Substack confirms $65M raise, promises to ‘rapidly’ expand its financial backing of newly independent writers

This afternoon Substack, a paid-newsletter startup, confirmed that it has raised $65 million, as initially reported by Axios. technewss dug into the math behind the financing here. As anticipated, a16z led the new financing. What’s in store from the now Series B-backed company? Product work.

Optimus Ride partners with Polaris to commercialize electric autonomous vehicles

Autonomous, electric mobility service provider Optimus Ride announced a partnership with powersports vehicle manufacturer Polaris to bring fully autonomous GEM electric vehicles to market. The two will introduce a new line of Polaris GEM low-speed vehicles that will be engineered to fully integrate

Arm announces the next generation of its processor architecture

Arm today announced Armv9, the next generation of its chip architecture. Its predecessor, Armv8, launched a decade ago and while it has seen its fair share of changes and updates, the new architecture brings a number of major updates to the platform that warrant a shift in version numbers. Unsurpri

Google starts trialing its FLoC cookie alternative in Chrome

Google today announced that it is rolling out Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a crucial part of its Privacy Sandbox project for Chrome, as a developer origin trial. FLoC is meant to be an alternative to the kind of cookies that advertising technology companies use today to track you across th

Ballot counting for Amazon’s historic union vote starts today

Vote counting begins today in the historic effort to unionize Amazon's Bessemer, Alabama fulfillment center. The warehouse — which opened exactly a year ago to meet ramping up demand as COVID-19 bore down on the U.S. — has become ground zero for one of the most important labor effor

ConsenSys launches a more energy-efficient NFT ecosystem with a project from artist Damien Hirst as its first drop

The NFT craze has been an intriguing moment for digital artists who have seen great leaps in how tech has allowed them to create their work, but not as much progress in shifting how they profit off of it. Though crypto’s early adopter artists have seemed to gain the most attention thus far, m

Google’s Area 120 launches Stack, an app that digitizes personal docs and extracts key information

Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, is today releasing its latest project called Stack, an app that will help you digitize your documents, receipts and other papers you have lying around the house, and then automatically save them to Google Drive. The app will also helpfully suggest a name

Volkswagen really is becoming ‘Voltswagen’ in the US [UPDATE: Bad April Fool’s joke from VW]

UPDATE: Per the Wall Street Journal, this is actually not happening and was instead an April Fool’s joke gone wrong. VW USA still has not responded to requests for comment, but VW Europe told the publication that it was in fact a joke. The release announcing the news remains live on VW’

HighRadius raises $300M, triples valuation to $3.1B for AI-powered fintech software

HighRadius, which has developed AI-powered fintech software, announced Tuesday it has raised $300 million in a Series C funding round led by D1 Capital and Tiger Global. The round values Houston-based HighRadius at $3.1 billion, triple its valuation of “more than $1 billion” at the time of its

Duo goes passwordless

Duo, the authentication service Cisco acquired for $2.35 blion in 2018, today announced its plans to launch a passwordless authentication service that wl allow users to log in to their Duo-protected services through security keys or platform biometrics like Apple’s Face ID or Microsoft’

Celebrity video request site Cameo reaches unicorn status with $100M raise

Cameo, the celebrity video site you're probably familiar with if you've celebrated a birthday in the last three years, announced this morning that it's raised a $100M Series C. The round, which was led by Jonathan Turner with e.ventures, puts the site's value at just north of $1 bil

SpaceX is outfitting its Dragon spacecraft with an observation dome for space tourists

SpaceX is set to make a change to its Crew Dragon spacecraft for its forthcoming history-making all-civilian launch, currently set for September 15. That Dragon will replace its International Space Station docking mechanism with a transparent dome, through which passengers will be able to take in a

Stockly lets e-commerce websites sell out-of-stock items from a shared inventory

Meet Stockly, a French startup that keeps the inventory of various e-commerce websites in sync. When you see an out-of-stock item on an e-commerce website, chances are you leave that website and try to find the same item on another site. If you operate an e-commerce website, Stockly lets you sell i

Aurora and Volvo partner to bring autonomous long-haul trucks to North America

The autonomous vehicle startup Aurora Innovation said Tuesday it has reached an agreement with Volvo to jointly develop autonomous semi trucks for North America. The partnership, which the two companies say will span several years and is through Volvo’s Autonomous Solutions unit, will focus o