Crunch Hype

A weekend statement from the Taiwanese government over its ability to provide water to the nation’s chip manufacturers in the face of an unprecedented drought make it clear that climate change is a direct threat to the foundations of the tech industry. As reported by Bloomberg, Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen took to Facebook on Sunday […]

Spain’s government has reached an agreement with trade unions and business associations over labor reforms that will see delivery platform couriers recognized as employees, it said today. Once such a law is passed, the development could have major ramifications for platforms operating in the market — which include the likes of Deliveroo, Glovo and UberEats, […]

In just a few hours, we’re going to (virtually) meet up in the Magic City, Miami. Since we first let you know about our new Spotlight series, we’ve gotten a ton of registrations and some amazing submissions for our pitch-off. The small event features three segments: networking, a pitch-off, and a fireside chat with Rebecca […]

Google Cloud today announced the launch of a new support option for its Premium Support customers that run mission-critical services on its platform. The new service, imaginatively dubbed Mission Critical Services (MCS), brings Google’s own experience with Site Reliability Engineering to its customers. This is not Google completely taking over the management of these services, […]

Facebook is expanding its monetization options for video creators. For anyone watching videos posted by those creators, that probably means you’ll see more ads. Facebook App Monetization Director Yoav Arnstein wrote in a blog post that creators will now be able to include in-stream ads in videos that are as short as one minute — […]

“It seems quite odd that no one has built the SpaceX equivalent for the ocean,” Anthony DiMare tells TechCrunch. “There’s no big, modern technology company that fits the space yet.” DiMare cofounded Bedrock Ocean Exploration last year, with Charles Chiau. The latter brought a depth of robotics expertise to the space, while DiMare has experience […]

If there were any doubt about a cryptocurrency boom, we need look no further than at the explosion of growth of certain companies in the space. One such company is BlockFi, which today announced it has closed on a massive $350 million Series D funding that values it at $3 billion. While this news in […]

Warehouse automation company Nimble Robotics today announced that it has raised a $50 million Series A. Led by DNS Capital and GSR Ventures and featuring Accel and Reinvent Capital, the round will go toward helping the company essentially double its headcount this year. Founded by former Stanford PhD student Simon Kalouche, the system utilizes deep […]

Scott Galloway, the New York University professor, author, and tech entrepreneur, is taking the wraps off a $30 million Series A round for his newest company, Section4, a platform for business “upskilling” that has now raised $37 million altogether. The company is premised on the belief that millions of workers need help to stay competitive […]

With prices ranging from $15 to $50, the strawberries grown by the vertical farming startup Oishii aren’t going to be found in just any grocery store. Instead, the nearly five year-old startup is taking what its co-founder Hiroki Koga called the Tesla approach and targeting the highest end of the market in a New York […]

SpaceX now has 60 more Starlink satellites in orbit – it launched its latest full complement of the internet broadband spacecraft early this morning from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Just last Thursday, SpaceX launched its last batch of 60, and this past week it also confirmed that it’s expanding its beta of the Starlink internet […]

Primary care startup Forward Health is looking to expand its tech-powered, personalized healthcare model across the U.S., and will use a new $225 million Series D raise to help make it happen. The new capital comes from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Mark Benioff – and recording artist The Weeknd – among others. I spoke […]

Three and a half years after launching Google Pay in India, the Android-maker is paving the way to tap its users’ transaction data for monetization purposes — though it plans to give them ample warning, and the option to opt-out. Google said on Thursday that it will roll out an update to Google Pay next […]

Taavet Hinrikus, the first employee of Skype and co-founder of fintech giant Wise (formerly TransferWise), is teaming up with Teleport co-founder and current Topia CPO Sten Tamkivi to create a new investment vehicle. Both are already seasoned investors — Hinrikus is one of Europe’s bona fide super angels, with over 100 investments to his name […]

The traditional process of buying, insuring and financing cars across emerging markets can be challenging, and it defeats the purpose of building an all-around car shopping experience. Today, FlexClub, a South African company, has been provided with $5 million to improve drivers’ experience in these markets. FlexClub was founded in 2019 by Marlon Gallardo, Rudolf […]

mPharma, a Ghanaian health tech startup that manages prescription drug inventory for pharmacies and their suppliers, today announced its expansion to Ethiopia. The company was founded by Daniel Shoukimas, Gregory Rockson and James Finucane in 2013. It specializes in vendor-managed inventory, retail pharmacy operations and market intelligence serving hospitals, pharmacies and patients. In Africa, the pharmaceutical […]

