Crunch Hype

It's the software that can determine if a micromobility company breaks out of the rideshare model and into the sales or subscription model, or becomes subsidized by or absorbed into public transit.

We all know these constant video calls are doing something to our brains. How else could we get tired and frazzled from sitting around in our own home all day? Well, now Microsoft has done a little brain science and found out that yeah, constant video calls do increase your stress and brain noise. Tell […]

It might be time for neighborhood restaurants and coffee shops to start thinking about a subscription business — at least according to a new Y Combinator-backed startup called Per Diem. The company is announcing today that it has raised $2.3 million in seed funding led by Two Sigma Ventures. As co-founder CEO Tomer Molovinsky put […]

I’m an entrepreneur who created my first startup a few months ago. Once it gets off the ground, I’d like to visit the U.S. to test the market and meet with investors. Which visas would let me do that?

The latest hearing to target Big Tech will drill down on competition in Apple’s App Store and Google Play. The Senate hearing, set for Wednesday at 2:30 p,m. EDT and embedded below, will feature testimony from the two big app store gatekeepers, and three companies that have banded together to critique the immense power that […]

Right on schedule, Google today launched the third developer preview of Android 12, the latest version of its mobile operating system. According to Google’s roadmap, this will be the last developer preview before Android 12 goes into beta, which is typically also when you’ll likely see the first over-the-air updates for nondevelopers who want to […]

There are any number of seed rounds that cross our desks every day, a never-ending march of enterprise software, consumer apps, games, hardware, biotech and sometimes even a space startup. But amid the regular flow of funding news, it’s still rare to come across a company raising money to take on addiction with software. So […]

Figma spent years in stealth before launching its web-based collaborative design tool. Since coming into the light, the company has been iterating quickly. Today, Figma launches its biggest product update to date. Meet FigJam, Figma’s new whiteboarding tool. The entire concept of Figma stemmed from the fact that designers were taking up much more space […]

The Arkansas "conscience law" -- and others like it -- place the burden of finding appropriate care on the patient instead of on the medical community, where it belongs. These laws must be repealed.

It was “the eighth wonder of the world,” Donald Trump said, driving a golden shovel into the ground. The then-president touted Foxconn’s planned Wisconsin factory as a major win for his economic goals. A year and a half later, the future of the manufacturing deal is far less certain. Earlier this week, the state announced […]

Google today announced a major update to Meet, its video-meeting service, which brings several user interface tweaks for desktop users, as well as quite a bit of new functionality, including multi-pinning so that you can highlight multiple feeds instead of just one, as well as new AI-driven video capabilities for light adjustments, autozoom, and a […]

In the words of co-founder and CEO Jonathan Shambroom, Creator+ is a new startup that will “finance, produce and distribute feature-length films from today’s top creators and emerging storytellers.” The company is coming out of stealth today and also announcing that it has raised $12 million in funding led by Petra Group and Freestyle Capital, […]

Most startups don’t have a technology problem — they have a marketing problem. This year, we’re going to see more companies realize the need to deepen relationships with their constituents.

The B2B payments space has seen an explosion in demand, and investor interest, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as businesses try to figure out how to pay each other digitally. The challenges become even more complex when dealing with cross-border payments. Startups that were formed before the pandemic stand to benefit from the […]

Earlier this year, Roku acquired the program catalog from Quibi, the short-form video app backed by Jeffrey Katzenberg that had failed to gain traction amid the pandemic, despite nearly $2 billion in financing. Quibi had been designed for on-the-go viewing, but launched when users were staying at home — watching TV on bigger screens and […]

Robotic process automation (RPA) unicorn UiPath last night priced its IPO at $56 per share, above its raised price target range of $52 to $54. The company sold 9,416,384 shares at that price, alongside 14,474,393 from existing shareholders. Its underwriters can purchase 3,583,616 shares at its IPO price if they so choose. UiPath raised $527.3 […]

Many of the world’s organizations shifted to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But even as more people are vaccinated and offices are planning re-openings, it’s clear that for some organizations, remote work is here to stay. Deel, a startup which provides payroll, compliance tools and other services to help businesses hire remotely, has […]

 Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive Natasha and Alex and Danny wanted to chat crypto. No, not cryptography, but cryptocurrency. The topic has been hot in recent months thanks to Coinbase, recent weeks thanks to the rapid price appreciation in the […]

