Crunch Hype

The hectic M&A cycle we have seen throughout 2020 continued this weekend when Vista Equity Partners announced it was acquiring Pluralsight for $3.5 billion. That comes out to $20.26 per share. The company stock closed on Friday at $18.50 per share on a market cap of over $2.7 billion. With Pluralsight, Vista gets an online […]

Update: It looks like various services are starting to come back again, but with some glitches (such as the address bar in Gmail not working correctly). We’ve contacted Google for a statement about what happened. In all, it looks like a huge range of Google services were down for about an hour today. That hour that […]

Everybody thought the deal was done — Take-Two was supposed to acquire Codemasters for nearly $1 billion. Take-Two even reached an agreement with the board of Codemasters. But Electronic Arts crashed the party at the last minute and offered even more money. EA now plans to buy Codemasters for $1.2 billion. Sky News originally reported […]

The rush to capitalize on the shift to online learning, post-pandemic, continues. IntellectoKids, a developer of educational apps for children aged 3 to 7 years, has raised $3 million in a Series A financing led by US-based Allrise Capital and other investors, including Genesis Investments. The platform offers parents of preschool children ‘gamified’ educational content […]

Exoskeleton technology has been one of the more interesting developments in the world of robotics: instead of building machines that replace humans altogether, build hardware that humans can wear to supercharge their abilities. Today, German Bionic, one of the startups designing exoskeletons specifically aimed at industrial and physical applications — it describes its Cray X […]

Cledara, the SaaS purchase and management platform that helps bring greater viability and control over a company’s sprawling software subscriptions, has raised $3.4 million in additional funding. The round is led by Nauta Capital, with participation from existing investor Anthemis. It comes off the back of the startup growing revenues by 20x in 2020 — […]

Nokia, the 155-year-old iconic firm that has manufactured a range of items from rubber to cables to phones and telecommunications equipment, is ready to expand to a new category. The Finnish firm on Monday launched the Nokia PureBook X14 laptop in collaboration with Walmart -owned Flipkart for the Indian market. The Nokia PureBook X14, which […]

The Chinese government is moving to curb the power of some of China’s most influential internet companies. The country’s top market regulator announced Monday that it is fining Alibaba and China Literature, Tencent’s e-book spinoff, for failing to report their past acquisition deals for clearance. The cases involve Alibaba’s equity investments in major Chinese mall […]

Pioneered by WeChat almost four years ago, mini-apps are now common in China and India, and gaining traction in other markets, too. Mini-apps, or lightweight apps designed for integration into host apps, allow smartphone users to access several services through one app, saving them data and storage space. They also give host apps more ways […]

Ola said on Monday that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of Tamil Nadu in India to set up what it claims would be the “world’s largest scooter manufacturing facility” in the South Indian state as the Indian ride-hailing firm begins a new push with electric vehicles. The SoftBank-backed Indian ride-hailing […]

Reddit announced that it has acquired short video platform Dubsmash. The deal’s terms were undisclosed. Dubsmash will retain its own platform and brand, and Reddit will integrate its video creation tools. Its co-founders, Suchit Dash, Jonas Drüppel and Tim Specht, will join Reddit. According to Crunchbase data, the app has raised $20.2 million from investors […]

In the year ahead, we'll likely see lobbying efforts from both gig companies and gig worker organizations — as well as more lawsuits.

“Mank” is a change of pace for director David Fincher — instead of exploring the world of startup backstabbing (“The Social Network”), political backstabbing (“House of Cards”) or actual stabbings (“Seven,” “Zodiac,” “Gone Girl,” “Mindhunter” etc.), Fincher takes us back to ’30s and ’40s Hollywood. Working from a script by Fincher’s late father Jack, the movie […]

The place we’re in, the valley of the dolls between the vote and the Inauguration, is overshadowed by the battle to save our lives. The vaccines look promising, and so does the persistence of the Trumpster to play his games. Somehow we have to live with that, on both sides. In the business we’re in, […]

Welcome back to Human Capital, where I break down the latest in diversity, equity and inclusion, and labor in tech. This week, Twitter dropped its latest diversity report and Tesla released its first one ever. Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized for the way things went down with Dr. Timnit Gebru, a prominent researcher in […]

