Crunch Hype

AWS has launched a new hardware device, the AWS Panorama Appliance, which, alongside the AWS Panorama SDK, will transform existing on-premises cameras into computer vision enabled super-powered surveillance devices. Pitching the hardware as a new way for customers to inspect parts on manufacturing lines, ensure that safety protocols are being followed, or analyze traffic in retail […]

One of the areas that is often left behind when it comes to cloud computing is the industrial sector. That’s because these facilities often have older equipment or proprietary systems that aren’t well suited to the cloud. Amazon wants to change that, and today the company announced a slew of new services at AWS re:Invent […]

AWS today closed out its first re:Invent keynote with a focus on edge computing. The company launched two smaller appliances for its Outpost service, which originally brought AWS as a managed service and appliance right into its customers’ existing data centers in the form of a large rack. Now, the company is launching these smaller […]

Whether it’s a fun day hike, a car camping excursion or a multi-day backcountry backpacking trip, there’s plenty of great camping and hiking gear that can make life easier for the outdoors person (without going overboard).

The future of grocery shopping will be a win-win for both stores and customers.

Google today introduced a new mobile management and security solution, Android Enterprise Essentials, which, despite its name, is actually aimed at small to medium-sized businesses. The company explains this solution leverages Google’s experience in building Android Enterprise device management and security tools for larger organizations in order to come up with a simpler solution for […]

BuildBuddy, whose software helps developers compile and test code quickly using a blend of open-source technology and proprietary tools, announced a funding round today worth $3.15 million. The company was part of the Winter 2020 Y Combinator batch, which saw its traditional demo day in March turned into an all-virtual affair. The startups from the […]

When Amazon Web Services launched QuickSight, its business intelligence service, back in 2016 the company wanted to provide product information and customer information for business users — not just developers. At the time, the natural language processing technologies available weren’t robust enough to give customers the tools to search databases effectively using queries in plain […]

At AWS re:Invent today, Andy Jassy announced DevOps Guru, a new tool for DevOps teams to help the operations side find issues that could be having an impact on an application performance. Consider it like the sibling of CodeGuru, the service the company announced last year to find issues in your code before you deploy. […]

Voi, the Stockholm-headquartered micro mobility company known for its e-scooter rentals, has raised $160 million in new funding. The round, about two thirds equity and one third debt, is led by The Raine Group. Others participating include VNV Global, Balderton, Creandum, Project A, Inbox, and “sustainability-focused investor” Stena Sessan, along with individual backers with links […]

AWS launched a new service today, Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, that makes it easier for data scientists to prepare their data for machine learning training. In addition, the company is also launching SageMaker Feature Store, available in the SageMaker Studio, a new service that makes it easier to name, organize, find and share machine learning […]

AWS announced some big updates to its Lambda serverless function service today. For starters, starting today it will be able to deliver functions with up to 10MB of memory and 6 vCPUs (virtual CPUs). This will allow developers building more compute-intensive functions to get the resources they need. “Starting today, you can allocate up to […]

AWS has launched a new tool to let developers move data from one store to another called Glue Elastic Views. At the AWS:Invent keynote CEO Andy Jassy announced Glue Elastic Views, a service that lets programmers move data across multiple data stores more seamlessly. The new service can take data from disparate silos and move […]

AWS today announced a new database product that is clearly meant to go after Microsoft’s SQL Server and make it easier — and cheaper — for SQL Server users to migrate to the AWS cloud. The new service is Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL. The tagline AWS CEO Andy Jassy used for this service in his […]

Floww – a data-driven marketplace designed to allow founders to pitch investors, with the whole investment relationship managed online – says it has raised $6.7M / £5M to date in Seed funding from angels and family offices. Investors include Ramon Mendes De Leon, Duncan Simpson Craib, Angus Davidson, Stephane Delacote and Pip Baker (Google’s Head […]

Today at AWS re:Invent, Andy Jassy talked a lot about how companies are making a big push to the cloud, but today’s container-focussed announcements gave a big nod to the data center as the company announced ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere, both designed to let you run these services on-premises, as well as in the […]

The idea of people going to live and work in space, outside of the extremely unique case of the International Space Station, has long been the strict domain of science fiction. That’s changing fast, however, with public space agencies, private companies and the scientific community all looking at ways of making it safe for people […]

