Crunch Hype

Octane, a metered SaaS billing system, helps vendors create a plan, monitor usage and charge in a similar way to Snowflake and AWS.

Microsoft offered a broad “Holiday 2021” release date when it announced Windows 11, back in June. Of course, it didn’t specify precisely which holiday. Perhaps the company was aiming for World Teachers’ Day, a belated Sukkot or an extremely early Halloween. After strongly implying a late-October release a few months back (which some pointing to […]

Quip is focused on growth, innovation and community building among its over 7.5 million customers in 100 countries.

Walnut's a no-code platform enables customers to create customized product demonstrations, integrate them into their sales and marketing processes and then generate insights from the demos.

Spotify today is officially rolling out its shared playlist feature called Blend to global users, with a few changes. Earlier this summer, Spotify had first launched the new shared playlist experience into beta testing. The feature, which allows two people to combine their favorite songs into one shared playlist, uses the same music mixing technology […]

As the broader crypto world enjoys a late summer surge in enthusiasm, more and more blockchain developers who have taken the plunge are bumping into the blaring scaling issues faced by decentralized apps on the Ethereum blockchain. The popular network has seen its popularity explode in the past year but its transaction volume has stayed […]

As artificial intelligence continues to weave its way into more enterprise applications, a startup that has built a platform to help businesses, especially non-tech organizations, build more customized AI decision making tools for themselves has picked up some significant growth funding. Peak AI, a startup out of Manchester, England, that has built a “decision intelligence” […]

Kevala, the startup that collects and analyzes energy grid infrastructure data for utility companies, renewable energy providers, EV charging companies, regulators and other energy industry stakeholders, has raised $21 million in a Series A round. The company says it will use the funds to grow its team from 60 employees to around 100 by the […]

Having a loved one with specialized care needs is incredibly challenging, but not something that people who have never had to deal with the issue would necessarily quite understand. For anyone who has had to help care for someone with special needs, the lack of options out there to navigate finding access to care providers […]

Hum Capital CEO Blair Silverberg thinks that the future of fundraising requires a return to old school Wall Street – sans the fraud. Back in the day, he explained, people would go to Wall Street and request funding for different projects, such as a rail line from New Jersey to St. Louis or a new […]

Owner.com provides a free online ordering, delivery and marketing platform for independent restaurants that puts them on a similar playing fields with large restaurant chains.

Max Q is a weekly newsletter from TechCrunch all about space. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Mondays in your inbox. We had a few launches this week, including SpaceX’s first one after one of its longer recent pauses in activity. Astra hoped to have its first commercial payload mission go well, but […]

The rumored satellite features for future iPhones are reserved for emergency uses only, Bloomberg says, after an initial analyst report sparked speculation about carrier-free calls and messaging.

In the two years since Gatik AI came out of stealth, the autonomous vehicle startup has launched pilots with Walmart and Canadian retail giant Loblaw in its bid to prove that self-driving technology combined with box trucks is the secret economic sauce for hauling goods short distances. Now, the company is expanding into Texas — […]

In India, a country that is more densely populated and has lower rates of car ownership, auto rickshaws and other two- or three-wheeled vehicles play a central role. While many auto rickshaws on Indian roads are already electric, they tend to rely on lead-acid batteries that need to be replaced every six to 11 months. […]

The scale of the tech industry’s spending to influence the European Union’s tech policy agenda has been laid out in a report published today by Corporate Europe Observatory and Lobbycontrol — which found hundreds of companies, groups and business associations shelling out a total of €97 million (~$115M) annually lobbying EU institutions. The level of […]

After a number of delays, South Korea’s National Assembly today voted to approve the passage of its “Anti-Google law.” Nicknamed after the search giant but more wide-ranging, the law will prevent Google and Apple from forcing developers to use their in-app billing systems when building apps for their two market-dominating app stores . This is […]

LoftyInc Capital, a pan-African VC firm, announced today that it is launching its third fund — LoftyInc Afropreneurs Fund 3 — at $10 million for tech startups in Africa. The firm has reached the first close of $5.5 million. Some of the limited partners in the vehicle include those from its second fund, FBNQuest Funds, […]

