Crunch Hype

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Robotic process automation unicorn UiPath is set to go public this week, concentrating our focus on its value.

It’s been a strange few years for Fitbit. After defining the fitness tracking space, the company was a bit late to the smartwatch trend, but was still able to ride that wave to a rebound. But while watches have received most of the press the now Google-owned company has garnered in recent years, bands still […]

Facebook is deepening its relationship with music company Spotify and will allow users to listen to music hosted on Spotify while browsing through its apps as part of a new initiative called “Project Boombox,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday. Facebook is building an in-line audio player that will allow users to listen to songs […]

Facebook today officially announced a suite of new audio products — an indication that it’s taking the threat from Clubhouse and other audio platforms more seriously. The company is doing more than just building its own take on Clubhouse, however, it’s also announcing tools that allow podcast creators to share long-form audio, a new Spotify […]

Geico, the second-largest auto insurer in the U.S., has fixed a security bug that let fraudsters steal customers’ driver’s license numbers from its website. In a data breach notice filed with the California attorney general’s office, Geico said information gathered from other sources was used to “obtain unauthorized access to your driver’s license number through […]

Venture capital is a networks business — from networks of founders to the web of investors and angels and gossamer threads of potential customers, talent and service providers. The density of those networks determines success: Find just the right person to fit a role or a slot on a cap table, and a startup might […]

The era of cloud gaming hasn’t arrived with the intensity that may have seemed imminent a couple years ago when major tech platforms announced their plays. In 2021, the market is still pretty much nonexistent despite established presences from nearly all of tech’s biggest players. Microsoft has been slow to roll out its Xbox Cloud […]

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration is opening an investigation into a crash involving a Tesla that authorities say was operating with no one behind the wheel, which left two men dead on late Saturday evening outside of Houston. The 2019 Tesla Model S went off the road after it failed to negotiate a slight […]

On the heels of Clubhouse’s latest fundraise, Reddit today officially unveiled its Clubhouse rival, Reddit Talk following a recent report from Mashable that revealed the company had been developing audio-based social networking features. Like many of the newly launched Clubhouse clones, Reddit’s voice chat experience hasn’t deviated much from Clubhouse’s overall design where speakers sit […]

A stunning first quarter in venture capital funding was not restricted to the United States; Europe also had one hell of a start to the year.

Regret — such an unfortunate and unnecessary emotion, is it not? If you missed out on our April TC Early Stage bootcamp, this is your chance to cast regret aside and secure your spot at TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising on July 8-9. Jumping on the TC Early Stage bandwagon this well, early, […]

Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite constellation is one step closer to actually making it to space: The company announced it has secured an agreement with the United Launch Alliance (ULA) to fly its satellites on nine Atlas V rocket launches. Amazon intends to use multiple launch providers and spacecraft to ultimately get the full complement of […]

Apple will reinstate Parler on its App Store following its multi-month ban, according to a letter Apple has sent to Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Ken Buck, which was made public this morning via a post on Congressman Buck’s Twitter. TechCrunch also obtained the letter and confirmed with Apple directly. The lawmakers had earlier written […]

French startup Alan has raised a $220 million funding round at a $1.67 billion valuation (€185 million and €1.4 billion respectively). Coatue is leading the round with Dragoneer, Exor, and existing investors Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital and Temasek also participating. Alan has been building health insurance products from scratch. When I first covered the company […]

We’ve all heard the phrase “passive income” to describe how people can make money by owning rental properties. Many Americans would love to passively earn money, but the process of becoming a landlord can be intimidating and complicated. I mean, how many people have looked back and wished they hadn’t sold a property after seeing […]

Tyltgo wants to make it easier for restaurants and small businesses to compete with same-day delivery services offered by the likes of Amazon and HelloFresh. The Canadian company, which recently raised CAD $2.3 million (USD $1.8 million) in a seed round, is akin to a white label Uber Eats, providing businesses an on-demand delivery platform […]

