Crunch Hype

Startups that deliver their service via an API are having a moment. Or perhaps a year. Speaking with founders and investors this year, it has become clear that the API model of delivering a product is more than an occasional hit-maker for companies like Twilio or Plaid. Instead, it appears that there is ample room […]

Fintech startup Revolut has rolled out a handful of additional features over the past few days. The financial app lets you track all your subscriptions that you pay with your Revolut account or your card. In the U.S., Revolut is adding a savings bonus based on your purchasing habits. Finally, business customers can now order […]

Since the robotic dental surgery assistant Yomi first came on the market in 2019 more than 2,700 patients have stared up at its plastic sheathed metal arms, and now the company behind it, Neocis, has raised $72 million to bring it into more dentists’ offices. The money came from new investors DFJ Growth and Vivo […]

Back in March, startup studio Betaworks announced that was partnering with James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems to create a new program called Betalab, which would fund and mentor early-stage startups that would try to “Fix the Internet.” In the initial announcement, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, “While migrating our social lives to the internet allowed us to […]

The Kroger Co., one of the biggest grocery chains in the Midwest is dipping its toe into on-demand delivery and the ghost kitchen craze through a partnership with an Indianapolis-based startup, ClusterTruck. Supermarkets would seem to be logical places to site the kinds of ghost kitchens that have caught investor’s eye over the past few […]

The U.S. Space Force obviously won’t be able to train most of their service people in actual space, so they relatively new arm of America’s defense forces has tasked Slingshot Aerospace to create a VR space sim, in partnership with The Third Floor, a Hollywood VFX firm that worked on blockbusters including Gravity, The Martian […]

IBM, a company that originally made its name out of its leadership in building a myriad of enterprise hardware (quite literally: its name is an abbreviation for International Business Machines), is taking one more step away from that legacy and deeper into the world of cloud services. The company today announced that it plans to […]

MessageBird, the Amsterdam-headquartered cloud communications company, has raised $200 million in Series C funding in a round led by Silicon Valley’s Spark Capital. The new investment gives 2011-founded MessageBird a whopping $3 billion valuation, and includes participation from Bonnier, Glynn Capital, LGT Lightstone, Longbow, Mousse Partners and New View Capital. Existing investors Accel, Atomico, and […]

Grid AI, a startup founded by the inventor of the popular open-source PyTorch Lightning project, William Falcon, that aims to help machine learning engineers more efficiently, today announced that it has raised an $18.6 million Series A funding round, which closed earlier this summer. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain […]

The next U.S. Presidential debate between President Trump and Democratic candidate and former VP Joe Biden will be done remotely, the U.S. Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced today. This follows an intense news cycle that came immediately after the first Presidential debate, which saw Trump and a large number of his White House inner […]

Dr Lal PathLabs, one of the largest lab testing companies in India, left a huge cache of patient data on a public server for months, TechCrunch has learned. The lab testing giant, headquartered in New Delhi, serves some 70,000 patients a day, and quickly became a major player in testing patients for COVID-19 after winning […]

Google’s appeal against an order by France’s competition watchdog to negotiate with publishers for reuse of snippets of their content has failed. As we reported in April, the French authority was acting on a new ‘neighbouring right’ for news which was transposed into national law following a pan-EU copyright reform agreed last year. The Paris […]

Mobile usage continues to remain high amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, which has prompted social distancing measures and lockdown policies, and has pushed consumers to connect online for work, school and socializing. This, in turn, has helped drive record spending in apps during the quarter, as well as a huge surge in time spent in apps. […]

The German energy company E.ON, which counts over 50 million commercial, residential, and industrial customers, has created a new EUR250 million ($265 million) investment fund called Future Energy Ventures to invest in “asset-light” tech startups. As utilities move to decarbonize their sources of energy generation they’re coming to the realization that they will need exposure […]

Yesterday, a 450-page “investigation on competition in digital markets” was published by the House based on 16 months of evidence gathering, including interviews with employees and past employees and others with first-hand knowledge of the inner workings of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The picture it paints is of companies that have abused their power […]

French fintech startup Lydia is going to work with financial API startup Tink for its open banking features in its app. Lydia started as a peer-to-peer payment app and now has 4 million users in Europe. Lydia’s vision has evolved to become a financial super app that lets you control your bank accounts and access […]

Running a small to medium-sized business means a small staff needs to juggle a plethora of tasks, like bookkeeping, tax records and regulatory filings. Singaporean startup Lanturn streamlines their workload with a combination of corporate services and an internal platform that helps automate administrative work. Lanturn announced today that it has raised a $3 million […]

