Author: pekandesigns

Next Insurance, a three-year-old U.S.-based firm that sells insurance products to small businesses, has become the latest unicorn in the nation after bagging $250 million in a new financing round, the startup said today. Germany-based Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurers, alone funded Next Insurance’s Series C round, the two said in a […]

83North has closed its fifth fund, completing an oversubscribed $300 million raise and bringing its total capital under management to $1.1BN+. The VC firm, which spun out from Silicon Valley giant Greylock Partners in 2015 — and invests in startups in Europe and Israel, out of offices in London and Tel Aviv — last closed […]

On the heels of Bird closing a $275 million round to help put itself in pole position in the electric scooter market, a smaller European rival has also raised some money to grow its own business. Tier Mobility, a Berlin-based startup that operates a fleet of 20,000 scooters across 40 cities in 12 countries, has […]

India’s largest budget lodging startup Oyo Hotels and Homes said today it plans to raise about $1.5 billion as part of a new financing round as the startup looks to expand its footprints in the U.S. and Europe. Ritesh Agarwal, the founder and CEO of Oyo, said he will invest $700 million in the startup’s new […]

A show of hands, startuppers. Who’s ready to save some money on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019, our premier tech conference that takes place on 11-12 December? Then listen up, because our super early bird pricing ends in just five days. Right now, passes start at €345 + VAT and, depending on which pass you […]

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the new Extra Crunch series where we’ll help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps — including everything from the OS’s to the apps that run upon them, as well as the money that flows through it all. The app industry in 2018 […]

In a wide-ranging conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco last week, Postmates co-founder and chief executive officer Bastian Lehmann made light of the company’s lack of IPO documents. The San Francisco-based on-demand delivery business was expected to publicly file its IPO prospectus in September in preparation for a fall exit, sources familiar with the matter […]

Dr. Stuart Russell, a distinguished AI researcher and computer scientist at UC Berkeley, believes there is a fundamental and potentially civilization-ending shortcoming in the “standard model” of AI, which is taught (and Dr. Russell wrote the main textbook) and applied virtually everywhere. Dr. Russell’s new book, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, […]

The U.S. government may not be able to prevent another global cyberattack like WannaCry, a senior cybersecurity official has said. Jeanette Manfra, the assistant director for cybersecurity for Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF that the 2017 WannaCry cyberattack, which saw hundreds of thousands of computers […]