Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter.

Spending millions for a digital work of art that could be screenshotted feels similar to traipsing around a strip of concrete as a tourist activity.

Despite government programs, local entrepreneurs stress that the region’s modest success is primarily driven by the private sector.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

Whether a company is liable for cyber incidents based on the actions of employees or contractors will depend on the circumstances of what happened.

The Czech Republic may be better known for beer, hockey and the sights of Prague, but its entrepreneurial community is as ambitious as any.

Who says there is no room for a new social network? Tiger Global is in advanced stages of talks to lead a round of $15 million to $20 million in seven-month-old Kutumb that values the Indian startup at about $170 million, four people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

After 4 years on the market, Apple has discontinued its original HomePod.

Passion Capital, the early-stage venture firm in London, told TechCrunch earlier this week that — in an apparent first for a European fund —  it plans to crowdfund the final stage of its third and latest vehicle.

Our growing library of how-to stories are aimed squarely at early-stage founders and workers trying to solve long-term problems.

A prominent Republican senator weighs in on Amazon’s labor disputes, Microsoft reports a security vulnerability in Exchange and we examine ByteDance’s gaming strategy.

Immune intelligence startup Serimmune hopes to better understand the relationship between antibody epitopes (the parts of antigen molecules that bind to antibodies) and the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tweets are the subject of another lawsuit.

Here, I’ll share what I’ve learned and offer tactical advice for finding, reaching out to, cultivating relationships with and working at deep tech companies as a nontechnical candidate.

Hackers are exploiting recently discovered vulnerabilities in Exchange email servers to drop ransomware, Microsoft has warned, a move that puts tens of thousands of email servers at risk of destructive attacks.

There has been an unprecedented IPO boom of tech companies in the Brazilian stock exchange, which is transformative for a market that was traditionally dominated by utilities, mining, oil and financial companies.

BMW has joined the cohort of investors that are backing Boston Metal’s carbon dioxide-free production technology for steel.

Spring may be just around the corner (in the U. S.. , anyway), but it’s never too early to start planning for TechCrunch Disrupt 2021, which takes place on September 21-23.

Investors often say they don’t just invest in products, but in the right teams to solve a particular problem.

Hindenburg Research, the short-seller firm whose report on Nikola Motor led to an SEC investigation and the resignation of its founder, is targeting another electric vehicle company.

Madrid-based TaxDown, which automates income tax filing by calculating regional deductions due to users so they don’t have to navigate complex tax rules themselves, has raised €2.

One last time, let's discuss some big startups that are scaling quickly: Appspace, Synack, and Druva.

St. Louis-based voice assistant startup Disruptel is announcing that it has raised $1.

Workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse have already received public support from Democratic politicians ranging from Bernie Sanders to Joe Biden, the latter of whom promised to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen,” late-last year.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Yesterday, the European oil and gas major producer Shell announced the latest cohort selected to participate in its Shell GameChanger Accelerator (GCxN), focused on supporting companies developing tech for the transition away from fossil fuels.

The federal government and regulatory powers need to hold Big Tech accountable to their commitments by immediately enacting policy change.

Uber has had a good result against litigation in the Netherlands, where its European business is headquartered, that had alleged it uses algorithms to terminate drivers — but which the court has rejected.

From the point of view of a consumer, customer service sometimes feels like a monolith, but behind the scenes it can be a very fragmented business, with dozens of companies providing various different tools to help agents do their jobs.

For the last few years, ByteDance, the parent company of short video app TikTok, has been working to diversify its revenue streams beyond advertisement and find more ways to monetize its hundreds of millions of users.

Luminar Technologies has deepened ties with Volvo Cars to develop and eventually sell an automated driving system for highways to other automakers.

B2B SaaS startup Legl has bagged $7M in Series A funding led by Octopus Ventures for its platform for law firms which offers tools to streamline core business processes such as customer onboarding, due diligence and payments.

The artist Beeple scores a huge NFT sale, Twitter Spaces are coming soon and Seth Rogen’s weed startup launches in the U.