E-commerce is booming as retailers race to transform their brick-and-mortar footprints into online storefronts. By some counts, the market grew an astonishing 42% in 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and estimates show that online spending in the U.S. will surpass $1 trillion by 2022. It’s a bonanza, and everyone is figuring out […]

Startups are stories of feverish dreams and obsessive fears. Short of hearing it from the source, a glimpse into the inbox of a founder would be the best way to experience the travails they endure on the way to building a business. A customer finally makes a purchase, a VC invests or walks away, an […]

Email is the communication medium that refuses to die. “Eventually, every technology is trumped by something new and better. And I feel that email is ready to be trumped. But by what?” wrote the venture capitalist Fred Wilson in 2007. Three years later, he updated readers that other forms of messaging had outgrown email. “It […]

Brands are emotions made physical. The clothes we wear, the media we consume, the devices we use — all signal not only to others what we value and see in ourselves, they also are a way to construct our very identities. Experimenting to deepen that bond has been at the core of the marketing profession […]

Many of the stories in our EC-1 series tell tales of startups in the wilderness hacking out green field opportunities. Klaviyo is a different breed of company: One that went into an established market and challenged powerful incumbents, ultimately finding success with a new, more data-oriented generation of email marketers. As such, the lessons that […]

Tel Aviv-based ultra-high resolution radar startup Arbe Robotics has a new customer: Chinese autonomous driving company AutoX, which has procured 400,000 Arbe-based radar systems to go in its Level 4 fleet. The companies said in a statement that Arbe’s platform addresses “core issues” that have been the source of recent AV motor accidents, such as […]

Low-code technology, which we’ve been hearing about for years, is ready for widespread adoption, enabling you to easily streamline (and scale) everything from integration to artificial intelligence.

As online identity management grows in importance, Mastercard swooped in this morning and bought identity verification company Ekata for $850 million. Mastercard certainly sees the rapid digital transformation that is happening in online commerce, a move that was accelerated by COVID. It’s a transformation that once started isn’t likely to change back to the old […]

The UK government has intervened to trigger public interest scrutiny of chipmaker’s Nvidia’s planned to buy Arm Holdings. The secretary of state for digital issues, Oliver Dowden, said today that the government wants to ensure that any national security implications of the semiconductor deal are explored. Nvidia’s $40BN acquisition of UK-based Arm was announced last […]

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hi there, new and returning readers. This is The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and packages move (today and in the future) from […]

TechCrunch just hosted its first pitch-off in Detroit and we’re pleased to announce Diet ID won the event. The company, based in Detroit and founded in 2016 by Dr. David Katz, gives users a clinically tested approach to dietary assessment and management. Diet ID competed against other Detroit-area startups including Rivet Work, Plain Sight and […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You […]

Facebook today announced a new feature that will allow users to export their Facebook posts and notes to a number of third-party services. Although the company has long since offered tools that let you download the information you’ve posted to Facebook, the tool launching today offers a more practical way of saving that data — […]

TechCrunch just hosted a small virtual meetup with Detroit startups and venture capitals. Like the one we held last month in Miami, the event was a blast and featured a talk with two local VCs on what startups work in Detroit and how to raise money from local investors. In case you missed it, the […]

Atlassian today announced that it has acquired Brisbane, Australia-based ThinkTilt, the company behind the popular Jira-centric no-code/low-code form builder ProForma. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. The acquisition is meant to help strengthen Jira Service Management, Atlassian’s version of Jira that focuses on IT service management (ITSM). Launched in November […]

When Zoom launched Zoom Apps and the Marketplace as a place to sell them last year, it was a big signal that the company wanted to be more than just a popular video conferencing application. It wanted to be a platform, which developers could use to build applications on top of Zoom. Today the company […]

A lawyer and veteran of the startup world (but don’t call him a VC), Andrew Yang rose to national prominence during his 2020 campaign for president. A hard-fought battle in a crowded field, Yang made a name for himself as an outsider candidate, heavily favoring a technocratic approach to policy that reflected his entrepreneurial background. […]

