Embedded finance will help fill the life insurance coverage gap

An estimated 41 million Americans say they need life insurance but have yet to purchase coverage. Despite this awareness among consumers, the Life Insurance Marketing and Research Association estimates a $12 trillion coverage gap, with about 50% of millennials planning to purchase coverage within t

Snap acquires AR startup WaveOptics, which provides tech for Spectacles, for over $500M

Snap yesterday announced the latest iteration of its Spectacles augmented reality glasses, and today the company revealed a bit more news: it is also acquiring the startup that supplied the technology that helps power them. The Snapchat parent is snapping up WaveOptics, an AR startup that makes the

Decentralized Komorebi Collective launches to back female and nonbinary crypto founders

As decentralized currencies have taken off in recent months, there’s been renewed attention around DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, as a means of bringing together groups of investors who can deploy capital as a unit while voting collectively on those investments. In the spiri

India objects to ‘manipulated’ label on politicians tweets; asks removal of reference to ‘Indian variant’ of coronavirus

The Indian government has expressed strong objection to Twitter for classifying tweets by Indian politicians as “manipulated media,” and separately asked social media firms to remove posts that refers to an “Indian variant” of the coronavirus. The first notice comes two days

Indonesian agritech platform TaniHub Group harvests a $65.5M Series B round

TaniHub Group, an Indonesian startup that helps farmers get better prices and more customers for their crops, has raised a $65.5 million Series B. The funding was led by MDI Ventures, the investment arm of Telkom Group, one of Indonesia's largest telecoms, with participation from Add Ventures,

BuffaloGrid and Techfugees launch education, solar charging initiative for refugees, aim to raise $3M

BuffaloGrid, a startup that provides phone charging and digital content to people in off-grid environments, is teaming up with the Techfugees refugee nonprofit to provide free educational content and device charging to displaced people across East Africa and the Middle East. The initial service wil

Rakuten and Beyond Next invest $1.4M seed funding in farm-to-table startup Secai Marche

Farmers and food businesses, like restaurants, deal with the same issue: a fragmented supply chain. Secai Marche wants to streamline agricultural logistics, making fulfillment more cost-efficient and enabling food businesses to bundle products from different farmers into the same order. The company

Mio, a social commerce startup focused on smaller cities and rural areas in Vietnam, raises $1M seed

Vietnam has one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, but many major platforms still focus on large cities. This means people in smaller cities or rural areas need to deal with longer wait times for deliveries. Social commerce company Mio is taking advantage of that gap by bu

Telemedicine startups are positioning themselves for a post-pandemic world

Telemedicine, in its original form of the phone call, has been around for decades. For people in remote or rural areas without easy access to in-person care, consulting a doctor over the phone has often been the go-to approach. But for a large swath of the world used to taking half a day off work j

Daily Crunch: Ford’s powerhouse F-150 Lightning pickup can actually power your house

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. It's Thursday, everyone, and the technology and startup worlds were a mixed bag today. We learned about the final death of Internet Explorer (RIP), new AR gla

Investors help Procore build a decacorn valuation in public debut

Watching construction tech software company Procore go public today after pricing above its range makes the IPO slowdown look like the deceleration that wasn't. Investors quickly bid up the company’s value in trading, giving Procore a higher valuation than it might have anticipated, along

factory14 raises $200M to jump into the Amazon marketplace roll-up race

It doesn’t feel like a week goes by at the moment that another startup doesn’t emerge armed with a huge wallet of cash to pursue a strategy of consolidating and then scaling promising brands that have built a business selling on marketplaces like Amazon’s. In the latest developmen

In the race for tech talent, the US should look to Mexico

The global tech sector is booming, and as technologies like cloud and AI accelerate their growth, the demand for tech talent outpaces supply globally. Specifically, the U.S. tech sector has seen unprecedented growth in recent years, with four tech firms reaching a $1 trillion market cap by the begi

Apple launches an affiliate program for paid podcast subscriptions

Apple last month unveiled its plans for paid podcast subscriptions in a newly redesigned Apple Podcasts app. Now, it’s introducing a new program that will help podcast creators grow their subscriber base: affiliate marketing. The company’s “Apple Services Performance Partner Progr