Crunch Hype

Uber has lost a long running employment tribunal challenge in the UK’s Supreme Court — with the court dismissing the ride-hailing giant’s appeal and reaffirming earlier rulings that drivers who brought the case are workers, not independent contractors. The case, which dates back to 2016, has major ramifications for Uber’s business model (and other gig […]

AccountsIQ, a financial management software (FMS) startup founded by a team of chartered accountants (when accountants want to be entrepreneurs, you know startups are a thing), has raised €5.8 million in funding. Backing the Dublin-based company, which targets mid-sized businesses that operate multi-entities, is Finch Capital, the fintech focussed VC that recently outed its third […]

"I think there is a lot of interesting stuff coming out of Stockholm and accelerating with all recent success stories," said VNV Global's Bjorn von Sivers.

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, February 12, 2021. Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor @fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram. The Gillmor Gang on […]

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Saturday, February 6, 2021. Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor @fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram. The Gillmor Gang on […]

We explore the fallout of Facebook’s news ban, WhatsApp addresses privacy concerns and Perseverance lands on Mars. This is your Daily Crunch for February 18, 2021. The big story: Facebook’s Australian news ban is pretty broad Yes, this was the lead story in yesterday’s newsletter, but 24 hours later, we have a better sense of […]

As the Biden administration works to bring legislation to Congress to address the endemic problem of immigration reform in America, on the other side of the nation a small California startup called SESO Labor has raised $4.5 million to ensure that farms can have access to legal migrant labor. SESO’s founder Mike Guirguis raised the […]

Chorus launched its online experience on March 16 of last year. It was fairly auspicious timing, as those things go, falling the same day seven public health departments launched a joint shelter-in-place order in its native California. Like countless other companies, 2020 didn’t go according to plan for the meditation app. But the site scrambled […]

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. In very good Show News™, Chris is back! He’s working on the next iteration of the show, something that you will be able to see starting Very Soon. […]

The first church of artificial intelligence has shut its conceptual doors. Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer who avoided an 18-month prison sentence after receiving a presidential pardon last month, has closed the church he created to understand and accept a godhead based on artificial intelligence. The Way of the Future church, which Levandowski formed […]

2020 was a weird year by any measure. Certainly it was a wild ride for those in the consumer electronics category. Take smartphones — first there were manufacturing delays out of China, followed by an across the board decrease in demand. There are lots of reasons contributing to the latter, but the simplest and most […]

Mars rover Perseverance has landed on the surface of Mars after a white-knuckle descent involving picking a landing spot just moments before making a rocket-powered sky-crane landing. The rover immediately sent back its first image of Jezero Crater, which it will be exploring over the course of its mission. A clearly tense but optimistic team […]

Last month, Facebook-owned WhatsApp announced it would delay enforcement of its new privacy terms, following a backlash from confused users which later led to a legal challenge in India and various regulatory investigations. WhatsApp users had misinterpreted the privacy updates as an indication that the app would begin sharing more data — including their private […]

Algorithms are powerful and automated, but they cannot yet manage everything on their own.

Photomath, the popular mobile app that helps you solve equations, has raised a $23 million Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures. The app is a massive consumer success, and chances are you might already know about it if you have a teenager in your household. The app lets you point your phone’s camera […]

Uber today notified employees that it will extend its work from home policy through September 13. “In considering the extension, we took into account the latest scientific data and experts’ views; the fact that different countries are at different stages of recovery; and the start of the school year,” Uber Chief People Officer Nikki Krishnamurthy […]

If you use Office, Microsoft would really, really, really like you to buy a cloud-enabled subscription to Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365). But as the company promised, it will continue to make a stand-alone, perpetual license for Office available for the foreseeable future. A while back, it launched Office 2019, which includes the standard suite […]

When Wendell Brooks stepped down as managing partner and head of Intel Capital last August, Anthony Lin was named to replace him on an interim basis. At the time, it wasn’t clear if he would be given the role permanently, but today, six months later, the answer is known. In a letter to the firm’s […]