General Motors is joining the list of big automakers picking their horses in the race to develop better batteries for electric vehicles with its lead of a $139 million investment into the lithium-metal battery developer, SES. Volkswagen has QuantumScape; Ford has invested in SolidPower (along with Hyundai and BMW); and now with SES’ big backing […]

The pandemic-induced lockdowns halted many a home decoration project, but the irony was that our homes became even more important. But where to get ideas to decorate? Home decor experts could no longer visit. Now an LA-based startup is addressing this digitization of the interior design market, but kicking off with a typically LA-oriented, high-end […]

The online grocery market is poised to get a little more crowded in the next several months, with the launch of a startup led by a veteran founder who has taken big hits from Amazon in the past, but now hopes to come back swinging with the help of an army of robots. Home Delivery […]

NASA has marked a major milestone in its extraterrestrial exploration program, with the first powered flight of an aircraft on Mars. The flight occurred very early this morning, and NASA received telemetry confirming that the ‘Ingenuity’ helicopter it sent to Mars with its Perseverance rover. This is a major achievement, in no small part because […]

Buzzy ‘social audio’ app Clubhouse has raised a Series C funding round, reportedly valuing the company at $4 billion. Clubhouse said the new round of financing was led by Andrew Chen of Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from DST Global, Tiger Global and Elad Gil. This round means Clubhouse has tripled the valuation it attained in […]

As the autonomous driving race in China heats up, Didi is rushing to expand its car fleets by picking Swedish automaker Volvo, an old partner of Uber, as its ally. Didi said on Monday it will be using the XC90 SUVs of Volvo, which has been owned by Chinese auto company Geely since 2010, for […]

More than a year after the pandemic began, remote work shows no signs of going away. While it has its cons, it remains top of mind for potential employees around the world before joining a new company. But while most people in Africa still go to physical offices despite the pandemic, a few companies have […]

The buy now, pay later model, popularized by companies like Klarn and Affirm has been one of the big e-commerce winners in the last year, giving consumers who might be stretched financially another option to pay for things when they buy them online. While that has prompted the UK financial authority to re-examine how it […]

Gett, the ride-hailing startup that has been carving out a niche for itself in a crowded and competitive market for on-demand transportation by focusing on enterprise accounts and connecting people with rides in some 1,500 cities leveraging a number of third-party fleets, is adding another partner today as it continues to double down on its […]

Six-year-old Bangalore-based fintech Razorpay topped a $1 billion valuation late last year, becoming the first Y Combinator-backed Indian startup to reach the much sought after unicorn status. In less than six months since, the Indian startup has tripled its valuation and is preparing to launch in the Southeast Asian markets. Razorpay said on Monday it […]

If you accept that VMware is in play, the prospective price tag means that the number of firms that could afford such a purchase are few and far between.

Almost exactly a month ago, Peloton CEO John Foley wrote an open letter about the the company’s treadmill. “I’m reaching out to you today because I recently learned about a tragic accident involving a child and the Tread+, resulting in, unthinkably, a death,” it begins. “While we are aware of only a small handful of […]

This week Scale AI raised a $325 million Series E. The company, as TechCrunch has written, works in the data labeling space. And it has been on a fundraising tear over the last few years.

Say it louder for the people in the back: As tech grows bigger by the minute and venture capital adds dollar signs by the day, a startup hub’s success is not an either/or situation. The next Silicon Valley is a tired narrative, when in reality startups look, innovate and create differently all over the world. […]

In the second episode of our new podcast Found, our guest is Brie Code. Code is the founder and CEO of TRU LUV, a startup based out of Toronto that has its roots in the game industry, but that is taking a radically different approach to designing interactive experiences based on a historically-overlooked motivating paradigm […]

At TechCrunch’s Detroit City Spotlight this week, I sat down with Rae Witte, the journalist behind the StockX EC-1. TechCrunch’s EC-1 push allows individual authors to go deep on a particular company. And as StockX has been headquartered in Detroit since its inception, we took the chance to dig into our reporting in front of […]