Crunch Hype

Baking operational flexibility, agility and speed into your startup’s DNA from the get-go will go a long way toward driving your ultimate success. Understanding its importance and learning best practices might seem daunting, but TC Early Stage 2021: Operations and Fundraising (April 1-2), is all about connecting early-stage founders with subject-matter experts across the startup […]

Big tech is back on the virtual hill. Three of tech’s most prominent CEOs will appear before the House Energy and Commerce committee today at 9AM PT as lawmakers grill the companies on their failure to contain disinformation and extremism. In opening statements made available before the hearing, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and […]

In the trucking industry, “dwell and detention” times are the enemies of efficiency, profits and drivers. More than two billion hours are lost each year due to dwell —the time spent at a distribution yard or facility — and detention — the gap between when unloading or loading is supposed to begin and when it […]

Almost every private equity and venture capital investor now advertises that they have a platform to support their portfolio companies.

Holberton, the education startup that started out as a coding school in San Francisco and today works with partners to run schools in the U.S., Europe, LatAm and Europe, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B funding round led by Redpoint eventures. Existing investors Daphni, Imaginable Futures, Pearson Ventures, Reach Capital and Trinity Ventures also participated in […]

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Yay Images for a new Extra Crunch Partner Perk. Starting today, Extra Crunch members can get unlimited access to Yay Images’ collection of over 12M stock images, 1.5M vectors, and 250,000 HD/4K Videos at a discounted annual rate. The Yay Images Solo Plan (one user) can be […]

Ryu Games, a startup that helps developers add cash tournaments to their mobile games, announced this morning it has raised $2.3 million in a seed round. The funds came from a number of investors, including Side Door Ventures, MGV Capital, Velo Partners and Citta Ventures. In addition, 500 Startups participated in the round. To see the […]

Online branded payments now run the gamut of anything from Spotify vouchers, Netflix vouchers, Neosurf, PaySafe cards, and everything in between. Consumers use them to pay for a variety of things. In Europe, they are an increasingly big business. Now, European branded payments company Recharge.com has raised €10m ($11.8m) in a debt funding round led […]

What would happen to Robinhood and its cohorts if the apparent cooling in consumer trading demand continues? Let's talk about it.

Gorillas, the Berlin-HQ’d startup that promises to let you order groceries and other “every day” items for delivery in as little as ten minutes, has raised $290 million in Series B funding, at a valuation that surpasses $1 billion. The round — which was first reported by BI — is led by Coatue Management, DST […]

The curbside is being squeezed as the number of commercial vehicle operators and gig economy workers battle over this increasingly scarce real estate — a problem that has been compounded by an uptick in on-demand delivery services fueled by the pandemic. A number of startups such as Coord and curbflow have popped up in recent […]

This morning CoScreen, a startup that helps teams share screens and collaborate in real-time, formally launched its product to market. It also disclosed that it has raised $4.6 million to date. Unusual Ventures led its Seed round. Till Pieper, CoScreen’s co-founder and CEO told TechCrunch in an interview that it raised the bulk of its […]

Skycatch today announced a $25 million raise, led by ADB Ventures and Waymaker. Founded in 2013, the Bay Area-based company provides centimeter-accurate 3D scanning services, primarily for construction sites and mining operations. The service has already been rolled out in a number of different locations around the world — with north of 10,000 sites, according […]

Before even taking its first deposit, Greenwood, the digital banking service targeting Black and Latino individuals and business owners, has raised $40 million — only a few months after its launch. Coming in to finance the new challenger bank are six of the seven largest U.S. Banks and the payment technology developers Mastercard and Visa. That’s […]

When the world shifted toward virtual one year ago, one service in particular saw heated demand: digital notary services. The ability to get a document notarized without leaving one’s home suddenly became more of a necessity than a luxury. Pat Kinsel, founder and CEO of Boston-based Notarize, worked to get appropriate legislation passed across the […]

Data centers and bitcoin mining operations are becoming huge energy hogs and the explosive growth of both risks undoing a lot of the progress that’s been made to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. It’s one of the major criticisms of cryptocurrency operations and something that many in the industry are trying to address. Enter LiquidStack, […]

Plant-based meat replacements have commanded a huge amount of investor and consumer attention in the decade or more since new entrants like Beyond Meat first burst onto the scene. These companies have raised billions of dollars and the industry is now worth at least $20 billion as companies try to bring all the meaty taste […]

