Crunch Hype

Robotic vacuum giant iRobot this week sent warnings to select owners of the Roomba i7+, noting that the Clean Base docking station has the potential to malfunction and short circuit. According to iRobot, concern stems from “very rare cases,” wherein liquids are deposited into the Clean Base Automatic Dirt Disposal unit. “We learned that certain Roomba i7+ […]

News today that Ant Group’s IPO is suddenly on hold in both Shanghai and Hong Kong caused a sell-off of Alibaba shares. This afternoon, equity in sister-company Alibaba is off around 8% in the wake of the delayed offering and news that Ant had run into regulatory issues with the Chinese government. Ant was spun […]

Hulu is bringing its Watch Party social viewing feature to its livestreamed election news coverage, provided via its existing partnership with ABC News Live. The company announced today it will allow its on-demand customers to test Watch Party while watching ABC’s “Election 2020” coverage via the Hulu.com website. The new co-viewing feature lets Hulu users […]

When Quibi announced it was shutting its doors recently after raising $1.75 billion, it begged an obvious question: If the original idea didn’t work, why not adjust its model or do something completely different while it still had capital? It wouldn’t have been the first company to decide to shift gears. Perhaps because of the […]

NBC News has updated its iOS app with a new feature that brings election news, data and results directly to your iPhone or iPad home screen. With the app’s new “Decision 2020” iOS 14 widget, you can customize a series of widgets with information related to early voting stats, polls, as well as the current […]

Tech stocks shot higher as American voters went to the polls, the gains coming far ahead of results that could indicate who will win the presidency. American stocks broadly rose, with the S&P 500 index closing up 1.78% to 3,369.11 — one of the best Election Day closes for the S&P — while the tech-heavy […]

“If it smells, that’s how they’re going to receive it.” While that claim would likely make most D2C founders cringe, for founder Chris Alston, it’s part of the magic of his company, Mov. The upstart, based in Los Angeles, connects fans to the game-worn apparel of their favorite athletes through a sweepstakes-style model. And in […]

PayPal this week laid out its vision for the future of its digital wallet platform and its PayPal and Venmo apps. During its third-quarter earnings call on Monday, the company said it plans to roll out substantial changes to its mobile apps over the next year to integrate a range of new features, including enhanced […]

Do you find the expression “the sky’s the limit” well, limiting? Join a global community of brilliant visionaries, makers and investors on December 16-17 for TC Sessions: Space 2020, an online conference dedicated to moving beyond the confines of this world through innovative tech and to creating stellar startup opportunities. Speaking of a stellar opportunity, […]

Online education tools continue to see a surge of interest boosted by major changes in work and learning practices in the midst of a global health pandemic. And today, one of the early pioneers of the medium is announcing some funding as it tips into profitability on the back of a pivot to enterprise services, […]

Fintech has been a key startup story in recent quarters, with leading players in the genre raising titanic rounds at eye-popping valuations. Consider companies like Robinhood, and its epic capital run this year on the back of huge revenue growth, or Chime, which also raised huge sums while riding a tailwind provided by the savings […]

The Shanghai stock exchange announced postponing Ant Group’s colossal initial public offering, a day after Chinese regulators weighed a slew of new fintech rules and summoned Jack Ma and other top executives to a closed-door meeting. The rare talk between China’s top financial regulators and Ant, which revealed “major changes in the fintech regulatory environment,” […]

ZenGo, a mobile app to manage your cryptocurrencies, is about to launch a Visa debit card in the U.S. This isn’t the first crypto-powered debit card — Coinbase announced a U.S. expansion for its debit card just last week. But ZenGo is a non-custodial wallet, which means that you’re in control of your crypto assets. When […]

It’s too soon to know who will win the U.S. election tomorrow. Tomorrow may even be too soon to know who wins the election. But it’s always a good time to talk with investors about how they’re thinking about the future, and some can’t help but ponder the possibilities if Joe Biden wins the race. […]

In an election eve preview of what to expect in the coming days, President Trump pushed the limits on Twitter’s election-specific policies Monday night. In a tweet, Trump railed against the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Pennsylvania officials to count ballots postmarked by Election Day. The Republican party has waged a brazen legal onslaught against […]

It seems like SoftBank and the Mubadala Corp. aren’t finished taking big swings at the commercial real estate business in the U.S. Even after the collapse of WeWork, the investors are doubling down on a similar business model as part of a syndicate investing $700 million into REEF Technology. REEF began its life as Miami-based […]

