Crunch Hype

Facebook’s battle against misinformation will never be over at this rate, but that doesn’t mean the company has given up. On the contrary it is only by dint of constant improvement to its automated systems that it is able to keep itself even remotely free of hate speech and misinformation. CTO Mike Schroepfer touted the […]

President-elect Joe Biden may have spent eight years in an administration that doted on the tech industry, but that long honeymoon, punctuated by four years of Trump, looks to be over. Tech is on notice in 2020. The Russian election interference saga of the 2016 election opened the floodgates for social media’s ills. The subsequent […]

Astra is set to launch it’s next orbital rocket, with a window that opens on December 7 and lasts for 12 days following until December 18, with an 11 AM to 2:30 PM PT block each day during which the launch could occur, depending on weather and conditions on the ground. This is the startup’s […]

General Motors said it will spend $27 billion over the next five years on the development of electric vehicles and automated technology, a 35% percent increase that exceeds the automaker’s investment and gas and diesel and is an effort bring products to market faster. More than half of GM’s capital spending and product development team […]

Apple and Verizon today announced a new partnership that will make it easier for their business partners to go all-in on 5G. Fleet Swap, as the program is called, allows businesses to trade in their entire fleet of smartphones — no matter whether they are currently a Verizon customer or not — and move to […]

Advertising drives the modern digital economy. Whether it’s reading news sites like this one or perusing your social media feeds, advertising is the single most important industry that came out of the development of the web. Yet, for all the tens of billions of dollars poured into online advertising just in the United States alone, […]

Google and Nvidia both had some news about their respective cloud gaming service today. Let’s start with Nvidia. GeForce Now is now available on the iPhone and the iPad as a web app. The company says it’s a beta for now, but you can start using it by heading over to play.geforcenow.com on your iOS […]

Although COVID-19 is surging in the United States and around the world, Warner Bros. still plans to release “Wonder Woman 1984” on Christmas Day — but its plans are are no longer limited to a theatrical release. Director Patty Jenkins and star Gal Gadot both posted tweets last night announcing that in in the United […]

Microsoft announced a few updates to its Edge browser today that are all about shopping. In addition to expanding the price comparison feature the team announced last month, Edge can now also automatically find coupons for you. In addition, the company is launching a new shopping hub in its Bing search engine. The timing here […]

Google has updated its flagship iPhone apps with support for home screen widgets, a new feature of iOS 14. The company announced today it’s rolling out new widgets for Gmail, Google Drive, Google Fit and soon, Google Calendar and Google Chrome, in order to put useful information on the home screen or to provide quick […]

Last night Affirm filed to go public, herding yet another unicorn into the end-of-year IPO corral. The consumer installment lending service joins DoorDash and Airbnb in filing recently, as a number of highly valued, venture-backed private companies look to float while the public markets are more interested in growth than profits. TechCrunch took an initial […]

Space Force is at a critical part of its young life, and Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond leads the service forward as its commanding officer. We’re thrilled to have him join us for a fireside chat at our TC Sessions: Space event on December 16 & 17. Since its founding in 2019, Gen. Raymond quickly […]

Niko Bonatsos Contributor Share on Twitter Niko Bonatsos is a managing director at General Catalyst Partners. More posts by this contributor As VCs enroll the startup class of 2016, it’s RIP for ‘me too’ companies I’ve long said that I don’t care where you come from, if your name is hard to say, or you […]

Autodesk, the U.S. publicly listed software and services company that targets engineering and design industries, acquired Norway’s Spacemaker this week. The startup has developed AI-supported software for urban development, something Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost broadly calls generative design. The price of the acquisition is $240 million in a mostly all-cash deal. Spacemaker’s VC backers included […]

As strange as they are, you would be forgiven for getting about the existence of Echo Frames. Amazon announced the smart glasses among a deluge of Alexa-focused products at an event last year that also included an even stranger smart ring. The experimental product was Day 1 Edition device — meaning it was available to […]

As your S3 storage requirements grow, it gets harder to understand exactly what you have, and this especially true when it crosses multiple regions. This could have broad implications for administrators, who are forced to build their own solutions to get that missing visibility. AWS changed that this week when it announced a new product […]

The clinical trial management software developer Medable has raised $91 million in a new round of financing as life sciences companies struggle with how to conduct the necessary validation studies of new drugs and devices in a pandemically challenged environment. Digital and decentralized clinical trials are becoming a necessity given the health and safety guidelines […]

