Crunch Hype

So, onto 2021 we go. Let's see if the bulls are right again.

Voyager Space Holdings continues to build up its portfolio of strategic space service offerings with the acquisition of a majority stake in X.O. Markets, the parent company of Nanoracks. Nanoracks has provided commercial space services for years now, and most recently provided the Bishop Airlock that was installed on the International Space Station. Bishop is […]

The undoing of Nikola continues. Today, the company announced the termination of its contract with Republic Services for 2,500 garbage trucks. Announced back in August, the deal had Nikola building garbage trucks in 2023 with on-road testing scheduled for 2024. This is the latest deal to unravel for Nikola as it tries to patch up […]

When we examine any year in enterprise M&A, it’s tempting to highlight the biggest, gaudiest deals — and there were plenty of those in 2020. I’ve written about 34 acquisitions so far this year. Of those, 15 were worth $1 billion or more, 12 were small enough to not require that the companies disclose the […]

Ahead of the turning of the New Year, many people are wishing they could do something about the environment. Now, a U.K. startup hopes to make our environmental impact more personal. Yayzy has now launched an iOS app (Android is coming) which literally links to your bank account to work out the environmental impact of […]

ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, is entering the health industry as it seeks to diversify a business dependent on advertising and livestreaming sales. The company, which prides itself on content algorithms, has started seeking talent in AI drug discovery across Mountain View, Shanghai and Beijing, its recruiting page shows. “We are looking for candidates to […]

Instant messaging app Telegram is “approaching” 500 million users and plans to generate revenue starting next year to keep the business afloat, its founder Pavel Durov said on Wednesday. Durov said he has personally bankrolled the seven-year-old business so far, but as the startup scales he is looking for ways to monetize the instant messaging […]

You’ve heard of challenger banks? Now meet the challenger energy suppliers. The UK’s Octopus Energy has attained a $2.06 billion valuation (£1.5 billion) after attracting a $200 million (£150 million) investment from Tokyo Gas for a 9.7% stake, in order to launch a joint venture. Octopus will own 30% of the venture, with Tokyo Gas […]

Lalamove will extend its network to cover more small Chinese cities after raising $515 million in Series E funding, the on-demand logistics company announced on its site. The round was led by Sequoia Capital China, with participation from Hillhouse Capital and Shunwei Capital. All three are returning investors. According to Crunchbase data, this brings Lalamove’s […]

WeRide, one of China’s most-funded startups developing autonomous driving capabilities, said on Wednesday that it has raised a $200 million strategic round from Chinese bus maker Yutong. Mega investments aren’t uncommon at companies like WeRide developing the next-generation level 4 driving standard, which denotes that the car can handle the majority of driving situations independently without […]

TaskRabbit has reset an unknown number of customer passwords after confirming it detected “suspicious activity” on its network. The IKEA -owned online marketplace for on-demand labor said it reset user passwords out of an abundance of caution and that it “took steps to prevent access to any user accounts,” a TaskRabbit spokesperson told TechCrunch. The […]

The stimulus bill includes significant changes to copyright law and enforcement, the Biden administration may have to build a presidential Twitter following from scratch and we round up the startups that shut down this year. This is your Daily Crunch for December 22, 2020. The big story: Stimulus bill increases penalties for illegal streaming services […]

Content moderation has been a thorny topic in 2020. And when I say “thorny,” I mean in the sense of having multiple congressional hearings on the subject. Twitter and Facebook in particular have been mired in concerns around the subject, fielding complaints that they both haven’t done enough to weed out problematic content and suggestions […]

Tesla stock’s miraculously bizarre 2020 might have a gone different way had Apple’s Tim Cook agreed to a meeting in recent years, or so says Elon Musk. Reacting to Reuters’ recent news that Apple has not abandoned its electric car program and is still pursuing plans to build a physical vehicle, Musk tweeted that in […]

Bandit ML aims to optimize and automate the process of presenting the right offer to the right customer. The startup was part of the summer 2020 class at accelerator Y Combinator . It also raised a $1.32 million seed round in September from YC, Haystack Fund, Webb Investment Network, Liquid 2 Ventures, Jigsaw Ventures, Basecamp Fund, […]

NASA has finished work on a new launchpad at its Kennedy Space Center in Florida — Launch Complex 48 (LC-48), a pad that will be able to support smaller launch vehicles than either LC-39A or B, or SLC-41, which currently host SpaceX, SLS and ULA launches, respectively. It’s designed to be able to be used […]

AWS, Amazon’s flourishing cloud arm, has been growing at a rapid clip for more than a decade. An early public cloud infrastructure vendor, it has taken advantage of first-to-market status to become the most successful player in the space. In fact, one could argue that many of today’s startups wouldn’t have gotten off the ground […]

If 2020 showed us how hard “Zoom school” really is, then 2021 should not be about creating more versions of Zoom schools.