Motional revealed Tuesday the first images of its planned robotaxi, a Hyundai all-electric Ioniq 5 SUV that will be the centerpiece of a driverless ride-hailing service the company wants customers to be able to access starting in 2023 through the Lyft app. The purpose-built vehicle, which will be assembled by Hyundai, is integrated with Motional’s […]

More major consolidation underway in the world of payments: Prosus — the Dutch tech giant that bundles together Naspers’ fintech, e-commerce and other international investments and businesses outside of South Africa (including a big stake in Tencent) — today announced that it would pay $4.7 billion to acquire BillDesk, a payments provider based in India. […]

German startup Dance is launching its subscription service in its hometown Berlin. For a flat monthly fee of €79 (around $93 at today’s exchange rate), users will get a custom-designed electric bike as well as access to an on-demand repair and maintenance service. Founded by the former founders of SoundCloud and Jimdo, the company managed […]

More than 15 years ago, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, which was acquired by Nasdaq in 2008, and another since-sold exchange called HedgeStreet, both announced they intended to offer something called event contracts to investors. The idea was to allow people to bet “yes” or “no” on questions about future events that were structured as all-or-nothing […]

Coral Capital, a Tokyo-based venture capital firm, announced today that it has closed its third fund, Coral Capital III, raising $128 million (14 billion yen). Coral Capital’s total assets under management (AUM) is now $275 million. Limited partners in the vehicle include Mizuho Bank, Mitsubishi Estate, Shinsei Bank, Pavilion Capital, Founders Fund, Dai-ichi Life Insurance, […]

Doctor Anywhere, a startup that takes an “omnichannel” approach to healthcare, announced today it has raised $88 million SGD (about $65.7 million USD) in Series C funding. The round was led by Asia Partners, with participation from Novo Holdings, Philips and OSK-SBI Partners. It also included returning investors EDBI, Square Peg, IHH Healthcare, Kamet Capital […]

Few robotics categories are poised to benefit more from the events of the past year than construction. It’s a booming field that could benefit massively from automaton, a fact that’s only been amplified as the pandemic brought many nonessential businesses to a standstill. We’ve seen a number of players in the category raise notable rounds […]

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Square’s popular free invoicing software is becoming the company’s next big subscription service. The company is poised to announce a paid subscription offering called Invoices Plus, which will offer sellers a set of advanced features, including some that had previously been available with the free service. The service itself had been quietly introduced to individual […]

Adolescence is a turbulent period and its challenges are being exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even in the best of times, teens dealing with personal and school problems might have trouble talking about them. New Zealand-based startup Komodo is a student well-being platform that wants to give students a place to communicate with staff, while […]

There has been significant hype around Latin America’s startup success. For good reason, too: Startups have raised $9.3 billion in just the first half of 2021, almost double the amount in all of 2020.

For more than a year now, Zoom has been on a mission to transform from an application into a platform. To that end it made three announcements last year: Zoom Apps development tools, the Zoom Apps marketplace and a $100 million development fund to invest in some of the more promising startups building tools on […]

Prive, a months-old, San Francisco-based startup founded by two former Uber product managers, just raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding to create what it describes as a far more customizable e-commerce subscriptions platform for D2C brands. The round was co-led by Patrick Chung and Brandon Farwell at XFund and Ben Ling from Bling Capital, with […]

Alternative lending is any lending that occurs outside of a conventional financial institution. These lenders offer different types of loans such as lines of credit, microloans and equipment financing.