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Subscribe here. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. Welcome to the depths of December, a time in which […]

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here. Maybe it is a stock market bubble, or a tech-stock bubble at least. And maybe DoorDash, Airbnb and C3.ai and their bankers should have priced higher regardless to take advantage of all […]

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in global consumer spend in 2019. Not including third-party Chinese app stores, iOS and Android […]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech, the New York Times first reported on Friday night, and later supported by The Wall Street Journal. This EUA follows a recommendation by an independent panel of experts commissioned by the […]

Hyundai takes a controlling stake in an iconic robotics company, Twitter acquires a screen-sharing startup and we round up some security-themed gift ideas. This is your Daily Crunch for December 11, 2020. The big story: Hyundai acquires 80% stake in Boston Robotics Boston Robotics is behind a number of impressive robots, including the dog-like quadruped […]

Austinites, watch out; another tech company is headed into town. Just days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed during an interview that he has moved to Texas, and less than two weeks after HP Enterprise, a spin-out of the iconic Silicon Valley company Hewlett-Packard, announced that it is separately moving to Texas, yet another of […]

You don’t have to buy into 5G conspiracy theories to think that you could do with a little less radiation in your life. One way of blocking radiation is a Faraday cage, but this is usually a metal mesh of some kind, making everyday use difficult. Researchers at Drexel University have managed to create a […]

There are definitely people who are working at companies that we start engaging before they even have an idea. So it's never too early

This holiday season, TechCrunch readers can send an Extra Crunch annual membership as a gift to a friend, family member or co-worker for 25% off. The gifting feature can be found here. Extra Crunch is our membership program that helps you spot technology trends and opportunities, build better startups and stay connected. It features thousands […]

These predictions center around how we’ll fundraise post-pandemic, how the funding divide may widen for some, what fundraising activity could look like and sectors we think will fare well.

Benchmark, the storied venture firm, has brought aboard a fifth general partner: 29-year-old Miles Grimshaw, a Yale graduate who joins the outfit from Thrive Capital, where he similarly joined a team of four other partners back in 2013, helping them raise the firm’s fourth and fifth funds (per Forbes). From his post as a general […]

It was an unprecedented year for [insert anything under the sun], and while plenty of tech verticals saw shifts that warped business models and shifted user habits, the gaming industry experienced plenty of new ideas in 2020. However, the loudest trends don’t always take hold as predicted. This year, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon each […]

For many of us, being home a lot more right now also means being online a lot more. It's a great time to evaluate how you're keeping your data safe — and to help others in your life do the same.

Ready to blast off and join thousands of attendees around the world at TC Sessions: Space 2020 on December 16-17? The event, focused on space technology and dedicated to helping early-stage startups succeed in this exciting yet daunting industry, features panel discussions and interviews with the top leaders, visionaries and makers on the planet. Want to […]

Today, Twitter announced that it is acquiring Squad and that the team from the screen-sharing social app will be joining Twitter’s ranks. Squad’s co-founders, CEO Esther Crawford and CTO Ethan Sutin, and the rest of the team will be coming aboard inside Twitter’s design, engineering and product departments, Twitter tells us. Crawford specifically notes that […]

This quarter, strong earnings results from public cloud companies were overshadowed by a seemingly endless IPO cycle. Another moment we somewhat missed over the last few weeks was the stock market pushing the value of public cloud companies to all-time highs. These events are connected. And they bode well for startups working on SaaS and […]

The European Commission must block the Google -Fitbit merger as a matter of democratic imperative, prominent academic and author Shoshana Zuboff has warned. The Harvard professor who wrote the defining book on surveillance capitalism has become the latest voice raised against the $2.1 billion data+devices deal — that’s now been delayed at the regulatory clearance […]

French startup In&motion has raised a $12 million (€10 million) funding round led by Upfront Ventures, with 360 Capital also participating. The company has been working on wearable airbag systems for motorbikes. Integrated in a vest, the airbag is completely autonomous and can detect crashes in 60 milliseconds. The company has worked on a device […]

Gorillas, a grocery delivery startup that operates its own hyper local fulfillment centers and has already been a hit in Berlin, has raised $44 million in Series A funding. Probably one of European tech’s worst kept secrets this year, the round is led by hedge fund Coatue, with participation from other unnamed European investors. Coatue’s […]

