Crunch Hype

The shift toward social+ is not going anywhere, and the fintech vertical is no exception. The good news is the social+finance trend is still in its infancy, which means there are opportunities to gain a first-mover advantage by acting now.

Uber’s use of facial recognition technology for a driver identity system is being challenged in the U.K., where the App Drivers & Couriers Union (ADCU) and Worker Info Exchange (WIE) have called for Microsoft to suspend the ride-hailing giant’s use of B2B facial recognition after finding multiple cases where drivers were mis-identified and went on […]

There is a prevailing notion that while the cloud infrastructure market is growing fast, the vast majority of workloads remain on premises. While that could be true, new research from Synergy Research Group found that cloud infrastructure spending surpassed on-prem spending for the first time in 2020 — and did so by a wide margin. […]

If three jam-packed days of TechCrunch Disrupt 2021, the mother of all tech conferences that takes place on September 21-23, wasn’t enough to get your startup motor running, listen up. You can attend the all-virtual TC Disrupt 2021 for less than a $100. Your eyes do not deceive. Read on! Right now, super early-bird pricing […]

Fetcher, a startup that promises to make the recruiting process easier while also diversifying the candidate pool, is announcing that it has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding. Originally known as Scout, the New York startup was founded by CEO Andres Blank, CPO Chris Calmeyn and engineering directors Javier Castiarena and Santi Aimetta. Blank […]

Brian Brackeen, the founder and former CEO of facial recognition startup Kairos, has made his way back to the company following his ouster in 2018. Brackeen is now chairing the company’s scientific advisory board, where he’ll help to address and eliminate issues of racial bias from the technology. While that’s not the company’s explicit mission […]

Once the path less traveled, bootstrapping today has become a much more viable and common approach to building a startup. By not taking venture capital dollars early, bootstrapping can force founders to remain disciplined in serving their paying customers well. It’s also a pretty compelling way to minimize dilution for founders and early employees. No […]

Per a new dataset I spent this morning chewing on, VCs are firing cannons of capital into the AI startup world while exits reach new records.

Earlier this month, Los Angeles became the latest city to task its various departments with prepping a feasibility study for deploying new software and monitoring technologies to better account for its carbon footprint. LA’s city council initiative, led by Council member Paul Koretz, follows a push from the state legislature to mandate that all businesses […]

SpaceX has completed what’s known as the ‘stacking’ of its first Super Heavy prototype, the extremely large next-generation first-stage rocket booster that it will eventually use to propel its Starship spacecraft to orbit and beyond. The Super Heavy Booster is about 220 feet tall – which is roughly the wingspan of a Boeing 747, or […]

As WhatsApp spends months to address users’ concerns and confusion about its planned policy update, there is evidently one entity it hasn’t had much luck making inroads with: The Government of India. The Indian government alleged on Friday that WhatsApp’s planned privacy update, which goes into effect in two months, violates local laws on several […]

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. This time around we had whatever passes for a quiet week as far as news volume. But that still meant we had to cut stuff and […]

Over the last few months, we’ve added a number of new Extra Crunch features at the request of the community. This includes Group Membership, expanding support to new countries like Israel and Norway, adding “sign in with Google” to improve checkout speed, and increasing login timeout so users aren’t regularly logged out of the product. […]

Igor Marinelli and Gabriel Lameirinhas were raised around manufacturing plants. Marinelli’s father worked for International Paper in a plant outside of Sao Paulo while Lameirinhas’ father worked in a cement plant. Throughout their lives, the two friends had heard their parents complain about the sorry state of maintenance and monitoring of the heavy equipment that […]

As indoor farming expands, a number of new companies are cropping up to provide better data and monitoring tools for the businesses aimed at improving efficiencies and quality of indoor crops. One of these companies, the Copenhagen-based Nordetect, is entering the U.S. market with around $1.5 million in funding from government investment firms and traditional […]

The private equity giant Blackstone is today announcing the final close of its first growth equity fund — Blackstone Growth — with $4.5 billion in capital commitments from a wide range of family offices, entrepreneurs, endowments, strategic institutional investors, pension funds, and other big wheels. The outfit says it’s the “largest first-time growth equity private […]

