Crunch Hype

A lot has changed since Monk’s Hill Ventures released its first report on tech compensation in Southeast Asia five years ago, with base salaries and competition for top talent jumping dramatically. But one thing has remained the same since 2016: startup compensation data, including information about base pay, bonuses and stock options, is still hard […]

Amazon will soon be a big part of the space economy in the form of its Kuiper satellite internet constellation, but here on Earth its ambitions are more commonplace: get an accelerator going. They’ve partnered with space-focused VC outfit Seraphim Capital to create a four-week program with (among other things) a $100,000 AWS credit for […]

Clubhouse’s list of competitors is growing. LinkedIn has now confirmed it’s also testing a social audio experience in its app which would allow creators on its network to connect with their community. Unlike the Clubhouse rivals being built by Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn believes its audio networking feature will be differentiated because it will be […]

Google tries out new ad targeting technology, PayPal adds cryptocurrency support and Substack raises additional funding. This is your Daily Crunch for March 30, 2021. The big story: Google starts testing its cookie alternative Google announced today that it has begun rolling out a new technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) in a developer […]

Apple has updated its native Maps app with more helpful information designed to assist with travel while mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Apple Maps on iPhone, iPad and Mac will now show COVID-19 health measure information for airports when searched via the app, either through a link to the airport’s own COVID-19 advisory page, or […]

TechCrunch Early Stage is coming up this week, and all attendees can get three months of free access to Extra Crunch as a part of a ticket purchase. Extra Crunch is our members-only community focused on founders and startup teams, and it features over 100 exclusive articles per month. Head here to buy your ticket […]

Amazon has acquired a startup in India that is helping offline stores go online, the e-commerce group’s latest attempt to make inroads in the world’s second most populous nation where brick and mortar continue to drive more than 95% of sales. The American e-commerce group said on Tuesday evening that it has acquired Perpule, a […]

Applications for Startup Battlefield are now open! Founders, this past year has been challenging in ways words can’t encompass. But you are persevering and now is the time to show the world what you have been working on. TechCrunch is on the hunt for game-changing and ground-breaking startups from around the globe to feature in […]

The NFT ecosystem is having an explosive moment and the startups that were ready to run with it are getting lots of cash to continue capturing that momentum. SuperRare, an NFT art platform that has garnered tens of millions in new sales in recent weeks, has just raised millions from investors. The $9 million Series […]

YouTube announced today it will begin testing what could end up being a significant change to its video platform: It’s going to try hiding the dislike count on videos from public view. The company says it will run a “small experiment” where it will try out a few different designs where dislike counts are no […]

This afternoon Substack, a paid-newsletter startup, confirmed that it has raised $65 million, as initially reported by Axios. TechCrunch dug into the math behind the financing here. As anticipated, a16z led the new financing. What’s in store from the now Series B-backed company? Product work. The company wrote that it intends to “rapidly” expand its […]

Autonomous, electric mobility service provider Optimus Ride announced a partnership with powersports vehicle manufacturer Polaris to bring fully autonomous GEM electric vehicles to market. The two will introduce a new line of Polaris GEM low-speed vehicles that will be engineered to fully integrate Optimus Ride’s autonomous software and hardware suite. The microtransit vehicles are expected […]

Arm today announced Armv9, the next generation of its chip architecture. Its predecessor, Armv8 launched a decade ago and while it has seen its fair share of changes and updates, the new architecture brings a number of major updates to the platform that warrant a shift in version numbers. Unsurprisingly, Armv9 builds on V8 and […]

Google today announced that it is rolling out Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a crucial part of its Privacy Sandbox project for Chrome, as a developer origin trial. FLoC is meant to be an alternative to the kind of cookies that advertising technology companies use today to track you across the web. Instead of a […]

Vote counting begins today in the historic effort to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama fulfillment center. The warehouse — which opened exactly a year ago to meet ramping up demand as COVID-19 bore down on the U.S. — has become ground zero for one of the most import labor efforts in modern American history. Voting began […]

The NFT craze has been an intriguing moment for digital artists who have seen seen great leaps in how tech has allowed them to create their work, but not as much progress in shifting how they profit off of it. Though crypto’s early adopter artists have seemed to gain the most attention thus far, more […]

Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, is today releasing its latest project called Stack, an app that will help you digitize your documents, receipts and other papers you have lying around the house, and then automatically save them to Google Drive. The app will also helpfully suggest a name for your scans and the right category […]

Automaker Volkswagen wants you to know it’s serious about electric vehicles — so serious, in fact, that it’s officially rebranding around a pun in the U.S. The company revealed in a press release that it’s changing its name from “Volkswagen of America” to “Voltswagen of America” in a press release today. News this could happen […]

HighRadius, which has developed AI-powered fintech software, announced Tuesday it has raised $300 million in a Series C funding round led by D1 Capital and Tiger Global. The round values Houston-based HighRadius at $3.1 billion, triple its valuation of “more than $1 billion” at the time of its $125 million Series B in January of […]

Duo, the authentication service Cisco acquired for $2.35 billion in 2018, today announced its plans to launch a passwordless authentication service that will allow users to log in to their Duo-protected services through security keys or platform biometrics like Apple’s Face ID or Microsoft’s Windows Hello. The infrastructure-agnostic service will go into public preview in […]

Back in the halcyon days of 2019, we piloted a new format for Extra Crunch we dubbed the EC-1. Modeled after the Form S-1 filing that late-stage startups submit to the SEC as part of the IPO process, EC-1s are authoritative, deep analyses into growth-stage startups. We profiled and analyzed a number of companies like […]

The company that would become Tonal had to fight through multiple VC rounds of skeptical investors ready to say that two-letter word that stops all progress.

Company building, brand building, launch strategy and marketing tactics are key to the success of most startups — and that’s what this second part of the Tonal EC-1 is all about.

Once a fitness tech company like Tonal launches its product, it immediately faces another challenge: how to keep those users engaged.

Why should any customer spend upward of $3,000 on a Tonal device? The answer will determine Tonal’s eventual success, and that’s the theme we will explore in this fourth and final part of the EC-1.

Cameo, the celebrity video site you’re probably familiar with if you’ve celebrated a birthday in the last three years, announced this morning that it’s raised a $100M Series C. The round, which was led by Jonathan Turner with e.ventures, puts the site’s value at just north of $1 billion. Cameo has been building a good […]

SpaceX is set to make a change to its Crew Dragon spacecraft for its forthcoming history-making all-civilian launch, currently set for September 15. That Dragon will replace its International Space Station docking mechanism with a transparent dome, through which passengers will be able to take in an awe-inspiring surround panorama of space and the Earth […]

Meet Stockly, a French startup that keeps the inventory of various e-commerce websites in sync. When you see an out-of-stock item on an e-commerce website, chances are you leave that website and try to find the same item on another site. If you operate an e-commerce website, Stockly lets you sell items even when they’re […]

The autonomous vehicle startup Aurora Innovation said Tuesday it has reached an agreement with Volvo to jointly develop autonomous semi trucks for North America. The partnership, which the two companies say will span several years and is through Volvo’s Autonomous Solutions unit, will focus on trucks built to operate autonomously on highways between hubs for […]

MobiKwik said on Tuesday it was investigating claims of data breach after a website claimed to have exposed private information of nearly 100 million users of the Indian mobile payments startup. Over the weekend, a site on the dark web claimed it had 8.2 terabytes of MobiKwik user data. The data included phone numbers, email […]

Capitolis, which makes technology for capital markets players such as investment and merchant banks, has closed on a $90 million Series C funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The financing included participation from existing backers Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, S Capital, Spark Capital, SVB Capital, Citi, J.P. Morgan and State Street and brings Capitolis’ […]

Self-driving and robotics startup Cartken has partnered with REEF Technology, a startup that operates parking lots and neighborhood hubs, to bring self-driving delivery robots to the streets of downtown Miami. With this announcement, Cartken officially comes out of stealth mode. The company, founded by ex-Google engineers and colleagues behind the unrequited Bookbot, was formed to […]

Substack didn't invent the paid newsletter, but the startup's early success with the model is enticing previous backers to more than double down on the media startup.

