Crunch Hype

Apple unveils new high-end headphones, Calm raises more funding and Cyberpunk 2077 faces criticism. This is your Daily Crunch for December 8, 2020. The big story: Apple announces AirPods Max headphones These are Apple’s first over-ear headphones under the AirPods brand (it also owns Beats), and at $549 they’re priced significantly higher than previous AirPods. […]

According to media reports, food-delivery giant DoorDash priced its IPO at $102 per share, ahead of its final IPO pricing range of $90 to $95 per share. The company’s debut has been warmly anticipated by public investors, as evinced by the company raising its range from an initial target of $75 to $85. While we’re […]

The Senate today confirmed the appointment of Nathan Simington to the FCC, which with the imminent departure of Chairman Ajit Pai sets up the agency for years of deadlock unless Democrats take the Senate. The last-minute appointment breaks with political norms, and the vote was entirely on party lines after Democrats objected to the nomination. […]

Uber has offloaded its air taxi enterprise Elevate to Joby Aviation, the last of several moonshots to be sold by the ride-hailing company in a pursuit to stick to its core business and reach profitability. The transaction announced Tuesday is part of a complex deal that includes Uber investing $75 million into Joby and an […]

FireEye, normally the first company that cyberattack victims will call, has now admitted it too has fallen victim to hackers, which the company called a “sophisticated threat actor” that was likely backed by a nation-state. In a blog post confirming the breach, the company’s chief executive Kevin Mandia said the nation-backed hackers have “top-tier offensive […]

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday that he has moved to Texas, confirming months of speculation that the billionaire would leave California, a state of which he has become increasingly critical. Musk confirmed the move during an interview at the The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council annual summit. His remarks confirmed a CNBC […]

Nearly three years after it was first launched, Amazon Web Services’ SageMaker platform has gotten a significant upgrade in the form of new features, making it easier for developers to automate and scale each step of the process to build new automation and machine learning capabilities, the company said. As machine learning moves into the […]

Drivers cruising along an off-the-beaten track might stumble upon an unusual sight in the coming months: a Rivian electric charging station. The electric automaker has designed and is now starting to build out a network of electric vehicle charging stations throughout the United States as it prepares for the first deliveries of its R1T pickup […]

One of the biggest games of the year, “Cyberpunk 2077,” is about to be released, but developer CD Projekt Red is already under fire for an early game sequence with the potential to induce seizures. Players with epilepsy should be warned that there is currently no way to skip this, and the visual feature will […]

As more and more alternative investment marketplaces pop up around specific verticals like art or collectibles, Indiegogo founder Slava Rubin is launching a Kayak-like platform called Vincent which helps curious investors get a handle on what the entire asset class has to offer. Rubin and co-founders Evan Cohen, Eric Cantor and Ross Cohen have raised […]

A third-party contacts app you’re not using may be handing out your home address to its users. In November, former Yahoo CEO and Google veteran Marissa Mayer and co-founder Enrique Muñoz Torres introduced their newly rebranded startup Sunshine, and its first product, Sunshine Contacts. The new iOS app offers to organize your address book by […]

Palantir’s push into federal health work continues. The data analytics company just picked up a new U.S. Food and Drug Administration contract which will span three years for a total of $44.4 million. The company’s shares, which have doubled in value over the last two months, are up around 20 percent on the news. As […]

The aerospace industry has seen an explosion of activity from the world of startups, where bright engineers are foregoing jobs at large corporations and opting instead to raise funding from increasingly ambitious venture capitalists to build their own startups to turn moonshots into business realities. In the latest development, a startup out of Munich has […]

French President Emmanuel Macron sat down with Niklas Zennström for an interview on the European tech ecosystem. Macron listed everything that’s needed to create European tech giants that compete with the biggest American and Chinese tech companies. According to him, Europe needs to focus on “financing, integration of our markets and an actual single market, […]

This year has taken a toll on so many small businesses, yet the data shows the entrepreneurial spirit remains strong with a drive to push onward, improve and succeed.

