Crunch Hype

Sony’s Vision-S prototype sedan, one of the biggest surprises at CES last year, didn’t fade away after the tech trade show ended. The Vision-S is back in a series of new videos released by Sony during 2021 CES, which kicked off Monday. Two videos show the Vision-S prototype driving on a private track and then […]

The backbone of Indonesia’s economy are small- to medium-sized businesses, which account for 60% of its gross domestic product. Many still rely on manual bookkeeping, but the impact of COVID-19 has driven small businesses to digitize more of their operations. BukuKas, one of several startups helping SMEs go online, announced today it has raised a […]

In October, TechCrunch broke the news that PopSockets was developing its own line of MagSafe-compatible products that will support the new wireless charging capabilities of the iPhone 12 devices. Today, at the (virtual) 2021 Consumer Electronics Show, the company formally introduced its upcoming products for the first time. The new line will include three MagSafe-compatible […]

When Sony teased the AirPeak late last year, it didn’t give us much to go one. We knew the consumer electronics giant was finally getting in the drone business — but beyond that, not much else. Just a dark image or two from some piece of the UAV. See the latest news from Sony unveiled […]

Last week and throughout the weekend, technology companies took the historic step of deplatforming the president of the United States in the wake of a riot in which the US Capitol was stormed by a collection of white nationalists, QAnon supporters, and right wing activists. The decision to remove Donald Trump, his fundraising and moneymaking […]

Building on a policy that the company said has been in place since the Charlottesville protests back in 2017, Airbnb said it will take additional steps to beef up community protections for the DC metro area ahead of the presidential inauguration. Airbnb already removes people from the platform who are associated with violent hate groups […]

Launched in South Korea five years ago, content discovery platform Dable now serves a total of six markets in Asia. Now it plans to speed up the pace of its expansion, with six new markets in the region planned for this year, before entering European countries and the United States. Dable announced today that it […]

Platforms and infrastructure providers dump Parler, Microsoft unveils a new Surface and a Chinese fitness app raises $360 million. This is your Daily Crunch for January 11, 2021. The big story: Parler sues Amazon after going offline President Donald Trump has found himself banned from most of the major social media and internet platforms, with […]

Noopl looks like one of the more interesting hardware startups to come out of CES day one. The Sacramento-based company has designed an accessory that it says can help drown out background noise for users in a loud environment. The little accessory sports a Lightning plug (it’s currently iOS only), which connects to the bottom […]

WhatsApp has enjoyed unrivaled reach in India for years. By mid-2019, the Facebook-owned app had amassed over 400 million users in the country. Its closest app rival at the time was YouTube, which, according to the company’s own statement and data from mobile insight firm App Annie, had about 260 million users in India then. […]

In the wake of last week’s violence at the U.S. Capitol, Facebook today announced it will be taking additional steps to remove content referencing the phrase “stop the steal” on its platform. The phrase is associated with the right-wing campaign that falsely alleges the democratic U.S. elections have been rigged and aims to keep Trump […]

A new category of investors has emerged offering a hybrid between VC and revenue-based investment (RBI), which we call “flexible VC."

SoleSavy, a community built around buying hot sneakers and related items that are increasingly hard to acquire at retail, raised $2 million in a round that closed late last year. SoleSavy is a group of communities that is currently mostly hosted on Slack. SoleSavy’s co-founders Dejan Pralica and Justin Dusanj founded the company in 2018 […]

Ubiquiti, one of the biggest sellers of networking gear, including routers, webcams and mesh networks, has alerted its customers to a data breach. In a short email to customers on Monday, the tech company said it became aware of unauthorized access to its systems hosted by a third-party cloud provider. Ubiquiti didn’t name the cloud […]

Less than a full day into CES 2021, and it seems that smart glasses are very much shaping up as a trend. I wrote about a pair of AR glasses from Lenovo aimed at business applications yesterday, and a few other companies have popped up in the meantime, with various levels of “smartness” included. Vuzix’s […]

Snapchat’s parent company Snap has acquired StreetCred, a New York City startup building a platform for location data. Snap confirmed the news to TechCrunch and said the acquisition will result in four StreetCred team members — including co-founders Randy Meech and Diana Shkolnikov — joining the company, where they’ll be working on map and location-related […]

