Crunch Hype

VC and corporate investment into climate tech grew at a faster rate than overall VC investment as a whole between 2013-2019, according to a major new report — to the tune of $60 billion of early-stage capital. The new research by PwC (“The State of Climate Tech 2020“) found that although it’s still early days […]

Peterson Ventures, a 12-year-old, Salt Lake City, Utah-based seed-stage fund, has long operated fairly quietly, but many of its bets have become known brands in the respective worlds of consumer and enterprise software investing. Among these is the shoe company Allbirds; the men’s clothing company Bonobos (acquired a few years ago by Walmart); and Lucid […]

Shopify blames “rogue” employees for a data breach, Google Maps adds COVID-19 data and China pushes back against the TikTok deal. This is your Daily Crunch for September 23, 2020. The big story: Shopify confirms data breach The e-commerce platform blamed two “rogue members” of its support team, alleging that they stole customer data from […]

It happens to the best of us. Some newer, flashier model comes along and we’re no longer the latest and greatest new thing. The iPad’s had a plenty good run, of course. Ten years ago, the device redefined what a tablet is and has maintained a dominant spot atop the category, as countless competitors have […]

In this case, money, it really is the shoes. GOAT, the proprietor of online and physical retail locations for reselling the collectible kicks and kits that are the currency of street cred and cultural cool among the youths, is now worth a whopping $1.75 billion thanks to $100 million in new financing. It’s a big […]

Live TV streaming service Sling TV is joining in on the co-watching trend. The company today announced the launch of its own version of a co-viewing feature, which allows friends and family in different locations to watch live TV together at the same time. What makes Sling TV’s implementation unique, however, is that it’s allowing […]

TikTok’s fight with the Trump administration doesn’t yet appear to be over, regardless of what the deal that was signed between its parent company ByteDance and Oracle says. Earlier today, the company filed a motion to stop the Commerce Department from enforcing a ban against the popular social app. That ban was supposed to come […]

Shopify has confirmed a data breach, in which two “rogue members” of its support team stole customer data from at least 100 merchants. In a blog post, the online shopping site said that its investigation so far showed that the two employees, who have since been fired, were “engaged in a scheme to obtain customer […]

Tesla is suing the Trump administration over tariffs on a computer chip and other parts it imports from China, joining an increasingly long list of similar lawsuits filed by hundreds of companies, including automakers Ford, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo. Tesla, which names U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in the lawsuit filed in the U.S. Court of […]

California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on Wednesday requiring sales of all new passenger vehicles be zero-emission by 2035. The new order would be a huge boost for electric vehicles, and vehicles using alternative fuels like hydrogen, and could boost a sector that’s already surging in California. As an announcement from the California […]

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, Alex Wilhelm hosted a panel titled “Getting to $100 million ARR” on the Extra Crunch Stage. He was joined by three executives, including Vineet Jain, CEO and co-founder at Egnyte, Michal Tsur, president and co-founder at Kaltura and Sid Sijbrandij, CEO at GitLab. The panelists discussed their path to building […]

Tesla owners were locked out of their vehicles and the accompanying app for about an hour Wednesday morning, thanks to an outage that affected the company’s entire network, according to several sources. The Tesla outage was caused by an internal break of their application programming interface (or API), according to sources familiar with the outage. […]

Holy cats, it’s less than two weeks until TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 kicks off for two program-packed days focused squarely on mobility and transportation technology. On October 6-7, thousands of people from around the world will gather virtually to talk trends, demo products, share insight and discover new opportunities to drive their business into the future. […]

Robots have shown themselves to excel at any number of sports and activities, though they do best when they have a single task. Fortunately some sports, such as curling, consist mostly of one task, and Korean researchers have made a robot that throws the stone well enough to compete at a national level. If you’ve […]

The iOS 14 home screen customization trend is driving a new set of apps to the top of the App Store charts, and delivering record downloads for sources of inspiration, like Pinterest. According to new data from app store market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, installs of the top 20 home screen customization apps reached 5.7 […]

Every founder dreams of building a substantial company. For those who make it through the myriad challenges, it typically results in an exit. If it’s through an acquisition, that can mean cashing in your equity, paying back investors and rewarding long-time employees, but it also usually results in a loss of power and a substantially […]

Conventional wisdom says your company should be up and running and have some traction before you raise, but MasterClass co-founder David Rogier says entrepreneurs should try to raise funds before launching.

