Crunch Hype

Today, American securities watchdog the SEC announced that Robinhood, a free-to-trade broker that has grown rapidly in recent years, has paid a $65 million fine to settle charges relating to some of its historical business practices. The actions at issue occured between 2015 and 2018, with the SEC alleging that the company “made misleading statements and […]

Canoo, the Los Angeles-based electric vehicle startup that will make its debut later this month on the Nasdaq as a publicly traded company, revealed Thursday an all-electric multi-purpose delivery vehicle. The electric delivery vehicle, which includes a high roof height, storage lockers and a software as a service platform to manage fleets, is targeted at […]

Walmart and TikTok announced this morning they will be partnering on the first pilot test of a new shoppable product experience on TikTok’s social video app. Walmart, as you may recall, had planned to invest in TikTok when the app was being threatened with a ban from the U.S. market unless it sold its U.S. […]

The idea sounds almost too simple. Create a version of Linkedin that’s specifically for the healthcare industry, where professionals can find out not just who has what credentials, but also learn about the research those professionals are conducting and the specialties they have. In the middle of a global pandemic, when industry insiders are all […]

Cloudflare is launching a new product today called Cloudflare Pages. It competes directly with Netlify or Vercel, two cloud hosting companies that let you build and deploy sites using JAMstack frameworks. Popular JAMstack frameworks include Gatsby, Jekyll, Hugo, Vue.js, Next.js, etc. If that announcement sounds familiar, that’s because reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, leaked details […]

Launch startup Astra had a monumental week, achieving their first spaceflight with a rocket test on Tuesday. Astra CEO Chris Kemp joined Relativity CEO Tim Ellis, and VOX Space President Mandy Vaughn at our TC Sessions: Space event on Wednesday, and with Relativity’s huge $500 million round earlier this year, and Virgin Orbit’s milestone test […]

Corporate spend management startup Ramp has raised $30 million more in a new round, it announced today. TechCrunch covered Ramp’s launch earlier this year, when it also detailed that it had raised around $23 million up to that point. The startup raised its latest round in August of 2020, with conversations about the deal kicking […]

SpaceX is launching a Falcon 9 today from Kennedy Space Center, with a launch window that spans three hours and opens at 9 AM EST (6 AM PST). The mission will carry a spy satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and will include a recovery attempt for the first-stage booster used on the […]

A startup with a new type of spacecraft propulsion system could make the interplanetary travel seen in Star Trek a reality. Magdrive has just closed a £1.4M seed round led by Founders Fund, an early investor in SpaceX, backed by Luminous Ventures, 7percent Ventures, and Entrepreneur First. Magdrive is developing a next generation of spacecraft […]

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a major upswing in virtual learning — where some schools have gone (and stayed) remote, and others have incorporated significantly stronger online components, in order to help communities maintain more social distancing. That has in turn led to a surge in the usage of tools to help home learners […]

Aceable, the Austin-based mobile edtech service for state-accredited classes, is getting an “A” from investors again as private equity firm HGGC pours $50 million into the company. In the eight years since Aceable’s launch, the company has grown from a driver’s ed test prep service to an online training tool for drivers and real estate […]

French startup PhotoRoom is launching its app on Android today. The company has been working on a utility photography app that lets you remove the background from a photo, swaps it for another background and tweaks your photo. And it’s been working well on iOS already as the company attended Y Combinator, doubled its annual […]

Better Dairy, a U.K. startup developing animal-free dairy that was founded out of Entrepreneur First (EF), has picked up £1.6 million in seed funding. The London-based company is currently in the R&D stages of developing products that are “molecularly identical” to traditional dairy without using animals as part of the production process. This seed round […]

GoCardless, the London fintech that aims to become the one-stop shop globally for businesses that want to let customers pay via recurring bank payments, has raised $95 million in Series F funding. According to The Telegraph newspaper, this gives the company much coveted unicorn status. However, I understand the round values GoCardless at just over […]

There are over 600 million internet users in India, but only a fraction of this population is fluent in English. Most online services and much of the content on the web currently, however, are available exclusively in English. This language barrier continues to contribute to a digital divide in the world’s second largest internet market […]

Waresix, one of Indonesia’s largest logistics startups, has acquired Trukita, a company that focuses on the “first mile.” The term refers to the part of the supply chain where goods are transported from ports to warehouses. Both Waresix and Trukita operate by connecting businesses to shippers and warehouses, and the acquisition will enable them to […]

