Crunch Hype

The Federal Trade Commission has unanimously voted to ban the spyware maker SpyFone and its chief executive Scott Zuckerman from the surveillance industry, the first order of its kind, after the agency accused the company of harvesting mobile data on thousands of people and leaving it on the open internet. The agency said SpyFone “secretly […]

Challenger bank Point has raised a $46.5 million Series B funding round. The company offers an account associated with a debit card. And the startup positions itself as a premium debit card company and tries to offer credit card rewards with debit cards. Existing investor Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures is investing more money in the […]

Paris-based startup megacampus Station F is announcing a new program for early-stage startups looking for opportunities to join the Station F community — the FemTech Program. With this new program, the Station F team wants to put a spotlight on FemTech startups and make it easier to start a FemTech startup. Station F is a […]

HomeLight, which operates a real estate technology platform, announced today that it has secured $100 million in a Series D round of funding and $263 million in debt financing. Return backer Zeev Ventures led the equity round, which also included participation from Group 11, Stereo Capital, Menlo Ventures and Lydia Jett of the SoftBank Vision […]

YouTravel.Me is the latest startup to grab some venture capital dollars as the travel industry gets back on its feet amid the global pandemic.

3D printing has garnered a lot of hype, much of it for good reason: the technology has unlocked new kinds of object shapes and geometries, and it uses materials that tend to be much lighter weight than their traditionally manufactured counterparts. But there remain high barriers to entry for many companies that either don’t have […]

Pancake is democratizing interior design services to make it accessible to everyone.

To learn more about the pros and cons, we spoke with executives from Marqeta, Expensify and Cardless.

Pixalate provides fraud protection, privacy and compliance analytics for connected television and mobile advertising.

It’s been a long time coming but Facebook is finally feeling some heat from Europe’s much trumpeted data protection regime: Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has just announced a €225 million (~$267M) for WhatsApp. The Facebook-owned messaging app has been under investigation by the Irish DPC, its lead data supervisor in the European Union, since […]

India’s top banks five years ago built the interoperable UPI railroads and enabled over 150 million people in the South Asian market to pay digitally. Scores of firms — including local firms Paytm, PhonePe, CRED and international giants Google and Facebook — in India today support the UPI infrastructure, which is now reporting 3 billion […]

The FAA is looking into an anomaly on the Virgin Galactic flight that carried Richard Branson to space. Virgin's spacecraft went off-course during descent, triggering an "entry glide-cone warning."

Last-mile logistics supplier AxleHire provides same-day and next-day delivery through a network that includes gig economy, couriers and traditional carriers. Over the past year, it has been quietly piloting automated repositioning startup Tortoise’s remote controlled delivery robots in Los Angeles and compact container delivery service URB-E’s e-bike container delivery in New York City. On Thursday, […]

Summer is still technically in session, but a snowball is slowly developing in the world of apps, and specifically the world of in-app payments. A report in Reuters today says that the Competition Commission of India, the country’s monopoly regulator, will soon be looking at an antitrust suit filed against Apple over how it mandates […]

PhonePe, one of the largest digital payments services in India, on Thursday launched Pulse, a free product to offer insights into how people in the world’s second largest internet market are paying digitally. And PhonePe would know: the Flipkart-backed five-year-old startup said its insights are based on over 22 billion transactions it has processed over […]

In Europe and the US we are very much getting used to groceries being delivered within 15 minutes, with a huge battleground of startups in the space. Startups across Europe and the US have raised no less than $3.1 billion in the last quarter alone for grocery deliveries within 10 or 20-minute delivery promises. But […]

RISE, one of Asia’s largest tech conferences, is returning to Hong Kong in March 2022 as an in-person event, and will be held there for at least five years, announced organizer Web Summit today. Last year, Web Summit said RISE would move to Kuala Lumpur, but its return to Hong Kong means the conference will […]

Market research and insights are often underutilized assets for enterprises but it’s usually too hard to find content and there’s a lot of duplication, or information isn’t used well. Swedish startup Stravito says it can centralize internal and external data sources and create something more akin to a ‘Spotify or Netflix’ for these kinds of […]

Stockeld Chunk is made using fermented legumes, which gives the cheese a feta-like look and feel and contains 30% protein.

