Crunch Hype

Regulatory action prompts Visa to back off a fintech acquisition, Uber and Moderna partner and Checkout.com is valued at $15 billion. This is your Daily Crunch for January 12, 2021. The big story: Visa calls off Plaid acquisition The deal, valued at $5.3 billion, was first announced just over a year ago. However, the Department […]

The year of the first-ever all-virtual CES is, unsurprisingly, the year of the virtual gym. The past 12 months have seen most of our fitness routines completely transformed — speaking for myself, my Apple Watch step count shows two big empty spots where March and April are. Fitness startups have seen unexpected windfall in all […]

Future Ventures — cofounded by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson and Maryanna Saenko, a colleague of Jurvetson at his last firm, DFJ, as well as an investor previously with Airbus Ventures and Khosla Ventures — has closed its second fund with $200 million in capital commitments, say the pair. In a wide-ranging conversation yesterday […]

Visa and Plaid called off their agreement this afternoon, ending the consumer credit giant’s takeover of the data-focused fintech API startup. The deal, valued at $5.3 billion at the time of its announcement, first broke cover on January 13, 2020, or nearly one year ago to the day. However, the Department of Justice filed suit […]

Sono Motors wants to bring technology it developed for its solar electric car to the masses. And it’s starting with autonomous shuttle startup EasyMile. The German-based startup said Tuesday during a presentation at the virtual 2021 CES tech trade show that it will license its solar body panel technology to other companies. EasyMile, which provides […]

This morning Techstars, a network of startup accelerators and a venture capital fund, announced that Maëlle Gavet is its new CEO. Former CEO and co-founder David Brown will stay on Techstars’ board, while the group’s other co-founder, David Cohen, will become the chairman of its board. TechCrunch spoke with Gavet this morning about her new […]

There are a number of eye-numbing market maps out there that seem to suggest that the security market is highly saturated. But when it comes to cloud security, is there room for more?

You & Mr. Jones announced today that it has added $60 million in new funding from Merian Chrysalis, bringing the Series B round announced in December to a total of $260 million. The round values the company at $1.36 billion, post-money. You & Mr. Jones takes its name from CEO David Jones, who founded the […]

Because streaming services only release viewership numbers selectively, and because each one uses its own methodology, it can be hard to compare the popularity of different streaming shows and movies. So Nielsen, which provides the standard ratings for traditional TV (and is working to combine those ratings with streaming data), is offering some apples-to-apples comparison […]

Outdoor cooking industry leader and famed kettle-grill-maker Weber has acquired June, the smart cooking startup founded in 2013 by Matt Van Horn and Nikhil Bhogal. While financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, Weber has confirmed that June will continue to operate as its own brand wholly owned by Weber-Stephen Products and will continue to […]

"2021 could be nothing short of amazing for our industry."

Consumer online shopping habits have led to a windfall of revenues for these web storefronts, but COVID-era trends have also breathed new life into the market for developer tools that help e-commerce sites operate more smoothly for shoppers. LA-based Nacelle is one of many e-commerce infrastructure startups to earn attention from investors amid COVID. The […]

As ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft continue to find their feet in a new landscape for transportation services — where unessential travel is being actively discouraged in many markets, and people remain concerned about catching the coronavirus in restricted, shared spaces — a smaller player that has carved out a place for itself targeting […]

A group of rideshare drivers in California and the Service Employees International Union filed a lawsuit today alleging Proposition 22 violates California’s constitution. The goal of the suit is to overturn Prop 22, which classifies gig workers as independent contractors in California. The suit, filed in California’s Supreme Court, argues Prop 22 makes it harder […]

The popularity of podcasting and online video shows no signs of slowing down, and so we continue to see a wave of creators publishing a profusion of audio and video content to fill out the airwaves. Today, a company building a platform to make that work easier and more interesting to execute is announcing a […]

Vantage, a new service that makes managing AWS resources and their associated spend easier, is coming out of stealth today. The service offers its users an alternative to the complex AWS console with support for most of the standard AWS services, including EC2 instances, S3 buckets, VPCs, ECS and Fargate and Route 53 hosted zones. […]

Eden, the office management platform that has raised nearly $70 million since inception, is today making a tweak to its nomenclature to reflect its push into SaaS tools. Henceforth, the startup will be called Eden Workplace. “We had a lot of clients in different categories like retail, some industrial and some classic real estate and […]

