Crunch Hype

Autodesk, the U.S. publicly listed software and services company that targets engineering and design industries, has acquired Norway’s Spacemaker, a startup that has developed AI-supported software for urban development. The price of the acquisition is $240 million in a mostly all-cash deal. Spacemaker’s VC backers include European firms Atomico and Northzone, which co-led the company’s […]

Lego’s partnership with Nintendo delivered a pretty awesome debut earlier this year with the interactive Lego Super Mario Starter Course, and now it’s following that up with additional sets designed to complement the first. These include a new ‘Master Your Adventure Maker Set,’ which adds customization options by tweaking Lego Mario’s response via three new […]

Forto, a digital freight forwarder which has experienced a boom during the pandemic, has raised another $50 million in funding. This takes its total investment to $73 million after it raised $23m in debt financing from the European Investment Bank this year. It’s now raised $126 million in total, since its launch in 2016. The […]

In a period of social distancing, making new professional connections feels harder than ever. So Amsterdam-based Cooper is building a network that’s all about making and receiving introductions. “Everything that happens in the network is based on on the foundation of introductions,” CEO Robert Gaal told me. “You should never get an unwanted message, and […]

Telkomsel, Indonesia’s biggest telecom network, has invested $150 million in ride-hailing firm Gojek, the two companies said on Tuesday. As part of the “strategic partnership,” the two firms said they will explore a “broad range of collaboration opportunities” to reach millions of Indonesians. Since 2018, Gojek and Telkomsel have maintained a deal to subsidize the […]

PingCAP, the open-source software developer best known for NewSQL database TiDB, has raised a $270 million Series D. TiDB handles hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP), and is aimed at high-growth companies, including payment and e-commerce services, that need to handle increasingly large amounts of data. The round’s lead investors were GGV Capital, Access Technology […]

Tibber, a ‘digital electricity’ supplier which uses AI to switch around power for houses based on their predicted levels of consumption – has closed a $65 million Series B round led by Eight Roads Ventures and Balderton Capital, with participation from existing investors including San Francisco-based Founders Fund, which invested last year. Alongside equity, Tibber […]

AMP Robotics, the manufacturer of robotic recycling systems, has received its largest purchase order from the publicly traded North American waste handling company, Waste Connections. The order, for 24 machine learning enabled robotic recycling systems, will be used on container, fiber and residue lines across numerous materials recovery facilities, the company said. The AMP technology […]

After weeks of rumors, Huawei confirmed it is selling Honor to a consortium of companies, including government-backed firms, Honor’s distribution partners and suppliers, in a move to save its budget phone brand from U.S. pressure. The decision was announced in a joint statement released Tuesday morning in a local Shenzhen paper. Once the transaction is […]

GitHub defies a takedown order, Strava raises a big round and Moderna reports promising COVID-19 vaccine results. This is your Daily Crunch for November 16, 2020. The big story: GitHub reinstates YouTube downloading project Back in October, the Recording Industry Association of America sent a DMCA complaint to GitHub over a project called YouTube-dl, which […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today we have an Equity Shot for you about Airbnb’s S-1 filing, as it looks to go public before the year is out. First we get into Airbnb’s macro performance, which shows a stable-picture historical revenue growth. There […]

Tesla will be added to the S&P 500, a milestone that will expand its investor base and put the electric automaker in the same company as heavyweights like Apple, Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft. The announcement, made Monday afternoon by the S&P Dow Jones Indices, sent shares 13.7% higher in after-market trading. Tesla will officially join the benchmark […]

After giving in to the looming threat of subpoenas, two of tech’s most high profile CEOs will again be grilled by Congress. On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will host Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for what’s likely to be another multi-hour airing of assorted grievances. In this round, Republican lawmakers called the […]

After a tumultuous year for the travel industry, Airbnb’s long-awaited IPO filing just dropped. One thing is clear: there is still plenty of juice left in the home-sharing platform, and a smattering of VCs and the company’s founders are positioned to receive some serious returns. My colleague Alex Wilhelm has an overview article on Airbnb’s […]

Baidu said on Monday it is acquiring Joyy’s live-streaming service YY Live in China for $3.6 billion in an all-cash deal as the Chinese internet giant makes a further push to diversify beyond its core search business and play catch-up in video entertainment. The announcement, which Baidu shared on the sidelines of its quarterly earnings, […]