Welcome Tech, which has built a digital platform aimed at immigrants and their families, has raised $35 million in a Series B funding round co-led by TTV Capital, Owl Ventures and SoftBank Group Corp.’s SB Opportunity Fund. Crosscut Ventures, Mubadala Capital, Next Play Capital and Owl Capital also participated in the financing, which brings the […]

Misfits Market, a startup known for selling “ugly” fruits and vegetables at discount prices, announced this morning that it has raised $200 million in Series C funding. The company says this brings its total funding to $301.5 million and moves its valuation into unicorn territory (i.e., above $1 billion). It isn’t getting any more specific […]

Amazon is bringing its new biometric device, the Amazon One scanner, to Whole Foods store. The retail giant this past fall first introduced the Amazon One scanner, which allows shoppers to enter a store by having their palm scanned. The customer’s palm signature can be associated with their payment mechanism in a retail environment — […]

Companies like Ro and Hims have capitalized on the need for more seamless and discreet access to health and wellness products that are part of everyday life. For men. Stix is looking to do the same for women, and has today announced the raise of a $3.5 million seed round. The financing was co-led by […]

Our venture capital-focused podcast Equity made it to the finals of its category in the Webbys, a digital awards show for digital things. We were pretty stoked about it. Natasha, in fact, was both excited and ready to go to battle with editing tools so that we could share an image of sorts in an […]

OneSoil, a company selling technology to help farmers monitor fields and increase yields, has raised $5 million from international investors Almaz Capital and PortfoLion. The company’s tech integrates satellite imagery with mobile and desktop applications for farming analytics. These offerings include both remote crop monitoring, variable-rate seed and fertilizer applications that can reduce the time […]

Have you ever dreamed about the opportunity to find yourself in, say, an elevator with an investor who is open to hearing your pitch? Well, then the next episode of Extra Crunch Live is for you. If you’ve hung out with us on an ECL before, you know we start with a bit of top […]

Enterprises are adopting an ever-wider range of SaaS applications to work and interface with customers, and that is proving to be a major security concern: it’s not just the prospect of phishing, credential stuffing and other malicious tricks to get into systems that are a worry, but the fact that more applications mean more attack […]

Authzed, an early stage startup that wants to make it easier for developers to build permissions in their applications, announced a $3.9 million seed round today. The investment was led by Work-Bench with participation from Y Combinator and Amplify Partners. CEO and co-founder Jake Moshenko says the service is an API that is designed to […]

The Cadillac Lyriq, the all-electric crossover and flagship of GM’s luxury brand, will start at a skosh under $60,000 when it comes to the U.S. market in early 2022. The price, which doesn’t include destination charges, is one of the last remaining details to be shared about the production version of the Lyriq. GM first […]

European Union lawmakers have presented their risk-based proposal for regulating high risk applications of artificial intelligence within the bloc’s single market. The plan includes prohibitions on a small number of use-cases that are considered too dangerous to people’s safety or EU citizens’ fundamental rights, such as a China-style social credit scoring system or certain types […]

As content moderation continues to be a critical aspect of how social media platforms work — one that they may be pressured to get right, or at least do better in tackling — a startup that has built a set of data and image models to help with that, along with any other tasks that […]

Some of the most popular running apps are still lagging behind on security and privacy. That’s the verdict from security researchers who examined the leading running apps five years apart and found only a few apps had improved — and not by much. Running apps know and learn a lot about you as you use […]

Late-stage Fintech startup Pleo, which offers expense management tools and ‘smart’ company Mastercards, says it plans to raise a Series C round of funding this summer. It’s also launching a B2B bill payments service this week. Co-founder and CEO Jeppe Rindom told me via a call: “We have money until 2022, but we’ve seen incredible […]

As businesses continue to adopt new digital tools to get their names out into the world, a startup that’s built a sales and marketing platform specifically for small and medium businesses is announcing a big round of funding. ActiveCampaign, which has built what it describes as a “customer experience automation” platform — providing a way […]

Electric scooters powered by Gogoro’s swappable, rechargeable batteries now account for nearly a quarter of monthly sales in Taiwan, its home market. But one of the most frequent questions co-founder and chief executive officer Horace Luke gets asked is when will Gogoro launch its scooters in other countries. “I always said, ‘we’re getting ready, we’re […]

