Crunch Hype

Thanks to major players like Amazon and Walmart, we’ve become accustomed to next- or same-day delivery. But the pandemic has also renewed our interest in buying from smaller businesses and retailers. Swyft, a company that has just raised $17.5 million in Series A, helps retailers of any size provide affordable same-day delivery. The round was […]

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, the Equity team sat down not with external investors or founders, but with two of our own. Yes, this week, for the first time Natasha and Alex got to break a little internal […]

The longer we continue to work with either all or part of our teams in remote, out-of-physical-office environments, the more imperative it becomes for those teams to have some tools in place to keep the channels of communication and management open, and for the individuals in those teams to have a sense of how well […]

Polestar, the Swedish electric vehicle brand spun out of Volvo Car Group, set on Wednesday a “moonshot goal” of creating the first climate neutral car by 2030. But instead of getting there through more widely-practiced offsetting measures, such as planting trees, the company said it’s going to fundamentally change the way the new EV is […]

TechCrunch is coming to Detroit — virtually, at least. On April 15, TechCrunch is hosting a small online event with local venture capitalists, founders and those curious about the growing ecosystem. There will also be a small pitch-off event where Detroit-based startups have three minutes to pitch their companies to Detroit-based VCs. TechCrunch just published […]

Apple is sharing more details today about its upcoming App Tracking Transparency feature, which will allow users to control, on an app-by-app level, whether their data is shared for ad-targeting purposes. In a sense, anyone using the current version of iOS can see App Tracking Transparency in action, since iOS already includes a Tracking menu […]

Popular saving and investing app Acorns has acquired Pillar, an AI-powered startup built to help manage student loan debt, in its second acquisition of 2021. New York-based Pillar helps consumers optimize their debt payments by focusing first on student loans. It launched in May 2019 with $5.5 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins. […]

COVID-19 forced many retailers and brands to adopt new technologies. Retail analytics unicorn Trax expects that this openness to tech innovation will continue even after the pandemic. The Singapore-based company announced today that it has raised $640 million in Series E funding to expand its products, which combine computer vision and cloud-based software to help […]

A new UK public body that will be tasked with helping regulate the most powerful companies in the digital sector to ensure competition thrives online and consumers of digital services have more choice and control over their data has launched today. The Digital Markets Unit (DMU), which was announced in November last year — following […]

Alexandr Wang has spent the last five years looking to accelerate the development of AI and machine learning algorithms with Scale AI. The company has raised upward of $270 million since inception and doesn’t show any signs of slowing. That’s why we’re thrilled to hang out with Wang and Scale AI investor Dan Levine (Accel) […]

Avant, an online lender that has raised over $600 million in equity, announced today that it has acquired Zero Financial and its neobank brand, Level, to further its mission of becoming a digital bank for the masses. Founded in 2012, Chicago-based Avant started out primarily as an online lender targeting “underserved consumers,” but is evolving […]

More than 200 million people in India transact money digitally, but fewer than 30 million invest in mutual funds and stocks. An Indian startup that is attempting to change this figure by courting millennials announced a new financing round on Wednesday and turned into the newest unicorn in the world’s second largest internet market. Bangalore-based […]

Plaid, a unicorn that helps connect consumers’ bank accounts to financial applications, has raised a $425 million Series D, it announced this morning. TechCrunch understands that the new capital infusion, led by Altimeter Capital, values the company at around $13.4 billion. It is not surprising that Plaid, a former takeover target for consumer credit giant […]

Artificial intelligence has become a fundamental cornerstone of how a lot of business software works, providing a useful boost in reading, understanding, and using the often-fragmented trove of data that organizations generate these days. In the latest development, an Israeli startup called Blue dot, which uses AI to help companies handle their tax accounting, is […]

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals. Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words. This is your chance to put Zagreb on the Techcrunch Map! If you […]

No-code startups continue to see a lot of traction among enterprises, where employees — strictly speaking, non-technical, but still using software every day — are getting hands-on and building apps to take on some of the more repetitive aspects of their jobs, the so-called “citizen coders” of the working world. And in one of the […]

China is pushing forward an internet society where economic and public activities increasingly take place online. In the process, troves of citizen and government data get transferred to cloud servers, raising concerns over information security. One startup called ThreatBook sees an opportunity in this revolution and pledges to protect corporations and bureaucracies against malicious cyberattacks. […]

