Crunch Hype

The French and Dutch governments have signalled support for EU rules that can proactively intervene against so-called gatekeepers, aka “structuring platforms” or “large digital platforms with significant network effects acting as gatekeepers” — or, more colloquially, ‘big tech’. They have also called for a single European body with enforcement powers over such platforms — and […]

Brendan Sweeney didn’t know anything about the restaurant business before he and his co-founders launched the Atlanta-based startup Popmenu. What Sweeney did know was that it was nuts that while every other business was using incredible graphics, curated text, carefully crafted images and fancy videos to make their pitch to customers restaurants were — posting […]

Nintendo’s new RC Mario Kart looks terrific

When Stripe announced earlier this year that it had picked up another $600 million in funding, it said one big reason for the funding was to expand its API-based payments services into more geographies. Today the company is coming good on that plan in the form of some M&A. Stripe is acquiring Paystack, a startup […]

Uber said on Thursday it is working to hire 225 engineers in India, strengthening its tech team in the key overseas market months after it eliminated thousands of jobs globally. The ride-hailing firm, which competes with Ola in India, said today it has hired Manikandan Thangarathnam, who spent nearly 13 years as a director of […]

Separated by a strait, the internet in Taiwan and mainland China are two different worlds. Even mainland tech giants Alibaba and Tencent have had little success entering the island, often running into regulatory hurdles. Less than a year after Taobao launched on the island through an Alibaba-backed joint venture, the marketplace announced it will cease […]

Menlo Ventures, the 44-year-old venture firm with offices in Menlo Park and San Francisco, is taking the wraps of its fifteenth early-stage fund today, a vehicle it closed with $500 million in capital commitments. It’s the same amount that Menlo announced last year for a growth-stage fund, the second in the firm’s history. We talked […]

Breitling is partnering with Arianee to issue a new kind of certificates of authenticity for its luxury watches. Instead of relying on physical certificates, the watchmaker gives you a unique digital passport that certifies the origin of the watch. Behind the scene, Arianee is using non-fungible tokens compliant with the Ethereum’s ERC-721 standard (remember CryptoKitties?). […]

Sit quietly for a moment and pay attention to the different sounds around you. You might hear appliances beeping, cars honking, a dog barking, someone sneezing. These are all noises Cochlear.ai, a Seoul-based sound recognition startup, is training its SaaS platform to identify. The company’s goal is to develop software that can identify almost any […]

WarnerMedia will discontinue HBO and WB TV channels in India, Pakistan, Maldives, and Bangladesh later this year as the entertainment conglomerate struggles to find a sustainable business model in South Asian despite operating in the region for over a decade. The company said it will end HBO and WB TV channels in the aforementioned markets, […]

French startup WizVille is launching a new product called Local Monitor to help restaurant owners, haircut places, bakeries and all kinds of small shops track their Google Maps ratings and the ratings of their competitors. While there are plenty of ratings services to compare places around you, such as Foursquare, Yelp and Tripadvisor, Google Maps […]

Longevity, as far as startups are concerned, tends to be a moonshot-y space where technologies like biotech and AI are experimentally applied in a sort of modern day alchemical quest — and the great hope is to (somehow) ‘hack’ biology and substantially extend the human lifespan. Or even end death altogether. Coming considerably closer to […]

Gogoro announced today that its Eeyo 1s is now available for sale in France, the smart electric bike’s first European market. Another model, the Eeyo 1, will launch over the next few months in France, Belgium, Monaco, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Czech Republic. In France, the Eeyo 1s can be purchased through Fnac, Darty […]

A pitch to offer artists a way to give geo-fenced, live events to fans around the world has brought the new Los Angeles startup Moment House $1.5 million in seed funding. The money came from heavy hitters in the Los Angeles entertainment and investment scene including Scooter Braun, Troy Carter, Kygo’s Palm Tree Crew and […]

Khosla Ventures, the eponymous venture firm helmed by longtime Silicon Valley rainmaker, Vinod Khosla, is raising $1.1 billion for its latest venture fund, according to documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing was first spotted by Ari Levy over at CNBC. Khosla Ventures files to raise $1.1 billion fund. Some beach reading: https://t.co/eKXq92kDMP […]

Brighteye Ventures, the European edtech VC firm, is announcing the $54 million first close of its second fund, bringing total assets under management to over $112 million. Backing comes from a mixture of existing and new investors, made up primarily of unnamed international family offices. The fund’s second close is expected to take place next […]

