New antitrust suit from Phhhoto alleges Facebook copied and killed the competition

A former upstart Instagram rival is suing Meta, formerly known as Facebook, over allegations that the company violated antitrust laws by cloning a competing product and ultimately killing its business. The app, Phhhoto, launched in 2014, inviting users to create and share short GIF-like videos. If that sounds familiar, that’s because the same functionality was […]

TechCrunch+ roundup: Holiday marketing tips, low-cost NFTs, SaaS sprawl study

Cargo ships are stacked up outside ports, and empty shipping containers are in short supply, as are the truck drivers who would take them to market. This is not the time for doing business as usual.

An inclusive new DTC beauty platform secures $3 million in funding — and a supercharged offline strategy

Earlier this week, Thirteen Lune, a direct-to-consumer beauty platform that was launched last year in LA with $1 million in seed funding from Diddy, Gwyneth Paltrow and Beautycounter founder Gregg Renfrew, announced $3 million in additional seed funding. We might not normally pause on this kind of development, especially in a market where dozens of […]

Cruise lays out its plan for ‘how’ it will make robotaxis a reality

The string of engineers who spoke Thursday night during a deep dive into Cruise’s autonomous vehicle technology never mentioned Tesla’s name. They didn’t have to, although the message was clear enough. GM’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise presented a technical and deployment roadmap — at a granular level — that aimed to show how it has built […]

Kenya’s Twiga raises $50M to scale food solutions across Africa

Years ago, Americans spent most of their disposable income on food but consistent investment in retail infrastructure has changed that. Now, they only spend 6% of their household income on food and beverages. Africa still battles with this and it is not hard to see why. The continent’s retail markets are highly fragmented and mostly made up […]