Praveen chintu

Una Brands , a Singapore-based e-commerce aggregator, has raised $30 million in pre-Series C financing just five months after announcing its $30 million Series B funding  that was raised in September of last year.  Northstar Group, a regional private equity firm, is the sole investor in Una Brands’ latest round, which involves a mix of equity and debt, though Una Brands declined to break out how much equity versus debt the newest round involves. It also declined to disclose its valuation when asked. The company has now raised more than $100 million in total funding since its inception in 2021, and says it will use the new capital to continue developing its platform and buying up more direct-to-consumer brands in categories like home and living, mom and baby, and beauty and personal care.  Una Brands has differentiated itself as an Asia-focused e-commerce aggregator capable of operating brands across all channels, such as Amazon, Shopify, Shopee, Lazada and Tokopedia, compared to

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here . TikTok just can’t dodge the watchful eyes of the watchmen: Earlier this year, Taylor reported that a string of universities banned TikTok from devices . Last week, Paul reported that the European Commission threw the kibosh on having TikTok on work devices , and today, Amanda reported that Canada followed suit for its government devices . The bans are coming down over concerns that China-based TikTok can be used to spy on its users. — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Raise the roof : Continuing to work remotely in 2023 remains a hotly contested issue in today’s workplaces. What if we told you that Gable can give your company better remote working options? Still with us? Okay, Haje writes about how Gable raised $12 million to not only show your remote employees a nearby workplace, but also show them if any of their colleagues are there s

Electric vehicle maker Rivian generated $663 million in revenue in the fourth quarter and $1.66 billion for the full year, a result that was buoyed by an uptick in production and deliveries towards the end of the year but still wasn’t enough to meet Wall Street’s expectations. Yahoo analysts surveyed expected Rivian to generate $742.4 million in the fourth quarter and 1.73 billion for the full year. Shares dropped 8% as shareholders focused on a trio of suboptimal news, including missed expectations, a recall and an increased, but still lower-than-expected production forecast for 2023. The company reported a net loss of $1.72 billion in the fourth quarter and $6.8 billion for the full year. On an adjusted basis, it reported a loss of $1.5 billion and $5.2 billion for Q4 and full year, respectively.  The company attributed its net loss to high costs, noting that many of its material cost supply contracts were established in 2018 and 2019 prior to start of production, when it had “l

Mammoth, a recently launched Mastodon app that’s trying to make it easier on users who want to join the decentralized social web, has a notable financial backer. The company confirmed that its leading pre-seed investor is Mozilla, a proponent of the open web, who invested in the company’s first general round alongside others, including Long Journey Ventures and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff. The company has a unique founding story as well. The app was originally built by iOS developer Shihab Mehboob, the creator behind a number of apps including the whimsical music app Vinyls and the Twitter client Aviary 2 . The latter was impacted by Elon Musk’s Twitter API changes which put an end to third-party Twitter clients , prompting Mehboob to turn his attention to the decentralized and open source Twitter alternative Mastodon. Mammoth was the result of those efforts, but it has since been acquired by the company that’s now running the project, led by principal developer Bart Decrem. Now, t

The NFT market may be finding its footing again as the market for non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain surpassed $1 billion for the first time since May 2022. Amid the recent rebound, NFT marketplace Blur has also bested the once-largest NFT marketplace OpenSea in monthly volume for the third month in a row as the crypto market debates the issue of NFT creator royalties. Earlier this month, Blur also released its highly anticipated token airdrop, which disbursed about 360 million Blur tokens to users, or about 12% of the project’s total supply. Many speculated that Blur activity would fall off after its airdrop lure concluded. Instead, trading volume on the marketplace continued to grow. The rise of Blur in the NFT market has helped reignite a debate concerning royalties. In previous quarters, OpenSea tried to balance creator royalties as it held the top position for NFT marketplaces, but Blur’s aggressive stance is causing OpenSea to change its tack. Blur’s NFT marketplac

U.S. satellite television provider Dish confirmed that a ransomware is to blame for an ongoing outage and warned that intruders exfiltrated data from its systems. The multiday outage , which began last Thursday and was confirmed by Dish on Monday, is affecting Dish’s main website, apps, and customer support systems, along with the company’s Sling TV streaming and wireless services. Now, in a public filing published Tuesday, first spotted by Bleeping Computer , Dish said it had “determined that the outage was due to a cyber-security incident and notified appropriate law enforcement authorities.” Dish initially blamed the outage on “internal systems issues.” The company goes on to say that the filing relates to expectations “regarding its ability to contain, assess and remediate the ransomware attack and the impact of the ransomware attack on the corporation’s employees, customers, business, operations or financial results.” Dish said in the filing that the attackers extracted “cert

A new Mastodon app called Mammoth has already gained 10,000 downloads in the first few days of its availability on the App Store. The app was built by a team that includes the developer of the Aviary app for Twitter, which was among those unceremoniously killed by Twitter earlier this year after new owner Elon Musk decided the wider app ecosystem no longer had a need for third-party Twitter clients. That decision left longtime Twitter apps in the lurch  but prompted several app developers to turn their attention to the open-source, decentralized social network Mastodon instead. Last month, for example, the maker of the popular Twitter client Tweetbot launched a new Mastodon app called Ivory , after Elon Musk’s API changes wiped out the company’s Twitter-focused predecessor with no warning. Now Mammoth is entering the market to offer users yet another option. Unlike Ivory, which is an attempt to build a business to replace the losses from Tweetbot’s closure, Mammoth — for the time

