Crunch Hype

Wealthfront was one of the earliest and remains one of the most formidable companies in the so-called robo-advisor space — algorithmic apps that manage and optimize your savings and investments. Since its debut, the platform has skyrocketed in popularity, taking in more than $200 million in venture capital according to Crunchbase, including a recent $75 […]

Google’s plans to wind down its Google Play Music service in favor of the company’s newer YouTube Music have been known for some time. But Google this week has given users a deadline on making the switch. The company says YouTube Music will fully replace Google Play Music in December 2020, at which point Google […]

Reading headlines here and there, one might assume that venture capital interest in fintech startups is setting records every quarter. After all: didn’t Robinhood raise $280 million and $320 million more this year? Stripe raised $600 million just a few minutes ago, and wasn’t it Monzo that raised £60 million a few weeks back? Oh, […]

If the current level of interest represents the new normal for VCs, we expect it to only increase as we enter the fall.

Founders are in a great position to fundraise right now. VCs are ready to deploy capital and are activity searching for businesses to invest in. Time to make the most of it.

Samsung promised a lot of gadgets for today’s big Unpacked event — five in all, as a matter of fact. As expected, the big headliners — both figuratively and literally — are the latest additions to the popular Note line. Also unsurprising is the company’s positioning the Note 20 — along with the rest of […]

While dog owners have plenty of direct-to-consumer options if they want to order pet food online, we haven’t seen a similar wave of startups for cats. But that may be starting to change. Earlier this year, I wrote about Cat Person, a startup backed by Harry’s Labs offering a variety of cat care products, including […]

As Kubernetes and cloud native technologies proliferate, developers and IT have found a growing set of technical challenges they need to address, and new concepts and projects have popped up to deal with them. For instance, operators provide a way to package, deploy and manage your cloud native application in an automated way. Kubermatic wants […]

The Nintendo Switch’s ability to quickly transition from portable to home console is definitely one of its major selling points, but Nintendo’s official dock never really made much sense with the portable nature of the Switch itself. Luckily, third-party accessory maker Genki created the Covert Dock, a device no larger than a smartphone USB charger […]

Harness has made a name for itself creating tools like continuous delivery (CD) for software engineers to give them the kind of power that has been traditionally reserved for companies with large engineering teams like Google, Facebook and Netflix. Today, the company announced it has acquired Drone.io, an open source continuous integration (CI) company, marking […]

Sight Diagnostics, the Israel-based health-tech company behind the FDA-cleared OLO blood analyzer, today announced that it has raised a $71 million Series D round with participation from Koch Disruptive Technologies, Longliv Ventures (which led its Series C round)and crowd-funding platform OurCrowd. With this, the company has now raised a total of $124 million, though the […]

Instagram Reels, the company’s significant effort in challenging TikTok on short-form creative content, is launching globally, starting today. The feature is being made available across 50 countries, including the U.S., as TechCrunch had previously reported. The expansion means Reels will now be available in key international markets, such as India, Brazil, France, Germany, the U.K., […]

SpaceX achieved a big win in their Starship spacecraft development program on Tuesday evening, flying the SN5 prototype of that future vehicle to a height of around 500 feet, propelled by a single Raptor engine. The test, which took place at SpaceX’s rocket development and testing facility in Boca Chica, Texas, marks the first time […]

James Stranko Contributor James Stranko is a writer and independent advisor to American tech companies expanding abroad. He was on the founding team of Fuel, McKinsey’s practice serving VC firms and pre-IPO tech leaders. Daire Hickey Contributor Share on Twitter Daire Hickey is managing partner of 150Bond, a strategic advisory firm based between New York […]

Springboard, an online education platform that provides upskilling and reskilling training courses to people looking to learn in-demand roles, has raised $31 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand to more geographies. The Series B financing round for the San Francisco-headquartered startup was led by investment firm Telstra Ventures . Vulcan […]

Electric vehicle charging network ChargePoint raised $127 million in funding in a bid to expand its platform for businesses and fleets in North America and Europe. A mix of existing investors from the oil and gas, utilities and venture industries added to the round, including American Electric Power, Chevron Technology Ventures, Clearvision and Quantum Energy Partners. […]

Internet device search engine Censys is one of the biggest search engines you’ve probably never heard of. If Google is the search engine for finding information sitting on the web, Censys is the search engine for finding internet devices, like computers, servers, and smart devices, that hosts the data to begin with. By continually mapping […]

