Crunch Hype

Disrupt 2020 doesn’t arrive until September, but the countdown clock to early-bird savings winds to a halt in just four days. Grab this opportunity to attend one of the best tech conferences for all-things startup, cross this task off your to-do list and save up to $300. Simply buy your pass before the offer expires […]

Looking for ways to keep your business moving forward? Exhibiting in Startup Alley at Disrupt 2020 can be one of the smartest investments you’ll ever make. But don’t take our word for it. Instead, register to attend our Ask Me Anything Session (Startup Alley Edition) scheduled for July 30 at 4 p.m. ET/ 1 p.m. […]

There are many painful ways for a startup to fail — including founders who ultimately throw in the towel and turn off the lights. But assuming a founder intends to keeps moving forward, there are a few pitfalls that Garry Tan has seen during his career as a founder, Y Combinator partner and, lately, co-founder […]

After feedback from the investor and founder communities, Y Combinator is making a change to how it does Demo Days in a remote world. The accelerator announced today that it will keep its two-day Demo Day virtual, but instead of offering pre-recorded pitches on-demand, the entire program will be streamed live. In an e-mail, Y […]

Chief executives from four of the world’s most powerful companies will defend the vast empires they’ve built in testimony before Congress on Wednesday. In a hearing held by the House’s Antitrust Subcommittee, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg will all face questions about how their business practices propelled them into the market-dominant […]

Today, Priti Youssef Choksi is a partner with venture firm Norwest Venture Partners . But she previously spent five-and-a-half years at Google, where she worked on strategic partnerships, and nearly nine years at Facebook, where she began in corporate development and later focused on M&A. Because Choksi knows firsthand how some of the biggest companies […]

Lightricks, the startup behind a suite of photo and video editing apps — including most notably, selfie editor Facetune 2 — is taking its retouching capabilities to video. Today, the company is launching Facetune Video, a selfie video editing app, that allows users to retouch and edit their selfie and portrait videos using a set […]

As part of its continued preparations to begin its commercial passenger spaceflight operations, Virgin Galactic has revealed the final design the interior cabin of its VSS Unity spacecraft. The company unveiled the interiors during a virtual event today, and offered members of the press (myself included) a special tour of the interior in VR. The […]

GitHub today announced that it will start publishing a public roadmap to help its users understand when it will ship new features across its various versions of the GitHub code repository and products like GitHub Actions, its mobile app and its security tools. “What we’re trying to do is provide a way for people to […]

Spotify announced today it’s updating its recently launched shared-queue feature, Group Session, to support remote usage. Essentially a “party mode,” the feature first debuted in May, offering a way for participants contribute to a collaborative playlist in real-time and control what’s playing across everyone’s devices. Spotify explained at the time that, despite social distancing measures, […]

For the past 10 years, Disrupt has been a place for the tech community to come together to connect and learn. And while thousands of techies won’t be able to descend on the Moscone Center this year, the Disrupt show will most certainly go on. On the conference’s 10th anniversary, we’re coming to you virtually. […]

Indonesia-based online travel portal, Traveloka, has picked up $250M in fresh funding to beef up its coronavirus-battered balance sheet. The travel aggregator dubs the capital injection a “strong vote of confidence” in its strategy to adjust to what it couches as a ‘new normal’ for travel by retooling its focus on domestic and short hop […]

A lot has been written about increased interest around automation and robotics during the pandemic — I know because I’ve done a lot of the writing. Most of these discussions tend to revolve around things like logistics, delivery and food preparation. But there’s also a compelling case to be made for companionship. And for that […]

Twitter has temporarily frozen Donald Trump Jr.’s account after the president’s son shared a video making false and potentially life-threatening claims about the coronavirus pandemic. The younger Trump’s account was restricted Tuesday morning after he shared a link to the viral video, tweeting “This is a much [sic] watch!!! So different from the narrative that […]

Gaming platform Roblox, which has seen a surge of use due to the coronavirus pandemic, now has over 150 million monthly active users, up from the 115 million it announced in February before the U.S.’s shelter-in-place orders went into effect. The company also said its developer community is on pace to earn over $250 million […]

Low-code is a hot category these days. It helps companies build workflows or simple applications without coding skills, freeing up valuable engineering resources for more important projects. Paragon, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, announced a $2.5 million seed round today for its low-code application integration platform. Investors include Y Combinator, Village […]