Email startup Superhuman has been lauded by plenty in the tech community as a simpler and faster way to navigate email, but at $30 per month, the service’s hefty subscription price has been out of reach for plenty of potential users. Today, the startup is taking some aims to bring more users outside of the […]

French startup Kard has added $3.5 million (€3 million) to its seed round. The company already raised the same amount last year, which means that Kard has raised $7 million (€6 million) in total for its seed round. Founders Future is leading the round, with Laurence Krieger, Michael Vaughan, Jon Oringer and Iris Mittenaere also […]

The pandemic has caused K-12 classrooms, chaotic at the best of times, to descend into Zoom call chaos. What’s more, thousands of teachers who must wrangle this new, weird system are doing so with just a single monitor, making it difficult to see their students and the lesson at the same time. Two Screens for […]

Google today announced an update to Google Maps that will bring a new COVID-19 layer to the service to help you better understand the number of cases in a given area. With the pandemic continuing to spread in many countries — and ahead of what many fear will be a second wave — Google Maps […]

Glovo, a Spain-based delivery platform startup, is facing legal disruption in its home market after the country’s Supreme Court ruled against its classification of delivery couriers as ‘autonomous’ (i.e. self employed) — finding riders are instead in a laboural relationship with the platform. It’s the latest in a string of legal rulings around the classification […]

It seems as if every month introduces a whole new paradigm to VC investing. First COVID-19 triggered a wave of changes as founders learned how to pitch their startups remotely and VCs learned how to judge quality without meeting their potential portfolio companies in person. Then we had the rise of SPACs and the rise […]

Volkswagen unveiled Wednesday the ID.4, an all-electric crossover that’s part of the German automaker’s plan to sell 1 million EVs annually by 2025. The unveiling ceremony was virtual, but a few days before TechCrunch got a chance to get an up close view of the vehicle and experience a truly surreal and lonely reveal that […]

Facebook garnered the ire of some virtual reality developers last year when they announced that they would be more aggressively curating the content that was for sale in the Oculus Store on their then-upcoming Quest headset. Developers who had been used to a more self-serve experience on the PC storefront were unexpectedly put in the […]

Instagram is today rolling out a few changes to its TikTok competitor, Reels, after early reviews of the feature criticized its design and reports indicated it was failing to gain traction. The company says it’s responding to user feedback on a few fronts, by giving Reels users the ability to create longer videos, extend the […]

Leonardo DiCaprio is making a significant commitment to the Los Angeles-based investment firm, Struck Capital, as part of the actor’s commitment to building LA into a tech development powerhouse. It’s part of what Struck Capital founder Adam Struck called a vision of making Los Angeles “a leading hub for innovation to save the world.” Struck […]

It’s been a long road for Palantir as it has submitted amendment after amendment with the SEC related to its S-1 filing over the past two months. But after weeks of back and forth, it’s official: Palantir’s S-1 has been marked effective, which means that it has been accepted by the SEC and its target […]

Blue Origin founder and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has made no secret of his ambition to eventually create orbiting space stations that act as places for people to live and work – he outlined a vision based on space settlement designs first conceived by physicist Gerard K. O’Neill at a Blue Origin event, including its […]

Town Sports International, the parent company of New York Sports Clubs and Christi’s Fitness gyms, is mopping up after a security lapse exposed customer data. Security researcher Bob Diachenko received a tip from a contact, Sami Toivonen, about an unprotected server containing almost a terabyte of spreadsheets representing years of internal company data, including financial […]

Last night Robinhood, the American fintech unicorn that provides free securities trading services to consumers via an app, announced that it raised an additional $460 million in its previously known Series G. That round is now worth $660 million at an $11.7 billion post-money valuation. A little over a month ago Robinhood announced that it […]

WhyLabs, a new machine learning startup that was spun out of the Allen Institute, is coming out of stealth today. Founded by a group of former Amazon machine learning engineers, Alessya Visnjic, Sam Gracie and Andy Dang, together with Madrona Venture Group principal Maria Karaivanova, WhyLabs’ focus is on ML operations after models have been […]

European antitrust regulators now have until almost the end of the year to take a decision on whether to green light Google’s planned acquisition of Fitbit. The tech giant announced its intention to buy the fitness tracking wearable maker in November 2019, saying it would shell out $2.1 billion in cash to make off with […]

