Crunch Hype

The GameStop mania didn’t just drive up the stock price of a declining video game retailer, it’s also sent trading apps and others to the top of the App Store, due to record-breaking downloads. Today, the popular trading app Robinhood has become the No. 1 app overall on the App Store for the first time, […]

Facebook’s self-regulatory ‘Oversight Board’ (FOB) has delivered its first batch of decisions on contested content moderation decisions almost two months after picking its first cases. A long time in the making, the FOB is part of Facebook’s crisis PR push to distance its business from the impact of controversial content moderation decisions — by creating […]

Workday started the work day with some big news today. It’s acquiring employee feedback platform Peakon for $700 million in cash. One thing we have learned during the pandemic is that organizations need to find new ways to build stronger connections with their employees, and that’s precisely what Peakon provides. “Bringing Peakon into the Workday […]

A new type of neural network that’s capable of adapting its underlying behavior after the initial training phase could be the key to big improvements in situations where conditions can change quickly – like autonomous driving, controlling robots, or diagnosing medical conditions. These so-called ‘liquid’ neural networks were devised by MIT Computer Science and Artificial […]

Indian startup Shopalyst has officially launched a new platform that it calls the Discovery Commerce Cloud, which it says can help brands take full advantage of digital advertising. Co-founder and CEO Girish Ramachandra told me that Shopalyst was created to allow for “one seamless journey for the shopper” across advertising and e-commerce — something he […]

The venture potential of a startup that caters to individual students — instead of a slow-moving, small-pocketed institution — has a bullish aura that attracts investors. Add in a pandemic that forced many to embrace remote learning overnight, and it makes sense that we have seen companies like Outschool and ClassDojo turn first profits while […]

Buy now, pay later services — which let consumers finance the purchase of goods online by paying back the total in installments over time — have been growing in ubiquity this past year. Today, Scalapay, one of the companies that’s building a platform to enable buy now, pay later (BNPL) and related features, has raised […]

Update: Robinhood has made public note of the changes, stating that “in light of recent volatility” it is “restricting transactions for certain securities to position closing only, including $AMC, $BB, $BBBY, $EXPR, $GME, $KOSS, $NAKD and $NOK.” The company added that it has “raised margin requirements for certain securities.” Robinhood, the popular consumer trading application, […]

Last night, Qualtrics priced its IPO at $30 per share, selling 50.4 million shares in the process. Notably, the company’s IPO price was harder to chase down than usual, with a formal press release in scarce supply. SEC filings indicate that the company “anticipate[s]” a price of $30 per share, and reports from media and […]

UCLA researchers have been awarded a $3.65 million grant to collect, contextualize, and digitally preserve a huge archive of materials relating to policing and mass incarceration. It should help historians and anthropologists, but more fundamentally it will thoroughly document a period that many would rather forget. The “Archiving the Age of Mass incarceration” effort is […]

San Jose-based robotics company Fetch unveiled its latest robot this morning. The PalletTransport1500 is an autonomous bot designed specifically to replace forklift uses in warehouses. The systems, which are designed to pick up and delivery pallets, are capable of sporting payloads of up to 2,504 pounds. The device joins a number of different robotic forklift […]

Apple and Google banned apps from sharing users' location data with X-Mode, a data broker with links to U.S. military contractors.

Boxed, the New York-based online retailer that sells and delivers bulk-sized groceries, makes its foray into Asia by partnering with Aeon, one of Asia’s largest brick-and-mortar retail operators. Unlike its consumer-focused business in the U.S., which has been described as “Costco for millennials,” Boxed is exporting its nascent software-as-a-service solution to Aeon in Malaysia. As […]

As we move deeper into a cloud-centric world, everything was supposed to get easier, but in truth there’s a lot of moving parts, and companies need help getting everything to work. This takes people with a particular set of skills to help clients with tasks like integrations, managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments and getting data […]

New wellness startup Heights is formally launching this week, focusing on a category it describes as ‘braincare’. The startup will market “ultra high quality, sustainable plant-based supplements that feed your brain” based on what it says is scientific data. It has raised a $2 million Seed funding round (£1.7M) via the Seedrs crowdfunding platform, with the […]

While the pandemic has left some startups strapped for cash, the aptly-named Brazilian neobank Nubank is swimming in it. This morning, the company announced that it has raised a $400 million Series G round, putting their total funding to date at $1.2 billion. But even more remarkable, in addition to their new $25 billion valuation (up from […]

