Crunch Hype

Gig economy companies like to tout the flexibility and freedom they offer workers, but for the people finding work through companies like Instacart, Uber, DoorDash and Lyft, the economic and physical risks can outweigh the rewards. Contractors who are now considered front-line providers of essential services for their wealthier customers in the age of social […]

August 5 is Samsung’s turn to enter the uncanny valley of live virtual product launches. As the company prepares to take the stage in its native South Korea to launch the Galaxy Note S20. The company’s new smartphone chief TM Roh addressed in a new blog post what a strange time it is to be […]

General Motors is on track to deliver 20 electric vehicles by 2023, the company said in its latest sustainability report. That includes models for nearly all of its brands, including Cadillac, GMC, Chevrolet, and Buick. Most of these vehicles utilize GM’s new modular EV architecture called Ultium. With this platform, GM says some vehicles will […]

SpaceX is launching South Korea’s first dedicated military communications satellite on Monday, with a target liftoff time of 5 PM EDT (2 PM PDT). The launch window spans nearly four hours, ending at 8:55 PM EDT (5:55 PM PDT), so SpaceX has considerable flexibility in terms of when the launch could actually take place. The […]

A set of mini apps has gone live on Snapchat platform, marking the beginning of a new chapter for Los Angeles-headquartered firm as it aims to emulate aspects of the popular Chinese “super-app” model. Unveiled last month, Snap Minis are lightweight, simplified versions of apps that live within Snap’s Chat section. These apps — built […]

A group of UK Uber drivers has launched a legal challenge against the company’s subsidiary in the Netherlands. The complaints relate to access to personal data and algorithmic accountability. Uber drivers and Uber Eats couriers are being invited to join the challenge which targets Uber’s use of profiling and data-fuelled algorithms to manage gig workers […]

As the sports world slowly begins to emerge from the pandemic shut down with MLB scheduled to start this week, Fox Sports is launching its redesigned sports app today for Android and iOS. The new app and accompanying website, offers a more modern interface, access to live sports (with cable subscription) and bonus camera angles […]

The United Arab Emirates has succeeded with the initial stage of its first ever Mars mission, thanks to the launch of an H-IIA rocket built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan on Sunday. The rocket carried the Al Amal (Hope) Probe for the UAE, a Mars orbiter that is set to […]

The Jack Ma -controlled Ant Group finally sets in motion what the market has been anticipating for years. The financial services and payments behemoth said Monday that it has kickstarted the process of a concurrent initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and Shanghai Stock Exchange’s Nasdaq-style Star Market. The public listing will […]

eBay is reportedly getting close to a deal to sell its classified-ads business to Adevinta, a Norwegian company that runs online marketplaces across Europe and Latin America. According to a Wall Street Journal report, if the negotiations are successful, a cash and stock deal could be announced as soon as Monday. The transaction is expected […]

Xpeng, an electric vehicle startup run by former Alibaba executive He Xiaopeng, said Monday it has raised around $500 million in a Series C+ round to further develop models tailored to China’s tech-savvy middle-class consumers. The announcement followed its Series C round of $400 million closed last November. A source told TechCrunch that the company’s […]

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox. Hello and welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B. The […]

Humanoid robots have not stood up to the expectation set forth by Rosie from The Jetsons in the 1960s, but they’re finally becoming good enough to come to market.

One of the upsides of this job is that you get to see everything going on out there in the startup world. One of the downsides of this job is seeing just how many ideas out there aren’t all that original. Every week in my inbox, there is another no-code startup. Another fintech play for […]

Even though we did a lot of arguing about Netflix’s new action movie “The Old Guard,” we’re mostly in agreement: The movie is both reasonably entertaining and astonishingly stupid. We didn’t take issue with the basic concept, which sees Charlize Theron leading a small group of immortal mercenaries. But the plotting feels arbitrary and lazy […]

Beyond the role software can play in helping enable better data sharing and contact tracing, there are many other problems in which software can play a critical role in resolving.

