Astra hires longtime Apple veteran Benjamin Lyon as chief engineer

New space startup Astra, which is currently focused on commercial rockets, but which plans to eventually build satellites, too, has hired one of Apple’s key engineering leaders to head its own engineering efforts. Benjamin Lyon spent more than two decades at Apple, where he worked on everythi

ExOne gets $1.6M DoD contract to build a 3D printing 'factory' in shipping container

ExOne this week announced that the U.S. Department of Defense has granted it $1.6 million. It's one of the Pennsylvania-based metal 3D printing company's largest government contracts, in service of building a portable 3D printing factory for the front line — essentially a method for t

As expected, stock trading service Public raises $220M at unicorn valuation

The day before Robinhood goes under the the Congressional hammer, domestic rival Public.com announced this morning that it has closed a $220 million funding round at a $1.2 billion valuation. News of the round was first broken by technewss. Further reporting colored in the lines concerning the inv

Ally.io rasies $50M Series C as the OKR software market stays explosive

This morning Ally.io, a software startup with a focus on the OKR (objectives and key results, in case you’ve somehow avoided being exposed) goal-setting technique, announced that it has closed $50 million in new capital. The Series C round was led by Green Oaks Capital, Madrona Capital and it

Google Maps users can now pay for parking or their transit fare right from the app

Drivers throughout the United States will now have the option to pay for street parking right from Google Maps as part of an expanded partnership with transportation software companies Passport and ParkMobile. Google also announced it was extending this contactless payment feature to public transit

Low-code focused OutSystems raises $150M at a $9.5B valuation

This morning, OutSystems, a low-code app development service, announced that it has closed $150 million in new capital. The round was led by Abdiel Capital and Tiger Global. Notably this is not the largest funding event that the Portugal and U.S.-based software company has raised. technewss covere

YouTube to expand Shorts to the US, add 4K and offline DVR to YouTube TV, launch in-video shopping and more in 2021

YouTube has a host of big product updates coming this year, and it just detailed a lot of them in a blog post from Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan. Google’s streaming video site plans to expand its TikTok-esque Shorts mobile video creation and consumption tool to the U.S. (it’s current

Amazon will let users vote on new Alexa devices with pre-orders, including a cuckoo clock

Amazon's Day 1 Edition program pulled back the curtain ever-so-slightly on the company's hardware development process. The initial class featured its Echo Frames smart glasses and Loop smart ring. Based on early user feedback, the company only opted to continue production on the former. But

Grafana Labs launches observability stack for enterprise customers

Grafana Labs has created an open-source observability trifecta that includes Prometheus for monitoring, Loki for logging and Tempo for tracing. Today, the company announced it was releasing enterprise versions of these open-source projects in a unified stack designed specifically for the needs of l

Edgybees raises $9.5M Series A for its aerial video augmentation service

Edgybees, a company that helps businesses, first responders and mitary users accurately geotag and augment their aerial video streams in real time, today announced that it has raised a $9.5 mlion Series A round. The news comes almost exactly two years after the company announced its $5.5 mlion seed

Spectral raises $6.2M for its DevSecOps service

Tel Aviv-based Spectral is bringing its new DevSecOps code scanner out of stealth today and announcing a $6.2 mlion funding round. The startup’s programming language-agnostic service aims to automated code security development teams to help them detect potential security issues in their codeb

Databricks brings its lakehouse to Google Cloud

Databricks and Google Cloud today announced a new partnership that wl bring to Databricks customers a deep integration with Google’s BigQuery platform and Google Kubernetes Engine. This wl allow Databricks’ users to bring their data lakes and the service’s analytics capabities to

Facebook fined again in Italy for misleading users over what it does with their data

Facebook has been fined again by Italy’s competition authority — this time the penalty is €7 million (~$8.4M) — for failing to comply with an earlier order related to how it informs users about the commercial uses it makes of their data. The AGCM began investigating certain comm

Geothermal home heating gets a $30 million boost from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures

There’s a low-energy solution to home heating and cooling sitting right underneath most houses, but until recently no one has been able to tap it at a low enough cost across a broad swath of the country. That solution is geothermal energy, using the earth’s own heat to provide temperatu