BYD Co., the Chinese auto giant backed by Warren Buffett, is rushing to make China self-sufficient in the production of electric vehicles. On Monday, the firm said in a filing it has secured 800 million yuan ($113 million) in a Series A+ round for its chipmaking arm, BYD Semiconductor. At stake is the race to make
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How do you give your brand a voice that feels authentic and unique? How can you communicate with users in a way that helps and engages without feeling weird or forced? We’re thrilled to announce that Anna Pickard, Head of Brand Communications at Slack, will be joining us at TC Early Stage to teach us
Chinese internet giant ByteDance has announced plans to discontinue two of its apps in India, its biggest overseas market, and urged its users to move to TikTok. Vigo Video and Vigo Lite, two apps that allow users to create and share short-form sketches and lip-syncing to Bollywood songs, posted a message early Monday (local time)
Rajat Bhageria Contributor We were promised robots everywhere — fully autonomous robots that will drive our cars end-to-end, clean our dishes, drive our freight, make our food, pipette and do our lab work, write our legal documents, mow the lawn, balance our books and even clean our houses. And yet instead of Terminator or WALL-E
Tesla Model 3 vehicles produced at its Fremont, Calif. factory will reportedly come standard with a wireless charging pad and USB-C ports, upgrades that were first spotted by Drive Tesla Canada. Electrek also reported on the changes. The upgrades now put U.S.-made Model 3s on par with the same vehicles made at Tesla’s factory in
“A lot of people denigrate the value of talking about race and racism in technological spaces,” said Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race, which has surged to the top of the New York Times best sellers list in paperback nonfiction, two and a half years after its initial January 2018
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
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