Crunch Hype

Color of Change, the nonprofit civil rights advocacy group, along with a growing number of other organizations, called for social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook to remove President Donald Trump from their platforms, following a chaotic day of protests and rioting that led a mob of pro-Trump supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol […]

In a reversal of its long standing policy, Twitter has locked the President of the United States’ Twitter account and forced the removal of three offending tweets. “As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for […]

Facebook and YouTube have removed a video posted by President Trump telling rioters who stormed Congress “we love you.” The same video was left online but blocked from being shared by Twitter just minutes ago. A great deal of video and content from the chaotic scene in Washington, D.C. can be found on social media, […]

A pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol while the president encouraged them on Twitter and … well, it feels extremely hard to care about anything else right now. That said, there was a whole other news cycle before then, and I know you read The Daily Crunch for tech headlines. So I’ll do my best […]

As chaos and violence have erupted in Washington, D.C., social media platforms are grappling with the fallout. A spokesperson for Reddit tells TechCrunch: Reddit’s site-wide policies prohibit content that promotes hate or encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence. In accordance with this, we have been proactively reaching out to moderators to remind them of […]

Twitter took a new action against President Trump’s account Wednesday, adding a large, pop-up warning message to his latest tweet addressing the ongoing chaos on Capitol Hill. The company has restricted engagement on the tweet, citing a “risk of violence.” Trump’s new message to his mob of angry supporters came in video form, following an […]

A chaotic scene unfolded in Washington D.C. on Wednesday as a large crowd of pro-Trump protesters stormed the U.S. Capitol Building. The Trump supporters flooded into the nation’s capital to attend a rally held earlier by President Trump outside the White House. The rally was timed to protest lawmakers gathering Wednesday to certify President-elect Joe […]

One of the most prominent and popular new models for investors is revenue-based investing (RBI).

Snapchat was among the first apps to leverage the iPhone 12 Pro’s LiDAR Scanner for AR, but now TikTok has followed suit. The social video app confirmed today it has launched its first-ever lidar-powered effect to help its users ring in the new year. The effect features an AR ball, similar to the one that […]

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued new final rules to help pave the way for the re-introduction of supersonic commercial flight. The U.S. airspace regulator’s rules provide guidance for companies looking to gain approval for flight testing of supersonic aircraft under development, which includes startups like Boom Supersonic, which has just completed its […]

Last month, Looking Glass Factory introduced the Portrait, its first offering for a more general audience. The device utilizes the company’s impressive holographic imaging technology for a far more accessible form factor — a technically impressive digital photo frame, put simply. Of course, one of the biggest question marks for technology like this is always […]

After a year of video calls and Slack messages, the definition of workplace is set to shift again. In a post-pandemic world, some will return to the office, many will remain remote and regardless of where an employee sits, Florent Crivello, the founder of Teamflow, has raised millions for what he views as a trillion-dollar […]

Twitter this morning announced it’s bringing the full-service creative agency Ueno in-house to work alongside Twitter’s own design and research teams. The move, an acqui-hire of sorts, is one where Twitter is essentially buying the agency with which it already had a close working relationship, as Ueno had previously partnered with Twitter on various design […]

Venture capital, from my vantage point, has lost its sheen for a lot of product-based brands. They’re not destitute and desperate for financing.

The New York Stock Exchange announced this morning that it will be delisting three major Chinese telecom companies, a move that it first announced last week before seeming to reverse course on Monday. This is all happening in response to the Trump administration’s broader order barring U.S. investment in companies that support the Chinese military. […]

Loosely, then: at the low end of its valuation range, Poshmark is worth 8.6x its current run rate, and at the top-end a richer 10.9x.

In April 2020, when the entire world was laser-focused on the coronavirus pandemic, we realized that startupland was in unprecedented territory. How should startups navigate fundraising, operations, and better understand the market? In a matter of a couple weeks, we spun up a little series called Extra Crunch Live, giving Extra Crunch members the chance […]

Apple this morning offered an updated look at its App Store business with the release of its holiday sales figures. The company said App Store customers spent $1.8 billion in apps during the week of Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, driven largely by games. And App Store customers also hit a new single-day spending […]

The UK’s competition and markets regulator is seeking views on Nvidia’s takeover of Arm Holdings as it prepares to kick off formal oversight of potential competition impacts of the deal. The US-based chipmaker’s $40BN purchase of the UK-based chip designer, announced last September, has triggered a range of domestic concerns — over the impact on […]

Can you please share an overview of the U.S. immigration system and how it works so I can get the big picture and understand what I’m navigating?