Amazon has found a new partner to expand the reach of its cloud services business — AWS — in India, the world’s second largest internet market. On Wednesday, the e-commerce giant announced it has partnered with Bharti Airtel, the third-largest telecom operator in India with more than 300 million subscribers, to sell a wide-range of […]

First there was same-day delivery. Then came one-hour delivery. Now a new London startup wants to make 15 minute delivery a thing. Putting the hyper hyper-local into online grocery shopping, Weezy combines its own strategically located fulfilment centres with a fleet of electric moped and bicycle couriers, ready to accept orders via the Weezy app. […]

While growing up, Peter Shearer watched his mother get up every day at 2AM or 3AM to prepare for her catering business. For many people who own small food businesses in Indonesia, “everything is handled on their own, so I really, really wanted to create a system so they can have better operations and get […]

Triller, the short video app backed by a Hollywood mogul and music celebrities, is rapidly ballooning in both user size and valuation. It’s now seeking a new funding round of $250 million that will push its valuation to over $1 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the matter. That’s a leap from its […]

Electric vehicles (EVs) are spreading throughout the world. While Tesla has drawn the most attention in the United States with its luxurious and cutting-edge cars, EVs are becoming a mainstay in markets far away from the environs of California. Take India for instance. In the local mobility market, two- and three-wheel vehicles are starting to […]

SpaceX has been developing Starship, its next-generation spacecraft, at its site in Boca Chica, Texas. The company has built a number of different Starship prototypes to date, include one prior version called the Starhopper that was essentially just the bottom portion of the rocket. Today, the company flew its first full-scale prototype (minus the domed […]

Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, has been sentenced to 18 months on one count of stealing trade secrets. Judge Alsup said that home confinement would “[give] a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets. Prison […]

Those wondering whether The Walt Disney Company would eventually give up on a traditional theatrical release for “Mulan” now have their answer. While the coronavirus pandemic prompted Disney to accelerate the streaming release of some movies like Pixar’s “Onward,” and to send certain lower-profile movies like “Artemis Fowl” straight to Disney+, until now the company has […]

Disney+ had more than 60.5 million paying subscribers as of yesterday, according to The Walt Disney Company’s CEO Bob Chapek. Chapek shared the number during a call to discuss the company’s latest earnings report, which covered the company’s most recent quarter ending on June 27. He was essentially offering an update on the 57.5 million […]

You might have missed it, but amidst the current political-M&A-pandemic-election-disinformation news cycle we find ourselves in this week, SaaS and cloud companies reached new public market records. Yesterday, the Bessemer-Nasdaq cloud index closed at 2,035.54, a new record finish for the basket of software companies. And, today, the index broached the 2,040 mark before ceding […]

Apple isn’t the only one accused of kicking out competitive solutions from its App Store. Google did the same — for over a month at least — or so alleges parental control app maker Boomerang. The company’s product competes with Google’s own Family Link solution for controlling screen time and children’s use of mobile devices. […]

After more than three decades climbing Apple’s ranks, marketing chief Phil Schiller is taking a step back at the company, being replaced by a long-time product marketing leader inside Apple. Schiller is taking on a new role as an Apple Fellow, where he will continue to lead the App Store and the company’s events, a […]

Plus: how to monitor and fix Facebook/Instagram ad fatigue, and using mobile app ads to drive landing page conversions.

Qualified, a startup co-founded by former Salesforce executives Kraig Swensrud and Sean Whiteley, has raised $12 million in Series A funding. Swensrud (Qualified’s CEO) said the startup is meant to solve a problem that he faced when he was CMO at Salesforce. Apparently he’d complain about being “blind,” because he knew so little about who […]

A 17-year-old Florida teenager is accused of perpetrating one of the year’s biggest and most high-profile hacks: Twitter. A federal 30-count indictment filed in Tampa said Graham Ivan Clark used a phone spearphishing attack to pivot through multiple layers of Twitter’s security and bypassed its two-factor authentication to gain access to an internal “admin” tool […]

Rocket Lab has managed to engineer a significant payload capacity bump into its existing Electron space launch vehicle, the company revealed today. Electron can now fly as much as 300 kg (660 lbs) to low Earth orbit (or around 440 lbs to a higher, sun synchronous orbit), and that’s mostly due to battery technology advances, […]

