Crunch Hype

SoftBank’s earnings always leads to a bonanza of news. One storyline that has dominated the company’s earnings over the past few years that has all but disappeared though is WeWork. The co-working company, which saw its scorching-hot flame dim a few years ago and which has been parlayed into such books as Billion Dollar Loser, […]

DoorDash is expanding its robotic footprint into the kitchen. The delivery service is set to acquire Chowbotics, a Bay Area-based robotics best known for its salad-making robot, Sally. TechCrunch has confirmed the acquisition, which was first noted by The Wall Street Journal. “We have long admired the work that Chowbotics has done to increase access […]

Why is there so much M&A action in the container security space now?

SoftBank reported earnings today, including the performance of its $98.6 billion Vision Fund. The numbers were enticing, given the recent exit of DoorDash, which returned billions to SoftBank and represents one of its first truly blockbuster investments out of the fund. The company has now seen 18 investments exit, including 10 fully exited and eight […]

In February 2019 we launched Extra Crunch to help founders and startup teams get ahead, and this week we’re celebrating its two-year anniversary. Because Extra Crunch is turning two, we’re offering a limited-time deal on two-year membership plans. From now until February 15, new users signing up for Extra Crunch in the U.S. can get […]

The French government and the government-backed initiative La French Tech unveiled the new indexes that identify the most promising French startups. The 40 top-performing startups are called the Next40, and the top 120 startups are grouped into the French Tech 120. The Next40 and French Tech 120 are somewhat new as this is only the […]

SoftBank had some good data to report overnight with its third-quarter earnings, which covers the last quarter of 2020 through December 31. The company’s first Vision Fund reported large gains driven by DoorDash, where the company’s $680 million investment blew up to just shy of $9 billion — a 13.2x return in SoftBank’s math. While […]

InEvent, a startup powering virtual and hybrid events, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding from Storm Ventures. That’s just tiny fraction of the $125 million that online events platform Hopin raised last fall — in fact, a recent Equity episode suggested that Hopin might be the fastest growth story of […]

Twitter is continuing to explore the addition of subscription services and other paid features to supplement its advertising revenues, according to a report from Bloomberg this morning. The company is considering a range of ideas, the report said, including tipping, paid consumer-facing features like profile customizations or an “undo send” option, or subscription-based access to […]

Additive manufacturing has proven an ideal solution for certain tasks, but the technology still lacks more traditional methods in a number of categories. One of the biggest is the requirement for post-printing assembly. 3D printers can create extremely complex components, but an outside party (be it human or machine) is required to put them together. […]

Aydin Senkut is a Swiss Army knife of an investor. He has been on the Midas List for the past seven years, with early investments in companies like Shopify, Rovio, Fitbit, Ayden, Credit Karma, SoundHound and more. One such investment is Guideline, an enterprise tech company focused on giving small businesses a simplified way to […]

Ethena co-founders Roxanne Petraeus and Anne Solmssen began their company with a clear goal: There needs to be a more modern, and effective, way to deploy anti-harassment training to employees. Ethena’s solution is to send employees bite-sized monthly “nudges” or pings with five-minute lessons, replacing the usual one-hour annual workshop with more flexible learning. The […]

The IPO frenzy is not letting up, Bumble informed the world this morning.

A Chicago-based startup, Jiobit, wanted to make a better child location tracker than the bulky smartwatches and other insecurely designed products already on the market. So in 2018, it launched its own modular kid tracker — a small dongle of sorts that could be tied to shoelaces, belt loops, or school backpack, for example. Today, […]

The Atlanta-based BIP Capital has a new name for its venture capital operations (Panoramic Ventures); a new partner (Paul Judge); and is launching a $300 million new fund in its bid to plant a flag as the premier venture fund among the rising startup cities across the country. Miami may have grabbed headlines recently as […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You […]

Getaway CEO Jon Staff said that while the startup’s offerings weren’t designed with a pandemic in mind, they turned out to be well-suited for a time when people were eager to find safe ways to get off Zoom and out of their homes. Founded in 2015, Getaway builds “Outposts” — collections of tiny cabins in […]

