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When ByteDance bought the Chinese VR headset maker Pico a year ago, the message it sent was clear: it was betting that the immersive device would be where future generations spend most of their time consuming digital content. It’s a marriage reminiscent of Meta’s acquisition of Oculus back in 2014, except the world is now in a different place with technological advances that make VR headsets cheaper, less laggy, and more comfortable to wear. The TikTok parent has long aimed to compete in a market dominated by Oculus’s VR devices for consumers. When Meta launched Quest 2 in 2020, ByteDance worked on a confidential internal project to develop AR glasses, The Information reported . Pico’s product launch this week is a further indication of its ambition to challenge Quest, which has enjoyed roughly two-thirds of the global AR and VR market for the past two years. The Pico 4, which starts at €429 (around $420 thanks to a strong dollar) for 128GB and ships to Europe, Japan, and South Ko

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 . Happy Friday! We don’t know about you, but we are both ready for some R&R after ploughing through a wall of deep-cringe texts from the Musk/Twitter trial. We hope you get some, too, this weekend. This afternoon, Tesla is running its second AI day. Last year’s was a hoot , and we have some predictions for what’s coming down the pipe today, too . — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Under attack : Microsoft confirmed that it “is aware” of some attacks to its Exchange server. Carly is staying on top of the story and reports that there is “no immediate fix.” Eyeing that sweet capital : Manish has a scoop that Uniswap Labs, a decentralized exchange, is going after over $100 million in new funding. Stream on : YouTube TV is offering a new à la carte option that enables subscribers to purchase stand-alone networks without subscribing to the

Google appears to have disabled access to Google Translate in parts of China , redirecting visitors to the Hong Kong domain — which isn’t accessible from the mainland. According to users on Reddit and site archives viewed by TechCrunch, Google swapped the Google Translate interface at translate.google.cn with a generic Google Search page at some point within the last 24 hours. The change is reportedly impacting the translation features of apps like KOReader, a document viewer, for China-based users, as well as Chrome’s built-in translation functionality. Google hasn’t responded to a request for comment; we’ll update this piece if we hear back. Google has a long and complicated relationship with the Chinese government. In 2006, the company entered the Chinese market with a version of its search engine that was subject to government censorship rules. But after state-sponsored hacks and government-ordered blocks on Google services in response to YouTube footage showing Chinese secur

Embedded insurance — selling coverage at the same time as another product or service — is on the rise. According to data platform Dealroom , it accounts for a growing share of all policies sold, and startups in this space raised nearly $800 million in 2021 alone. Having recently polled investors on all things insurtech, we were curious to know if the market remained as bullish on embedded insurance as last year — and whether it was warranted. “Personally, I remain bullish on embedded insurance,” Brewer Lane Ventures general partner Martha Notaras told TechCrunch. “Many insurance purchases are difficult, so rolling insurance into another transaction makes a lot of sense.” While seeing clear value in the ability to bundle insurance with another purchase, Notaras and other investors we talked to also had reservations. “We believe in the concept of embedded insurance, but a more measured approach would suit investors well when analyzing these businesses,” Distributed Ventures partner

Tesla AI Day is here — the company’s second-annual event designed to show off its progress in AI and robotics. Viewers should expect demos and updates on the Optimus robot, the Dojo supercomputer as well as its “Autopilot” advanced driver assistance system, along with the $15,000 upgrade known as FSD, or “Full Self Driving.” (Tesla vehicles are not self-driving.) CEO Elon Musk has billed Tesla AI Day as a recruitment event. And what better way to reach the 80-hour workweek ride-or-die for Tesla crowd than scheduling this for a Friday evening? Note, this event is meant for recruiting AI & robotics engineers, so will be highly technical https://t.co/BcxAEv6qJd — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2022 Tesla AI Day is scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. PT September 30 (that’s today). If past is prologue then Tesla AI Day will not start promptly at 5 p.m. — Elon tends to run late. Like the company’s other events, Tesla AI Day 2022 should be livestreamed on the Tesla YouTube chan

