Crunch Hype

As you prepare to dive in to three days of TechCrunch Disrupt 2021, be sure to take your passport. No, not the government-issued variety. Our Disrupt Passport lets you collect experiences during the virtual conference and gives you a chance to win some pretty fabulous prizes. Seriously, who wouldn’t want a chance to win these? […]

Customer communication platform Front is holding an event today to introduce three new features. These new features focus on showing you more information about your customers right from Front’s user interface. If you’re not familiar with Front, the company started as a shared email inbox product so that you can interact with incoming emails as […]

It’s been an Extra Crunch summer. We’ve heard how to craft your pitch deck around the one thing that really hooks an investor, and how the industry experience of Retail Zipline’s Melissa Wong ticked every box for Emergence when raising her Series A. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve also gotten a […]

Microsoft is further nudging users away from passwords by rolling out passwordless sign-in options to all consumer Microsoft accounts. The tech giant, like many others in the industry, has waged a war against traditional password-based authentication for some time. This is because passwords are a prime target for cyberattacks, since weak or reused passwords can […]

SmartNews, a Tokyo-headquartered news aggregation website and app that’s grown in popularity despite hefty competition from built-in aggregators like Apple News, today announced it has closed on $230 million in Series F funding. The round brings SmartNews’ total raise to date to over $400 million and values the business at $2 billion — or as […]

Retail investors love him. Venture capitalists envy him. But pretty much everyone writing checks these days is paying attention to Chamath Palihapitiya, whose star has been on the rise since the outset of his career at an early online media player called Winamp that was acquired by AOL. Indeed, over the last 20 years, Palihapitiya […]

The total addressable market that Forge serves is growing by the day, with more and more unicorns being born and a steady drumbeat of unicorn IPOs doing little to clear the decks.

Relyance AI, an early-stage startup that is helping companies stay in compliance with privacy laws at the code level, announced a $25 million Series A today. At the same time, they revealed a previously unannounced $5 million seed round. Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures led the A round, while Unusual was sole lead on the […]

A few years ago, I was charged with a misdemeanor for smoking marijuana in public and driving under the influence. I have a green card and want to apply for U.S. citizenship next year. Can I?

Airbase, a corporate spend management startup, announced this morning that it now supports subsidiaries in different countries for U.S.-based businesses. As more companies lean into remote work, and a great many startups are founding themselves on multiple continents, the new capability could boost Airbase’s effective total addressable market. The product news is interesting, but more […]

One of the biggest problems in the world of e-commerce is the predicament of shopping cart abandonment: when shoppers aren’t getting to what they want fast enough — whether it’s finding the right item, or paying for it in a quick and easy way — they bounce. That singular problem is driving a wave of […]

We’re thrilled that TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 is just slightly more than a month away on October 27. You have purchased your event ticket, right? No? Well then, it’s time to get your rhymes-with-SaaS in gear. Bonus: You’ll save $100 if you buy your pass before October 1 at 11:59 pm (PT). What’s that? You […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic. This time ’round we took a look into the world of on-demand delivery in Europe, with an especial focus on the so-called “instant” grocery sector, […]

Google’s streaming TV service, YouTube TV, announced today it’s adding more Spanish-language networks to its base membership package and is preparing to launch an add-on package that will include even more Spanish-language content. Starting today, all subscribers will gain access to three new TV networks at no additional cost: Univision, UniMás, and Galavisión. These will […]

Ascend is moving insurance into the digital age by with a payments platform that combines financing, collections and payables.

The ability to offer stock options is utterly essential to startups. They convince talented people to join when the startup is unlikely to be capable of matching the high salaries that larger, established tech firms can offer. However, it’s a complex business developing a competitive stock option plan. Luckily, London-based VC Index Ventures today launches both a […]

Inspired Capital, the New York-based early-stage venture firm that was founded in 2019 by entrepreneurs Alexa von Tobel and Penny Pritzker, is today announcing the close of their second fund with $281 million in capital commitments, an amount that brings the firm’s total assets under management to nearly half a billion dollars. (Inspired raised $200 […]

Businesses and the tech companies that serve them are run on data. At best, it can be used to help with decision-making, to understand how well or badly an organization is doing, and to build new systems to run the next generation of services. At its most challenging, though, data can represent a real headache: […]

Earlier this year, a startup called Olive launched its new shopping site and app with the goal of making e-commerce more efficient, convenient, and sustainable by offering a way for consumers to aggregate their orders from across retailers into single shipments that arrive in reusable packaging, not cardboard. If items need to be returned, those […]

SmarterTravel provides personalized travel recommendations and targeted travel content.

