Crunch Hype

Online platforms take action against President Trump, Lenovo tries out a swiveling screen and Roblox raises $250 million. This is your Daily Crunch for January 7, 2021. The big story: Facebook bans Trump for two weeks After a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol yesterday, a number of online platforms moved to suspend accounts connected […]

Epic today announced the acquisition of Rad Game Tools, maker of game development tools for many years. They’ve stayed largely behind the scenes, but many gamers will recognize the colorful Bink Video logo, which has appeared in the openings of many a title over the years. “Our work with Epic goes back decades, and joining […]

Like many startups, Atlanta-based Voxie was created to solve a problem that founder and CEO Bogdan Constantin faced himself. In Constantin’s case, this was at his previous tuxedo rental startup Menguin (ultimately acquired by Generation Tux), where he said he had to market a product with a six-to-nine month sales cycle, as customers were usually weighing […]

MadeiraMadeira, the Brazilian answer to Wayfair or Ikea, is now worth $1 billion after raising $190 million in late stage financing from investors led by SoftBank’s Latin American investment fund and the Brazilian public and private investment firm, Dynamo. An online marketplace specializing in home products, MadeiraMadeira offers roughly 300,000 products so customers can build […]

RedHat today announced that it’s acquiring container security startup StackRox . The companies did not share the purchase price. RedHat, which is perhaps best known for its enterprise Linux products has been making the shift to the cloud in recent years. IBM purchased the company in 2018 for a hefty $34 billion and has been […]

In a new statement issued by former First Lady Michelle Obama, she calls on Silicon Valley specifically to address its role in the violent insurrection attempt by pro-Trump rioters at the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday. Obama’s statement also calls out the obviously biased treatment that the primarily white pro-Trump fanatics faced by law enforcement […]

Six years after launching its service linking employer-sponsored insurance plans with surgical centers of excellence, Carrum Health has raised $40 million in a new round of financing to capitalize on tailwinds propelling its business forward. As the COVID-19 pandemic exposes cracks in the U.S. healthcare system, one of the ways that employers have tried to […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Happy 2021, or as our own Danny Crichton aptly names it, December 38, 2020. Equity crew is back to start the new year in full force, with Alex, Natasha and Danny on the mics and Chris behind the scenes. The […]

Following a slate of temporary and permanent bans from a number of the top online platforms, popular video streaming service Twitch today confirmed that it has disabled the President of the United States’ account. A spokesperson for the site told TechCrunch, In light of yesterday’s shocking attack on the Capitol, we have disabled President Trump’s […]

The breach will likely present a major task for Congress' IT departments, which must now determine what's been stolen and which security risks could still pose a threat to the Capitol's network.

Some consolidation is underway in the world of challenger banking apps. BBVA today told users of Simple — the pioneering mobile and online banking app that it acquired for $117 million in 2014 — that it is planning to shut down the service, moving accounts to BBVA’s USA business in the process. The move is […]

We are only beginning to understand the long-lasting effects the pandemic will have on mental health.

Mobile advertising company Tapjoy has settled with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it was misleading consumers about the in-app rewards they could earn in mobile games. According to the FTC, Tapjoy deceived consumers who participated in various activities — like purchasing a product, signing up for a free trial, providing their personal […]

YouTube just announced that channels publishing “false claims” about the U.S. presidential election will be penalized with a strike, which would temporarily suspend them from posting videos. If you’re wondering why it took this long, YouTube announced last month (a full month after the presidential election, but right after the “safe harbor” deadline for audits […]

Some of the biggest decision-makers in edtech are taking a scalpel to the way tutoring used to work.

