Crunch Hype

WhatsApp was briefly down Tuesday, with users unable to send or receive messages on the Facebook-owned end-to-end encrypted messaging app. Affected users may have seen that WhatsApp was “connecting” to the service when trying to send a message. The outage started at about 4 p.m. ET but appeared to be working again by 4:30 p.m. […]

The Trump administration has backed down from plans to revoke visas of international students studying in the U.S. whose schools planned to provide their classes exclusively online in the fall because of the coronavirus pandemic. The reversal comes as over a dozen universities and colleges threatened legal action against the administration’s order. The multi-faceted effort […]

A few months ago, we declared that “browsers are interesting again,” thanks to increased competition among the major players. Now, as more startups are getting onboard, things are getting downright exciting. A small but growing number of projects are building web browsers with a more specific type of user in mind. Whether that perceived user […]

A handful of Silicon Valley’s notable figures are backing a software startup looking to challenge Google Chrome’s dominance. The startup, called The Browser Company, is led by Joshua Miller, who previously served as the Obama White House’s director of Product and is currently an investor at Thrive Capital, an investment firm founded by Josh Kushner. […]

It’s not often Silicon Valley gets behind a single cause. Supporting net neutrality was one, reforming government surveillance another. Last week, Big Tech took up its latest: halting any cooperation with Hong Kong police. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and even China-headquartered TikTok said last week they would no longer respond to demands for user data […]

Construction is one of the largest industries still resisting the call of the 21st century, its practitioners opting for decades-old but tried and true methods. Ben Huh, of Cheezburger fame, aims to modernize the planning and assembly of buildings with software-generated floorplans and rooms that fit together like LEGO bricks. Huh’s new company, Social Construct, […]

Despite some market chop, the U.S. IPO market is still active, with fresh debut nCino pricing above its elevated price range, and Jamf moving to start its pricing process after filing to go public at the end of June. In addition to the pricing news, yesterday evening saw e-commerce software company BigCommerce commence its own […]

“Helping navigate the elusiveness of product market fit” is how Sanjiv Sanghavi, the co-founder of ClassPass and itinerant startup executive, describes his roles at different companies. From ClassPass through Knotel, Sanghavi has shepherded several businesses to growth and over a billion dollars in valuations; now he’s looking to bring that branding and marketing savvy to […]

A new gadget called the OpenCV AI Kit, or OAK, looks to replicate the success of Raspberry Pi and other minimal computing solutions, but for the growing fields of computer vision and 3D perception. Its new multi-camera PCBs pack a lot of capability into a small, open-source unit and are now seeking funding on Kickstarter. […]

Nothing is more important for founders than finding their first check or the investor who will lead their round, and yet, finding the right VCs to invest in their startups is an arduous and agonizing prospect. By some counts, there are now tens of thousands of VCs scattered across all corners of the globe, investing […]

Over the past month, we have been asking founders to submit recommendations of VCs for The TechCrunch List, our newly-launched curated directory of investors who are ready to write first checks and lead venture rounds into startups. You can head over to the list itself to see all 391 investors across 22 verticals. Announcing The […]

Developer-centric identity platform Auth0 today announced that it has raised a $120 million Series F round led by Salesforce Ventures. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Meritech Capital, World Innovation Lab, Trinity Ventures, Telstra Ventures and K9 Ventures also participated in this round, as well as new investor DTCP. With this, the company has […]

Google Play Pass, the Android alternative to subscription-based game store Apple Arcade, is expanding. Launched in September 2019 with over 350 apps and games, Play Pass today announced it’s added 150 new titles, including Sonic the Hedgehog, Golf Peaks, and kid-friendly content, like apps from Sesame Workshop, for example. In addition, the service will be […]

Brief, a newly launched news aggregator founded by former Google engineers, aims to tackle a number of problems with today’s news cycle, including information overload, burnout, media bias, and algorithms that prioritize engagement over news accuracy. Today, there are so many places to read the news and many aggregators on the market offer access to […]

Wall Street darling Tesla is holding onto its recent gains today on the back of a bullish analyst report, despite some weakness in tech shares. Tesla has seen its value skyrocket in recent quarters, rising from a 52-week low share price of $211 to $1,548.81 today. That figure, however, is low in the eyes of […]

Logitech has released new versions of its MX peripherals in Mac-friendly finishes, as well as a new K380 wireless Bluetooth keyboard designed for Apple devices. These aren’t dramatically different devices from the existing versions that Logitech offers – but that’s a good thing in this case, and it elevates what were already amazing peripherals to […]

Picking up transparent objects is hard when you’re a robot. Many of the traditional cameras and sensors just can’t get a good enough view to tell the grasper where to go. The light from infrared cameras passes through the objects and gets scattered in the process, and depth cameras have trouble determine the proper shape […]

