Crunch Hype

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.

One of us is a career attacker and the other is a CISO. Here's how we'd respond to an Exchange breach.

Whether pure-play RPA will survive as a category remains to be seen, but it will likely be around for a long time under the intelligent process automation umbrella.

Cross-border payments startup dLocal has raised $150 million at a $5 billion valuation, less than seven months after securing $200 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. This means that the five-year-old Uruguayan company has effectively quadrupled its valuation in a matter of months. Alkeon Capital led the latest round, which also included participation from BOND, […]

Choosing which option is best from a buffet's worth of possibilities is an interesting task for startup CEOs and their boards.

Apple has announced an expansion for its subscription gaming service Apple Arcade. In addition to exclusive game releases, the company is adding two new categories — Timeless Classics and App Store Greats. In the “App Store Greats” category, you can find some well-known iPhone games that have been released over the past decade, such as […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. It was a busy week on the IPO front, Danny was buried in getting the Tonal EC-1 out, and Natasha took some time off. But the […]

Mike Barile spent two years and racked up nearly $20,000 in credit card debt to bring his first startup, Backflip, to life. The former management consultant had spent years toiling in the startup grind, first at Uber, then, after taking a coding academy bootcamp through AppAcademy (where Barile met his co-founder, Adam Foosaner), at Google […]

Ten global startups, three rounds of pitching, nine expert judges. It’s not the 12 Days of Startups (no robotic partridge in a pear tree here), it’s the TC Early Stage Pitch-Off — otherwise known as day two of TC Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising. Yesterday on day one, TC Early Stage was all about […]

LatAm entrepreneurs look to Asian tech giants for inspiration because of similar market conditions. But don't treat LatAm countries as a monolith.

Edtech unicorns have boatloads of cash to spend following the capital boost to the sector in 2020. As a result, edtech M&A activity has continued to swell.

Tiger Global closes a $6.65 billion fund, Facebook gives users more tools to encourage COVID vaccination and iPhone app spending continues to grow. This is your Daily Crunch for April 1, 2021. The big story: Tiger Global raises one of the biggest venture funds ever Investment giant Tiger Global had already announced that it was […]

Microsoft stumbled back online Thursday after an hours-long outage in the middle of the U.S. west coast working afternoon. Besides its homepage, Microsoft’s Xbox and Office services went down, log-in pages didn’t load, and the company’s status pages were also knocked offline by the outage. Worse, Microsoft’s cloud service Azure also fell offline, causing outages […]

Today Coinbase, an American cryptocurrency trading platform and software company, said that it will begin to trade via a direct listing on April 14th. In a separate release the company also said that it will provide a financial update on April 6th, after the close of trading. Coinbase’s impending public debut comes at an interesting […]

While several tech companies are opting to delay their IPOs in the face of less-than-enthusiastic market demand for their shares, real estate tech company Compass forged ahead and went public today. After pricing its shares at $18 apiece last night, the low end of a lowered IPO price range, Compass shares closed the day up just […]

Being excessively cautious can prevent organizations from realizing the benefits of data-driven collaboration. Play offense, not defense.

I use Feedly to work my way through each day’s stream of politics, tech and media stories. Today, I am greeted with a picture of something called Feedly Cloud and the following message: Scheduled Maintenance Feedly will be back in less than 30 minutes. Sixty minutes later, it still says that. Feedly is built on […]

If you watch funding announcements as we do, you may have noticed something this year. There are a lot of mega-rounds coming together, and Tiger Global is involved in a notable number of them, often as the round’s co-lead. Just this week alone, half a dozen companies have announced rounds that the New York-based investing […]

The first season of “The Mandalorian” last year wasn’t just a great show, it was the result of an entirely new paradigm in film and TV production. Stagecraft, the enormous LED-wall volume ILM used to shoot that season has since been expanded and updated to be better, faster and easier to use. In a behind-the-scenes […]

Cyber strategy and company strategy are inextricably linked. Consequently, chief information security officers (CISOs) in the C-Suite will be just as common and influential as CFOs in maximizing shareholder value.

As hot as the blockchain space appears to be these days, it’s still far from simple to get a decentralized application reliably up and running. The NFT boom and rising cryptocurrency prices have brought more attention to applications running on the blockchain, but the dominant cloud service platforms aren’t quite ready to make a full-commit […]

U.S. consumers spent an average of $138 on iPhone apps last year, an increase of 38% year over year, largely driven by the pandemic impacts, according to new data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Throughout 2020, consumers turned to iPhone apps for work, school, entertainment, shopping and more, driving per-user spending to a […]

There’s a persistent fallacy swirling around that any startup growing pain or scaling problem can be solved with business development. That’s frankly not true.

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 your city on the Techcrunch Map! This […]

Meet Soda, a data monitoring platform that is going to help you discover issues with your data processing setup. This way, you can react as quickly as possible and make sure that you keep the full data picture. If you’re building a digital-first company, you and your customers are likely generating a ton of data. […]

Are you ready to do whatever it takes to move the needle and drive your startup forward? Then you’re ready for TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. The leading tech conference focused on founders takes place September 21-23. There’s nothing like the thrill that comes from discovering early-stage startups and Disrupt is the world’s top launch platform. The […]

For obvious reasons, food delivery was among the categories that soared during a year of Covid-19 related lockdowns. The question remains how these changes will impact both grocery and restaurant delivery long-term, but at the very least, it seems certain that the categories have hit an inflection point. This could also be the moment that […]

The Exchange doubts many folks expected the IPO climate to get so chilly without warning. But we could be in for a quarter's pause.

