Crunch Hype

Sarah Kunst, founding partner at Cleo Capital, has worn many hats. She’s been an entrepreneur, served on plenty of boards, is a contributing author at Marie Clare, has been a senior advisor to Bumble and worked as a consultant in marketing, business development and more. With all that experience, she knows all too well that […]

While the growth of game-streaming audiences have continued on desktop platforms, the streaming space has felt surprisingly stagnant at times, particularly due to the missing mobile element and a lack of startup competitors. Lowkey, a gaming startup that builds software for game streamers, is aiming to build out opportunities in bit-sized clips on mobile. The […]

Taken together, the various market signs could point to a modest to moderate cooling in the IPO market. For a host of companies looking to debut via a SPAC, that could prove to be bad news.

The killer use case for AR/VR might just be warfare. Today, Microsoft announced that it has received a contract to outfit the United States Army with tens of thousands of augmented reality headsets based on the company’s HoloLens tech. This contract could be worth as much as $21.88 billion over 10 years, the company says. […]

Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump promoted a new interview with the former president on Facebook and Instagram Tuesday, but a workaround to Trump’s ban on two of the world’s most popular social networks wasn’t long for this world. She was apparently swiftly cautioned by Facebook that anything posted “in the voice of President Trump” is not […]

The last year wasn’t an easy one for just about anybody, but a new report from Project Include shows that the shift to remote work affected some groups more negatively than others. Unsurprisingly, it was people already struggling against harassment and bias, particularly women of color and those identifying as LGBTQ, who saw the biggest […]

This morning Datapeople, a startup that sells software designed to make recruiting more equitable, announced that it has raised $8 million across two funding events, including a $5 million round in mid-2020. The company, which counts Uncork Capital, NextView Ventures and First Round Capital as backers, does two things. Its initial product, what Datapeople calls […]

The embedded fintech movement has just begun, but there is already a sister concept percolating: embedded procurement, which will allow businesses to buy things they need through vertical B2B apps.

Picture it. It’s September, and you’re at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 about to present your virtual elevator pitch to thousands of attendees around the world. In the short span of 120 seconds, your company will become known to a rapt audience of early-startup influencers including potential customers, investors, tech icons and the media. An awesome opportunity, […]

Instagram today is officially launching a new feature called Remix, which offers a way to record your Reels video alongside a video from another user. The option is similar to TikTok’s existing Duets feature, which also lets users to react to or interact with another person’s video content while creating their own. Instagram’s new feature […]

Everyone is scrambling to build a Clubhouse clone right now, but for Discord it makes perfect sense. With everyone stuck at home searching for safe ways to rekindle their social lives over the last year, Discord’s appeal exploded. The company cites new behavior it observed during the pandemic as the inspiration for Stage Channels, a […]

In less than 24 hours, thousands of new startup founders from around the world will tune in to day one of TC Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising. They’ll choose from a wide range of presentations that span the startup ecosystem and actively engage with top experts ready to help them develop and strengthen their […]

Best practices and must-know components of machine learning, broken down into five practical and easily applicable lessons.

The gaming sector has never been hotter or had higher expectations from investors who are dumping billions into upstarts that can adjust to shifting tides faster that the existing giants will. Bay Area-based Manticore Games is one of the second-layer gaming platforms looking to build on the market’s momentum. The startup tells TechCrunch they’ve closed […]

The pandemic’s remarkable impact on the app industry has not slowed down in 2021. In fact, consumer spending in apps has hit a new record in the first quarter of this year, a new report from App Annie indicates. The firm says consumers in Q1 2021 spent $32 billion on apps across both iOS and […]

Apple is adding two new voices to Siri’s English offerings, and eliminating the default ‘female voice’ selection in the latest beta version of iOS. This means that every person setting up Siri will choose a voice for themselves and it will no longer default to the voice assistant being female, a topic that has come […]

Fast-growing fintech Pipe has raised another round of funding at a $2 billion valuation, just weeks after raising $50M in growth funding, according to sources familiar with the deal. Although the round is still ongoing, Pipe has reportedly raised $150 million in a “massively oversubscribed” round led by Baltimore, Md.-based Greenspring Associates. While the company […]

As the world changes rapidly, so too do the most traditional of industries. That includes property tech and insurtech. Luckily for us, two of the top minds in those spaces are joining us on an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live. On April 21 at noon PT/3pm ET, Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace and Hippo’s Assaf […]

My soon-to-be spouse will sponsor me for a green card. Are there any minimum salary requirements for her to sponsor me? Is there anything I should keep in mind before starting the green card process?

