Crunch Hype

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 […]

When Laura Wittig and Liza Moiseeva met as guests on a podcast about sustainable fashion, they jibed so well together that they began one of their own: Good Together. Their show’s goal was to provide listeners with a place to learn how to be eco-conscious consumers, but with baby steps. Wittig thinks the non-judgmental environment […]

BeGreatTV, an online education platform featuring Black and brown instructors, recently closed a $450K pre-seed round from Stand Together Ventures Lab, Arlan Hamilton, Tiffany Haddish and others. The goal with BeGreatTV is to enable anyone to learn from talented Black and brown innovators and leaders, founder and CEO Cortney Woodruff told TechCrunch. “When you think […]

Myanmar’s new military government has ordered local telecom operators, internet gateways, and other internet service providers to block Twitter and Instagram in the South Asian country days after imposing a similar blackout on Facebook to ensure “stability” in the Southeast Asian nation. Norwegian telecom giant Telenor, which is one of the largest telecos in Myanmar, said […]

This week on Extra Crunch Live, the duo explained how they came together for Grafana's Series A — and eventually, its Series B. We've included highlights as well as the full video of our conversation.

When you are able to navigate a world that is designed for you, it’s easy to avoid thinking about how the world is designed for you. But it can be different if you are disabled. At TechCrunch Sessions: Justice on March 3, we will examine the importance of ensuring accessible product design from the beginning. […]

In a single week, Robinhood raised more money than all startups in Spain, Italy, Ireland, Poland, Austria, Hungary and Russia combined last year.

Tickr, an app that allows U.K. consumers to make financial investments based on their impact on society and the environment, has secured £2.5 million ($3.4 million) in funding lead by Ada Ventures, a VC which focuses on “impact” startups. The cash will be used for product development, expanding the user base, and eventually taking Tickr […]

India is restoring 4G internet services in Jammu and Kashmir, a senior government official said Friday evening, 18 months after imposing a sweeping communications blackout in the Muslim-majority region in an attempt to curb the spread of potential backlash over New Delhi’s decision to revoke Kashmir’s semiautonomous status in August of 2019. Rohit Kansal, principal […]

Dublin-based Frontline Ventures has released details of its new €70 million ($83.8 million) Frontline Seed Fund III, which will be aimed at European B2B startups. The new fund will bring Frontline’s total funds under management to €250 million, deployed out of its offices in London, Dublin and San Francisco. Backers of the fund include the […]

Djamo, a financial super app for consumers in Francophone Africa, is the first startup from Ivory Coast to get backing from Y Combinator. While there has been a huge profusion of financial services that have emerged in recent years in Africa, Djamo’s mission is to try to plug one specific and very underserved gap in […]

Twinco Capital, a Madrid and Amsterdam-based startup making it easier to access supply chain finance, has raised €3 million in funding. Leading the round is Spanish VC fund Mundi Ventures, with participation from previous backer Finch Capital and several unnamed angels. Twinco Capital also has a debt facility with the Spanish investment bank EBN Banco […]

PayPal is shutting down its domestic business in India, less than four years after the American giant kickstarted local operations in the world’s second largest internet market. “From 1 April 2021, we will focus all our attention on enabling more international sales for Indian businesses, and shift focus away from our domestic products in India. […]

Kuaishou, a Chinese video app that’s largely underappreciated outside China, has just completed a massive initial public offering in Hong Kong. The app is by far the biggest rival for Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese version, and unlike many Western video platforms that make money from ads and subscriptions, Kuaishou’s cash cow is its tipping business. Kuaishou’s […]

Democrats in the House voted to strip freshman Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of some of her responsibilities Thursday, citing her penchant for violent, anti-democratic and at times anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Greene has expressed support for a range of alarming conspiracies, including the belief that the 2018 Parkland school shooting that killed 17 people was […]

This probably falls under “good problems,” in the grand scheme of things. After another record quarter, Peloton has announced that it will invest more than $100 million in air and ocean freight deliveries due to “longer-than-acceptable wait times for the delivery of our products.” The fitness company is among those tech firms that have seen […]

NASA has awarded Firefly Aerospace a $93.3 million contract to take a lunar lander module loaded with experiments to the surface of the moon. While the company will not be performing the launch itself, it will be providing the spacecraft and “Blue Ghost” lander for the 2023 mission. The space agency made the award as […]

TechCrunch tuned into 500 Startups' 27th demo day today, keen to get our eyes on the accelerator's latest companies.