For the past year and a half, Google has been rolling out its next-generation messaging to Android users to replace the old, clunky, and insecure SMS text messaging. Now the company says that rollout is complete, and plans to bring end-to-end encryption to Android messages next year. Google’s Rich Communications Services is Android’s answer to […]

PayPal is expanding its fundraising efforts with today’s launch of the Generosity Network. Unlike the PayPal Giving Fund, which helps people support charities through online donations, the new Generosity Network lets people raise money for themselves, other individuals in need, or organizations like a small business or a charity. This puts the network more directly […]

Two companies in the data business are teaming up, with Near announcing that it has acquired French startup Teemo. Near founder and CEO Anil Mathews told me that his company processes data around the online and offline behavior of 1.6 billion consumers each month: “We marry these two worlds and fill in the gap.” Teemo, […]

Launch provider Rocket Lab has a mission today – codenamed ‘Return to Sender,’ it’s the company’s 16th launch, and it will carry, among other things, a payload that will demonstrate a technology to help safely deorbit satellites. It has a secondary mission that’s potentially more important for Rocket Lab and the launch business in general, […]

Ten years ago a group of young tech founders in Moscow decided to get an apartment together, at Shmitovskiy lane 16. In time, the ecosystem around the group swelled to the point where today it now encompasses 300 entrepreneurs, executives, artists, and many other industries. The group now organizes the annual ‘Founders for Founders’ conference, […]

Mitigating the effects of climate change and pollution is a global problem, but it’s one that requires local solutions. While that seems like common sense, most communities around the world don’t have tools that can monitor emissions and pollutants at the granular levels they need to develop plans that can address these pollutants. Aclima, a […]

Spotify today announced that it has leveraged last year’s SoundBetter acquisition to create a marketplace for artists who make short, looping visuals for Canvas. The feature, which began rolling out widely last year, is an attempt to leverage technology, in order to make a more engaging alternative to the standard album art. As Sarah pointed […]

Wave, the virtual concert platform that’s already produced events for John Legend and The Weeknd, has inked a deal to bring its virtual concerts to China through a partnership with Tencent Music Entertainment Group. The deal includes Tencent taking a minority stake in the music service, the companies said in a statement. Under the partnership, […]

Voyager Space Holdings, one of the companies that has been on a bit of an acquisitive spree recently as it looks to put together a comprehensive and multi-vertical space technology offering, has announced that it intends to acquire The Launch Company, an Anchorage-based startup that is focused on “streamlining the launch process,” with the ultimate […]

Fintech has come into its own the past few years. Once an area of investment widely derided and avoided by VCs due to its regulated nature and entrenched incumbents, fintech has now emerged as one of the most popular categories for investment, buttressed by multiple, multi-billion dollar exits in just the past year like Plaid, […]

South Korea-based PUBG Corporation, which runs sleeper hit gaming title PUBG Mobile, announced last week that it plans to return to India, its largest market by users. But its announcement did not address a key question: Is India, which banned the app in September, on the same page? The company says it will locally store […]

Diagnoss, the Berkeley, Calif.-based startup backed by the machine learning-focused startup studio The House, has launched its coding assistant for medical billing, the company said. The software provides real-time feedback on documentation and coding. Coding problems can be the difference between success and failure for hospitals, according to Diagnoss. Healthcare providers were decimated by the […]

Instagram is continuing to develop its standalone messaging app, Threads. Last month, the company modified the app to make it possible for users to message everyone, instead of just “close friends,” as its other messaging app, Direct, once did. Today, Instagram is releasing a redesigned version of the Threads app with updated navigation and a […]

Go SMS Pro, one of the most popular messaging apps for Android, is exposing photos, videos and other files sent privately by its users. Worse, the app maker has done nothing to fix the bug. Security researchers at Trustwave discovered the flaw in August and contacted the app maker with a 90-day deadline to fix […]

The UK has announced a massive boost in defense spending — £16.5 billion ($21.8BN) over four years, the biggest such spending bump for 30 years — in what prime minister Boris Johnson has described as a “once in a generation modernization” of the UK’s armed forces and “the end of the era of retreat” on […]

Using machine learning to analyze medical imaging seems like an obvious application for the novel visualization tools that have been developed over the past decade, and now a clutch of investors have backed Subtle Medical — a company that aims to bring those technologies to the healthcare market. The company has raised $12.2 million in […]

Afresh, a company selling software to track demand and manage orders for fresh produce in grocery stores, is now worth $100 million. That hefty valuation comes on the back of a $13 million extension to the company’s latest round of funding, led by Food Retail Ventures and joined by existing investors Innovation Endeavors, Maersk Growth, […]

