Crunch Hype

Oldsmar is a small town in Florida that became the center of the cyber world this week when a hacker broke into its drinking water supply and tried to poison it. It’s the nightmare scenario that the security community has warned for years, one that could kill thousands by targeting the critical infrastructure that we […]

“We intend to build the Standard Oil of renewable energy,” said James McGinniss, the co-founder and chief executive of David Energy, in a statement announcing the company’s new $19 million seed round of debt and equity funding. McGinniss’ company is aiming to boost renewable energy adoption and slash energy usage in the built environment by […]

TC Sessions: Justice, our second-ever dedicated event to diversity, equity, inclusion and labor in tech, is coming up on March 3, 2021. This is a virtual one-day conference featuring the brightest innovators, leaders and worker-activists in the industry. We’re pumped to be able to host Backstage Capital founder and Managing Partner Arlan Hamilton, Gig Workers […]

LiveRamp has acquired DataFleets, a fresh young startup that made it possible to take advantage of large volumes of encrypted data without the risk or fuss of decrypting or transferring it. LiveRamp, an enterprise data connectivity platform itself, paid more than $68 million for the company, a huge multiple on DataFleet’s $4.5 million seed announced […]

The commercial real estate industry is facing its share of challenges, considering the fact that so many people are working from home (and not in offices) and retail is riding a slippery slope as more people shop online. But from downturns, opportunity emerges. Enter OptioLend, a new startup that wants to help individual investors take […]

Aurora has reached a deal with Toyota and auto-parts supplier Denso to develop and test vehicles equipped with the self-driving startup’s technology, beginning with a fleet of Toyota Sienna minivans. Engineering teams from Aurora and Toyota will work together to design and build the self-driving Sienna minivans with an aim to start testing a fleet […]

Spotify this morning confirmed it’s testing a new, synced lyrics feature in the U.S. market, following a report from Engadget. Though the streaming music service today offers live lyrics in a number of markets — 27, in fact, including its recent launch in South Korea — it has not offered lyrics in the U.S. for […]

Once upon a time, the idea of 3D-printed homes felt like a thing of the future. But as housing gets less and less affordable — especially in ultra-expensive markets such as the Bay Area — companies are getting creative in their quest to build more affordable homes using technology. One of those companies, Oakland-based Mighty […]

Jüsto, an online supermarket based in Mexico City, announced Tuesday it has raised $65 million in a Series A round led by General Atlantic. The amount is sizable for a Series A in general, but supersized for a LatAm startup. In fact, according to PitchBook data cited by General Atlantic, the round represents the largest […]

Zeta co-founder Aditi Shekar has spent the past three years tracking the ways couples share and manage their finances, from each card swipe to every split bill. Her effort led to tens of thousands of couples signing up for a free budgeting app experiment. Today, those learnings have been formed into a venture-backed startup. Zeta […]

A new study from Mount Sinai researchers published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research found that wearable hardware, and specifically the Apple Watch, can effectively predict a positive COVID-19 diagnosis up to a week before current PCR-based nasal swab tests. The investigation dubbed the ‘Warrior Watch Study,‘ used a dedicated Apple Watch and […]

“Seed rounds are up!” “Seed rounds are higher valued than ever!” “There were 10% less VCs investing in seed rounds last year!” !!!!!!!!1 We’ve all seen these stories, and we’re fine connoisseurs of them here at TechCrunch, for sure. Trend data about VC investing are always enticing to startup founders and investors, since they affect […]

To ensure anyone who wants to create change has the tools, resources and skillsets to do so, we must renew our focus on closing the skills gap and addressing deep inequalities in our society.

Every business should have a DEI game plan in 2021. Here’s ours.

SAFEs have effectively pushed a lot of public signal regarding seed deals, and even smaller rounds, underground.