Tel Aviv’s Orca AI, a computer vision startup that can be retrofitted to cargo ships and improve navigation and collision avoidance, has raised $13 million in a Series A funding, taking its total raised to over $15.5 million. While most cargo ships carry security cameras, computer vision cameras are rare. Orca AI hopes its solution could introduce autonomous […]

Samsung announced Galaxy Upcycling a few years back, but has largely been quiet on that front, aside from some stage time at CES back in January. Today the company announced that Upcycling at Home is being opened to beta today for users in the U.S., Korea and the U.K. It’s a pretty novel program, in […]

Excel and Google Sheets can only address pure ‘number crunching’ in a limited way. A new UK startup, Causal hopes to tackle this issue and has now raised a $4.2 million seed round led by Accel. Existing investors Coatue, Passion Capital, Verissimo Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Varadh Jain and others, also participated. The raise brings Causal’s […]

The last five years have seen a plethora of fintech applications in Nigeria (and Africa, in general) grow at an astonishing rate. But most of these companies and developers find it difficult to access real-time banking data. This, in turn, creates a bottleneck when onboarding and verifying customers. Since 2019, Plaid-esque companies, but with different […]

Facebook and its family of apps have long grappled with the issue of how to better manage — and eradicate — bullying and other harassment on its platform, turning both to algorithms and humans in its efforts to tackle the problem better. In the latest development, today, Instagram is announcing some new tools of its […]

A week after the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase staged a direct listing, much of the focus remains on the wealth that the listing generated for executives at the company, its board members, and its private investors. Citing data from Capital Market Laboratories, Cointelegraph on Monday noted, for example, that 12,965,079 shares worth close to $5 billion […]

Restaurants rode a wave of usage of food delivery services like Deliveroo, Uber Eats and DoorDash in the last year, discovering new revenues and ways to connect with diners to offset the fact that in-person trade for many of them had disappeared overnight. But they also discovered something less appetizing: dealing with the mess of […]

Robotic process automation has become buzzy in the last few months. New York-based UiPath is on course to launch an initial public offering after gaining an astounding valuation of $35 billion in February. Over in China, homegrown RPA startup Laiye is making waves as well. Laiye, which develops software to mimic mundane workplace tasks like […]

Apple announces new devices, Amazon opens a hair salon and Venmo adds cryptocurrency support. This is your Daily Crunch for April 20, 2021. The big story: Apple announces a new iPad Pro and much more Apple revealed a bunch of new products at its press event today. As expected, there’s going to be a new […]

The 19th annual Shanghai Auto Show delivered a bevy of electric and tech-centric vehicles this year. Chinese, European and U.S. automakers showed off their latest offerings in every price segment, from the budget-minded ​​Wuling Hong Guang Mini via a joint venture between SAIC Motor Corp., General Motors Co. and Liuzhou Wuling Motors Co. to the […]

Today’s Apple event, chock-full of the company’s products that will help decide whether the company meets, exceeds or undershoots Wall Street expectations for its future growth and performance, had little to no impact on its share price. By now this is the theme: Apple announces a slew of new products, services, software or peripherals, and […]

Smartphones will be included in the scope of a planned “security by design” U.K. law aimed at beefing up the security of consumer devices, the government said today. It made the announcement in its response to a consultation on legislative plans aimed at tackling some of the most lax security practices long-associated with the Internet […]

Netflix added 4 million net new subscribers in the first quarter of 2021, bringing its total subscriber base to 207.6 million, according to its latest earnings report. Any year-over-year comparison was inevitably going to make this latest quarter seem disappointing, since Netflix grew by an unprecedented rate (15.77 million net new subscribers) during the same […]

French startup BlaBlaCar has raised a new $115 million funding round (€97 million). While the company is better known for its long distance carpooling marketplace, BlaBlaCar has also added a bus marketplace with the acquisition of Ouibus and an online bus ticketing platform with the acquisition of Busfor. Existing investor VNV Global is leading the […]

A month after reports that Microsoft sought to buy the hot voice chat app Discord surfaced, those talks are off, a source familiar with the deal confirmed to TechCrunch. Discord is considering plans to stay independent, possibly charting a path to its own IPO in the not-too-distant future. The Wall Street Journal first reported news […]

After visits by unnamed masked intruders and the cancellation of its lease, Imaguru — the country’s key startup hub, event and co-working space in Minsk — has effectively been shut down by the Lukashenko regime, which has led a brutal crackdown on its own people in recent months. But the company behind the space says […]