Popular instant messaging app Telegram has joined the elite club of apps that have been downloaded over 1 billion times globally, according to Sensor Tower. The Dubai-headquartered app, which was launched in late 2013, surpassed the milestone on Friday, the mobile insight firm told TechCrunch. As is the case with the app’s chief rival, WhatsApp, […]

Hair loss resulting from chemotherapy is one of the most recognizable side effects in all of medicine, and for many is an unwanted public announcement of their condition and treatment. Luminate Medical may have a solution in a medical wearable that prevents the chemical cocktail from tainting hair follicles, preventing the worst of the loss […]

TikTok parent company ByteDance seems to be looking to one-up Facebook anywhere it can. After taking over the mantle of most-downloaded social media app in the world with TikTok, ByteDance is coming for Facebook’s moonshot, buying up its own virtual reality headset maker called Pico. The deal first reported on by Bloomberg last week was […]

In a bid to expand its classical music offering, Apple today announced that it has acquired Primephonic. The Amsterdam-based service, which launched in 2014, will bring a laser focus on a music genre that’s been sorely lacking in Apple Music’s generalized approach to streaming. The service will effectively be discontinued as a standalone offering as […]

Instagram will begin prodding users to share their birthday with the service, if they haven’t already done so. The company today announced it will now start popping up a notification that asks you to add your birthday to “personalize your experience.” But the prompt can only be dismissed a handful of times before becoming a […]

Less than two weeks after its official launch, The Boring Company’s Loop system in Las Vegas had its first security breach. On June 21, the morning of the final day of the International Beauty Show, an “unauthorized vehicle” joined the system’s fleet of Tesla taxis underground, emails between the Loop’s operations manager and a Clark […]

One of the consequences of rising CO2 levels in our atmosphere is that levels also rise proportionately in the ocean, harming wildlife and changing ecosystems. Heimdal is a startup working to pull that CO2 back out at scale using renewable energy and producing carbon-negative industrial materials, including limestone for making concrete, in the process, and […]

Startup founders, take a minute to track Toast's revenue growth per category over time. Sometimes diversified offense is functional defense, it turns out.

The venture world is — quite literally — waking up to the potential of applying artificial intelligence to a wider variety of real-world, consumer-driven problems, and today comes the latest development on that front: Eight Sleep, which makes “smart” mattresses and mattress covers for regular mattresses that use machine learning and other artificial intelligence-based algorithms […]

Ryan Reynolds is America’s sweetheart, despite being both Canadian and somewhat irreverent. The actor, producer, screenwriter and entrepreneur has been nominated for a Golden Globe and Grammy for his work on the Deadpool franchise. But it wasn’t just his acting that made Deadpool a record-breaking, billion-dollar franchise. Reynolds is one of the world’s greatest when […]

The survey asked professionals: Do you believe antitrust legislation should be used to break up Big Tech companies like Amazon and Google?

A new startup called Clay, backed by $8 million in seed funding, has built a system designed to help you be more thoughtful with the people in your life, which operates somewhat like a personal CRM. With Clay, you build a collection of the people you meet by connecting your email and calendar with social […]

Who doesn’t want a vacation home? Right. That’s what I thought. Kocomo is a Mexico City-based startup that wants to help make that dream a reality. And it has just closed on $6 million equity and $50 million debt financing to advance on that goal. The company aims to allow for cross-border co-ownership of luxury […]

Ideanomics, a fintech and electric mobility firm based in New York, has added to its list of acquisitions on Monday to buy commercial electric vehicle manufacturer Via Motors in an all-stock deal valued at $450 million. Ideanomics has been aggressively purchasing mobility businesses this year, as it seeks to build out vertically integrated offerings for […]

Petlove&Co, a São Paulo-based digital platform for products and services for the pet market, announced today that it has raised about $150 million (R$750 million) today in a funding round led by Riverwood Capital. The round is nearly double that of what Petlove has raised in its history. The company started its life as PetSuperMarket […]

A lot of startup founders think there’s a dire need for their product in the market, but Liya Shuster-Bier knew for sure that there was one, because she’d required it herself prior to building it — yet nothing like it existed. Liya’s company Alula provides a new kind of shopping platform, organized based on treatment […]

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. I’m […]

When you hear the word, “enterprise” and you immediately think software instead of Star Trek, you’re going to love this post — and the SaaS and Enterprise-focused knowledge waiting for you at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23. We’ve packed a veritable boatload of Grade A prime programming into three full days of Disrupt. Prepare […]