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here. We’re pleased to kick off this week’s newsletter by sharing an important new project: The TechCrunch List. It’s a database of investors who have shown a commitment to first checks and leading rounds […]

The police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were sparks that reignited smoldering fury against authorities across the globe. One of the most watched locations has been Seattle, where protestors barricaded off a cop-free zone, drawing outsize attention and, in the process, forming a new case study in the uses of technology both to […]

Welcome to The Exchange, an upcoming weekly newsletter featuring TechCrunch and Extra Crunch reporting on startups, money and markets. You can sign up for it here to receive it regularly when it launches on July 25th, and catch up on prior editions of the column and newsletter here. It’s Saturday, July 18, and this is The […]

This week we look at the political intersections between the app stores and international relations. There's other news around regulations and lawsuits, and for fun we look at some new emoji.

While it’s no secret U.S. Hispanics represent unparalleled growth opportunities for the U.S. economy, most startups don’t realize this Hispanic youth means an abundance of prime spending years.

The shift to games as economic platforms will be neither swift nor cinematic. But like all true change, it will be profound.

Fallout continues from this week’s big Twitter hack, podcaster Harry Stebbings launches a small VC fund and robots help with sorting the mail. Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 17, 2020. The big story: More details emerge in Twitter hack As we recapped in yesterday’s newsletter, a number of high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked earlier […]

We continue to be stuck inside, and video games continue to sell well. It’s pretty much as simple as that, honestly. I mean, there’s more nuance than that, obviously, but that’s really the top line takeaway from NPD’s June gaming numbers. More specifically, last month saw $1.2 billion total spent on gaming, up 26% from […]

Many major websites and services were unreachable for a period Friday afternoon due to issues at Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The outage seems to have started at about 2:15 Pacific time and lasted for about 25 minutes before connections began to be restored. Google DNS may also have been affected. Update: Cloudflare at 2:46 says […]

From a partnership with the Russian company 3D Bioprinting Solutions to make chicken meat replacement using plant material and lab-cultured chicken cells to an expansion of its Beyond Fried Chicken pilots to Southern California, KFC is aggressively pushing forward with its experiments around the future of food. In Russia, that means providing 3D Bioprinting with […]

Kittu Kolluri — who in late 2016 stepped down as a general partner with NEA after 11 years with the investing giant to form the much smaller, much earlier-stage outfit Neotribe — has closed on $216 million for the outfit’s second fund, a sizable jump up from its $130 million debut fund. (Kolluri and his […]

AutoX, the autonomous vehicle startup backed by Alibaba, has been granted a permit in California to begin driverless testing on public roads in a limited area in San Jose. The permit will allow AutoX to test its autonomous vehicles without a human safety driver behind the wheel. This is the third company to receive a […]

Rish Joshi Contributor Rish is an entrepreneur and investor. Previously, he was a VC at Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), co-founded a fintech startup building an analytics platform for SEC filings and worked on deep-learning research as a graduate student in computer science at MIT. More posts by this contributor Generative algorithms are redefining the […]

It’s not hard to see why Russell Quinn calls 2017 the worst year of his life. That was the year he moved back to the United Kingdom to take care of his mother, and the year in which both his mother and grandmother died within a month of each other. Quinn recalled returning to Los […]

Earlier this month, venture capitalist and former Spotify global director of marketing Sophia Bendz announced that she was leaving London-based Atomico to join Berlin’s Cherry Ventures. Her stated reason for leaving the London VC firm — which mainly does Series A and Series B rounds — is that, having made the difficult transition from seasoned […]

FedEx has flirted with robotic technologies before, most notably in the case of Roxo. The delivery robot made its debut in New York City last year, only to get the boot from Mayor Bill de Blasio. These days, however, the prospect of increased automation seems all the more pressing, as COVID-19 has left many reconsidering […]

In the wake of yesterday’s landmark ruling by Europe’s top court — striking down a flagship transatlantic data transfer framework called Privacy Shield, and cranking up the legal uncertainty around processing EU citizens’ data in the U.S. in the process — Europe’s lead data protection regulator has fired its own warning shot at the region’s […]

The venture capital world is constantly changing, and its evolution can sometimes flip pieces of conventional wisdom on their heads. For example, a recent flurry of extension rounds from Silicon Valley’s hottest startups like Stripe and Robinhood seem to signal that the investment type has suddenly become cool. Extensions evolving from unloved to hot is […]