Pie Insurance, a startup offering workers’ compensation insurance to small businesses, announced this morning that it has closed on $118 million in a Series C round of funding. Allianz X — investment arm of German financial services giant Allianz — and Acrew Capital co-led the round, which brings the Washington, D.C.-based startup’s total equity funding […]

One of the slower weeks for robotics investments I’ve seen since I started doing this roundup. This stuff ebbs and flows, though, and there’s always bound to be a bit of a flurry at the beginning of the year. This week, most of the top news revolves around research, which, let’s be honest, is where […]

The Brazilian-based pan-Latin American food delivery startup iFood has announced a series of initiatives designed to reduce the company’s environmental impact as consumers push companies to focus more on sustainability. The program has two main components — one focused on plastic pollution and waste and another aiming to become carbon neutral in its operations by […]

Clothing giant FatFace had a data breach, but doesn’t want you to tell anyone about it. The company sent an email to customers this week disclosing that it first detected a breach on January 17. A hacker made off with the customer’s name, email and postal address, and the last four-digits of their credit card. […]

The home medical supply market in the U.S. is significant and growing, but the way that Americans go about getting much-needed medical supplies, particularly for those with chronic conditions, relies on outdated and clumsy sales mechanisms that often have very poor customer experiences. New startup Better Health aims to change that, with an e-commerce approach […]

Digital House, a Buenos Aires-based edtech focused on developing tech talent through immersive remote courses, announced today it has raised more than $50 million in new funding. Notably, two of the main investors are not venture capital firms but instead are two large tech companies: Latin American e-commerce giant Mercado Libre and San Francisco-based software […]

The latest in a string of space tech SPACs announced this year is Redwire, an entity created by a PE firm in 2020, which has acquired a number of smaller companies including Adcole Space, Roccor, Made in Space, LoadPath, Oakman Aerospace, Deployable Space Systems and more — all within the last year or so. Redwire […]

Indian edtech giant Byju’s, which raised over a billion dollars last year as the pandemic accelerated the adoption of online learning services in India, is about to kickoff a new fundraising spree. Byju’s is in talks to raise over $600 million in a new financing round that values the Indian startup at $15 billion, up […]

The partners at MaC Venture Capital, the Los Angeles-based investment firm that has just closed on $103 million for its inaugural fund, have spent the bulk of their careers breaking barriers. Formed when M Ventures (a firm founded by former Washington DC mayor Adrian Fenty); the first Black talent agency partner in the history of […]

Everybody says they want to build user-centric companies and products, but how exactly is that achieved? Talking and listening to users, of course — a task that is both unnecessarily time-consuming and cumbersome to organise, according to Axel Thomson, a former product manager at U.K. recipe-box subscription unicorn Gousto. His burgeoning startup, dubbed Ribbon, wants […]

Meniga, the London fintech that provides digital banking technology to leading banks, has closed €10 million in additional funding. The round is led by Velocity Capital and Frumtak Ventures. Also participating are Industrifonden, the U.K. Government’s Future Fund and existing customers UniCredit, Swedbank, Groupe BPCE and Íslandsbanki. Meniga says the funding will be used for […]

Outlets that follow the crypto industry have been observing a trend, which is that according to Google search data, the rise in interest in non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, now almost matches the level of interest in 2017 in initial coin offerings, or ICOs. Of course, ICOs largely disappeared from the scene after the SEC started […]

Hong Kong-based viAct helps construction sites perform around-the-clock monitoring with an AI-based cloud platform that combines computer vision, edge devices and a mobile app. The startup announced today it has raised a $2 million seed round, co-led by SOSV and Vectr Ventures. The funding included participation from Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund, Artesian Ventures and […]

While the governments of the United States and China are pushing policies for technological decoupling, private tech firms continue to tap resources from both sides. In the field of autonomous vehicles, it’s common to see Chinese startups — or startups with a strong Chinese link — keep operations and seek investments in both countries. But […]

UI-licious, a Singapore-based startup that simplifies automated user interface testing for web applications, announced today it has raised $1.5 million in pre-Series A funding. The round was led by Monk’s Hill Ventures and will be used to grow UI-licious’ product development and marketing teams. Founded in 2016 by Shi Ling Tai and Eugene Cheah, UI-licious […]