Patreon has tripled its valuation to $4 billion in a $155 million funding round led by Tiger Global, the company confirmed to the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. The creator economy platform, which allows artists to be directly funded by their fans, received new attention amid the Covid-19 pandemic as creators were forced to push […]

European regulators have questions about a Facebook data breach, Clubhouse adds payments and a robotics company has SPAC plans. This is your Daily Crunch for April 6, 2021. The big story: Facebook faces questions over data breach A data breach involving personal data (such as email addresses and phone numbers) of more than 500 million […]

Encrypted chat app Signal is adding payments to the services it provides, a long-expected move and one the company is taking its time on. A U.K.-only beta program will allow users to trade the cryptocurrency MobileCoin quickly, easily, and most importantly, privately. If you’re in the U.K., or have some way to appear to be, […]

A group of Democratic lawmakers wrote to Mark Zuckerberg this week to press the CEO on his plans to curate a version of Instagram for children. In a hearing last month, Zuckerberg confirmed reporting by BuzzFeed that the company was exploring an age-gated version of its app designed for young users. Senators Ed Markey (D-MA), […]

In the first quarter of 2021, American consumer cryptocurrency trading giant Coinbase grew sharply, generating strong profits at the same time. For Coinbase, the disclosure of its preliminary Q1 2021 results comes a week ahead of its direct listing, an event that will see the company begin to trade publicly. As it is both cash […]

Bay Area-based Rapid Robotics today announced a $12 million Series A. The new round, led by NEA, brings the company’s total funding up to $17.5 million. It joins a recently closed seed round, announced way back in November of last year. Existing investors Greycroft, Bee Partners and 468 Capital also took part in the round. […]

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals. Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words. This is your chance to put Belfast on the Techcrunch Map! If you […]

Apple has launched a new app, Find My Certification Asst., designed for use by MFi (Made for iPhone) Licensees, who need to test their accessories’ interoperability with Apple’s Find My network. The network helps users find lost Apple devices — like iPhones, AirPods and Mac computers, among other things — but is poised to add […]

Instead of sending batteries straight to recycling — and leaving unrealized value on the table — startups and automakers are finding ways to reuse batteries in a small and growing market.

Today, in a twist, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has announced a proposal for a $10 million allocation in the state budget to create a seed fund for Black and Latinx startups, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The Black and Latinx Seed Fund will be administered by the New Economic Development Authority (NJEDA). NJEDA CEO Tim […]

The competition for note-taking is as fierce as it has ever been with plenty of highly-valued productivity startups fighting for an audience it can potentially serve endless productivity offshoots. In the past year, Notion raised at a $2 billion valuation, Coda raised at $636 million, and Roam raised at $200 million. A new competitor in […]

Wisk Aero, the air mobility company borne out of a joint venture between Kitty Hawk and Boeing, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Archer Aviation alleging patent infringement and trade secret misappropriation. Wisk claims in the lawsuit that Archer perpetrated a “brazen theft” of confidential information and intellectual property. The lawsuit points to the design of […]

GM is adding an electric Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck to its lineup, as the automaker pushes to deliver more than 1 million electric vehicles globally by 2025. GM President Mark Reuss said Tuesday that the Chevrolet Silverado electric full-size pickup will be based on the automaker’s Ultium battery platform and will have an estimated range of […]

Esri, the geographic information system (GIS), mapping and spatial analytics company, is hosting its (virtual) developer summit today. Unsurprisingly, it is making a couple of major announcements at the event that range from a new design system and improved JavaScript APIs to support for running ArcGIS Enterprise in containers on Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project was […]

Twitter is abuzz with the news that Topps, a company perhaps best known for making collectible trading cards, is going public via a SPAC. The reverse merger with its chosen blank-check company values the combination on an equity basis at $1.163 billion. That makes Topps some sort of unicorn. And because it has both e-commerce […]

Facebook confirms it’s testing a new QR code feature and payment links for use with Facebook Pay to make it easier for people in the U.S. to send or request money from one another. The QR code feature, similar to Venmo’s QR codes and others, will allow a user to scan a friend’s code with […]

While it’s true the VC world has gone SPAC-happy, the reverse merger method hasn’t been a huge driver in robotics thus far, with some notable exceptions like Berkshire-Grey. This morning, however, Utah-based Sarcos Robotics announced plans to board the SPAC train, courtesy of Rotor Acquisition Corp. The deal could potentially value the robotic exoskeleton maker […]

