Crunch Hype

At its first virtual World Wide Developers Conference back in June, Apple unveiled a huge piece of news about the future of the Mac. After years of rumors, the company finally confirmed plans to wean itself off of Intel processors in favor of its own in-house ARM-based chips. Apple noted that the process would be […]

In 2010, the late Barnaby Jack, a world-renowned security researcher, hacked an ATM live onstage at the Black Hat conference by tricking the cash dispenser into spitting out a stream of dollar bills. The technique was appropriately named “jackpotting.” A decade on from Jack’s blockbuster demo, security researchers are presenting two new vulnerabilities in Nautilus […]

Robinhood’s huge, two-part Series F round came partially in Q2 and partially in Q3. The app-based trading platform announced the first $280 million in early May, valuing the company at around $8.3 billion, up from a prior price tag of around $7.6 billion. Then in July, Robinhood tacked on $320 million more at the same […]

Quantum computing will represent the most fundamental acceleration in computing power that we have ever encountered, leaving Moore's law in the dust.

What’s going on with the UK’s coronavirus contacts tracing app? Reports in the national press today suggest a launch of the much delayed software will happen this month but also that the app will no longer be able to automatically carry out contacts tracing. The Times reports that a repackaged version of the app will […]

You won’t find a better deal than this on Disrupt 2020 passes, but you won’t find it at all if you don’t take action within 48 short hours. The opportunity to save up to $300 dollars on your pass disappears when the early-bird deadline expires. Wake up, smell the savings and buy your Disrupt pass […]

The Michigan startup scene is growing and venture capitalists see several key areas of opportunities. What follows is a survey of some of the top VCs in the state and how they see COVID-19 affecting the growth of Detroit, Ann Arbor and all of Michigan’s startup ecosystem. According to the Michigan Venture Capital Association (MVCA), […]

Data science is the name of the game these days for companies that want to improve their decision making by tapping the information they are already amassing in their apps and other systems. And today, a startup called Mode Analytics, which has built a platform incorporating machine learning, business intelligence and big data analytics to […]

Sony knows how to make a great pair of headphones. The WH-1000XM3 are one of the best received pairs of over-ear models in recent years. Two years later, the company is ready to unveil their successors, which sport a number of smart connected features. In fact, the WH-1000XM4 bring all sorts of nice upgrades to […]

Days after announcing the Pixel 4a, Google has quietly discontinued sales of the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL. The move, noted early by the Verge, represents an extremely truncated lifecycle for a Google flagship — around half of the 18 months the company continued to sell its two predecessors. Google already announced the imminent […]

Special is a new startup offering online video creators a way to move beyond advertising for their income. The service was created by the team behind tech consulting and development firm Triple Tree Software. Special’s co-founder and CEO Sam Lucas told me that the team had already “scrapped our way from nothing to a seven-figure […]

Our survey found that 79% of tech employees expected public statements from their employer supporting #BLM.

As sales teams partner with other companies, they go through a process called account mapping to find common customers and prospects. This is usually a highly manual activity tracked in spreadsheets. Crossbeam, a Philadelphia startup, has come up with a way to automate partnership data integration. Today the company announced a $25 million Series B […]

WordPress.com, a division of Automattic, is launching a new product called P2. And this time, it’s all about improving internal communications for private groups. As a remote company, Automattic has been using P2 internally for years to communicate asynchronously. It’s a place to share long-form posts, a repository to keep onboarding documents and other important […]

TikTok, the Chinese video sharing app that’s found itself at the center of a geopolitical power struggle which threatens to put hard limits on its global growth this year, said today it will build its first data center in Europe. The announcement of a TikTok data center in the EU also follows a landmark ruling […]

Uber has bought UK based Autocab, which sells SaaS to the taxi and private hire vehicle industry, with the aim of expanding the utility of its own platform by linking users who open its app in places where it doesn’t offer trips to local providers who do. No acquisition price has been disclosed and Uber […]

Over a third of the world’s smartphone sales come from Chinese vendors Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo. These manufacturers have thrived not only because they offer value-for-money handsets thanks to China’s supply chains, but they also enjoy a relatively open mobile ecosystem, in which consumers in most countries can freely access the likes of Google, Instagram […]

