Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Welcome back to TechCrunch PM! This afternoon, learn about some new Google features, a startup that wants to manage your retirement, lots of venture rounds and a gadget to help your children get excited about being a music engineer. Let’s read!

— Christine

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: TechCrunch / Bryce Durbin

More Fisker woes: Reporter Sean O’Kane learned that the electric vehicle startup was unable to track payments for its EVs for several months, triggering an internal audit. Fisker was able to recover the payments, but this snafu is just another red flag in its color guard of multiple “material weaknesses” in its internal financial reporting. Read More

What Google can do for you: Want to navigate the streets of Venice without getting lost or find the best hole-in-the-wall pho restaurant while in San Francisco? Meet Google. The search engine giant is now your new travel agent featuring an AI component that will generate travel itineraries for your vacations. Read More

Google doesn’t only do travel, which is good because you're going to need some new clothes to travel with. The company's new feature will give you style recommendations when shopping for apparel, shoes and accessories. Read More

Shaking up retirement: Former Embark founder Stephen Chen is back with NewRetirement, building software to help people create financial retirement plans. The idea came from his own life experience of helping his mother navigate retirement without having to worry about finances. Read More

Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Getty Images / Andriy Onufriyenko

Observe raises $115 million: Enterprises are under pressure to find more cost-effective ways to run their technologies. That’s where Observe comes in. The company, which is cozy with Snowflake, “builds observability tools for machine-generated data that aims to break down data silos, [which is] useful for developers to understand how apps are working, being used, and potentially failing.” Read More

Drugs are only as good as the patient data: Century Health, which raised $2 million, is applying artificial intelligence to clinical data as a way to uncover new applications for drugs. Read More

See how your apples are doing: Orchard Robotics’ system is cutting out the middleman, or perhaps middle farmer. Founder and CEO Charlie Wu says Orchard’s cameras “image trees from bud to bloom to harvest, and use advanced computer vision and machine learning models we’ve developed to collect precise data about hundreds of millions of fruit.” Read More

Music producer in-training: If your child saw “Pitch Perfect” and wants to do what Anna Kendrick’s character Beca did with her computer, Playtime Engineering has you covered. The Blipblox has all the bells and whistles to simplify electronic music-making. Read More

Sensing road repairs: Cyvl.ai, now with $6 million in new capital, is using sensors that it says “can create a digital twin of the infrastructure piece such as a road, and then showing where there are weaknesses and predicting when there is likely to be a repair event.” With all that’s gone on with transportation infrastructure lately, seems like good timing. Read More

Around the web

Image Credits: Getty Images / akindo

Bloomberg reports that Japan’s yen hit a 34-year low.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is moving forward with its case against cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, according to Axios. Catch up with TechCrunch's article.

The massive sell-off of GameStop stock continues. Investing.com has more.

TechCrunch Minute

Image Credits: Robinhood

Robinhood’s credit card has arrived to take on Apple and any upcoming challengers: Robinhood’s new credit card was revealed Tuesday, and though it’s only available for Robinhood Gold members, the Gold Card does have a feature that’s spurring headlines: the ability to invest cash-back bonuses into investments. It’s notable to see how day-to-day consumer finance is becoming a technology story. Hit the clip, and chat with Alex Wilhelm! Read More