Abel Tesfaye, the Super Bowl-headlining musician known as The Weeknd, is the latest artist to embrace the excitement around NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Specifically, he’s teaming up with Nifty Gateway, the same marketplace that worked with Beeple to auction off a piece of digital art for $6.6 million earlier this year (a very impressive number, though quickly […]

TechCrunch Early Stage goes down tomorrow (not a joke!) and the agenda is jam-packed with breakout sessions covering everything a startup needs to know about fundraising and operations. We’ve already told you plenty about the fundraising sessions, which are high in both quality and quantity. Today, however, I’d like to tell you a little bit […]

President Joe Biden has earmarked $174 billion from his ambitious infrastructure plan to build out domestic supply chains for electric vehicles, noting the imperative for United States automakers to “compete globally” to win a larger share of the EV market. The funds are just one part of Biden’s plan, which calls for an ambitious $2 […]

The sweeping infrastructure package put forward today by President Joe Biden comes with a price tag of roughly $2 trillion (and hefty tax hikes) but gives startups and the broader tech industry about $1 trillion worth of reasons to support it. Tech companies have spent the past decade or more developing innovations that can be […]

Meet Leeway, a French startup that is building an end-to-end software-as-a-service solution for your contracts. Leeway lets you centralize all your contracts in a single repository, go through multiple negotiation steps and trigger a DocuSign event for the signature. The company raised a $4.2 million seed round from HenQ, Kima Ventures as well as several […]

Instead of breaking up big tech, we should focus on ensuring that it grows better as it grows bigger by establishing a level playing field for startups’ and competitors’ proprietary digital markets.

Deliveroops. After a lackluster IPO pricing run, shares of Deliveroo are lower today, marking a disappointing debut for the hot delivery company. A good question to ask at this juncture is why Deliveroo struggled with its IPO during a historically strong moment for tech flotations. The European unicorn listed on the London Stock Exchange, however, […]

As companies embrace the use of data, hiring more data scientists, a roadblock persists around sharing that data. It requires too much copying and pasting and manual work. Hex, a new startup, wants to change that by providing a way to dispense data across the company in a streamlined and elegant way. Today, the company […]

Coursera, an edtech unicorn, will begin its life today as a public company after pricing its IPO at $33 per share yesterday evening. Using a simple share count, the company’s valuation comes to $4.30 billion, or $4.38 billion if its underwriters exercise their option to purchase shares at its offering price. A more diluted share […]

Spotify this morning announced it’s significantly expanding its selection of personalized playlists with the addition of three new categories of playlists under the heading of “Spotify Mixes.” This collection will include artist mixes, genre mixes, and decade mixes — meaning you’ll gain access to a sizable number of new mixes with easy-to-understand titles, like 2010s […]

The team behind Cortado Ventures thinks there’s plenty of untapped investment opportunity in the Midwest. To change that, it’s raised $20 million in what appears to be Okalhoma’s largest venture fund to date. The firm is led by partners Nathaniel Harding, David Woods and Mike Moradi. In a Medium post, Harding (an angel investor and […]

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 got ahold of three founders from the recent Y Combinator batch (more here, and here) to chat through their experiences with a remote accelerator. TechCrunch was curious if the […]

Following years of backlash over its algorithms and their ability to push people to more extreme content, which Facebook continues to deny, the company today announced it would give its users new tools to more easily switch over to non-algorithmic views of their News Feed. This includes the recently launched “Favorites,” which shows you posts […]

At the age of 14, Jacklyn Rome saw firsthand how divorce can impact families, and how arguing about finances both during and after the process can impact children. The experience stuck with her. As an adult, after leading new product launches at Uber and Blue Apron, Rome came up with the concept behind her startup, […]

Harlem Capital is announcing that it has raised $134 million for its second fund — well above its target of $100 million and its initial cap of $125 million. The firm was founded in 2015 by managing partners Henri Pierre-Jacques and Jarrid Tingle. It started out as an angel syndicate with the goal of investing […]

When investors gave Moveworks a hefty $75 million Series B at the end of 2019, they were investing in a chatbot startup that to that point had been tuned to answer IT help question in an automated way. Today, the company announced it had used that money to expand the platform to encompass employee questions […]