No one likes having to go to the automotive repair shop. There’s little transparency into what happens after a car is dropped off, invoices are often little more than a series of illegible bullet points, and the ordeal can feel chaotic. AutoLeap, a six-month-old, Toronto-based startup that quietly raised $5 million in seed funding in […]

China’s embattled coffee delivery startup Luckin has reached a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, agreeing to pay a $180 million penalty to settle charges that it overstated its revenues, expenses, and losses by the hundreds of millions of dollars. The announcement by the market regulator arrived Wednesday evening, months after short-seller Muddy […]

French fintech startup Lydia has extended its Series B round. Accel is leading the extension with all major existing shareholders also participating. Lydia first raised $45 million in January 2020 — Tencent led that investment. The startup is now raising another $86 million, which means that Lydia has raised $131 million in total as part […]

Facebook takes aim at Apple, Texas sues Google and we interview the CEO of Boston Dynamics. This is your Daily Crunch for December 16, 2020. The big story: Facebook escalates Apple criticism Facebook took a big swing at Apple’s upcoming app tracking restrictions today with full-page ads in the print editions of The New York […]

It took an unusually long time, but HBO Max is set to launch on Roku devices tomorrow. Roku users make up a massive chunk of the cord-cutting market, so the absence of an HBO Max app for Roku nearly seven months after the service launched was pretty glaring. We’d been wondering where the Max app was […]

An IPO? A shoe-reselling marketplace? Sure! At the numbers we know about it, why not?

A lot can change in a year. Especially this year. For Boston Dynamics, the past 12 months have brought a number of radical changes traditionally not seen at 30-year-old businesses of its size. It’s a list that includes the first new CEO in the company’s history, wide availability of its first commercial product and, most […]

Amazon SVP of Devices & Services David Limp joined us at TC Sessions: Space today, and he shared some new details about the company’s Project Kuiper broadband satellite constellation. Limp shared more details on the technical design challenges that the Kuiper team solved with its revolutionary customer terminal, but he also shared more info on […]

With COVID-19 vaccinations just beginning, Twitter will ramp up its efforts to tamp down conspiracy theories that might discourage people from getting the vaccine. The newly expanded rules apply to debunked information about the adverse effects of getting vaccinated, misleading tweets claiming the vaccine is not necessary and conspiracies that claim COVID-19 vaccines are used […]

By not only meeting the demands of these new regulations but exceeding them, companies have an opportunity to differentiate themselves from competitors to grow their bottom line,

Few young software companies have had as great a year as San Diego-based ClickUp . The company, which makes business productivity tools for task management, goals and docs, raised its first bit of outside funding in mid-2020. Just six months later, it has reached a $1 billion valuation after doubling its customer base and revenue […]

Texas announced Wednesday that it will sue Google, accusing the search giant of maintaining an illegal monopoly in online advertising. Texas will be joined by Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, South Dakota, North Dakota, Utah and Idaho, according to reporting from Reuters. The suit was first announced in a video from Texas Attorney General Ken […]

Facebook already made it clear that it isn’t happy about Apple’s upcoming restrictions on app tracking and ad targeting, but the publicity battle entered a new phase today. Over the summer, Apple announced that beginning in iOS 14, developers will have to ask users for permission in order to use their IDFA identifiers for ad […]

Investors put money into businesses they understand and founders they trust and respect. That is a constant at any time, COVID-19 or not.

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is perhaps one of the company’s most ambitious projects yet: Building a globe-spanning broadband wireless network to deliver affordable connectivity to underserved communities. Project Kuiper has made progress this year with a key FCC approval, and now it’s also created a prototype of a key piece of hardware that will help its […]

I’m on an F1 OPT and am about to incorporate a startup with my two American co-founders. What were the biggest immigration changes in 2020 affecting us?

