Crunch Hype

Enterprise IT has been completely transformed by SaaS the past decade. Okta last week published a report that showed that the largest companies now use 175 apps, a doubling over the past few years. More professionals have more tools to do their jobs than ever before. It’s an explosion of creativity and expressiveness and operational […]

SpaceX has announced its first all-civilian private spaceflight mission, a high-priced galactic tourism launch that it hopes to fly by the fourth quarter of 2021. The mission, which will use SpaceX’s Dragon crew spacecraft and its Falcon 9 rocket, will include Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman, who is CEO of Shift4 Payments, as well as […]

When Google originally announced Stadia, its cloud gaming service, the company also announced a first-party game studio. Stadia Games and Entertainment was supposed to release exclusive titles for the new platform. And yet, Google has changed its mind and is now shutting down its internal game studios. “Given our focus on building on the proven […]

Otonomo, the cloud-based software startup that help companies capture and monetize connected car data, is headed to the public market. The Israeli-based startup said Monday it has agreed to merge with special purpose acquisition company Software Acquisition Group Inc. II with a valuation of $1.4 billion. Otonomo is joining a growing pool of automotive startups that […]

Every sport has its practice drills and exercises to help players hone skills between games. Why would esports be any different? Gwoop, a startup out of Minnesota, wants to be the place where gamers go to train between matches. They’re building up a collection of free browser-based training tools meant to help you measure and […]

Following its $16 million Series B last fall, event discovery network IRL is launching a new website that adds more social features around events, including profiles, chats and the ability to join group events, among other things. With the changes, users will also be able to receive personalized event recommendations, participate in group events, as […]

Another hour, another billion-dollar round. That’s how February is kicking off. This time it’s Databricks, which just raised $1 billion Series G at a whopping $28 billion post-money valuation. Databricks is a data-and-AI focused company that interacts with corporate information stored in the public cloud. News of the new round began leaking last week. Franklin […]

Even after COVID-19, companies that thrive — or even simply survive — will be design-mature and digital-first.

UiPath, one of the leaders in the quickly growing robotic process automation (RPA) space, announced Monday that it has closed on $750 million in Series F funding at a staggering post-money valuation of $35 billion. Existing backers Alkeon Capital and Coatue co-led the round, which also included participation from other returning investors such as Altimeter […]

In addition to AirPlay support for Fitness+, today’s iOS 14.5 developer beta is bringing some key new features to mobile operating system. At the top of the list is undoubtedly Apple Watch unlock for users wearing face coverings. The long-awaited feature arrives a year or so into a pandemic that has made face masks a […]

Microsoft today announced that Azure Quantum, its cloud-based platform for using quantum hardware and software tools from partners like Honeywell Quantum Solutions, IonQ, 1QBit and others, is now in public preview. Azure Quantum went into limited preview last May. At the time, it was only open to a small number of select Microsoft partners and […]

A week after introducing Time to Walk, Apple has released another software update aimed at expanding its Fitness+ footprint. With today’s arrival the developer seed of watchOS 7.4 and iOS 14.5, the company is adding a new feature that will make it possible to stream workouts to an AirPlay enabled TV – with some caveats. […]

Smartphone maker Xiaomi has sued the United States government over its inclusion in a military blacklist. The filing, which was submitted on Friday, calls the decision “unlawful and unconstitutional.” The Chinese smartphone maker adds: It is not owned or controlled by, or otherwise affiliated with the Chinese government or military, or owned or controlled by […]

Poland-based Telemedico has closed a €5.5 million (~$6.6M) Series A round of funding. The round is led by Flashpoint Venture Capital, Uniqa Ventures, PKO VC, Black Pearls VC (an existing investor) and Adamed. Telehealth services specifically, and digital health more broadly, have racked up plenty of growth during the pandemic as demand for remote consultations […]

Google regularly tweaks its search results pages and tries out new designs. It’s not that often, though, that it adds new features to those results, so when it does, it’s worth paying attention to. Today, Google is adding a new menu item to virtually all search results in English in the U.S. on mobile, desktop […]