Electric vehicle fleet and infrastructure startup Gravity thinks it has cracked the code for urban EV charging infrastructure. The company, which was founded in February this year, announced its construction project to convert an indoor parking garage in the middle of Manhattan into a public EV fast charging hub. When the 29-space garage on 42nd […]

Building credit history can be difficult if you are a consumer that is having trouble getting access to credit in the first place. Enter TomoCredit, which has developed a credit card focused on building credit history for first-time borrowers. The San Francisco-based startup is announcing today that it has raised $10 million in a Series […]

In order to support a buildout of renewable energy, which tends to over-generate electricity at certain times of day and under-generate at others, the grid is going to need a lot of batteries. While lithium-ion works fine for consumer electronics and even electric vehicles, battery startup EnerVenue says it developed a breakthrough technology to revolutionize […]

The EU will use legislation to push for greater resilience and sovereignty in regional semiconductor supply chains. The bloc’s president trailed a forthcoming ‘European Chips Act’ in a state of the union speech today. Ursula von der Leyen suggested that gaining greater autonomy in chipmaking is now a key component of the EU’s overarching digital […]

E-commerce has undoubtedly seen a huge boost in growth in the last year and a half of Covid-19 living, with people turning to the web and apps to shop for essentials and not-so-essentials to keep their social distance, and using delivery services to receive their goods rather than picking things up in person. Today, a […]

Zonos automatically classifies goods and calculates an accurate total landed cost on international transactions.

Walmart has tapped Argo AI and Ford to launch an autonomous vehicle delivery service in Austin, Miami and Washington D.C., the companies said Wednesday. The service will allow customers to place online orders for groceries and other items using Walmart’s ordering platform. Argo’s cloud-based infrastructure will be integrated with Walmart’s online platform, routing the orders […]

Doccla, a healthtech startup with a platform that can monitor patients on hospital wards and in the home, has secured a $3.3 million Seed funding round, led by Giant Ventures and Speedinvest. The company allows hospitals to predict when beds will be freed up by monitoring patients remotely via wearable medical devices, thus helping to […]

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has yet another ‘Big Tech’ GDPR probe to add to its pile: The regulator said yesterday it has opened two investigations into video sharing platform TikTok. The first covers how TikTok handles children’s data, and whether it complies with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. The DPC also said it will examine […]

What would happened if your go-to calendar and messaging apps were in fact one and the same thing? That’s the thinking behind Onin — a UK startup that wants to simplify event planning by, well, making a more organized app for organizing stuff. If that sounds a little niche, it pays to remember that calendars […]

The distance between their farms and the nearest processor is key for smallholder farmers who need to process their crops. And though Nigeria’s food processing systems have a keen resemblance to the West with respect to big factories and huge economies of scale in high-demand cities, farmers still suffer from poor logistics networks. With distance […]

Folk is a new productivity tool started by European startup studio eFounders. And the startup just raised a $3.3 million seed funding round led by Accel with a big group of business angels. When you think about managing contacts and relationships in a professional environment, you might think that companies have solved this already. An […]

Truecaller, which operates an eponymous caller-identification service, said on Wednesday it is looking to raise $116 million in an initial public offering on Nasdaq Stockholm. The 12-year-old Stockholm-headquartered firm, which counts India as its biggest market by users, is aiming for a valuation of about $3 billion in the IPO, according to earlier local media […]

Founded in 2013, Bangladesh’s Chaldal was one of the first grocery delivery startups in the world to use the “dark” store model, picking up orders from its own warehouses instead of retail stores. Now the company says it is the country’s second-largest grocery player and the largest grocery e-commerce platform, with 27 warehouses located in […]