Ideally, it is expected of every business to reach its customers effectively. However, that’s not the case as limiting factors that hinder proper digital communication come into play at different growth stages. Termii, a Nigerian communications platform-as-a-service startup that solves this problem for African businesses, announced today that it has closed a $1.4 million seed round. […]

For small and mid-sized restaurants in Nigeria and most of Africa, food procurement can be a complex process to manage. The system is such that a business can easily run out of money or have considerable savings. Most restaurants don’t have access to deal directly with farms to get better deals because they lack the […]

Across the street from Suzhou North, a high-speed railway station in a historic city near Shanghai, a futuristic M-shaped building easily catches the eye of anyone passing by. It houses the headquarters of the five-year-old Chinese autonomous driving startup, Momenta. Like other major Chinese cities, Suzhou, which is famous for its serene canals and classical […]

Let’s stipulate the storm of user media (social audio, newsletters, live streaming) is evidence of something real and lasting. When this citizen media migrates to small business and the enterprise, we see that as confirmation, validation. Most of these efforts are in the investment phase, where startups and platforms consolidate ecosystems around the various disruptions. […]

There’s been quite a bit of movement in the additive manufacturing space in recent months. If I had to pinpoint a reason, I would say that — much like robotics (another space I follow fairly closely) — the category has gotten a boost in interest from the pandemic. Medical applications are understandably of interest lately, […]

Ford said Thursday that some some Ford F-150 pickup trucks and Edge crossover without certain electronic modules due to a twofold punch of a global semiconductor shortage and a lack of parts caused a winter storm. Ford said it will build and hold the vehicles for a number of weeks, then ship the vehicles to […]

Fort Robotics today announced a $13 million raise. Led by Prime Movers Lab, the round also features Prologis Ventures, Quiet Capital, Lemnos Labs, Creative Ventures, Ahoy Capital, Compound, FundersClub and Mark Cuban. The Philadelphia-based company was founded in 2018 by Samuel Reeves, who previous headed up Humanistic Robotics. That fellow Pennsylvania startup is focused on […]

MrBeast’s management company is getting into the venture business. Night Media, the six-year-old, Dallas-based multimedia talent management company, is closing a debut fund with $20 million in capital commitments from the powerful family-friendly online influencers it manages, along with other social media stars. The idea, says Night Media CEO Reed Duchscher, is to write initial […]

YouTube Shorts comes to the U.S., Amazon starts testing electric delivery vans in San Francisco and new data suggests the impact of Google Play’s recent changes. This is your Daily Crunch for March 18, 2021. The big story: YouTube’s TikTok rival launches in the US The YouTube Shorts product allows users to record, edit and […]

Substack has attracted a number of high-profile writers to its newsletter platform — and it’s not a secret that the venture-backed startup has lured some of them with sizable payments. For example, a New Yorker article late last year identified several writers (Anne Helen Petersen, Matthew Yglesias) who’d accepted “substantial” advances, and others (Robert Christgau, […]

Why would Snowflake give up such a powerful tool a mere six months after it went public? We decided to look at the notion of dual-class shares and why Snowflake may have been willing to let them go.

NASA doesn’t just let anyone launch whatever they want to space without checking in with the agency about potential impacts to its own assets on orbit, including the International Space Station (ISS). The agency has a standard set of guidelines around so-called “Conjunction Assessment,” which is basically to determine the risk that a close approach […]

OpenSea has been one of a handful of NFT marketplaces to explode in popularity in recent weeks as collectors wade into the trading of non-fungible tokens on the blockchain. While new startups have been popping up everyday, platforms that launched in crypto’s earlier times are receiving rampant attention from investors who see this wave of […]

Rivian, the EV startup backed by Amazon, Cox Automotive and T. Rowe Price, plans to install more than 10,000 chargers by the end of 2023. The network will have a dual purpose: quickly power its electric vehicle models with fast chargers installed along highways and provide Level 2 chargers at further afield locations next to […]

Determined early-stage startup founders (are there really any other kind?) always keep a sharp eye out for advantages that help them build better and faster. Well, heads up folks because this is a brand-new opportunity like no other, and it takes place at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23. We’re talking about Startup Alley+, a […]

An artificial retina would be an enormous boon to the many people with visual impairments, and the possibility is creeping closer to reality year by year. One of the latest advancements takes a different and very promising approach, using tiny dots that convert light to electricity, and virtual reality has helped show that it could […]

Google this week announced its was cutting the commissions it charges Android app developers who publish on its Google Play marketplace, following a similar move by Apple last year aimed at fending off antitrust claims. According to Google’s own estimates, 99% of its developers who sell goods and services would see their fees cut in […]

Whether it's bundling bookings, payments or just trip planning, startups are offering new mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) products intended to make transit agencies the backbone of urban mobility.