When you look at maps of micromobility across the world, it appears there’s not a ton of activity throughout Africa. Well, that’s because there’s not, Gura Ride founder and CEO Tony Adesina said at TC Sessions: Mobility. In Africa, there are “very few” micromobility operators, Adesina said. “Almost non-existent.” That’s why launching bike and scooter […]

The major tech platforms push back against the House antitrust report, Google Assistant gets a “guest” mode and we interview a freshly minted Nobel laureate. This is your Daily Crunch for October 7, 2020. The big story: Big tech responds to antitrust report The House Judiciary Committee released its tech antitrust report late yesterday, concluding […]

We don’t often cover telecom technology startups, but it’s periodically worth checking in to see what’s happening in that space. We can get a good indication from the latest cohort to emerge from an accelerator associated with South Korea’s largest wireless carrier, SK Telecom. This group of startups will join the Telecom Infra Project accelerator […]

In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook said it will no longer allow content that encourages poll watching that uses “militarized” language or intends to “intimidate, exert control, or display power over election officials or voters.” Facebook credited the update to its platform rules to civil rights experts who it worked with to create the policy. […]

Amazon has sent a legal notice to Future Group, India’s second largest retail chain, for breaching the terms of its contract by selling a significant portion of the business to Ambani’s Reliance Retail. Future Group announced in late August that it was selling its retail and wholesale business, as well as its logistics and warehousing […]

The goal of Sight Tech Global, a virtual, global event on December 2-3, 2020, is to gather the world’s top experts who are applying advanced technologies, notably AI, to the future of accessibility and assistive tech for people who are blind or visually impaired. Today we’re excited to roll out most of the agenda. There […]

Welcome back to Extra Crunch’s Media Roundup, where I round up the stories that entrepreneurs in the content and advertising business should be thinking about — trends, larger platform shifts, as well as noteworthy funding rounds. This time, we’ve got some bad news for movie theaters, the specter of antitrust regulation and a new career […]

YouTube has long allowed its users to test new features and products before they go live to a wider audience. But in a recent change, YouTube’s latest series of experiments are being limited to those who subscribe to the Premium tier of YouTube’s service. Currently, paid subscribers are the only ones able to test several […]

Watching the news this past week was like drinking from a firehose. Speaking of which, you probably missed a busy week in cybersecurity, so here are the big stories from the past week. THE BIG PICTURE Blackbaud hack gets worse, as bank account data stolen Blackbaud, a cloud technology company used by colleges, universities, nonprofits […]

On Tuesday, during TechCrunch’s annual Mobility event, we had the opportunity to interview three investors who spend much of their time focused narrowly on shifts in the transportation industry and we talked with the three — Amy Gu of Hemi Ventures, Reilly Brennan of Trucks VC, and Olaf Sakkers of Maniv Mobility — about a […]

Claire Díaz-Ortiz has been many things over the course of her career — an angel investor, an early Twitter employee (who notably got the Pope on Twitter), the founder of a nonprofit, a published author and an entrepreneur. Now, the globe-trotting, multi-hyphenate polymath is adding “partner” to her list of titles as she joins the […]

Remember ‘Do Not Track‘? The tracker-loving adtech industry hopes you don’t recall that decade+ doomed attempt to bake user-friendly privacy controls into browsers. But a coalition of privacy-forward tech companies, publishers and advocacy groups has taken the wraps off of a push to develop a new standard that gives Internet users a super simple way […]

Here’s a summary of the pros and cons of O-1A and EB-1A visas.

Google is launching a few new privacy features today that include a refreshed Safety Center that’s now live in the U.S. and coming soon globally, as well as more prominent alerts when the company expects that your account has been tampered with. The most interesting new feature, however, is a new Guest mode for the […]

Former Apple software engineer and designer Ken Kocienda, whose work included the original iPhone and the development of touchscreen autocorrect, has created his first iOS app, Up Spell. The fast-paced, fun word game challenges users to spell all the words you can in two minutes and uses a lexicon of words Kocienda built to allow […]

Most startup founders have a tough road to their first round of funding, but the founders of Digital Brain had it a bit tougher than most. The two young founders survived by entering and winning hackathons to pay their rent and put on food on the table. One of the ideas they came up with […]

Last year, Instagram announced it was ending support for its standalone mobile messaging app known as Direct, which had allowed users to quickly create and share messages with friends. Shortly thereafter, the company launched Threads, a new messaging app focused on status updates and communication with only those you identified in Instagram as your “Close […]

