Tech Guest Posts

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Happy Thursday, Crunchers! If you’ve been to Disrupt before, you’ll remember we had a stage or two or three. This year, we’re going all out, with a bunch of tracks to tickle […].

Alex Circei Contributor Share on Twitter Alex Circei is the CEO and co-founder of Waydev, a development analytics tool that measures engineering teams’ performance. More posts by this contributor Use DORA metrics to support the next generation of remote-work models Insider hacks to streamline your SOC 3 certification application While the past few years saw […].

ispace, a company with a spacecraft en route to the moon, is now trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The Japanese firm raised around $52 million (¥6.7 billion) in an initial public offering last month. Shares reportedly went untraded on the first listing day due to a large volume of buy orders and demand to […].

Kris Holt / Engadget: Meta open sources Animated Drawings, an AI project that turns doodles into animations, with a dataset of nearly 180K drawings  —  Meta has open-sourced an artificial intelligence project that lets anyone bring their doodles to life.  The company hopes that by offering Animated Drawings … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/7qCBesV.

Aria Alamalhodaei / TechCrunch: Toronto-based Kepler, which plans to launch a network of optical satellites to deliver data at 2.5Gbps to satellites in low Earth orbit, raised a $92M Series C  —  Toronto-based startup Kepler Communications closed another tranche of capital to continue building out its on-orbit data network. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/bxeWVNY.

Elevate, a consumer benefits administration platform, today announced that it raised $28 million in a funding round led by Anthemis with participation from Fin Capital Norwest Venture Partners, Greycroft, Bowery Capital, and Firebolt Ventures. The new cash, which brings Elevate’s total raised to $43 million, will be put toward product development, hiring and customer acquisition, […].

Redfin has laid off 201 employees, the third time the Seattle-based real estate company has reduced its workforce since June. The layoffs, which represents about 4% of its workforce, was first reported by GeekWire. A company spokesperson confirmed the layoffs and told TechCrunch in an email that the roles were primarily in “real estate support” […].

The battle for market share in the luxury EV sector is heating up, leaving customers with more choice than ever before. That’s great news for consumers and a pressure cooker for EV makers hoping to carve out market share. The latest entry to this competitive luxury EV landscape is the Lucid Air Touring sedan, a […].

After rolling out Coachella-themed fashion item drops in Fortnite last year, Coachella is expanding even further into gaming with the launch of Coachella Island, a new destination in Fortnite that allows players to virtually experience the popular music festival. Coachella Island launches tomorrow, April 14, at 3 PM ET. Gamers can find the new destination […].

Nilay Patel / The Verge: Q&A with Substack CEO Chris Best about Notes, asking for investment without sharing financial details, and more, as he evades some content moderation questions  —  Can Substack handle the wrath of Elon Musk and the pain of content moderation?  —  It is fair to say that Substack … from Techmeme […].

Toronto-based startup Kepler Communications closed another tranche of capital to continue building out its on-orbit data network. The new funding, which comes to $92 million, will be used to launch a constellation of optical communications satellites next year. Those satellites will join Kepler’s existing network of 19 radio-frequency satellites operating in sun-synchronous orbits (SSO). Two […].

Did someone just leak the front half of Tesla’s long-awaited Model 3 refresh? Car internet is abuzz over a photo that — some Redditors suspect — could show an update to the automaker’s sedan, with a revised face that has inspired some comparisons to the Roadster. Here’s the photo that’s now making the rounds: Tesla […].

Law enforcement officials arrested a 21-year-old on Thursday after tracing a trove of classified secrets that found their way to the public through the chat app Discord. The suspect, U.S. Air Force National Guard member Jack Teixeira, was identified by The New York Times prior to his arrest. Teixeira reportedly led a private Discord group […].

Things could’ve been worse, I guess. Companies with all female-founding teams raised about $800 million, or 2.1%, out of the estimated $37 billion invested in U.S. startups in Q1 2023, according to PitchBook. In dollar terms, that is a 53% year-over-year decline from the $1.7 billion all-female founding teams raised in Q1 2022. The decline […].

The TechCrunch Podcast Network has been nominated for two Webbys in the Best Technology Podcast category. You can help TechCrunch win by voting for Chain Reaction, which digs into the wild world of crypto. Or Found, which brings you the stories behind the startups by sitting down with the founders themselves. Please take a few […].

Julie Muhn / Finovate: ID.me, the digital ID service used by the IRS and other US agencies, raised a $132M Series D led by Viking Global, bringing its total funding to $240M+  —  – ID.me announced a $132 million funding round, bringing its total raised to $240 million.  — The company has brought on Samantha […].

In a sign that the seed-stage AI segment is still alive and kicking, Betaworks, the startup studio and VC firm, is launching a new program that’ll award around ten companies working on AI $500,000 in funding. Scheduled to run from mid-June until mid-September, Betaworks’ program — the ninth of its kind — will provide startups […].

Last fall, Alex and I discussed bringing back the TC+ robotics survey. I gave him the usual caveat: I’m into it, but it will have to wait until I can find the time. You know how these things go — you wake up one morning and somehow it’s five months later. I’ve got excuses if […].

PBS and a handful of other news organizations have joined NPR in stepping away from Twitter, the social media platform once synonymous with breaking news. A PBS spokesperson confirmed to Axios that PBS had “no plans to resume tweeting” after Twitter gave it a murky “government-funded media” label over the weekend. A few other news […].

When the financial markets go all wobbly, conservative investors turn to scarce resources that are unlikely to plummet in value, including things like silver, gold, palladium and platinum. Diamond Standard wants to add diamonds to that list and has created a blockchain-based system to create tokens that gives investors access to diamonds, much like how […].