Snyk, a developer of application security technology, is now worth $4.7 billion after a new fundraising and secondary sale that totaled $300 million. In all, investors have poured $470 million into the company after this new investment, which was led by Accel and Tiger Global, with participation from a host of existing investors including Addition, […]

Montreal-based Heyday announced today that it has raised $6.5 million Canadian ($5.1 million in US dollars) in additional seed funding. Co-founder and CEO Steve Desjarlais told me that the startup’s goal is to allow retailers to support more automation and more personalization in their online customer interactions, while co-founder and CMO Etienne Merineau described it […]

Apple is making a big investment in Germany, Russia takes aim at Twitter and Roblox goes public. This is your Daily Crunch for March 10, 2021. P.S. Don’t forget to sign up for TC Early Stage 2021, a virtual event focused on operations and fundraising that we’re holding on April 1 and 2! Apple announces […]

Last month Jeff Bezos announced he would step down as CEO of Amazon later this year, moving into the executive chairman role, while passing the baton to AWS CEO Andy Jassy. Could Marc Benioff, co-founder, chairman and CEO at Salesforce be the next big-name executive to make a similar move? A Reuter’s story published on […]

The U.S. Department of Defense is setting up a working group to focus on climate change. The new group will be led by Joe Bryan, who was appointed as a special assistant to the Secretary of Defense focused on climate earlier this year. The move is one of several steps that the Biden administration has […]

A newly launched Mac app called Superpowered aims to make it easier to stay on top of all your Zoom calls and Google Meets, without having to scramble to find the meeting link in your inbox or calendar app at the last minute. Instead of relying on calendar reminders, Superpowered offers a notification inbox for the […]

Actor Terry Crews is going in on the blockchain. With the help of social currency startup Roll, Crews is launching his own social currency, $POWER. But first, let’s break down what that means. Anyone can create a social currency, which hundreds of creators have already done via Roll, to change their relationships with fans and […]

Facebook has challenged the FTC’s antitrust case against it using a standard playbook that questions the agency’s arguably expansive approach to defining monopolies. But the old reliable “we’re not a monopoly because we never raised prices” and “how can it be anti-competitive if we never allowed competition” may themselves soon be challenged by new doctrine […]

As we look ahead to a hybrid work world, we must find new ways to continue supporting employee productivity and creativity. It’s only when we’re able to fully realize passive collaboration virtually that we’ll have unlocked the full potential of remote and hybrid work situations.

As Roblox began to trade today, the company’s shares shot above its reference price of $45 per share. Currently, Roblox is trading at $71.10 per share, up just over 60% from the reference price that it announced last night. That effort finally set a directional value of sorts on Roblox’s shares before it floated on […]

British electric vehicle subscription service Onto has partnered with Shell to give its users access to charging stations in preparation for a wave of new EVs coming to market over the next several years. The partnership, which Shell announced Tuesday, will give Onto customers access to more than 3,400 Shell Recharge charge points in the […]

Twitter says it’s running a test with a small subset of iOS and Android users to “give people an accurate preview” of what an image will look like without the trial and error that process involves now. As it stands now, the platform automatically crops images to make them display in a more condensed way […]

I’m an entrepreneur who wants to expand my startup to the U.S. What are the benefits and drawbacks of various types of visas and green cards?

This morning Arist, a startup that sells software allowing other organizations to offer SMS-based training to staff, announced that it has extended its seed round to $3.9 million after adding $2 million to its prior raise. TechCrunch has covered the company modestly before this seed-extension, noting that it was part of the CRV-backed Liftoff List, […]

"Today, there is a greater number of mature fintech companies, so this could be slowing down the pace at which seed- or angel-stage fintech companies are forming or receiving funding."