The UK’s competition regulator will make a decision on whether or not Facebook’s purchase of Giphy has a ‘realistic prospect’ of substantially lessening competition by March 25, it said today, as it continues to scrutinize the acquisition. “The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) hereby gives notice pursuant to paragraph (b) of the definition of ‘initial […]

If the rise of direct-to-consumer businesses has been one of the big e-commerce trends of the last decade, then the growth of startups raising huge rounds to consolidate D2C players, to bring more economies of scale to the model, has definitely been a related theme of the past year. In the latest move, a startup […]

Google has updated and broadened its Play Store policy on gaming loyalty programs to help developers better understand the practices that are permitted, months after confusion about the guidance prompted some backlash in India, the biggest Android market by users. The company said on Thursday that it now specifies guidance on gamified loyalty programs that […]

Catalyst Fund, a global accelerator managed by BFA Global, announced the 8th cohort for its Inclusive Fintech Program today. The accelerator runs the flagship program annually and with a focus on Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Mexico and India, selected startups receive £80,000 (~$100,000) in grant capital, six months of support and connections with follow-on investors. […]

Tokopedia, Lazada, Shopee, and other firms created an e-commerce market in Indonesia in the past decade, making it possible for consumers to shop online in the island nation. But as is true in other Asian markets, most small retailers and mom-and-pop stores in the Southeast Asian country still face a myriad of challenges in sourcing […]

The media licensing business is a massive market, but much of the work involved is still handled manually through emails and spreadsheets. A startup called Flowhaven is working to change that. The company, which has now closed on $16 million in Series A funding, helps brands to manage their licensing partnerships, including the account management aspects, […]

Cowrywise, a Nigerian fintech startup that offers digital wealth management and financial planning solutions, has raised $3 million in pre-Series A funding. Quona Capital led the round as Tsadik Foundation, Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia, and a syndicate of Nigerian angel investors locally and in the diaspora participated. The company previously raised more than $500,000 through […]

WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned popular messaging app with more than 2 billion users, has been getting a lot of heat and losing users in recent weeks after announcing (and then delaying) changes to how it uses your data. It’s not done with how it’s tweaking privacy and security. Now, it’s adding a new biometric feature to […]

Levity, which has been operating in stealth (until now), is the latest no-code company to throw its wares into the ring, having picked up $1.7M in pre-seed funding led by Gil Dibner’s Angular Ventures. The Berlin-based startup wants to bring AI-powered workflow automation to anyone, letting knowldge workers automate tedious, repetitive and manual parts of […]

Apple has shared a few more details about its much-discussed privacy changes in iOS 14. The company first announced at WWDC in June that app developers would have to ask users for permission in order to track and share their IDFA identifier for cross-property ad targeting purposes. While iOS 14 launched in the fall, Apple […]

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the company’s 2020 Q4 earnings call that all engineering work is now complete on the Tesla Semi, the freight-hauling semi truck that the company is building with an all-electric powertrain. The company expects to begin deliveries of Tesla Semi this year, it said in its Q4 earnings release, and […]

The man behind a once-influential pro-Trump account is facing charges of election interference for allegedly disseminating voting disinformation on Twitter in 2016. Federal prosecutors allege that Douglass Mackey, who used the name “Ricky Vaughn” on Twitter, encouraged people to cast their ballot via text or on social media, effectively tricking others into throwing away those votes. […]

Tesla is open to licensing its software, including its Autopilot highly-automated driving technology and the neural network training it has built to improve its autonomous driving technology. Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed those considerations on the company’s Q4 earnings call on Wednesday, adding that the company has in fact already “had some preliminary discussions about […]

After a wild day for public markets driven by Reddit traders commandeering stocks and combatting hedge fund short sellers, the community at r/wallstreetbets no longer has a home on Discord and its Reddit community has been locked down as an invite-only subreddit for the time being. Update: 4:49pm PT: The r/wallstreetbets subreddit returned with a […]

Tesla just released its latest earnings report, and the results indicate that Elon Musk’s bets on energy storage and solar are beginning to pay off. The storage business was the star of the company’s power plays in the fourth quarter, with quarterly year-on-year growth approaching 200%. As the company said in its presentation to shareholders, […]

Reddit users have some fun with the stock market, Facebook predicts advertising challenges and ByteDance is cutting jobs in India. This is your Daily Crunch for January 27, 2021. The big story: GameStop becomes a meme stock GameStop’s stock continued to climb today, along with Blockbuster and AMC — all stocks shorted by institutional investors. […]