Between recent drama around gambling and its controversial decision to take a bigger slice of the subscription revenue pie , it’s been a dramatic couple of weeks for Twitch. Now, the company says it’s testing one new way for streamers to bring in cash from their most committed followers in the form of “elevated chats,” which let viewers pay to highlight a chat message and keep it visible for a set amount of time. Twitch’s elevated chats look a lot like YouTube’s “super chats.” Like that feature, paying more will get your message featured for a longer interval, starting at $5 for 30 seconds and going up to $100 for 2.5 minutes in the spotlight. Those time intervals aren’t customizable for the time being. We're experimenting with a new way for viewers to pay to support their favorite streamers! Elevated Chat will be available on select channels today. Keep your messages visible in chat a for a longer period of time! Learn more https://t.co/t54NIG5uay — Twitch Support (

Truepill , a platform that helps other companies offer diagnostics, telehealth services and prescriptions, has conducted its fourth layoff of the year. Sources say the layoff impacted around 65% of the existing staff across the engineering, human resources, design, IT and finance teams. The layoff comes around two months after its last round, which impacted about a third of the company, or 175 people. One employee, who spoke to TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity, said that they were told that their position was “no longer sustainable due to economic factors” on a 1:1 call with leadership. Severance was mentioned but HR has not yet reached out to the employee with further details. “[The company said] it hoped there wasn’t going to be any layoffs after the August round,” the source said. “[Leadership said that] investors made some requests in order for the company to extend the financial runway so they made tough choices, but that we were now on good footing.” A company-wide al

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 . Today we are mostly listening to acoustic covers of songs we love (a surprise Iron and Wine cover , perhaps?), and mentally preparing ourselves for TechCrunch Disrupt. Which reminds us — did you know you can get 15% off passes with the DC discount code for being a Daily Crunch reader ? Don’t say we never did anything for you, dear reader!  — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Simple crypto : Cryptocurrencies are still complex, or that’s the viewpoint of Solvo, a new app that is making crypto investment simpler, Romain reports. What’s different is that instead of being offered dozens of currencies to choose from, Solvo has curated a list of 10 so you don’t get lost in all the names. Well that didn’t last long : On Monday we brought you news that “the OG app is out to bring Instagram back to its glory days .” Today, Ivan has an update that th

It’s demo day season. This morning marked the kickoff of VC firm 500 Global’s Fall 2022 Demo Day, which saw over a dozen startups give their best pitches to prospective investors — and customers. Participants ran the gamut from fintech and sustainability to edtech and developer tools, and several stood out from the rest of the pack. The event comes just weeks after Y Combinator had its bi-annual Demo Day , its first since moving operations back to in-person. 500 Global, formerly branded under 500 Startups , has an accelerator that competes with YC. Both outfits look to back early-stage founders with money and advice in exchange for equity. YC has backed over 3,500 founders, while 500 Global has backed more than 2,800 founders, according to each institution’s websites. Unlike YC, 500 Global has geographic-specific accelerator programs, similar to Techstars, with focus on areas like Aichi, Japan, Cambodia, and Alberta, Canada. That said, today’s debut from 500 Global is from its first

When insurtech company Metromile went public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in February last year, it was valued at over $1 billion. A year and five months later, Lemonade acquired the company for less than $145 million. As the markets turned early this year, insurtech left most generalist investors’ playbooks almost as fast as Metromile and its peers’ plummeting valuations. Yet, the sector is very much alive, and the “correction” of these companies’ valuations presents an opportunity for those who have cash left on their balance sheets, investors told TechCrunch. “Just like how not every insurtech was a unicorn last year, not all of them are worth zero today,” said Florian Graillot , founding partner at Astorya.vc . The insurtech market has been through a rough time this past year, so we reached out to eight active investors in the space to get a read of what’s been cooking as the markets aggressively recalibrated what an insurtech startup is worth. We’re wid