Facebook Pages are being redesigned. The social network announced today a significant change to the Facebook Page experience for creators and public figures, which includes a new look-and-feel, updated navigation, the introduction of a dedicated News Feed, a new Q&A format for engaging fans, and other tools and insights. Notably, the redesign will also do […]

Spending on cosmetics has usually weathered economic crises, but that changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with stay-at-home orders and masks tempering people’s desire to wear makeup. This forced retailers to accelerate their online strategies, finding new ways to capture shoppers’ attention without in-store samples. Virtual beauty try-on technology, like the ones developed by Perfect Corp., […]

Eating less meat is the easiest way for anyone to lower their carbon footprint and the prepared food delivery startup, Thistle, has just raised $10.3 million to make that choice even easier for consumers. The company delivers plant-based full menus (with meat options available for customers that want them) for its customers along with a range […]

Sports have been among some of the most popular and lucrative media plays in the world, luring broadcasters, advertisers and consumers to fork out huge sums to secure the chance to watch (and sponsor) their favorite teams and athletes. That content, unsurprisingly, also typically costs a ton of money to produce, narrowing the production and […]

YouTube has reversed a controversial ban on the account of TalkRadio, a News Corp-owned UK national radio station that covers news and current affairs. The station revealed yesterday its channel had been removed from YouTube but said it had not been provided with an explanation for the suspension. YouTube – A statement from talkRADIO. Listen […]

Senti Biosciences, a company developing cancer therapies using a new programmable biology platform, said it has raised $105 million in a new round of financing led by the venture arm of life sciences giant, Bayer. The company’s technology uses new computational biological techniques to manufacture cell and gene therapies that can more precisely target specific […]

The Covid-19 pandemic and specifically need for social distancing to slow the spread of the virus have continued to keep many of us away from the office. Now, increasingly, many organizations and people believe that it could usher in a more permanent shift to remote, distributed and virtual work. Today, a startup that has built […]

Business-to-business marketplace Udaan has raised $280 million from new and existing investors as the Indian startup builds a war-chest to accelerate its growth and fend off rivals. The new capital is not part of a new financing round but is an extension of Series D. The Bangalore-based startup, which secured $585 million prior to the […]

Bibit, a robo-advisor app that wants to make investing more accessible in Indonesia, has raised $30 million from Sequoia Capital India. Returning investors East Ventures, EV Growth, AC Ventures and 500 Startups also participated. This funding is a growth round and comes after Bibit’s May 2019 Series A. It brings the company’s total funding so […]

While the world continues to await the arrival of safe, reliable and cost-effective self-driving cars, one of the pioneers in the world of autonomous vehicle software has raised some substantial funding to double down on what it sees as a more immediate opportunity: providing technology to industrial companies to build off-road applications. Oxbotica, the Oxford, […]

Contrary to reports, Google is not delaying updates to its iOS apps because it doesn’t want to comply with Apple’s recently announced App Store Privacy Labels policy. The new policy, a part of the company’s larger privacy push, requires developers to disclose how data is collected from App Store users and used to track them. […]

OpenAI’s latest strange yet fascinating creation is DALL-E, which by way of hasty summary might be called “GPT-3 for images.” It creates illustrations, photos, renders or whatever method you prefer, of anything you can intelligibly describe, from “a cat wearing a bow tie” to “a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog.” But don’t […]

The New York Stock Exchange reverses course, Nintendo acquires a game studio and an Indian electronics and lifestyle startup raises $100 million. This is your Daily Crunch for January 5, 2021. The big story: NYSE won’t delist Chinese telcos The New York Stock Exchange is reversing a recent decision to delist China’s three major telecom […]

Hinge Health, the San Francisco-based company that offers a digital solution to treat chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions — such as back and joint pain — has closed a $310 million in Series D funding, according to sources. The round is led by Coatue and Tiger Global, and values 2015-founded Hinge at $3 billion post-money, people […]

