Category: Beijing

SoftBank pours $500M into Didi in China’s biggest autonomous driving round

The race to automate vehicles on China’s roads is heating up. Didi, the Uber of China, announced this week an outsized investment of over $500 million in its freshly minted autonomous driving subsidiary. Placing the bet — the single largest fundraising round in China’s autonomous driving sector — is its…

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Meet News Break, the news app trending in America founded by a Chinese media veteran

TikTok isn’t the only new media app with Chinese background that’s making waves in the U.S. News Break, a news app founded by China’s media veteran Jeff Zheng with teams in Beijing, Shanghai, Seattle and Mountain View, has been sitting among the top three news apps in the U.S. App…

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China Roundup: A blow to US-listed Chinese firms and TikTok’s new global face

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. It’s been a tumultuous week for Chinese tech firms abroad: Huawei’s mounting pressure from the U.S., a big blow to…

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China’s Geek+ brings warehouse robots to US via Conveyco partnership

Chinese robots will soon be seen roaming a number of warehouse floors across North America. Geek+, a well-funded Chinese robotics company that specializes in logistics automation for factories, warehouses and supply chains, furthers its expansion in North America after striking a strategic partnership with Conveyco, an order fulfillment and distribution…

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TikTok parent ByteDance leads $6M round in financial AI startup Lingxi

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has added Lingxi, a Beijing-based startup that applies machine intelligence to financial services such as debt collection and insurance sales, to its ever-expanding portfolio of investments. The AI startup has raised a $6.2 million Series A round co-led by ByteDance and Rocket Internet, the German accelerator…

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FBI and DHS accuse Chinese hackers of targeting U.S. COVID-19 research

In a rare joint public statement, the FBI and Homeland Security’s cybersecurity advisory unit CISA have accused top Chinese hackers of trying to steal U.S. research related to the coronavirus strain, known as COVID-19. The statement, published today, said that Chinese hackers “have been observed attempting to identify and illicitly…

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