Hamburger-flipping robotics company Miso introduces an automated beverage dispenser

How do you follow up a burger-flipping robot? If you're Miso Robotics (which you likely are, if you've created a burger-flipping robot), the answer is simple: beverages. The robotics startup continues to focus on the fast food service industry with the planned launch of an automated beverag

Chinese sellers on Amazon in hot demand by VCs and e-commerce roll-ups

Chinese merchants selling on Amazon are having a moment. The scruffy exporters are used to roaming about suburban factory areas and dealing with constant cash flow strain, but suddenly they find themselves having coffee with top Chinese venture capital firms and investment representatives from inte

Dutch payments startup Mollie raises another $800M at a $6.5B valuation

A payments startup whose backend was originally built by the founder while still living with his parents and bootstrapping the company is today announcing a massive round of funding that catapults it into being one of the most valuable startups in Europe. Mollie, an Amsterdam-based startup that pro

Vienna’s GoStudent raises $244M at a $1.7B valuation for its online tutor marketplace

Online teaching came into the spotlight for many students and parents in the last year, and today one of the companies that saw a big lift during that rush of activity is announcing a big round of funding to carry it into what has emerged as a more permanent change of habits for many learners. GoSt

Gillmor Gang: Who Knew

The Gillmor Gang recording session is nestled on Friday midday on the East Coast and midmorning out West. Streamed live on Twitter, Facebook Live, and Youtube embed, the show is then edited, sweetened with titles and music, and released on technewss. It’s a kind of hybrid between podcast, Z

Tesla backs vision-only approach to autonomy using powerful supercomputer

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been teasing a neural network training computer called “Dojo” since at least 2019. Musk says Dojo will be able to process vast amounts of video data to achieve vision-only autonomous driving. While Dojo itself is still in development, Tesla today revealed a new s

Fintech veteran Jitendra Gupta is ready for his new inning — now he is going after banks in India

For most people in India, having to engage with banks doesn’t instill a sense of joy. Banks in the South Asian market are notorious for making unannounced spam calls to upsell customers loans and credit cards, even when they have been explicitly asked not to do so. Moreover, when a customer d

Clubhouse is building a DM text chat feature

Some Clubhouse users were treated to a surprise feature in their favorite app, but it wasn’t long for this world. A new UI element called “backchannel” popped up briefly before disappearing late last week, pointing the Clubhouse faithful to a new area of the app and generating ple

Mobile commerce startup Via rounds up $15 million in Series A funding

Mobile commerce is where it’s at, and rising investment in so-called conversational commerce startups underscores the opportunity. Via, a two-year-old, Bay Area-based startup, is among those riding the wave, having identified some trends that are becoming clearer by the month. First, more e-c

Facebook’s entry into VR advertising isn’t going too well

Facebook’s efforts to bring advertising to the Oculus virtual reality platform it has spent billions of dollars building out doesn’t seem to be off to a great start. The company announced last week that they were planning to roll out their first in-game ads inside the title “Blast

Daily Crunch: Facebook rolls out podcasts and Live Audio Rooms for US listeners

To get a roundup of technewss's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 21, 2021. The tech industry is skipping any sort of a summer slowdown. Facebook is taking on Clubhouse and Spotify, Ind

What does Red Hat’s sale to IBM tell us about Couchbase’s valuation?

The IPO rush of 2021 continued this week with a fresh filing from NoSQL provider Couchbase. The company raised hundreds of millions while private, making its impending debut an important moment for a number of private investors, including venture capitalists. According to PitchBook data, Couchbase

Twitch suspends two popular female creators over sexy ASMR streams

Popular Twitch streamers Amouranth and Indiefoxx are the two latest casualties of Twitch’s ongoing battle to enforce its own confusing rules around sexually suggestive content. Both creators were suspended following ASMR streams that pushed the bounds of Twitch’s community guidelines fo

Electric utility bike startup Ubco raises $10 million to fund its global expansion

Ubco, the New Zealand-based electric utility bike startup, has raised $10 million to fund a global expansion focused on the U.S. market and scale up its commercial subscription service business.  Ubco's hero product, the Ubco 2X2, is an all-wheel drive electric motorbike that looks like a dirt