No one likes dilution, and that’s why every founder is looking for alternatives to traditional equity investing by venture capitalists. Financial entrepreneurs have launched a number of products, from SaaS securitization to debt-based financing, to help founders avoid that dilution, particularly when they have recurring revenues clocked on the books. SaaS securitization will disrupt VC’s […]

Lenovo keeps rolling out unique takes on familiar categories this year at CES. Last week it was the screen-swiveling all-in-one and some AR glasses, and today (the first official day of the show), the company’s got an interesting update to last year’s dual-display ThinkBook Plus. Like the original, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 2 i sports […]

Grafana Labs, the company behind the increasingly popular open-source monitoring and observability platform, today announced both an updated version of its cloud service and the launch of a free tier for it. The free plan for Grafana Cloud has some limitations, but it includes access to virtually all of Grafana Labs’ tools for monitoring modern […]

We are more than seven years into the notion of modern containerization, and it still requires a complex set of tools and a high level of knowledge on how containers work. The DockerSlim open source project developed several years ago from a desire to remove some of that complexity for developers. Slim.ai, a new startup […]

Around a third of Americans regularly get their news from Facebook, according to the latest study from Pew Research Center, whose surveys aim to better understand the current media landscape in the U.S. In the updated report, Pew Research found that around half of U.S. adults, or 53%, said they “often” or “sometimes” use social […]

GM revealed Tuesday a Cadillac -branded electric vertical takeoff and landing drone concept that is designed — if it’s ever built — to let owners cruise the skies in isolated luxury. The single seat eVTOL, which was showcased alongside an autonomous vehicle during GM’s keynote presentation at the virtual 2021 CES tech trade show, is […]

Smartphone sales are bad — and have been for a couple of years now. Certainly this ongoing pandemic hasn’t helped. All the talk about how 5G and new form factors were going to cause a kind of bounce-back all fell by the wayside, as people put a pause on unnecessary luxuries. Samsung is the only […]

Facebook today is rolling out an update to its Access Your Information tool with the goal of making the tool easier to both use and navigate, as well as better explain how and why that data is used. The new version of the tool has been visually redesigned, and now further breaks down the viewable […]

We may finally have an answer to why Byju’s, the world’s most valuable edtech startup, raised hundreds of millions of dollars last year. Bloomberg reports that the Bangalore-based startup has agreed to buy Aakash Educational Services, which owns and operates more than 200 physical tutoring centres across the country aimed at students preparing to qualify […]

Roboflow, a startup that aims to simplify the process of building computer vision models, today announced that it has raised a $2.1 million seed round co-led by Lachy Groom and Craft Ventures. Additional investors include Segment co-founder Calvin French-Owen, Lob CEO Leore Avidar, Firebase co-founder James Tamplin and early Dropbox engineer Aston Motes, among others. […]

Today — and the data proves this — if you are a white male, you have an unfair advantage when looking to raise venture capital.

Walmart announced today it will soon begin to pilot a new solution that could eventually allow the retailer to deliver groceries to customers’ homes 24 hours per day. The company is partnering with HomeValet, the maker of a temperature-controlled smart box that’s placed outside the home. Customers’ groceries can be delivered, contact-free, to the secure […]

Uber has expanded a program that incentivizes drivers to use all-electric and hybrid vehicles to more than 1,400 cities in North America including Austin, Houston, Miami and New York City as part of the ride-hailing company’s broader plan to become a zero-emission platform by 2040. The program, known as Uber Green, gives customers the option […]

Perhaps these companies would have merely stayed private sans SPACs. If that's true, two cheers for blank-check companies?

GM has launched a new business unit to offer commercial customers — starting with FedEx — an ecosystem of electric and connected products, the latest effort in the company’s ambitious $27 billion bid to become a leading electric automaker. The new business called BrightDrop, which officially launched Tuesday during the virtual 2021 CES, will begin […]

America is a land of paperwork, and nowhere is that more obvious than at the end of someone’s life. Advanced care directives have to be carefully disseminated to healthcare providers and strictly followed. Property has to be divided and transferred while meeting relevant estate laws. And of course, there are the logistics of a funeral, […]

Cockroach Labs, makers of CockroachDB, have been on a fundraising roll for the last couple of years. Today the company announced a $160 million Series E on a fat $2 billion valuation. The round comes just eight months after the startup raised an $86.6 million Series D. The latest investment was led by Altimeter Capital […]