Zoom has a new marketplace and new integrations, Spotify gets a new format and we review Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Go. This is your Daily Crunch for October 14, 2020. The big story: Zoom launches its events marketplace Zoom’s new OnZoom marketplace allows anyone to host and sell tickets for virtual events. It’s also integrating the […]

Audrey Gelman, the former CEO of The Wing who resigned in June, today posted a letter she sent to former employees of The Wing last week. In it, Gelman apologized for not taking action to combat mistreatment of women of color at The Wing. She also acknowledged that her drive for success and scaling quickly […]

I’m going to be totally honest with you. I don’t really understand Google’s phone strategy right now. And for what it’s worth, I’m not really sure Google does either. I wrote about it here, but I’ll save you from having to read an additional 800 words on top of all these. The short version is […]

A cache of emails and other selected data purportedly from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden were published today by the New York Post. Ordinarily a major leak related to a figure involved in a controversy of Presidential importance would be on every front page — but the red flags on this one are so […]

A new app called Mycons launched today and is tapping into the iOS 14 home screen customization trend by making it easier for anyone, including non-designers, to quickly create their own custom icons, as well as shop premade icon-and-wallpaper packs from designers. With the release of iOS 14 in mid-September, millions of users began to […]

Google today unveiled Journalist Studio, a set of online tools for journalists. Most of the products included in Journalist Studio, such as Google Trends and the Fact Check Explorer, were already available elsewhere. But in addition to bringing everything together into a new suite of products, Google also announced two new tools: Pinpoint and The […]

The Tesla Model S is about to get a bit less expensive. Tesla CEO and resident meme maker Elon Musk just tweeted that the Model S sedan will soon be priced at $69,420. This pricing wasn’t done on a whim and a joint. The price cut is likely in response to Lucid undercutting Tesla on […]

To shutter employment-based visa programs, even temporarily, is to shut out the innovation and entrepreneurialism our economy desperately needs.

Elon Musk has shared some updated info about the timeline for the seven-seat version of the Model Y, Tesla’s more affordable electric SUV. The Model Y began deliveries to customers in March of this year in the U.S., but Musk said in June that he anticipated the company would start shipping seven row variants of […]

From now until October 25, TechCrunch readers in the U.S. can save 10% on an annual plan for Extra Crunch. If you aren’t familiar, Extra Crunch is our membership program focused on startups, founders and investors with more than 100 exclusive articles published per month. You can claim the deal here. Extra Crunch helps you […]

The Surface Laptop Go joined me in the woods last week. It lived in my backpack for a few days and came along for a 20-mile hike through footpaths and across bridges of questionable integrity. It is, without a doubt, light. It’s certainly lighter than the MacBook Air I also packed for the trip, at […]

Virgin Galactic is getting ready to fly its first mission to space from its Spaceport America facility in New Mexico. This is the site that the company will use to host all of its commercial flights, and making it to space from this launch locale is crucial to getting to that point. Earlier this year, […]

NASA has announced more than a third of a billion dollars worth of “Tipping Point” contracts awarded to over a dozen companies pursuing potentially transformative space technologies. The projects range from in-space testing of cryogenic tech to a 4G LTE network for the Moon. The space agency is almost always accepting applications for at least […]

There are more than 2 billion websites in existence in the world today, millions of apps, and a growing range of digital screens where people and businesses present constantly changing arrays of information to each other. But all that opportunity also has a flip side: how can you say what you want, just how you […]

Would-be small satellite launch service provider Virgin Orbit is aiming to redo its key orbital demonstration launch this December, which would be a remarkable turnaround after its attempt in March didn’t manage to reach orbit as the company had hoped. The company aims to offer low-cost launch services for small satellites, using its mid-air launch […]

Plenty‌ ‌Unlimited‌ has raised $140 million in new funding to build more vertical farms around the U.S. The new funding, which brings the company’s total cash haul to an abundant $500 million, was led by existing investor Softbank Vision Fund also included the berry farming giant Driscoll’s. It’s a move that will give Driscoll’s exposure […]

If you ever doubted the hunger brands have for more and better information about consumers, you only need to look at Twilio buying customer data startup Segment this week for $3.2 billion. Google sees this the same thing as everyone else, and today it introduced updates to Google Analytics to help companies understand their customers […]

