Crunch Hype

Blue Origin and the members of its “national team” – Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper – have delivered a full-scale engineering prototype of their human lunar lander to NASA for the agency to examine and review as it readies to build the real thing for eventual use in NASA’s Artemis program Moon missions. The […]

George Sehremelis is building what he calls a “social news network,” with the aim of combatting the spread of misinformation and fake news online. “My goal has always been to make an impact on the 2020 election,” Sehremelis told me — a tall order, particularly when the big social networks are struggling to solve these […]

Yalochat, a five-year-old, Mexico City-based conversational commerce platform that enables customers like Coca Cola and Walmart to upsell, collect payments, and provide better service to their own customers over WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat in China, has closed on $15 million in Series B funding led by B Capital Group. Sierra Ventures, which led a […]

Airbnb has been implementing measures to help limit hosting of unauthorized parties at listings booked through its platform, and today it implemented the strictest of all: A global ban on all parties and events. This includes an occupancy cap of 16 guests max at even the largest of the listings available on its platform, and […]

Budget-strapped students, this post is for you. We have a limited number of discount passes to Disrupt 2020 for $125 a pop. Buy your student pass now, before one of two things happen. One, we run out of tickets. Two, the price on any remaining passes increases on September 13. Insert sad face emoji here. […]

Vertical farming technology provider iFarm has bagged a $4 million seed round, led by Gagarin Capital, an earlier investor in the startup. Other investors in the round include Matrix Capital, Impulse VC, IMI.VC and several business angels. The Finnish startup is focused on providing software that enables others to carry out vertical farming — targeting […]

For startups not selling tier-one software, the next few quarters could be rough. For startups selling must-have delivered code, it's going to be a damn hot year.

Lightning and a massive heatwave have contributed to raging wildfires in Northern California. By last count, some 11,000 lighting strikes caused hundreds of blazes n a 72 hour period — 26 of which have been classified as major fires, according to officials. The fires have grown to around 124,000 acres, threatening some 25,000 structures in […]

Target announced today its grocery pickup service is available nationwide, First introduced earlier this summer in the Midwest, Target said it would soon roll out grocery pickup services across the U.S., reaching 1,500 stores in a matter of months. Today, Target says it has reached that goal, which equates to nearly 85% of its locations. […]

When space launch startup Firefly’s first planned orbital flight takes off in November, it’ll carry an experimental payload developed by engineers from Purdue University: A drag sail that’s designed to haul a rocket back to Earth once it’s fulfilled its mission and deployed its cargo. Safely deorbiting a spent launch vehicle would mean one less […]

DoorDash is announcing that customers can now order groceries through the DoorDash app from partners including Smart & Final, Meijer and Fresh Thyme. Additional stores like Hy-vee and Gristedes/D’Agnostino are supposed to be added in the next few weeks. Through these partnerships, DoorDash says it has a delivery footprint covering 75 million Americans in markets […]

FINRA’s AI Report is particularly interesting for fintechs since it explores how firms are deploying AI as well as the agency's expectations for AI oversight.

The promise of SaaS has always been about taking tedious, expensive manual tasks and finding a way to build a platform to automate them. Cobalt.io is doing that with pentesting, the process of testing an application for security vulnerabilities before it goes out the door. Today, the startup announced a $29 million Series B led […]

Ready for our first virtual TC Sessions Mobility 2020? As we like to say, it’s not just one long webinar. We’re creating the quality production levels you’d expect from our IRL events (thanks, technology). This session spans two days — October 6-7 — to give you more time to take in the speakers, the interviews, […]

Most of us are now familiar with apps that track what’s known as our ‘digital biomarkers’. These include the steps, we’ve taken, our heart rate, and our weight. In recent years startups have appeared which can, in a relatively turnkey manner, track our ‘biomedical markers’, such as cholesterol levels, for instance. Few, however, are seeking […]

“Any time you’re moving dirt you have to have somebody come in and assess it, whether that’s under a state or federal jurisdiction… because of the waters that are present,” says Ecobot co-founder and chief executive, Lee Lance. “It has been a pen and paper process since the Clean Water Act about two decades ago.” […]

Klara, a New York-based healthcare startup that pitches itself as a better tool for patient engagement for doctor’s offices and other clinical practices, has raised $15 million in new financing. The money comes as investors continue to pour cash into companies developing new communications, diagnostics and management tools for medical offices as patients look for […]