Microsoft tries to improve corporate intranet, Google will offer new smartphone health measurements and 23andMe is going public via SPAC. This is your Daily Crunch for February 4, 2021. The big story: Microsoft rethinks corporate intranet Microsoft launched what it’s calling a new “employee experience platform,” designed to reinvent those corporate intranet sites that large […]

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. The good news is that we managed to fit it all into a single episode this week. The bad news is that that means the show […]

Huawei’s status in the U.S. has been one of many question marks hovering over the newly minted Biden administration. The smartphone maker was one of a number of Chinese companies added to the Department of Commerce’s “entity list” during Trump’s four years in office. Gina Raimondo, Joe Biden’s nominee for Commerce secretary, has offered what […]

As Democrats settle into control of both chambers of Congress, signs of the party’s legislative priorities are starting to manifest. So far, lawmakers’ interest in reimagining tech’s regulatory landscape appears to be alive and well. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is out with a new proposal for antitrust reform that would create more barriers for big […]

Robotic process automation (RPA) has found a strong foothold in the world of enterprise IT through its effective use of AI and other technology to help automate repetitive tasks to free up people to focus on more complicated work. Today, a startup called Infinitus is coming out of stealth to apply this concept to the […]

As startups have stayed private longer and liquidity has become harder to secure for early employees and investors, more and more shareholders have looked for ways to unload their shares to others. All the way back in 2011, companies like SecondMarket were seeing nine-figures’ worth of shares being traded on their secondary share platforms. That […]

Twitter is upping its data analytics game in the form of an expanded, multiyear partnership with Google Cloud. The social media giant first began working with Google in 2018 to move Hadoop clusters to the Google Cloud platform as a part of its Partly Cloudy strategy. With the expanded agreement, Twitter will move its offline […]

Virtual health and wellness platforms have grown increasingly popular throughout the pandemic, but a new startup wants to focus that effort exclusively on senior citizens. Bold, a digital health and wellness service, plans to prevent chronic health problems in older adults through free and personalized exercise programs. Co-founded by Amanda Rees and her partner Hari […]

The recent Databricks funding round, a $1 billion investment at a $28 billion valuation, was one of the year’s most notable private investments so far. For Databricks signaled its IPO readiness by disclosing to TechCrunch last year that it had scaled its revenue run rate from $200 million to $350 million in a year, so […]

Fundraising is challenging, especially for deep tech founders who need to get investors excited about a complex technology, a complex sales cycle and a complex risk profile.

Meet moka.care, a French startup that has built several services that should help you improve your psychological well-being. The company sells its solution to employers directly. They can then offer access to moka.care to their employees. The startup raised a $3 million (€2.5 million) funding round from Singular, the VC firm founded by former Alven […]

The Venmo mobile payments app is going to look very different in 2021 as it inches closer to neobank territory with expansions into budgeting, saving and cryptocurrency, said Venmo parent company PayPal, during its fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday. The company also plans to put its $4 billion Honey acquisition to work by integrating its suite […]

Flux, the London fintech that has built a technology platform for banks and merchants to power itemised digital receipts and more, has seen its lengthy pilot with Barclays bear fruit. Announced formally today — but actually quietly rolled out a few months ago — Flux-powered digital receipts are now available as an opt-in for all […]

Latitude, a startup building games with “infinite storylines” generated by artificial intelligence, is announcing that it has raised $3.3 million in seed funding. The idea of an AI-generated story might make you think of hilariously nonsensical experiments like “Sunspring,” but Latitude’s first title, AI Dungeon, is an impressively open-ended (and coherent) text adventure game where […]

As impressive as the cameras in our smartphones are, they’re fundamentally limited by the physical necessities of lenses and sensors. Metalenz skips over that part with a camera made of a single “metasurface” that could save precious space and battery life in phones and other devices… and they’re about to ship it. The concept is […]

