Crunch Hype

While the money flowing into Silicon Valley is reaching historic heights, the competition for getting customer attention and growing businesses is still a major challenge. At TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing & Fundraising, we’re diving into the topic of growth and scaling and bringing in experts across the startup landscape to share what they’ve learned in […]

Casa Blanca, which aims to develop a “Bumble-like app” for finding a home, has raised $2.6 million in seed funding. Co-founder and CEO Hannah Bomze got her real estate license at the age of 18 and worked at Compass and Douglas Elliman Real Estate before launching Casa Blanca last year. She launched the app last […]

Chili Piper, which has a sophisticated SaaS appointment scheduling platform for sales teams, has raised a $33 million B round led by Tiger Global. Existing investors Base10 Partners and Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused VC) also participated. This brings the company’s total financing to $54 million. The company will use the capital raised to accelerate product […]

E-commerce is booming, but among the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs of online businesses are finding a place to store the items they are selling and dealing with the logistics of operating. Tyler Scriven, Maxwell Bonnie and Paul D’Arrigo co-founded Saltbox in an effort to solve that problem. The trio came up with a unique “co-warehousing” […]

Platforms exist to help startups get to users and customers faster and should be used as means to an end, but everyone must get their piece.

While the seemingly unending debate around Substack has focused on well-known writers with a national profile, the newsletter platform just announced that it will be supporting local (presumably non-famous) journalists through a new program. The startup described Substack Local as a $1 million initiative that will fund independent writers creating local news publications. Similar to […]

Facebook announced this morning it will begin testing a new experience for discovering businesses in its News Feed in the U.S. When live, users to tap on topics they’re interested in underneath posts and ads in their News Feed in order to explore related content from businesses. The change comes at a time when Facebook […]

When I’ve written about Stationhead in the past, I’ve focused on how the startup aims to bring the personality and interactivity of a live radio broadcast to streaming music. But CEO Ryan Star said his ambitions are broader now: “We’re going to be the largest social audio platform in the world.” The startup says it’s growing […]

Meet Feels, a new French startup that wants to change how dating apps work. According to the company, scrolling through photos and reading descriptions tend to be a boring experience. Feels want to improve profiles so that navigating the app feels more like watching TikTok videos or browsing stories. “For the past 10 years, there’s […]

Graphic designer Paul Rand once famously said that the public was more familiar with bad design than good design. While he was referring to most of the design in the world being “bad”, these days that phrase might take on a second meaning: people typically only notice and talk about (and usually complain about) design […]

Olist, a Brazilian e-commerce marketplace integrator, has raised $23 million in a Series D round extension led by new investor Goldman Sachs Asset Management that brings its total Series D financing to $80 million. Existing backer Redpoint Ventures, which first put money in Olist in 2015, also participated in the latest round. With this latest […]

If you or a loved one has ever undergone a tumor removal as part of cancer treatment, you’re likely familiar with the period of uncertainty and fear that follows. Will the cancer return, and if so, will the doctors catch it at an early enough stage? C2i Genomics has developed software that’s 100x more sensitive […]

Some weeks are slim pickings when it comes to pulling together interesting robotics stories. This is, decidedly, not one of those weeks. In fact, it’s been a bit tough keeping up with the deluge of robotics activity over the past seven days. I’m going to take that very small sample size as purely anecdotal evidence […]

Four years ago, MasterClass, a platform that sells celebrity-taught classes, invited chess legend Garry Kasparov to teach a class. He said yes, but soon realized that creating a message that could satisfy a majority of players was a “struggle throughout the process.” While the class did pretty well, Kasparov found it “a little bit annoying” […]

Polestar, Volvo Car Group’s standalone electric performance brand, has raised $550 million in its first external round led by Chongqing Chengxing Equity Investment Fund Partnership, Zibo Financial Holding and Zibo Hightech Industrial Investment. SK Inc., the South Korean global conglomerate, and a range of other investors also participated. While this is Polestar’s first external round, the […]

Dan Gilbert loves his hometown of Detroit. He loves it so much that the billionaire founder of what would eventually become the mortgage lender Quicken Loans has poured at least $2.5 billion into rehabilitating buildings in the heart of the city. He has also invested in many companies that are now tenants in those buildings, […]

