Crunch Hype

James Cox spent much of his professional career at Uber trying to crack the problem of how to reduce congestion through ride-sharing. As one of the architects of the Uber Pool service and a longtime proponent of ride-sharing as a means to slash vehicle emissions, Cox leapt at the chance to harness technology developed at […]

The foldable category got off to a famously rocky start. Fifteen months after the release of the first Galaxy Fold, Samsung has time to work out some of the issues with the original device in a fairly public fashion, given the world the better-received Galaxy Z Flip and Z Fold 2 this year. Likely due […]

Over the course of the last year, Adobe has quietly continued to expand its tools for helping developers use PDFs in their applications. In April, the company launched a couple of SDKs, for example, which are now known as the PDF Embed API and PDF Tools API, and with that update, the company also launched […]

It’s only a matter of time now before drones become a key component of everyday logistics infrastructure, but there are still significant barriers between where we are today and that future – particularly when it comes to regulation. Iris Automation is developing computer vision products that can help simplify the regulatory challenges involved in setting […]

Rocket Lab has completed its 17th mission, putting a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite on orbit for client Synspective, a Tokyo-based space startup that has raised over $100 million in funding to date. Syspective aims to operate a 30-satellite constellation that can provide global imaging coverage of Earth, with SAR’s benefits of being able to […]

TikTok this morning announced a new set of Community Guidelines that aim to strengthen its existing policies in areas like harassment, dangerous acts, self-harm and violence, alongside the introduction of four new features similarly focused on the community’s well-being. These include updated resources for those struggling with self-harm or suicide, opt-in viewing screens that hide […]

Amazon today is launching a way for customers to create custom clothing with a new service called Made for You, which lets shoppers create a custom T-shirt to their exact measurements. But unlike some companies that use mobile technology to scan and measure your body from an app, Amazon Fashion’s Made for You service requires […]

Less than a year after it raised a $15 million Series B, Public, a social-focused free stock trading service, has raised a $65 million Series C. The startup is not the only company to raise successive rounds this year. Welcome has managed the feat, along with Skyflow and others. Public’s Series C, therefore, fits into […]

This is not a review of the 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E Sport SUV. A few weeks back, I spent two short hours in Ford’s upcoming EV. I don’t feel comfortable declaring a conclusion with just a couple of hours behind the wheel. I need more time with the Mach-E, and after Ford reads this article, […]

A startup hailing from far-flung Iceland is emerging as one of the key players in the race to distribute one of the key Coronavirus vaccines around the world. Controlant — which has a unique real-time supply chain monitoring technology based on GSM networks and is specifically geared to areas like pharmaceuticals and life sciences — […]

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has issued Twitter with a fine of €450,000 (~$547k) for failing to promptly declare and properly document a data breach under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The decision is noteworthy as it’s the first such cross-border GDPR decision by the Irish watchdog, which is the lead EU privacy supervisor […]

We’re excited to announce that Extra Crunch memberships are now available in several Nordic countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. For a full list of supported countries, head here. Sign up for Extra Crunch membership here to join our growing community of founders, startup teams, and investors. Use the code NORDICCRUNCH during checkout for an […]

Accessing and sharing data is a complicated issue for large businesses, and doing this in a secure, compliant way is a problem for many. eXate, a London-based data software firm is attacking this problem and has now raised a £2.3 million seed round led by Outward VC, with additional backing from ING Ventures and Triple […]

Taxdoo, a startup that has built what it calls an “automated platform for financial compliance” aimed at cross-border e-commerce companies, has raised $21 million in new funding. Leading the Series A round is venture capital firm Accel, with participation from Visionaries Club, 20VC and existing investor HTGF. The funding will be invested in Taxdoo’s growth […]

Deena Shakir joined Lux Capital as a partner last year after spending seven years with Google, the last of them with GV, Google’s venture unit. While Shakir seems to fit right in with the firm — known for its wealth of PhDs and moonshot investments — venture wasn’t something she was focused on as a […]

Zenoti, a 10-year-old startup that develops services for the spa and salon industry, is the latest entrant to the coveted unicorn list. The Bellevue, Washington-headquartered SaaS startup has raised $160 million in its Series D financing round that valued it at “well past $1 billion,” said Sudheer Koneru, founder and chief executive of Zenoti, in […]