Four European apps which secure user data via end-to-end encryption, ProtonMail, Threema, Tresorit and Tutanota, have issued a joint-statement warning over recent moves by EU institutions that they say are setting lawmakers on a dangerous path to backdooring encryption. End-to-end encryption refers to a form of encryption where the service provider does not hold keys […]

The Model S will see some significant changes to its interior this year. After months of rumors, Tesla confirmed the revisions in a few images released just ahead of its quarterly earnings call scheduled for later this afternoon. Some of the changes — like the shift to a widescreen display — are things that have […]

IAC has acquired Confide, the encrypted mobile messaging that once made headlines for its use by White House staffers during the Trump administration. The deal, which closed on Dec. 1, 2020 but was not publicly announced, sees Confide joining Teltech, the makers of spam call-busting app Robokiller, which itself had joined IAC’s Mosaic Group by […]

Squarespace announced this afternoon that it is going public. The online website creation and hosting service is a venture-backed entity, having raised Series A and B rounds in 2010 and 2014, respectively. Those deals were worth a combined $78.5 million, according to Crunchbase data. But Squarespace is perhaps best known for its epic 2017-era $200 million […]

On Wednesday, Apple announces that it had banked $111.4 billion of revenue in a single quarter, beating investor expectations and blowing past its previous all-time revenue record. Investors yawned with the stock down slightly in after-hours trading following the report’s release. It’s a big number but it also bested analyst’s forecasts for Apple’s first quarter. […]

While Facebook’s fourth quarter earnings report included solid user and revenue numbers, the company sounded a note of caution for 2021. In the “CFO outlook” section of the earnings release, Facebook said it anticipates facing “more significant advertising headwinds” this year. “This includes the impact of platform changes, notably iOS 14, as well as the […]

The furor surrounding GameStop and its stock price has consumed social media, business television, and the hopes and dreams of many retail investors. It has even convinced some folks that causing short-term economic damage to a few hedge funds is similar to shaking up the global financial market. It isn’t, but a lot of folks […]

You’d be forgiven for being underwhelmed by the output from SoftBank Robotics thus far. The firm’s best-known product to date is almost certainly Pepper, a humanoid robot designed for greeting and signage that grew out of it 2015 acquisition of French robotics company Aldebaran. There’s also the matter of the investment firm’s acquisition and eventual […]

This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky vision. The future is here and the call to action is now.

Rumors have been flying this week that SAP was going to buy Berlin business process automation startup Signavio, and sure enough the company made it official today. The companies did not reveal the purchase price, but Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the deal could be worth $1.2 billion. With Signavio SAP gets a cloud-native […]

Cryptocurrencies, more so than most other things, are only valuable because of a shared agreement that they are valuable. Their value is a product of digital handshakes over millions of transactions firming up that consensus. For bitcoin, the trust that it has worth has turned more valuable in the past several months; it’s been on […]

A little less than two years ago, when the actor, producer and investor Robert Downey Jr. unveiled his new, sustainability focused initiative called the FootPrint Coalition at Amazon’s re:MARS conference it was little more than a static website and a subscription prompt. Jump cut to today, and the firm now has five portfolio companies, a […]

Spin, the micromobility startup acquired by Ford, has developed a new scooter with partners Segway-Ninebot and software startup Tortoise that aims to solve the sidewalk clutter problem for good. The Spin S-200 scooter not only has three wheels — a design change that helps it stand out in a crowded pool of two-wheelers — it’s […]

My biological dad passed away several years ago when I was an adult and my mom has since remarried. Can they get green cards?

At TC Sessions: Justice on March 3, we’re going to dive head-first into data discrimination, algorithmic bias and how to ensure a more just future, as technology companies rely more on automated processes to make decisions. Algorithms are sets of rules that computers follow in order to solve problems and make decisions about a particular […]

Stilt, a provider of financial services for immigrants in the United States, announced today it has raised a $100 million warehouse facility from Silicon Valley Bank for lending to its customers. This brings Stilt’s total debt facilities so far to $225 million, and will enable it to reach more than $350 million in annualized loan […]

Last year, we hit you with 44(!) episodes of Extra Crunch Live, a series that gives startups and founders direct insights from the experts who know best. We’re making Extra Crunch Live even better in 2021: we’ll take a look at funding deals through the eyes of the founders and investors who made them happen, […]

Today, we're discussing OwnBackup and Assembly, two middle-late startups that are entering unicorn territory.