Starting a small company used to be simple. Get some space on Main Street, put out a shingle, and begin plying your trade. Then the regulatory state came, and so did the internet. Now, entrepreneurs have to apply for licenses — sometimes multiple licenses in multiple states — and also handle all the intricacies of […]

Data engineering is one of these new disciplines that has gone from buzzword to mission critical in just a few years. Data engineers design and build all the connections between sources of raw data (your payments information or ad-tracking data or what have you) and the ultimate analytics dashboards used by business executives and data […]

As Amazon’s Marketplace continues to grow and mature, a new opportunity has emerged in the world of e-commerce for a new breed of startups to consolidate the most promising of the smaller businesses that sell via Amazon’s platform, and build out their own economies of scale within that ecosystem. In the latest development, SellerX — […]

Portuguese VC Faber has hit the first close of its Faber Tech II fund at €20.5 million ($24.3 million). The fund will focus on early-stage data-driven startups starting from Southern Europe and the Iberian peninsula, with the aim of reaching a final close of €30 million in the coming months. The new fund targets pre-series […]

Marathon Venture Capital in Athens, Greece has completed the first closing of its second fund, reaching the €40m / $47M mark. Backing the new fund is the European Investment Fund, HDBI, as well as corporates, family offices and HNWIs around the world (plus many Greek founders). It plans to invest in Seed-stage startups from €1m […]

Juni, a Swedish pre-launch startup that’s building a banking app and platform for e-commerce and online marketing entrepreneurs, has raised just over €2.1 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Berlin-based Cherry Ventures — the first deal, I believe, from newly recruited partner Sophia Bendz, who herself is based in Sweden. Various angel investors […]

African cross-border fintech startup Chipper Cash has raised a $30 million Series B funding round led by Ribbit Capital with participation of Bezos Expeditions — the personal VC fund of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Chipper Cash was founded in San Francisco in 2018 by Ugandan Ham Serunjogi and Ghanaian Maijid Moujaled. The company offers mobile-based, no fee, P2P […]

Affirm, a consumer finance business founded by PayPal mafia member Max Levchin, filed to go public this afternoon. The company’s financial results show that Affirm, which doles out personalized loans on an installment basis to consumers at the point of sale, has an enticing combination of rapidly expanding revenues and slimming losses. Growth and a […]

Apple is making a big shift in App Store fees, Duolingo raises more funding and Pfizer releases updated vaccine results. This is your Daily Crunch for November 18, 2020. The big story: Apple cuts App Store fees Apple is cutting the 30% fee it normally charges for App Store transactions to 15% for some developers […]

General Motors is launching an insurance service, returning to a business that it abandoned more than a decade ago, but this time more in step with the connected-car era. The service, called OnStar Insurance, will offer bundled auto, home and renters’ insurance, starting this year with GM employees in Arizona. GM’s new insurance agency, OnStar […]

A new Mac-optimized fork of machine learning environment TensorFlow posts some major performance increases. Although a big part of that is that until now the GPU wasn’t used for training tasks (!), M1-based devices see even further gains, suggesting a spate of popular workflow optimizations like this one are incoming. Announced on both TensorFlow and […]

Call it a holiday miracle. Apple today announced that animated holiday classics “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas” will, indeed, be appearing on television this year. The news comes after some pushback against an Apple TV+ exclusive that found the Peanuts cartoons being pulled from TV broadcast. As we noted last month, […]

At CES back in January, I met with a handful of founders who were/are crowdfunding musical instruments. It’s a fascinating category and one to watch if you have a passing interest in either music or technology. Like a vast majority of hardware startups, most companies in the space will build one product if they’re lucky […]

In retrospect, 2019 feels like the working world’s last dance with spontaneity. The pre-pandemic past is rife with conferences, running into co-workers and post-work happy hours. Now, as companies such as Microsoft and Twitter declare remote work as the future, the very existence of physical offices is unclear for the long-term. Yet, to a growing […]

Apple is making a change to how app shortcuts work in the next release of the iOS 14 operating system. In iOS 14.3 beta 2, the Shortcuts app will now no longer open when you tap on an app shortcut on your iPhone’s home screen. That means users who have created custom icons for their […]

Apple has agreed to pay $113 million to 34 states and the District of Columbia to settle allegations that it broke consumer protection laws when it systematically downplayed widespread iPhone battery problems in 2016. This is in addition to the half billion the company already paid to consumers over the issue earlier this year and […]