Crunch Hype

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

Charlie, a personal finance app that began as a chatbot, is relaunching today with a revamped experience focused on the larger goal of helping everyday Americans get out of debt. To do so, Charlie presents users with a full picture of their current debt and how long it will take them to pay it off. […]

Finesse, a startup promising to take the guesswork and waste out of fashion, is announcing that it has raised $4.5 million in seed and pre-seed funding. Founder and CEO Ramin Ahmari said the tremendous waste in the fashion industry has become a badly-kept secret, with Burberry recently facing a backlash over its practice of burning […]

The top-line feature for Ring’s latest is no doubt its price. No way around that. At $60, it’s $40 cheaper than the standard Video Doorbell – and prices from there go up significantly, with the “Elite” running $350. Perhaps the company is feeling some pressure from the race the bottom for smart home hardware pricing. […]

Pinecone, a new startup from the folks who helped launch Amazon SageMaker, has built a vector database that generates data in a specialized format to help build machine learning applications faster, something that was previously only accessible to the largest organizations. Today the company came out of stealth with a new product and announced a […]

SAP today announced a new offering it calls ‘RISE with SAP,’ a solution that is meant to help the company’s customers go through their respective digital transformations and become what SAP calls ‘intelligent enterprises.’ RISE is a subscription service that combines a set of services and product offerings. SAP’s head of product success Sven Denecken […]

Gamestop shares are set to rally 70% this morning when trading starts, and AMC shares opened up 300%, extending a run that has perplexed market observers, irked hedge funds, and generally made crypto’s recent gains appear soft and weak. Being a retail trader is mostly being a sucker, hoping to best the markets while lacking […]

After acquiring Optimizely last fall, content management company Episerver is adopting the Optimizely name for the entire organization. CEO Alex Atzberger told me that the company will be rolling out new branding in the next coming months, as well as renaming its entire product suite to reflect the Optimizely brand. “We believe it’s no longer […]

Days after the billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya announced his involvement in the $1.3 billion acquisition of the solar and home improvement lending business Sunlight Financial, a collection of investors announced a nearly $1 billion cash infusion into Loanpal, another renewable energy and home improvement lender. The $800 million commitment to Loanpal arrives alongside a flurry […]

Lynk, a “knowledge-as-a-service” platform that connects clients with over 840,000 experts in a wide range of fields, announced today it has raised $24 million led by Brewer Lane Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, with participation from Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund. The company uses machine learning algorithms to match users, who include investment firms, Fortune 100 companies and […]

Literati has raised a $40 million Series B to pursue an unusual startup opportunity — namely, book clubs. Founder and CEO Jessica Ewing (a former product manager at Google) explained that the Austin-based company started out with book clubs for kids, before launching its Luminary brand for adult book clubs last year. And the Luminary […]

LottieFiles, a platform for JSON-based Lottie animations, has raised a Series A of $9 million. The round was led by M12, Microsoft’s venture capital arm, with participation from returning investor 500 Startups. Based in San Francisco and Kuala Lumpur, LottieFiles was founded in 2018. The platform includes Lottie creation, editing and testing tools, and a […]

A year ago, Starship Technologies had a couple hundred autonomous bots delivering burritos and pizzas to students on college campuses and residents in a few neighborhoods. The company — with $17 million of new capital in its coffers — has expanded its fleet five-fold since COVID-19 swept through the European and North American markets that […]

Classiq, a Tel Aviv-based startup that aims to make it easier for computer scientists and developers to create quantum algorithms and applications, today announced that it has raised a $10.5 million Series A round led by Team8 Capital and Wing Capital. Entrée Capital, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd and Sumitomo Corporation (through IN Venture) also participated in […]

The pandemic has spelled economic setbacks for many people and industries, but the capital swirling about the technology world continues to roar along. In the latest development, TCV — the storied venture capital firm behind the likes of Airbnb, Spotify, Peloton and Facebook — has closed a record $4 billion for its latest fund. This […]

It’s not every day you see a Latin American startup funded by a U.S. venture capital firm based in the midwest. Playvox, a Colombian startup that wants to bring a positive twist to customer service monitoring announced a $25 million Series A from Five Elms Capital, a Kansas City, MO VC firm. It has now […]

Datastax, the company best known for commercializing the open-source Apache Cassandra database, is moving beyond databases. As the company announced today, it has acquired Kesque, a cloud messaging service. The Kesque team built its service on top of the Apache Pulsar messaging and streaming project. Datastax has now taken that team’s knowledge in this area […]

