Paralympians bring home gold medals, but we’re failing them on web accessibility
Joseph WengierContributor Share on Twitter Joseph Wengier competed in five Paralympics and won nine gold medals. He promotes the advancement of a more inclusive internet as an ambassador for accessibility technology company UserWay. After winning my first gold medal...
Sorare raises $680 million for its fantasy sports NFT game
French startup Sorare has announced that it has raised a significant funding round. SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 has led a $680 million Series B round, which values the company at $4.3 billion. Sorare has built a fantasty football (soccer) platform based on NFTs, or...
VC Mark Suster: “The bet we’re making now is on founder skills,” instead of customers or products
We recently caught up with longtime VC Mark Suster of L.A.-based Upfront Ventures, which last raised both an early-stage fund and a growth stage fund several years ago and, according to regulatory filings, is in the market right now, though Suster couldn’t...
MIT study finds Tesla drivers become inattentive when Autopilot is activated
By the end of this week, potentially thousands of Tesla owners will be testing out the automaker’s newest version of its “Full Self-Driving” beta software, version 10.0.1, on public roads, even as regulators and federal officials investigate the...
iOS 15 adds all the little features that were missing
What's new in iOS 15 The release of iOS 15 should be a major event for mobile operating systems. And yet, this year, there’s no breakthrough feature or overarching theme that makes this release stand out. Apple has focused on quality-of-life updates as well as...
Near Space Labs closes $13M Series A to send more Earth imaging robots to the stratosphere
The decreasing cost of launch and a slew of other tech innovations have brought about a renaissance in geospatial intelligence, with multiple startups aiming to capture higher-quality and more frequent images of Earth than have ever before been available. Most of...
Xata is a database service for serverless apps
Meet Xata, a startup with a new take on managed databases. The company runs your database for you and turns it into an API so that you can query and update it from your serverless app. Xata has raised a $5 million funding round. Its product is not yet ready for prime...
India’s Cars24, a used-vehicle sales platform, raises $450M at a $1.84B valuation
The used car market is getting another major infusion of venture capital today, with one of the faster scaling startups out of India picking up a major round of financing to double down on growth: Cars24 — a site and app that sells users cars and used...
How to meet the demand of EV infrastructure and maintain a stable grid
Andrew TangContributor Share on Twitter Andrew Tang is vice president of energy storage and optimization at Wärtsilä Energy, which provides solutions for renewable energy integration and EV charging infrastructure development. As electric vehicles (EVs) become the new...
User’s Guide to TechCrunch Disrupt 2021
TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 approaches in just three days. Here’s your how-to guide for everything you can expect at Disrupt. Although the main show kicks off on Tuesday the 21st, there’ll be some sneak peeks and extras going down on Monday. Make sure to log in to Hopin...