Crunch Hype

Facebook is expanding the availability of the tools it offers to help game streamers and other online creators make money. The social network first launched fan subscriptions in early 2018, giving a small group of creators in the United States and the United Kingdom the ability to charge their fans a $4.99 monthly fee for […]

Handwashing for the Apple Watch happily slotted alongside face masks for Memojis in the list of COVID-19-related features the company introduced at last week’s WWDC keynote. It’s a pedestrian action, something we take entirely for granted the several times a day we do it. Over the past five months, however, handwashing has taken on a […]

Scotts Miracle-Gro, the lawn care and fertilizer giant that has opened up a secondary business as a pioneer in cannabis and hemp cultivation, is launching a $50 million corporate venture capital fund called1868 Ventures. Is it strange that a fertilizer company would commit to a $50 million fund to invest in two to three startup […]

Amazon said on Monday it has eliminated all single-use plastic in its packaging across its fulfillment centers in India, delivering on a pledge it made last year to achieve this goal by June. The American e-commerce group said it had replaced packaging materials such as bubble wraps with paper cushions and was also using “100% […]

Like it or loathe it, video has proven to be the most engaging of all mediums across the web, and today a company out of Israel called Artlist — which provides royalty-free libraries of music, sound effects and even video itself to enhance video content — is announcing a significant growth round of $48 million, […]

Zuoyebang, a Beijing-headquartered startup that runs an online learning app, said on Monday it has raised $750 million in a new financing round as investors demonstrate their continued trust in — and focus on — Asia’s booming edtech market. U.S. investment firm Tiger Global and Hong Kong-based private equity firm FountainVest Partners led the six-year-old […]

Extra Crunch is now live in Romania. That adds to our existing support in Europe in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and U.K.. There’s been reason to be bullish on Romania’s technology sector for some time. A TechCrunch op-ed called the country the “Silicon Valley of Transylvania” in 2016, noting that […]

While many in Silicon Valley might prefer to forget about investor Mike Rothenberg roughly four years after his young venture firm began to implode, his story is still being written, and the latest chapter doesn’t bode well for the 36-year-old. While Rothenberg earlier tangled with the Securities & Exchange Commission and lost, it was a […]

E-commerce giant Flipkart is planning to launch a hyperlocal service that would enable customers to buy items from local stores and have those delivered to them in an hour and a half or less. Yatra, an online travel and hotel ticketing service, is exploring a new business line altogether: Supplying office accessories. Flipkart and Yatra […]

Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review. Last week, I wrote about Apple’s App Store controversy, which I’m kind of revisiting this week through the lens of how Apple’s WWDC announcements tease a change to what apps fundamentally look like in the future. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get […]

In the war between subscription video on-demand (SVOD) services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, Starz has been growing on the sidelines and fighting to be the preferred add-on for consumers on top of their primary subscription. That journey has required the longtime premium cable TV network to rethink its target audience, content strategy and […]

Four TechCrunch staffers discuss the potential impacts of the government's decision to halt all new work visas through the end of the year.

When “The Politician” debuted on Netflix last year, it divided the hosts of the Original Content podcast. After season two, we were more united: The show is not good. To be clear, “The Politician” is still pretty entertaining, thanks to a consistent dedication to packing as many ridiculous plot twists as possible into any given episode. […]

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. Hi friends and first-time readers. Welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to […]

While the US tech industry relentlessly tries to do business with the rest of the world, this week it became further embroiled in national politics. High-skill immigration visas have been suspended until the end of the year by the Trump administration, precluding thousands of present and future startup employees and founders from coming to the US and building companies here.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per […]

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is leaving Initialized Capital, the investment firm he co-founded in 2011 with Garry Tan, as first reported by Axios and confirmed by TechCrunch. The move comes weeks after Ohanian publicly stepped down from the Reddit board of directors, with Y Combinator president Michael Seibel taking his spot. Ohanian launched Initialized Capital […]

Pavel Durov’s grand cryptocurrency dreams for his Telegram messaging service are ending with an $18.5 million civil settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a pledge to return the more than $1.2 billion that investors had put into its TON digital token. The settlement ends a months long legal battle between the company […]