BeyondID, a cloud identity consulting firm, announced a $9 million Series A today led by Tercera. It marked the first investment from Tercera, a firm that launched earlier this month with the goal of investing in service startups like Beyond. The company focuses on helping clients manage security and identity in the cloud, taking aim […]

UK-based Isotropic Systems has raised a $40 million funding in an “oversubscribed” round that the startup says will help it get its next-generation broadband terminal to the production phase by its 2022 target. The funding, a Series B that brings the company’s total raised to $60 million, was led by SES and included participation form […]

Today in an SEC filing, Tesla disclosed that it has acquired $1.5 billion in bitcoin, the popular cryptocurrency. Moreover, the company noted that it may also accept bitcoin in the future as a form of payment for its cars, though it did allow that there is some regulatory uncertainty around that effort. As the news […]

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hi friends and new readers, welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to […]

Automattic, the for-profit company tied to open source web publishing platform WordPress, is announcing that it has acquired analytics provider Parse.ly. Specifically, Parse.ly is now part of WPVIP, the organization within Automattic that offers enterprise hosting and support to publishers including TechCrunch. (We use Parse.ly, too.) WPVIP CEO Nick Gernert described this as the organization’s […]

Thousands of Chinese users suddenly found themselves unable to access Clubhouse on early Monday evening as the country prepared to start the week-long Lunar New Year holiday. Inside WeChat groups, Clubhouse users rushed to report the situation and help each other with ways to get back onto the red hot live audio app. Audio drop-in […]

Phable, a three-year-old healthtech startup that is serving patients with chronic illnesses in India, has raised $12 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale in the world’s second most populated nation. Manipal Hospitals, one of the largest healthcare providers in India, led the Series A round in Phable. Existing investor New […]

We often hear about companies working to improve the customer experience, but for IT their customers are the company’s employees. Nexthink, a late stage startup that wants to help IT serve its internal constituents better, announced a $180 million Series D today on a healthy $1.1 billion valuation. The firm, which was founded in Lausanne, […]

Elon Musk notified the world that he would be donating $100 million to pursue new technologies for carbon capture, methods through which carbon dioxide can be actively extracted from the atmosphere as a means to help stave off climate change. As TechCrunch reported in January when he made the tweet, Musk’s sizeable pool of monetary […]

VerSe Innovation, the parent firm of popular news and entertainment app Dailyhunt and short video app Josh, said on Monday it has raised over $100 million as part of a Series H financing round from Qatar Investment Authority and Glade Brook Capital Partners. The announcement follows another $100 million+ investment the startup secured from Google, […]

ByteDance is bringing its battle with archrival Tencent to the court at a time when the Chinese government moves to curve the power of the country’s internet behemoths. The Beijing Intellectual Property Court has permitted a ByteDance lawsuit brought against Tencent to proceed, a ByteDance spokesperson confirmed with TechCrunch. Upstart new media company ByteDance alleged […]

Harry Stebbings, the podcaster-turned-VC, is stepping down as a partner of Stride.VC, the London-based venture capital firm he co-founded with Fred Destin, formerly of Accel. In a series of tweets, Destin said that Stebbings won’t be involved in Stride’s second fund (though he’ll remain a partner in fund one), and will instead be focusing on […]

On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board rejected Amazon’s attempt to delay a union vote set to begin on Monday, February 8. For many, the online giant’s bid was seen as a stalling tactic, including a motion to demand votes take place in-person — a clear health risk, as the COVID-19 virus still poses a […]

TechCrunch is embarking on a major project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities. Our survey of VCs in Belfast and Northern Ireland will capture how things are faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic. We’d like to know how Northern Ireland’s startup scene is […]

We crawled into an abandoned school bus, trespassed through dilapidated hallways, dodged fleeting thunderstorms, and wandered the empty streets of Chinatown late into the evening. For two summery weeks, I couldn’t have been happier. New York City was in lockdown. I’d been quarantined in my dinky apartment, disheartened and restless. I was anxious to do […]