Saikat Dey, the founder of Detroit’s own Guardhat Technologies, got his start working in the steel industry. His last job, before founding Guardhat, was serving as the chief executive officer of Severstal International, the multinational steel conglomerate whose headquarters were in Dearborn, Mich. There, managing the global business of the fourth largest steelmaker by volume […]

A number of startups have promised to bring a drive-and-fly vehicle to market over the past few years, but none have yet managed to follow through. NFT Inc. is betting it will succeed where its rivals have failed, with preorders opening Thursday for ASKA, company’s first electric flying car. The SUV-sized ASKA ( which means […]

As companies create machine learning models, the operations team needs to ensure the data used for the model is of sufficient quality, a process that can be time consuming. BigEye (formerly Toro), an early stage startup is helping by automating data quality. Today the company announced a $17 million Series A led Sequoia Capital with […]

Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company aiming to deploy robotaxis in San Francisco and Dubai, has added Walmart as an investor in an extended fundraising round that has grown to $2.75 billion. The company said it has a post-money valuation of more than $30 billion. Walmart and several unnamed institutional investors added capital to a $2 […]

Autodesk, the publicly-traded software company best known for its CAD and 3D modeling tools, today announced that it has acquired Upchain, a Toronto-based startup that offers a cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) service. The two companies, which didn’t disclose the acquisition price, expect the transaction to close by July 31, 2021. Since its launch in […]

The carbon accounting and management platform Persefoni now has $9.7 million more in funding to support its international expansion, product development, and recruitment efforts. The round, led by Rice Investment Group with participation from NGP ETP, the electricity, renewable and sustainability-focused investment arm of the oil and gas and power focused investment fund NGP, comes […]

DJI just updated one of its most popular drones, and I’m pleased to report the new features improve an already good product. The new $999 Air 2S packs an impressive image sensor, range, and object tracking/sensing technology that makes it an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a portable prosumer drone. I’ve been testing the […]

Word nerds with a love for linguistic curiosities and novel nomenclature that’s more fulsome than their ability to make interesting new terms stick will be thrilled by Yak Tack: A neat little aide–mémoire (in Android and iOS app form) designed for expanding (English) vocabulary, either as a native speaker or language learner. Yak Tack uses […]

Amazon on Thursday announced a $250 million venture fund to invest in Indian startups and entrepreneurs focusing on digitization of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the key overseas market. The announcement comes at a time when the American e-commerce group, which has previously invested over $6.5 billion in its India business, faces heat from […]

Automation has become a big theme in enterprise IT, with organizations using RPA, no-code and low-code tools, and other technology to speed up work and bring more insights and analytics into how they do things every day, and today IBM is announcing an acquisition as it hopes to take on a bigger role in providing […]

We all know the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital adoption in a number of areas, particularly in the financial services space. Within financial services, there are few spaces hotter than B2B payments. With a $120 trillion market size, it’s no surprise that an increasing number of fintechs focused on digitizing payments have been attracting investor […]

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 is in advanced stages of talks to invest up to half a billion dollars into food delivery startup Swiggy, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The new investment values the Indian startup at about $5.5 billion, the sources said. The new investment would add to the $800 million fundraise Swiggy […]

As computing systems become increasingly bigger and more complex, forensics have become an increasingly important part of how organizations can better secure them. As the recent Solar Winds breach has shown, it’s not always just a matter of being able to identify data loss, or prevent hackers from coming in in the first place. In […]

Flipkart said on Thursday it has agreed to acquire online travel and hotel ticketing firm Cleartrip as the Walmart-owned e-commerce firm looks to expand its offerings in the world’s second largest internet market. The deal values 14-year-old Cleartrip, which raised about $74 million prior to the acquisition, at about $40 million, a person familiar with […]

E-wallets are rapidly gaining popularity in the Philippines, overtaking credit cards, which have a penetration rate of under 10%. Fintech startup Plentina is leveraging that trend with buy now, pay later (BNPL) installment loans that can be used and repaid through e-wallets. The company announced today it has closed a $2.2 million seed round, co-led […]

JustKitchen, a cloud kitchen startup, will start trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) Venture Exchange on Thursday morning. It is doing a direct listing of its common shares, having already raised $8 million at a $30 million valuation. The company says this makes it one of the first—if not the first—cloud kitchen company to […]

A startup out of Berlin that’s built and grown a successful online language learning platform based around live teachers and virtual classrooms is announcing some funding today to continue expanding its business. Lingoda, which connects students who want to learn a language — currently English, Spanish, French or German — with native-speaking teachers who run […]

Fintech startup N26 is launching N26 Insurance as it plans to offer insurance products that you can access from the company’s mobile app and website. The first insurance product is a smartphone insurance plan for German customers. But the startup doesn’t plan to stop there. N26 says it is also working on private liability insurance, […]

There’s no shortage of data-driven sales management tools in the market. Naturally, Atrium, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based company cofounded by serial entrepreneur Pete Kazanjy, says it does a far better job of empowering sales managers to improve their team’s performance. How? By giving them easy, digestible, real-time insights into who on their team is outperforming, […]

Coinbase makes an impressive public debut, Dell spins out VMware and Ford announces a new hands-free driving system. This is your Daily Crunch for April 14, 2021. The big story: Coinbase goes public Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase went public today via direct listing at an opening price of $381 per share, climbing to nearly $430 before […]

Pico, a New York startup that helps online creators and media companies make money and manage their customer data, announced today that it has launched an upgraded platform and raised $6.5 million in new funding. In a statement, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Nick Chen said Pico helps creators with their two biggest problems — […]

With clarity of vision, privacy can improve business outcomes. Prioritizing consumer trust and transparency is the right thing to do, and it can help the bottom line too.

Dell announced this afternoon that it’s spinning out VMware, a move that has been suspected for some time. Dell acquired VMware as part of the massive $58 billion EMC acquisition (announced as $67 billion) in 2015. The way that the deal works is that Dell plans to offer VMware shareholders a special dividend of between […]

A security lapse at online grocery delivery startup Mercato exposed tens of thousands of customer orders, TechCrunch has learned. A person with knowledge of the incident told TechCrunch that the incident happened in January after one of the company’s cloud storage buckets, hosted on Amazon’s cloud, was left open and unprotected. The company fixed the […]

"We would go all in on a product and we'd build it and put blood, sweat and tears into it, and then I would kill it, and we'd move on to the next thing."

Ford will debut its new hands-free driving feature on the 2021 F-150 pickup truck and certain 2021 Mustang Mach-E models through a software update later this year, technology that the automaker developed to rival similar systems from Tesla and GM. That hands-free capability — which uses cameras, radar sensors and software to provide a combination […]

TikTok is taking another step towards directly funding publishers’ content with today’s announcement that it’s financially backing the production of media publisher NowThis’ new series, “VIRAL,” which will feature interviews with public health experts and a live Q&A session focused on answering questions about the pandemic. The partnership represents TikTok’s first-ever funding of an episodic […]

Startup Battlefield — the matriarch of all pitch competitions — is the stuff of tech legend. Heck, it even played a role in the HBO show, “Silicon Valley,” and its influence touches early-stage startups around the globe. Under no circumstance will you find a bigger, better platform for launching your startup to the world. Battlefield […]

After inking a deal to work together almost three years ago, U.S. supermarket chain Kroger and U.K. online grocer Ocado today took the wraps off the first major product of that deal. Kroger has launched a new Ocado-powered customer fulfillment center in Monroe, Ohio, outside of Cincinnati, a gigantic warehouse covering 375,000 square feet and […]

Making deepfake videos used to be hard. Now all you need is a smartphone. Avatarify, a startup that allows people to make deepfake videos directly on their phone rather than in the cloud, is soaring up the app charts after being used by celebrities such as Victoria Beckham. However, the problem with many deepfake videos […]

There’s no doubt this past year has been a major watershed moment for the robotics industry. Warehouse and logistics have been a particular target for an automation push, as companies have worked to keep the lights on amidst stay at home orders and other labor shortages. MIT spinoff Pickle is one of the latest startups […]

Von Tobel outlines steps to stay out of debt, build credit and accumulate wealth to ensure financial peace of mind as you take on the most stressful venture of your life: Starting a company.

Google today announced that it is moving FeedBurner to a new infrastructure but also deprecating its email subscription service. If you’re an internet user of a certain age, chances are you used Google’s FeedBurner to manage the RSS feeds of your personal blogs and early podcasts at some point. During the Web 2.0 era, it […]

Today shares of Coinbase began to trade after the company executed a direct listing. From a reference price of $250, Coinbase shares opened at $381 today, a change of around 52%. At its open Coinbase was valued at $99.6 billion on a fully diluted basis. As of the time of writing Coinbase has appreciated further […]