techcrunch News of 05/28/20

Win A Wild Card To Compete In Startup Battlefield At Disrupt 2020

Ready to take advantage of every opportunity to keep your startup on track and moving forward? Yes, yes you are. Exhibiting in Startup Alley during Disrupt SF 2020 is nothing but opportunity. It offers founders beaucoup benefits, but there’s one ...

2020 Lotus Evora GT Review: A Thrilling, Analog Weekend Racer

Why’s this on TechCrunch? We hear that occasionally when posting things outside of our general programming. Generally, there’s a tech hook; there isn’t here with this $100,000 2020 Lotus Evora GT. The Lotus Evora GT is ...

A 12 Year Journey Ends As Skimlinks Is Acquired By Retail Marketing Platform Connexity

Connexity , a lead-gen platform for online retailers, has acquired Skimlinks , a UK platform for publishers to make money through affiliate links. Terms of the deal were undisclosed. According to Crunchbase, Skimlinks had raised a total of $25.5M ...

Vaya Africa Launches Electric Ride-Hail Taxi Network

Vaya Africa, a ride-hail mobility venture founded by Zimbabwean mogul Strive Masiyiwa, has launched an electric taxi service and charging network in Zimbabwe with plans to expand across the continent. The South Africa headquartered company has ...

Rivian Is Building An In-House Insurance Agency

Rivian is hiring an insurance agency data manager, a job posting that suggests the all-electric automaker is planning to offer its own insurance to customers. The job was first posted by RivianForums , which also reached out to TechCrunch with ...

Zipline Begins US Medical Delivery With UAV Program Honed In Africa

Drones are being deployed in the fight to curb COVID-19 in the U.S. Novant Health and California based UAV delivery startup Zipline have launched distribution of personal protective gear and medical equipment in North Carolina. Novant is a ...

D-ID, The Israeli Company That Digitally De-Identifies Faces In Videos And Still Images, Raises $13 Million

If only Facebook had been using the kind of technology that TechCrunch Startup Battlefield alumnus D-ID was pitching, it could have avoided exposing all of our faces to privacy destroying software services like Clearview AI. At least, ...

As Fashion Has Its Metaverse Moment, One App Looks To Bridge Real And Virtual Worlds For Sneakerheads

Fashion is having its moment in the metaverse. A riot of luxury labels, music, and games are vying for attention in the virtual world. And as physical events and the entertainment industry that depends on them shuts down, virtual things have come to ...

Elon Musk: The Tesla Cybertruck Isn’T Getting Any Smaller

In the days and weeks after Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed the cybertruck — a post-apocalyptic inspired vehicle made of cold-rolled steel — there was a lot of speculation about whether it would be smaller once it actually made it to market. ...

UK Government Reverses Course On Huawei’S Involvement In 5g Networks

Conservative members of the United Kingdom’s government have pushed Prime Minister Boris Johnson to draw up plans to remove telecom equipment made by the Chinese manufacturer Huawei from the nation’s 5G networks by 2023, according to ...

Startup Battlefield Is Going Virtual With TechCrunch Disrupt 2020

You read that right. The big announcement came yesterday — TechCrunch Disrupt is now fully virtual . What does this mean for Startup Battlefield? More opportunity. The best companies from across the globe, an even bigger launch platform, the ...

Cake Brings A Swedish Take On E-Motorcycle Design To The U.S.

Cake has crafted the Swedish edition of electric motorcycle design starting in the dirt. The Stockholm based mobility startup’s debut, the Kalk OR, is a 150 pound, battery powered two-wheeler engineered for agile off-road riding and available in a ...

TechCrunch Disrupt 2020 Is Going Virtual

The headline says it all. TechCrunch’s big yearly event, Disrupt , is going fully virtual in 2020. As you can imagine, this is largely due to the impact that the coronavirus has had on the world. But it also gives us a chance to make our event even ...

Kenya’S Apollo Agriculture Raises $6m Series A Led By Anthemis

Apollo Agriculture believes it can attain profits by helping Kenya’s smallholder farmers maximize theirs. That’s the mission of the Nairobi based startup that raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Anthemis. Founded in ...

TikTok Parent ByteDance Leads $6m Round In Financial AI Startup Lingxi

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has added Lingxi, a Beijing-based startup that applies machine intelligence to financial services such as debt collection and insurance sales, to its ever-expanding portfolio of investments. The AI ...

Study Launched Into How Startups Will Return To Offices — Will WFH Continue?

A comprehensive study into how startups will work in the future, in the wake of the global COVID-9 pandemic, has been launched by UK non-profit Founders Forum . The initiative comes in the wake of a number of organizations announcing extended offices ...

Everylwell Gains First FDA Authorization For A Standalone At-Home COVID-19 Test Sample Collection Kit

Everlywell was one of the first startups to announce that it was working on a self-administered, at-home COVID-19 diagnostic kit, but it initially sought out to ship kits before regulators made clear that this was not in line with its guidelines. ...

Opera’S OPay Still Plans Africa Expansion On Nigerian Super App

Opera’s Africa fintech startup OPay remains committed to building a multi-service super app in Nigeria as the foundation to expand on the continent. OPay also continues to operate ORide for limited passenger service — though the ...

Cruise Lays Off 8% Of Workforce Amid COVID-19, Puts Resources Towards Engineering

Cruise, the self-driving car subsidiary of GM that also has backing from SoftBank Vision Fund, automaker Honda and T. Rowe Price & Associates, is laying off nearly 8% of its more than 1,800-member workforce today as it tries to reduce costs ...

WeWork And SoftBank Unveil The First 14 Startups In Their Emerge Accelerator For Underrepresented Founders

SoftBank Investment Fund and WeWork Labs say they’ve officially kicked off the first session of Emerge , an accelerator program designed for underrepresented founders. In their press release, the companies describe Emerge as ...