Back in 2018, Tencent pledged to put more focus on enterprises as traditional industries in China increasingly tapped technology to boost productivity. The firm’s industrial projects range from using AI to screen medical images to building customer management tools for retailers on its WeChat messenger. Most recently, Tencent invested in FJ Dynamics, a Chinese startup […]

Dott is better known for its electric scooter service that is available in a few cities across Europe. But the company is working on electric bikes and wants to launch a bike-sharing service in London and Paris in March 2021. Dott currently doesn’t operate in London. So it looks like it’ll be the company’s 16th […]

Only about a third of the yields Indian farmers produce reaches the big markets. Those whose produce makes it there today are able to leverage post-harvest services. Everyone else is missing out. A Noida-based startup is working with all the stakeholders — farmers, food processors, traders and financial institutions — to bridge this post-harvest services […]

The U.K. is moving ahead with a populist but controversial plan to regulate a wide range of illegal and/or harmful content almost anywhere online such stuff might pose a risk to children. The government has set out its final response to the consultation it kicked off back in April 2019 — committing to introduce an […]

We review Apple Fitness+, Gmail goes down and Pornhub cracks down on unverified content. This is your Daily Crunch for December 14, 2020. The big story: Apple launches Fitness+ Brian Heater tried out Apple’s new $10-per-month subscription service for guided workouts, prompting some broader reflections on exercise during this terrible year — and on how […]

The FTC is ordering the companies behind many of the largest social and video platforms to explain how they use the treasure troves of data they harvest from users. Amazon, TikTok owner ByteDance, Facebook, WhatsApp, Discord, Reddit, Snap, Twitter and YouTube were all sent the order, with a deadline set 45 days from now. The […]

Pinterest today announced it has settled the gender discrimination lawsuit brought forth by former COO Francoise Brougher. In August, Brougher sued Pinterest, alleging gender discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination. As part of the settlement, Pinterest will pay $20 million to Brougher and her attorneys, and both Pinterest and Brougher will commit $2.5 million toward “Advancing […]

It's a difficult time to be a photographer. Getting creative feels impossible when every day is the same and the most exotic locale you visit is the living room. Travel is out this year, vacations are pushed back and everybody is cooped up inside trying not to lose it.

It's more important than ever to know if your IT team has made sound investments and has the agility needed to operate successfully in the face of continued uncertainty.

Roblox announced today that it’s buying a digital avatar startup called Loom.ai. Purchasing a company that has focused singularly on creating more realistic human avatars is an interesting play for a gaming platform that has made such an impact by building experiences that tend to cast realism to the wayside. We covered the company’s $1.35 […]

After nearly a decade selling gaming and console peripherals to gamers looking to spice up their systems, Atlanta-based KontrolFreek has been acquired by the international peripherals retailer SteelSeries. Terms of the acquisition were undisclosed, but KontrolFreek has shipped more than 2 million units of its flagship product, which is available in over 9,000 retailers in […]

"I think that having objective sources of fact checking are important. We know that fact-checking does reduce the belief in and sharing of fake information."

Indiegogo plans to help more Japanese entrepreneurs run successful crowdfunding campaigns through a new expansion of its Global Fast Track Program. Indiegogo first launched the program several years ago in China. The idea behind Global Fast Track is to provide an extra level of support to entrepreneurs in specific markets, guiding them through the process […]

Q&A, a startup developing tech for the music industry co-founded by industry insiders Troy Carter (Lady Gaga’s first manager) and Suzy Ryoo (Carter’s longtime collaborator), has launched a new suite of software products through a division called Venice Innovation Labs. The new tools are designed to help record labels beta test songs, manage artists, and […]

The Nest Hub Max is getting Zoom . Google outlined the arrival of the popular teleconferencing platform in a blog post today, noting that it has started to roll out for users in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia. The much-requested feature is arriving as an “early preview,” essentially meaning that users will have to […]

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, the company announced it would soon require developers to disclose their app’s privacy practices to customers via new, glanceable summaries that appear on their apps’ product pages on the App Store. Today, these new app privacy labels are going live across all of Apple’s App Stores, including iOS, […]