Even the world’s second largest smartphone market isn’t immune to COVID-19. Smartphone shipments in India fell 48% in the second quarter compared with the same period a year ago, the most drastic drop one of the rare growing markets has seen in a decade, research firm Canalys reported Friday evening. About 17.3 million smartphone units […]

Your product may solve problems. It may cost less and do more. It may very well change the world. But unless you can get the word out, ensuring the right group of people know about it and are willing to use it, pay for it and evangelize it, then your hard work is in vain. […]

Call it what you will — startup bootcamp, founders’ masterclass or the mother of all how-to events — we’re just days away from TC Early Stage 2020. But you don’t have to wait another minute to start making essential connections. CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, is now open for business. Wait up. You don’t have […]

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule has been docked at the International Space Station (ISS) since its historic first crewed launch in May, but it’s getting ready to make its return trip. NASA had planned to keep the spacecraft and astronauts at ISS for a while, depending on station mission needs, but they’re zeroing in on the […]

As Zoom and Microsoft and Google hammer it out for video-chat hegemony, startups are developing apps and services that either add on or compete with the major players. There hasn’t been enough activity — yet — to call it a boom, but there’s enough going on to warrant our attention. Call it a boomlet, if […]

Contrary to popular belief, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to success in Silicon Valley. Beyond raising traditional venture capital and beyond the pursuing-growth-at-all-costs strategy, there are people in the startup ecosystem that are finding success through less mainstream avenues. At TechCrunch Disrupt on September 14-18, I’ll be chatting with Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik, Driver’s Seat […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was full of news of all sorts, but as we recorded, both Danny and Natasha “not Tash” Mascarenhas were still locked out of their Twitter accounts after a proletariat revolution on the social platform saw the […]

Podcasts are becoming big business — in part because of how well they can attract and keep audiences at a time when so many other media formats are finding it hard to pin down that elusive metric of engagement. Now a podcast host who has built out a popular series around the world of startup […]

Western intelligence agencies say they’ve found evidence that Russian cyber espionage is targeting efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine in a number of countries. In an advisory report, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said the Russia-linked cyber espionage group commonly known as ‘APT29’ — which is also sometimes referred to as ‘the Dukes’ […]

Carolina Brochado, the former Atomico partner and most recently a partner at Softbank Vision Fund’s London office, has joined EQT to help launch a new fund dedicated to growth-stage investments, TechCrunch has learned. According to multiple sources, Brochado is part of a new growth fund team at EQT that will sit between its existing earlier-stage […]

Apple flexes its muscles in China with another megastore that unveiled on Friday. Located in Beijing’s upscale shopping district Sanlitun, the outlet replaces and more than doubles the size of Apple’s first store in China in the same location, which instantly caused a sensation back in 2008. The landmark building reopened in the heat of […]

A U.S. federal court judge ruled on Thursday that WhatsApp and parent company Facebook’s lawsuit against Israeli mobile surveillance software company NSO Group can go forward. Phyllis Hamilton, Chief Judge of the United Stated District Court of the Northern District of California, denied most of the arguments NSO Group made when it filed a motion […]

As you may have heard, we’re taking our entire events lineup fully virtual in 2020. This is of course in response to COVID-19. We’re working hard to make sure that, despite limitations, this year’s events will be some of the best we’ve ever produced. To make that happen, we’re partnering with virtual event masterminds like […]

A Twitter hack hits the platform’s most famous users, Netflix gets a co-CEO and Revel’s mopeds are coming to San Francisco. Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 16, 2020. The big story: High-profile Twitter accounts hacked in crypto scam This was a crazy one: The Twitter accounts of Apple, Elon Musk, Joe Biden and many, […]

Today after the bell, Netflix reported its Q2 financial performance. After its second-quarter numbers were out, the popular video streaming service saw its value drop sharply, with its shares off 10% in after-hours trading as of the time of writing. What happened to the high-flying Netflix, a company that you might have expected to report […]

Meditation apps have been a nice tech-centric respite for many, as the world continues to fall apart at the seams. HBO Max is hoping to build on that success with the launch of a new show based on the wildly popular Calm app. It is, thankfully, neither drama nor workplace comedy (HBO’s already done the […]