Tech
HungryPanda, a food ordering app for the Asian diaspora, picks up $55M
Apps catering to the Chinese and wider Asian diaspora, especially urban consumers focused on food, can be big business. Now, HungryPanda, one of the trailblazing startups in that market is announcing more funding.
The food ordering and delivery app, founded in London and aimed squarely at Chinese and other Asian consumers living outside their home countries, has picked up another $55 million. It will use the capital to continue building its existing business and expanding deeper in newer categories like groceries, it said.
The startup, founded in 2017, claims to be the largest of the Asian overseas food delivery platforms, competing against the likes of Fantuan (based out of Vancouver) and GrubMarket-owned FreshGoGo (based out of New York).
Operating as a classic three-sided, on-demand foodie marketplace a la DoorDash or Instacart, HungryPanda said it now has 6 million customers, 100,000 merchants and 80,000 riders across 80 cities in 10 countries. The company’s footprint has grown over the years. When it last raised funding — $130 million in 2021 — it said it was live in 60 cities; and in 2020, when it raised $90 million and was in 47 cities. (It’s never disclosed the number of customers before 2024 so 6 million in a fresh number.)
HungryPanda said it’s aiming for $1 billion in gross transaction volume for this year, and it is already profitable.
“Reaching profitability while maintaining significant growth demonstrates the strength of our business model and our long-term vision. This success is a testament to the dedication and hard work of our entire team,” said Eric Liu, HungryPanda’s founder and CEO, in a statement. “HungryPanda is more than just a delivery platform—we see ourselves as an ambassador of Asian cuisine. With this new funding, we are poised to accelerate our expansion into North America, elevate our services, and continue to champion the richness of Asian food culture on a global scale.”
The company is describing the capital as a “refinancing and fundraise” implying that some of this is primary and some possibly secondary and/or debt. We have reached out to investors and the startup to ask and will update as we learn more. Mars Growth Capital (a JV between Liquidity Group and MUFG) is leading the round with previous backers Perwyn, Kinnevik, 83North, and Felix also participating. Valuation is not being disclosed, but for some context on that, the last valuation PitchBook lists is from 2020 and is just over $289 million. However, given that it’s raised $275 million to date and the size of its gross transactions and growing footprint, that figure is likely to be higher now.
Eric Liu founded HungryPanda out of his own direct needs. As a student at the University of Nottingham, he found that while there were Chinese restaurants in the city, they found it nearly impossible to order from them. Menus were in English and the translations were nearly meaningless and the food had been sometimes criminally adjusted to meet British palates.
As Liu has told us previously, this was a bigger deal than it might be for some other groups of expats: Chinese people prefer to eat “traditional” food, and they take the business of eating very seriously.
HungryPanda was his solution: an app, in Chinese, that provided all the information to students like him in a format that they could actually use, including items that typically might only be offered on side menus to Chinese customers in Mandarin, if at all, if you are eating in the restaurant itself.
At least initially — the company has grown a lot from its early roots — HungryPanda’s focus on younger eaters, specifically students, helped it bypass some of the trickier unit economics of food delivery platforms. While apps like Deliveroo were built around the idea of around two deliveries per hour per driver to make an hour profitable, HungryPanda was used by people ordering “family style” and doubling or tripling or more per delivery, making individual journeys more profitable. It’s notable that other apps catering to a wider pool of users have adopted some of those mechanics over the years — a sign of it working.
Even without being an app for all consumers, HungryPanda and its ilk are targeting a sizeable market. The Chinese diaspora of first-generation consumers alone is estimated now to be at over 50 million people globally. That is before adding in other generations of immigrants and other countries beyond China.
This has proven to be a winning formula and one that seems to be driving some substantial revenue even beyond food consumption. Not only are there a number of other apps that have sprouted up also targeting Asian consumers on the hunt for more authentic food, but there are examples of how a swarm of consumers, chattering about authentic Asian food, have created whole destinations out of some towns — witness a sudden surge of young Chinese visitors to Dusseldorf, after Chinese users in the city started posting about the food available there on social media app Xiaohongshu.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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