During a small gathering of journalists in China, Ren Zhengfei made his first public remarks since Joe Biden was inaugurated at the 46th President of the United States. The Huawei CEO struck a hopeful tone for those gathered around the table, in comments reported by CNBC among others. “I would welcome such phone calls and […]

Eniac Ventures, a seed firm with a focus on New York startups, is announcing its fifth fund totaling $125 million. Eniac’s four general partners — Hadley Harris, Nihal Mehta, Vic Singh and Tim Young — have been making seed investments together for more than a decade, and they’ve known each other for even longer, having first […]

Nextmv, a platform that optimizes and tests decision models for logistics companies, announced the close of an $8 million Series A round earlier today. FirstMark, an existing investor, doubled down on nextmv and led the Series A. Other investors include Github CTO Jason Warner, Seamless founder Jason Finger, Stripe COO Claire Johnson, Ankit Agarwal from […]

Shopify announced this morning it’s partnered with Facebook to expand its payment option, Shop Pay, to all Shopify merchants selling across both Facebook and Instagram. This is the first time Shop Pay will be made available outside of Shopify’s own platform, and represents a significant expansion for the e-commerce platform’s payments technology. The company tells […]

This morning Monte Carlo, a startup focused on helping other companies better monitor their data inflows, announced that it has closed a $25 million Series B. The round, which was co-led by GGV and Redpoint, comes mere months after its September Series A that was worth $15 million. Accel led the company’s Series A and […]

Polish video game maker CD Projekt, which makes Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher, has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack. In a statement posted to its Twitter account, the company said it will “not give in nor negotiate” with the hackers, saying it has backups in place. “We have already secured our IT […]

One of the original startups that set out to create a low-Earth orbit satellite constellation to provide a data network here on Earth is now open for business: Swarm, which now operates 81 of its sandwich-sized satellites on orbit, announced today that its network service is live and available to commercial customers. Founded in 2017 […]

Discovery and research of new molecular compounds is an expensive business, with development costs exceeding $10 billion per substance in some cases. Part of that comes from the need to closely examine every relevant molecule, studying its chemical composition and interactions as well as its physical structure at the atomic level. Despite advances in software […]

Emergency response services have been one of the unsung heroes of the last chaotic year, providing essential and urgent medical and other assistance during a period that has faced not just the usual run of natural and man-made disasters, but a global health pandemic to boot. Today, a startup that is building tools to make […]

French startup Homa Games has raised a $15 million seed round led by e.ventures and Idinvest Partners. The company has built several in-house technologies that can take a game from a prototype to an App Store success. It partners with third-party game studios and has a few in-house game studios as well. OneRagtime, Jean-Marie Messier, […]

Four years ago when Zach Jones went to do due diligence on C-Zero, a startup out of Santa Barbara, Calif. commercializing a new approach to producing hydrogen, for the small family office he was working for, he had no idea he’d wind up as the company’s chief executive officer. Or that the company would wind […]

SentinelOne, a late-stage security startup that helps customers make sense of security data using AI and machine learning, announced today that it is acquiring Scalyr, the high-speed logging startup for $155 million in stock and cash. SentinelOne sorts through oodles of data to help customers understand their security posture, and having a tool that enables […]

Fabric, a startup powering e-commerce for companies like GNC and ABC Carpet and Home, has raised $43 million in Series A funding. The announcement comes less than four months after Fabric announced its $9.5 million seed round. CEO Faisal Masud said Fabric hadn’t intended to raise more funding so quickly, but given its growth and […]

The pandemic-fueled economic uncertainty of the last year has led many to project that the rate of credit defaults among consumers will continue to wobble into 2021. Today a startup that has built a platform to help consumers mitigate that situation is announcing some funding on the back of more demand for its services. Symend, […]

Soon, your cloud photo backups could reside on beams of light transmitted between satellites instead of in huge, power-hungry server farms here on Earth. Startup LyteLoop has spent the past five years doing tackling the physics challenges that can make that possible, and now it’s raised $40 million to help it leapfrog the remaining engineering […]

SplashLearn, a 10-year-old U.S.-headquartered edtech startup that teaches children through a game-based curriculum, has raised $18 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand to more markets. San Francisco-based Owl Ventures led the Series C funding round in SplashLearn, and Accel, which had earlier invested $7 million in the startup’s Series B, […]

The lead data supervisor for a slew of tech giants in the European Union, including Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok and Twitter, is still relying on Lotus Notes to manage complaints and investigations lodged under the bloc’s flagship General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), per freedom of information requests made by the Irish Council for Civil […]

There’s been a profusion of startups emerging in the last year around the concept of rolling up smaller e-commerce businesses — operations that mainly sell and distribute their products on marketplace platforms like Amazon’s — using economies of scale to bring them together to run and grow them more efficiently. Today, one of the latest […]

Finch Capital, the early-stage fintech VC with a presence in London and Amsterdam, has raised a third fund. Targeting a final close of €150 million, the fund has already secured €85 million from LPs ready to deploy. Out of Finch Capital “Europe III,” the VC will invest in fintech startups at the Series A and […]