The other day, I attended a celebration of one of the pioneers of collaboration technology, Ray Ozzie. The father of Lotus Notes, Ozzie left Lotus and his startup firm Iris after a hostile takeover by IBM, and eventually joined Microsoft when that company acquired his next startup, Groove. By “attended” I mean a virtual event […]

H&M has been removed by major e-commerce and service apps in China after a Communist Party organization barraged it for a statement expressing “deep concern” over allegations of forced labor in Xinjiang’s cotton industry. On Thursday morning, a search for “H&M” yielded zero results on e-commerce platforms including Alibaba’s Taobao, JD.com and Pinduoduo, Meituan’s shop-listing […]

Steady founder and CEO Adam Roseman and Flourish Ventures' Emmalyn Shaw joined Jordan Crook for a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live.

Our picks for the most intriguing companies of Y Combinator’s latest batch were based entirely on substance and our endless expertise, so it’s time for something much more superficial. Here are the 11 best logos from the hundreds of companies that presented yesterday. Watching companies go by 60 seconds at a time for like eight […]

Slack launches a new direct messaging feature, Amazon Web Services gets a new leader and we round up our favorite Y Combinator startups. This is your Daily Crunch for March 24, 2021. The big story: Don’t panic about Slack’s new Connect feature Slack recently launched the new direct messaging feature Connect, which is supposed to […]

When AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced in an email to employees yesterday that Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky was returning to run AWS, it was probably not the choice most considered. But to the industry watchers we spoke to over the last couple of days, it was a move that made absolute sense once you thought […]

As shocking as it sounds, we could be entering a much better era for small, local businesses.

The pandemic made the internet a lifeline for shopping, earning a living and maintaining personal relationships. Now, as lockdowns start to lift, the real estate industry has to figure out what that means.

Medical and biotech had a strong showing at Y Combinator’s latest demo day, with nearly a dozen companies in the space catching my eye. The things a startup can accomplish in this space are astonishing these days, so don’t be surprised if a few of these companies are headline news in the next year. Startups […]

We have only a small window of time to restore manufacturing as a foundation of American prosperity, and a remarkable but underappreciated federal program has a big role to play.

Polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS, is a common disorder that can cause irregular periods, infertility or gestational diabetes in women. And the condition is far from rare: PCOS impacts one in 10 women, meaning there’s a big market of people out there that want better support and risk-screening to navigate the symptoms. That’s where Veera […]

If you’re old enough to remember the outrage that followed Twitter’s decision to replace stars with hearts (aka likes instead of favorites), then you know that Twitter’s user base has strong feelings about how it wants to engage with tweets. Now, Twitter is considering another radical change on this front that could shake things up […]

Facebook on Wednesday announced new actions to disrupt a network of China-based hackers leveraging the platform to compromise targets in the Uyghur community. The group, known to security researchers as “Earth Empusa,” “Evil Eye” or “Poison Carp” targeted around 500 people on Facebook, including individuals living abroad in the United States, Turkey, Syria, Australia and […]

While many view Google's Core Web Vitals as a big hoop to jump through to please the search powers that be, others are seeing -- and seizing -- the opportunities that come along with this change.

Investor FOMO following Roblox’s blockbuster public debut is pushing venture capitalists who missed out on that gaming giant to invest in competing platforms. Today, Rec Room announced it has raised $100 million from Sequoia and Index, with participation from Madrona Venture Group. The deal is a huge influx of capital for Rec Room, which had […]

A German court that’s considering Facebook’s appeal against a pioneering pro-privacy order by the country’s competition authority to stop combining user data without consent has said it will refer questions to Europe’s top court. In a press release today the Düsseldorf court writes [translated by Google]: “…the Senate has come to the conclusion that a […]

Next week, TechCrunch is hosting Early Stage — a virtual bootcamp for founders to gain the critical insight needed to launch and scale their companies. Day one is all about how-to’s. What about day two? April 2 is the inaugural TC Early Stage Pitch-Off featuring 10 exceptional early-stage startups. The Pitch-Off is split into two […]

I was originally looking at opening an office in Silicon Valley to be close to software engineers and investors, but then… COVID-19 :) A lot has changed over the last year - can I still come?