Infermedica, the Poland-founded health tech startup that offers an AI-driven platform for preliminary diagnosis and triage, has raised just over $10 million in Series A funding. The round is led by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and digital health fund Heal Capital. Existing investors Karma Ventures, Inovo Venture Partners, and Dreamit Ventures […]

In an open letter to Facebook’s leadership posted earlier today, the attorneys general from twenty states called on the company to do more to fight intimidation, discrimination, disinformation, harassment and hate speech on the platform. “Although Facebook has made some progress in counteracting the use of its platform to dehumanize and demean, that is just […]

Twitter took action against the official Trump campaign Twitter account Wednesday, freezing @TeamTrump’s ability to tweet until it removed a video in which the president made misleading claims about the coronavirus. In the video clip, taken from a Wednesday morning Fox News interview, President Trump makes the unfounded assertion that children are “almost immune” from […]

Facebook took down a video President Trump posted to his account Wednesday, citing its rules against false claims about the coronavirus. The decision to remove the video signals a new direction for Facebook, which has been taking incremental steps recently to distance itself from the perception that the company deliberately turns a blind eye to […]

Uber and Lyft are both facing another lawsuit from the office of the California Labor Commissioner alleging wage theft. Filed today, the suits argue both Uber and Lyft are misclassifying their drivers as independent contractors and aim to enforce the labor practices set forth by AB 5. “The Uber and Lyft business model rests on […]

Unagi, the portable and design-forward electric scooter company that made a splash with celebs and pop stars, has launched a subscription service. The service, called Unagi All-Access, will be offered in New York City and Los Angeles. The company said it plans to expand to additional markets as it gathers customer feedback and refines the […]

YouTube has banned a large number of Chinese accounts it said were engaging in “coordinated influence operations” on political issues, the company announced today; 2,596 accounts from China alone were taken down from April to June, compared with 277 in the first three months of 2020. “These channels mostly uploaded spammy, non-political content, but a […]

Too often, Black founders are locked out of Silicon Valley before they even have a chance to get started, Marceau Michel, founder of venture capital firm Black Founders Matter, tells TechCrunch. “It’s important we’re looking at the social justice movement from very different places,” Michel says. “It’s one thing for Black people to not be […]

Tinder is testing a new top-level subscription plan, Tinder Platinum, which it expects to roll out before year-end. The news of the coming service was announced this week by Tinder parent Match Group during its Q2 2020 earnings call with investors. Match described the subscription as providing additional value beyond Tinder’s current paid plan, Tinder […]

Instagram apparently handled searches for popular hashtags related to the two presidential candidates differently, pointing Joe Biden search queries toward often negative related hashtags while making no such suggestions in corresponding searches pertaining to President Trump. A new report by the Tech Transparency Project details the strange platform behavior. In the report, the tech watchdog […]

On-demand delivery startup DoorDash has launched a digital storefront to sell household items, as well as the types of things you’d find at a convenience store. So, chips, ice cream, spices and packaged foods from local restaurants. Called DashMart, the convenience store is available in eight cities throughout the U.S. and plans to launch in […]

Krisp’s smart noise suppression tech, which silences ambient sounds and isolates your voice for calls, arrived just in time. The company got out in front of the global shift to virtual presence, turning early niche traction into real customers and attracting a shiny new $5 million Series A funding round to expand and diversify its […]

When Rent the Runway co-founders Jennifer Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman got their first term sheet, it had an exploding clause in it: If they didn’t sign the offer in 24 hours, they would lose the deal. The co-founders, then students at Harvard Business School, were ready to commit, but their lawyer advised them to pause […]

Software valuations are bonkers, which means it’s a great time to go public. Asana, Monday.com, Wrike and every other gosh darn software company that is putting it off, pay attention. Heck, even service-y Palantir could excel in this market. Let me explain. Over the past few weeks, TechCrunch has tracked the filing, first pricing, rejiggered […]

Security researchers say they have developed a new technique to detect modern cell-site simulators. Cell site simulators, known as “stingrays,” impersonate cell towers and can capture information about any phone in its range — including in some cases calls, messages and data. Police secretly deploy stingrays hundreds of times a year across the United States, […]

Now more than ever, companies should examine all sources of capital and ensure they are sufficiently funded to emerge from this period stronger than they entered it.

