Crunch Hype

We interviewed MuteSix CRO Greg Gillman to discuss how the LA-based performance marketing agency bets on content and data to work with its direct-to-consumer e-commerce clients.

Following last year’s price hike on its Live TV service, Hulu is now preparing to raise prices again. Starting on October 8, 2021, Hulu will raise the price for both its on-demand plans, Hulu and Hulu with No Ads. However, unlike the earlier price hike which had clocked in at $10 more per month for […]

Invites just went for Apple’s next big event, scheduled for 10AM PT/1PM ET on September 14. The invite doesn’t offer a lot in the way of what’s to come — it’s a neon logo set against a lovely sierras backdrop and an apparent The Mamas & the Papas reference in the form of “California Streaming.” […]

Vowel's meeting operating system has the goal of making meetings more useful before, during and after.

The live streaming boom is driving a significant uptick in the creator economy, as a new forecast estimates consumers will spend $6.78 billion in social apps in 2021. That figure will grow to $17.2 billion annually by 2025, according to data from mobile data firm App Annie, which notes the upward trend represents a five-year […]

Washington D.C’s Howard University has canceled classes after becoming the latest educational institution to be hit by a ransomware attack. The incident was discovered on September 3, just weeks after students returned to campus, when the University’s Enterprise Technology Services (ETS) detected “unusual activity” on the University’s network and intentionally shut it down in order […]

Intel subsidiary Mobileye and rental car giant Sixt SE plan to launch a robotaxi service in Munich next year, the CEOs of the two companies announced Tuesday during the IAA Mobility show in Germany. The robotaxi service is leveraging all of Intel’s, and more specifically Mobileye’s, assets that have been in development or purchased in […]

HoneyBee, a startup that aims to help companies provide access to financial support to their employees, announced today it has raised $5.7 million in equity in a round led by FFVC. Resolute Ventures, Afore Capital, Rebalance Capital, K50 and Financial Venture Studio also participated in the financing, along with two-time NBA all-star Baron Davis. HoneyBee […]

On October 27, less than two fast-moving months away, we’re hosting TC Sessions: SaaS 2021, our first event focused exclusively on the software-as-a-service ecosystem. SaaS — the de facto business model for B2B and B2C startups and enterprises alike — shows no sign of slowing down. This is a prime opportunity to hear and learn […]

Jetty, a fintech company which aims to give renters flexibility when paying rent, has raised $23 million in a funding round co-led by Citi and Flourish Ventures. The financing brings Jetty’s total raised since its 2016 inception to $78 million. Other investors participating in the latest growth round include Credit Ease and K5. Previous backers […]

Emulate Inc., a biotech company focused on developing “organ-on-a-chip” technology, closed an $82 million Series E round on Tuesday. This latest round is intended to formulate a massive investment in a “roadmap” for developing model organ systems created to fit drugmakers’ needs and bring the idea of an organ-on-a-chip into use in the lab. An […]

Don’t wait until your best talent walks out the door to ring the alarm. Focusing on employee engagement is the ultimate win-win for employers who can tap into the potential of their human resources.

Anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life exposed the personal information of hundreds of job applicants after a website bug allowed anyone to access their resumes, which were stored in an unprotected directory on its website. A security researcher told TechCrunch that the group’s main website, built largely in WordPress, was not properly protecting the file […]

Peanut, a social networking app for women, initially found traction connecting women in the earlier stages of their motherhood journey. But over the years, the network expanded to support women through other life stages. Now, that will include menopause, as well — a life stage that will impact nearly half the world’s population at some […]

AI is everywhere in tech, and you can bet it will be a vital topic at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23. It’s the driving force behind just about everything from rockets, robotics and customer service to deep science and autonomous vehicles. It’s even changing the game for dystopian fiction writers. As always, every Disrupt […]

As developers look for ways to simplify how they create software, serverless solutions, which enable them to write code without worrying about the underlying infrastructure required to run their applications, is becoming increasingly popular. DigitalOcean announced today that it is enhancing its existing offering in this area with the acquisition of serverless startup Nimbella. The […]

Spanish on-demand delivery platform Glovo today announced plans to double its investment in Africa and expand its operations on the continent. The Barcelona-based company has invested up to €25M ($30M) by bringing its food delivery service to six African countries — Morocco, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria. Glovo is available in more than […]