Coupang's IPO was a success, no matter how you slice it, even if you have valuation quibbles.

GM’s venture arm invested in battery startup SolidEnergy Systems five years ago.

Today, the auction of an NFT digital art collage from a relatively unrecognized digital artist ended with a purchase price above $69 million.

We’ve identified six common patterns of how VCs articulate their theses, and some best practices in doing so.

Backed by innovations in science, big data, financing and farmer networking, investing in regenerative agriculture promises to slash farming’s carbon footprint while rewarding farmers for their stewardship.

Volkswagen, once a dabbler in electric vehicles, is now betting its future on the technology.

Gather helps people, well, gather in virtual spaces for any reason, whether it be for weddings, magic conventions, or, just a regular day at work.

The alternative asset market showed promise pre-pandemic but amid a broader rally among traditional asset classes, the number of investors searching for and promoting value in the space has exploded.

Pakistan has banned TikTok again in the country after reviewing a complaint that said the popular video app hosted immoral and objectionable content.

We’re just a few weeks out from the first TC Early Stage 2021 event on April 1-2.

So, this is going to sound like a cop out (because, honestly, it kind of is), but the through line for the past week’s robotics investments is variety.

Coursera’s S-1 dropped last Friday, giving us a glimpse of the financial impact that COVID-19 had on a large edtech company.

We know that a lot of elements go into the formation of a startup ecosystem.

The popularity of video and other streamed content like podcasts is continuing to grow at a breakneck speed, and today a startup called Epidemic Sound, a marketplace to source the background music for that media, is announcing a huge round of funding to scale along with it.

TechCrunch Sessions: Justice covered a wide variety of topics. From DEI to labor to accessibility, the sessions went deep on the issues that matter most in the tech world.

Seth Rogen and four friends-turned-co-founders have been building a weed company for close to ten years, and its products are now available in the United States.

If you’ve ever had to file a claim with your insurance company, you know that it’s not exactly fun.

People returning from a period of incarceration face innumerable challenges, among them entering a high-tech workforce that requires a new set of skills.

Valuations are up because software company growth will persist longer than most analysts and investors expected, making the present value of software companies' future cash flows larger, even if they had yet to grow into those later projections.

Los-Angeles based startup Canoo revealed its newest — and now third — electric vehicle, a pickup truck that does away with the sharp corners and huge engine housing of both comparable EV trucks and legacy diesel pickups and is aimed at both commercial customers and weekend warrior-minded consumers.

Twitter Spaces, the social network’s Clubhouse rival, is working towards a public launch in April, the company announced in comments made in a public Twitter Space audio room on Wednesday.

Given the deluge of climate focused companies flooding public markets, it’s getting hard to keep track of who’s doing what, where they’re traded and how they’re performing.

As we’ve made our way through this pandemic, it has forced businesses to rethink and accelerate trends.

Roblox went public yesterday after seeing tremendous growth in 2020, and that’s not just good news for the company’s employees and investors — there are also startups like Gamefam hoping to take advantage of the platform’s success.

Hugging Face has raised a $40 million Series B funding round — Addition is leading the round.

A weekend statement from the Taiwanese government over its ability to provide water to the nation’s chip manufacturers in the face of an unprecedented drought make it clear that climate change is a direct threat to the foundations of the tech industry.

Spain’s government has reached an agreement with trade unions and business associations over labor reforms that will see delivery platform couriers recognized as employees, it said today.

In just a few hours, we’re going to (virtually) meet up in the Magic City, Miami.

Google Cloud today announced the launch of a new support option for its Premium Support customers that run mission-critical services on its platform.

Facebook is expanding its monetization options for video creators.

“It seems quite odd that no one has built the SpaceX equivalent for the ocean,” Anthony DiMare tells TechCrunch.

If there were any doubt about a cryptocurrency boom, we need look no further than at the explosion of growth of certain companies in the space.

Warehouse automation company Nimble Robotics today announced that it has raised a $50 million Series A.

