China’s robotaxis charged ahead in 2021

Autonomous driving startups in China are in an arms race to put passengers in their machine-driven vehicles. Every few weeks, news arrives that another major player has got the greenlight to launch a new pilot program or a small-scale service. These press releases, often dotted with regulatory jargon and flowery language to aggrandize the companies’ […]

AI chip maker Kneron raises $25M for autonomous driving push

AI chips, which are semiconductors designed to accelerate machine learning, have many applications. One of the promising use cases, according to Albert Liu, is using AI chips in autonomous driving vehicles. That’s why Liu’s AI chipmaking startup Kneron has been quietly racking up investments to march into smart transportation. It recently closed a new round […]

India’s Cars24, a used-vehicle sales platform, raises $400M, now at a $3.3B valuation, to double down on growth

With supply chains in the automotive industry continuing to be disrupted due to Covid-19, demand has surged in the used-car market. Today, one of the startups that’s seeing a lot of growth as a result of that is announcing a big round of funding to further tap the opportunity. Cars24, a startup out of India […]

Apple iCloud, Twitter and Minecraft vulnerable to ‘ubiquitous’ zero-day exploit

A number of popular services, including Apple iCloud, Twitter, Cloudflare, Minecraft and Steam, are reportedly vulnerable to a zero-day exploit affecting a popular Java logging library. The vulnerability, dubbed “Log4Shell” by researchers at LunaSec and credited to Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba, has been found in Apache Log4j, an open source logging utility that’s used in […]

China roundup: Tesla supplier CATL to buy Canada’s Millennial Lithium

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. China’s anti-competition tech crackdown continues to redefine the dynamics among the country’s internet giants, leading to collaboration between Alibaba and Tencent in the payments race. In […]