Crunch Hype

Used-goods marketplaces, an online staple since the beginning of the internet as we know it, have really come into their own during the Covid-19 pandemic: they’ve been a place for people clearing out their domestic spaces to list items that they have that are still in good shape, making some money in the process; and […]

Bob W, the self-described “tech-driven” hospitality provider that offers an alternative to traditional hotels and short-stay rentals, is disclosing €10 million in seed funding. Leading the round, which included a first tranche of €4 million last year, is byFounders VC and private equity firm Finnish Industry Investment (Tesi). Other European real estate and venture capitalist […]

Charles, a Berlin-based startup that offers a “conversational-commerce” SaaS for businesses that want to sell on WhatsApp and other chat apps, has raised €6.4 million in funding. Led by Accel and HV Capital, the seed funding will be used by the company to scale and meet existing demand for its conversational commerce platform. Launched in […]

Egyptian-based VC firm Sawari Ventures has closed its $71 million fund for North Africa’s rapidly growing startup ecosystem. The firm first announced its fund in 2018, when it closed an initial $35 million (which subsequently increased to $41 million) in hopes to close at $70 million, per Menabytes. The investors in the first tranche included […]

AI models not only take time to build and train, but also to deploy in an organization’s workflow. That’s where MLOps (machine learning operations) companies come in, helping clients scale their AI technology. InfuseAI, a MLOps startup based in Taiwan, announced today it has raised a $4.3 million Series A, led by original design manufacturer […]

Glints, the Singapore-based career platform, announced today it has raised $22.5 million in Series C funding led by Japanese human resources management firm PERSOL Holdings. The new capital will be used on Glints’ expansion in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Taiwan and hiring for its product and engineering teams. Glints co-founder and chief executive officer Oswald […]

KKR has just closed $15 billion for its Asia-focused private equity fund, exceeding its original target size after receiving “strong support” from new and existing global investors, including those in the Asia Pacific region. The new close came nearly four years after KKR raised its Asian Fund III of $9.3 billion and marks the New […]

Hipmunk’s founders are building a successor to their now-defunct flight search service. The startup was acquired by SAP-owned travel and expense platform Concur in 2016, and its CEO Adam Goldstein departed in 2018. But Goldstein told me he and his co-founder Steve Huffman (also co-founder and CEO of Reddit) were still disappointed when Concur shut […]

Clubhouse, a one-year-old social audio app reportedly valued at $1 billion, will now allow users to send money to their favorite creators — or speakers — on the platform. In a blog post, the startup announced the new monetization feature, Clubhouse Payments, as the “the first of many features that allow creators to get paid […]

The Supreme Court announces several tech-related rulings, LG will shut down its smartphone business and we take a deep dive into the story of StockX. This is your Daily Crunch for April 5, 2021. The big story: The Supreme Court sides with Google in Oracle suit The U.S. Supreme Court announced a couple of tech-related […]

It was time for LG to move on. Frankly, the only surprise was that it didn’t do so sooner.

Apple CEO Tim Cook dropped a few hints in an interview released Monday about the direction of the much-anticipated Apple car, including that autonomous vehicle technology will likely be a key feature. “The autonomy itself is a core technology, in my view,” Cook told Kara Swisher in an interview on the “Sway” podcast. “If you […]

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas flaunted a dangerous ignorance regarding matters digital in an opinion published today. In attempting to explain the legal difficulties of social media platforms, particularly those arising from Twitter’s ban of Trump, he makes an ill-informed, bordering on bizarre, argument as to why such companies may need their First Amendment rights […]

Last year, Amazon fired Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa. The pair of employees had been among the company’s most outspoken critics on staff, openly taking Amazon to task for environmental and labor issues. This week, the National Labor Relations Board determined that the pair’s firing was an illegal form of retaliation. Speaking with The New […]

A grand jury has indicted a California resident accused of stealing Shopify customer data on over a hundred merchants, TechCrunch has learned. The indictment charges Tassilo Heinrich with aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit wire fraud by allegedly working with two Shopify customer support agents to steal merchant and customer data from Shopify customers […]

Consumers are increasingly adding digital assets, from cryptocurrency to NFTs, to their wealth mix. But how do you prevent them from disappearing into the digital ether when you die?

The highest court in the land has a lot to say about tech this week. The Supreme Court weighed in on Google’s long legal battle with Oracle on Monday, overturning a prior victory for the latter company that could have resulted in an $8 billion award. In a 6-2 decision, the court ruled that Google […]

Houseparty, the social video app acquired by Fortnite maker Epic Games in 2019, has just announced a major new step in terms of integrating these two properties: the company says it will now allow gamers to livestream their Fortnite gameplay directly into Houseparty. The feature works to allow users to share their gameplay with up […]

The Supreme Court has vacated a previous ruling that found former President Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking his Twitter foes. The ruling was upheld by a Manhattan federal appeals court in 2019, which deemed Trump’s actions unconstitutional. The court found that because Trump used Twitter to “conduct official business” and interact with the […]

Among other technology trends accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of contactless mobile payments boomed in 2020. According to a recent report by analyst firm eMarketer, in-store mobile payments usage grew 29% last year in the U.S., as the pandemic pushed consumers to swap out cash and credit cards for the presumably safer mobile […]

Let's learn about Alkami and its software, dig into its backers and final private valuation, pick apart its numbers, and then check out its impending IPO valuation.