Hoxton Farms, a U.K. startup that wants to produce animal fat without using animals, has raised £2.7 million in seed funding. The round is led by Founders Fund, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm founded by Peter Thiel. Also participating is Backed, Presight Capital, CPT Capital and Sustainable Food Ventures. Still at the R&D stage, […]

Tesla, which is seeing rapid growth in China as it ramps up local manufacturing capacity, has been called upon by the Chinese government for talks over quality issues in its electric cars. A group of Chinese authorities, including the country’s top market regulator, cyberspace watchdog and transportation authority, held talks with Tesla after consumers complained […]

LanzaJet, the renewable jet fuel startup spun out from the longtime renewable and synthetic fuel manufacturer, LanzaTech, has inked a supply agreement with British Airways to supply the company with at least 7500 tons of fuel additive per yer. The deal marks the second agreement between the UK-based airline and a renewable jet fuels manufacturer […]

Maya is dedicated to making it easier for women to get healthcare, especially for sensitive issues like reproductive and mental health. Now the startup, based in Bangladesh and incorporated in Singapore, is expanding into new countries. Maya announced today it has raised $2.2 million in seed funding, which it said is the largest raised by […]

Reddit has raised a new funding round, totalling $250 million. This is the company’s Series E round of financing, and it comes hot on the heels of renewed public attention on the site that has dubbed itself ‘the front page of the Internet,’ owing to the role the subreddit r/WallStreetBets played in the recent meteoric […]

Dayna Grayson and Rachel Holt seemingly didn’t have the best timing. It was late in 2019 when the two, who met six years ago in Washington through a mutual acquaintance, decided to act on earlier conversations and start a fund together called Construct Capital. At the time, Grayson spied an opportunity to create a new […]

Tesla’s $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin may be good for Elon Musk, but it’s definitely risky for the company that made him the world’s richest man, according to investors, analysts and money managers at some of the country’s largest banks. As a standard bearer for the consumer electric vehicle industry and the broader climate tech […]

Cynthia Perry, a former design research senior manager at Salesforce who left earlier this month, posted her resignation letter on LinkedIn that detailed her negative treatment at the company, Protocol first reported. In it, Perry, a Black woman, alleges she experienced “countless microaggressions and inequity” during her time there. Ultimately, Perry said she left her […]

DoorDash acquires a salad-making robotics startup, Twitter confirms subscription plans and Tesla makes a big bet on bitcoin. This is your Daily Crunch for February 8, 2021. The big story: DoorDash acquires Chowbotics DoorDash has acquired the Bay Area startup behind Sally, a salad-making, vending machine-style robot that added contactless ordering last fall. DoorDash says […]

Vaccine misinformation has been around since well before the pandemic, but ensuring that anti-scientific conspiracies don’t get boosted online is more crucial than ever as the world races against the spread of a deadly, changing virus. Now, Facebook says it will expand the criteria it uses to take down false vaccine claims. Under the new […]

Income-share agreements, or ISAs, have been gathering force as an alternative financial model for students, particularly at non-traditional schools like coding boot camps and trade schools. We’ve done some pretty deep dives into the space over the years in terms of how these loan products incentivize students and colleges to work together for better professional […]

Micromobility startup Helbiz, which now operates across Europe and the USA, is merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to become a publicly listed company, giving it a war chest to potentially roll-up smaller competitors in the space, as well as the resources to expand into “cloud” or “ghost” kitchens as part of a […]

Unless you’ve got someone’s Amazon Wish List, gift giving today can still be fairly difficult. You don’t necessarily know a friend or family member’s shipping address, their sizes or their particular tastes, at times. A new startup called Goody, backed by a recent $4 million fundraise, wants to help. Through its newly launched mobile gifting […]

Late Friday, Oscar Health filed to go public, adding another company to today’s burgeoning IPO market. The New York-based health insurance unicorn has raised well north of $1 billion during its life, making its public debut a critical event for a host of investors. Oscar Health lists a placeholder raise value of $100 million in […]

Ifeoma Ozoma, a former Pinterest employee who alleged racial and gender discrimination at the company, is co-leading new legislation with California State Senator Connie Leyva and others to empower those who experience workplace discrimination and/or harassment. Introduced today, the Silenced No More Act (SB 331) would prevent the use of non-disclosure agreements in workplace situations […]

This group of companies are what we're calling our $50 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) group, though we're not too strict on that revenue figure.