Patrick Morrisey, VP of corporate communications at GM, told TechCrunch that the reduction in spending is still in effect, despite today’s capital infusion.
In total, Cruise has already raised over $15 billion, per Crunchbase data.
In October, a Cruise robotaxi ran over and dragged a pedestrian 20 feet in San Francisco.
The pedestrian had initially been hit by a human-driven car and landed in the path of a Cruise robotaxi.
In other states where AV companies don’t need to acquire permits, Cruise is already making a comeback.
Now at the top of the App Store, The Eclipse App is a great companion for Monday’s solar eclipseA well-designed app designed to optimize your viewing of the total solar eclipse on Tuesday has surged to the top of the App Store.
The app began its App Store climb late on Sunday, gaining 35,000 downloads on the App Store and starting to move up the charts.
The app is currently ranked first in its category (Travel) and ninth Overall in the U.S. App Store and eighth in its category via Google Play.
Reviews are mostly positive on the App Store: There are 40 5-star reviews vs. 22 1-star reviews, Appfigures says.
You can also check your local forecast and subscribe to local events and check out other local points of interest.
Zaver now has $30 million to make it a realityWe last checked in on Zaver, a Swedish B2C Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) provider in Europe, when it raised a $5 million funding round in 2021.
The company has now closed a $10 million extension to its Series A funding round, bringing its total Series A to $20 million.
Total investment to date stands at $30 million.
In Europe, Zaver competes on BNPL with Klarna, PayPal, and incumbents such as Santander and BNP Paribas.
However, Zaver’s schtick is it claims it can assess the risk on BNPL cart sizes of up to €200,000 in real time due to its risk assessment algorithms.
Stripe is sufficiently large that when we consider its growth we have to weigh it against the overall growth in the payment space more generally.
Major growth pointsIn its annual missive, Stripe noted that it crossed the $1 trillion total payment volume metric in 2023, a figure that is large, and round, if imprecise.
Certainly the threshold is notable, but when paired with recent growth figures becomes all the more impressive.
Stripe said that in 2023 its payment volume rose 25%.
Any company processing that much total payment volume through Stripe could build their own in-house stack, or pursue a more DIY option.
TikTok announced today that its revamped creator fund has increased total creator revenue by over 250% within the last six months.
The company says the fund, which launched a year ago and eventually replaced TikTok’s original $1 billion Creator Fund, is exiting beta in the coming weeks.
Since rolling out longer videos, TikTok says users are spending 50% of their time watching longer content, while viewership of longer videos has increased nearly 40% over the last six months.
When TikTok first launched the revamped fund, it estimated that creators would be able to make more than 20 times what they were previously earning on TikTok.
TikTok’s new creator fund seeks to appease creators and encourage them to post their longer videos on TikTok, instead of just YouTube.
The digital currency hit a new all-time high for the first time since November 2021 when it passed $69,000 on Tuesday morning, as demand surged in recent weeks following the spot bitcoin ETF approvals in the U.S. and the pending bitcoin halving in late April.
Bitcoin halving, which is usually referred to as “the halvening,” is a periodic decline in bitcoin mining rates, which means the number of bitcoin miners can potentially get for each block mined is cut in half.
This process is meant to control the supply of bitcoin over time and once the number of bitcoin in circulation hits 21 million, its total supply, the process will end.
The price jump increase is also being driven by the 11 spot bitcoin ETFs the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved in January.
The total market cap across the spot bitcoin ETF products is $53.74 billion, according to Blockworks data.
“The largest portion of anyone’s income almost always goes toward housing costs,” founder and CEO Atticus LeBlanc told TechCrunch.
“And if you look around, you know that housing costs are skyrocketing, as much as 40% in some markets.
Most notably, active members have saved $2.6 million monthly and around $47.4 million in total savings generated.
“The life-changing results speak for themselves… These incredible results have led PadSplit residents to purchase their own vehicles, traditional apartments, launch their own companies and buy their own homes,” added LeBlanc.
PadSplit, meanwhile, reports that the average monthly cost to live in one of its units is $729.
On Friday, the streaming music company issued its response to Apple’s new DMA rules, calling the new fees imposed on developers “extortion” and Apple’s compliance plan “a complete and total farce,” that demonstrated the tech giant believes that the rules don’t apply to them.
It will also charge a 3% payment processing fee when developers use Apple’s in-app payments instead of their own.
Apple’s App Store will maintain its power, Ek believes.
Plus, because of the increased fees, Spotify doesn’t even have a choice, Ek explains — it’s forced to stick with the current system.
“With our EU Apple install base in the 100 million range, this new tax on downloads and updates could skyrocket our customer acquisition costs, potentially increasing them tenfold.
Tech layoffs are accelerating, according to the data.
After quick revenue growth in 2023, midsized tech companies are cutting as well.
Brex’s latest layoffs make it plain that even some of the best-known, and most richly funded, upstart tech companies are finding their headcount to be too much.
Thankfully, that information is at our fingertips and we can report that, yes, the layoff surge that you are feeling is in fact an actual wave.
In that month, Layoffs.FYI counted just 4,707 tech layoffs across 65 total known cuts.
Fruit flies have been studied in detail because they are a model organism that has many of the same components as humans. Fruit flies have a connectome, or a complete…