Earlier this year, we covered the demise of flexible workspace operator Knotel. The once high-flying startup had just announced it had filed for bankruptcy and that its assets were being acquired by investor and commercial real estate brokerage Newmark for a reported $70 million. It was a hard fall for a company that just one […]

Thanks to a warm welcome from Miami, our first City Spotlight was a big success. We met investors and entrepreneurs who are working on amazing things, and we were proud to share their personal stories on why Miami is the right city for them to live in and do business. Join us on our next […]

StockX is a unique company at the nexus of two radical transitions that isn’t just redefining markets, but our culture as well.

StockX may be a multibillion dollar juggernaut with massive influence radiating throughout sneaker culture today, but it started with taking the leap to transforming a personal passion into a business plan.

In this part of the EC-1, we’ll explore how authentication got started at StockX and how it has grown, as well as what it takes to compete with the fakes — and the fallout when the company gets a decision wrong.

E-commerce startups and tech companies have sprouted up to target this connected cultural consumer, and StockX has had to run quickly to maintain its product and marketplace lead.

While StockX’s idea of access does circumvent gatekeeping and the backdoor deals of the past to an extent, it has come at the cost of having access taken from vibrant regions, brick-and-mortar stores and small businesses to those with more capital.

Cora, a São Paulo-based technology-enabled lender to small-and-medium-sized businesses, has raised $26.7 million in a Series A round led by Silicon Valley VC firm Ribbit Capital. Kaszek Ventures, QED Investors and Greenoaks Capital also participated in the financing, which brings the startup’s total raised to $36.7 million since its 2019 inception. Kaszek led Cora’s $10 […]

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 […]

Spotify is opening up its personalized playlist, “On Repeat,” to advertising sponsorship. This playlist, launched in 2019 and featuring users’ favorite songs, is only the second personalized playlist on the music streaming service that’s being made available for sponsorship. Spotify’s flagship playlist, “Discover Weekly,” became the first in 2019. The sponsorship is made possible through […]

Brian Brooks grew up on credit. And for him, that’s a good thing. Brooks is from a small town in Colorado that took a big hit when the steel factory — the main driver of its economy — shut down. A couple of years later, when Brooks was 14, his father passed away, and it […]

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 […]

Over the course of their careers, Alex Bovee and Paul Querna realized that while the use of SaaS apps and cloud infrastructure was exploding, the process to give employees permission to use them was not keeping up. The pair led Zero Trust strategies and products at Okta, and could see the problem firsthand. For the […]

Swiggy has raised about $800 million in a new financing round, the Indian food delivery startup told employees on Monday, as it looks to expand its business in the country quarters after the startup cut its workforce to navigate the pandemic. In an email to employees, first reported by Times of India journalist Digbijay Mishra, […]

In many ways, China is the ideal testbed for alternative protein. The country has a long history of imitation meat rooted in Buddhist vegetarianism and a growing, health-conscious middle class.

FinanZero, a Brazilian online credit marketplace, announced today that it has closed a $7 million round of funding — its fourth since it launched in 2016. It has raised a total of $22.85 million to date. The real-time online loan broker allows people to apply for a personal loan, a car equity loan or a […]

Why did Byju’s raise over $1 billion last year and is already inching closer to securing another half a billion dollars? We are getting some answers today. Byju’s said on Monday it has acquired Aakash Educational Services, a 33-year-old chain of physical coaching centres, as the Indian online learning giant looks to further consolidate its […]

Meesho said on Monday it has raised $300 million in a new financing round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 as the Indian social commerce startup works to become the “single ecosystem that will enable all small businesses to succeed online.” The new round — a Series E — gives the five-year-old startup a valuation […]

LG said on Monday it will close its loss-making mobile phone business worldwide as the once pioneer brand looks to focus its resources in “growth areas” such as electric vehicle components, connected devices, smart homes, robotics, AI and B2B solutions, and platforms and services. The South Korean firm said in a statement that its board […]

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Happy Saturday, everyone. I do hope that you are in good spirits and in good […]

Amazon kicked off the holiday weekend by backtracking slightly on a social media offensive that unfolded in the waning days of a historic unionization vote. The earlier comments reportedly arrived as Jeff Bezos was pushing for a more aggressive strategy. Along with taking on Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the Amazon News Twitter account […]

At the end of 2020, I argued that edtech needs to think bigger in order to stay relevant after the pandemic. I urged founders to think less about how to bundle and unbundle lecture experience, and more about how to replace outdated systems and methods with new, tech-powered solutions. In other words, don’t simply put […]

Amber Group claimed it faced "cyberattacks, hacking and mischievous players." In reality, the app was just not that secure.

NASA’s SBIR program regularly doles out cash to promising small businesses and research programs, and the lists of awardees is always interesting to sift through. Here are a dozen companies and proposals from this batch that are especially compelling or suggest new directions for missions and industry in space. Sadly these brief descriptions are often […]

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android […]

Apple adds classic titles to Apple Arcade, Microsoft experiences an outage and Coinbase is going public. This is your Daily Crunch for April 2, 2021. The big story: Apple Arcade expands with classic games Until now, Apple’s game subscription service was limited to exclusive new titles, but today it’s introducing two new categories: App Store […]

This week included a deep dive on Tonal, a look at Substack's valuation and how-tos on startup hiring and responding to security breaches.

Woody Sears has long been interested in storytelling. Following the debut in 2007 of the first iPhone, he founded a storytelling app called Zuuka that built up a library of narrated and illustrated kids’ books for the iPhone and iPad. Sears later sold that company to a small New York-based outfit. But Sears, who is […]

Underrepresented founders are the most undervalued asset class in the U.S. today, and investors are starting to realize that diversity is not charity -- it’s economic opportunity.