Facebook isn’t the only big tech company taking action against Donald Trump’s web presence in the wake of yesterday’s riots in Washington, D.C. Shopify, which hosted shops related to Trump’s campaign paraphernalia and the outgoing President’s personal brand, TrumpStore, has apparently taken down both of those properties. “Shopify does not tolerate actions that incite violence. […]

Consumer financial services startup SoFi is going public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp V, one of a series of blank-check companies formed by venture capital investor Chamath Palihapitiya. The deal, confirmed by SoFi, would value the fintech at $8.65 billion according to the company’s statement. It includes […]

What a week. Democracy is still standing and the nation is getting back to work, so let’s press forward, even if it does feel surreal to cover business news after witnessing a live-streamed coup attempt. Setting aside the tectonic political moment, there’s plenty of activity inside the world of startups we need to discuss. The […]

A new startup has officially emerged from stealth with the raise of its $62 million Series A funding round. Endeavor BioMedicines is led by co-founder and CEO John Hood, who previously led Impact Biomedicines, and its new funding comes from Omega Funds and Longitude Capital, as well as the company’s own management team. Endeavor is […]

Former Disney and Discovery execs are teaming up to launch a new streaming service called Struum, arriving in the spring, that aims to take the Classpass model and apply it to the streaming landscape. That is, Struum’s plan is to aggregate content from smaller video on demand services, then provide that under its own subscription. […]

A Twitter spokesperson has confirmed with TechCrunch this morning that Trump has deleted three tweets that led to the temporarily suspension of this account last night. Twitter locked the account pending deletion of the offending tweets on Wednesday following the riot and siege of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and said that the suspension […]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced via his platform that Donald Trump will be blocked from using both Facebook and Instagram “for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.” The company blocked his accounts temporarily on Wednesday following Trump’s posting on content that incited his followers to violence, […]

Elon Musk, the controversial and enigmatic entrepreneur who heads up SpaceX and Tesla, has reached a status that only three others have held in the past two decades: world’s richest person. On his way to the top spot, Musk has surpassed a bevy of billionaires this year, including Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. He reached […]

Roblox is now one of the world’s most valuable private companies in the world after a monster Series H raise brings the social gaming platform a stratospheric $29.5 billion valuation. The company won’t be private for long, though. The $520 million raise led by Altimeter Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group is a significant cash influx […]

Lisbon — and Portugal generally — is becoming a magnet for digital nomads with talent.

Cable or fiber. For the vast majority of American homes, there’s no choice of how customers get their internet access. If you’re lucky to live in some dense urban areas with amenable landlords, that ‘or’ might become an ‘and.’ Yet, as more and more people rely on the internet for more than just cat photos […]

Mandy Price was already a highly successful lawyer in private practice before she took the jump into entrepreneurship alongside two co-founders to launch Kanarys a little over one year ago. The Harvard Law School graduated didn’t have to start her company, which helps businesses measure the efficacy of their diversity and inclusion efforts using hard […]

Leave it to Lenovo to give the world a swiveling all-in-one. It’s kind of the company’s M.O. – not always the most necessary or practical, but never not interesting. When it comes to fairly staid product categories like this, I’m all for trying something a little weird. And hey, in a world of convertible and […]

This morning Gtmhub, a multinational startup that builds software to help other companies manage their corporate planning, announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B. The round was led by Insight, and included both participation from new investor Singular, and prior investors LauncHub and CRV. Gtmhub raised capital around 13 months ago, a […]

Digital product design — the process of building services like websites and apps that work without bugs and as you intend them to — has come into focus as an especially important thing to get right in the last year. With more customers using sites and apps to interact with a business, if something is […]

Happy almost CES! Sure the year’s biggest consumer electronics show hasn’t officially kicked off, but, well, what do such arbitrary signposts really mean in a year like 2021, right? Samsung just dropped what’s almost certainly one of its biggest pieces of news for the show, with the arrival of the Galaxy Chromebook 2. The two-in-one […]

The popular news app News Break is announcing that it has raised $115 million in new funding. The press release claims this round makes News Break “one of the first new unicorns of 2021,” but the startup declined to disclose its actual valuation. Founder and CEO Jeff Zheng said that when he started the company […]

Three years ago, Mercedes-Benz unveiled MBUX, an infotainment system that represented a leap forward in the legacy automotive industry. That system, with its crisp graphics, intuitive user interface and voice assistant, was closer to the experience of using a smartphone and finally got away from the pixelated screens and cluttered designs found in most modern […]

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire set to likely soon become the world’s richest man, and one of the most influential voices in the world of tech entrepreneurship, continued his recent trend of criticizing Facebook with a Twitter post late Wednesday night, following the attempted insurrection by pro-Trump rioters at the U.S. Capitol building. Musk shared […]