Airbnb filed to go public today, bringing the well-known unicorn one step closer to being a public company. The financial results show a company on the rebound, but smaller than it was. Its more granular financial results also make clear how hard the pandemic was on the travel-reliant unicorn. Regarding Airbnb’s worth, investors will have […]

Ride Vision, an Israeli startup that is building an AI-driven safety system to prevent motorcycle collisions, today announced that it has raised a $7 million Series A round led by crowdsourcing platform OurCrowd. YL Ventures, which typically specializes in cybersecurity startups but also led the company’s $2.5 million seed round in 2018, Mobilion VC and […]

Beyond Meat has launched two new versions of its Beyond Burgers, the company announced today. The two new options will be available on store shelves in 2021, but will be on offer at a two-day pop up event in Los Angeles for folks to try. The new Beyond Burger patties are designed to mirror the […]

Colleges are diving into esports, with 115 different programs offering scholarships for esports and club programs are growing even faster. Certainly, it will help attract students, but monetization is really tricky.

Deep Vision, a new AI startup that is building an AI inferencing chip for edge computing solutions, is coming out of stealth today. The six-year-old company’s new ARA-1 processors promise to strike the right balance between low latency, energy efficiency and compute power for use in anything from sensors to cameras and full-fledged edge servers. […]

It’s price hike season! Just a few weeks after Netflix bumped up prices on a bunch of its plans, it looks like Hulu will soon be charging more for its Live TV service. The company has confirmed to us that it will be bumping the monthly cost of Hulu + Live from $54.99 to $64.99 […]

Here’s a closer look at the three growth marketing tactics I credit with helping us scale Lifesum over the last 36 months. It’s a strategy any startup can use, regardless of size or budget.

Arrikto, a startup that wants to speed up the machine learning development lifecycle by allowing engineers and data scientists to treat data like code, is coming out of stealth today and announcing a $10 million Series A round. The round was led by Unusual Ventures, with Unusual’s John Vrionis joining the board. “Our technology at […]

Apple is making it easier to discover and listen to podcasts via the web. The company announced today an Apple Podcasts embed web player is now available, allowing anyone — including creators, listeners or marketers — to generate embed codes for the over 1.5 million shows available across the Apple Podcasts service. The codes can […]

GitHub has restored the code of a project that the RIAA demanded it take down last month after finding that the group’s DMCA complaint was meritless. YouTube-dl, a tool that lets videos from the streaming site be downloaded for offline viewing, is back in action — and GitHub is changing its policy and earmarking a […]

Activity and fitness tracking platform Strava has raised $110 million in new funding, in a Series F round led by TCV and Sequoia, and including participation by Dragoneer group, Madrone Capital Partners, Jackson Square Ventures and Go4it Capital. The funding will be used to propel the development of new features, and expand the company’s reach […]

Shared e-scooters are on track to surpass half a billion rides globally in 2021. These are several of the most important innovations that got us here.

Squarespace is adding a new monetization option for websites built on the platform: Member Areas, where businesses can charge for access to exclusive content. Chief Product Officer Paul Gubbay said that particularly in the midst of the pandemic, businesses on Squarespace “want to experiment with different ways to make money.” They can already use the […]

Federal regulators have approved Mastercard’s acquisition of Salt Lake City-based startup Finicity, which provides open-banking APIs. The deal is expected to go for $825 million. “We were notified that the Department of Justice completed its review of our planned acquisition of Finicity and has cleared it to move forward,” Mastercard wrote in a statement. “We […]

WildWorks, the gaming company that makes the popular kids game Animal Jam, has confirmed a data breach. Animal Jam is one of the most popular games for kids, ranking in the top five games in the 9-11 age category in Apple’s App Store in the U.S., according to data provided by App Annie. But while […]

As companies work with data, one of the big obstacles they face is making sure they are not exposing personally identifiable information (PII) or other sensitive data. It usually requires a painstaking manual effort to strip out that data. Gretel, an early stage startup, wants to change that by making it faster and easier to […]

TechCrunch Sessions: Space (December 16 & 17) is just a few short weeks away and there is perhaps no better time than the end of this horrid year to set our eyes to the horizon and dream of some place far, far away. David Limp, Amazon’s SVP of Amazon Devices and Services, is just the […]