Richard Socher, former chief scientist at Salesforce, who helped build the Einstein artificial intelligence platform, is taking on a new challenge — and it’s a doozy. Socher wants to fix consumer search and today he announced you.com, a new search engine to take on the mighty Google. “We are building you.com. You can already go […]

It’s GitHub Universe week and unsurprisingly, the ubiquitous code management service is announcing a slew of updates. Companies can now become GitHub Sponsors and invest in open-source projects by paying developers directly. There is automatic merging of pull requests (if that’s your thing), discussions for all public repositories and the beta of dependency reviews. GitHub […]

TC Sessions: Space is happening next week (December 16-17), and as well as talking to some of the biggest names in the industry, we’ll be highlighting a few of the most interesting startups as well. Kayhan Space aims to coordinate the increasingly crowded lower orbits, and Firehawk Aerospace has a new approach to rocketry that […]

So, how are filmmakers reacting to the news that Warner Bros. will be releasing all of next year’s movies on HBO Max at the same time that they’re released in theaters? Not too well, according to a story published yesterday in The Hollywood Reporter. While the story includes plenty of anonymous commentary (mostly from agents), […]

Dozens of medical imaging devices built by General Electric are secured with hardcoded default passwords that can’t be easily changed, but could be exploited to access sensitive patient scans, according to new findings by security firm CyberMDX. The researchers said that an attacker would only need to be on the same network to exploit a […]

For the longest time, Google’s new Fuchsia operating system remained a bit of a mystery — with little information in terms of the company’s plans for it, even as the team behind it brought the code to GitHub under a standard open-source license. These days, we know that it’s Google’s first attempt at developing a […]

YouTube in 2016 added support for HDR (high-dynamic range) videos on its platform, allowing cretators to upload videos offering higher contrast, more accurate shadows and highlights, a wider range of colors, and, overall improved image quality. Today, the company announced it’s now bringing HDR support to live streamed videos, too. This will make YouTube the […]

As companies rely increasingly on machine learning models to run their businesses, it’s imperative to include anti-bias measures to ensure these models are not making false or misleading assumptions. Today at AWS re:Invent, AWS introduced Amazon SageMaker Clarify to help reduce bias in machine learning models. “We are launching Amazon SageMaker Clarify. And what that […]

Calm, a well-known meditation app, has raised new capital at a valuation of $2 billion. The round was anticipated after the company was reported to be hunting for up to $150 million at a valuation of $2.2 billion; perhaps Calm will follow in the steps of Robinhood and add a second tranche to the round […]

Boost Biomes, the Y Combinator-backed developer of microbiome-based bio-fungicides and bio-pesticides for agricultural applications, has added $2 million in funding and picked up a new strategic investor in Japan’s Universal Materials Incubator. To date, Boost Biomes has raised over $7 million in financing to support the development of new products like its biofungicide developed from […]

Snap today announced a new 2021 fund of $3.5 million that will be directed toward supporting Snapchat Lens creators and developers who are using the company’s Lens Studio tool to explore the use of AR technologies. The news kicked off Snap’s multi-day virtual event, Lens Fest, where it also announced an upgraded version of its […]

Thumbtack, a marketplace where you can hire local professionals for home improvement and other services, is announcing that it has acquired Setter. Founded in 2016, Setter provides its customers with video home checkups conducted by experts, then offers personalized plans for how to address any issues. In a blog post, Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta said […]

Venture capital activity is high at the moment, making it difficult to keep up with the influx of new rounds that are being announced. Our cup runneth over, and I would much rather be busy than bored, but not all sectors are as busy as others. We’re not drowning in consumer social rounds, for example. […]

It’s a special day; we’re hosting the year’s final episode of Extra Crunch Live with General Catalyst’s Peter Boyce and Katherine Boyle at 4pm ET/1pm PT. Extra Crunch members can join the live conversation (details below) or catch it on demand. Questions from the audience are not just allowed, they’re highly encouraged, so if you’re […]

ShoppingGives, a Chicago-based startup pitching retailers a service that can integrate non-profit donations into their sales and shopping platforms, has raised an undisclosed amount from Serena Williams’ venture capital firm, Serena Ventures, the company said. ShoppingGives allows retailers to offer a donation on behalf of a shopper to any of over 1.5 million nonprofits that […]

Startups that raised earlier in 2020 are finding success again before the year closes. Today it’s Skyflow, a startup that TechCrunch covered in May when it announced a $7.5 million round. The company disclosed a new investment worth $17.5 million on Tuesday. The new round, a Series A, was led by Canvas Ventures. Foundation Capital, […]

Buzzy face-swap video app Reface, which lends users celebrity ‘superpowers’ by turning their selfies into “eerily realistic” famous video clips at the tap of a button, has caught the attention of Andreessen Horowitz. The Silicon Valley venture firm leads a $5.5 million seed round in the deep tech entertainment startup, announced today. Reface tells us […]

Investors are buying into the shares of publicly traded Stitch Fix, the personal styling online clothes store, after it reported much better-than-expected earnings yesterday. Shares of the company’s stock were up $16.86, or 47.05%, in early trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange. For the company’s fiscal first quarter, which ends Oct. 31, Stitch Fix reported […]