TuSimple, the self-driving truck startup backed by Sina, Nvidia, UPS and Tier 1 supplier Mando Corporation, is headed back into the marketplace in search of new capital from investors. The company has hired investment bank Morgan Stanley to help it raise $250 million, according to multiple sources familiar with the effort. Morgan Stanley recently sent […]

Spot.IM, which offers a platform for publishers (including TechCrunch) to manage their user comments, announced this week that it’s rebranding as OpenWeb. CEO and co-founder Nadav Shoval told me that the new name reflects a vision that’s far grander and more ambitious than the company’s initial product, a location-based messaging service. “We all felt that […]

Games and esports analytics firm Newzoo released its highly cited annual report on the size and state of the video gaming industry yesterday. The firm is predicting 2020 global game industry revenue from consumers of $159.3 billion, a 9.3% increase year-over-year. Newzoo predicts the market will surpass $200 billion by the end of 2023. Importantly, […]

Sometimes you just can’t get a [L]uckin’ break. After announcing this morning that it is ending its fight to stay listed on Nasdaq, China-based coffee chain and delivery company Luckin Coffee announced in a filing with the SEC that it is requiring that its chairman, Lu Zhengyao, resign. Luckin Coffee will unluckin’ly delist from Nasdaq […]

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a forthcoming weekly newsletter from the TC crew about startups, money, and markets. You can sign up for it here, and receive it regularly when it formally launches in a few weeks. You can email me about it here, or talk to me on Twitter. Let’s go! In the last […]

Shares of Agora, a China and U.S.-based “real-time engagement” API company, soared today after it went public. Yesterday Agora priced 17.5 million shares at $20 apiece, up from its target range of $16 to $18 per share. The firm raised $350 in its debut, or around 10 times its Q1 2020 revenue and is now […]

Telemedicine is becoming more widely embraced by the day — and not just for humans. With a pet in roughly 65% of U.S. homes, there is now a dizzying number of companies enabling vets to meet with their furry patients remotely, including Petriage, Anipanion, TeleVet, Linkyvet, TeleTails, VetNOW, PawSquad, Vetoclock and Petpro Connect. One of […]

With the game industry booming, more entrepreneurs are evaluating where to base their new startup or open a new office for their existing company. The U.S. government’s block on H1-B and L-1 visas will encourage American game startups to add an office abroad much sooner than they otherwise would have. But where? This spring, I […]

Nearly 40 million Americans are unemployed, and a recent study that examined more than 66,000 tech job layoffs found that sales and customer success roles are most vulnerable amid COVID-19. In response, some quarters of Silicon Valley are abuzz about a long-standing technology: reskilling, or training individuals to adopt an entirely new skillset or career […]

In a blog post this Friday afternoon, Y Combinator’s president Geoff Ralston said that the accelerator would make two changes to its terms for startups. The first would see the size of the standard deal for YC startups decline from $150,000 for 7% (roughly a $2.1 million post-money valuation) to $125,000 for the same equity […]

As advertisers pull away from Facebook to protest the social networking giant’s hands-off approach to misinformation and hate speech, the company is instituting a number of stronger policies to woo them back. In a livestreamed segment of the company’s weekly all-hands meeting, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recapped some of the steps Facebook is already taking, and […]

It’s now o’clock, founders. A mere 12 hours stands between you and a chance to compete in Startup Battlefield and launch your pre-Series A startup during Disrupt 2020 — in front of the world’s influential technorati. You won’t find a bigger launching pad, and this window of extraordinary opportunity slams shut on June 26 at 11:59 […]

When Apple confirmed it had acquired Fleetsmith, a mobile device management vendor, on Wednesday, it seemed like a straightforward purchase, but Fleetsmith customers quickly learned a key piece of functionality had stopped working — and many weren’t happy about it. Apple systems administrators began complaining on social media on the morning of the acquisition announcement […]

Advertiser momentum against Facebook’s content and monetization policies continues to grow. Last night, Verizon (which owns TechCrunch) said it will be pausing advertising on Facebook and Instagram “until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable and is consistent with what we’ve done with YouTube and other partners.” Then today, it was joined […]

It's part of structural inequality in our society, where we're building businesses that are optimized for their financial return rather than their return to society.