The ongoing push for social distancing to slow the spread of Covid-19 has meant that more people than ever before are using internet-based services to get things done. And that is having a direct impact on digital customer service, which is seeing unprecedented traffic and demands when things are not running smoothly. Today, one of […]

As the pandemic took hold in 2020, companies accelerated their move to cloud services. Lacework, the cloud security startup, was in the right place at the right time as customers looked for ways to secure their cloud native workloads. The company reported that revenue grew 300% year over year for the second straight year. It […]

This morning Hopin, a quickly-growing startup that sells a technology platform for hosting digital events, announced that it has acquired StreamYard. The acquired company, which bootstrapped itself to material revenue scale, will retain its brand and in-market product. The deal is worth $250 million, paid in a mix of cash and stock. Hopin raised a […]

Waymo will no longer use the term ‘self-driving’ to describe the technology it has been developing for more than a decade, opting instead for ‘autonomous.’ The Alphabet company said that this seemingly small shift is an important effort to clarify what the technology does and doesn’t do. It’s also been viewed as an attempt to […]

Challenger banks, incumbent banks, and all of the many businesses that are making inroads into any kind of banking service all have something in common: when it comes to launching a new product like a credit line or a deposit or current account, these days many of them are opting not to build from the […]

Digital services taxes adopted by India, Italy, and Turkey in the past years discriminate against U.S. companies, the U.S. Trade Representative said on Wednesday. USTR, which began investigations into the three nation’s digital services taxes in June last year, said it found them to be inconsistent with international tax principles, unreasonable, and burdening or restricting […]

Too Good To Go, the startup that lets you buy food right before it goes to waste, is raising a $31.1 million round. blisce/ is leading the round and investing $15.4 million as part of today’s round. Existing investors and employees are also participating. While the company has been around for a while, this is […]

French startup Pennylane has raised $18.4 million (€15 million) for its accounting service that combines automated processes with human accountants. Existing investors Global Founders Capital and Partech are investing once again. Pennylane is both a software-as-a-service company that helps you deal with your financial data and an accounting firm. By working with accountants directly, it […]

IPRally, a burgeoning startup out of Finland aiming to solve the patent search problem, has raised €2 million in seed funding. Leading the round is by JOIN Capital, and Spintop Ventures, with participation from existing pre-seed backer Icebreaker VC. It brings the total raised by the 2018-founded company to €2.35 million. Co-founded by CEO Sakari […]

Snapchat locked President Donald Trump’s account after pro-Trump rioters stormed the United States Capitol. A Snap spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the action was taken on Wednesday and added that the company will monitor the situation closely before re-evaluating its decision. This is not the first time Snap has taken action against Trump’s account over […]

The State Department ordered diplomats to stop posting on social media after pro-Trump rioters stormed the United States Capitol, reports CNN, citing three diplomatic sources. Diplomats overseas were also told by the under secretary for public affairs to remove scheduled content for Facebook, Hootsuite and Twitter until told otherwise, and that planned social media posts […]

It was hard not to feel emotional today, as the world watched for more than four hours as rioters stormed into and throughout the Capitol building in Washington to disrupt the certification of the election win of incoming U.S. President-Elect Joe Biden. They’d been encouraged earlier in the afternoon by outgoing President Donald Trump to […]

Eat Just, a food startup from San Francisco making chicken-less eggs, has ambitions to crack the Chinese market where consumer appetite for plant-based food is growing and other Western vegan substitute brands like Beyond became available in recent quarters. The startup said this week it will be suppling to fast-food chain Dicos, a local rival […]

After removing a video in which President Trump praised a violent group of his supporters who broke into the U.S. Capitol building, Facebook is rolling out a new set of rules in response to the day’s shocking events. Both Facebook and Instagram also announced that the president would be locked out of posting to his […]

Today’s historic and terrifying coup attempt by pro-Trump extremists in Washington, D.C. played out live the same way it was fomented — on social media. Once again Twitter, streaming sites and other user-generated media were the only place to learn what was happening in the nation’s capital — and the best place to be misled […]

After pro-Trump extremists violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, a number of tech executives and industry leaders are calling on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to more aggressively curb the president’s messages amplifying and endorsing violence. After Trump released a video calling the extremists “very special” and telling them to go home, […]