Amazon today announced a new Alexa feature, Live Translation, that will translate conversations between people who speak two different languages. The feature uses Amazon’s speech recognition technology and neural machine translation technology to work, and supports translating between English and French, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese (Brazilian), German, or Italian. To use Live Translation, an Echo device […]

A spurt of delays could derail the end-of-year IPO cavalcade, pushing some major flotations into 2021 and possibly complicating next year’s public-liquidity run. On Saturday, the NYT reported that gaming development platform Roblox would delay its IPO into the new year. Its CEO informed employees that the hiatus would allow Roblox to “improve [its] specific […]

Andreas Pursian, Markus Gilles, and Jonas Brandau, the three co-founders of Klima, an app focused on helping consumers understand and offset their carbon emissions, first found entrepreneurial success at Hyper. The mobile magazine publishing toolkit they developed was sold to Mic in 2017, but it was only the most recent success in a string of […]

Sanchali Pal first woke up to the world’s climate crisis after watching the 2008 documentary Food Inc. The Princeton undergraduate saw the film in 2011, and it started her on the journey that would lead her to launch Joro, the Sequoia-backed startup that monitors consumer spending to offer tips on how to offset and reduce […]

If your event budget is more like dental floss than a shoestring, this is your lucky day. Our $25 Expo Only ticket offers affordable access to an impressive array of presentations — and opportunity — at TC Sessions: Space 2020 on December 16-17. Full disclosure: The Expo Only ticket does not include networking with CrunchMatch, […]

Adult video giant Pornhub this week announced that it has taken the unprecedented step of removing millions of user-uploaded videos. The move, which the Canadian-born site calls “the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history,” arrives in the wake of a New York Times opinion piece that stated the “site is infested with rape videos.” […]

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

Big data is a sham. For years now, we have been told that every company should save every last morsel of digital exhaust in some sort of database, lest management lose some competitive intelligence against … a competitor, or something. There is just one problem with big data though: it’s honking huge. Processing petabytes of […]

The Council of the European Union, the body which represents individual EU Member States’ governments, has adopted a resolution on encryption — calling for what they dub “security through encryption and security despite encryption”. “Competent authorities must be able to access data in a lawful and targeted manner, in full respect of fundamental rights and […]

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 big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds, and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can […]

Six years ago, Zoox launched quietly with a mighty mission: build and commercialize just about every aspect of a robotaxi service from the self-driving software stack and on-demand ride-sharing app to the management of the fleet and an unconventional vehicle that would transport passengers. Now, it’s finally lifting the veil on its multi-year effort. Zoox, […]

Long established as a global financial center, Singapore also looks set to become the “Silicon Valley of Asia.” Tencent, ByteDance and Alibaba are reportedly planning regional hubs in the city-state, with ByteDance in particular expected to add hundreds of jobs over the next three years. They will join an international coterie of tech giants like […]

Enterprise recruiting company iCIMS is announcing that it has acquired Altru. iCIMS declined to comment on the terms of the deal, but a source with knowledge of the companies told us that the price is a combination of cash and stock, totaling around $60 million. Founded in 2000, iCIMS offers a “talent cloud” used by […]

Collab, Facebook’s experimental app for making collaborative music videos, is today launching out of private beta testing with a public release on the App Store. The app is one of now many projects from Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, which tests out new ideas that could ultimately influence Facebook’s next steps in social media. […]

Just last week, General Catalyst’s Peter Boyce explained how one of the most important things he looks for in a founder is a personal connection to the problem they’re solving. Kate Westervelt is one such founder. Westervelt founded Mombox, a curated kit of postnatal care products focused squarely on the mom rather than the child. […]

It’s not nearly on the same scale as Google’s outage earlier today, but it turns out that Microsoft’s Outlook email service has been having problems, too. Readers are reporting to us, and an update on Microsoft’s site status for its various Office services confirms, that some Outlook users may not be able to sign in […]

Given all of the…feedback Amazon has received, it’s hard to believe the Halo wasn’t widely available until today. Announced in late-August, the product has been offered in “early access” to invited users. That changes today, however, as the product opens to everyone in the U.S. The band runs $100, a price that includes six months […]

I’m glistening. My heart rate is finally slowing a bit as I type this. The slightest hints of my asthma are subsiding. I’m not going to tell you I feel “good,” as relative as that term might be in a year when everything has gone to hell somehow both gradually and all at once over […]