Scott Galloway, the New York University professor, author, and tech entrepreneur, is taking the wraps off a $30 million Series A round for his newest company, Section4, a platform for business “upskilling” that has now raised $37 million altogether.

With prices ranging from $15 to $50, the strawberries grown by the vertical farming startup Oishii aren’t going to be found in just any grocery store.

SpaceX now has 60 more Starlink satellites in orbit – it launched its latest full complement of the internet broadband spacecraft early this morning from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Primary care startup Forward Health is looking to expand its tech-powered, personalized healthcare model across the U.

Three and a half years after launching Google Pay in India, the Android-maker is paving the way to tap its users’ transaction data for monetization purposes — though it plans to give them ample warning, and the option to opt-out.

Taavet Hinrikus, the first employee of Skype and co-founder of fintech giant Wise (formerly TransferWise), is teaming up with Teleport co-founder and current Topia CPO Sten Tamkivi to create a new investment vehicle.

The traditional process of buying, insuring and financing cars across emerging markets can be challenging, and it defeats the purpose of building an all-around car shopping experience.

mPharma, a Ghanaian health tech startup that manages prescription drug inventory for pharmacies and their suppliers, today announced its expansion to Ethiopia.

Snyk, a developer of application security technology, is now worth $4.

Montreal-based Heyday announced today that it has raised $6. 5 million Canadian ($5.

Apple is making a big investment in Germany, Russia takes aim at Twitter and Roblox goes public.

Last month Jeff Bezos announced he would step down as CEO of Amazon later this year, moving into the executive chairman role, while passing the baton to AWS CEO Andy Jassy.

The U. S.. Department of Defense is setting up a working group to focus on climate change The new group will be led by Joe Bryan, who was appointed as a Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense focused on climate earlier this year.

A newly launched Mac app called Superpowered aims to make it easier to stay on top of all your Zoom calls and Google Meets, without having to scramble to find the meeting link in your inbox or calendar app at the last minute.

Actor Terry Crews is going in on the blockchain. With the help of social currency startup Roll, Crews is launching his own social currency, $POWER.

Facebook has challenged the FTC’s antitrust case against it using a standard playbook that questions the agency’s arguably expansive approach to defining monopolies.

As we look ahead to a hybrid work world, we must find new ways to continue supporting employee productivity and creativity.

As Roblox began to trade today, the company’s shares shot above its reference price of $45 per share.

British electric vehicle subscription service Onto has partnered with Shell to give its users access to charging stations in preparation for a wave of new EVs coming to market over the next several years.

Twitter says it’s running a test with a small subset of iOS and Android users to “give people an accurate preview” of what an image will look like without the trial and error that process involves now.

I’m an entrepreneur who wants to expand my startup to the U. S.

This morning Arist, a startup that sells software allowing other organizations to offer SMS-based training to staff, announced that it has extended its seed round to $3.

"Today, there is a greater number of mature fintech companies, so this could be slowing down the pace at which seed- or angel-stage fintech companies are forming or receiving funding.

A team of mobile app engineers and designers from companies like Rent the Runway, ClassPass, Kickstarter and others, are now launching their own startup, Runway, to address the common pain points they experienced around the mobile app release cycle.

As the U. S.. reportedly readies for retaliation against Russia for hacking into some of the government’s most sensitive federal networks, the U.

Korean e-commerce giant Coupang is expected to hold one of the biggest tech IPOs of the year on March 11.

Apple has announced that it plans to increase its corporate spendings in Germany.

In recent years, the tech and venture scene in Latin America has been growing at an accelerated pace.

On January 6, America watched in horror as groups that recruited and organized on major social media sites violently attacked the seat of American democracy.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Japan is often under discussed as an expansion target for American startups, but in the past few years it has become a top market for companies like Slack, Salesforce, Twitter and, more recently, Clubhouse.

DataGrail, a startup that helps customers understand where their data lives in order to help comply with a growing body of privacy regulations, announced a $30 million Series B today.

Advances in technology provide all kinds of benefits, but also introduce risks — especially to already marginalized populations.

On the heels of a heated standoff between platforms and publishers in Australia, U.