French startup Cajoo is raising some money in order to compete more aggressively in the new and highly competitive category of food delivery companies. Interestingly, the lead investor in today’s funding round is Carrefour, the supermarket giant. Headline (formerly e.ventures) is also participating in the round as well as existing investors Frst and XAnge. Carrefour’s […]

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey gave a coalition of app-based service providers like Uber and Lyft the go-ahead to start collecting signatures needed to put a proposed ballot measure before voters that would define drivers as independent contractors rather than employees. Backers of the initiative, which is essentially a MA version of Proposition 22, would […]

Apple has reached a settlement with the Japanese regulator to allow developers of “reader” apps to link to their own websites for users to manage their accounts. The change goes to effect in early 2022. Apple has been facing scrutiny in multiple markets, including the US and South Korea, over how it mandates its own […]

From beaming actors into the class room to plucking things out of space, the second day of Y Combinator’s S21 Demo Day was a fresh snapshot of what nearly 200 startup teams believe is the future of innovation. Yesterday, the TechCrunch team covered the first half of this batch, as well as the startups with one-minute […]

In the U.K., a 12-month grace period for compliance with a design code aimed at protecting children online expires today — meaning app makers offering digital services in the market which are “likely” to be accessed by children (defined in this context as users under 18 years old) are expected to comply with a set […]

Being a CEO is more than building on a vision, a product or an idea. It's about leading your people with values to accomplish mutual goals in a way that doesn't zap them of their morale or dignity.

Does this sound familiar? An app goes viral on social media, often including TikTok, then immediately climbs to the top of the App Store where it gains even more new installs thanks to the heightened exposure. That’s what happened with the recent No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, Fontmaker, a subscription-based fonts app which […]

Bright Cellars, a six-year-old, Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based subscription-based wine seller has, like many upstarts, evolved over time. While it once sent its club members third-party wines that fit their particular profiles, Bright Cellars says it’s now amassing enough data about its customers through its “palate” quizzes that it no longer sells wines made by other brands. […]

Peter Beck hasn’t been shy about his intention to grow Rocket Lab into more than just a launch provider, but a fully vertically integrated space company that makes spacecraft in addition to sending them to orbit. The company, which he founded in 2006, has taken yet another major stride toward that goal with the news […]

Virtual events have been a temporary measure during the pandemic. But what will their value be as more of the world attempts to return to life before the pandemic?

A new video from Agility Robotics showcases an increasing familiar sight: advanced, autonomous robots performing boring warehouse tasks. It’s not the sort of video that tends to be hugely viral for a company, rather, it’s the sort of meat and potatoes proof of concept that companies like Boston Dynamics wedge between flashy videos of parkour […]

After opening applications in June, Twitter is rolling out Super Follows, its premium subscription option, starting today. The feature, first revealed in February, will allow users to subscribe to accounts they like for a monthly subscription fee in exchange for exclusive content. For creators, Super Follows are another useful tool in the emerging patchwork of […]

Berlin Brands Group (BBG) — one of the new wave of e-commerce startups hoping to build lucrative economies of scale around buying up smaller brands that sell on marketplaces like Amazon and using technology to run and scale them more efficiently — has picked up a big round of funding to fill out that mission. […]

In the United States, a 401(k) plan is an employer-sponsored defined-contribution pension account. However, with legacy institutional investing, most of these have at least some level of fossil fuel involvement and let’s face it, very few of us really know. Now a startup plans to change that. California-based startup Sphere wants to get employees to […]

