TechCrunch Startup News

What if you could pay now to store something online permanently? You could preserve a website against censorship, save legal contracts, or offer an app even after your company fails. That’s the promise of Arweave‘s Permaweb. The startup has built a new type of blockchain that relies on Moore’s Law-style declining data storage costs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gradeup, an edtech startup in India that operates an exam preparation platform for undergraduate and postgraduate level courses, has raised $7 million from Times Internet as it looks to expand its business in the country. Times Internet, a conglomerate in India, invested $7 million in Series A and $3 million in Seed financing rounds of the four-year-old Noida-based startup, it said. Times Internet is the only external investor in Gradeup, they said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There’s too much hype about mythical “10X developers”. Everyone’s desperate to hire these ‘ninja rockstars’. In reality, it’s smarter to find ways of deleting annoying chores for the coders you already have. That’s where CTO.ai comes in. Emerging from stealth today, CTO.ai lets developers build and borrow DevOps shortcuts. These automate long series of steps they usually have to do manually thanks to integrations with GitHub, AWS, Slack, and more. CTO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to Max Q, our weekly look at what’s happening in space and space startup news. This week was a bit more quiet than usual coming off of the amazingly over-packed International Astronautical Congress, but there were still some big moves that promise a lot more action to come before they year’s over – particularly in the race to fly American astronauts to space on a rocket launched from American soil once again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Addresses are ambiguous, not precise enough or don’t even exist in some places. what3words wants to map the entire world and overhaul addresses three words at a time. That’s why I’m excited to announce that what3words Chief Commercial Officer Clare Jones is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. The startup has divided the world in 3 meter squares. Each square has been assigned three words. This way, it’s easy to read, easy to write and even easy to say. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The cloud kitchen craze has reached Latin America. Food tech startup called Muy landed a fresh $15 million Series B to expand into Mexico and soon Brazil. The service is currently operative in Colombia. Muy is a “cloud kitchen meets Chipotle,” says one investor. The company describes itself as a virtual kitchen and smart chef system that uses AI to produce food based on forecasts of demand, which can help to reduce food waste. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Digital media startup Brut is announcing that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding. The money will be used, in part, to finance its launch in the United States. CEO Guillaume Lacroix said that that he and his co-founders all come from the French TV industry, where they were all “frustrated not to be able to follow up the conversation on social. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Webiny, a London startup developing a serverless content management system, announced a $347,000 (£247,000) seed round today led by EU investment firm Episode 1. Webiny founder Sven Al Hamad says that Webiny is the first full-feature content management built for a serverless environment. “That means that we built Webiny from the ground up, and architected it so it works only inside serverless functions,” he said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quip, the dental care startup that first went to market with electric toothbrushes, has launched its first product outside of brushes:a floss applicator with a refillable canister. The floss costs $20 for the metallic applicator and refills cost $5. Each string is pre-marked every 18 inches to help guide people to use that amount for each session. The floss has been in the works since before Quip officially launched its toothbrush, Quip CEO Simon Enever told TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Blade, the French startup behind Shadow, held a press conference this morning to announce some product news as well as some corporate changes. Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. For a monthly subscription fee, you can access a gaming PC in a data center near you. Compared to other cloud gaming services, Shadow provides a full Windows 10 instance. You can install anything you want, Steam, Photoshop or Word. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices