Crunch Hype

Cleo Capital, a venture capital firm founded in 2018 by Sarah Kunst, is raising up to $20 million for its second fund, according to a source familiar with the matter. A recent SEC filing shows that Cleo Capital has already raised $6.7 million of that goal, bringing total assets under management to around $10 million. […]

Efforts to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse were defeated by a wide margin in the second day of vote counting. More than half of the 3,215 votes cast broke in favor of the retailer. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which would have served as the workers’ union, had the vote passed, was quick […]

Digital mortgage lender Better.com has raised a $500 million round from Japanese investment conglomerate SoftBank that values the company at $6 billion. The financing is notable for a few reasons. For one, that new $6 billion valuation, is up 50% from the $4 billion it was valued at last November when it raised $200 million […]

The 2022 Chevy Bolt EUV may look like a larger, slightly longer Chevrolet Bolt, but under that boxy exterior lies a whole lot of tech that’s both affordable and very advanced. With the launch of the Chevy Bolt EUV, and its available suite of advanced driver assistance systems, GM is putting both advanced driver assistance […]

TechCrunch is hosting a small virtual event on April 15 for startups in Detroit and we’re still looking for a few startups to pitch at the event. The deadline is today, Friday, April 9th. Apply below. Want to attend the free event? Register here. TechCrunch just published a feature on Detroit-darling StockX and this meetup […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Danny and and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s rigamarole of news. Alex took some well-deserved time off, but that meant we got to poke a little fun at him and create a Special Edition segment […]

For years now, a growing number of tech companies — large and small — have either relocated their headquarters to Austin or opened another office or campus in the Texas capital. They’ve been drawn to the city for a number of factors, including its laid-back lifestyle, no state tax, a business-friendly environment and lower cost […]

Bucky Moore, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, gives founders tactical advice on the process of raising a Series A round.

While visual ‘no code‘ tools are helping businesses get more out of computing without the need for armies of in-house techies to configure software on behalf of other staff, access to the most powerful tech tools — at the ‘deep tech’ AI coal face — still requires some expert help (and/or costly in-house expertise). This […]

French startup Vybe has raised a $2.9 million funding round (€2.4 million) to build a challenger bank for teens. The company is currently testing its product with a soft launch. Users get a Mastercard payment card paired with an e-wallet. Each Vybe account comes with its own IBAN so that users can send and receive […]

The office shut-down at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic last year spurred huge investment in digital transformation and a wave of tech companies helping with that, but there were some distinct losers in the shift, too — specifically those whose business models were predicated on serving the very offices that disappeared overnight. Today, one […]

Corporate catering company Elior has acquired French startup Nestor for an undisclosed amount. Nestor originally started with a simple idea to differentiate itself from food delivery giants, such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats and others. Every day, the startup offered a single menu for lunch. If you liked what was on the menu, you could order […]

Iyuno-SDI Group, a provider of translated subtitles and other media localization services, announced today it has raised $160 million in funding from SoftBank Vision 2. The company said this makes the fund one of its largest shareholders. Iyuno-SDI Group was formed after Iyuno Media Group completed its acquisition of SDI Media last month. In a […]

China’s tech giants have had a rough time in Western markets over the last few years. Huawei and DJI have been hit by trade restrictions, while TikTok and WeChat are threatened with their apps being banned in the U.S. Overall, Chinese companies with an overseas footprint are increasingly wary of rising geopolitical tensions. But at […]

Elon Musk’s Neuralink, one of his many companies and the only one currently focused on mind control (that we’re aware of), has released a new blog post and video detailing some of its recent updates — including using its hardware to make it possible for a monkey to play pong with only its brain. In […]

You may ask yourself, say the Talking Heads. What is this thing working from anywhere? Or as Google says, work from right here in the office. As the vaccines roll on out, some of us are just not ready for returning to normal. On this edition of the Gillmor Gang, the office is a state […]

It’s been a little over a week since union voting concluded for Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama. Things have been fairly quiet in the eye of the storm for most of it. That changed today, however, as vote counting began in earnest. Thus far, things are breaking pretty dramatically in the company’s favor, following […]

Cybercriminals have taken out a number of Facebook ads masquerading as a Clubhouse app for PC users in order to target unsuspecting victims with malware, TechCrunch has learned. TechCrunch was alerted Wednesday to Facebook ads tied to several Facebook pages impersonating Clubhouse, the drop-in audio chat app only available on iPhones. Clicking on the ad would […]

Box gets some financial ammunition against an activist investor, Samsung launches the Galaxy SmartTag+ and we look at the history of CryptoPunks. This is your Daily Crunch for April 8, 2021. The big story: KKR invests $500M into Box Private equity firm KKR is making an investment into Box that should help the cloud content […]

Are Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down for you right now? Us too! And lots and lots of other people too, it seems. We’re getting reports left and right of outages across the three Facebook properties, with no indication so far as to the cause. It’s all down so hard that Facebook’s own server status page […]

It’s been a big year for crypto, and Robinhood shared some stats today providing more evidence that the crypto boom is more than just hype — at least for now. In a blog, Christine Brown, Robinhood’s head of crypto operations, revealed that in the first quarter of 2021, 9.5 million of its customers traded crypto […]

In a circular released by Nigeria’s capital market regulator SEC today, investment platforms providing access to foreign securities might be treading on dangerous grounds. According to the SEC regulations that have just been brought to light, these platforms are trading foreign securities not registered in the country and have been warned to stop doing so. […]

The Epic v. Apple lawsuit alleging monopolistic practices by the latter will begin next month, and today the main arguments of each company were published, having been trimmed down somewhat at the court’s discretion. With the basic facts agreed upon, the two companies will go to battle over what they mean, and their CEOs will […]

Calendly CEO Tope Awotona and Blake Bartlett, partner at OpenView, talk about expanding internationally, when to bootstrap and when to fundraise, and how VCs approach a profitable company.

The coronavirus pandemic has increased our collective screen time, and that’s particularly true on mobile devices. According to a new report from mobile data and analytics firm App Annie, global consumers are now spending an average of 4.2 hours per day using apps on our smartphones, an increase of 30% from just two years prior. […]

LiquidStack does it. So does Submer. They’re both dropping servers carrying sensitive data into goop in an effort to save the planet. Now they’re joined by one of the biggest tech companies in the world in their efforts to improve the energy efficiency of data centers, because Microsoft is getting into the liquid-immersion cooling market. […]

Here at TechCrunch, we spend most of our time talking to founders. Investors probably come a close second, but it’s definitely founders at the top of the list. That comes through in our articles and our events, but even with all we do there, it only begins to scratch the surface on the many, many […]

Realworld has a big vision — founder and CEO Genevieve Ryan Bellaire told me her goal is “simplifying adulthood.” And the New York startup has raised $3.4 million in seed funding to make it happen. Apparently that’s something Ballaire struggled with herself in her early twenties. Despite being a lawyer with an MBA, she said […]

In a small industrial park located nearly halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, one company is claiming to have hit a milestone in the development of a new technology for generating power from nuclear fusion. The twenty year old fusion energy technology developer TAE Technologies said its reactors could be operating at commercial scale […]

MaC Venture Capital founder Marlon Nichols lays out his strategies for early-stage investing, and how these lessons can translate into a successful launch for entrepreneurs.

Indoor farming company AppHarvest this week announced that it has acquired Root AI. The deal is valued at around $60 million, with $10 million in cash and the reminder coming from AppHarvest stock. Root AI is a Boston-based robotics startup, with a mission fairly in line with that of its future parent company. We’ve covered […]

President Biden has announced a new set of initiatives by which he hopes to curb the gun violence he described as “an epidemic” and “an international embarrassment.” Among other things, the ATF will be closing loopholes in unregulated online sales and so-called “ghost guns,” which can be built or printed with no serial numbers or […]

General Motors is idling more plants and extending shutdowns at other facilities in North America due to a continued shortage of semiconductor chips that are used to control myriad operations in vehicles, including the infotainment, power steering and brake systems. In an update Thursday, GM indicated that eight assembly plants are affected by the temporary […]

Last month, hours before news of Beeple’s $69 million NFT sale grabbed the front pages of newspapers across the country, a pair of 24 x 24 pixel portraits of aliens wearing little hats sold separately for around $7.5 million each. The sales, which occurred within 20 hours of each other, didn’t garner the same headlines […]

Rocket Lab is preparing for its next launch, currently set to take place in May from its launch facility in New Zealand. The payload for the flight are two satellites to join BlackSky’s Earth observation constellation, but Rocket Lab has a secondary goal crucial to its aim of adding reusability to its Electron launch vehicle: […]

Generation Investment Management partner Dave Easton talks about how to build a board as a founder, and specifically how to build a board you can live with.

Before Luis von Ahn co-founded Duolingo, a gamified language-learning app used by hundreds of millions around the world, he was fixated on squiggly letters. The entrepreneur was a co-inventor of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, or those security prompts you get while browsing the web to verify if you are a human or if you are a […]

Happy Robotics Week, to those who celebrate. I know a lot of us are unable to be with our loved ones this year, which means no robotics tree, robotics baskets full of robot eggs and green robot beer. Still, the National Robotics Week organization is putting on a bunch of virtual events across 50 states […]

Samsung’s Galaxy SmartTag+, the company’s competitor to Apple’s forthcoming lost-item finder known as AirTags, has now arrived. Samsung had first announced its Tile competitor known as the Galaxy SmartTag, a Bluetooth-powered locator, during its press event in January. At the time, it teased that a ultra-wideband (UWB) powered version called the Galaxy SmartTag+ would arrive […]

Andium, a company focused on remote field monitoring of assets including oil and gas wells has just raised some not-insignificant cash in an investment round led by OGCI Climate Investments, a firm formed by the largest oil companies in the world. Launched in 2014 to “support” the targets laid out in the Paris Agreement to […]

At first glance, Quiq and Snaps might sound like similar startups — they both help businesses talk to their customers via text messaging and other messaging apps. But Snaps CEO Christian Brucculeri said “there’s almost no overlap in what we do” and that the companies are “almost complete complements.” That’s why Quiq (based in Bozeman, Montana) […]

When Box announced it was getting a $500 million investment from private equity firm KKR this morning, it was hard not to see it as a positive move for the company. It has been operating under the shadow of Starboard Value, and this influx of cash could give it a way forward independent of the […]

Fenwick & West partner Dawn Belt breaks down some of the terms that trip up first-time entrepreneurs.

Do you have what it takes to be a Startup Battlefield champion? All you need is a killer pitch, an MVP, nerves of steel and the drive and determination to take on all comers to claim the coveted Disrupt Cup. If you fit the description, apply to compete in Startup Battlefield at TC Disrupt 2021 […]

Sophie Zhou Novati worked as a senior engineer at Facebook and then Nextdoor, where she struggled to hire great engineers for her team. Frustrated, she decided to try training engineers to meet her team’s hiring standards by mentoring at a local coding bootcamp. After two and a half years of mentoring on nights and weekends, […]

Edraak, an online education nonprofit, exposed the private information of thousands of students after uploading student data to an unprotected cloud storage server, apparently by mistake. The nonprofit, founded by Jordan’s Queen Rania and headquartered in the kingdom’s capital, was set up in 2013 to promote education across the Arab region. The organization works with […]

The pandemic upended the way people shop for their everyday needs, including groceries. Online grocery sales in the U.S. are expected to reach 21.5% of the total grocery sales by 2025, after leaping from 3.4% pre-pandemic to 10.2% as of 2020. One business riding this wave is Mercato, an online grocery platform that helps smaller […]

There’s an “uber for everything” these days and now there are “Ubers for personal chefs”. Just take a look at PopTop or 100 Pleats for instance. Now in London, there is Yhangry (which brands itself as the appropriately shouty YHANGRY). This is a “private chef parties at home” website, and no doubt an app at […]

Howard Lerman, the co-founder and CEO of Yext, has a new startup called Wonder Inventions, which is officially launching its first product today — Dynascore. Let’s focus on Dynascore first. Lerman said he and his team created the product to solve the problem of the ever-growing demand for video content, which often relies on stock […]

Neal Sáles-Griffin, managing director of Techstars Chicago, hands out essential tips and tricks for when you're applying to an accelerator