Kleiner Perkins is one of the most prestigious venture firms in all of Silicon Valley. The firm has invested in startups like Twitter, Google, Square, Peloton, Spotify, Robinhood and many, many more. As such, the folks at Kleiner Perkins know a thing or two about what it takes to fundraise across the various stages of […]

Popular, highly-scrutinized trading app Robinhood has raised $2.4 billion to its balance sheet from shareholders, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal and then confirmed by the company. The private startup raised $1 billion on Friday, meaning that it has raised $3.4 billion in a handful of days as it seeks to support a […]

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday 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 […]

Millions of Ford and Lincoln-branded vehicles will be powered by Android operating system beginning in 2023 as part of a six-year partnership announced Monday that will bring embedded Google apps and services to drivers. Ford and Google said as part of the partnership they will establish a new collaborative group called Team Upshift that will […]

Google and Ford today announced a new partnership around bringing Android Automotive to Ford’s Ford- and Lincoln-branded cars, starting in 2023. But at the same time, the two companies also announced that Ford has chosen Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider. “With Google Cloud, Ford will digitally transform from the front office to the […]

Weights & Biases, a startup building tools for machine learning practitioners, is announcing that it’s raised $45 million in Series B funding. The company was founded by Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis — Biewald and Van Pelt previously founded CrowdFlower/Figure Eight (acquired by Appen). Weights & Biases says it now has more […]

So much for a blowback!

Apple has introduced an iCloud Passwords Chrome extension that will make life easier for those who use both Windows computers and other Apple devices, like a Macbook or an iPhone. The new browser extension lets you access the passwords you saved in Safari on your other Apple devices, then use them within Chrome when you’re on […]

New transparency figures released by Amazon show the company responded to a record number of government data demands in the last six months of 2020. The new figures land in the company’s bi-annual transparency report published to Amazon’s website over the weekend. Amazon said it processed 27,664 government demands for user data in the last […]

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. […]

Last fall, Amazon introduced a new biometric device, Amazon One, that allowed customers to pay at Amazon Go stores using their palm. Today, the company says the device is being rolled out to additional Amazon stores in Seattle — an expansion that will make the system available across eight total Amazon physical retail stores, including […]

The GameStop debacle has been hailed by many as a first of its kind form of digital activism, with the ‘crowd’ coming together to stick it to Wall Street, and specifically hedge funds that are in the business of short selling. However, what if you’re a startup or scale-up caught in the middle of such […]

Rapid7, the Boston-based security operations company, has been making moves into the cloud recently and this morning it announced that it has acquired Kubernetes security startup Alcide for $50 million. As the world shifts to cloud native using Kubernetes to manage containerized workloads, it’s tricky ensuring that the containers are configured correctly to keep them […]

DesignCrowd announced today it has raised $10 million AUD (about $7.6 billion USD) in pre-IPO funding. The capital will be used on hiring and product development, with the goal of accelerating the growth of BrandCrowd, its DIY platform. The new funding comes as DesignCrowd gets ready for a potential initial public offering on the Australian […]

In 2018, Carbon, a Nigerian fintech startup, made its financials public for the first time. Although typical for foreign private startups, it’s almost an anomaly in Africa. There have been rare cases in the past, for instance, when Rocket Internet had to include Jumia’s financials in its yearly reports after going public. At the time, […]

New space startup bluShift wants to bring a new kind of propellant to the small satellite launching market, with rockets powered by bio-derived rocket fuels. These differ from traditional fuels in that they offer safety advantages during handling, and ecological advantages during production and use. The startup has been working on its solid rocket biofuel […]

Twitter blocked access to dozens of accounts in India, including some that belonged to high-profile individuals, on Monday to comply with a “legal demand,” prompting confusion and anger among users who are seeking an explanation for this action. Among those whose accounts have been withheld in India include Caravan, a news outlet that conducts investigative […]

India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed a handful of benefits for the startup ecosystem and to accelerate the growth of digital services in the annual budget Monday as the South Asian nation looks to revive the economy that was severely-hit amid the coronavirus pandemic. Sitharaman said the nation has earmarked 1,500 crore Indian rupees ($205.3 […]