Spotify today is introducing a new feature designed to make podcasts more interactive. The company says it’s beginning to test “Polls,” a tool that will allow listeners to engage with podcasts by answering questions posed by the podcast hosts during the show. The polls will appear in the Spotify app, and can be found either […]

One thing Samsung knows for certain: it’s interested in budget flagships. The category makes sense these days, as users are increasingly unwilling to spend north of $1,000 on new phones. That’s doubly the case during the COVID-19 pandemic, with people leaving the house far less often and simply not possessing the same sort of disposable […]

Yext is making its site search product Yext Answers available to a broader set of customers today with the launch of a new program that it calls Hitchhikers. The company launched Yext Answers in October 2019 with the goal of making a brand’s website — rather than whatever shows up via Google search — the […]

Digital technologies now serve as the central nervous system for the global economy, and making that nervous system work depends on networks of massive data centers that hoover up enormous amounts of power to keep businesses operating around the world. It’s not just keeping those data centers on, but keeping the rows and rows of […]

Over the past several months, it’s become painfully clear that COVID-19 isn’t a problem that we’re going to leave behind in 2021. After hemming and hawing a bit, the CTA ultimately pulled the trigger for an online-only version of the show in January. Other tech shows are similarly — at best — still up in […]

Last week, we talked a bit about how investors are seeking new techniques to bring humanity back to their deal flow and sourcing mechanisms, beyond the boring Zoom call. The newest strategy I’ve seen is PrimeTime VC, a game show that pits venture capitalists against each other to debate on topics like TikTok to Y […]

Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on Twitter Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: How […]

Pinterest is announcing its spin on the increasingly popular stories format today — Story Pins, which combine multiple pages of images, videos, voiceover and overlaid text. We wrote about Story Pins back in June, and apparently various versions of the format have been in the works since last year. But the company is only officially […]

Bowery Farming has added to its executive team as it expands its retail footprint to 650 stores, the company said. From three indoor farms in Kearny, N.J. and Nottingham, Md., the New York-based company is pitching a smattering of leafy greens and herbs. Irving Fain, Bowery’s chief executive and founder declined to disclose the company’s […]

We’ve probably all been there: you’ve been poking around your phone for an hour, deep in some sort of Google research rabbit hole. You finally find a link that almost certainly has the info you’ve been looking for. You tap it.. aaaand it’s a fifty page PDF. Now you get to pinch and zoom your […]

Nature, a Japanese hardware startup that focuses on IoT home devices, announced the launch Remo 3, its home appliance smart remote, in the United States and Canada today. Priced at $129, the Bluetooth-enabled Remo 3 allows people to control multiple appliances that uses an infrared remote, including air conditioners, TVs, robot vacuum cleaners and fans, […]

Five years ago, Traefik Labs founder and CEO Emile Vauge was working on a project deploying thousands of microservices and he was lacking a cloud native application proxy that could handle this kind of scale. So like any good developer, he created one himself and Traefik was born. If you go back five years, the […]

Yesterday, a fitness equipment maker called Echelon Fitness announced its latest product, the so-called Prime Bike. At $500, it’s nearly a clone of Peloton’s $1,900 product. The company said it had developed the bike “in collaboration with Amazon”. Amazon is now saying that’s not true and has removed the product from its site and issued […]

After operating in stealth mode for about two years, First Resonance, a company founded by former SpaceX engineers, is finally showing the world their software toolkit designed to let manufacturers make things using the processes employed by their former boss. It’s a suite of software products that can allow for more flexible manufacturing processes and […]

Zoom was never created to be a consumer product. Nonetheless, the video-conferencing company’s accessibility made it the answer to every social situation threatened by the pandemic, from happy hours to meetings. Months later, we’re realizing that force-feeding social experiences into an enterprise software company isn’t a perfect solution. Zoom School is a perfect example of […]

Facebook’s head of global policy has denied the tech giant could close its service to Europeans if local regulators order it to suspend data transfers to the US following a landmark Court of Justice ruling in July that has cemented the schism between US surveillance laws and EU privacy rights. Press reports emerged this week […]

The pitch for Berlin-based Endel is pretty straightforward, according to its co-founder and CEO Oleg Stavitsky. “The way I usually describe Endel is: This is a technology that is built to help you focus, relax and sleep,” Stavitsky told me. “Of course, the way we do that is a little more complicated than that.” The […]