Holler, described by founder and CEO Travis Montaque as “a conversational media company,” just announced that it’s raised $36 million in Series B funding. You may not know what conversational media is, but there’s a decent chance you’ve used Holler’s technology. For example, if you’ve added a sticker or a GIF to your Venmo payments, […]

Potential threats to the free flow of GIFs continue to trouble the UK’s competition watchdog. Facebook’s $400M purchase of Giphy, announced last year, is now facing an in-depth probe by the CMA after the regulator found the acquisition raises competition concerns related to digital advertising. It now has until September 15 to investigate and report. […]

Who’s ready for bootcamp? Today’s the day new founders get down to the business of, well, building a better business. TechCrunch Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising provides early-stage founders with access to top founders, investors and subject-matter experts across the startup realm. The goal? Learn and develop the skills essential for startup success, avoid […]

As Covid-19 vaccines are becoming more readily available to larger groups of the U.S. population, Facebook has teamed up with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to launch new Facebook profile frames that allow users to share their support for getting vaccinated with their […]

Every tech vendor has to pass security muster with customers, typically a tedious activity involving answering long questionnaires. Kintent, a new startup that wants to automate this process, announced a $4 million seed today led by Tola Capital with help from a bunch of tech industry angel investors. After company co-founder and CEO Sravish Sridhar […]

mmhmm, the software that allows folks to personalize their appearance on video chat, has today announced that its introducing usage-based enterprise accounts. In a conversation with TechCrunch, founder and CEO Phil Libin said this is a natural evolution, remarking that mmhmm has had hundreds of registrations from users all at the same company. “It was […]

So, let me preempt this by saying that there are plenty of robotics verticals worth getting excited about. But at the moment, everyone sure seems focused on warehouse fulfillment. It’s understandable, of course. Right now, it’s Amazon versus the world, and the retail giant certainly has a leg up on much of the world on […]

Thrasio, an early mover and leading player in the wave of startups emerging to consolidate and scale companies that sell their goods mainly via Amazon’s Marketplace, has raised some more funding and is making a key executive appointment to do some scaling of its own. The company, which to date has acquired and consolidated some […]

Next Insurance recently announced that it has raised a $250 million round, valuing the SMB-focused insurance provider at $4 billion. The company last raised another $250 million in September 2020, at a valuation of $2 billion. This funding also comes after Next Insurance acquired Juniper Labs in December, and AP Intego more recently. Next sells […]

Meet Collabio Spaces: An office suite app with a cloudless co-authoring twist that looks helpful if you need to collaborate on documents without having to worry about losing control of your data or the thread of changes. The p2p software lets multiple people co-edit a document locally — from a mobile device or desktop computer […]

Pair Eyewear has raised a $12 million Series A to help glasses-wearing kids and adults turn those glasses into what co-CEO Sophia Edelstein called “a form of self-expression.” After all, Edelstein (who founded the company with her co-CEO Nathan Kondamuri) noted that “you’re spending a lot of money on [glasses], and then you’re stuck with […]

Launched in only November last year, the Craft Docs app — which was built from the ground up as an iOS app for collaborative documents — has secured an $8 million Series A round led by Creandum. Also participating was InReach Ventures, Gareth Williams, former CEO and co-founder of Skyscanner, and a number of other […]

Two weeks ago, TPG’s Rise Fund invested $200 million in Airtel Mobile Commerce BV (AMC BV) — the mobile money business of telecom Airtel Africa. After closing the deal, the Bharti Airtel subsidiary noted that it was still in discussions to sell additional minority stake (25% of the issued share capital) to more potential investors. […]

Competition in China’s gaming industry is getting stiffer in recent times as tech giants sniff out potential buyouts and investments to beef up their gaming alliance, whether it pertains to content or distribution. Bilibili, the go-to video streaming platform for young Chinese, is the latest to make a major gaming deal. It has agreed to […]

LINE completed its merger with Yahoo! Japan owner Z Holdings last month, and now the two firm’s venture capital arms have also combined. Z Holdings announced today that its subsidiary, YJ Capital, has merged with LINE Ventures to form Z Venture Capital. The new firm also announced the launch of a 30 billion JPY (about […]

Many companies had to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic. For SOSV-backed Achiko, this meant shifting its focus from mobile payment services to affordable COVID-19 screening. Achiko’s platform combines an app called Teman Sehat (“Health Buddy” in Indonesian) for payments and keeping test records, and proprietary low-cost testing kits using DNA aptamers, or synthetic strands of […]

Cendana Capital, a San Francisco-based fund of funds manager, has amassed stakes in more than 100 venture firms since launching in 2010. For the most part, it did this by focusing on managers who are raising funds of $100 million or less in capital, even foregoing stakes in beloved outfits like Forerunner Ventures and Uncork […]

On the heels of Deliveroo raising more than $2 billion ahead of its debut on the London Stock Exchange this week, another hopeful in the food delivery sector has closed a super-sized round. Glovo, a startup out of Spain with 10 million users that delivers restaurant take-out, groceries and other items in partnership with brick-and-mortar […]

Before you can improve a workflow, you have to understand how work advances through a business, which is more complex than you might imagine inside a large enterprise. That’s where Celonis comes in. It uses software to identify how work moves through an organization and suggests more efficient ways of getting the same work done, […]

From the earliest days of the pandemic, it was no secret that video chat was about to become a very hot space. Over the past several months investors have bankrolled a handful of video startups with specific niches, ranging from always-on office surveillance to platforms that encouraged plenty of mini calls to avoid the need […]