PayPal announced this morning that its customers can now use either PayPal or Venmo QR codes when checking out at over 8,200 CVS retail stores across the U.S. This is the first national retailer to integrate PayPal’s QR code checkout technology at point-of-sale, the company noted. The additional checkout option will also expand the number […]

The coronavirus has erased a large chunk of college’s value proposition: the on-campus experience. Campuses are closed, sports have been paused and, understandably, students don’t want to pay the same tuition for a fraction of the services. As a result, enrollment is down across the country and university business models are under unrelenting pressure. The […]

The last thing I recall thinking about C3.ai (C3) was seeing its billboards outside San Francisco and asking myself what the hell the company actually did and how much it was spending on huge outdoor advertisements. So much for what I know. The company filed to go public on Friday, and instead of being a […]

Spotify today launched a new feature designed to give podcast listeners a new way to organize and save content they want to listen to at a later time or keep their favorite episodes bookmarked for easy access. The feature, called “Your Episodes,” lets you bookmark individual episodes from any podcast, which are then added a […]

Over the past decade, many startups have tried (and many have failed) to rethink the way we schedule our meetings and calls. But we seem to be in a calendrical renaissance, with incumbents like Google and Outlook getting smarter and smarter and newcomers like Calendly growing significantly. Undock, an Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator-backed startup, is looking […]

Chooch.ai, a startup that hopes to bring computer vision more broadly to companies to help them identify and tag elements at high speed, announced a $20 million Series A today. Vickers Venture Partners led the round with participation from 212, Streamlined Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, Waterman Ventures and several other unnamed investors. Today’s investment brings […]

I am excited that these actions further speed money velocity and allow more people on both the entrepreneurial and investment side of the ecosystem to participate.

Capcom, the Japanese game maker behind the Resident Evil and Street Fighter franchises, has confirmed that hackers stole customer data and files from its internal network following a ransomware attack earlier in the month. That’s an about-turn from the days immediately following the cyberattack, in which Capcom said it had no evidence that customer data […]

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 […]

WarnerMedia’s streaming service HBO Max is finally coming to Amazon’s Fire TV, nearly half a year after it first launched. The service, which combines HBO content with an expanded selection from WarnerMedia’s library and a slate of originals, debuted without support for two of the largest streaming platforms in the U.S.: Amazon Fire TV and […]

NASA added a surprise fifth passenger to the Crew-1 mission currently en route to the International Space Station – a plush The Child (aka Baby Yoda) from The Mandalorian. The doll is what’s known as the “zero-gravity indicator” – typically a soft, small object that is allowed to float free in the spacecraft cabin to […]

For years, founders and investors in China had little interest in open source software because it did not seem like the most viable business model. Zilliz‘s latest financing round shows that attitude is changing. The three-year-old Chinese startup, which builds open source software for processing unstructured data, recently closed a Series B round of $43 […]

As the online world slowly moves to a more privacy-focused environment free of cookies, startups building alternative ways to help businesses manage customer identity and build marketing around that are getting attention. Zeotap, a customer identity platform built around a company’s own (first-party) data that combines this with other data sources to create more complete […]

A unique device identifier that Apple assigns to each iPhone for third parties to track users for ad targeting — aka the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) — is itself now the target of two new complaints filed by European privacy campaign not-for-profit, noyb. The complaints, lodged with German and Spanish data protection authorities, contend that […]

For the past three years, UpCodes and its founders have been entangled in a copyright lawsuit filed by the International Code Council (ICC). Though both focus on the building industry (specifically, the codes architects and builders need to follow), the lawsuit deals with an issue that has wider ramifications: is it possible to copyright the […]

Techfugees, the global non-profit which advocates the use of technology to aid refugees and displaced people, has appointed tech entrepreneur and Raj Burman as its new CEO. Burman succeeds Josephine Goube, who will continue as executive director of the adjacent Techfugees Charity in order to concentrate on scaling its country-based programs for refugees. Burman has […]

Following fast on the heels of Pfizer’s announcement of its COVID-19 vaccine efficacy, Moderna is also sharing positive results from its Phase 3 trial on Monday. The biotech company says that its COVID-19 vaccine candidate has shown efficacy of 94.5% in its first interim data analysis, which covers 95 confirmed COVID cases among its study […]

Organizations today are sitting on mountains of data that they amass and use in their own businesses, but many are also looking to share those troves with other parties to expand their business — a model that comes with challenges (privacy and data protection being two key ones); and these days (due to Covid-19 and […]