The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the governing body overseeing the country’s widely used Unified Payments Interface (UPI) mobile payment system, is set to engage with various fintech startups this month to develop a strategy to address the growing market dominance of PhonePe and Google Pay in the UPI ecosystem. NPCI executives plan to … Read more
Waymo, the self-driving company under Alphabet, began testing its robotaxis in Atlanta on Tuesday, adding another city to its ever-expanding testing and deployment domain. Over the next few months, Waymo will deploy a handful of cars driven manually by humans to gather mapping data and get familiar with Atlanta’s environment, Sandy Karp, a Waymo spokesperson, … Read more
The round could total $870M, including $670M worth of secondary Late stage HRtech startup Rippling is raising new capital. The company’s new round, that has not yet closed, would inject $200 million into Rippling with another $670 million worth of shares being sold by existing stockholders, according to two people familiar with the deal. This … Read more
Now that humanoids are all the rage in the robotics industry, Boston Dynamics on Tuesday officially retired theirs. The Hyundai-owned firm has always marched to the beat of its own drummer. Even so, it’s an odd decision as funding pours into the category by the hundreds of millions. Venturing an educated guess, I would say … Read more
Truth Social, the social media platform owned by Donald Trump’s media company, has announced plans to launch a live TV streaming platform. The platform will focus on “news networks” and “religious channels,” along with “other content that has been cancelled, is at risk of cancellation, or is being suppressed on other platforms and services,” according … Read more
When prolific venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Hippeau announced in early 2024 they were pivoting away from consumer tech, it sparked a social media debate about whether there are still opportunities. Maven Ventures’ Jim Scheinman and Sara Deshpande say “yes.” And to prove it, they raised $60 million in capital commitments for a … Read more
For those who use WhatsApp more like an inbox, the app will now become more useful. WhatsApp on Tuesday announced a handful of new chat filters for the app to access certain types of messages easily: All, Unread and Groups. The “All” filter is selected by default and shows you an unfiltered version of your … Read more
It may seem like a paradox to have virtualized Kubernetes clusters. They are, after all, an abstraction in themselves of virtual machines made popular by VMware in the early 2000s. Loft Labs saw a similar problem with resource utilization in Kubernetes clusters that VMware saw with server utilization, and has built a virtualization tool to … Read more
For the firm that calls itself “the first check in deep tech,” the last check for SOSV’s latest $306 million fund took a bit longer than founder Sean O’Sullivan would have liked. That’s probably less a reflection on the firm than an indictment of the macroeconomic environment: Ask any VC, and they’ll tell you the … Read more
Heat pumps are having a bit of a moment. They outsold gas furnaces for the second year running, and homeowners who install them are eligible for thousands in incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act. But they’re not growing quite as fast as they perhaps could be. Getting consumers to adopt new technology isn’t always easy, … Read more