Twitter says a security bug may have exposed the private direct messages of its Android app users, but said that there was no evidence that the vulnerability was ever exploited. The bug could have allowed a malicious Android app running on the same device to siphon off a user’s direct messages stored in the Twitter […]

Samsung’s first virtual Unpacked ranked somewhere between Microsoft and Apple’s recent events in terms of overall presentation and general awkwardness. The show kicked off seven minutes late, and a number of on-screen presenters certainly tended toward the more…awkward side of things, but overall, it was a decent first virtual event as the company embraces what […]

Microsoft today announced the launch of a new open-source service mesh based on the Envoy proxy. The Open Service Mesh is meant to be a reference implementation of the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) spec, a standard interface for service meshes on Kubernetes that has the backing of most of the players in this ecosystem. The […]

It takes a village — or in this case a kickass global startup community — to help you survive and thrive in challenging times. Tap into your village at Disrupt 2020, but do it quickly to gain entry at the lowest possible price. You have just three days left before the price goes up. Buy […]

If you want to build technology to be harnessed for equity, diversity and social advancement of the many — rather than freedom and inclusion for the few — we think Canada is a good place to do it.

It was only relatively recently, in October 2018, that TechCrunch held Startup Battlefield MENA to unpack startups in the Middle East and North Africa. When TechCrunch went looking for a city in the region to host the event in, it quickly became clear that Beirut was the one for us. Vibrant, full of creative entrepreneurs, […]

Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia has teamed up with AngelList to launch his debut $5 million rolling fund to invest in early-stage entrepreneurs. He is cutting $100,000 to $250,000 checks for startups and has a particular interest in B2B, SaaS, future of work, video and developer tools. Limited partners include Arlan Hamilton, Josh Kopelman and AngelList […]

Byju’s has acquired edtech startup WhiteHat Jr. for $300 million as the Indian online learning giant looks to expand its dominant reach in the country. The all-cash deal makes 18-month-old Mumbai-headquartered WhiteHat Jr., which offers online coding classes to school-going students, the fastest exit story of this size in Indian startup ecosystem. WhiteHat Jr., which […]

As uncertainty swirls around TikTok’s future in the U.S., the company this morning announced new Community Guidelines focused on helping keep misleading and deceptive content off its platform. The new rules aim to better clarify what’s allowed and not allowed on TikTok, broaden the app’s fact-checking partnerships ahead of the U.S. election, and ban the […]

Google today announced a major update to its mobile G Suite productivity apps. Among these updates are the addition of a dark theme for Docs, Sheets and Slides, as well as the addition of Google’s Smart Compose technology to Docs on mobile and the ability to edit Microsoft Office documents without having to covert them. […]

How and when should startup founders think about the “exit”? It’s the perennial question in tech entrepreneurialism, but the how’s and when’s are questions to which there are a multitude of answers. For one thing, new founders often forget that the terms of the exit may not eventually be entirely in their control. There’s the […]

It seemed so simple. A small schema issue in a database was wrecking a feature in the app, increasing latency and degrading the user experience. The resident data engineer pops in a fix to amend the schema, and everything seems fine — for now. Unbeknownst to them, that small fix completely clobbered all the dashboards […]

PandaDoc, the startup that provides a fully digital sales document workflow from proposal to electronic signature to collecting payment, announced a $30 million Series B extension today, making it the the second such extension the company has taken since taking its original $15 million Series B in 2017. The total for the three B investments […]

Three months ago, Jump’s bright red bikes and scooters had disappeared from city streets after Uber unloaded the micromobility company to Lime as part of a complex $170 million fundraising round. When the Jump bikes were finally spotted it was in a recycling yard, where more than 20,000 of them laid in piles, awaiting their […]

In a sign of the growing importance and value of digital healthcare in the world of medicine, two of the industry’s publicly traded companies have agreed to a whopping $18.5 billion merger. The union of Teladoc Health, a provider of virtual care services, and Livongo, which has made a name for itself by integrating hardware […]

Samsung promised five “power devices” for its virtually-only Unpacked event. We already know about the Note 20, Galaxy Watch 3, Tab S7 and Buds Live — so what’s left? We speculated based on an earlier news that the company would debuting a new foldable — the biggest question, however, is whether it would be a […]

Given the challenges of getting an H-1B through the lottery and the visa ban, can we potentially sponsor someone for a green card?