Slice, the online ordering platform for independent pizzerias, announced two new offerings this morning — a point-of-sale system designed specifically for those businesses, as well as a rewards program for diners. The launch of the new Slice Register builds on last year’s acquisition of point-of-sale company Instore, and the appointment of its CEO Matt Niehaus […]

Shares of Spotify are up a fraction this morning after the company announced that it will acquire Betty Labs, the company behind the Locker Room, which focuses on live audio. Prior to the deal, Betty Labs had raised more than $9 million, per Crunchbase data. Spotify is best known for its music streaming business, but […]

Apple this morning announced that it will be returning to an all-virtual format for a second year. The company went online-only for the first time in 2020, as Covid-19 ground in-person events to a halt. While vaccine rollouts have begun in much of the world, the return of the in-person event industry still seems iffy […]

AI has become a fundamental cornerstone of how tech companies are building tools for salespeople: they are useful for supercharging (and complementing) the abilities of talented humans, or helping them keep themselves significantly more organised; even if in some cases — as with chatbots — they are replacing them altogether. In the latest development, 6sense, […]

SpaceX conducted yet another high-altitude test flight of its Starship prototype spacecraft on Tuesday, the fourth of these so far. Like all the flight testing and construction of Starship prototypes, this one took off from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas development facility – a location recently renamed ‘Starbase’ by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Unfortunately, things didn’t […]

Cybersecurity training is one of those things that everyone has to do but not something everyone necessarily looks forward to. Living Security is an Austin-based startup out to change cybersecurity training something you look forward to, not dread. And the company has just closed on a $14 million Series B to continue its expansion beyond […]

Michael Cohn became a celebrity in the Atlanta startup ecosystem when the company he co-founded was sold to Accenture in a deal valued somewhere between $350 million and $400 million nearly six years ago. That same year, Sean O’Brien also made waves in the community when he helped shepherd the sale of the collaboration software […]

Two-and-a-half years later, the Nest Home Hub remains one of my favorite smart screens on the market. Maybe that’s a commentary on the rate of improvement in the category, or maybe Google just got things pretty right the first time out. It remains one of the best-looking products on the market, built from solid but […]

Motional will integrate its driverless technology into Hyundai’s new all-electric SUV to create the company’s first robotaxi. At the start of 2023, customers in certain markets will be able to book the fully electric, fully autonomous taxi through the Lyft app. The Hyundai IONIQ 5, which was revealed in February with a consumer release date […]

We now know the names of all four individuals who will fly on the historic Inspiration4 mission, the first all-civilian spaceflight in history. In addition to previously revealed crew members Jared Isaacman (who’s footing the entire bill) and St. Jude Children’s Hospital employee Haley Arceneaux, Inspiration4 will include Dr. Sian Proctor and Christopher Sembroski as […]

LinkedIn, the social network now with 740 million users around the world, has carved out an identity for itself as the place online where professionals go to list their places of work, get headhunted for other work, and look for work. But for years it’s been looking for ways to better leverage that position to […]

Weather intelligence platform ClimaCell today announced that it has raised a $77 million Series D funding round led by private equity firm Stonecourt Capital, with participation by Highline Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to about $185 million. In addition to the new funding, ClimaCell announced that it has changed its name to Tomorrow.io, […]

Commercial human spaceflight company Virgin Galactic has unveiled the first ever Spaceship III, the third major iteration of its spacecraft design. The first in this new series is called ‘VSS (Virgin SpaceShip) Imagine,’ and will start ground testing now with the aim of beginning its first glide flights starting this summer. VSS Imagine has a […]

As more companies become ever more reliant on digital infrastructure for everyday work, the more they become major targets for malicious hackers — both trends accelerated by the pandemic — and that is leading to an ever-greater need for IT and security departments to find ways of protecting data should it become compromised. Today, one […]

Eben Bayer has spent the better part of fourteen years proving out the power of the humble mushroom as the world’s truly functional food. As the chief executive and founder of Ecovative Design, Bayer has made replacements for foam packaging, lamps and furniture, leather materials, and even meats like bacon from mighty mushroom mycelia (they […]

Byju’s is eying acquisition of a startup that could help the biggest e-learning Indian firm deepen its footprint in the U.S. The Indian startup is in talks to acquire online reading platform Epic, a startup that offers unlimited access to over 40,000 books, videos, and quizzes from more than 250 publishers to kids aged 12 […]

MessageBird, the omnichannel cloud communications platform recently valued at $3 billion, is continuing to ramp up its M&A activity. Following last year’s acquisition of Pusher, a company that provides real-time web technologies, it is announcing that it has acquired “video-first” customer engagement platform 24sessions, and customer data platform Hull. Terms of the two new deals […]