A team of mobile app engineers and designers from companies like Rent the Runway, ClassPass, Kickstarter and others, are now launching their own startup, Runway, to address the common pain points they experienced around the mobile app release cycle. With Runway, teams can connect their existing tools to keep track of the progress of an […]

As the U.S. reportedly readies for retaliation against Russia for hacking into some of the government’s most sensitive federal networks, the U.S. is facing another old adversary in cyberspace: China. Microsoft last week revealed a new hacking group it calls Hafnium, which operates in, and is backed by, China. Hafnium used four previously unreported vulnerabilities […]

Korean e-commerce giant Coupang is expected to hold one of the biggest tech IPOs of the year on March 11. The company disclosed earlier this month that it is seeking up to $3.6 billion at a potential $51 billion valuation on the New York Stock Exchange. Founded in 2010, Coupang is sometimes described as the […]

Apple has announced that it plans to increase its corporate spendings in Germany. In particular, the company wants to set up a new facility in Munich, Germany. Called the European Silicon Design Center, the team will focus on 5G and potentially future wireless technologies. The company said that Munich is already its largest engineering hub […]

On the heels of a heated standoff between platforms and publishers in Australia, U.S. lawmakers reintroduced a piece of legislation that would allow the news industry to collectively negotiate content deals with tech companies. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act is sponsored in the Senate by Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Kennedy (R-LA) and in […]

In recent years, the tech and venture scene in Latin America has been growing at an accelerated pace. More global investors are backing startups in the region and certain sectors in particular, such as fintech, are exploding. Global investors are not only pouring money into companies. They’re also investing in funds. Today, Volpe Capital announced […]

On January 6, America watched in horror as groups that recruited and organized on major social media sites violently attacked the seat of American democracy. Within a matter of hours, tech companies took actions they’d said we’re out of the question for years. But real change requires thoughtful policy and a clear-eyed look at the […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down and focus on a single topic, or theme. This is our sweet spot: going beyond definitions and into the dirty and deep impact of how a phenomenon could impact […]

Japan is under discussed as an expansion target for American startups, but in the past few years it has become a top market for companies like Slack, Salesforce, Twitter and, more recently, Clubhouse. Today SIP Global Partners is announcing a new fund to invest in early-stage U.S. startups that have the potential to expand into […]

DataGrail, a startup that helps customers understand where their data lives in order to help comply with a growing body of privacy regulations, announced a $30 million Series B today. Felicis Ventures led the round with help from Basis Set Ventures, Operator Collective and previous investors. One of the interesting aspects of this round was […]

Advances in technology provide all kinds of benefits, but also introduce risks — especially to already marginalized populations. AI for the People’s Mutale Nkonde, disability rights lawyer Haben Girma, and author of Algorithms of Oppression Safiya Umoja Noble have studied and documented these risks for years in their work. They joined us at TC Sessions: […]

The wave of shared electric scooters that swept through cities several years ago helped Populus AI get its start. Now, surging demand for delivery — and the pressure it places on curb space — is helping the transportation data startup attract new capital and expand to more cities. Populus, a San Francisco-based startup founded in […]

Adobe has been moving quickly to update its imaging software to work natively on Apple’s new in-house processors for Macs, starting with the M1-based MacBook Pro and MacBook Air released late last year. After shipping native versions of Lightroom and Camera Raw, it’s now releasing an Apple Silicon-optimized version of Photoshop, which delivers big performance […]

Israel’s retrain.ai, which uses AI and Machine Learning to read job boards at scale and to gain insight into where the job market is going, has closed $9M Series A led by Square Peg. Since retrain.ai’s $4M seed round last year was unannounced (led by Hetz Ventures, with TechAviv and .406 Ventures participating) that means it’s […]

On the heels of last week’s launch of a new Q&A format for creators responding to viewer questions, TikTok today announced it’s rolling out new commenting features. Creators will now be able to control which comments can be posted on their content, before those comments go live. Another new addition, aimed at users who are […]

Tetrate, the company commercializing an open source networking project that allows for easier data sharing across different applications, has raised $40 million. The round, led by Sapphire Ventures underscores the importance of the Istio project and just how critical services that facilitate cross-platform data sharing have become. Sapphire was joined by other new investors including Scale […]

Julia Collins is the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn in the form of Zume, a robotics company that cooked pizzas and delivered them at the same time. The company attracted investment from Softbank and was valued at a reported $2.25 billion in 2019, but ultimately didn’t live up to expectations. Collins is now […]

In its latest strike against online content it doesn’t control Russia is throttling Twitter. State agency Roskomnadzor said today it was taking the action in response to the social media not removing banned content, claiming it had identified more than 3,000 unlawful posts that have not been taken down — and warning it could implement […]

This morning Clara, a corporate spend-management startup focused on the Latin American market, announced its product launch and a $3.5 million pre-seed round led by General Catalyst. The company’s funding caught TechCrunch’s eye as there has been a flurry of funding for related companies serving the United States market. From Divvy to Brex to Ramp […]