This morning Zira raised $3.1 million in a seed round. The startup provides software that helps businesses schedule their hourly workforce in a more intelligent manner. Software often fails to reach non-information workers, so it’s nice to see a startup focus on a somewhat forgotten demographic. General Catalyst and Abstract Ventures led the round, which […]

In September 2020, Helsinki’s City Council approved plans for an expansion of the existing “Maria 01 Campus,” a former downtown hospital complex. Even before it starts spreading its acreage, the facility is already home to 120 startups and 12 venture capital funds. The campus is owned by the biggest startup conference in the Nordics, Slush, […]

Samsung and three major contract manufacturing partners of Apple are among 16 firms to win $6.65 billion incentives under India’s federal plan to boost domestic smartphone production over the next five years. These companies had applied for the incentive program in August. In a statement Tuesday evening, Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) […]

Greycroft, the New York and L.A.-based venture firm founded in 2006 by investors Alan Patricof, Dana Settle, and Ian Sigalow, has closed on two new funds totaling $678 million in capital commitments. One of those funds is its sixth flagship early-stage fund and it closed with $310 million dollars. The firm also collected $368 million […]

The prospect of truly zero contact delivery seems closer — and more important — than ever with the pandemic changing how we think of last mile logistics. Autonomous delivery executives from FedEx, Postmates, and Refraction AI joined us to talk about the emerging field at TechCrunch Mobility 2020. FedEx VP of Advanced Technology and Innovation […]

Nvidia is in the process of acquiring chip designer Arm for $40 billion. Coincidentally, both companies are also holding their respective developer conferences this week. After he finished his keynote at the Arm DevSummit, I sat down with Arm CEO Simon Segars to talk about the acquisition and what it means for the company. Segars […]

Google rebrands G Suite, Apple announces its next event date and John McAfee is arrested. This is your Daily Crunch for October 6, 2020. The big story: G Suite becomes Google Workspace To a large extent, Google Workspace is just a rebranding of G Suite, complete with a new set of (less distinctive) logos for […]

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee has finally released its omnibus report on its investigation into the monopoly powers held by Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Facebook and its findings will do nothing to stem the power of big tech. For startups, the most relevant points are the potential solutions the committee proposes for addressing big tech […]

Facebook expanded a ban on QAnon-related content on its various social platforms Tuesday, deepening a previous prohibition on QAnon-related groups that had “discussed potential violence,” according to the company. Today’s move by Facebook to not only ban violent QAnon content but “any Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts representing QAnon” is an escalation by the […]

Google really whiffed with the new logos for its “reimagination” of G Suite as Google Workspace, replacing icons that are familiar, recognizable, and in Gmail’s case iconic if you will, with little rainbow blobs that everyone will now struggle to tell apart in their tabs. Companies always talk loud and long about their design language […]

AT TC Sessions: Mobility, we heard from Tortoise co-founder and president Dmitry Shevelenko, Elemental Excelerator director of Innovation, Mobility, Danielle Harris and Superpedestrian VP of Strategy and Policy, Avra van der Zee about the next opportunities in micromobility. “Thinking about how micromobility could expand, and the accessibility of it in terms of getting people on […]

Now’s the time for sustainable investments to shine. There are billions of dollars in funding in both public and private markets dedicated to new sustainable investing and demand for consumers for a more conscious capitalism has never been stronger. As founders and investors reawaken to a sustainable morning in America a few areas are going […]

The news last week that NextEra Energy, a U.S. utility and renewable energy company, briefly overtook ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco to become the world’s most valuable energy producer shows just how valuable sustainable businesses have become. It’s yet another proof point that there are billions of dollars available for companies focused on renewable energy alone […]

As investing whirlwind Chamath Palihapitiya continues to make headlines with his full-court press to take private tech companies public via SPACs while markets are hot, one of his targets has disclosed financial information that helps us better understand the transaction it is undertaking. Palihapitiya’s Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. II (a public, blank-check company, or […]

After demonstrating scale, growth and financial improvement, one founder of a two-year-old agritech startup based in India told me that he’s now confronting a new challenge: Unlike his peers in edtech, fintech or e-commerce, there are very few investors he could approach for raising funds, he told TechCrunch, requesting anonymity. He suggested that a startup […]

Twitter is testing a new way to follow accounts. The company announced today it’s rolling out a new feature, “Suggested Follows,” that will pop up a list of other accounts you may want to follow on the profile page of someone you had just followed. The feature will be tested on Android devices, for the […]