Twitter users have to wait to longer to find out what penalties, if any, the platform faces under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for a data breach that dates back around two years. In the meanwhile the platform has continued to suffer security failures — including, just last month, when hackers gained […]

ispace, one of the startups working on putting a private lunar lander on the Moon sometime in the next few years has raised a $28 million Series B funding round, which will be used to help it continue to develop its commercial lander ahead of planned 2022 and 2023 launches. Alongside the investment, the Japanese […]

When people in the US or Europe think of crowdfunding and medical expenses, sites like GoFundMe, where people fundraise around specific predicaments, come to mind. But today comes news of how another approach — a platform based around crowdfunding and mutual aid that pays out when its members fall into medical dire straits — is […]

Founded just four months ago, Tokyo-based BeaTrust has raised a JPY 300 million (about USD $2.83 million) seed round for its enterprise collaboration platform. The startup’s ambitious goal is to change corporate culture at large Japanese companies before expanding into other countries. The round came from CyberAgent Capital; DNX Ventures; ITOCHU Technology Ventures; STRIVE; One […]

Riff, a London-based startup developing what it describes as a “voice-first” chat tool for remote working, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding, prior to a full launch next year. Leading the round is Balderton Capital, which is better known for Series A rounds but quite often does seed investments on the quiet. Also participating […]

Earlier today, Facebook said it has removed hundreds of QAnon groups from its site, and that it’s restricting many more groups, along with hundreds of pages, and more than 10,000 Instagram accounts. As the New York Times observed in its report about the maneuvers, four-year-old QAnon, once a fringe phenomenon, has gone mainstream in recent […]

Having trouble accessing your Gmail, Google Drive, or Google Meet? You’re not alone. Thousands of users, mostly in India, parts of the U.S., Australia, Japan, and Malaysia are reporting that they are unable to access the aforementioned Google services. Some users have reported that they are unable to log-in into their Gmail accounts, while others […]

iQiyi and Tencent’s WeTV, two of China’s most popular streaming services, may be barred from operating in Taiwan next month as the government prepares to close regulatory loopholes that enabled them to offer local versions of their services through partnerships. But iQiyi and WeTV will still be accessible if subscribers are willing to, for example, […]

Apple stock reaches a big milestone, Facebook Portal gets more work-friendly and Twitter reports progress against hate speech. This is your Daily Crunch for August 19, 2020. The big story: Apple hits $2 trillion market cap Apple’s share price is up around 59% since the beginning of the year, despite seeing relatively modest, 11% year-over-year […]

In a turn of fortune, Airbnb today announced that it has filed to go public, albeit confidentially. The move puts the home-sharing service on a path to a public offering sooner rather than later, and comes after reports that the company was prepping an IPO filing this month. Those same reports indicated that Airbnb could […]

Schools and universities across the United States are split on whether to open for the fall semester, thanks to the ongoing pandemic. Albion College, a small liberal arts school in Michigan, said in June it would allow its nearly 1,500 students to return to campus for the new academic year starting in August. Lectures would […]

By now you’ve probably heard that under pressure from the current administration, TikTok owner ByteDance is putting the viral video service up for sale, and surprisingly a couple of big name enterprise companies are interested. These organizations are better known for the kind of tech that would bore the average TikTok user to tears. Yet, […]

Lucid Motors said Wednesday that its upcoming all-electric Air sedan will have fast-charging capability that will let owners add 300 miles of range to the battery in 20 minutes and a home-charging unit that will allow owners to send energy from their car to their home. Lucid said it is able to hit this benchmark […]

Arizona-based high-altitude balloon startup World View has a new partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to help the latter collect data to help it deepen its study of the Earth’s stratosphere, the second layer of the Earth’s atmosphere that spans between 4.3 and 12 miles above the surface, depending on where you […]

Twitter has given its biannual transparency reports a new home with today’s launch of the Twitter Transparency Center, which the company says was designed to make the reporting more easily understood and accessible. The launch was timed alongside the belated release of Twitter’s latest transparency report covering the second half of 2019. The company attributed […]

Max Levchin needs little introduction in the world of tech. As an entrepreneur, he’s been the co-founder of PayPal (now public), Slide (acquired by Google) and Affirm (reportedly about to go public), some of the hottest startups to have come out of Silicon Valley. And as an investor, he’s applied his power of observation and […]