After living through the global upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, many workers are re-evaluating their career path. Stefan Heinrich Henriquez, a former Head of Global Marketing at TikTok and Chief Marketing Officer at Cameo, is one of them. “I have been thinking about music since my time at TikTok, and I was really thinking about […]

Bringing order and understanding to unstructured information located across disparate silos has been one of more significant breakthroughs of the big data era, and today a European startup that has built a platform to help with this challenge specifically in the area of life sciences — and has, notably, been used by labs to sequence […]

Elvie, the women’s health tech pioneer behind a connected breast pump and smart pelvic floor exerciser, has topped up a Series C which it announced earlier this summer (July) — adding a further £12.7m to bring the total raised to £70 million ($97m). The 2013-founded, UK-based startup previously raised a $42M Series B in 2019, and […]

Hyundai Motor Group is backing hydrogen as a top energy solution for sustainability. With its new fuel cell system that it plans to launch in the next few years, the South Korean automaker said it will provide hydrogen fuel cell versions for all its commercial vehicles by 2028. Hyundai announced its strategy for the future […]

Francophone Africa has its first unicorn, and if you’ve been following tech on the continent, you will be very unsurprised to hear that it’s coming from the world of fintech. Wave, a U.S. and Senegal-based mobile money provider, has raised $200 million in Series A round of funding. The investment is the largest-ever Series A […]

BP Ventures, the investing arm of oil and gas giant BP, has announced a €10 million (~$11.9 million) investment in Ryd, a German in-car digital payments provider. The fresh funds will help Ryd expand its service into international markets and build out its offering, according to a statement. Ryd’s service allows users to lump together […]

Indian crypto exchange CoinSwitch Kuber is in advanced stages of talks to raise a new financing round at up to $2 billion in valuation, several sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. If the talks materialize in a deal, CoinSwitch Kuber will become the second crypto startup in the world’s second largest internet market to […]

Financial services, especially those for people who don’t have access to traditional bank accounts or lines of credit, are proliferating in Southeast Asia. Jeff App wants to give consumers a “super app” where they can compare many financial products and apply for them using the startup’s proprietary data-scoring models. For service providers, Jeff serves as […]

Every startup founder faces the same issue — how do you manage your cap table and equity plans in a transparent and lightweight manner? If you’re based in the U.S., chances are you’re using an equity management solution like Carta. But if you’re not based in the U.S., you don’t have a ton of options. […]

For many manufacturers and freight forwarders, managing logistics is still a very manual process: tracking shipments with a call or online lookup, and entering that data into an Excel spreadsheet. Portcast, which describes itself as a “next-generation logistics operating system,” makes the process more efficient by gathering data from myriad sources and not only track […]

In the latest quasi-throwback toward ‘do not track‘, the UK’s data protection chief has come out in favor of a browser- and/or device-level setting to allow Internet users to set “lasting” cookie preferences — suggesting this as a fix for the barrage of consent pop-ups that continues to infest websites in the region. European web […]

ShopUp, a startup that is digitizing neighborhood stores in Bangladesh, has raised $75 million in a new financing round that is also the largest in the South Asian market. Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures led ShopUp’s $75 million Series B round. Prosus Ventures as well as existing investors Flourish Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, and VEON Ventures […]

The pandemic has triggered more demand for contactless and staff-less operations in the hospitality sector, and now H2O Hospitality, the unmanned hotel management company, has closed a $30 million round on the back of that boost. The South Korea and Japan-based startup automates front and backend processes including accommodation reservation, room management and front desk […]

A.ID, an identity and compliance platform with a focus on high-risk clients, has closed a pre-seed investment round of $500,000 from angel investors including former employees of RobinHood, Square and Snap. The startup says it is addressing a market that traditional Fintech companies and banking instutions can’t seem to deal with: namely the rise of […]

Financial automation platform, Aurelia has raised $3 million in seed funding, led by Blossom Capital. Billing itself as a sort of “IFTTT for finance” aimed at small businesses that want to integrate their bank accounts with financial tools, Aurelia says this then gives them greater control over cash flow, taxes etc to automate normally manual […]

The manufacturing industry took a hard hit from the Covid-19 pandemic, but there are signs of how it is slowly starting to come back into shape — helped in part by new efforts to make factories more responsive to the fluctuations in demand that come with the ups and downs of grappling with the shifting […]