The explosion in productivity software amid a broader remote work boom has been one of the pandemic’s clearest tech impacts. But learning to use a dozen new programs while having to decipher which data is hosted where can sometimes seem to have an adverse effect on worker productivity. It’s all time that users can take […]

Shortly after Twitter announced it would begin testing a better way to display images on its app, it’s now doing the same for YouTube videos. According to a new post on Twitter’s Support account, the company will today start testing a way to watch YouTube videos directly from your home timeline within the Twitter iOS […]

Challenger banks continue to make significant advances in attracting customers away from the big incumbents by providing more modern, user-friendly tools to manage their money. Today, one of the trailblazers in this area, Kuda Technologies, is announcing funding to continue building out its specific ambition: to provide a modern banking service for Africans and the […]

Laura Crabtree spent a good chunk of her childhood watching rocket launches on television, and her entire professional career launching rockets, first at Northrup Grumman and then at SpaceX. Now, the former senior missions operations engineer at SpaceX is the co-founder and chief executive of a new LA-based space startup called Epsilon3, which says it […]

Given the market needs for tax compliance, it’s somewhat shocking how poorly companies are being served by the majority of legacy software companies.

The success of your transition into a no-code company relies on how you strategically engage employees and key stakeholders to build a culture of empowerment where anyone can automate processes in minutes.

Confluence, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace, has been around for more than 15 years, and is often a core knowledge-sharing tool for the companies that implement it. But for the most part, Confluence is a business tool and looks like it, with walls of text and the occasional graph, table or image. But user expectations have […]

Offerpad is the latest proptech company to go public via a SPAC merger. The Phoenix, Ariz.-based company announced Thursday its plans to go public by merging with Supernova Partners Acquisition Company in a deal valued at $3 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the second, or early third, quarter of 2021. The combined […]

Vega, a startup that is building a decentralized protocol for creating and trading on derivatives markets, has raised $5 million in funding. Arrington Capital and Cumberland DRW co-led the round, which also included participation from Coinbase Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Signum Capital, CMT Digital, CMS Holdings, Three Commas and a slew of others. The new investment […]

Trading platforms are being valued more like high-margin video games than software stocks.

Amazon is expanding customer deliveries via electric cargo vehicle to San Francisco, making the Bay Area the second of 16 total cities the company expects to bring its Rivian-sourced EVs to in 2021. San Francisco’s unique terrain and climate were a couple of the reasons Amazon said it chose the city for its second round […]

In cybersecurity, nothing is “unhackable.” Security bugs are an unavoidable consequence of an online world, but how companies receive and respond to hackers can make or break them. Get it right, and you build bonds with the security and hacker community and improve your security by fixing flaws before malicious actors do. Get it wrong […]

The tech industry should be more vigilant than ever in opposing discriminatory state-level anti-LGBTQ legislation that would target workers and their families.

Nvidia’s cloud gaming service GeForce Now has announced some changes when it comes to subscription plans. Starting today, paid memberships now cost $9.99 per month, or $99.99 per year — they are now called ‘Priority’ memberships. If you’re an existing ‘Founders’ member, you’ll keep the same subscription price as long as you remain a subscriber. […]

The B2B payments space has been on fire for a while, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only fueled mass adoption of digitizing finances. In regions like Latin America, the need for innovation in the sector is even more paramount than in the United States with so many people still relying on outdated processes. One Mexico […]

OpenReel, a startup that makes it easier for teams to record videos remotely, has raised $19 million in Series A funding. CEO Lee Firestone told me that he and CTO Joe Mathew first started a video agency together, but when they were given “a pretty significant project” that involved remote production, they weren’t satisfied with […]