Consumers reduced their mobile app spending in the third quarter of 2022 by roughly 5%, but the social video app TikTok just delivered another record-breaking quarter on this front. For the fourth straight quarter in a row, TikTok continued its streak as the app that has ever generated the most revenue in a quarter. These new findings, in a report published today by Sensor Tower, see TikTok again becoming the highest-grossing app in the world even as the overall market is seeing a slight decline. However, the report does combine TikTok revenue with its Chinese version, known as Douyin — so it’s technically the revenue generated by the two apps offering the same feature set of short-form, vertical videos — not one. TikTok’s global app along with Douyin on iOS together retained the position as the top-grossing non-game app across the App Store and Google Play combined, with approximately $914.4 million in consumer spending in the quarter. Reached for comment, Sensor Tower explained t

Una Brands , an e-commerce aggregator focused on brands in the Asia-Pacific region, announced the first close of its Series B round at $30 million today. The funding was led by White Star Capital and Alpha JWC Ventures. Headquartered in Singapore, Una Brands has a presence in Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, China and the United States, and over 200 employees. It launched in 2021 with $40 million in funding, and has now raised a total of about $100 million. Over the last year, Una Brands has acquired more than 20 e-commerce brands in six countries, including ergonomic furniture vendors ErgoTune and EverDesk+. After taking over operations, Una Brands expanded those brands into Australia and grew revenue by over 40% in less than a year. In total, Una Brands says it now has annualized revenue of more than $50 million and is expected to achieve group profitability by the end of this year. While many other e-commerce roll-up companies (like Thrasio ) focus on brands that sell on

We’re beyond amazed at the collective creativity, ingenuity and technical prowess of the Startup Battlefield 200 . Out of thousands of applications, only 200 early-stage startups made the final cut, and you’ll find all of them — and only them — exhibiting on the TechCrunch Disrupt show floor on October 18-20 in San Francisco. That’s a whole lotta noteworthy startups, so we’re going to break it down a bit for you and highlight them by vertical. Today it’s hardware, robotics and mobility. Hungry for more? You can find them all listed in the Exhibitor Directory . Startup Battlefield 200: Hardware, Robotics, AI+ML & Mobility + Transportation edition Aether Biomedical Pvt Ally Robotics Boundless Robotics Buzr Labs, Inc. Deep Render Ltd. FLUIX Helios Life Enterprises Hidden Door Impossible Metals Jasper KATAKEM LintrinsIC Metabob PantheonDesign PseudolithIC Inc. RIF Robotics Studiobox Swap Robotics (opens in a new window) (opens in a new window) Swap Robotics

Taiwanese battery-swapping company Gogoro has signed a $345 million five-year credit facility agreement in order to increase liquidity among uncertain economic conditions. The loan comes from a group of 10 syndicated banks led by Mega International Commercial Bank Co., according to a regulatory filing . Gogoro will use the funds to pay off an existing facility, secure energy cells for its batteries, support operations in Taiwan and provide working capital as needed, according to a company spokesperson. The company will have an option to extend the loan for an additional two years and even get a discount if it continues to meet its carbon reduction goals. The fresh funds come a month after Gogoro released its second-quarter earnings results, which showed a company that is still growing, but is cautious, given market and macroeconomic conditions. Year-over-year Gogoro managed to increase its revenue by 5.3% to $90.7 million; however, the impact of COVID in Taiwan and China caused Go

Tesla’s second AI Day is fast approaching, and with it a flurry of speculations as to what will be discussed at the event — a phenomenon that we at TechCrunch are certainly not above. AI Day is the luxury electric vehicle maker’s annual event to hype up its artificial intelligence capabilities across different business segments, with the ultimate goal of recruiting the brightest minds and engineers. Even without Tesla’s star head of AI Andrej Karpathy, who left the company in July , expect this event to be full of technical jargon and big promises from Tesla’s executives, including the big dog himself, CEO Elon Musk. We’ll talk about what we’re expecting to hear about based on recent news, as well as last year’s AI day event . But first, how to watch. Tesla’s AI Day is scheduled for September 30 and should begin around 5 p.m. PT, although Tesla’s events are often notorious for running late. Remote viewers can watch it livestreamed on Tesla’s YouTube channel  or on its website. N