Uber and pharmaceutical company Moderna have announced a partnership around COVID-19 vaccination, which will include a number of different initiatives. To start, it’s only confirmed component is to provide users with credible, factual information about COVID-19 vaccine safety through Uber’s consumer app, but the companies have also discussed additional “options” including building ride scheduling via […]

The maker of a defunct cloud photo storage app that pivoted to selling facial recognition services has been ordered to delete user data and any algorithms trained on it, under the terms of an FTC settlement. The regulator investigated complaints the Ever app — which gained earlier notoriety for using dark patterns to spam users’ […]

Archer, a company that’s looking to develop an airline of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for use in urban transport, will work with automaker Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) in a new partnership to benefit from the latter’s expertise in engineering, design, supply chain and materials science. Archer aims to start production of its […]

For the past three years, the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) has brought startups to CES . This year, its virtual pavilion, organized with Taiwan Tech Arena, is hosting 100 startups, organized into five categories: Smart Living, Tech for Good, Cybersecurity and Cloud, Healthcare and Wellness, and Mobility Tech. During two press events, […]

Organizations today — perhaps more than ever before — are relying on technology to help them figure out what the next weeks, months, and years will hold for their business at what has been one of the more tumultuous periods for our global economy in decades. Today, a company that is providing the platform to […]

Technologists are getting better at coding biology and venture firms are flooding a new generation of startups with cash so that they can commercialize their technology bringing in the next wave of genetic innovation. Tessera Therapeutics, the Boston-based spinup from Flagship Pioneering, is the latest company to enter the mix with $230 million in new […]

UK SpaceTech startup Skyrora is currently the only private company capable of launching rockets from UK soil. On Christmas Eve at its testing facility in Fife, Scotland, the team performed a third-stage static fire engine test onboard a new vehicle that will ultimately carry satellites to their final destination. But what’s more interesting is that […]

One of the technology byproducts of the Covid-19 pandemic is that it has raised the game for businesses to have better digital tools in place to interface with customers, and their own work, to get things done. Today, a company called Jobber, which has built a platform doing just that for a particular segment of […]

Moving forward, Yelp users won’t just be asked whether a business has good food or accepts credit cards — the platform is also allowing them to share feedback on whether the staff is wearing masks and enforcing social distancing. Yelp’s head of consumer product Akhil Kuduvalli Ramesh suggested that this is the next phase of […]

One year in, the Covid-19 global health pandemic continues to have something of a dragging effect on many aspects of life, but today a key bellwether for how technology is developing underscored how the industry continues to march on. The number of patents granted in the US in 2020 totaled 352,013, representing a decline of […]

LAUNCHub Ventures, an early-stage European VC which concentrates mainly on Central Eastern (CEE) and South-Eastern Europe (SEE), has completed the first closing of its new fund at €44 million ($53.5M), with an aspiration to reach a target size of €70 million. A final close is expected by Q2 2021. Its principal backer is the European […]

Roughly eight years ago, investors Mark Kvamme and Chris Olsen left Silicon Valley to open a venture firm, Drive Capital, in Columbus, Ohio. It wasn’t an easy decision. Leaving California wasn’t exactly fashionable at the time. In fact, While Olsen had grown up in Cincinnati, the Yale grad had landed at Sequoia Capital a couple […]

Pinduoduo, a rapidly growing Chinese e-commerce company, is weathering its PR storm after the death of an employee sparked criticism against the firm’s grueling working hours. The employee, 21 years old, collapsed on her way home from work on a late night before New Year. The cause of her death has not been disclosed but […]

Payments company Checkout.com is raising once again. The company has closed a $450 million Series C round with Tiger Global Management leading the round — Greenoaks Capital and all existing investors are also participating. If you’re not familiar with the company, Checkout.com wants to build a one-stop shop for all things related to payments, such […]

Curve, the London-based fintech that combines multiple cards and accounts into one smart card and an app, has secured a Series C finding round of $95 million. The financing was led by IDC Ventures, Fuel Venture Capital and Vulcan Capital (the investment arm of the estate of Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen), with […]

Zipmex, a digital assets exchange headquartered in Singapore, announced today it has raised $6 million in funding led by Jump Capital. The startup, which plans to become a digital assets bank, says the round exceeded its initial target of $4 million. Along with earlier funding, it brings the total Zipmex has raised so far to […]