With one day to go to the election, our thoughts are with those who look forward to talking about something else. Difficult as it might be to imagine, there must be other things to work on. One thing that comes to mind is the impact of the virus on how we manage our days and […]

Indonesia’s logistics industry is very fragmented, with several large providers operating alongside thousands of smaller companies. This means shippers often have to work with a variety of carriers, driving up costs and making supply chains harder to manage. Logisly, a Jakarta-based startup that describes itself as a “B2B tech-enabled logistics platform,” announced today it has […]

Robotics and automation startups have seen a strong uptick in interest over the course of the pandemic. And it’s easy to see which companies have a newfound interest in automating their workforce amid a seemingly endless virus-driven shutdown. But Walmart, which has long promised to take an increasing focus on such technology, has reportedly pulled […]

Apple is closing out the year with another big event, Twitter details its plans to fight election-related misinformation and WeWork employees used an embarrassingly insecure printer password. This is your Daily Crunch for November 2, 2020. The big story: Apple announces its next big event Yes, almost everyone’s attention is locked onto tomorrow’s U.S. presidential […]

AWS today announced the launch of its newest GPU-equipped instances. Dubbed P4, these new instances are launching a decade after AWS launched its first set of Cluster GPU instances. This new generation is powered by Intel Cascade Lake processors and eight of Nvidia’s A100 Tensor Core GPUs. These instances, AWS promises, offer up to 2.5x […]

PayPal’s stock is down in after-hours trading after reporting third-quarter earnings that beat expectations. It’s not immediately clear why PayPal is losing ground, although it could stem from retail investor having higher expectations than what analysts estimated for the high-flying company. Despite failing to delight the investing public, it’s possible to see continued strength for […]

TikTok announced this morning it has signed a new licensing agreement with Sony Music Entertainment (SME) that will allow the short-form video app to continue to offer songs from Sony Music artists for use by creators on its platform. The agreement will also see the companies partnering on efforts to promote Sony artists, TikTok said. […]

On the eve on the 2020 U.S. election, tensions are running high. The good news? 2020 isn’t 2016. Social networks are way better prepared to handle a wide array of complex, dangerous or otherwise ambiguous Election Day scenarios. The bad news: 2020 is its own beast, one that’s unleashed a nightmare health scenario on a […]

Alphabet’s X (the Google-owner’s so-called “Moonshot Factory”) published a new blog post today about Project Amber, a project it’s been working on over the past three years — the results of which it’s now making available open source for the rest of the mental health research community to learn from, and hopefully build upon. The […]

Financial guidance company NerdWallet announced at the end of last week that it has acquired Fundera. New York City-based Fundera was co-founded in 2013 by Jared Hecht, who previously co-founded GroupMe. It created a marketplace where small businesses could find loans, subsequently expanding into other areas like legal services, while also (like NerdWallet) offering free […]

Rocket Lab’s next mission will put dozens of satellites into orbit using the launch company’s Kick Stage “space tug,” as well as a 3D-printed garden gnome from Valve Software’s Gabe Newell. The latter is a test of a new manufacturing technique, but also a philanthropic endeavor from the gaming industry legend. Scheduled for no earlier […]

French cloud hosting company Scaleway originally started with very cheap cloud instances. Over the years, the company has expanded its offering and added more premium services, such as managed Kubernetes, object storage, block storage, managed databases, load balancers and GPU instances. But Scaleway is now launching another cheap cloud instance that costs €0.0025 per hour […]

I know it will come as a shock to you as a reader of the news, but there is an election this week. Well, tomorrow actually. It’s the rare election where the logistics of the election itself seem to be increasingly dominating the discussion. Not since the Florida recount of 2000 have pollsters, analysts and […]

One of the most active and notorious data-stealing ransomware groups, Maze, says it is “officially closed.” The announcement came as a waffling statement, riddled with spelling mistakes and published on its website on the dark web, which for the past year has published vast troves of stolen internal documents and files from the companies it […]

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to force teachers, students and parents to adopt new technologies, edtech’s total addressable market has massively grown in the last several months. The shift has urged venture capitalists to pour money into the sector accordingly, ushering a number of startups into the unicorn club. But maturation doesn’t just mean bigger […]

Spotify announced today it will begin to test a new service that gives artists more of a say in how their music is discovered on the Spotify platform. At launch, the service will allow artists and labels to identify music that’s a priority to them and Spotify will then add a signal to help the […]