Pinterest has committed to adopting the recommendations from its special committee of the Board of Directors, the company wrote in a blog post today. The committee formed earlier this year in June, shortly after two former employees, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, went public with their allegations of racial and gender discrimination while working […]

A few weeks after announcing that iOS support was on the way, Google’s cloud gaming service now supports the iPhone and iPad. As expected, the company is using a web app to access the service. Google also says that you need to update to iOS 14.3, the latest iOS update that was released earlier this […]

Mike Folgner has had his share of success building video editing tools, having sold Jumpcut.com to Yahoo and SnappyTV to Twitter. But as he explained in a new Medium post, he still sees “unfinished business” in the video industry. “Today, most major productivity software categories have made the leap from desktop software to the web,” […]

After reaching a previous all-time high on November 30th, 2020 and December 1st, 2020, bitcoin is now trading well above $20,000 and has surpassed its previous peak price. Bitcoin’s value has rapidly increased over the past two months. According to CoinMarketCap, you could buy one bitcoin for $11,500 on October 16th. As I’m writing this […]

It’s been more than two years since the Pentagon announced its $10 billion, decade long JEDI cloud contract, which was supposed to provide a pathway to technological modernization for U.S. armed forces. While Microsoft was awarded the contract in October 2019, Amazon went to court to protest that decision, and it has been in legal […]

The budding venture studio being built inside M13 has signed PepsiCo as its first new corporate partner. Through the deal, PepsiCo has agreed to bankroll the first founder-in-residence program from the New York and Los Angeles-based firm, which poached former Techstars Los Angeles managing director Anna Barber to lead its new initiative. The initial M13 […]

As businesses face a complex and evolving privacy landscape, a new tool called PrivacyGrader can help them make sure they’re doing the right things. The tool was created by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, as part of their new data compliance and security startup Ketch. (Chavez and Vaidya also founded the super{set} startup studio; Ketch […]

The super popular chat app Discord is getting a much-requested feature starting today: mobile screen sharing. As the name suggests, mobile screen sharing lets users capture and broadcast everything on their phone’s display and stream it to a group of friends. The company tells me they’ve been particularly focused on making it work well when […]

Hightouch, a SaaS service that helps businesses sync their customer data across sales and marketing tools, is coming out of stealth and announcing a $2.1 million seed round. The round was led by Afore Capital and Slack Fund, with a number of angel investors also participating. At its core, Hightouch, which participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 […]

AWS today announced the preview of Amazon Location, a new service for developers who want to add location-based features to their web-based and mobile applications. Based on mapping data from Esri and HERE Technologies, the service provides all of the basic mapping and point-of-interest data you would expect from a mapping service, including built-in tracking […]

Now more than ever both the importance and limitations of the global delivery infrastructure are on full display. But while Amazon and others try to speed up last mile delivery using drones, Dash Systems hopes to expedite the middle mile — with military-inspired airdrops putting pallets of parcels down at their penultimate destinations, even in […]

T-minus 3…2…1…liftoff! Day one of TC Sessions: Space 2020, our first conference dedicated to space technology, early-stage startups and the brilliant minds forging a new era of space exploration, is officially underway. Get ready for two days of interviews, panel discussions, fireside chats and breakout sessions with the space industry’s mightiest movers and shakers — […]

There are now so many wireless earbuds, it’s hard to keep track, but one of the reasons why we’ve seen this explosion in new and existing manufacturers entering this business is the availability of Bluetooth Audio SoCs from Qualcomm, including the QCC5100 and QCC30xx series. Today, the company is launching the latest chipset in its […]

If the pattern of more relaxed debuts continues, this could be its start.

BigID has been on the investment fast track, raising $94 million over three rounds that started in January 2018. Today, that investment train kept rolling as the company announced a $70 million Series D on a valuation of $1 billion. Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global co-led the round with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture […]

A group of major U.S. news publishers have joined the Coalition for App Fairness (CAF), the advocacy group pushing for increased regulation over app stores and fair treatment for all developers. The publisher trade association now joining CAF is Digital Content Next, a representative for the AP, The New York Times, NPR, ESPN, Vox, The […]

The startup opioid use disorder therapy service Bicycle Health will soon be available to patients in half the country, just three years after its launch in 2017, according to founder Ankit Gupta. A serial entrepreneur whose last company, Pulse News, was acquired by LinkedIn back in 2013, Gupta left the LinkedIn in 2016 (around the […]

ZeroAvia, the company that’s on a mission to move the world to zero-emission, hydrogen-fueled flight, has just received some corporate jet fuel in the form of a new $21.4 million cash infusion. The investment came from the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures and the Ecosystem Integrity Fund, which led the company’s latest round, alongside previous investors […]