In this country, we have a longstanding peaceful transfer of power for the executive office, even in the wake of the hardest-fought elections. Certain circumstances have led many to question whether the tradition will continue come January 20. Despite his very vocal protestations, however, the current president has agreed to step aside, should all of […]

Even in a non-hell year, running a successful startup is a tremendous lift. After the events of 2020, however, no doubt many already lean businesses are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. For every company that saw increased interest in their offerings during the pandemic, there were several that simply couldn’t make it […]

MIT’s famous Media Lab, the multidisciplinary idea factory that produces many a fascinating invention and influential thinker, has found a new director in its backyard after scouring the globe for candidates. Dava Newman, MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics and former deputy administrator of NASA under Obama, will helm the intellectual hub. The Media Lab […]

It goes without saying, but 2020 was a bad year for a lot of people. For many, it was a year of stress, of sadness, and anxiety. It was a year of missing friends and family; of just getting to the next day, even as each day seemed to blur into the last. As we’ve […]

Being “underbanked” doesn’t mean that someone lacks access to financial services. Instead, it often means they don’t have traditional bank accounts or credit cards. But in markets like Indonesia, many still use digital wallets or e-commerce platforms, creating alternative sources of user data that can help them secure working capital and other financial tools. Finantier, […]

Indianapolis-based Boardable, a provider of board management software tools for nonprofits, has raised $8 million in a new round of financing, the company said. The investment came from Base10 Partners with participation from the company’s seed-stage backer, the Indianapolis-based enterprise investment firm High Alpha. Boardable provides organizational tools to help nonprofits better manage their board meetings […]

IAC announced today that it plans to turn Vimeo into an independent, publicly traded company. Last month, IAC CEO Joey Levin wrote a letter to shareholders in which he said the holding company had “begun contemplating spinning Vimeo off to our shareholders.” It sounds like the company has moved beyond the contemplation phase, with plans […]

ReturnSafe, a symptom checking and contact tracing employee health management toolkit for businesses, has raised $3.25 million in financing from investors including Fifty Years and Active Capital. With companies looking to reopen operations and have their employees return to work safely, management toolkits that track employee health are piling into the market offering all sorts […]

We may pick a battle with Facebook and win, but lose the larger war. Losing that war may mean pushing the next Instagram out of Silicon Valley.

Group Nine Media — which owns Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo, Seeker and PopSugar — is the latest company to form a SPAC, according to a filing with the SEC. These blank-check corporations, as they’re also known, have become a popular way to raise money from the public markets. The filing says that Group Nine is creating […]

As we head toward the exits of 2020, we have one more name to add to our roll call of private companies that have reached the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) milestone. Well, one and a half. But before we get into Nexthink and give Coalition a honorable mention, let’s talk about the startups […]

We’ve already written several stories about the new pandemic stimulus package that Congress approved yesterday, including funding to increase broadband access and for new energy initiatives. There are, however, other provisions that could also have serious implications for the technology and media worlds. For one thing, the bill includes a proposal from Senator Thom Tillis […]

The New York Times is bringing its signature crosswords game into augmented reality. The media company announced this morning it’s launching a new AR-enabled game, “Shattered Crosswords,” on Instagram, where players will be able to solve clues by finding spinning broken crossword pieces in AR. When the right vantage point is achieved, players will find […]

StepZen, a new startup from the crew who gave you Apigee (which was sold to Google in 2016 for $625 million) had a different vision for their latest company. They are building a single API that pulls data from disparate sources to help developers deliver more complex customer experiences online. Today, the startup emerged from […]

In 2016, when the world felt like an entirely different place, Jordan Hewson launched a platform called Speakable. It was meant to let news readers take action on a cause or issue in the very moment they cared most: while reading a news article about it. The company partnered with publishers and NGOs to deliver […]