The events of the past few months have shaken the lives of everyone, but especially Black people in the U.S. COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted members of the Black community while police violence has recently claimed the lives of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and others. Two weeks ago, two Black transgender women, […]

One the more nuanced changes is that the reform could help smaller funds in cities outside of major hubs like San Francisco and New York raise capital.

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has had a number of unexpected impacts on global economic activity — most of them negative. But the pandemic has also highlighted the need for alternative solutions to challenges where traditional solutions now prove either too costly, or too difficult to do while maintaining good health and safety practices. Near Space […]

Up until 2013, Adobe sold its software in cardboard boxes that were distributed mostly by third party vendors.

Amazon makes an autonomous driving acquisition, Microsoft closes its retail stores and health insurance startup Oscar raises $225 million. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 26, 2020. 1. Amazon to acquire autonomous driving startup Zoox According to Amazon’s announcement, Zoox will continue to exist as a standalone business, with current CEO Aicha Evans continuing in […]

Two years after closing their debut fund of $150 million, Base10 co-founders Adeyemi Ajao and TJ Nahigian, are back with a $250 million investment fund and a sense of vindication for their thesis of investing in startups making automation for the people. For Ajao, an immigrant who spent grew up in Nigeria and Spain before […]

Byju’s is in advanced stages of talks to acquire Doubtnut, a two-year-old education learning app, as the Indian edtech giant looks to expand its reach in smaller cities and towns in the world’s second-largest internet market. Three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that the acquisition offer from nine-year-old Byju’s values the younger startup […]

Last year The Europas Awards for European Tech Startups was held at a sunny garden party next to a historic museum in London. Last night, because of the global Coronavirus pandemic, it was held over Zoom. But the enthusiasm and success of Europe’s tech startup industry still shone through the list of finalists and winners. […]

As far as pandemic-proof businesses go, a startup for barbershops isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind — unless you raised millions just days before barbershops were shut down across the country. Dave Salvant and Songe LaRon, co-founders of New York-based Squire, a back-end barbershop management tool for independent businesses they launched in […]

We’re less than a month away from launching TC Early Stage 2020, our interactive online bootcamp, that runs July 21-22. Don’t miss out on more than 50 expert-led workshops focused on the core subjects every early-stage startup founder needs to ace. But hold up — today is your last chance to score an early-bird deal. […]

“Tenet” has been viewed as an important bellwether for Hollywood. After all, director Christopher Nolan has long been a surefire blockbuster machine, courtesy of films like the “Dark Knight” trilogy, “Inception” and “Interstellar.” The mysterious thriller will be a clear test of whether audiences are willing to brave the indoor theater experience, even as COVID-19 […]

SpaceX is launching yet another Starlink mission – its fourth in a month – on Thursday afternoon at 4:18 PM EDT (1:18 PM PDT). The launch will carry 57 of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, which will join the existing constellation in space in order to prepare for SpaceX’s launch of Starlink broadband internet service. Also on […]

Housing has been constructed for millennia, and while clearly our modern abodes are ever so slightly better than the elk tents we used to live in, the construction techniques behind housing today haven’t progressed all that much. What has progressed are prices — it’s more expensive than ever to build a modern unit, and that’s […]

You might have been considering – or have already started – picking up a new hobby this year, particularly one you can do at home. Podcasting seems to be a popular option, and RODE is a company that has done more to cater specifically to this audience than just about any other audio company out […]

Agora's financials make its IPO pricing a neat puzzle, so let's pull apart the good and the bad to better understand why the market was willing to pay than the company anticipated.

It was one of the fastest growing startups in modern history and one of the most anticipated IPOs of 2019. But now, following the company’s disclosure of a potential fraud of hundreds of millions of dollars, Luckin’s journey is starting to meet its end. The company, in a statement today filed with the SEC, said […]

As other retailers begin the slow, cautious move to reopen, Microsoft has announced that will be permanently shutting down the vast majority of its retail stores. There are some exceptions, including flagships in urban hubs including London, New York City, Sydney and its own campus in Redmond, Washington, but the remainder of the locations are […]