We’re digging into Q2 2020 venture capital results this week. Today we are exploring U.S.-specific results after taking a broader perspective yesterday. As with every quarter, our goal is to understand how strong, or not, the domestic and global VC markets are so that we can better follow the pace of startup dealmaking. The Exchange […]

The next big media streaming service arrives tomorrow, as NBCUniversal launches Peacock. The service has already been available to parent company Comcast’s Xfinity X1 and Flex cable customers since April, but tomorrow marks the launch to a general audience, with anyone in the United States able to sign up and access Peacock on a range […]

Recurrency, a member of the Summer 2020 Y Combinator cohort, was started by a 21 year old just out of college. He decided to take on a highly established market that is led by giants like SAP, Infor, Oracle and Microsoft, but instead of taking a highly complex area of enterprise software in one big […]

TechCrunch’s first Early Stage event goes down in exactly one week, and we’re pretty freakin’ amped about it! Early Stage is unique in that it’s more of an entrepreneurial bootcamp, smashed into a two-day virtual format, than a traditional conference. Experts from across the industry will give presentations on a specific topic, from How To […]

Amazon today introduced the latest in smart store tech with the introduction of the Amazon Dash Cart, a grocery store shopping cart that identifies then charges you for the items you place inside its basket. The cart will first be made available at the Amazon grocery store opening in Woodland Hills, California later this year, […]

Amazon this morning announced a partnership with Crossover Health to build worker healthcare facilities near its fulfillment centers. The plan is still in a pilot phase, as the commerce giant employs the services of Crossover, which builds clinics for corporate clients. The startup has built such facilities for Apple and Facebook, and was even rumored […]

The UK government has confirmed a widely expected U-turn related to “high risk” 5G vendors linked to the Chinese state — attributing the policy shift to the US recently imposing tighter sanctions on Huawei’s access to its technologies. UK digital minister Oliver Dowden told parliament the new policy will bar telcos from buying 5G kit […]

Jyoti Bansal was part of the AppDynamics founding team, a company that Cisco bought in 2017 for $3.7 billion. He might have been content to rest on that big win, but instead he went on to launch Harness and a venture capital arm, Unusual Ventures. Today, he announced his newest company called Traceable, which attacks […]

In this pandemic world, in-person meetings are a thing of the past. Most meetings these days are done via video conference, and no company has capitalized on the shift quite like Zoom. Macro, a new FirstMark-backed company, is looking to capitalize on the capitalization. To Capitalism! Sorry. Let’s get back on track. Macro is a […]

These should be trying times for an app whose sole purpose is to collect information on where people travel and reward them for sharing it. However, not only has Miles, the startup company founded by Jigar Shah, survived the pandemic, it managed to attract new capital from a strategic investor during the months where everyone […]

The 2021 Bronco knows you have gadgets, and it’s here for them. Located above the dash, before the windshield, is an accessory mounting bar. Mount your iPhone here. Attach your radar detector or GoPro or dashcam or whatever. It’s fantastic, and I hope similar solutions comes to more vehicles. The Ford Bronco has a lot […]

Investors’ love affair with new, plant-based alternatives to animal products continues as Blackstone Growth, a (newish) investment vehicle from one of the world’s largest financial services firms, said it led a $200 million into the colossus of oat-milk brands, Oatly. The Malmö based company also attracted some of the biggest names in entertainment, consumer business, […]

RealityEngines.AI, the machine learning startup co-founded by former AWS and Google exec Bindu Reddy, today announced that it is rebranding as Abacus.AI and launching its autonomous AI service into general availability. In addition, the company also today disclosed that it has raised a $13 million Series A round led by Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi, who […]

Sentry, the Accel-backed company that creates bug-monitoring software for app developers, announced its latest product today. Called Performance Monitoring, it is frontend performance monitoring software for Python and Javascript. The company, whose investors also include New Enterprise Associates, said the feature can reduce the amount of time spent fixing errors to a few minutes by […]

Spotify is today introducing a new feature aimed at helping people discover interesting and popular podcasts. The company this morning announced the launch of two brand-new podcast charts, Top Podcasts and Trending Podcasts, which will showcase both the overall most-listened to and the biggest movers, respectively. The new feature will arrive in the Spotify mobile […]

Smokers and pellet grills are growing in popularity, likely because a lot more people are cooking at home – and looking for other ways to up their home chef game. The Asmoke Pellet Grill, which is currently in the final stretch of a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, has a price point that’s far below most […]

Working these days is not what it used to be. To enforce social distancing and slow the spread of the COVID-19 health pandemic, many of us have decamped from our offices to our homes, we only connect with colleagues and others virtually, and it’s all too easy to lose sight of our focus and strategy […]