Update: There’s an entire second session of this? My lord. Today the House Financial Services Committee dragged the CEO of Reddit, a Cato wonk, social media icon DeepFuckingValue, the CEO of Citadel Kenneth Griffin, a hedgefund bro who got whomped by DeepFuckingValue, and the CEO of Robinhood Vlad Tenev, who got womped when individual investors […]

Google has appointed Dr. Marian Croak to lead its responsible artificial intelligence division within Google Research, Bloomberg reported earlier today. Croak was previously the vice president of engineering at the company. In her new role, Croak will oversee the teams working on accessibility, AI for social good, algorithmic fairness in health, brain fairness, ethical AI […]

Queenly, a marketplace for formalwear, launched into a world where its core product of dresses and gowns had a massive competitor, bigger and more elusive than Poshmark: quarantine. The coronavirus pandemic has caused the fancy in-person events that one might attend, such as award shows, pageants, proms and weddings to be canceled to limit spread. […]

Extra Crunch Live is off to a great start this year. Lightspeed’s Gaurav Gupta and Grafana’s Raj Dutt taught us how to nail the narrative. Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut and Guideline’s Kevin Busque showed us how valuable a simple pitch deck can be. And yesterday, Accel’s Steve Loughlin and Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig discussed the challenges […]

Google announced today the Apple TV+ streaming service has now arrived on the Google TV platform, starting with Chromecast with Google TV. It will also become available on Google TVs from both Sony and TCL, with expansions to other Android TV-powered devices in the months to come, Google says. Google TV was first introduced last September […]

Public SaaS companies that have adopted usage-based pricing are better at landing new customers, growing with them and retaining them.

Doing home renovations yourself can be more cost-effective than hiring a contractor, but many people don’t know where to begin. Ian Janicki, the founder and CEO of DIY home renovation startup Outfit, has always wanted to make architecture and design more accessible to people. “I realized I could leverage my knowledge of being handy to […]

Almost exactly a year after Google announced the first developer preview of Android 11, the company today released the first developer preview of Android 12. Google delayed the roll-out of Android 11 a bit as the teams and the company’s partners adjusted to working during a pandemic, but it looks like that didn’t stop it […]

Social audio app Clubhouse has now topped 8 million global downloads, despite still being in a prelaunch, invite-only mode, according to new data released today by mobile data and analytics firm App Annie. Per its estimates, Clubhouse grew from over 3.5 million global downloads as of Feb. 1, 2021, to reach 8.1 million by Feb. […]

Volta Energy Technologies, the energy investment and advisory services firm backed by some of the biggest names in energy and energy storage materials, has closed on nearly $90 million of a targeted $150 million investment fund, according to people familiar with the group’s plans. The venture investment vehicle compliments an $180 million existing commitment from […]

LOT Network, the non-profit that helps businesses of all sizes and across industries defend themselves against patent trolls by creating a shared pool of patents to immunize themselves against them, today announced that TikTik parent ByteDance is joining its group. ByteDance has acquired its fair share of patents in recent years and is itself embroiled […]

It's hard to overvalue a startup when the public market is willing to double its valuation the moment it starts to trade.

Census, a startup that helps businesses sync their customer data from their data warehouses to their various business tools like Salesforce and Marketo, today announced that it has raised a $16 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital. Other participants in this round include Andreessen Horowitz, which led the company’s $4.3 million seed round […]

A couple of weeks ago SentinelOne announced it was acquiring high-speed logging platform Scalyr for $155 million. Just this morning CrowdStrike struck next, announcing it was buying unlimited logging tool Humio for $400 million. In Humio, CrowdStrike gets a company that will provide it with the ability to collect unlimited logging information. Most companies have […]

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles is warning of a potential data breach after a contractor was hit by ransomware. The Seattle-based Automatic Funds Transfer Services (AFTS), which the DMV said it has used for verifying changes of address with the national database since 2019, was hit by an unspecified strain of ransomware earlier this month. […]

The rise of “Zoom University” was only possible because edtech wasn’t ready to address the biggest opportunity of the past year: remote learning at scale. Of course, the term encapsulates more than just Zoom, it’s a nod to how schools had to rapidly adopt enterprise video conferencing software to keep school in session in the […]