CES 2020 got in just under the wire, ahead of COVID-19 reaching true international pandemic levels. And until today, the show’s governing body, the CTA, was planning to keep its record unbroken. Today, however, CEO Gary Shapiro announced via video that the Las Vegas event has been canceled. Instead, CES 2021 will follow the lead […]

NASA and SpaceX are looking to finish up the final demonstration mission of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon astronaut spacecraft at the end of this week, but it’s already looking ahead to Crew-2 – the second operational flight of Crew Dragon, currently set for sometime next spring. The agency revealed the four people that will fly aboard […]

Startup stories are often too reductive — an entrepreneur dreams up an idea, snags some co-founders, raises a bit of money, and presto: success and riches. It’s nearly never true. Even breakout successes like Slack that may feel straightforward have complicated stories. Amongst the most valuable startups there are hidden crises and disappointing quarters. Some […]

Playground Global has an eye on the future. A quick glance at the investment firm’s portfolio showcases a wide-ranging list of investments, covering robotics, autonomous driving, neural network, quantum computing, metallic 3D printing and gene therapy. Playground GlobalCEO Barrett will join us on Extra Crunch Live to chat about these categories and more at 2 […]

Lucid Motors is loading up its first electric vehicle with hardware — dozens of sensors, a driver monitoring system and an Ethernet-based architecture — for an advanced driver assistance system that aims to match and even surpass its rivals. There will be 32 sensors in all, according to Lucid, which has branded its advanced driver […]

XPRIZE is turning its tried and tested model of offering cash prizes to spur innovation in critical areas to the challenge of COVID-19 testing. the nonprofit has created a $5 million prize pool for a Rapid COVID Testing competition, in partnership with an organization called OpenCovidScreen formed by scientists, researchers and industry leaders to drive […]

A lot of tech is built on the premise of services that can target the widest or most lucrative pools of users (and they’re a blockbuster when they can do both). But that leaves out a number of consumers, who fall into the margins for all kinds of reasons, be they physical, age, financial or […]

In a world with growing amounts of data, finding the right set for a particular machine learning model can be a challenge. Explorium has created a platform to make that an easier task, and today the startup announced a $31 million Series B. The round was led by Zeev Venture with help from Dynamic Loop, […]

Just like we enjoy a range of different possible modes of transportation on Earth, the potential of the space economy allows for many different types of of vehicles and launch systems. Dawn Aerospace took the wrapper off one today, a suborbital spaceplane called the Dawn Mk-II Aurora that’s smaller than a compact car and that […]

Swiss computer vision startup, Advertima, has raised a €15 million Series A (~$17.5M) to build out a machine learning platform for physical retail stores to ‘upgrade’ the shopping experience via real-time shopper behavior analytics. The round is led by existing shareholder, Fortimo Group, a Swiss real estate company. Fed by visual sensors, Advertima’s platform provides […]

When SpaceX set out to fly humans on board its spacecraft, it decided to create its own spacesuit in-house. That’s a very different approach from most spacesuit projects, including those at NASA, which typically involve tapping in outside specialist contractors with a long history of experience to help with the work. In a new video, […]

ClimaCell, the weather forecasting and intelligence service that is using a number of interesting new techniques to gather weather data, today announced that it has raised a $23 million Series C round co-led by new investor Pitango Growth and existing investor Square Peg Captial. With this new round, the Boston- and TelAviv-based company’s total funding […]

Israeli startup Nanox has big ambitions to take on the world of medical imaging and imaging analytics with hardware that reduces the size and cost of scanning equipment, plus software that improves the quality of images and the insights you can gain from them. Today, Nanox is announcing another big step ahead in that plan: […]

The growth of digital banking has opened up a wealth of opportunities for making the world of finance more accessible and transparent to a greater number of people. But the darker underbelly is that it has also created more avenues for illicit activity to flourish, with some $2 trillion laundered annually but only 1-3% of that […]

The world’s hardware haven is taking a digital leap for pets. In May, China’s southern city Shenzhen announced that all dogs must be implanted with a chip, joining the rank of the U.K., Japan, Australia and a growing number of countries to make microchips mandatory for dogs. This week, city regulators began to set up injection […]

The latest startup to see an uplift in inbound interest flowing from the remote work boom triggered by the coronavirus pandemic is Berlin-based Everphone, which sells a ‘mobile as a service’ device rental package that caters to businesses needing to kit staff out with mobile hardware plus associated support. Everphone is announcing a €34 million […]