Everyday thousands of trucks carry freight along U.S. highways, propelling the economy forward as consumer goods, electronics, cars and agriculture make their way to distribution centers, stores and eventually households. It’s inside these trucks — many of which sit half empty — where Flock Freight, a five-year-old startup out of San Diego believes it can […]

At its annual re:Invent developer conference, AWS today announced the launch of AWS Trainium, the company’s next-gen custom chip dedicated to training machine learning models. The company promises that it can offer higher performance than any of its competitors in the cloud, with support for TensorFlow, PyTorch and MXNet. It will be available as EC2 […]

Electric automaker Lucid Motors has completed the initial phase of its $700 million factory, a milestone required to begin production of its first luxury all-electric Air sedan this spring. The factory, which is located about halfway between Tucson and Phoenix off Interstate 10, has the capacity to produce 30,000 vehicles a year. If Lucid, led […]

Chinese state news agencies are reporting a successful landing of the Chang’e-5 lunar robotic lander, which will seek to return lunar rock samples back to Earth. The launch took off on November 23, and attained lunar orbit on November 28. It launched the lander vehicle on November 30, and the reports today from the China […]

The conversation is part of the second season of our Extra Crunch Live series that has seen all sorts of investors and founders join TechCrunch for a dig into their work.

Many U.S. consumers spent this year’s Black Friday sales event shopping from home on mobile devices. That led to first-time installs of mobile shopping apps in the U.S. to break a new record for single-day installs on Black Friday 2020, according to a report from Sensor Tower. The firm estimates that U.S. consumers downloaded approximately […]

A Facebook -funded body that the tech giant set up to distance itself from tricky and potentially reputation-damaging content moderation decisions has announced the first bundle of cases it will consider. In a press release on its website the Facebook Oversight Board (FOB) says it sifted through more than 20,000 submissions before settling on six […]

BlackBerry shares shot up in early trading on news that the company will partner with Amazon Web Services to jointly develop and market its vehicle data integration and monitoring platform, IVY. BlackBerry stock was up 35% or $2.11 at the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange. It’s a sign of both the potential market […]

With the pandemic playing havoc with children’s education EdTech startups have been on a roll. A new fundraising seems to come almost every week at this point. Today it’s Novakid’s turn. This EdTech startup is yet another ‘learning English as a second language for children’ startup. But it at least has a chance among the […]

For all the ways that the Silicon Valley scene excels, diversity and inclusion is not one of them. But a new startup called Fundr is looking to do the heavy lifting to help investors diversify their portfolio. Fundr is an investment marketplace founded by Lauren Washington, Boris Moyston, and Jean-Philippe Desmontils. The platform is aimed […]

The Libra Association, a consortium created by Facebook to support its Libra cryptocurrency efforts, announced this morning that it has a new name — the Diem Association — and made some key hires ahead of its launch. This is just the latest course correction since the Libra project was announced last year. In an attempt […]

Uber today announced the official completion of its Postmates acquisition deal, which it announced originally back in July. The all-stock deal, valued at around $2.65 billion at the time of its disclosure, sees Postmates join Uber, while continuing to operate as a separate service with its own branding and front-end – while some backend operations, […]

As we’ve moved to work from home during the pandemic, it’s been challenging for remote workers to feel connected. Loop Team, a new entrant into the enterprise communications space, thinks the way we are communicating needs improvement. That’s why the startup is releasing Loop Team today, a tool that is trying to use software to […]

On the heels of Facebook taking a big step into customer service with the acquisition of Kustomer for $1 billion, another big move is afoot in the world of CRM. Sinch, a Swedish company that provides cloud-based “omnichannel” voice, video and messaging services to help enterprises communicate with customers, has announced that SoftBank is taking […]

India’s Oyo has been one of the worst impacted startups with the coronavirus, but it has enough cash to steer through the pandemic and then look at funding further scale, a top executive says. In a townhall with employees last week, Oyo founder Ritesh Agarwal said the budget lodging firm “continued to hold on to […]

There are 12 million small and medium businesses in the US, yet they have continued to be one of most underserved segments of the B2B universe: that volume underscores a lot of fragmentation, and alongside other issues like budget constraints, there are a number of barriers to building for them at scale. Today, however, a […]