Groww, an Indian startup that is helping millennials invest in mutual funds and stocks, is in advanced stages of talks to raise a new financing round at a $3 billion valuation, according to six people familiar with the matter. The Bangalore-based startup is negotiating to close a $250 million round, the people said, requesting anonymity […]

Supply chains can be a complex logistical challenge. But they pose an even greater environmental challenge. And it’s that latter problem — global supply-chain sustainability — where UK startup Sourceful is fully focused, although it argues its approach can boost efficiency as well as shrink environmental impact. So it’s a win-win, per the pitch. Early […]

While LinkedIn doubles down on creators to bring a more human, less manicured element to its networking platform for professionals, a company that has built a reputation for publishing primarily the more messy and human impressions of work life has made an acquisition that might help it compete better with LinkedIn. Glassdoor, the platform that […]

Rivian vehicles have received certifications from three agencies, the final hurdle that allows the electric automaker to sell and deliver its R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV in all 50 U.S. states. Rivian confirmed to TechCrunch in an email that the vehicles are fully certified by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Environmental Protection […]

Casper has laid off dozens of employees, including three C-Level executives: its chief marketing officer, chief technology officer and chief operating officer, sources say. The mattress company declined to comment. The round of layoffs, communicated to employees on Friday, largely impacted retail and operations teams, signaling that the business may be undergoing a broader restructuring. […]

The first production Rivian R1T electric pickup truck in “Rivian blue” rolled off the assembly line Tuesday morning at the company’s factory in Normal, Illinois, marking a milestone more than a decade in the making for the automaker and its founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe. The company, which started in 2009 as Mainstream Motors before […]

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

When Kleiner Perkins led Stord’s $12.4 million Series A in 2019, its founders were in their early 20s and so passionate about their startup that they each dropped out of their respective schools to focus on growing the business. Fast-forward two years and Stord — an Atlanta-based company that has developed a cloud supply chain — […]

Here are five reasons why VCs should consider ratcheting up their investment into adtech startups building the next generation of creative tools:

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged App Annie, a leading mobile data and analytics firm, as well as its co-founder and former CEO and Chairman Bertrand Schmitt, with securities fraud. App Annie and Schmitt have agreed to pay over $10 million to settle the fraud charges which are related to “deceptive practices […]

NASA has awarded a combined $146 million in contracts to five companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Dynetics, to develop lander concepts as part of the agency’s Artemis program. The awards include $26.5 million to Blue Origin; $40.8 million to Dynetics; $35.2 million to Lockheed Martin; $34.8 million to Northrop Grumman; and $9.4 million to […]

At first blush, the $12 billion Intuit-Mailchimp deal might not make a heck of a lot of sense. But people tend to pigeonhole companies, and in this case they might see Intuit as purely a financial software company and Mailchimp as an email marketing firm and nothing more. If that’s as far as your perspective […]

Gaming in general is moving toward accessibility, but that’s not as much the case in esports, which like other sports are competitive and by nature somewhat exclusive. Xbox and the Special Olympics are working together on a new event that combines competition with inclusion, and it’s going on right now. This week, Special Olympics athletes […]

Apple continues its tradition of improving the photography capabilities of consumer devices with today’s announcement of the iPhone 13 and 13 Pro, available on September 24. Last year’s iPhone 12 had two rear camera lenses, while the iPhone 12 Pro had three; the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro follow suit. The iPhone 13 features […]

Space rideshare service provider Spaceflight Inc. is going to be shuttling customers on a lunar flyby mission next year, part of its long-term vision of giving companies easy access to lunar orbits and beyond. The Seattle-based company will be delivering payload using its propulsive transfer vehicle, Sherpa EScape, or Sherpa-ES, the latest iteration of Sherpa […]

Canva is now valued at $40 billion following a fresh capital injection of $200 million (USD) in a round led by T. Rowe Price. New and existing investors participated in the round, including Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investments, Blackbird, Felicis and AirTree Ventures. This round solidifies Canva […]