After revealing its first fund just last year, a $100 million pool of investment capital dedicated to early stage startups focusing on sustainable food development, clean energy, health innovation and new space technologies, Prime Movers Lab is back with a second fund. Prime Movers Lab Fund II is larger, with $245 million committed, but it […]

People and businesses are relying on the internet to get things done more than ever before, an opportunity but also an infrastructure headache for service providers that need to scale quickly and reliably to meet that demand. Today, a startup that has built a clever, software-based way for them to expand their networks without buying […]

Beauty and wellness appointment booking apps have proliferated of the last few years, but it appears the race is still on as today one of the leaders, Booksy, raises $70 million in a Series C round led by Cat Rock Capital, with participation from Sprints Capital. The round was also joined by OpenOcean, Piton Capital, […]

Lime is adding electric mopeds — painted in the company’s signature green — to its micromobility platform as the startup aims to own the spectrum of inner city travel from jaunts to the corner store to longer distance trips up to five miles. Lime said Wednesday it plans to launch as many as 600 electric […]

Gardin, a ‘deep tech’ hardware and software startup developing optical phenotyping technology and analytics to optimise food production, has raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding. Leading the round is LDV Capital, with participation from Seedcamp, and MMC Ventures. A number of angel investors are also investing, including Pratima Aiyagari, Gilad Engel, and Abdulaziz Alrashed. Founded […]

French startup Mooncard is partnering with Flying Blue to offer Air France miles to its customers. This is the first time you can earn miles with a payment card in France that isn’t an American Express card. Mooncard provides corporate payment cards to streamline your expenses. Most companies in France don’t use corporate cards. But […]

Joanne Chen just became the second general partner in the history of the now 26-year-old, Silicon Valley venture firm, Foundation Capital. Were she still alive, Foundation’s founder, Kathryn Gould, would undoubtedly cheer the development. Known for her big personality, Gould first met Chen when Chen was an MBA student at the University of Chicago. Gould […]

eFounders is expanding its focus by creating a second startup studio called Logic Founders. This time, Logic Founders is going to focus on fintech startups exclusively. Camille Tyan (pictured above) is going to lead the new studio. Over the past ten years, eFounders has launched dozens of software-as-a-service companies trying to improve the way we […]

Chinese internet giant ByteDance has told employees in India that it is reducing the size of its team in the country after New Delhi retained ban on TikTok and other Chinese apps last week, said a source familiar with the matter and an internal memo obtained by TechCrunch. After the publication of this story, a […]

As Twitter seems to buy its way into competing with Clubhouse and Substack, one wonders whether the beleaguered social media company is finally ready to move past its truly awful track record of seizing opportunities. Twitter’s pace of product ambition has certainly seemed to speed in the past several months, conveniently following shareholder action to […]

Sila Nanotechnologies, a Silicon Valley battery materials company, has spent years developing technology designed to pack more energy into a cell at a lower cost — an end game that has helped it lock in partnerships with Amperex Technology Limited as well as automakers BMW and Daimler. Now, Sila Nano, flush with a fresh injection […]

A popular scheduling startup raises a big funding round, Twitter makes a newsletter acquisition and Beyond Meat teams up with PepsiCo. This is your Daily Crunch for January 26, 2021. The big story: Calendly valued at $3B Calendly, which helps users schedule and confirm meeting times, has raised $350 million from OpenView Venture Partners and […]

When Apple reports its earnings on Wednesday, you can expect mentions of India on the call. Apple shipped more than 1.5 million iPhone units in India in the quarter that ended in December, up 100% year-on-year, making this its best quarter in the world’s largest smartphone market to date, according to research firms Counterpoint and […]

ClassDojo’s first eight years as an edtech consumer startup could look like failure: zero revenue; no paid users; and a team that hasn’t aggressively grown in years. But the company, which helps parents and teachers communicate about students, has raised tens of millions in venture capital from elite Silicon Valley investors including Y Combinator, GSV, […]

First-time entrepreneurs are bound to make some major mistakes. The true measure of a serial entrepreneur, I’d submit, is the ability to recognize those mistakes and adapt.