Zapp, one of a number of startups currently battling it out in London and beyond by promising to let you order everyday items on-demand from its own delivery-only stores, has quietly raised a new round of funding from leading VCs, TechCrunch has learned. According to multiple sources, Silicon Valley’s Lightspeed and Europe’s Atomico (the VC […]

When the pandemic unfolded last year, demand for at-home fitness equipment skyrocketed, and Tonal was no exception. The maker of a smart home fitness trainer experienced an explosive increase in sales, and now the six-year-old San Francisco-based startup is gearing up for its next stage of growth. Tonal is adding $250 million of new funding […]

The fintech space and the Latin American venture scene are both booming. So it’s no surprise that an increasing number of global investors are investing in fintech startups based in Latin America. The latest is Clocktower Technology Ventures (CTV), the investing affiliate of Santa Monica, California-based macro investment firm Clocktower Group. Since launching in 2015, […]

Huawei’s struggles amid U.S.-China trade tensions are driving it to seek opportunities in other smart devices, setting itself up against a raft of hardware makers at home and abroad. The Chinese tech giant recorded sluggish revenue growth in 2020, climbing just 3.8% to 891.4 billion yuan ($136 billion), as its net profit grew 3.2% to […]

Independent music distribution platform and tool factory UnitedMasters has raised a $50M series B round led by Apple. A16z and Alphabet are participating again in this raise. United Masters is also entering a strategic partnership with Apple alongside this investment. If you’re unfamiliar with UnitedMasters, it’s a distribution company launched in 2017 by Steve Stoute, […]

According to a McKinsey report, the total number of mobile money services worldwide was 282 in 2017, with more than half of those operating in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2020, these numbers increased significantly, but the ratio remained similar. In 96 countries, there are 310 live mobile money services, according to a GSMA report. Out of […]

Kaya VC’s new €72 million ($80m) fund will focus on startups in Prague, Warsaw and the wider CEE region. Previously called Enern, the Central and Eastern European VC — which, historically, started out investing in wind-farms and ended up invested in software — has changed its name to better reflect its modern focus. The firm […]

imToken, the blockchain tech startup and crypto wallet developer, announced today it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Qiming Venture Partners. Participants included returning investor IDG Capital, and new backers Breyer Capital, HashKey, Signum Capital, Longling Capital, SNZ and Liang Xinjun, the co-founder of Fosun International. Founded in 2016, the startup’s […]

Global logistics company Geodis has tapped startup Phantom Auto to help it deploy forklifts that can be controlled remotely by human operators located hundreds, and even thousands, of miles away. The aim is to use the technology to reduce operator fatigue — and the injuries that can occur as a result — as well as […]

By now you’ve probably heard of ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) ratings for companies, or ratings for their carbon footprint. Well, now a UK company has come up with a way of rating the ‘ethics’ social media companies. EthicsGrade is an ESG ratings agency, focusing on AI governance. Headed up Charles Radclyffe, the former head […]

Nested, the London-based startup that is using technology to build a “modern” estate agency and improve the home-selling experience, has raised an additional £5 million. Backing comes from Axel Springer, alongside previous backers Balderton Capital and Northzone. Described as a “strategic investment,” Nested co-founder and CEO Matt Robinson tells TechCrunch that the round brings the […]

Update: It seems that the market is volatile indeed. After pricing its shares at the lower end of the range, Deliveroo, trading as “ROO” on the London Stock Exchange, opened at 331 pence (£3.31), down some 15% on its private placement pricing, and it has been continuing to decline in early trading. It’s now at […]

There are fewer than 300,000 doctors in India actively practicing medicine. They serve hundreds of millions of patients who suffer from chronic illness in the world’s second most populous nation. A doctor only has a few minutes to spend on a patient, remember the past diagnosis by glancing at their record, and formulate a plan […]

Appier’s initial public offering on the Tokyo Stock Exchange yesterday was a milestone not only for the company, but also Sequoia Capital India, one of its earliest investors. Founded in Taiwan, Appier was the fund’s first investment outside of India, and is now also the first company in its portfolio outside of India to go […]

Ugandan technology-enabled asset finance company Tugende today announced that it has closed $3.6 million in a Series A extension round. The investment, which, according to the company, was agreed on and structured in 2020, follows the $6.3 million raised in November 2020 and led by Toyota Tsusho investment fund Mobility 54. This brings Tugende’s total […]