The founder of Bird, a year-old scooter rental service that has attracted $450 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, already has sold some of his shares, according to people who were briefed on the unusual move. A regulatory filing suggests that the founder, Travis VanderZanden, might have received at least several tens of millions of dollars from the sale, but the exact size of ...

Apple has hired a high-profile senior engineer of Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving vehicle unit, Jaime Waydo, to join the iPhone maker’s own self-driving vehicle project, known as Titan, according to a person briefed about the move.

Ms. Waydo’s hiring could elevate the stature of Apple’s self-driving car efforts. It also signals that the company may be making progress ...

One of Airbnb’s major Chinese rivals is in talks with investors to raise about $100 million in a new funding round, people familiar with the matter said.

Beijing-based Xiaozhu was valued at $1 billion in its previous round in November when it raised $120 million from investors including Yunfeng Capital, a private equity fund backed by Alibaba founder Jack Ma. The talks for the new round ...

Tencent’s 2016 megadeal to buy Supercell cemented the Chinese tech giant’s stature as a global powerhouse in the $100 billion-plus videogame industry. The roughly $8 billion transaction by a Tencent-led group of Chinese investors was a huge bet that the Finnish mobile game maker behind worldwide hit “Clash of Clans” would keep creating new blockbusters.  

Two years ...

Electric scooter startups are aggressively seeking to raise money, telling potential investors that restrictions cities have placed on their operations won't impede their long-term growth. So far, Silicon Valley venture capital firms are all in.

Skip, a shared electric scooter operator that was founded by the co-creator of “Boosted Board” electric skateboards, told The ...

Tenable Network Security has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, according to two people with direct knowledge of the filing. Tenable is planning to go public in late July, the people said.

The filing, made on Monday, would make Tenable the third major cybersecurity company to go public this year, on the heels of Carbon Black and Zscaler. Both IPOs have been viewed as ...

Many new cars on the roads nowadays have sophisticated safety features that allow cars to steer and accelerate on their own. But when the cars crash, only the automakers know how those safety features performed. Crash investigators are often left guessing.

That’s because the information isn’t recorded in most cars’ event data recorders, the automotive equivalent of airplane ...

Amazon.com has contemplated offering home insurance as an offshoot of its development work on robots and other connected devices for the home, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The idea is that robots and other smart devices can be used to monitor for threats such as fires and burglaries, making it possible to offer cheaper premiums.

While there’s nothing that suggests ...

Uber plans to spend up to $500 million on a global marketing effort this year, according to a person familiar with the matter. It marks Uber’s first large-scale brand campaign and is part of an effort to repair the company’s image after last year’s scandals.

The branding campaign, which kicked off in the U.S. last month with television ads featuring Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, ...

Lyft has agreed to buy Motivate, which runs some of the biggest U.S. bike-share programs, according to two people briefed about the deal. The acquisition, which is likely to be worth $250 million or more, will quickly insert Lyft into the small but fast-growing U.S. bike-sharing market.

The two companies have agreed on the terms of the deal, although it hasn’t been finalized, one of these ...

BuzzFeed News plans to launch a new video interview show in the next two months, to stream on Facebook Watch. The weekly show is being described as a millennial-focused “Charlie Rose”–style program, with 20-minute episodes featuring an interview a week with a premiere celebrity, politician or other newsmaker.

Plans for the program show how BuzzFeed is building a stable of news ...

Of all the factors that explain Netflix’s success in upending the media industry, the least understood may be just how little it operates like a traditional media company.

At most studios and TV networks, decisions about whether to make a show or a movie can be made only by a handful of people atop the company, namely the president, a programming chief and a few other senior executives. ...

Last week, 20 Uber executives from around the world flew to Tokyo for a two-day, secret meeting on one of the company’s top priorities: How to work with taxis to crack Japan’s transportation market.

Uber is hoping to make a major push in Japan, a country where it desperately wants to succeed after ceding China to Didi Chuxing and Southeast Asia to Grab. But it needs a new strategy, ...

Apple is making a significant change to a wireless chip in the iPhone that will allow users to more securely unlock doors enabled with the same technology, a person familiar with the matter said.

The change to the near-field communication, or NFC, chip, which is expected to be announced next month, could pave the way for people to use iPhones for other security-sensitive interactions, from ...

Airbnb only recently began to regard travel giant Booking Holdings as a threat. But internal projections from the two companies suggest that the two may be neck and neck in the race to rent rooms outside traditional hotels, The Information has learned.

Airbnb internally projects it will sell 255 million to 265 million “room nights”—a measure of occupancy—this year, ...

Oracle’s efforts to catch up to Amazon in the cloud market are running into obstacles—from Oracle customers upset with the company’s aggressive sales tactics.

Several big Oracle customers, including oil and gas exploration company Halliburton, toy maker Mattel and electricity provider Edison Southern California, have recently rejected big cloud services deals proposed by ...

Lyft plans to seek permits to run an electric scooter service in San Francisco, The Information has learned. It is the clearest sign yet that the No. 2 ride-hailing firm plans to compete against its bigger rival Uber and a host of startups in the fast-growing market of electric scooters and bikes.

A local consulting firm representing Lyft approached San Francisco transportation officials in ...

Last fall, on a flight back from China, Evan Spiegel decided to remake Snapchat.

Inspired by apps he’d seen in that country, Mr. Spiegel wanted to create a new version separating users’ friends’ content from the professional media. Each category would be sorted by an algorithm rather than Snapchat’s existing chronological feed. Huddling on the plane with one of his top ...

BuzzFeed set out to reinvent Hollywood. It turns out that Hollywood reinvented BuzzFeed.

Five years after launching a film and TV business with an unconventional emphasis on audience data and fast program development, BuzzFeed Studios is changing tack. The company’s recent hiring of former MTV executive Lauren Dolgen to lead its studio division coincides with a shift toward more ...

Sonos had a big announcement last October: Its new voice-activated speaker would be the first to work with both Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. What hasn’t been reported is that Sonos achieved this by using its patent portfolio to play hardball with Google.

The tech giant previously had resisted allowing Google Assistant to work in speakers or other connected home devices that ...