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and many other companies, has mastered the art of using Twitter to harness fans and promote himself and his interests across as wide an audience as possible. Using some of that momentum, last night, he made a vocal debut on a newer platform — Silicon Valley’s hottest startup […]

Speaking is one of the hardest parts of learning a new language, especially if you don’t have someone to practice with regularly. ELSA is an app that helps by using speech recognition technology to correct pronunciation. Based in San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh City, ELSA announced today it has raised a $15 million Series […]

Ben, a London-based employee benefits and rewards platform, has raised $2.5 million in funding. The seed round is led by Cherry Ventures, and Seedcamp. A number of angel investors with backgrounds in fintech and HR tech also participated. They include Paul Forster (founder of Indeed), Taavet Hinrikus (founder of TransferWise), Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas (previously an exec […]

Despite China’s history of stringent media control, an industry of uninstitutionalized, individual publishers has managed to flourish on social media platforms like Tencent’s WeChat and ByteDance’s Toutiao. These self-publishers are called “We Media” in the Chinese internet lexicon, denoting the independent power of citizen journalists and content creators. Meanwhile, self-publishers have always had to tread […]

Access to the internet in Myanmar dropped sharply after the military detained leaders of ruling party National League for Democracy, including Aung San Suu Kyi, and declared a state of emergency. The NLD won a wide majority of parliamentary seats in November’s general election, which the military alleges was the result of election fraud. In […]

You’ve just landed on the web version of my weekly newsletter, Human Capital. It’s where we look at the recent events of the week pertaining to diversity, equity, inclusion and labor in tech. You can sign up here to get Human Capital delivered straight to your inbox every Friday at 1 p.m. PT. Let’s jump […]

Hello friends, this is Week in Review. Last week, I dove into the AR maneuverings of Apple and Facebook and what that means for the future of the web. This week, I’m aiming to touch the meme stock phenomenon that dominated American news cycles this week and see if there’s anything worth learning from it, […]

The new Netflix film “The White Tiger” tells the story of Balram, who is born to a poor family in the Indian village of Laxmangarh and escapes by using his intelligence and determination, ultimately becoming a successful entrepreneur in Bangalore. Viewers knows this from the start, as Balram (played by Adarsh Gourav) narrates his life […]

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. What a week. What a month. Are you doing all right? It’s okay if […]

Still figuring out what this newsletter is, I’m torn between aggregation and writing. The inputs vary from blog posts, Twitter threads, and the occasional video. Podcasting seems oddly muzzled by the acceleration of streaming. Blog posts are a misnomer; professional blogs represent the bulk of news and media citations, not usually the single voices of […]

When Robinhood, a startup that promises to make finance accessible for all, temporarily limited trading on GameStop, AMC, and other memestocks, many retail investors were pissed that the fintech darling suddenly didn’t live up to its name. The specific reasons may have been short-term and technical, but the choice looked corrupt to the average person. […]

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 continues to grow, 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 […]

India plans to introduce a law to ban private cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin in the country and provide a framework for the creation of an official digital currency during the current budget session of parliament. In the agenda (PDF) published on the lower house website, the legislation seeks to “prohibit all private cryptocurrencies in India,” […]

"Dublin is a really vibrant startup ecosystem," said Michelle Dervan of Rethink Education Management. "Young population. Lots of government supports to encourage entrepreneurship."

Earlier this week, Science Inc, the 10-year-old, L.A.-based incubator and venture firm, rolled out a blank-check company onto the Nasdaq, raising $310.5 million for what firm founders Peter Pham and Mike Jones say will be used to take public a company in the mobile, entertainment or direct-to-consumer service space. If they have one of their […]

Robinhood caps a wild week for new funding, Coinbase is going public and Johnson & Johnson reveals new vaccine trial data. This is your Daily Crunch for January 29, 2021. The big story: Robinhood raises $1B I know the newsletter has been dominated by Robinhood and stock market news for the past few days but, […]

Robinhood has detailed its latest step in the complex quagmire of market manipulation that is this week’s GameStop hedge fund Reddit army debacle. Users will for the present be limited to holding a single share of GameStop and dozens of other stocks. Several stocks were limited to five shares, and options contracts are likewise limited […]