Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Up top the crew this week was the regular contingent: Danny Crichton, Natasha Mascarenhas and myself. As a tiny programming note, we’re going back to posting some videos on …...Read More

NASA’s latest mission won’t actually reach space — but it will come very close, with a massive observation craft made up of a football stadium-sized high-altitude balloon, along with a special stratospheric telescope instrument that can observe wavelengths of light cast from newly formed stars but blocked by Earth’s atmosphere. …...Read More

Apple’s contract manufacturing partner Foxconn has started to assemble the current generation of iPhone units — the iPhone 11 lineup — in its plant near Chennai, India, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. A small batch of locally manufactured iPhone 11 units has already shipped to retail stores, …...Read More

The Not Company, a maker of plant-based meat and dairy substitutes in Chile, will soon be worth $250M The Not Company, Latin America’s leading contender in the plant-based meat and dairy substitute market, is about to close on an $85 million round of funding that would value it at $250 …...Read More

One little-known home and retail automation startup might seem like an unlikely candidate to help combat the ongoing pandemic. But its founder says its technology can do just that, even if it wasn’t the company’s original plan. Butlr, a spin-out of the MIT Media Lab, uses a mix of wireless, …...Read More

The state of New York voted this week to pause for two years any implementation of facial recognition technology in schools. The moratorium, approved by the New York Assembly and Senate Wednesday, comes after an upstate school district adopted the technology earlier this year, prompting a lawsuit in June from …...Read More

HBO Max, the AT&T-owned streaming service that combines HBO with WarnerMedia content, has grown to 4.1 million subscribers, since its launch on May 27. Combined, HBO and HBO Max reached a total of 36.3 million U.S. subscribers by the end of the second quarter, according to statements made by AT&T …...Read More

Quantum computing is at an interesting point. It’s at the cusp of being mature enough to solve real problems. But like in the early days of personal computers, there are lots of different companies trying different approaches to solving the fundamental physics problems that underly the technology, all while another …...Read More

What your company can learn from the Bank of England’s resilience proposal The outages at RBS, TSB and Visa left millions of people unable to deposit their paychecks, pay their bills, acquire new loans and more. As a result, the House of Commons’ Treasury Select Committee (TSC) began an investigation …...Read More

The U.S. Space Command has released details about an alleged anti-satellite weapons test it suspects Russian of conducting using an existing probe already on orbit, The Verge reports. The Russian satellite in question is the same one that made headlines back at the beginning of 2020 when it seemed to …...Read More