Over the last month, Twitch users have become increasingly concerned and frustrated with bot-driven hate raids. To protest Twitch’s lack of immediate action to prevent targeted harassment of marginalized creators, some streamers are going dark to observe #ADayOffTwitch today. Per the protest, users are sharing a list of demands for the Amazon-owned Twitch. They want […]

The company provided me with the Ubco 2X2 Adventure Bike for nearly a month, which gave me plenty of time to put it to the test.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has fined several brokerage firms a total of $750,000 for exposing the sensitive personally identifiable information of thousands of customers and clients after hackers took over employee email accounts. A total of eight entities belonging to three companies have been sanctioned by the SEC, including Cetera (Advisor Networks, Investment […]

Forum Brands, an e-commerce acquisition platform, announced today that it has secured $100 million in debt funding from TriplePoint Capital. The financing comes just just over two months after the startup raised $27 million in an equity funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Brenton Howland, Ruben Amar and Alex Kopco founded New York-based Forum […]

Google is launching a new version of its Chrome Beta browser today that’s introducing some fairly notable changes to its user interface and design. The browser will introduce an updated New Tab page, which will now include cards directing you back to past web search activities, instead of only a list of shortcuts to favorite […]

Twitter’s newest test could provide some long-awaited relief for anyone facing harassment on the platform. The new product test introduces a feature called “Safety Mode” that puts up a temporary line of defense between an account and the waves of toxic invective that Twitter is notorious for. The mode can be enabled from the settings […]

Goodcall’s free cloud-based conversational platform leverages artificial intelligence to manage incoming business phone calls and boost customer service while assisting to other patrons.

Private equity firm Apollo Global Management this morning announced that it has completed its acquisition of Yahoo (formerly known as Verizon Media Group, itself formerly known as Oath) from Verizon. The deal is worth $5 billion, with $4.25 billion in cash, plus preferred interests of $750 million. Verizon will be retaining 10% of the newly […]

Blueprint CEO Steve Berneman thinks that the $18 billion title insurance business should really be a $10 billion market. It was, we believe, the first time a startup discussed shrinking its market.

You read that right, folks. CrunchMatch, our AI-powered platform that simplifies finding and connecting with the people on your must-meet list, is now open for business. TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place on September 21-23, but why wait to get your network mojo working? Granted, networking can sometimes feel like a contact sport, especially at a […]

The recent round followed by a quick direct listing means that we'll be able to mock Sequoia if Amplitude winds up worth more than $4.15 billion when it floats.

How many of us have not switched insurance carriers because we don’t want to deal with the hassle of comparison shopping? A lot, I’d bet. Today, Insurify, a startup that wants to help people make it easier to get better rates on home, auto and life insurance, announced that it has closed $100 million in […]

Cox Automotive is getting into the electric vehicle battery lifecycle business. The company said Wednesday it acquired Oklahoma City-based Spiers New Technologies (SNT), a business that provides repair, remanufacturing, refurbishing and repurposing services for EV battery packs. The two companies did not disclose the terms of the deal. Cox said the acquisition will help it […]

Flat.mx, which wants to build a real estate “super app” for Latin America, has closed on a $20 million Series A round of funding. Anthemis and 500 Startups co-led the investment, which included participation from ALLVP and Expa. Previously, Flat.mx had raised a total $10 million in equity and $25 million in debt. Other backers […]

A stealthy startup co-founded by a former senior designer from Apple and one of its ex-senior software engineers has picked up a significant round funding to build out its business. Humane, which has ambitions to build a new class of consumer devices and technologies that stem from “a genuine collaboration of design and engineering” that […]

I’m considering either having my startup sponsor me for an O-1A visa or self-petitioning an EB-1A green card. Any advice or insights on how to present a strong case for an O-1A or EB-1A? Thanks!

Google is appealing the more than half a billion dollar fine it got slapped with by France’s competition authority in July. The penalty relates to the adtech giant’s approach toward paying news publishers for content reuse. In a statement today, Sebastien Missoffe, a Google France VP and country manager, characterized the fine as “disproportionate” — […]