minutes for the social media generation. What that mainly means is content tailored to the shortened attention spans of viewers on top which the service has hung all of its hopes, dreams and $1.8 billion. The new
Rocket Lab’s delayed 12th launch is scheduled to take place tonight late night Pacific time, mid-afternoon on the 11th at the company’s New Zealand launch facility. The Electron rocket will be taking payloads to orbit from NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office and the University of New South Wales. “Don’t Stop Me Now,” named after the
Tech has dropped the ball. For an industry that holds so much power, and prides itself on being ahead of the curve, the diversity of venture capital and among tech entrepreneurs leaves so much to be desired. More than 80 percent of VC firms don’t have a single black founder. It’s no surprise, then, that
A Swiss startup called HMCARE, spun out of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, has raised a million Swiss Francs (equivalent to about $105 million) to commercialize its transparent and relatively eco-friendly surgical masks. The founders were inspired by healthcare workers in the 2015 Ebola outbreak and at children’s hospitals around the world working closely
Honda has confirmed a cyberattack that brought parts of its global operations to a standstill. The company said in a brief statement Tuesday that the attack caused production issues outside of its headquarters in Japan. “Work is being undertaken to minimize the impact and to restore full functionality of production, sales, and development activities,” according
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced today that the company would no longer sell facial recognition services, calling for a “national dialogue” on whether it should be used at all. He also voiced support for a new bill aiming to reduce police violence and increase accountability. In a letter reported by CNBC, written in support of
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Here at Equity Monday we look at what happened over the weekend, what’s ahead, and a few recent funding rounds. As you’ll hear, we’re heading back into our normal cadence and topics, but if you do want to
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox. Hi friends and first-time readers. Welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to
The tech industry has generally wished that structural discrimination would go away, while pretending that it already has. But technology can be used by anyone for anything. And so, the world has watched video after video of police brutality against Black people in a real-time stream that plays through the closing days of quarantine, culminating
Millions have taken to the streets across the world to protest the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis last month. Protesters have faced both unprecedented police violence and surveillance. Just this week, the Justice Department granted the Drug Enforcement Administration, an agency typically tasked with
Amy Errett’s company, Madison Reed, sells in-home care color. It may not sound like a glamorous business but, as it turns out, it’s a very durable one, done the right way. Not only has the seven-year-old outfit been slowing chipping away at the dominant personal care giants like L’Oreal that have long controlled what’s currently
Lidar is fast becoming one of the most influential tools in archaeology, revealing things in a few hours what might have taken months of machete wielding and manual measurements otherwise. The latest such discovery is an enormous Mayan structure, more than a kilometer long, 3,000 years old, and seemingly used for astronomical observations. Takeshi Inomata
There’s a decent chance buying music is the furthest thing from your mind right now, and I can’t say I blame you. Here in the States, 108,000 people are dead of COVID-19, and protests against the killing of George Floyd raged on for an eighth night. And neither of these society-shaping events are set to
GM’s electric offensive to bring at least 20 new EVs to market by 2023 reportedly includes a commercial van. Reuters reported Thursday that the company is developing an electric van for the commercial market code named BV1. The vehicle is expected to start production in late 2021 and will use the Ultium battery system that
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. The ZoomInfo IPO slipped through our fingers in the last news cycle, so we’re going to catch up. Founded in 2000, the company has had a somewhat complicated history. ZoomInfo raised a Series A in