The company behind a popular line of marijuana vaporizers is stepping up its lobbying, communications and policy efforts as it prepares for an eventual initial public offering.

In recent weeks, PAX Labs—which makes a line of sleek devices for vaping cannabis in plant and oil forms—hired two technology industry veterans to help in those areas: Sharon Zezima, the company’s new ...

Imagine if Facebook’s key lieutenants quit to launch a rival product. In China, something like that just happened. Two of the people who helped develop WeChat, the nearly universal chat app run by Tencent, recently created new social networks called Pop and Echo.

It comes amid signs WeChat’s grip over social networking and media consumption in China may not be as total as it once ...

Tesla’s flat management structure appears to have become even flatter recently, as departures of key executives have left a larger than normal number of people answerable directly to CEO Elon Musk.

Tesla’s employee organization chart, located on an internal company website and viewed by The Information, recently showed 29 managers reporting to Mr. Musk. About a dozen of those ...

Airbnb’s years-long effort to crack the market for vacation tours and activities accelerated this year in what was known internally as the “summer of love.” After testing the service extensively, the company looked to grow its Experiences business rapidly, offering bar crawls, hat-making classes and other trip add-ons to more than 1,000 cities from Abu Dhabi to Reykjavik.

But ...

When Amazon announced plans last week to bump the minimum wage for 250,000 employees to $15 an hour, it avoided a related, but sensitive topic: When might machines replace those workers, many of whom work in its warehouses?   

Amazon already uses robots to handle some jobs in its warehouses, known as fulfillment centers, but it has downplayed the risk of robots replacing ...

The endowments of Harvard University, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina have made investments into at least one cryptocurrency fund, a person familiar with the investments said, in a sign of the asset class’ growing acceptance among institutional investors.

While many institutions have been reluctant to ...

Founders wield outsize influence over many of Silicon Valley’s most successful public companies through their shareholdings. But lately a growing number of tech firms are setting limits on founder power, partly in response to investor backlash.

Messaging service Slack, which is expected to go public next year, adopted rules in December that so-called supervoting shares held by co-founder ...

Costco Wholesale had preliminary discussions over the past few months about offering a video streaming service as a perk for its top-tier customers, according to three people with direct knowledge of the discussions.

The retailer has talked to at least two providers of existing streaming services about the possibility of offering such a service free for its “executive” members, ...

Five years ago, Apple was forced to temporarily close what was then its only retail store in Shenzhen, China, after it was besieged by lines of hundreds of customers waiting to swap broken iPhones for new devices, according to two former Apple employees who were briefed about the matter. In May 2013, the Shenzhen store logged more than 2,000 warranty claims a week, more than any other Apple ...

Microsoft’s efforts to build a futuristic computer based on quantum mechanics are getting a boost from former engineers of the chipmaker Qualcomm.

Over the past few months, Microsoft has aggressively hired chip engineers from a struggling Qualcomm division devoted to building chips for the computers that power data centers, more so than other companies, according to people familiar with ...

Chinese internet giant Tencent has agreed to invest about $200 million in Brazil’s Nubank, which offers virtual credit cards, in a deal that values the startup at around $4 billion, a person familiar with the matter said.

Tencent’s first investment in Brazil makes Nubank one of the most valuable startups in Latin America. It is the latest sign of how China’s tech titans are ...

One of the most appealing features of Tesla’s cars is their ability to steer themselves. But the semi-autonomous “Autopilot” feature has been linked to a series of crashes, and increasingly is blamed for encouraging drivers to take their eyes off the road and their hands off the wheel.

Tesla has responded by sending drivers mixed messages. While the automaker warns drivers ...

As U.S. and Asian tech giants pour billions of dollars into Southeast Asia, local startup valuations are soaring. Now, one of the region’s biggest online travel sites is in talks for a new funding round which would double its valuation to $4.1 billion, said a person familiar with the matter.

Indonesia-based Traveloka, backed by Expedia of the U.S. and Chinese online retailer JD.com, is ...

Even as China’s domestic investors struggle to raise cash, U.S. venture capitalists and other firms based outside of China are gathering record sums of money to invest in China.

Morningside, an early backer of Xiaomi, the smartphone maker listed in Hong Kong, is raising $1 billion. GGV, which backed Alibaba and travel company Qunar.com, is seeking to raise as much as $1.8 billion. ...

Instacart is on track to surpass $3 billion in grocery orders this year, as the same-day delivery service expands the number of supermarkets it works with, The Information has learned. That figure would represent more than double its business from last year.

The previously undisclosed figures show how Instacart has managed to thrive in the wake of a deal some thought would prove fatal for the ...

One morning in June, a self-driving car prototype developed by Alphabet’s Waymo unit drove itself northbound on the freeway not far from the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The Waymo vehicle, a white Chrysler Pacifica minivan, traveled on a route that the company uses to test different versions of autonomous vehicle software.

Behind the wheel of the Pacifica was a ...

SoftBank is changing the tech landscape by investing massive amounts of money in startups. Increasingly, that money is coming with more strings attached.

As it deploys its nearly $100 billion Vision Fund, the investing giant is negotiating deal terms that can go to great lengths to protect its returns and give it greater control over key decisions at companies, according to a review of public ...

SoftBank and Primavera Capital are in talks to invest in Bytedance, the six-year-old startup behind news app Toutiao and other popular Chinese entertainment apps, which is raising money ahead of a possible initial public offering next year.

The new round of financing could value Bytedance at as much as $75 billion, according to people familiar with the discussions, making it one of the most ...

Lyft appears to be getting better at controlling its costs.

The ride-hailing firm more than doubled revenue to $909 million in the first half of 2018 compared with a year earlier, according to a person with knowledge of the figures. But tighter control of expenses such as promotions for riders and technical infrastructure and networking meant the net loss rose at the relatively slower rate of ...

Facebook most likely will name Adam Mosseri as the new leader of Instagram, following the announcement on Monday night that the photo-sharing service’s two founders are leaving the company, according to people familiar with the matter.

The departure of the two founders, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom and CTO Mike Krieger, was the culmination of months of organizational changes within ...