Crunch Hype

Facebook is getting into fantasy sports and other types of fantasy games. The company this morning announced the launch of Facebook Fantasy Games in the U.S. and Canada on the Facebook app for iOS and Android. Some games are described as “simpler” versions of the traditional fantasy sports games already on the market, while others […]

Anima, the YC-backed platform that turns designs into code, has today announced the close of a $10 million Series A financing. The round was led by MizMaa Ventures with participation from INcapital and Hetz Ventures. We’ve been following Anima, which was bootstrapped until last year, for a while now. The startup indexes on several trending […]

“Traditional voice-based call center service is difficult and costly. This is where artificial intelligence and voice technology have presented an opportunity for enterprises to overcome the challenges of scale and engagement at their customer contact centers,” co-founder and CEO Skit Sourabh Gupta told TechCrunch. The Covid-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented increase in call volumes […]

Private equity firm Vista Equity Partners announced today that it is taking a majority stake in Drift, a company which aims to be the Amazon of businesses, with a “growth investment” that propels the venture-backed startup to unicorn status. Unfortunately, neither party would disclose the amount of the investment, or Drift’s new valuation. But co-founder […]

The free itinerary maker and road trip planner takes the best parts of Google Docs and Maps and enables users to import the information and map out their trips with others.

Lynk, the “knowledge-as-a-service” platform with more than 840,000 experts, announced today it has added $5 million raised from UBS’ Investment Bank division to its previously announced Series B. This brings the round’s new total to $29 million. The strategic investment marks the first time UBS has invested private equity in Lynk. The startup, which has […]

Agricultural robotics firm Carbon Robotics (not to be confused with our former Battlefield contestant) announced this week that it has secured $27 million in funding. The round — which features Anthos Capital, Ignition Capital, Fuse Venture Partners and Voyager Capital — follows an $8.4 million Series A raised back in 2019. The company’s total funding […]

Swedish electric motorcycle manufacturer Cake has released its newest vehicle, the Makka, a super lightweight e-moped that’s built for urban convenience. The bike starts at $3,500 and is now available for pre-order in the U.S. and Europe. The Makka is a step outside the norm for Cake, which is best-known for off-road motorbikes like its flagship […]

The acquisition was driven by a boost in e-commerce websites as a result of the global pandemic.

TikTok is expanding its in-app parental controls feature, Family Pairing, with educational resources designed to help parents better support their teenage users, the company announced morning. The pairing feature, which launched to global users last year, allows parents of teens aged 13 and older to connect their accounts with the child’s so the parent can […]

Direct to consumer online sales have helped a number of female-focused startups get products to market in recent years — often pitching better designed and generally more thoughtful feminine hygiene products than mainstream staples. The lack of innovation in the mainstream market for feminine hygiene has certainly created a gap for startups to address. Examples […]

If the world is to reach NetZero, and avoid climate disaster it needs to make every product sustainable and that means every purchase. But to do that you need a lot more transparency, so that means more data on suppliers to improve sourcing and benchmarking companies. While companies are often doing their best, the problem […]

The platform gives company finance teams a real-time look at what items employees are asking for funds to buy, and what is actually being spent.

Vic.ai, a startup that has built an AI-based platform it claims can ‘automate’ enterprise accounting, has raised a $50M Series B round led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from existing investors GGV Capital, Cowboy Ventures and Costanoa Ventures, bringing total capital raised to $63 million. The company’s customers include HSB (Sweden’s largest real-estate management company), Intercom Inc. and HireQuest […]

It’s an age-old tech industry story: company comes up with a tool to solve its own problem, then realizes the tool is actually worth more than the existing company. Something similar happened to Linearity. Its 17-year-old founder, Vladimir Danila, came up with the Vectornator tool to make vector design easier in 2017. It’s now used […]

The world of professional coaching has grown over the years as coaches realised they could easily counsel people remotely and clients realized digital coaching was far more efficient. But, equally, a problem arose in how to sift the wheat from the chaff. At the same time corporates realised that their own staff could benefit – […]

