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Unigrid Aims to Reduce Cost and Enhance Safety of Batteries through Sodium Technology

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The most widespread type of battery, lithium-ion, still costs around $140 per kilowatt-hour for a pack. Instead, manufacturers have started to explore sodium-ion batteries, not as a replacement, but as a complement to lithium-ion. To deliver that many batteries, Unigrid isn’t going to be building its own factories. Small vehicles like these are popular in India and Southeast Asia, where the intense heat can make lithium-ion batteries prone to overheating. To get its sodium-ion batteries into production, Unigrid has raised a $12 million Series A.

Extensive Outage of Discord Resolved, Service is Restored

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Discord is back online after an outage this morning, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The outage came as Meta’s Instagram, Facebook and Threads all went down this morning. YouTube has also confirmed that its service is having issues this morning too, and that it’s working on a fix. Users reported that they were unable to load messages, while others say said they were unable to access the service at all. Update 05/05/2024 11:45 AM ET: The article has been updated to reflect that Discord has solved the issue and is back online.

3 Years Later: Tracking Who Followed Through on Their Diversity Pledges After BLM

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In the past three years, a lot of companies launched DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, and we even saw a brief period when those promises were fulfilled. When the market was on the up and up, Black founders, like many other founders out there, were raising record amounts. But come 2022, the market dipped, interest rates skyrocketed, investments nearly froze, hiring slowed, and widespread layoffs hit everyone. Today, it almost feels like many of the promises the venture capital industry made in 2020 have gone unfulfilled. To find out exactly how many kept their word, we checked up on some of those that made commitments to DEI following the BLM protests in 2020.Who kept their word?