



Daily Crunch: Samsung’s vice chairman receives presidential pardon for bribery conviction
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. Last night was a full moon, somehow it’s already halfway through August, and did...



Hyundai announces $400M AI, robotics institute powered by Boston Dynamics
When Hyundai acquired Boston Dynamics at the end of 2020, there were plenty of open questions. Chief among them was why we should assume this acquisition would be any different than the past few? The 30-year-old bleeding-edge robotics firm had been an uncomfortable fit for its last two owners, Google and SoftBank, but the Korean automotive giant insisted things would be different. The pairing has, thus far, been something of a mixed...
Amazon launches AWS Private 5G so companies can build their own 4G mobile networks
Amazon’s cash-cow cloud division AWS has launched a new service designed to help companies deploy their own private 5G networks — eventually, at least. AWS first announced AWS Private 5G in early preview late last year, but it’s now officially available to AWS customers starting in its U.S. East (Ohio), U.S. East (N. Virginia), and U.S. West (Oregon) regions, with plans to roll it out internationally “in the near future.” But...



Conversational intelligence company Jiminny nabs $16.5M to unlock sales team insights
Jiminny, a U.K.-based conversational intelligence platform that companies use to record, transcribe and analyze communications from across sales and other customer-facing teams, today announced it has raised $16.5...


FullStory secures $25M to help companies spot issues in their apps and websites
FullStory, which sells analytics tools for apps and websites, secured $25 million in new equity financing, paperwork filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week shows. According to Crunchbase, the...


South Africa’s DataProphet closes $10M to scale its AI-as-a-service platform for manufacturers
Manufacturing plants or factories take raw material inputs and add value through a sequence of unit processes before shipping a product. Now, this process must follow a recipe. There are a series of instructions for products such as cars; in those instructions, a list of parameter values, specific temperature for iron melting, specific pressure for mold casting… and the list goes on. These factories, for instance, those in the...
iRobot announced a 10% staff cut the same day its Amazon news dropped
You’d be forgiven for missing this bit of news. I fully cop to not seeing it myself amid the buzz of last week’s Amazon acquisition news on Friday (knowing nod to Robot Report for pointing it out). Later that day, inside its quarterly earnings report, iRobot announced plans to cut 140 jobs — a figure that amounts to roughly 10% of its global workforce. Here’s the full note from the filing: To better align its cost structure...