Georgia is the only state in the U.S. right now where Facebook allows political ads to run, but after Tuesday’s polls close that’s set to change. According to Facebook’s site detailing changes to its ad policies and a story from Axios, the company will no longer allow political and social issue ads anywhere in the […]

On New Year’s Eve, TechCrunch Japan’s Editor-in-Chief Hirohide Yoshida passed away at age 49. In addition to being a tremendously valuable member of our international team who helped build the site’s presence on the international stage, Hiro-san was a thoughtful, warm and kind colleague who impacted the lives of those of us who had the […]

Any teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District who needs a second monitor can request one free of charge from Two Screens for Teachers, the nonprofit that recently extended a similar privilege to Seattle educators. If you’re a teacher in SF, you can sign up here. Having a second monitor may sound like a […]

Throughout 2019, Microsoft experimented with building a real-world, augmented reality Minecraft game designed in the same vein as Pokémon GO. Called Minecraft Earth, they finally opened it up to everyone in November of 2019. In just a few months, it’ll shut down and all player data will be deleted. So what happened? Writes the Minecraft […]

Virgin Orbit is wasting no time in 2021 getting back to active flight testing: The company has a window for its next orbital demonstration launch attempt that opens on Sunday, January 10, and that continues throughout the rest of the month. This follows an attempt last year made in May, which ended before the LauncherOne […]

Dell’s latest monitors reflect the growing need for simple, solid solutions to video conferencing needs, with a clever pop-up camera and a perhaps too clever by half Teams integration. The new displays integrate a number of advanced features — but they’re still made strictly with offices in mind. The new Dell 24, 27 and 34 […]

The U.S. government says hackers “likely Russian in origin” are responsible for breaching the networks of at least 10 U.S. federal agencies and several major tech companies, including FireEye and Microsoft. In a joint statement published Tuesday, the FBI, the NSA and Homeland Security’s cybersecurity advisory unit, CISA, said that the government was “still working […]

Procter & Gamble will not acquire women’s beauty products startup Billie, as previously planned, following action taken by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to stop the deal from proceeding. In December, the FTC sued to block P&G’s acquisition of the New York-based startup Billie, a maker of women’s razors and other beauty products, on the grounds […]

Coral reefs all over the world are struggling to survive, with millions of people and billions of dollars in business that rely on them at risk — on top of the fundamental tragedy of losing such a crucial ecosystem. Coral Vita aims to modernize both coral restoration techniques and the economy surrounding them, and has […]

While gaming giants Sony and Microsoft have made M&A a critical part of their strategic growth plans, Nintendo has always seemed to be more reluctant to bring outside talent into the fold of its video game empire. Today, the company announced that it will be acquiring the developer behind Luigi’s Mansion 3, Canada-based Next Level […]

Today Affirm, a fintech startup that offers payment options to e-commerce customers, released a new S-1/A filing. The new document follows a late-December filing of a similar nature, though that update focused on changing the language of Affirm’s reported results, tweaking its language to remove some adjusted metrics and hewing closer to generally accepted accounting […]

Boat, an electronics and lifestyle startup in India, has raised $100 million in a new financing round that many independent investors termed as the most successful hardware startup story to date in the world’s second-largest internet market. An affiliate of Warburg Pincus, a New York-headquartered private equity firm, financed the entire Series B round for […]

The systemic issues became apparent the way they often do -- when customers began complaining.

We’ve announced our slate of 2021 events, and we’d like to take this time to remind you that annual or two-year Extra Crunch members can receive a 20% discount on all TechCrunch 2021 virtual events. How to get the discount If you’re an annual or two-year subscriber, contact extracrunch@techcrunch.com to request your event ticket discount […]

The rise of distributed teams in response to the coronavirus has led to more video-conferencing meetings for all of us. As offices remain closed, distributed work is forcing companies to figure out a better way than Zoom or Google Hangouts to meet with employees across time zones and teams. Rewatch wants to make meetings more […]

More than two years ago, Ludwig Schoenack, Nikolaus Volk and Francesco Wiedemann looked at the bevy of scooter services, ride-hailing apps, public transit and car-sharing options available in most urban centers in the United States and saw a gap in the mobility market. Consumers who didn’t want to own a car, but needed one for […]