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Manufacturers operating self-driving vehicles in the UK will be liable for a vehicle’s actions when in autonomous mode, according to the country’s new roadmap to achieve a widespread rollout of self-driving vehicles by 2025.

The British government unveiled the roadmap over the weekend, announcing $119 million in funding for AV projects and an additional $41 million for research to support safety and new legislation.

The roadmap stated that new legislation will build on existing laws and state that manufacturers are responsible for the actions of self-driving vehicles, “meaning a human driver would not be liable for incidents related to driving

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here.

It’s been a week of people trying to make sense of what’s happening in tech. If you’ve been compartmentalizing: Cheers! Now let me walk you through what’s been going on.

On Monday, WeWork founder Adam Neumann raised a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz for a new real estate company, reportedly at an over $1 billion valuation. Neumann’s return, flush with the biggest check that one of the best-known firms has ever written, was met with a range

Snapchat today is rolling out its first set of parental controls, after announcing last October it was developing tools that would allow parents to gain better visibility into how their teens used the social networking app. The update follows the launches of similar parental control features across other apps favored by teens, including Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

To use the new feature, known as Family Center, parents or guardians will need to install the Snapchat app on their own device in order to link their account to their teens through an opt-in invite process.

Once configured, parents will be able

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, said on Friday it doesn’t own India-based platform WazirX despite disclosing the acquisition two and a half years ago in a move that has baffled industry players, including the Indian firm.

Changpeng Zhao, founder and chief executive of Binance, said in a series of tweets that the company has been “trying to conclude the deal for the past few years,” but hasn’t completed the transaction yet citing “a few issues” that he declined to elaborate.

Binance announced the acquisition of WazirX in late 2019 in a blog post. The official blog

Bluecopa, an Indian startup building a finance operations automation platform for high-volume companies, has raised $2.3 million to expand its offering in the global market.

The seed funding round was led by Mumbai-headquartered Blume Ventures, with participation from Titan Capital, T-Fund, Speciale Invest, Bharat Founders Fund, T2D3, Amplify and Force Ventures.

It was also joined by Chargebee founders Krish Subramanian and Rajaraman Santhanam, Rohit Chennamaneni of HR management platform Darwinbox and Asad Khan and Jay Singh of cross-browser testing tool LambdaTest.

“Just to take an analogy, say Salesforce for sales, Marketo for marketing, GitHub for developers, there is a large

All is not well with the proposed acquisition of U.K. start bus platform Zeelo by Mass transit group Swvl. Back in April, we covered how a possible $100 million acquisition was on the cards, and, indeed, both companies confirmed it was, though not the price.

Swvl, an Egyptian-born startup that provides shared transportation services for intercity and intracity trips, had previously gone public (NASDAQ: SWVL) via a SPAC, and had agreed to acquire Zeelo, adding to its recent acquisitions of Viapool and Shotl, as well as the announced acquisitions of Volt Lines and door2door.

When the news of the acquisition

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Good morning, you wonderful specimens of humanity! It’s Friday, and I’m writing this from the hammock in my sunny North Oakland garden, so life ain’t all that bad. (I can only assume that WFH stands for Work From Hammock).

This weekend, earmark a bit of time to apply to our Startup Battlefield 200. It gives you the chance to exhibit your startup for free at TechCrunch Disrupt in October and win the $100,000 prize. Applications close August

A day after Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), Kenya’s monetary authority, said that Chipper Cash and Flutterwave were not licensed to operate in the East African country, the regulator has directed all financial institutions to cease doing business with the two fintechs.

The CBK’s bank supervision deputy director, Matu Mugo, directed all regulated banks, microfinance and mortgage finance institutions to stop their partnerships with the two startups with immediate effect — dealing a blow to Flutterwave and Chipper Cash, some of Africa’s highest valued startups.

The letter to the CEOs followed remarks by CBK’s governor, Patrick Njoroge, that the two

When the Big 3 cloud infrastructure vendors – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – reported their earnings this week, it was clear that the cloud is helping keep their overall numbers up. But perhaps what was most surprising was that after years of sitting at 33% market share, AWS was up a tick to 34% in the second quarter, according to numbers from Synergy Research.

Even more surprising is that after years of steady market share growth, Microsoft was down a notch from 22% last quarter to 21% this quarter. Google came in third, holding steady around 10%.

Synergy chief analyst

Welcome back to Chain Reaction.

Last week, we looked at a crossover episode for meme investing. This week, we’re talking about Musk dumping tokens while holding onto others.

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Dumping favor

A weekly dispatch from the desk of TechCrunch crypto editor Lucas Matney:

Elon Musk shared that Tesla sold some Bitcoin this week. Well, to be fair they sold an awful lot of Bitcoin… tens of thousands of coins.

And while Tesla’s announcement last year that they were buying Bitcoin sent prices to