Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign up! We’re back and making up for lost time after taking off for Thanksgiving. Here we go! Webull, Yieldstreet and NomuPay go shopping Recently on the Equity Podcast, Alex Wilhelm and I talked … [Read more...]

Miguel Fernandez Contributor Miguel Fernandez is CEO and co-founder of Capchase, which provides non-dilutive financing to SaaS and comparable recurring-revenue companies. More posts by this contributor Revenue-based financing: A new playbook for startup fundraising Move over, TAM. There’s a new essential metric in town. Over the years, I’ve … [Read more...]

Hi, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter that highlights some of the more noteworthy moments in tech over the past few days. The holiday season is nigh upon us, but the tech industry waits for no one — on the horizon are IBM, AMD and Intel conferences, plus the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The news cycle won’t die down anytime soon, and rest assured … [Read more...]

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. We won’t be getting our hands on a Shein filing just yet, but we can’t wait to — especially to understand the logic and math behind its ubiquitous ads. But in the meantime, we landed on some … [Read more...]

As a woman in her 20s with an Instagram account, I’ve witnessed the explosive rise and destigmatization of medical spa treatments. From the influencer I ran track with in high school posting promos for lip blushing and fillers, to constantly discussing buying a Groupon for Baby Botox with my friend Emily, these treatments have become a part of regular conversation in a way they haven’t in the … [Read more...]

For years, dedicated Star Trek fans have been using AI in an attempt to make a version of the acclaimed series Deep Space 9 that looks decent on modern TVs. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but I was surprised to find that it’s actually quite good — certainly good enough that media companies ought to pay attention (instead of just sending me copyright strikes). I was inspired earlier this year to watch … [Read more...]

For the next few weeks, TechCrunch’s robotics newsletter Actuator will be running Q&As with some of the top minds in robotics. Subscribe here for future updates. Part 1: CMU’s Matthew Johnson-Roberson Part 2: Toyota Research Institute’s Max Bajracharya and Russ Tedrake This time it’s Dhruv Batra, research director, FAIR (The Fundamental AI Research) at Meta. The Facebook parent describes FAIR … [Read more...]

Vijay Sundaram Contributor Vijay Sundaram is chief strategy officer at Zoho, where he drives corporate strategy, execution, channel management, business development and enterprise sales. He is a prior entrepreneur and company founder, in cloud supply chain software, mobile advertising technology, and renewable energy. More posts by this contributor During … [Read more...]

Genetic testing company 23andMe announced on Friday that hackers accessed around 14,000 customer accounts in the company’s recent data breach. In a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission published Friday, the company said that, based on its investigation into the incident, it had determined that hackers had accessed 0.1% of its customer base. According to the company’s most … [Read more...]

Fisker, the California-based EV startup, cut its annual production guidance in an effort to free up $300 million in working capital, the company said in a business update Friday. Fisker said it expects to produce about 10,000 vehicles this year. The decision comes less than a month since Fisker cut its production target to between 13,000 and 17,000 vehicles for 2023. The production guidance is … [Read more...]

OpenAI’s app store for AI, the GPT Store, will not launch this year as previously announced, but rather on an unspecified date in early 2024, the company said. The delay is almost certainly due to the leadership shakeup that occurred in November, just after the initial announcement. The news was first reported by Axios, which obtained the memo sent to users and developers. It read in part: “we are … [Read more...]

After four years, the long-awaited launch of the Tesla Cybertruck electric pickup has come and gone. The boxy vehicle is Tesla’s first new model since 2020, when it started delivering the Model Y. Yet, Cybertruck’s initial debut predates that moment; Tesla CEO Elon Musk showed off an early version of the pickup at a memorable 2019 event, when it accidentally smashed two windows while attempting to … [Read more...]

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Hello, you scrumptious specimen of a human being. Have you looked yourself in the mirror and given yourself a high five today? No? Well, here’s your chance! I’ve had a productive couple of weeks on the site. I got pissy about founders failing to consider sustainability in startup pitch decks. I looked at a few thousand … [Read more...]

Amazon has purchased three Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX to support deployment of its Project Kuiper mega-constellation, the company said Friday. The new deal comes scarcely two months after it was revealed that Amazon was facing a lawsuit over its decision not to consider SpaceX — the most reliable rocket company on the planet — in its first round of launch contracts. The three Falcon 9 missions … [Read more...]

Remember a year ago, all the way back to last November before we knew about ChatGPT, when machine learning was all about building models to solve for a single task like loan approvals or fraud protection? That approach seemed to go out the window with the rise of generalized LLMs, but the fact is generalized models aren’t well suited to every problem, and task-based models are still alive and well … [Read more...]

Forests are worth as much as $150 trillion, according to the Boston Consulting Group, with much of the interest in them centering around carbon credits. That means that forests that are conserved or restored need to be monitored, to make sure that everything is working as planned. But that data is often unreliable and gathering it is tedious, leaving the door wide open for startups in the … [Read more...]

Bluesky, the startup aiming to build a decentralized social network to take on Twitter/X, says it has begun deploying new safety tooling to help moderate content on the network through automation. Although still in private beta, the company has already made headlines for issues around content moderation in recent months after it initially didn’t ban a member making death threats, and later didn’t … [Read more...]

AI is everywhere, and predictably, sales teams are among the early adopters. So I wasn’t surprised to see Scalestack raise $1 million to help make sales teams’ lives easier. So, as we’ve done every week for the past 18 months or so (I can’t believe this is going to be the 75th pitch deck teardown!), we’re going to put the deck Scalestack used to raise its round under the proverbial microscope and … [Read more...]

A new report by the Financial Times says X will now turn to small and medium-sized advertisers to shore up revenue after the company’s owner Elon Musk alienated big brands fleeing X over antisemitic content by telling them they could go fuck themselves during an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit earlier this week. But while the FT paints a picture of a bright future for X, where … [Read more...]

Rover is going private in a $2.3 billion, all-cash sale to Blackstone, the company announced earlier this week. The pet care–focused company raised hundreds of millions of dollars while private, through a Series G, and later went public via a SPAC. Notably, unlike a great many SPAC combinations, Rover is proving that blank-check companies are not merely a way to incinerate wealth. The Exchange … [Read more...]