Coupa Software, a publicly traded company that helps large corporations manage spending, announced that it was buying Llamasoft, an 18-year-old Michigan company that helps large companies manage their supply chain. The deal was pegged at $1.5 billion. This year Llamasoft released its latest tool, an AI-driven platform for managing supply chains intelligently. This capability in […]

Apple just sent out invites for its latest — and last — big event of 2020. Set for 10 a.m. PST on November 10, the “One More Thing” event will almost certainly focus on the long-awaited arrival of Apple silicon Macs. The big event will, naturally, be online-only — as it seems all big tech […]

Aeva, a Mountain View, Calif.-based lidar company started by two former Apple engineers and backed by Porsche SE, is merging with special purpose acquisition company InterPrivate Acquisition Corp., with a post-deal market valuation of $2.1 billion. The deal with InterPrivate, which is led by private equity investor Ahmed Fattouh, is expected to close by early […]

Offline-messaging app Bridgefy — which innovatively uses Bluetooth and Wi-fi — became known as the go-to app by thousands of protesters around the world to keep communications going even when oppressive regimes blocked or shut down the Internet. Recently, activists in Nigeria and Thailand have urged supporters to download the app, as last year, when […]

Getting to space isn’t as difficult as it used to be, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Relativity Space aims to vastly simplify the incredibly complex machine that is a launch vehicle by 3D-printing it from tip to tail fins. Co-founder and CEO Tim Ellis will be joining us at TC Sessions: Space on December […]

TVision is building what its team hopes will become the standard for measuring streaming viewership — and to accelerate those efforts, it’s raised $16 million in new funding. The New York City startup started out by measuring traditional TV viewing, using webcams to determine whether viewers were actually paying attention to the ads. More recently, […]

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox. Welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B. It was a […]

The last few quarters did not play out as as expected for venture capitalists or entrepreneurs; instead of a pandemic-fueled recession that cauterized the flow of private investment into startups, the economic shifts brought on by COVID-19 have given many companies a tailwind. Venture capitalists ramped up their spend in Q2 and Q3, pushing private investment […]

It was barely a month ago we began hearing rumors that Twilio was interested in acquiring Segment. The $3.2 billion deal was officially announced three weeks ago, and this morning the communications API company announced that the deal had closed, astonishingly fast for an acquisition of this size. While we can’t know for sure, the […]

Ad-supported streaming news platform Haystack News is announcing a significant expansion ahead of U.S. Election Day. The company this morning introduced sixteen 24/7 live streaming news channels, including ABC News Live, CBSN, Al Jazeera, Euronews, Newsmax, Yahoo Finance and several more live local news broadcast stations across the U.S. These are the first live news […]

As ever, launch title choices are likely to be a concern for gamers plunking down cash on a next-gen console. They can, however, take solace in the fact that the immensely popular battle royale title Fortnite will be available for both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S when those systems arrive a couple of […]

MIT has developed a new navigation system designed for use underwater that could do for underwater wayfinding what GPS has done for travel on and above the surface. GPS doesn’t really penetrate underwater, because radio waves aren’t really water-friendly. It’s why you commonly see things like sonar employed on submarines, which emit sound waves and […]

Stensul, a startup aiming to streamline the process of building marketing emails, has raised $16 million in Series B funding. When the company raised its $7 million Series A two years ago, founder and CEO Noah Dinkin told me about how it spun out of his previous startup, FanBridge. And while there are many products focused […]

When we covered Leena AI as a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 cohort, the young startup was firmly focused on building HR chatbots, but in the intervening years it has expanded the vision to a broader HR policy platform. Today, the company announced an $8 million Series A led by Greycroft with help […]

Twitter recently updated its policies in advance of the U.S. elections to include specific rules that detailed how it would handle tweets making claims about election results before they were official. Today, the company offered more information about how it plans to prioritize the enforcement of its rules and how it will label any tweets […]

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 […]

New research looking into how UK VC has been invested over the past decade according to race, gender and educational background makes for grim reading — with all-ethnic teams and female entrepreneurs receiving just a fraction of available funding vs all-white teams and male founders. The finding of baked in bias holds true across all […]

When it comes to using algorithms and other formulae to determine what kinds of services you might offer to specific customers and at what price, the insurance industry is one of the oldest in the book. But that legacy position masks the fact that some of its determinations might leave a lot to be desired, […]