Roblox acquires Discord competitor Guilded

Roblox is using M&A to bulk up its social infrastructure, announcing Monday morning that they had acquired the team at Guilded that has been building a chat platform for competitive gamers. The service competes with gaming chat giant Discord, with the team’s founders telling TechCrunch in the past that as Discord’s ambitions had grown beyond […]

The Nuro EC-1

Six years ago, I sat in the Google self-driving project’s Firefly vehicle — which I described, at the time, as a “little gumdrop on wheels” — and let it ferry me around a course in Mountain View.

Cisco beefing up app monitoring portfolio with acquisition of Epsagon for $500M

Cisco announced on Friday that it’s acquiring Israeli applications-monitoring startup Epsagon at a price pegged at $500 million. The purchase gives Cisco a more modern microservices-focused component for its growing applications-monitoring portfolio. The Israeli business publication Globes reported it had gotten confirmation from Cisco that the deal was for $500 million, but Cisco would not confirm […]

How one founder identified a gap in education working as a teacher and built a startup to fix it

Amanda DoAmaral was an educator herself before she decided to found a tech company aimed at improving the education system. That’s a surprisingly rare credential for a startup founder in this area to possess — despite the obvious benefits of real, first-hand experience. Her company, Fiveable, focuses on modernizing (including a remote-first approach) a key […]

Facebook adds four new branches to its 2Africa subsea cable network

Facebook today announced that it would extend the “most comprehensive” subsea cable to serve the African continent and Middle East region to four more branches. Facebook will do this in collaboration with the 2Africa consortium that includes China Mobile International, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, STC, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, and WIOCC. The new branches are Seychelles, the […]

Equity Monday: Hacks, IPOs, and the next generation of American tech giants

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You […]