Facebook’s lead data protection regulator in the European Union is seeking answers from the tech giant over a major data breach reported on over the weekend. The breach was reported on by Business Insider on Saturday which said personal data (including email addresses and mobile phone numbers) of more than 500M Facebook accounts had been […]

The last year has put a spotlight on mental health, and startup Real is looking to shake up the space with a product that makes group therapy available on-demand. Founded by CEO Ariela Safira, Real is inspired by a long-standing methodology in the world of mental health: Group therapy. AA, for instance, has been around […]

TikTok this morning announced the launch of a new feature designed to make its app accessible to people who are hard of hearing or deaf. The company is today debuting auto captions — a feature that, when enabled, will automatically transcribe the speech from a video so viewers can read what’s being said in the […]

A partnership between the University of North Carolina’s Kenan Flagler Entrepreneurship Center, the Opportunity Hub, and 100 Black Angels and Allies Fund, set up to improve representation and support of diverse founders in the tech industry, is getting more heavy-hitting partners from Duke and Stanford. As part of the partnership, faculty affiliated with Stanford and […]

Sonos has a new speaker that starts shipping later this month, and it’s a significant departure from the company’s usual offerings in a number of ways. The all-new Sonos Roam is a compact, portable speaker with a built-in battery and Bluetooth connectivity — but still very much a Sonos system team player, with wifi streaming, […]

Machine learning (ML) models are only as good as the data you feed them. That’s true during training, but also once a model is put in production. In the real world, the data itself can change as new events occur and even small changes to how databases and APIs report and store data could have […]

At its Octane21 conference, Okta, the popular authentication and identity platform, today announced a new — and free — developer edition that features fewer limitations and support for significantly more monthly active users than its current free plan. The new ‘Okta Starter Developer Edition,’ as it’s called, allows developers to scale up to 15,000 monthly […]

Digital transformation is the name of the game these days, and companies that are enabling businesses to take a leap into the future, by helping them tackle their most complex operations, are reaping the rewards. In the latest development, OneStream, a startup that provides a toolkit of services to enterprises to help them run financial […]

The European Union may investigate Facebook’s $1BN acquisition of customer service platform Kustomer after concerns were referred to it under EU merger rules. A spokeswoman for the Commission confirmed it received a request to refer the proposed acquisition from Austria under Article 22 of the EU’s Merger Regulation — a mechanism which allows Member States […]

Google Cloud today announced that it is joining the FinOps Foundation as a Premier Member. The FinOps Foundation is a relatively new open-source foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation, that launched last year. It aims to bring together companies in the ‘cloud financial management’ space to establish best practices and standards. As the term implies, […]

Messaging is the medium these days, and today a startup that has built an API to help others build text and video interactivity into their services is announcing a big round to continue scaling its business. Sendbird, a popular provider of chat, video and other interactive services to the likes of Reddit, Hinge, Paytm, Delivery […]

The energy giant Shell has joined a slew of strategic investors including All Nippon Airways, Suncor Energy, Mitsui, and British Airways in funding LanzaJet, the company commercializing a process to convert alcohol into jet fuel. A spin-off from LanzaTech, one of the last surviving climate tech startups from the first cleantech boom that’s still privately […]

Death, despite being one of the most inevitable of life’s events, can also be one of the most complicated and problematic. Fraught with emotional and religious complexities, for many families it can also come with financial and organizational ones. Today, a startup called Empathy is coming out of stealth with the aim of taking some […]

Historically, podcasts have been aimed at consumers. The value to be gained in the B2B world is something that has been largely untapped. For Lindsay Tjepkema — who has been entrenched in the world of B2B marketing for more than 15 years — the opportunity was massive. So in 2019, she founded Casted, an audio […]

The venture capital scene in the North African tech ecosystem will be absolutely buzzing right now with the announcement of two large VC funds in the space of two days. Today, Algebra Ventures, an Egyptian VC firm, announced that it has launched its $90 million second fund. Four years ago, Algebra Ventures closed its first […]

Two-year-old CRED has become the youngest Indian startup to be valued at $2 billion or higher. Bangalore-based CRED said on Tuesday it has raised $215 million in a new funding round — a Series D — that valued the Indian startup at $2.2 billion (post-money), up from about $800 million valuation in the $81 million […]