Meet Trustshare, a London-based startup that is working on escrow infrastructure for online classified, B2B marketplaces, trade directories and more. It’s a white-label platform that can be integrated with online marketplaces in just a few lines of code. If you’ve ever tried to sell something expensive on the web, you know that it’s hard to […]

UK startup Oviva, which sells a digital support offering, including for Type 2 diabetes treatment, dispensing personalized diet and lifestyle advice via apps to allow more people to be able to access support, has closed $80 million in Series C funding — bringing its total raised to date to $115M. The raise, which Oviva says […]

Amsterdam-based startup VanMoof has raised a $128 million Series C funding round. The company designs and sells electric bikes that are quite popular in some markets. It now wants to become the world’s leading e-bike brand by iterating at a faster pace. Asia-based private equity firm Hillhouse Investment is leading the round, with Gillian Tans, […]

After a 17-hour marathon through nearly 200 startup pitches, the Equity team was fired up to get back on Twitter and chat through some early trends and favorites from the first day of Y Combinator’s demo party. We’ll be back on the air tomorrow, so make sure you’re following the show on Twitter so you […]

In the customer service industry, your accent dictates many aspects of your job. It shouldn’t be the case that there’s a “better” or “worse” accent, but in today’s global economy (though who knows about tomorrow’s) it’s valuable to sound American or British. While many undergo accent neutralization training, Sanas is a startup with another approach […]

These startups made us do a double take, be it due to the size of the market opportunity, the ambition exhibited by the founding team or an idea that was just too clever to pass up.

On the heels of Heroes announcing a $200 million raise earlier today, to double down on buying and scaling third-party Amazon Marketplace sellers, another startup out of London aiming to do the same is announcing some significant funding of its own. Olsam, a roll-up play that is buying up both consumer and B2B merchants selling […]

Even as hundreds of millions of people in India have a bank account, only a tiny fraction of this population invests in any financial instrument. Fewer than 30 million people invest in mutual funds or stocks, for instance. In recent years, a handful of startups have made it easier for users — especially the millennials […]

The total cost of the deal came to $1 billion, giving the Russian company 100% ownership over all four businesses.

One of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies is getting into the NFT game. Larva Labs, the creator of CryptoPunks, just signed with United Talent Agency (UTA) in a representation deal that will bring one of the earliest and most iconic NFT projects into the entertainment and branding worlds. “I would say that it is one of […]

What do LinkedIn and Twitter have in common? They both introduced ephemeral story features that were pretty fleeting. LinkedIn announced today that it will suspend its Stories feature on September 30 and begin working on a different way to add short-form videos to the platform. LinkedIn announced the upcoming change to warn advertisers who might […]

Can reading glasses actually be cool? A new eyewear company called Cheeterz Club thinks so. The startup is working to change the perception of reading glasses from being just cheap, disposable items you pick up from a rotating display rack at your local drug store to being something you’d actually be proud to wear. To […]

A cybersecurity company says a popular smart home security system has a pair of vulnerabilities that can be exploited to disarm the system altogether. Rapid7 found the vulnerabilities in the Fortress S03, a home security system that relies on Wi-Fi to connect cameras, motion sensors and sirens to the internet, allowing owners to remotely monitor […]

Heroes, one of the new wave of startups aiming to build big e-commerce businesses by buying up smaller third-party merchants on Amazon’s Marketplace, has raised another big round of funding to double down on that strategy. The London startup has picked up $200 million, money that it will mainly be using to snap up more […]

Founded in 2012, Whoop is far from a household name in the world of fitness trackers. But over the years, the company has attracted its share of converts. It hasn’t had any issue attracting venture capital over the years, either. Last time we checked in on the Boston-based company was in late-2019, when it raised […]

Amsterdam-based challenger bank Bunq is updating its service with a handful of new features. In addition to Dutch, German and French bank account numbers, existing and new users in Spain can now get a Spanish IBAN. European IBANs are supposed to work across Europe. Your employer or internet provider can’t force you to get a […]

Apna, a 21-month-old startup that is helping millions of blue- and gray-collar workers in India upskill themselves, find communities and land jobs, is inching closer to becoming the fastest tech firm in the world’s second-largest internet market to become a unicorn. Tiger Global is in advanced stages of talks to lead a $100 million round […]

A global supply chain is, well, global. Each region, supplier and subcontractor in your chain needs to work in harmony with each other, because a single snag can ruin the whole process.