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. It’s been a bizarre few […]

The public markets have been so active lately that it’s hard to drum up excitement for yet another company making its way to the bull market. But, in the case of Bumble, a dating app where women message first, next week’s public debut is worth paying attention to. The market for dating startups has long […]

You’ve landed on Human Capital, a weekly newsletter detailing the latest in diversity, equity, inclusion and labor. Sign up here to receive the newsletter every Friday at 1 p.m. PT. The events of this week perfectly encapsulate the variety of worker and workplace-related struggles happening in the tech industry. Google settled some discrimination allegations with […]

For the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we looked back at “Soul,” which was released on Disney+ at the end of last year. The new Pixar film tells the story of Joe Gardner, a high school music teacher and jazz musician voiced by Jamie Foxx. Joe seems to be on the verge of […]

The SPAC mania continues unabated, with new SPACs being filed with the SEC on an almost hourly basis at times. SoftBank, the Japanese telecom conglomerate which has also been running the gigantic Vision Fund and its successor, doesn’t want to be left out. Yesterday, it filed back-to-back SPAC registration statements for two new blank-check companies. […]

The warrant ordered Google to turn over a set of user account data. Civil liberties groups have criticized the use of these dragnet search warrants.

On Friday just past midnight, I stumbled across a Clubhouse room hosted by a well-known figure in the Chinese startup community, Feng Dahui. At half-past midnight, the room still had nearly 500 listeners, many of whom were engineers, product managers, and entrepreneurs from China. The discussion centered around whether Clubhouse, an app that lets people […]

Everyone knows YouTubers and other creators are popular with internet users of all ages. But today, these influencers also have real businesses powered by a range of software tools and service providers who help weave videos, pictures, clips, memes and other types of content into sustainable success. The pandemic added fuel to existing trends pushing […]

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices […]

Venture capital and venture debt have continued to grow in the country, although the angel scene remains low-key.

Venture funds have historically counted on several types of limited partners — or LPs — for their own investing capital. One of these groups is institutional investors — think pension funds, university endowments, hospital systems and the like. Another is corporations. A third bucket centers on wealthy individuals and often their family offices. It’s a […]

Myanmar’s government extends its internet crackdown, Microsoft’s lobbying arm blacklists presidential election objectors and Dublin’s Frontline Ventures raises a new fund. This is your Daily Crunch for February 5, 2021. The big story: Myanmar blocks Twitter and Instagram The military government in Myanmar recently told telecom operators and internet service providers to block access to […]

I've never used "stonkathon" in a headline before, but it's been that kind of week.

This week, flexible workspace operator (and one-time unicorn) Knotel announced it had filed for bankruptcy and that its assets were being acquired by investor and commercial real estate brokerage Newmark for a reported $70 million. Knotel designed, built and ran custom headquarters for companies. It then managed the spaces with “flexible” terms. In March 2020, […]

The first major Section 230 reform proposal of the Biden era is out. In a new bill, Senate Democrats Mark Warner (D-VA), Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) propose changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that would fundamentally change the 1996 law widely credited with cultivating the modern internet. Section 230 […]

The Founder Institute isn’t just trying to help entrepreneurs launch new startups — with its new VC Lab, the accelerator says it’s also hoping to fuel the launch of 1,000 new venture capital funds. FI co-founder Jonathan Greechan described this as an attempt to bring more “alignment” to the startup ecosystem.” “The thinking here is […]

After “pausing” political giving to any politician who voted to overturn the 2020 election, Microsoft has clarified changes to the lobbying policy of its employee-funded PAC, doubling down on its original intention and changing gears with an eye toward funding impactful organizations. Microsoft, along with most other major companies in the tech sector and plenty […]

A legal challenge was heard today in Europe’s Court of Justice in relation to a controversial EU-funded research project using artificial intelligence for facial “lie detection” with the aim of speeding up immigration checks. The transparency lawsuit against the EU’s Research Executive Agency (REA), which oversees the bloc’s funding programs, was filed in March 2019 […]