S’More, a dating app that’s focused on helping users find more meaningful relationships, announced today that it has raised $2.1 million in seed funding. S’More (short for “something more”) ensures that users can’t focus on physical appearance, because photos are initally blurred — they gradually un-blur as you interact with someone. The startup has introduced new […]

Apple has released iOS 14.4 with security fixes for three vulnerabilities, said to be under active attack by hackers. The technology giant said in its security update pages for iOS and iPadOS 14.4 that the three bugs affecting iPhones and iPads “may have been actively exploited.” Details of the vulnerabilities are scarce, and an Apple […]

Tapbots, the company behind Tweetbot, has released a major update for the iPhone and iPad. Tweetbot 6 is now available in the App store. While there aren’t a lot of visual changes, there are a couple of important things happening under the hood. First, Tweetbot 6 is using Twitter’s API v2. An API is an […]

Sony is making a play for the top end of the professional digital camera world, where videographers and sports photographers demand immaculate image quality at high resolutions in short order. The new Alpha 1 beats pretty much everything on the market on paper, but it’ll set you back a cool $6,500. This is, of course, […]

Extra Crunch Live 2.0 launches next week! Among several improvements, we’re thrilled to ramp up the Pitch Deck Teardown. In short, folks can submit their pitch decks to get feedback from investors and founders alike. The importance of the pitch deck can’t be underestimated. It is often the first point of contact between a company […]

Mealco, a startup promising to help chefs launch new restaurants designed around delivery, is announcing that it has raised $7 million in seed funding. It’s probably not news to anyone reading this that opening a restaurant can be an expensive, risky proposition — and of course, many restaurants have gone out of business during the […]

Twitter today is rolling out a new product track on its API platform, as part of its ongoing efforts to rebuild the Twitter API from the ground up. The track, which aims to serve the needs of the academic research community’s efforts, offers broader access to the Twitter archive and fewer restrictions on tweet retrievals, […]

In 2019, female-led companies received less than 5 percent of the global venture capital. Bringing it to Africa, only 10 percent of the West African startups that cumulatively raised $1 million had at least one female co-founder in the past decade. There are many stats to back up the underrepresentation of women in starting a […]

As Facebook and Apple begin to fire up more projects in the AR/VR world, Google has spent the last year shutting down most of their existing projects in that space. Today, the folks at Google announced they had ended active development of Tilt Brush, a VR painting app that was one of virtual reality’s early […]

Tula is a new company founded with the specific purpose of developing user-friendly hardware and software for sound capture, and its debut product, the Tula Mic, is now shipping after a successful crowdfunding campaign last year. Tula Mic is both a USB-C microphone input for computers and mobile devices, and also a dedicated recorder that […]

Plastic-free grocery-delivery startup Zero is gearing up to launch in Los Angeles on February 10, after solely operating in the San Francisco Bay Area. Zero works directly with suppliers to sell food and other household items in jars, boxes and other types of sustainable packaging, and offers next-day delivery. Zero works with both big-name brands […]

If you’re working for a company that handles a ton of data, chances are your company is constantly moving data from applications, APIs and databases and sending it to a data warehouse or a data lake. There are a few well-known platforms to extract, load and transform data, such as Fivetran and Stitchdata. Airbyte is […]

Speculation around the Qualtrics public offering is nothing new. All the way back in 2016, CEO Ryan Smith was dropping not-so-subtle hints about his intentions to file for IPO. After a decade bootstrapping, and growing to $50 million in annual revenue, the company was swayed into taking outside capital from Sequoia, and then again from […]

Club Feast, a startup with a more affordable approach to meal delivery, is announcing that it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst. The company was founded by Atallah Atallah, Ghazi Atallah and Chris Miao. The basic concept is pretty simple: Restaurant delivery that only costs $5.99 per dish — cheaper […]

Google today announced that BeyondCorp Enterprise, the zero trust security platform modeled after how Google itself keeps its network safe without relying on a VPN, is now generally available. BeyondCorp Enterprise builds out Google’s existing BeyondCorp Remote Access offering with additional enterprise features. Google describes it as “a zero trust solution that enables secure access […]

Plex, the media software maker that’s expanded into streaming in recent years, is adding to its service once again with today’s launch of game streaming. Unlike other game streaming efforts from companies like Microsoft or Google, the new “Plex Arcade” isn’t focused on top gaming titles and new releases, but rather on retro games. At […]

Dallas-based Nomad set out to take an age-old cooking method and modernize it – but not by introducing connected or smart features. Instead, the Nomad Grill & Smoker takes classic charcoal grilling and relies on clever industrial design to make it packable and portable, while making sure cooks of all expertise levels can make great-tasting […]

Building a startup is never easy, especially when you’re in the early innings and navigating a huge learning curve. Education, support and sage advice are arguably as essential to startup success as fundraising. Find all that — and connect with your early founder community — at TC Early Stage 2021. We’re hosting two of these […]