Mapping the ocean’s floor is a surprisingly vital enterprise, which helps with a range of activities including shipping, coastal protection, and deep-sea resource gathering. It’s also a very costly and time-consuming activity, which can be demanding and dangerous for those involved. Saildrone is a startup focused on building out autonomous exploratory vessels that can do […]

Mobileye, a subsidiary of Intel, is scaling up its autonomous vehicle program and plans to launch test fleets in at least four more cities over the next several months, including Detroit, Paris Shanghai and Tokyo. Mobileye president and CEO Amnon Shashua said Monday during the virtual 2021 CES tech trade show that if the company […]

As the vaccination campaign to counter COVID-19 gets underway (albeit with a rocky start), a number of companies are attempting to support its rollout in a variety of ways. Healthvana, a health tech startup that began with a specific focus on providing patient information digitally for individuals living with HIV, is helping Los Angeles County […]

Alternative social media apps including MeWe, CloutHub and other privacy-focused rivals to big tech, are topping the app stores following Trump’s ban from mainstream social platforms like Facebook and Twitter and the more recent removal of conservative social app Parler from both the App Store and Google Play. In the days since the Parler ban, […]

Parler has sued Amazon after the beleaguered conservative social media site was expelled from AWS, filing a fanciful complaint alleging the internet giant took it out for political reasons — and in an antitrust conspiracy to benefit Twitter. But its own allegations, including breach of contract, are belied by evidence they supply alongside the suit. […]

This morning Affirm, the buy-now-pay-later financing startup, raised its IPO price range to $41 to $44 per share, up from a previous range of $33 to $38 per share. The sharp repricing is steep in percentage terms, with the bottom end of Affirm’s range rising a little more than 24% and the top end gaining […]

Facebook has hired Roy Austin to become its first-ever VP of Civil Rights and Deputy General Counsel to create a new civil rights organization within the company, Facebook announced today. Austin is set to start on January 19 and will be based in Washington, DC. Austin most recently served as a civil rights lawyer at […]

Before the pandemic, edtech companies went decades without raising financing due to lack of interest from generalist venture capitalists. Now, more than a year since COVID-19 began, the sector is showing signs of maturation, from first profits to unicorns, potential IPOs and a rush of talent. Momentum in mind, cross-border venture capital firm SuperCharger Ventures […]

We’ve been covering Square Off at CES for a couple of years now — ever since the connected chess startup competed in one of our pitch offs. The Mumbai-based startup has been rapidly iterating on technology that lets users play a physical chess game with opponents across the globe, including the arrival of the new […]

At CES 2021, BMW today provided us with a first glimpse of the future of its iDrive system, 20 years after it first launched in the 2001 7 Series. Today’s announcement mostly focuses on the past, with a look back at the history of BMW’s infotainment platform, but the company did provide a bit more […]

Pollen Robotics turned heads at last year’s CES . After all, a humanoid robot will do that on the show floor (even if it’s only half of one). The French startup is back for this year’s show (insofar as anyone is really back for the show), with some key updates to its robot, Reachy. The […]

After rallying to record-setting prices, recapturing the attention of the public and becoming once-again the topic du jour, cryptocurrencies are losing ground today. Bitcoin, the best-known cryptocurrency, peaked at more than $41,000 apiece on January 8. Today after shedding a little over 23% in the last 24 hours, one bitcoin is now worth around $31,800. […]

Embattled social media platform Parler is offline after Apple, Google and Amazon pulled the plug on the site after the violent riot at the U.S. Capitol last week that left five people dead. But while the site is gone (for now), millions of posts published to the site since the riot are not. A lone […]

The president of the United States is supposedly the most powerful man in the world. He also can’t post to Twitter. Or Facebook. Or a bunch of other social networks as we discovered over the course of the past week (He still has access to the nuclear launch codes though, so that’s an interesting dynamic […]

I believe startups in the United States should be demanding that legislators deliver a federal privacy law.

