Mark your calendars, startup fans, because TechCrunch is returning — live and in person — to the beautiful City by the Bay to host our flagship event, TechCrunch Disrupt, on October 18–20 at the Moscone West Convention Center followed by an online recap event on October 21. TC Disrupt is the grande dame of tech conferences for many reasons, and today we’d like to highlight some of the companies that you’ll be able to engage with at the event. Every year we’re fortunate to joi ...read more

The overturning of Roe v. Wade sent a huge shockwave through the U.S., and while the nation recovers slowly, the venture community is already beginning to act. Founders are reassessing where they open their businesses, not wanting to lure employees to a state that doesn’t support reproductive rights, and investors are considering adding healthcare to environmental, social and governance criteria to help spur innovation in the space. And as the midterm elections approach, the stakes are ...read more

A DroneSeed employee oversees the deployment of two drones above a burn site. (DroneSeed Photo) A swarm of giant drones navigates a scorched moonscape, tracing the rugged topography. The scene has a desolate, sci-fi vibe — but its reality is rooted in the terra firma. The devices belong to DroneSeed, a Seattle startup deploying technology to help restore some of the millions of acres of forests that have burned in wildfires across the U.S. and beyond. The conflagrations include fires so i ...read more

CEO Sudhir Bhatti, left, and COO Shavita Bhatti, co-founders of GrowthPlug. (GrowthPlug Photo) PracticeTek, a Knoxville, Tenn.-based investment firm that targets healthcare software companies, has acquired Beaverton, Ore.-based healthcare software startup GrowthPlug. The startup will continue to be led by husband-and-wife co-founders Sudhir Bhatti, who is the CEO, and Shavita Bhatti, the company’s chief operating officer. Its 50-person team based in the U.S. and India will also contin ...read more

When Nothing was unveiled early last year, founder Carl Pei promised that the hardware startup had a full road map. Early stories about the London-based firm alluded to a pitch deck full of Pokémon characters, each representing a different product in the pipeline. Roughly a year and a half later, Nothing has delivered two major products: the Ear (1) and Phone (1). It’s an impressive showing in a world where young hardware companies are accustomed to playing it safe. As has been customa ...read more

One of the most pressing issues the U.S. has to prepare for, perhaps, is the future it faces after the toppling of Roe v. Wade. Come the midterm elections, voters will weigh in on candidates and, consequently, measures that will dictate abortion access and other human rights issues. The role venture capital must play in all of this is becoming clearer: There has been a push to fund more reproductive health companies, include healthcare access in ESG investments and reevaluate the safest place ...read more

In brief: The Python programming language is being impacted by security issue programmers have know about for a while. Trellix researchers recently rediscovered a bug, highlighting the risk for hundreds of thousands of software projects and creating patches for tens of thousands of them. Being one of the most popular programming languages in the world, Python is both an opportunity and a risk for programs and the open source software supply chain. Case in point: researchers are rediscovering ...read more

Erik Torenberg is no longer the co-CEO of On Deck, a tech company that is trying to productize the community in a way that helps founders secure capital and advice. Torenberg, an early Product Hunt employee and the founder of investment firm Village Global, assumed the role only a year ago. But now, as On Deck returns to its founder-focused roots and spins off its second business, Torenberg is returning to a chairman position. “Now that we are a leaner company with a focused mandate, it mak ...read more

Investors are spending 24% less time looking at pitch decks in 2022, compared to 2021. On average, you have just under three minutes to convince them to take a meeting with you. In fact, for decks that fail to raise funding, investors give up in just 2 minutes and 13 seconds. That’s not a lot of time to make a first impression, so you’ve got to make it count. It’s pretty rare that I get to talk to someone who is as big of a pitch deck nerd as I am, but when I was finally able to nerd out ...read more

Let’s talk humanoids for a minute, shall we? Why do so many roboticists insist on creating robots that look like us? Get ready to see plenty more humanoid robots. The subject is top of mind for a few reasons. First — and most prominently — is the fact that Tesla plans to unveil a version of Optimus (aka Tesla Bot) that isn’t just a person in spandex. Tesla describes the project thusly: Develop the next generation of automation, including a general purpose, bi-pedal, humanoid robot cap ...read more