A good brand is hard to kill. Over the past several years, the smartphone space has seen a resurgence of once-mighty mobile brands making a comeback with various degrees of success. HMD’s Nokia phones are probably the best and most successful example, but even Palm had a brief moment in the sun. And then there’s […]

Ankhi Das, a top Facebook executive in India, has filed a criminal complaint against a journalist who she alleges attempted to defame her in a public Facebook post and made “sexually coloured remarks.” A review of the journalist Awesh Tiwari’s post, written in Hindi (the most widely spoken language in India), finds that it was […]

As we race toward Disrupt 2020, we’re keeping the Extra Crunch Live train rolling with a big entry next week as Twilio CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson joins us for a chat. Lawson is well-known in the tech industry for helping institutionalize API -delivered digital services, a business model variant that has become increasingly popular in […]

The Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, an asset manager controlling around $311 billion in assets for Canada’s pensioners and retirees, has identified four key industries that are set to experience massive changes as a result of the global economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The firm expects massive changes in e-commerce, healthcare, logistics and urban […]

Following Walmart’s pandemic-fueled earnings beat posted on Tuesday, Target today also handily beat Wall Street expectations to deliver a record-setting quarter across a number of key metrics. The retailer on Wednesday announced its strongest quarter to date for comparable sales, which grew 24.3% in Q2, driving Target’s profit up 80.3% year-over-year to $1.69 billion. Online […]

We can’t help but wonder what the future of work will look like in the wake of this pandemic. That’s the timely topic of today’s interactive webinar, COVID-19’s Impact on the Startup World. The second of three in our free series of interactive webinars — exclusively for founders exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley at Disrupt […]

No company is completely insulated from the macroeconomic fallout of COVID-19, but we are seeing some companies fare better than others, especially those providing ways to collaborate online. Count Atlassian in that camp, as it provides a suite of tools focused on working smarter in a digital context. At a time when many employees are […]

I’m employed at a major Silicon Valley tech company in H-1B status. I want to found a startup. How can I work at the startup?

The broader market melt up has helped buoy shares of Apple to new highs this morning. In early trading today, the market capitalization of the tech industry giant and FAAMG member crossed the $2 trillion mark before slipping just beneath the threshold. Shares of Apple have advanced just over 59% in 2020, despite the company’s […]

When you start a company, it can be tempting to keep it simple. You want something that investors and customers can easily understand. While it might be easier to go that route, that is not something that CloudFlare did when it launched a decade ago at TechCrunch Disrupt. Instead, the company decided to go big […]

Instagram has found a new place to display ads: at the end of your Feed. The Facebook-owned app in 2018 introduced a feature that will alert users when they’ve scrolled through all the new content in their Instagram Feed, with a notice reading “You’re All Caught Up” that appears on the screen. Now, Instagram says […]

Thinking back to the last time I accepted a job, I can’t recall actually reading any of the material that was sent over. I think I skimmed some docs to make sure the numbers written down matched what I had been told over the phone, but after that it was a blur of digital signing […]

Finmark, a member of Summer 2020 Y Combinator cohort, is not your typical YC startup. In fact company co-founder Rami Essaid has already built Distil, a security startup and saw it through to exit when he sold the company to Imperva last year. As he pondered what to do next, he took a quick turn […]

After yesterday’s look into the somewhat lackluster pace of investment into e-commerce-focused startups this year, a few VCs sent in notes that added useful context. So this morning let’s discuss why the pace of e-commerce startup fundraising has been so milquetoast in 2020. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every […]

Observing the microscopic creatures that fill our oceans is important work, but keeping your eye on one in the wild is practically impossible — and doing so in a dish isn’t the same. This ‘hydrodynamic treadmill’ however provides the best of both worlds: An unending water column for the creatures to swim in, without ever […]

Scotland’s first proposed spaceport has been fully approved to proceed with construction and operation (via The Northern Times). The facility, which will be built in northern Sutherland on a peninsula that extends into the North Atlantic. This will be the future launch site for Orbex, a startup looking to develop the UK’s first re-usable orbital […]

Facebook’s Portal line didn’t get off to the smoothest start when it launched back in 2018. The company no doubt realized from the outset that it would have a lot to prove on the privacy front when attempting to convince users to essentially invite a Facebook-powered camera into their living quarters. And in the intervening […]