SpaceX is already having a banner year, with major accomplishments including its first human spaceflight, and it’s aiming to pad its current record-breaking launch year with a 25th flight today. The launch will carry SiriusXM-7, a broadcasting satellite for satellite radio service SiriusXM, delivering it to a geostationary transfer orbit from Space Launch Complex-40 in […]

In case you missed it: A ransomware attack saw patient data stolen from one of the largest U.S. fertility networks; the Supreme Court began hearing a case that may change how millions of Americans use computers and the internet; and lawmakers in Massachusetts have voted to ban police from using facial recognition across the state. […]

Twitter has been doubling down on video services within its app, building out Twitter Live and recently launching Fleets so that users can share more moving media alongside their pithy 180-word observations, links and still photos. But in the process, it appears that it may also be streamlining its bigger stable of services. Code in […]

It’s official. Boston Dynamics is becoming part of the Hyundai family (pending regulatory approval, naturally). The Waltham, Massachusetts-based robot maker confirmed that the South Korean technology company is acquiring controlling interest in a press release today. The deal, which values the company at $1.1 billion, gives Hyundai Motor Group an 80% stake, with SoftBank controlling […]

Open banking platforms, where services that might not have previously lived next to each other are now joined up by way of APIs, has been one of the emerging trends of the last couple of years, and today one of the leaders in the space out of Europe has closed a round of funding to […]

All over the world startups are piling into the space marked “virtual interaction and collaboration”. What if a startup created a sort of ‘Club Penguin for adults’? Step forward Cosmos Video, which has a virtual venues platform that allows people to work, hang out and socialize together. It has now raised $2.6m in seed funding […]

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has returned a police reform bill back to the state legislature, asking lawmakers to strike out several provisions — including one for a statewide ban on police and public authorities using facial recognition technology, the first of its kind in the United States. The bill, which also banned police from using […]

We try out Apple’s new headphones, Spotify resets passwords and Airbnb goes public. This is your Daily Crunch for December 10, 2020. The big story: First impressions of the AirPods Max Our fearless leader Matthew Panzarino has written what he insists is “not a review” of the AirPods Max, (not a full review because he’s […]

Swell Energy, an installer and manager of residential renewable energy, energy efficiency and storage technologies, is raising $450 million to finance the construction of four virtual power plants representing a massive amount of energy storage capacity paired with solar power generation. It’s a sign of the distributed nature of renewable energy development and a transition […]

Disney just wrapped up the first segment of an investor day in which it laid out its plans for its direct-to-consumer streaming business, including Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Hotstar/Star. The company kicked off the presentation with some new subscriber numbers — 86.8 million for Disney+ (roughly 30% of those are subscribers to Disney+ Hotstar, which […]

The stunning debut of the food delivery company DoorDash on the public market this week has plenty of people puzzled. While undeniably fast-growing, the unprofitable delivery company has come under fire numerous times over its employment practices, and its IPO, like that of other gig-economy companies, leaves a lot of economic issues unresolved. So why […]

An independent panel of experts has recommended the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve an official Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer and BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. This means that it’s one step closer to beginning to be administered to people in special circumstances — including for front-line healthcare workers dealing with healthcare facilities stressed […]

Disney+, the on-demand streaming service that launched a year ago and has already courted over 86 million subscribers, is ready to expand to more international markets. At its annual investor day Thursday, the American entertainment giant announced a new streaming brand called “Star” that will feature content from ABC, FX and 20th Century Studios. In […]

If you’ve ever had a Father’s Day ad offering great deals for your dead dad sail into your inbox, you know that online advertising can be disturbing sometimes. Children’s gifts for people struggling to get pregnant, pet toys for your deceased doggo, the list goes on. Google is taking a small but helpful step to […]

Gorgias announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding, bringing the startup’s pre-money valuation to $300 million. When the company raised its Series A just over a year ago, CEO Romain Lapeyre (who founded Gorgias with CTO Alex Plugaru) told me that it works with e-commerce businesses to automate responses to […]

Crafting and DIY tools are wonderful gifts right now. We're all stuck inside and, for many of us, the days are sort of blurring together. Why not help your friends and family learn to make stuff? And if they already know how to make stuff, why not help them make more stuff?