Flipkart on Tuesday launched a hyperlocal service in suburbs of Bangalore, four years after the e-commerce group abruptly concluded its previous foray into this category. The e-commerce group, owned by Walmart, said Flipkart Quick leverages the company’s supply chain infrastructure and a new location mapping technology framework to deliver more than 2,000 products across grocery, perishables, […]

Google today announced its plans to build a new subsea cable with landing points in New York in the U.S. and Bude, UK and Bilbao, Spain in Europe. The new cable, named after the pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, will join Google’s various other private subsea cables like Curie between the U.S. and South America, […]

Since being re-acquired from Nokia in 2018 by a group including its original founders and some of its original investors, health tech company Withings has been focused on evolving their offering of consumer health hardware to provide medical-grade data that can be shared with, and leveraged by healthcare professionals to deliver better, more personalized care. […]

It’s been seven years since Tencent picked up a 36.5% stake in Sogou to fend off rival Baidu in the online search market. The social and gaming giant is now offering to buy out and take private its long-time ally. NYSE-listed Sogou said this week it has received a preliminary non-binding proposal from Tencent to […]

In three years Zachariah Reitano’s startup, Ro, has managed to hit a reported $1.5 billion valuation for its transformation from a company focused on treating erectile disfunction to a telemedicine service for a range of elective and urgent care-focused treatments. Through Rory for women’s health, Roman for men’s health, and Zero for smoking cessation, Reitano’s […]

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 paved the way for decades of incremental changes to the way buildings, businesses, and laws accommodate people with a wide variety of disabilities. At 30 years old this week, the law’s effect on tech has been profound, but there’s still a lot of work to do. The ADA […]

According to a new court filing, multiple California state offices are actively investigating Amazon over worker safety concerns as the coronavirus continues to rage throughout the U.S. In the filing, reported by Reuters, a San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman writes that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health […]

Tenet has long been expected to be a bellwether for filmgoers’ readiness to return to theaters. Director Christopher Nolan is a blockbuster machine, and if anyone can get butts in seats amid the worst pandemic in modern memory, it’s probably him. And to be fair, the film really has served as a kind of litmus […]

BMW said it will offer the all-electric versions of X1 compact SUV and the 5 Series as part of the German automaker’s plans to have 25 electrified models in its portfolio by 2023. BMW didn’t say exactly when an all-electric X1 or 5 Series might be available (TechCrunch reached out and will update if we […]

Following earlier reporting, Google has confirmed that it will continue to allow employees to work from home through the end of June of next year. The company told TechCrunch that Sundar Pichai announced the plan in an email sent to staff earlier today. “To give employees the ability to plan ahead, we are extending our […]

Mobile consumers are downloading and using more apps than ever before. According to recent data from App Annie, mobile users now have 93 apps on their phone as of the end of 2019, up from 85 apps at the end of 2015. They also now use around 41 apps per month, up from 35 in […]

After launching a number of new developer tools for Alexa last week, Amazon today is introducing an updated version of its Alexa mobile app for consumers. The new app aims to offer a more personalized experience, particularly on users’ home screens, and offers more instructions on how and when consumers can use the digital assistant, […]

When it comes to building a company, lots of things can and do go wrong. Margit Wennmachers — an operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz and long one of the most powerful public relations pros in the startup world — knows this firsthand. Thankfully for all of you, Wennmachers was able to join us for our […]

The coronavirus caused some disagreement amongst Boston’s venture capital community. Looking back at our mid-2020 survey of its VCs, some saw the city’s strength in biotech and healthcare as a competitive advantage, while others saw Boston’s diverse startup ecosystem as key to its survival. And some were worried that activity was about to clamp down. […]

A rare public showdown between Congress and the CEOs of tech’s biggest companies is still on track after being postponed last week. The House Judiciary Committee hearing, originally set for Monday, will now take place Wednesday, July 29 at 12 PM Eastern Time. The date was changed in light of the death of the civil […]

Tech companies are increasingly finding that accessibility isn’t a widget you plug into an otherwise final product, but something that’s integrated from the very beginning of development — but that takes resources few possess. Fable hopes to make disability-inclusive design easier by providing testing and development assistance from disabled folks on-demand and has raised a […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. After the morning show went out, the Equity crew could not shut up about the Qualtrics-SAP deal, so we had no choice but to jump back into recording mode for an off-the-cuff Equity Shot. As always, Shots are […]

Sport and fitness tech giant Garmin has confirmed its five-day outage was caused by a ransomware attack. In a brief statement on Monday, the company said it was hit by a cyberattack on July 23 that “encrypted some of our systems.” “As a result, many of our online services were interrupted including website functions, customer […]