This morning Pipe17, a software startup focused on the e-commerce market, announced that it has closed $8 million in funding. Pipe17’s service helps smaller e-commerce merchants connect their digital tools, without the need to code. With the startup’s service, e-commerce operations that may lack an in-house IT function can quickly connect their selling platform to […]

Outrage fast-followed Facebook’s announcement yesterday that it was making good on its threat to block Australian users’ ability to share news on its platform. The tech giant’s intentionally broad-brush — call it antisocial — implementation of content restrictions took down a swathe of non-news publishers’ Facebook pages, as well as silencing news outlets’, illustrating its planned […]

Abound, an online marketplace that helps independent retailers stock their shelves with new products from up-and-coming brands, is announcing that it has raised $22.9 million in its first institutional round of funding. CEO Bill Shope founded the company with Niklas de la Motte and Drew Sfugaras. He told me that small retailers are constantly on […]

Varo Bank, which last year became the first U.S. neobank to be granted a national bank charter, announced this morning it’s raised another $63 million in new funding. The round was led by NBA star Russell Westbrook, who will also join the startup as an advisor focused on the direction of Varo Bank’s programs aimed […]

Today, that software is offered as a cloud service should be pretty much considered a given. Certainly any modern tooling is going to be SaaS, and as companies and employees add services, it becomes a management nightmare. Enter Torii, an early stage startup that wants to make it easier to manage SaaS bloat. Today, the […]

3D printing has come a long way over the course of the last decade, but questions about mainstream adoption still linger around the technology. Medical devices have been a pretty compelling use case — they’re not really mass produced and require a high level of personalization. Clear orthodontics are a great example of something that […]

In recent years, the U.S. has seen more renters than at any point since at least 1965, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau housing data. Competition for renters is fierce and property managers are turning to technology to get a leg up. To meet that demand, Seattle-based Knock – one startup […]

Calendars. They are at the core of how we organize our workdays and meetings, but despite regular attempts to modernize the overall calendar experience, the calendar experience you see today in Outlook or G Suite Google Workspace hasn’t really changed at its core. And for the most part, the area that startups like Calendly or […]

Marqeta is expanding into the consumer credit card space to help other brands launch credit card programs. The move comes just days after the payment card issuing company reportedly filed confidentially for an initial public offering, making it the latest fintech to make a move to the public markets. The value of the IPO is […]

Application performance monitoring startup Sentry announced today that it has reached unicorn status, raising a $60 million Series D with a post-funding valuation of $1 billion. The round was led by Accel and New Enterprise Associates, both returning investors, and Bond. Accel led Sentry’s seed funding in 2015, and has invested in each of its […]

Some more internal emails Facebook really doesn’t want you to see: Turns out in 2017 COO Sheryl Sandberg had already known for years there were problems with a free ad planning tool the company offers to marketeers to display estimates of how many people campaigns running on its platform may reach, per newly unsealed court […]

Yext Answers allows businesses to provide a better search experience on their own websites — but as the name implies, the goal is really to make sure consumers get the answers they’re looking for. “If we deliver a link [in response to a search query], we consider it a failure on our side,” Chief Strategy […]

Each year, millions of students in India rush to get an admission in universities abroad. Often they don’t know which program they should focus on, or the college that is right for their skillset and ambition. Scores of legacy and newfound firms are attempting to offer counselling to these students. But despite India contributing more […]

With offline events now firmly moved to online for the foreseeable future, startups in the networking space had to pivot fast in the face of the pandemic. One of those was Grip, previously better known as a networking app for physical conferences (including TechCrunch Disrupt, at one point). Since last year, Grip moved into an […]

Earlybird Digital East Fund — a fund associated with Germany’s Earlybird VC, but operating separately — has launched a €200m ($242m) successor fund. The fund’s focus will remain the same as before: a Seed and Series-A fund focusing on what’s known as ‘Emerging Europe’, in other words, countries stretching from the Baltics to Central and […]

There are over 1.7 billion underbanked people globally, the majority of which are from emerging markets. For them, accessing loans can be difficult, which is a problem fintechs try to solve. One way they do this is by promoting financial inclusion by underwriting credit via a proprietary algorithm. One such company is FairMoney, which describes […]