image credit:SorareFrench startup Sorare has announced that it has raised a significant funding round. SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 has led a $680 million Series B round, which values the company at $4.3 billion.Sorare has built a fantasty football (soccer…
Netflix launches free plan in Kenya to boost growth
Image Credits: Krisztian Bocsi / Bloomberg / Getty ImagesNetflix said on Monday it is launching a free mobile plan in Kenya as the global streaming giant looks to tap the East African nation that is home to over 20 million internet users.The free …
VC Mark Suster: “The bet we’re making now is on founder skills,” not customers or products
Image Credits: Mark Suster / Upfront VenturesWe recently caught up with longtime VC Mark Suster of L.A.-based Upfront Ventures, which last raised both an early-stage fund and a growth stage fund several years ago and, according to regulatory filin…
MIT study finds Tesla drivers become inattentive when Autopilot is activated
Image Credits: Bloomberg / Contributor under a license.By the end of this week, potentially thousands of Tesla owners will be testing out the automaker’s newest version of its “Full Self-Driving” beta software, version 10.0.1, on public roads, eve…
Evil Geniuses CEO Nicole LaPointe Jameson is coming to Disrupt
Image Credits: Evil GeniusesAs the opportunities in the gaming world continue to expand aggressively as part of post-COVID shifts to the entertainment sector, esports has found its own opportunities in reaching new audiences. While competitive gam…
TrueLayer nabs $130M at a $1B+ valuation as open banking rises as a viable option to card networks
Image Credits: ipopba / Getty ImagesOpen banking — a disruptive technology that seeks to bypass the dominance of card networks and other traditional financial rails by letting banks open their systems directly to developers (and new services) by w…
Daily Crunch: European regulators share more privacy concerns over Facebook “smart” glasses
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for September 20, 2021. It is Disrupt week, everyone, and TechCrunch is buzzing. Kicki…
Australian growth marketing agency Ammo helps startups calibrate their efforts
When you are the founder of a young startup, it is always very hard to gauge the right amount of effort to dedicate to marketing. Botch it and you risk looking unprofessional. Hire a traditional agency and you might be wasting time and money.Australian…
Study finds half of Americans get news on social media, but percentage has dropped
A new report from Pew Research finds that around a third of U.S. adults continue to get their news regularly from Facebook, though the exact percentage has slipped from 36% in 2020 to 31% in 2021. This drop reflects an overall slight decline in the num…
Spotify playlist curators complain about ongoing abuse that favors bad actors over innocent parties
A number of Spotify playlist curators are complaining that the streaming music company is not addressing the ongoing issue of playlist abuse, which sees bad actors reporting playlists that have gained a following in order to give their own playlists better visibility. Currently, playlists created by Spotify users can be reported in the app for […]