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here . There’s another episode out of Inside Startup Battlefield, the podcast mini-documentary getting a behind-the-scenes look at the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield. Maggie just dropped the new EP: Getting to know the Battlefield 200 . Oh, and if you want to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt, you can apply now to speak ! — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Don’t you just love a new feature? : We have a team over in Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress, and one of the top stories coming out of there is the slew of new features Google has announced for Android, Chromebook and Wear OS. We’ll let Aisha give you the scoop, but it involves productivity, connectivity and accessibility. You know, the equivalent of the three educational “Rs,” but instead for mobile. A reason to wear sunglasses at night : Speaking of Mobile World Congress, Xiaomi unveiled i

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Today we’re thinking of the four astronauts heading to the International Space Station. See you guys soon! In this issue: Artificial gravity space station startup Vast makes its first acquisition Relativity Space sets a launch date News from Momentus, United Launch Alliance and more Vast acquires Launcher in quest to build artificial gravity space stations Vast Space , a company that emerged from stealth last September with the aim of building artificial gravity space stations in low Earth orbit, has acquired space tug startup Launcher. The acquisition, a first for Vast, will give the company access to Launcher’s Orbiter space tug and payload platform and its liquid rocket engine, E-2. Under the terms of the deal, Vast will also absorb all of Launcher’s talent, including Launcher founder Max Haot, who will join as president. The deal could be a big accelerator for Vast; the company’s founder, billionaire crypto pioneer Jed McCaleb, said Vast w

APIs are the building blocks of how the world of technology works: used to integrate applications with each other, API calls make up the majority of global internet traffic these days. Now, telecoms carriers, often cut out of the march of tech but now looking for more ways to monetize next-generation networks like 5G, want to get in on he act. Today the GSMA — the association representing the world’s major mobile operators — announced a new initiative with 21 carriers called Open Gateway, a framework to provide universal, open-source-based APIs into carrier networks for developers to access and use a variety of mobile network services like location or identity verificaiton and carrier billing, which previously would have been more complicated or more expensive (if not impossible) to integrate and use. The plan is to be able to kick off more development using APIs in applications like immersive mixed-reality experiences and web3 applications that will in turn give more 5G business to

The United States last September convened the first meeting of the working group, colloquially called "Fab 4" or "Chip 4", to discuss how to strengthen the semiconductor supply chain, after a global chip crunch caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/UluXkS5

The Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission will send NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the station on an eight-day mission, launching from Cape Canaveral and landing at White Sands, New Mexico, SpaceNews.com reported. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/y1XOuvD

CRED is rolling out a buy now and pay later service and a tap to pay feature as the Indian fintech platform broadens its offerings to boost engagement and monetization on the platform. Cred flash, the Bengaluru-headquartered startup’s foray into buy now and pay later category, will allow customers to make seamless payment on the app and across over 500 partner merchants including Swiggy, Zepto and Urban Company and clear the bill at no charge in 30 days. The customized credit extended to customers will allow them to make bill payments and recharges and other expenses with a single swipe and without having to wait for an OTP authentication code, said the startup, which is valued at over $6 billion . The service, powered by RBI-registered NBFC Parfait Finance and Investments Pvt Limited, will initially roll out to a select group of customers, the startup said. The BNPL product is the latest in a series of new offerings from CRED in recent years as it moves to make its eponymous fintec

New smartphones may get most of the headlines at MWC, but at its core, the annual trade show is still a telco event. It’s maybe no surprise then that the large cloud providers, who are all vying for the lucrative telco market, also made a few announcements ahead of the event. AWS jumped ahead of its competitors by announcing its news a week early and today, it’s Microsoft’s turn. The new features the company today announced for telco’s using its Azure cloud services focus on four areas: network transformation, automation and AI, network-aware applications and what Microsoft calls “ubiquitous computing from cloud to edge.” “The future hyperscale cloud is going to look a lot different than the cloud we have today,” Jason Zander, Microsoft’s EVP for Strategic Missions and Tech, told me. “Our expectation is that it’s going to expand; it will be a highly distributed fabric; it’s going to span from 5G to space. That future — this intelligent cloud, this intelligent edge — has to be powered

Twitter has laid off at least another 50 employees, according to a report from The Information and posts on social media from former workers. And apparently not even Elon Musk loyalist Esther Crawford, the chief executive of Twitter payments who oversaw the company’s Twitter Blue verification subscription, was spared, according to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer . Alex Heath of The Verge also confirmed that Crawford and most of the remaining product team were laid off this weekend, leading many to speculate that Musk is cleaning house to redecorate with a new regime. Recall that Crawford had been swept up by Musk’s hardcore takeover of Twitter last year, even boasting on the platform about sleeping at the office to handle round-the-clock demands from her new boss. When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork https://t.co/UBGKYPilbD — Esther Crawford (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022   The layoffs came this weekend after Twi