The pandemic has been terrible for many industries, but the book industry has gotten a rare reprieve in an otherwise dismal past decade. Locked in homes and forced to socially distance from others, us humans have more time on our hands and more need to connect to characters than ever before. That surge in interest […]

Tesla is striking while its share price — and ballooning market cap — is hot, filing today to sell $5 billion in shares after investors bid its equity to record levels. The newly announced dilutive fundraising event is having a muted impact on its value, which is off 2.3% in pre-market trading as investors digested […]

The two founders of Parrot Software, Roberto Cebrián and David Villarreal, first met in high school in Monterrey, Mexico. In the eleven years since , both have pursued successful careers in the tech industry and became family (they’re brothers-in-law). Now, they’re starting a new business together leveraging Cebrián’s experience running a point-of-sale company and Villarreal’s time […]

Sanguina, an Atlanta-based health technology developer, is launching its a mobile app in the Google Play Store that uses pictures of fingernails to determine whether or not someone is getting enough iron. The app measures hemoglobin levels, which are a key indicator of anemia, by analyzing the color of a person’s fingernail beds in a […]

Low code workflow has become all the rage among enterprise tech giants and SAP joined the group of companies offering simplified workflow creation today when it announced SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management, but it didn’t stop there. It also announced SAP Ruum, a new departmental workflow tool and SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, its entry […]

When Chi Xu left Magic Leap and returned to China, he had big ambitions. He believed China would have its own augmented and virtual reality giants, just as how the domestic smartphone industry birthed global leaders like Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi that rival Apple today. Xu, now chief executive of Nreal, one of China’s highest-funded […]

Apple is launching its subscription fitness service, which is built mainly to complement Apple Watch, on December 14. Apple Fitness+ was first announced at Apple’s iPhone event in September, and will offer guided workouts on iPhone iPad and Apple TV, with live personal metrics delivered by the Apple Watch’s health metrics monitoring. The fitness offering […]

As TC readers know, the tricky trade-off of the modern web is privacy for convenience. Online tracking is how this ‘great intimacy robbery’ is pulled off. Mass surveillance of what Internet users are looking at underpins Google’s dominant search engine and Facebook’s social empire, to name two of the highest profile ad-funded business models. TechCrunch’s […]

While the enterprise world likes to talk about “big data”, that term belies the real state of how data exists for many organizations: the truth of the matter is that it’s often very fragmented, living in different places and on different systems, making the concept of analysing and using it in a single, effective way […]

Round of applause for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism — which fought for two years to obtain details of a closed door meeting between Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and the UK secretary of state in charge of digital issues at the time, Matt Hancock (now health secretary). Freedom of information requests for minutes of the 2018 […]

The AirPods Max are joining the AirPods and AirPods Pro in Apple’s audio accessory lineup. As you can see on the photo, Apple is releasing its first over-ear headphones under the AirPods brand. The wireless headphones feature active noise cancellation and cost $549. With this product, Apple competes directly with Sony’s and Bose’s wireless headphones […]

SpaceX is all set to conduct a high-altitude test of its Starship rocket – a first for the spacecraft prototype design. The test will see Starship serial number 8 (SN8) fly from SpaceX’s development site in Cameron County, Texas, climb to a max height of around 41,000 feet, and then return to Earth during a […]

Companies like Stripe and Twilio have changed the game for online businesses by making it easier to integrate payments and communications services into their customer interfaces without having to build those features from the ground up, or make costly investments to integrate them from elsewhere. Today, another startup is launching and announcing some funding in […]

Lettuce celebrate the rise of indoor agriculture. In the past few months AppHarvest, a developer of greenhouse tomato farms went public through a special purpose acquisition vehicle, vertical farming giant Plenty raised $140 million, and now Gotham Greens, which is developing its own network of greenhouses, is announcing the close of $87 million in new […]

Carsome, which bills itself as Southeast Asia’s largest e-commerce platform for used cars, announced it has closed a $30 million Series D. The funding was led by Asia Partners, with participation from returning investors Burda Principal Investments and Ondine Capital. The startup described this as one of the largest “all-equity financings to date in Southeast […]

WhatsApp said on Tuesday it is adding a new shopping feature to its app as the Facebook -owned instant messaging service looks to court more merchants and invite a larger portion of its 2 billion userbase to shop. The instant messaging platform, where business accounts already process messages from more than 175 million people, said […]

Opendoor has opened the door, so to speak, for startups to apply their technical expertise in search, marketplaces and audience segmentation to rethink the very antiquated and analogue world of property. Today, a startup that is doing this in the specific area of distressed property is announcing a round of growth funding to ramp up […]