Microsoft’s venture capital fund, M12 Ventures, has led a slew of strategic corporate investors backing a new chip developer out of Southern California called Syntiant, which makes semiconductors for voice recognition and speech-based applications. “We started out to build a new type of processor for machine learning, and voice is our first application,” says Syntiant […]

Rigetti Computing, the quantum computing startup that is challenging industry heavyweights like IBM, Microsoft and D-Wave, today announced that it has closed a $79 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Franklin Templeton, Alumni Ventures Group, DCVC, EDBI, Morpheus Ventures and Northgate Capital. Bessemer’s Tomer Diari […]

In a typical security team, engineers write one-off scripts to track a particular problem on a cloud vendor such as an unauthorized user on your GitHub account, and while engineers are capable of writing such scripts, it’s not exactly an efficient or scalable way to deal with the range of security problems these pros need […]

All AV all disengagement reports have one thing in common: their usefulness is ubiquitously criticized by those who have to submit them.

Ford Motor CEO Jim Hackett is retiring, leaving the company three years after being tapped to transform the automaker into a leaner, more competitive and profitable company while investing in technology and shifting towards electrification, automation and connectivity. Jim Farley, who many believed was being groomed for the position, has been named president and CEO. […]

You have just four days left to access the complete Disrupt 2020 experience for best possible price. You can save up to $300 with early bird pricing, but that’s a fleeting opportunity. Get it in gear and buy the Disrupt pass of your choice before the deadline expires August 7 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). We’re […]

In a set-back for Google’s plan to acquire health wearable company Fitbit, the European Commission has announced it’s opening an investigation to dig into a range of competition concerns being attached to the proposal from multiple quarters. This means the deal is on ice for a period of time that could last until early December. […]

Apple sold a lot of Macs last quarter — a record, in fact, for Q3, jumping a full 21%, year over year. Given the state of the world, with most office workers moving to a remote setup, there’s little surprise the company’s desktop and laptops moved at such an impressive clip. For that reason alone, […]

We’ve had huge debates about the future of work — are we going to be working from home, working from the office, or perhaps, working from anywhere? Work From Home is dead, long live Work From Anywhere Well, Facebook has put its wager down, and it’s work from office. In a flurry of articles in […]

Facebook is making it easier for businesses to leverage its Messenger service on their own websites. The company in November 2017 first launched a new customer chat plugin which allowed customers to talk directly with a business on the business’s own website using the Messenger service. However, that plugin had required the website visitors to […]

Radish is announcing that it has raised $63.2 million in new funding. Breaking up book-length stories into smaller chapters that are released over days or weeks is an idea that was popularized in the 19th century, and startups have been trying to revive it for at least the past decade. Still, this round represents a […]

Big news today in the world of enterprise IT startups. Rippling, the startup founded by Parker Conrad to take on the ambitious challenge of building a platform to manage all aspects of employee data, from payroll and benefits through to device management, has closed $145 million in funding — a monster Series B that catapults […]

Security professionals are constantly dealing with an onslaught of information as their various tools trigger alerts, some of which require their attention and some which don’t. Unfortunately, it requires addressing the alert to find that out. GreyNoise wants to help by filtering out benign security alerts, leaving security pros to deal with the ones that […]

Today Intercom announced that it has hired a chief financial officer (CFO) as it ramps towards an IPO. The unicorn also promoted its COO to the CEO role earlier this year. The company’s recent CEO, Karen Peacock, told TechCrunch that her new CFO Dan Griggs was a strong candidate thanks to his experience helping take […]

Today AgentSync announced that it has closed a $4.4 million Seed round, co-led by Elad Gil and Caffeinated Capital. Other well-known names from the Silicon Valley scene took part in its funding round, including Affirm’s Max Levchin and the podcaster turned VC Harry Stebbings, among others. The round caught our eye because AgentSync is working […]

Amid a crowded market of mobile banking services, which will soon also include Google, U.S. challenger bank Current is launching a new program that will offer points-based rewards to its checking account customers. The program will allow Current members to earn up to 15x points on everyday debit card purchases at over U.S. 14,000 merchants, […]

Way back in the before times of October 2019, Microsoft announced that it would be expanding its Designed for Xbox stamp of approval to a line of mobile accessories. The play was pretty obvious: The company is trying to get serious about smartphone gaming through the backdoor approach of its own Project xCloud streaming service. […]