It’s hard to believe that fintech startup Revolut doesn’t have a proper banking license in its home country. But this is about to change as the company has applied for a banking license in the U.K. Up next, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) are going to look at the […]

Looking to gain traction with a younger user base, Hulu this morning announced it’s dropping the price of its on-demand streaming service to $1.99 per month for students over 18 who are attending a U.S. college or university. This represents an over 65% discount off Hulu’s ad-supported subscription, which typically sells for $5.99 per month, […]

In the world of annual refresh cycles, there’s always been a big question mark around what to do with all of the old tech we too readily abandon. There are a number of options for disposing and recycling these objects that often contain rare earth and sometimes harmful material. The concept of upcycling has also […]

True to its word, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suspended services to Parler, the right-wing-focused social network that proved a welcoming home for pro-Trump users whose calls for violence at the nation’s Capitol and beyond. The service suspension went into effect overnight after a 24-hour warning from AWS, which means that if you now go to […]

Telecom company Orange is making some changes to its venture capital arm. Orange Ventures is becoming a separate legal entity and Orange itself is allocating $430 million (€350 million). With this new corporate structure, Orange could attract third-party investors in its fund. Other telecom companies have made some headlines with their venture funds in the […]

Your startup’s pitch deck could be the difference between getting funded or getting ignored. It’s often the first point of contact between a company and venture investors, but it’s also a bit of a black box. How do these investors consume this content? Are they speed-flipping through the slides or taking their time? Do they […]

Redwood Materials, the recycling startup founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, has quietly opened up its enterprise to everyday consumers and all of the old electronics sitting in their junk drawers. The move expands upon the Carson City, Nevada-based company’s existing and primary strategy to recycle scrap from battery cell production and consumer electronics […]

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. You […]

For the last couple of years, Samsung’s CES press conferences have featured a parade of futuristic home robots. They’re are smart, dexterous and impressive (and reasonably adorable). But home robots are hard. Like, really, really hard. There’s a reason the robotic vacuum continues to be one real viable home robot nearly 20 years after the […]

According to the National Cancer Institute, some 1.8 million people are diagnosed with cancer each year in the U.S. alone. Factor in the friends, family and loved ones of those patients, and the number of people affected by this disease can boggle the mind. Liya Shuster-Bier understands this struggle all too well. After her mother […]

LG spent a good chunk of its CES press conference talking about its lineup of TVs for 2021. You can expect bigger, slimmer and brighter TVs. I’m not going to list the specifications of new models. But there are a few new features that are worth mentioning. LG doesn’t use Android TV for the operating […]

As CES starts in earnest today, I anticipate we’ll be seeing a lot of hardware focused on remote work. PC sales saw a nice spike last year, even as smartphone sales continued to slip. There was a lot of adapting that needed to be done, moving from offices to virtual work places, and now we’re […]

UBTech is the massively funding Chinese robotics company you’ve (probably) never heard of. If you’re familiar at all with the brand here in the States, it’s likely for its STEM or other robotic toys, including a Star Wars Storm Trooper robot from a few years back (my own first exposure to the company). But with […]

Moderna, the biotech company behind one of the two mRNA-based vaccines currently being rolled out globally to stem the tide of COVID-19, has announced that it will purse development programs around three new vaccine candidates in 2021. These include potential vaccines for HIV, seasonal flu and the Nipah virus. Moderna’s development and clinical trial of […]

Big tech’s decision to pull the plug on president Donald Trump’s presence on their platforms, following his supporters’ attack on the US capital last week, has been seized on in Europe as proof — if proof were needed — that laws have not kept pace with tech market power and platform giants must face consequences […]

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

As Chinese fitness class provider Keep continues to diversify its offerings to include Peloton-like bikes, health-conscious snacks among other things, it’s bringing in new investors to fund its ambitions. On Monday, Keep said it has recently closed a Series F financing round of $360 million led by SoftBank Vision Fund. Hillhouse Capital and Coatue Management […]

China’s search giant Baidu is extending its car ambitions from mere software to production. The company said Monday that it will set up a company to produce electric vehicles with the help of Chinese automaker Geely. Baidu, a dominant player in China’s internet search market for the last decade or so, will provide smart driving […]

San Francisco police are preparing for a pro-Trump protest at Twitter’s headquarters, a building which has been essentially abandoned since the start of the pandemic last year, with most Twitter employees working remotely. The potential protest comes days after Twitter banned the president from using its service — his favorite form of communication to millions […]