Today, two giants of the cannabis industry are announcing a partnership to create an improved retail experience for consumers and dispensaries alike. Through this partnership, Leafly and Jane’s technology solutions will offer dispensaries powerful tools to sync online e-commerce with in-store inventory — something that is sorely lacking in the cannabis world. Legal weed shoppers […]

Identity and access management service Okta today launched its new design system, both for its own corporate and brand use, but also as an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license. The Odyssey Design System, as the company calls it, is similar to the likes of Google’s Material Design or Microsoft’s Fluent Design. It may […]

Microsoft today launched Viva, a new “employee experience platform,” or, in non-marketing terms, its new take on the intranet sites most large companies tend to offer their employees. This includes standard features like access to internal communications built on integrations with SharePoint, Yammer and other Microsoft tools. In addition, Viva also offers access to team […]

With more of us spending significant amounts of time at home because of Covid-19, our attention has turned increasingly to how and what we eat. Even for those who like to cook, but especially for those who might not have the time or inclination, it can be a challenge to come up with tasty, nutritious, […]

It was only a matter of time before application programming interfaces came for the carbon credit offsets — the voluntary programs that allow companies to cancel out their greenhouse gas emissions (on paper) by financing renewable energy projects or carbon sequestration projects globally. Massive e-commerce and payments companies Shopify and Stripe are already providing emissions […]

Joompay, a startup with an iOS and Android app similar to Venmo and TransferWise, has now launched in Europe after obtaining a Luxembourg Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license. The app allows people to send and receive money with anyone, instantly and for free. However, it enters a crowded market, competing with peer to peer payment […]

Genetics testing and genome research company 23andMe is set to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition corp (SPAC) VG Acquisition Corp, a vehicle set up by Richard Branson and his company Virgin Group. The transaction is expected to result in 23andMe having around $984 million in cash available at close to spend […]

Monkey, a financial marketplace for receivables in Latin America, has raised $6 million in Series A funding. Quona Capital and Kinea Ventures co-led the round. The São Paulo-based startup was founded in 2016 by a trio that includes former Citi investment banker Gustavo Müller, Bruno Oliveira (who worked in strategic planning for Telefonica) and Felipe […]

London and Barcelona based audio-as-a-service SaaS startup Aflorithmic has scooped up $1.3 million in seed funding from Crowd Media Holdings, an Australia-based company focused on influencer-based ‘social commerce’ and marketing. It’s taking a 10% stake in Aflorithmic, per a press release, where it says the strategic investment is aimed at enabling it to offer FaceTime […]

Most Indians can’t access credit from formal financial institutions because they don’t have a credit score of any form to prove their creditworthiness. As an alternative, they look at informal institutions such as pawn shops or more recently, apps that offer loans without any paperwork but could charge interest rates as high as 1,000% and […]

We talk a lot these days about the future of work and the proliferation of new and better tools for distributed workforces, but companies focused on developing fleet management software — even if they have not really been viewed as “tech startups” — have been working on this problem for many years already. Today, one […]

It’s been a year since I covered ManoMano, the French e-commerce platform focused on DIY, home improvement and gardening products. And 2020 has been a successful years as the company’s gross merchandise volume doubled to €1.2 billion ($1.45 billion at today’s rate). ManoMano’s sales are also accelerating as the company reported a 50% increase in […]

Relationships can be messy, including between startup founders and their venture investors. But in a case that takes messy to an extreme, an insurtech company in Santa Monica, Calif. called Sure is alleging that its Series A investor used privileged information to launch a very similar, New York-based startup called Boost. Sure further assets that […]

Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna, Quadpay. These are some of the big global players in the buy now, pay later (BNPL) movement. They allow shoppers to purchase products online and pay in installments with nominal or no fees, and have become more prominent due to how the pandemic accelerated e-commerce market growth around the world. Credit card […]

Until now General Catalyst has been better known as a US VC which makes occasional forays into European territory. But that changes with the news today that Chris Bischoff, an experienced London-based investor, joins as Managing Director of its new London office. Bischoff brings with him an extensive track record of investment across the US […]