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Before […]

Berlin-based Mobius Labs has closed a €5.2 million (~$6.1M) funding round off the back of increased demand for its computer vision training platform. The Series A investment is led by Ventech VC, along with Atlantic Labs, APEX Ventures, Space Capital, Lunar Ventures plus some additional angel investors. The startup offers an SDK that lets the […]

ProtonMail, a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn’t log IP addresses […]

Indian logistics firm Delhivery has courted one more high-profile investor before its expected IPO in the next two quarters: Lee Fixel’s Addition. The Gurgaon-headquartered firm has disclosed in a regulatory filing that Addition has invested $76.4 million in the startup. The new investment is part of a Series I round, according to the filing, provided by […]

UK tech accelerator Founders Factory is joining forces with a European counterpart to launch the Founders Factory Sustainability Seed program. Launched in partnership with G-Force (the G is for Green) based out of Bratislava, Slovakia, the program will look to invest in and accelerate climate-tech startups. The program will invest in entrepreneurs with startups that […]

Nigerian automotive tech company Autochek today is announcing the acquisition of Cheki Kenya and Uganda from Ringier One Africa Media (ROAM) for an undisclosed amount. Per a statement, Autochek will finalize the deal in the coming weeks. With the acquisition, Autochek completes its expansion into East Africa and follows the first acquisition made almost a […]

Factorial, a startup out of Barcelona that has built a platform that lets SMBs run human resources functions with the same kind of tools that typically are used by much bigger companies, is today announcing some funding to bulk up its own position: the company has raised $80 million, funding that it will be using […]

Dukaan, a one-year-old Bangalore-based startup that enables merchants to set up online stores and sell products digitally, said on Monday it has raised $11 million in a new financing round as it looks to broaden its offerings and deepen footprints in the South Asian market. The new financing round, a Pre-Series A, was led by […]

Mercedes-Benz introduced a slew of electric vehicles ahead of the IAA Mobility show in Germany, including its first AMG-branded high-performance EV, a sedan and a G-Class SUV concept — all part of the company’s bid to become an electric-only automaker by the end of the decade. Mercedes has already started producing the all-electric EQS, a […]

Homage, the caregiving-focused startup, has raised a $30 million Series C led by Sheares Healthcare Group, which is wholly-owned by investment firm Temasek. Other participants included new investors DG Daiwa Ventures and Sagana Capital, and returning backers East Ventures (Growth), HealthXCapital, SeedPlus, Trihill Capital and Alternate Ventures. The new funding will be used to develop […]

Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, a standalone VW brand responsible for the development and sales of light commercial vehicles, and Argo AI, an autonomous driving technology company, unveiled the first version of the ID Buzz AD (Autonomous Driving) on Sunday. The two companies shared plans to test and commercially scale the jointly developed, fully-electric self-driving van over […]

It was curious enough that OLIO, a UK startup with an app that lets users post a photo of unwanted food and share it with the local neighborhood, picked up $6 million in Series A funding back in 2018. Many outside observers wondered what was going on with this simple app, which looked on first […]

Quantum Machines, an Israeli startup that is building the classical hardware and software infrastructure to help run quantum machines, announced a $50 million Series B investment today. Today’s round was led by Red Dot Capital Partners with help from Exor, Claridge Israel, Samsung NEXT, Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, LP, as well as TLV Partners, […]

Barcelona-based gaming video platform Gamestry has snatched up $5 million in seed funding, led by Goodwater Capital, Target Global and Kibo Ventures — turning investors’ heads with a 175x growth rate over the past 12 months. While the (for now) Spanish-language gaming video platform launched a few years back, in 2018, last year the founders […]

Today, Amazon Web Services is a mainstay in the cloud infrastructure services market, a $60 billion juggernaut of a business. But in 2008, it was still new, working to keep its head above water and handle growing demand for its cloud servers. In fact, 15 years ago last week, the company launched Amazon EC2 in […]

This week, the gaming industry again became a target of Beijing, which imposed arguably the world's strictest limits on underage players. On the other hand, China's tech titans are hastily answering Beijing's call for them to take on more social responsibilities and take a break from unfettered expansion.

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review. Last week, we dove into the truly bizarre machinations of the NFT market. This week, we’re talking about something that’s a little bit more impactful on the current state of the web — Apple’s NeuralHash kerfuffle. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can […]