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imToken , the blockchain tech startup and crypto wallet developer, announced today it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Qiming Venture Partners. Participants included returning investor IDG Capital, and new backers Breyer Capital, HashKey, Signum Capital, Longling Capital, SNZ and Liang Xinjun, the co-founder of Fosun International. Founded in 2016, the startup’s last funding announcement was for its $10 million Series A, led by IDG, in May 2018. imToken says its wallet for Ethereum, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies now has 12 million users and over $50 billion in assets are currently stored on its platform, with total transaction value exceeding $500 billion. Ethereum wallet imToken raises $10M Series A from IDG to expand in the US, Asia and Africa The company was launched in Hangzhou, China, before moving to it current headquarters to Singapore, and about 70% of its users are in mainland China, followed by markets including South Korea, the United States an...

Lidar companies across the planet are going SPAC , but Baraja isn’t in a hurry to go public. The Australian lidar maker has raised a $31M B round to continue the deployment and development of its “unique and ingenious” imaging system, with participation beyond the usual VC suspects. Baraja’s lidar uses what the company calls SpectrumScan, letting physics do the hard work of directing the light. By passing its laser through a prism, different wavelengths of light go in different directions — and when it comes back, it takes the same path. Actually it’s a bit more complicated than that, but if you’re curious check out my article from CES last year , which lays it out in more detail. The company hasn’t been lying still since then, even though the most obvious application of lidar — autonomous vehicles — hasn’t exactly taken off in the meantime. As co-founder and CEO Federico Collarte told me back in 2020 of the lidar industry, “if you don’t differentiate, you die.” And Baraja has done ...

It’s plain to see that electric vehicles are the future, but there’s more to making that change happen than swapping out a gas motor for a battery-powered one — especially in aircraft. H3X is a startup that aims to accelerate that future with a reimagined, completely integrated electric motor that it claims outperforms everything on the market. The small founding team — CEO Jason Sylvestre, CTO Max Liben, and COO Eric Maciolek — met in college while participating in an electric vehicle building and racing program. After stints in the tech and automobile industry (including at Tesla), the crew came back together when they saw that the Department of Energy was offering a bounty for improved high power density electric motors. “The problem was uniquely suited to our abilities, and passions too — we’re excited about this stuff. We care about decarbonization of the different transit sectors, and aviation is going to become a growing part of the global carbon footprint over the next few d...

An artificial retina would be an enormous boon to the many people with visual impairments, and the possibility is creeping closer to reality year by year. One of the latest advancements takes a different and very promising approach, using tiny dots that convert light to electricity, and virtual reality has helped show that it could be a viable path forward. These photovoltaic retinal prostheses come from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, where Diego Ghezzi has been working on the idea for several years now. Early retinal prosthetics were created decades ago, and the basic idea is as follows: A camera outside the body (on a pair of glasses, for instance) sends a signal over a wire to a tiny microelectrode array, which consists of many tiny electrodes that pierce the nonfunctioning retinal surface and stimulate the working cells directly. The problems with this are mainly that powering and sending data to the array requires a wire running from outside the eye in — genera...

Apple has announced that it plans to increase its corporate spendings in Germany. In particular, the company wants to set up a new facility in Munich, Germany. Called the European Silicon Design Center, the team will focus on 5G and potentially future wireless technologies. The company said that Munich is already its largest engineering hub in Europe. There are already 1,500 engineers working there. In particular, Apple has been putting together its own team of engineers working on power management chips. Overall, half of Apple’s engineers working on power management are located in Germany. Since then, Apple’s teams in the country have expanded beyond power management to work on other chip designs. Now, Apple plans to invest $1.2 billion (€1 billion) over the next three years on a new building and new R&D investments. While Apple is partnering with Qualcomm for the 5G modems in the iPhone 12 lineup, the company has also acquired most of Intel’s smartphone modem business . In...

There are many jobs in the construction industry that fall under the “dull, dirty, and dangerous” category said to be ripe for automation — but only a few can actually be taken on with today’s technology. One such job is the crucial but repetitive task of rebar tying, which a startup called SkyMul is aiming to completely automate using fleets of drones. Unless you’ve put together reinforced concrete at some point in your life, you may not know what rebar tying is. The steel rebar that provides strength to concrete floors, walls, and other structures is held in place during the pouring process by tying it to the other rebar where the rods cross. For a good-size building or bridge this can easily be thousands of ties — and the process is generally done manually. Rodbusters (as rebar tying specialists are called, or so I’m told) are masters of the art of looping a short length of plastic or wire around an intersection between two pieces of rebar, then twisting and tying it tightly so t...

Few things are more personal than a keyboard and yet they are often overlooked by Work From Home guides. Why use the standard issue keyboard when there are so many options available? This is a sampling of some of the keyboards used by TechCrunch’s editorial staff. Some are boring, some are for different languages, and each one is kind of dirty. Excuse the dust, grim, and general dirtiness of the following. Keyboards are gross and hard to clean and we did the best we could getting our keyboards photo-ready. I used two cans of air on my keyboard and it still looks like a toy in a preschool sandbox. Please note this post is not sponsored and TechCrunch does not earn anything from keyboard sales. We just want to show off our gear. What we’ve learned about working from home 7 months into the pandemic Danny Crichton Image Credits: Danny Crichton / Danny Crichton Working across borders is hard — working across languages is even harder. So getting a foreign language keyboard...

Tonal , maker of the smart home fitness trainer, announced it is more than tripling the number of physical locations it sells devices in through a new partnership with Nordstrom. Starting this month, Tonal will have 50-square-foot stations in the women’s activewear departments of at least 40 Nordstrom locations across the U.S., bringing the total number of Tonal physical locations to 60 by the end of 2021. Shoppers will be able to walk in or book appointments to try Tonal devices and purchase them through employees on-hand. “As we looked to expand our retail footprint and strategy, we looked to the retail landscape, and we really feel like Nordstrom says ‘best-in-class’ — the department store is well-suited to succeed in a COVID and post-COVID world,” explained Christopher Stadler, Tonal’s CMO. Tonal, which manufactures a wall-mounted device with a digital weight system that emulates various traditional gym stations, already operates 16 locations across the country with devices sho...