Acquia, the commercial company built on top of the open source Drupal content management system has pushed to be more than a publishing platform in recent years, using several strategic acquisitions to move into managing customer experience, and today the company announced a new approach to developing and marketing on the Drupal Cloud. This involves […]

At its virtual Cloud Next ’20 event, Google Cloud today announced Confidential VMs, a new type of virtual machine that makes use of the company’s work around confidential computing to ensure that data isn’t just encrypted at rest but also while it is in memory. “We already employ a variety of isolation and sandboxing techniques […]

Apparently, the internet is still popular. With the novel coronavirus marooning people at home for work and play, those “tubes” carrying our data back and forth have become ever more important to our livelihoods. Yet while we often as consumers think of the internet as what we buy from a service provider like Spectrum or […]

For many freelance photographers, marketing their businesses and editing photos takes as much time, if not much more, than photoshoots. Founded in 2017, Auckland-based Narrative helps professional photographers with tools including a website builder and Narrative Select, an AI-based tool that identifies the best frames from a shoot, cutting down the amount of time it […]

At its virtual Cloud Next ’20 event, Google today announced a number of updates to its cloud portfolio, but the public alpha launch of BigQuery Omni is probably the highlight of this year’s event. Powered by Google Cloud’s Anthos hybrid-cloud platform, BigQuery Omni allows developers to use the BigQuery engine to analyze data that sits […]

Feel that? That’s the unmistakable and overwhelming sensation of nostalgia for your misspent youth coursing through your blood, as the 35th anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System is sneaking up on you. The original NES turns 35 years old tomorrow, and to celebrate another shocking reminder of our own mortality, Lego just announced another fantastic-looking […]

Google Cloud today announced the private beta launch of Assured Workloads for Government, the company’s version of what some of its competitors would call their “government cloud.” With Assured Workloads for Government, Google Cloud ensures that government agencies and their contractors can ensure that all data stays in its U.S. regions. Government agencies can also […]

Bharti Airtel announced on Tuesday it has partnered with Verizon* to launch BlueJeans video-conferencing service in India to serve business customers in the world’s second largest internet market. The video conferencing service, branded as Airtel BlueJeans in India, offers “enterprise-grade security” (which includes encrypted calls, ability to lock and password protect a meeting and generate […]

Ulysses, a popular writing app for the Mac, iPhone and iPad, is receiving an update with some new features. The user interface has been slightly redesigned with a new right-hand column that acts as a dashboard. There’s also a new grammar and style check feature that goes beyond what’s provided on Apple’s platform by default. […]

This is Stretch — or, more precisely, the Stretch Research Edition. The name certainly conveys the tall, skinny and minimalist design of the home helper robot. Stretch is different and somehow familiar, with a straightforward technical design that adapts a number of standard robotic elements designed to offer a versatile machine that’s capable of navigating […]

The next time Harold and Kumar go to a White Castle, there may be a robot making their French Fries. In one of the first trials of a robotic fry cook at a national burger chain, White Castle said it would work with Pasadena, Calif.-based Miso Robotics to test that company’s robotic chef at a […]

Orbital Witness, a U.K.-based legaltech startup developing “AI-powered” software to transform the £4 billion U.K. property due diligence market, has raised £3.3 million in seed funding. The round is led by LocalGlobe and Outward VC, with participation from previous investors, including Seedcamp and JLL Spark. It brings Orbital Witness’s total funding to £4.5 million. Launched […]

App Annie is building on last year’s acquisition of analytics company Libring with the launch of a new version of Libring, rebranded as App Annie Ascend. CEO Ted Krantz told me that while Ascend will be sold to existing App Annie customers, the real hope is to reach “a dramatically different market” as App Annie […]

Nigeria’s e-commerce startup TradeDepot, which connects international brands to small businesses in Africa, has raised $10 million in a new round of funding to expand its business into financial services and credit offerings for retailers. First launched in 2016, TradeDepot has built up a network of 40,000 small businesses in Nigeria and connects them to […]

Huawei reported a 13.1% year-over-year revenue growth in the first half of 2020, even if countries around the world continued to weigh up bans on its equipment and smartphone sales shrink amid the pandemic, the telecom giant said in a brief on Monday. The firm’s revenue reached 454 billion yuan ($64.88 billion) in the period, […]

Luckin Coffee has replaced co-founder and (now ex-) chairman Charles Zhengyao Lu, despite his efforts to maintain control over the troubled Beijing-based coffee chain. The company disclosed in an SEC filing on Monday that Jinyi Guo, another co-founder, board member and former acting chief executive of Luckin, has been appointed as its new chairman and […]