Spotify today has released its highly-anticipated iOS 14 widget with the latest app update. The new widget, which comes in both the small and medium sizes for the time being, allows you to quickly access your recently played artists, albums and podcasts with a tap. The smaller widget will display just your most recently listened […]

Harley-Davidson should continue to make electric motorcycles. That’s my big takeaway after taking home the company’s LiveWire for three weeks. I’d ridden it on a closed course in 2019, but that wasn’t enough absorb the finer qualities of the 105 horsepower machine. After nearly a month and a thousand miles on the LiveWire, I’d venture to […]

I had only planned to stay a couple months, but got stuck. Now my company has some real opportunities to expand. How can I stay and start working?

True Ventures, the now 15-year-old firm with offices in Palo Alto, Calif., and San Francisco, is taking the wraps off two new funds this morning: it has closed its seventh early-stage fund with $465 million, and capped its fourth opportunity-type fund — used to back its own breakout portfolio companies — with $375 million. It’s […]

Zoom will begin rolling out end-to-end encryption to users of its videoconferencing platform from next week, it said today. The platform, whose fortunes have been supercharged by the pandemic-driven boom in remote working and socializing this year, has been working on rebooting its battered reputation in the areas of security and privacy since April — […]

This morning OpenView Venture Partners announced that it has closed $450 million for its new, sixth fund. The capital pool is its largest to date, coming in at roughly 50% larger than its preceding fund five. OpenView is based in Boston, but invests globally. The $450 million fund’s future existence has been known since at […]

The city of Toronto is going to start operating autonomous shuttles on a trial basis, through an agreement with Local Motors that will see that company’s Olli 2.0 all-electric self-driving shuttle ferry passengers beginning in Spring 2021. The trial is being conducted with Pacific Western Transportation, a transportation operations company, and each ride over the […]

Just months after it announced a $33 million Series B, Chicago-based M1 Finance today disclosed a $45 Series C. The new financing event was led by Left Lane Capital, the same investor that led M1’s Series B. Bear in mind that so-called inside rounds are now a bullish sign in 2020, as opposed to in prior […]

Electric car company Lucid finally revealed the price of its least expensive vehicle and it will start at $77,400. US buyers also qualify for a $7,500 tax credit making the vehicle eventually cost $69,900. This version of the Lucid Air comes rightfully less equipped than its more expensive counterparts. For $77,400 buyers get a 480 […]

Atlassian has been offering collaboration tools, often favored by developers and IT for some time with such stalwarts as Jira for help desk tickets, Confluence to organize your work and BitBucket to organize your development deliverables, but what it lacked was machine learning layer across the platform to help users work smarter within and across […]

The Exchange regularly covers companies as they approach and crest the $100 million revenue mark. Our goal in tracking startups growing at scale is to scout future IPO candidates and better understand the late-stage financing market. Today we’re digging into a company that is a little bit bigger than that. Namely Databricks, a data analytics company […]

Zoom is hosting its virtual Zoomtopia user conference this week. Given the attention the company has received as the de facto standard video meeting service since the start of the pandemic, it’s no surprise that the company is using the event to launch a number of new products. For the most part, though, we’re not […]

Spotify today is launching a new feature that combines spoken word audio commentary with music tracks. The new format will allow Spotify to reproduce the radio-like experience of listening to a DJ or a music journalist offering their perspective on the music. But Spotify is also making it possible for anyone to use the format […]

The company formerly known as NewsCred has a new name and a new product: Welcome. Co-founder and CEO Shafqat Islam explained that this follows a broader shift in the company’s strategy. While previously known as a content marketing business, Islam said NewsCred has been increasingly focused on building a broader software platform for marketers (a […]

An investigation into this summer’s Twitter hack by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS) has ended with a stinging rebuke for how easily Twitter let itself be duped by a “simple” social engineering technique — and with a wider call for key social media platforms to be regulated on security. In the […]

We’re going checking out a range of different headphones on TC this week and next as part of our ‘Headphone Week’ series, and today I’m checking out the Shure SRH1540 ($499). These aren’t new – they’ve been a stand-by among audiophiles in their price range for years now. But there’s a great reason for that: […]

Celonis began as a company to help customers understand how work flowed through your company by building a process map. This was valuable in itself, but the next logical step was to not only analyze the processes, but find ways to make them more efficient. Today, the company announced it has acquired Czech startup Integromat […]