Latvian fintech startup Nordigen is switching to a freemium model thanks to a free open banking API. Open banking was supposed to democratize access to banking information, but the company believes banking aggregation APIs from Tink or Plaid are too expensive. Instead, Nordigen thinks it can provide a free API to access account information and […]

vivenu, a ticketing platform that offers an API for venues and promoters to customize to their needs, has closed a $15 million (€12.6 million) in Series A funding led by Balderton Capital. Previous investor Redalpine also participated. Historically-speaking, most ticketing platform startups took a direct to consumer approach, or have provided turnkey solutions to big […]

DevOps continues to get a lot of attention as a wave of companies develop more sophisticated tools to help developers manage increasingly complex architectures and workloads. In the latest development, Databand — an AI-based observability platform for data pipelines, specifically to detect when something is going wrong with a datasource when an engineer is using […]

WhatsApp is finally upping its wallpapers and stickers game, delivering some much-awaited aesthetics updates to the popular app that over 2 billion people use. The instant messaging service said on Tuesday that it will now allow users to set custom wallpapers for different chats in a bid to make it easier for users to easily […]

Continuing its annual tradition, Google today announced its Best of 2020 awards — the company’s list of the best apps, games, movies and books for the year. Not surprisingly, the top apps picked by both Google Play users and editors reflect the stressful year that 2020 has been, with a top sleep app, Loóna, winning […]

French startup Ankorstore has raised a $29.9 million Series A round (€25 million) with Index Ventures leading the round. Existing investors GFC, Alven and Aglaé are also participating. Ankorstore is building a wholesale marketplace that connects independent shop owners with brands selling household supplies, maple syrup, headbands, bath salts, stationery items and a lot more. […]

Intellect, a Singapore-based startup that wants to lower barriers to mental health care in Asia, says it has reached more than one million users just six months after launching. Google also announced today that the startup’s consumer app, also called Intellect, is one of its picks for best personal growth apps of 2020. The company […]

Nearly all of China’s largest internet firms have established a presence in online grocery. Just this week, news arrived that Alibaba co-led the $196 million C3 funding round of Nice Tuan, the two-year-old grocery group-buying firm’s fourth round year to date. People in China shop online for almost everything, including groceries. At first, grocery e-commerce […]

AWS today opened its re:Invent conference with a surprise announcement: the company is bringing the Mac mini to its cloud. These new EC2 Mac instances, as AWS calls them, are now available in preview. They won’t come cheap, though. The target audience here — and the only one AWS is targeting for now — is […]

The pandemic has made it all but impossible for a retail company without an online presence to survive. Yet while companies heavily dependent on foot traffic like J.Crew and Sur la Table have filed for bankruptcy this year, companies that are expert in e-commerce have thrived, including Target and Walmart. Amazon alone now attracts roughly […]

Canadian electric truck and bus manufacturer The Lion Electric Company said Monday it plans to become a publicly traded company via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp. The combined company, which will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, will have a valuation of $1.9 billion. The companies raised […]

Facebook makes a billion-dollar acquisition, we learn more about Twitter’s Clubhouse-style feature and Moderna applies for emergency authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine. This is your Daily Crunch for November 30, 2020. The big story: Facebook acquires Kustomer for $1B Kustomer says it can give customer service teams better data and a more unified view of […]

With the release of watchOS 7, Apple at last turned the Apple Watch into the GPS-based kid tracker parents have wanted, albeit at a price point that requires careful consideration. As someone in the target demographic for such a device — a parent of a “tween” who’s allowed to freely roam the neighborhood (but not […]

Josh Elman is moving over to Apple, he announced on Twitter today, saying he will be focused on the company’s App Store and helping “customers discover the best apps for them.” Asked for more details about his new role, Elman referred us to Apple, which confirmed his employment but declined to offer more, including about […]

Vista Equity Partners hasn’t been shy about scooping up enterprise companies over the years, and today it added to a growing portfolio with its purchase of Gainsight. The company’s software helps clients with customer success, meaning it helps create a positive customer experience when they interact with your brand, making them more likely to come […]

Infogrid, an IoT startup which can retrofit an existing building to make it “smart”, has raised $15.5 million. The Series A funding round was led by Northzone, with participation from JLL Spark, Concrete VC, The Venture Collective, Jigsaw VC, an unnamed real estate investment group and an unnamed large international asset owner, although one report […]

Chris Kim and Nate Williams formed Union Labs with the conviction that investors and companies aren’t collaborating closely enough to ensure the success of the startups they back. Kim is the former co-founder and chief technology officer at the automatic lock company August. He first met Williams when the company was attempting to create a […]