The digital transformation currently sweeping society has likely reached your favorite local restaurant. Since 2013, Boston-based Toast has offered bars and eateries a software platform that lets them manage orders, payments and deliveries. Over the last year, its customers have processed more than $38 billion in gross payment volume, so Alex Wilhelm analyzed the company’s […]

We’ve had visionary investors onstage before, and we’ve had science fiction authors onstage — but never at the same time, let alone a pair who collaborated on a unique book of stories and essays that make an optimistic prediction of our AI-infused future. Sinovation founder Kai-Fu Lee and author of “Waste Tide” and others Chen […]

TikTok is making it easier for brands and agencies to work with the influencers using its service. The company is rolling out a new “TikTok Creator Marketplace API,” which allows marketing companies to integrate more directly with TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, the video app’s in-house influencer marketing platform. On the Creator Marketplace website, launched in late […]

African startups also increased from 10 in the winter batch to 15 this time around, a record for African startups in a single YC cohort.

Let's dig into the company's historical growth, track Freshworks' changing profitability profile and check to see if its revenue quality is improving over time.

Osana Salud, which aims to transform the healthcare infrastructure in Latin America, has closed on a $20 million Series A round of funding led by General Catalyst. The Argentina-based, yet fully remote, startup was founded in 2019 — just a few months before the pandemic. Since launching less than a year ago, Osana says it […]

Compound Foods uses synthetic biology to create coffee without coffee beans by extracting molecules.

The ongoing reverberations from the COVID-19 pandemic are continuing to make themselves felt in the most unlikely of places: spaceflight. On Friday, NASA took the unexpected step to ground a September satellite launch due to pandemic-related shortages of liquid oxygen (LOX), and there may be more launch delays yet to come. Demand for oxygen has […]

Fundraising is a huge part of building a successful startup, and whether you’re looking for information about the latest trends, alternative funding or how to fine-tune your pitch to attract investors, you’ll find that and a whole lot more at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23. Disrupt always taps the top experts, visionaries, founders, investors […]

Although wireless charging is still relatively new to the market, the benefits are beginning to become glaringly self-evident.

Facebook is preparing to adjust its News Feed to de-emphasize political posts and current events, but news reader Flipboard is instead rolling out an update that puts users in control of their own feeds. The company announced this morning the launch of a new controller on the cover of its own main newsfeed, aka the […]

If you’re in India, the Philippines, Russia, or Vietnam, Amazon Prime and Gorillas are probably not that much use to you. Comparable to DoorDash Drive or Lalamove (Malaysia), Dostavista is a “crowdsourced” same-day delivery service. Founded in Russia, the startup initially figured out a way to appeal to gig economy workers in countries such as […]

The company views its market as a new technology category. Databricks calls the technology a data “lakehouse,” a mashup of data lake and data warehouse.

Following a spate of leaks, Bose this morning announced the latest addition to its well-loved over ear headphones. The QuietComfort 45 (which replace the 35 II) sport improved noise cancellation and 24 hours of battery on a charge, per Bose’s metrics. The air travel mainstays run $330 – coming in $20 cheaper than the QC […]

Tech employees build amazing consumer-facing apps for the world. But for their internal communications, they are stuck using applications that don’t play well with one another. This is a problem since most employees at a mid-sized or large-sized firm spend a fourth or third of their days on internal communication applications. Now a San Francisco-headquartered […]

The voices on Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant and others still lack the rhythms and intonation that make speech human. NVIDIA has unveiled new tools that can capture those natural speech qualities.