VergeSense, a startup that uses machine vision to help businesses better understand how their office spaces are being utilized, today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series B funding round led by Tola Capital. Including the company’s $9 million Series A round, which it raised earlier this year, VergeSense has now raised a […]

Japanese startup Astroscale has shipped its ELSA-d spacecraft to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan, where it will be integrated with a Soyuz rocket for a launch scheduled for March of next year. This is a crucial mission for Astroscale, since it’ll be the first in-space demonstration of the company’s technology for de-orbiting space debris, a […]

Liberis, the U.K.-based fintech that provides finance for small businesses as an alternative to a traditional bank loan or extended overdraft, has replenished its own coffers with £70 million in funding. The round is a mixture of equity and debt, although the company is declining to disclose the percentage split, so we can likely chalk […]

Macau, the former Portuguese colony that is now the world’s biggest gambling center, is planning to host a tech fair next year to match the famed CES in Las Vegas. The brains behind the “Beyond” conference are Lu Gang, founder of Chinese tech news media company TechNode, which was TechCrunch’s former China partner, and Jason […]

Google said on Tuesday it is investing in two Indian startups, Glance and DailyHunt, as the Android-maker makes further push in the world’s second largest internet market. Two-year-old Indian startup Glance, which serves news, media content, and games on the lock screen of over 100 million smartphones, has raised $145 million in a new financing […]

In their rush to offer alternatives to advanced western chipsets, Chinese semiconductor companies are racking up large fundings from investors. Horizon Robotics, a five-year-old unicorn specializing in AI chips for robots and autonomous vehicles, announced Tuesday that it has secured $150 million in funding. The proceeds are the first close of an over $700 million […]

Casa Verde Capital, the investment fund co-founded by cannabis connoisseur Snoop Dogg (also known as Calvin Broadus), has closed on $100 million for its second investment fund, according to documents filed with the SEC. The fund, whose managing director, Karan Wadhera declined to comment for this article, has managed to raise more cash just as […]

A coalition of companies have filed an amicus brief in support of a legal case brought by WhatsApp against Israeli intelligence firm NSO Group, accusing the company of using an undisclosed vulnerability in the messaging app to hack into at least 1,400 devices, some of which were owned by journalists and human rights activists. NSO develops […]

We look at the tech implications of the new stimulus bill, Lockheed Martin makes a big rocket engine acquisition and Google Cloud expands. This is your Daily Crunch for December 21, 2020. The big story: Stimulus bill includes money for broadband and energy The $900 billion pandemic relief bill that lawmakers agreed on over the […]

The demise of the Apple car, the technology giant’s not-so-secret secret project, was perhaps overstated. Apple’s so-called Project Titan, which last year reduced the team by some 200 employees, is not only alive, it has plans to produce an electric passenger vehicle with “breakthrough battery technology” and automated vehicle technology by 2024, according to a […]

Here in the final few working days of 2020, a surprising number of new unicorns have come to light. The mad scramble that investors are seeing in seed-stage startups appears to be reflected across the later stages as well. That deal-making is still alive is not a surprise, but the cadence at which the market […]

Peloton has announced that it intends to acquire Precor, one of the world’s largest suppliers of commercial fitness equipment. You probably recognize the Precor brand name if you’ve ever spent time in a hotel or standalone commercial gym, which is exactly why Peloton making this purchase makes a ton of sense at this particular time […]

"We don't shy away from taking risks," said Spacefund's Meagan Crawford.

Breaches of this magnitude are going to happen. If they’re something your organization needs to be resilient against, then it’s best to be prepared for them.

If you’ve ever heard someone refer to the idea of “working in space,” you’d be forgiven for thinking they were describing a science-fiction plot. But the number of humans actively working beyond Earth’s atmosphere — and living significant chunks of their lives there, too — is about to start growing at a potentially exponential rate. […]

The new economic stimulus proposal that has been approved by Congress includes roughly $35.2 billion for energy initiatives, according to summary documents seen by TechCrunch. “This is probably the biggest energy bill we’ve seen in a decade,” said policy analyst Dr. Leah Stokes, an Assistant Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management […]

Twitter is rolling out new features to its developer community with an update to its recently rebuilt Twitter API. One addition to the now expanded collection of API v2 endpoints will allow app developers to eventually better support Twitter’s newer conversation controls — the feature that allows users to specify who can reply to their […]