Rita Liao

Reporter, China, TechCrunch

Rita covers Asia for TechCrunch, with a special interest in Chinese companies going global and web3 projects with real-world applications.

Before her previous writing stints with Tech in Asia and TechNode, Rita managed communications for SOSV’s accelerators in Asia. At one point, she worked for a documentary production company and a mindfulness retreat center in New England.

She studied political science and visual arts at Bowdoin College.

Contact: ritaliao@pm.me

Rita Liao

Latest from Rita Liao

Leveraging large languge models, Jobright created an AI agent that acts as a headhunter tailored to individual job seekers.

How Jobright uses AI to help foreign workers navigate the US job market

Evan, a high school sophomore from Houston, was stuck on a calculus problem. He pulled up Answer AI on his iPhone, snapped a photo of the problem from his Advanced…

AI tutors are quietly changing how kids in the US study, and the leading apps are from China

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

With U.S. regulators continuing to ramp up their scrutiny of crypto, startups and founders in the space are looking overseas to find friendlier climates to support their growth. One such…

Global crypto firms turn to Hong Kong for refuge — and opportunity

The graduates of Alliance DAO are often useful indicators of investor appetite and user adaption trends within the crypto space. The latest batch of the stage-agnostic crypto accelerator, unveiled today,…

Alliance DAO is attracting fewer US founders amid crypto crackdown

Throughout hip-hop’s long history, jewelry has served as an important vehicle for artists to convey their ideas and affluence, or simply to dazzle onlookers. Diamonds, in particular, serve as an…

Here’s a lab-grown diamond startup that’s attracted a16z’s attention

As the Gulf region gains growing strategic importance in the tech war between the U.S. and China, Microsoft makes a big move into one of its oil-rich countries. On Monday…

Microsoft’s $1.5B funding for G42 signals growing US-China rift

Chatbots have come a long way. For years, they were limited to responding with predetermined replies that followed a simple logic structure. But customers can have complex problems, and no…

HD raises $5.6M to build a Sierra AI for healthcare in Southeast Asia

Featured Article

TikTok ban could harm Amazon sellers looking for alternatives

In March, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that could force ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban in U.S. app stores. Much of the related discussion and debate has centered around American data security and speech rights, but a potential move also highlights something else:…

TikTok ban could harm Amazon sellers looking for alternatives

The field of insurance technology has had a rough time. About 7 years ago, early insurtech companies promised to disrupt the insurance industry with new tech, but today, most of…

The CareVoice raises $10M Series B, bucking the funding slowdown in health tech

Amid the speculation and volatility in the casino-like crypto land, there remains a subset of individuals who espouse blockchain’s potential to decentralize various aspects of human activities for the greater…

Taiko raises $37M to build web3 infrastructure for a censorship-free internet

Ever since Hong Kong legalized cryptocurrency trading last June, blockchain projects from the West have been paying more attention to the Asian financial hub. Aptos, the a16z- and Tiger Global-backed…

Ex-Meta employees’ Aptos tests Hong Kong’s crypto appetite

Want to weave various Stability AI–generated video clips into a movie? Now there’s a tool for that. Morph Studio, which has its own text-to-video model, just introduced an AI filmmaking…

Morph Studio lets you make films using Stability AI–generated clips

It’s hard to keep track of crypto’s technical development, but one thing hasn’t changed much: blockchain applications are notoriously hard to build. This stems in part from their decentralized nature,…

Initia raises $7.5M seed round to simplify blockchain development

Chinese tech companies are gathering all sorts of resources and talent to narrow their gap with OpenAI, and experiences for researchers on both sides of the Pacific Ocean can be…

Alibaba staffer offers a glimpse into building LLMs in China

Generative AI has done an impressive job in improving productivity in a wide range of areas, including website building. There’s no lack of tools that now allow one to generate…

Armenia’s 10Web brings AI website-building to WordPress

After a few years of funding frenzy, autonomous driving companies in China are experiencing a slowdown in investment. Some companies are still hauling in capital, though the era of bankrolling…

Backed by Chinese carmaker Great Wall, Haomo raises $14M for autonomous driving tech

The race to build the next big large language model is on, and now a contender out of China has reportedly banked a major round of funding to catapult it…

China’s Moonshot AI zooms to $2.5B valuation, raising $1B for an LLM focused on long context

Honor of Kings, Tencent’s massively popular mobile game, has its eye set on the international market in 2024. Starting on February 21, the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game will…

Tencent’s gaming cash cow Honor of Kings sets sights on MENA

In 2017, “new retail” began appearing in Alibaba’s earnings reports. Coined by the Chinese e-commerce behemoth, the term “new retail” refers to the seamless integration of online and offline retail.…

Alibaba faces reckoning with once-vaunted ‘new retail’ strategy

Before the world became fixated on artificial intelligence, thanks to generative AI’s advances, cryptocurrency was the darling of many investors. So when some venture capital firms started swiftly switching their…

This gaming startup tries to show ‘AI + crypto’ is not a fad

In the week when gadget lovers around the world are enchanted by Vision Pro, a young, brave startup is trying to carve out a space for its augmented reality device…

AR glasses with multimodal AI nets funding from Pokémon GO creator
AI

China’s generative video race heats up

On Monday, Tencent, the Chinese internet giant known for its video gaming empire and chat app WeChat, unveiled a new version of its open source video generation model DynamiCrafter on…

China’s generative video race heats up

In 2023, the global frenzy around artificial intelligence, fueled by the advent of ChatGPT, swept across the world. In China, where OpenAI’s chatbot is unavailable, startups and tech incumbents scrambled…

Despite global frenzy, investor enthusiasm in China’s AI startups wanes

XPeng, Tesla’s challenger from China, has its eye on the international market and plans to use its smart driving software as a selling point. The Guangzhou-based electric vehicle upstart said…

China’s XPeng is bringing its Tesla FSD equivalent to overseas owners

Featured Article

Facing roadblocks, China’s robotaxi darlings apply the brakes

A few years ago, robotaxis were the darlings of venture capitalists in China. A cadre of audacious startups, including Deeproute.ai, WeRide.ai, Pony.ai and Momenta reeled in hundreds of millions of dollars to fuel their costly ambitions. With pockets overflowing, they spent generously on building self-driving vehicle fleets. Their geeky executives,…

Facing roadblocks, China’s robotaxi darlings apply the brakes

Amid rising geopolitical tensions, many Chinese tech companies find themselves recalibrating their overseas pursuits, often sidestepping any reference to their origin. One bold startup called DP Technology stands out from…

Propelled by ‘science for humanity,’ this Chinese AI startup sets sight on US

Despite the ongoing regulatory crackdown on the crypto industry and the collapse of some of its poster children, the underlying decentralized technology continues to drive internet incumbents into the web3…

EthSign brings DocuSign-like features to Line, Telegram with a web3 twist

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of business intelligence tools that aim to help companies make critical business decisions based on data analytics. There’s a catch. As data…

Datalogz raises $5M to deal with your business intelligence sprawl

When it comes to spurring the development of cutting-edge technologies, the Chinese government is rather pragmatic in its policymaking process. In the field of autonomous driving, the country has made…

Your robotaxi ride in China is monitored – with video and audio recordings