Crunch Hype

Amazon has announced that it will acquire Zoox, a self-driving startup founded in 2014, which has raised nearly $1 billion in funding and which aims to develop autonomous driving technology, including vehicles, for the purposes of providing a full-stack solution for ride-hailing. Zoox will continue to exist as a standalone business according to Amazon’s announcement, […]

The direct-to-consumer health insurer Oscar has raised another $225 million in its latest, late-stage round of funding as its vision of tech-enabled health care services to drive down consumer costs becomes more and more of a reality. In an effort to prevent a patient’s potential exposure to the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, most healthcare practices are […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was a bit feisty, but that’s only because Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas and I were all in pretty good spirits. It would have been hard to not be, given how much good stuff there was to […]

Salt Lake City’s Spiff has announced a $10 million round of funding to expand the sales and marketing efforts for its service that automates commission payments for sales people. Some of the biggest names in startup tech are using the service to pay their sales force including Brex, Workfront, Algolia, and the publicly traded startup, […]

For Amazon, it’s never too late to try something in India. The e-commerce giant is exploring ways to further spread its tentacles in the largely offline, technology-free neighborhood stores in one of its key overseas markets. The American firm’s latest attempt is called “Smart Stores.” For this India-specific program, Amazon is providing physical stores with […]

Another brick in the wall for vacation rental platforms: Amsterdam is booting Airbnb and other such platforms from three districts in the city’s old center from July 1, further tightening its rules for such services. In other districts in the famous city of canals, vacation rentals will only be permitted with a permit from next Wednesday, […]

Indian online learning startup Byju’s has nearly doubled its valuation in a year as it adds one more high-profile name to the list of its backers: Bond. In a statement on Friday, Bangalore-based Byju’s said it had raised an undisclosed amount from the VC fund co-founded by Mary Meeker. The first-female founded VC firm’s check […]

Ford rolled out all the stops Thursday evening for the reveal of its all-new F-150 truck, right down to the splashy videos dominated by electric guitar riffs. Heck, the automaker even cast the sharp-tongued Denis Leary as its MC. Of course, none of that really matters. It’s all about what Ford has done to improve […]

Lordstown Motors unveiled Thursday a prototype of its electric future, a pickup truck with four in-wheel hub motors and a few other features all aimed squarely at attracting contractors and other buyers in the commercial market. The unveiling by this one-year-old Ohio startup didn’t get too deep into the details about the electric pickup truck […]

After closing stores across four states, this was no doubt a bit of an inevitable: Following reporting earlier today, Apple has confirmed that it will be shutting down an additional 14 stores in Florida, joining the two it closed last week. The company sent a statement to TechCrunch that is essentially identical to the one […]

Karat is a new startup promising to build better banking products for the creators who make a living on YouTube, Instagram, Twitch and other online platforms. Today it’s unveiling its first product — the Karat Black Card. The startup, which was part of accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch, is also announcing that it has […]

There are some wearables out there in the world that are making claims around COVID-19 and their ability to detect it, prevent it, certify that you don’t have it and more. But a new wearable device from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory might actually be able to do the most to prevent the spread of COVID-19 […]

There’s huge news today for Animal Crossing: New Horizons players still devoted to the most pleasantly addictive way to stay kind of sane stuck at home during the pandemic. In the biggest update yet to the Nintendo Switch hit, players will soon be able to explore the water around their island. Oh — and Gulliver […]

The fact that Apple takes a 30% cut of subscriptions purchased via the App Store isn’t news. But since the company threatened to boot email app Hey from the platform last week unless its developers paid the customary tribute, the tech world and lawmakers are giving Apple’s revenue share a harder look. Although Apple’s Senior […]

Virgin Galactic has passed a key milestone in its SpaceShipTwo qualification program. The company performed a glide flight, which means that it was flying its VSS Unity spacecraft unpowered in glide configuration, after its release from its carrier aircraft, a modified Boeing 747 called VMS Eve. This flight was the second such test flight that […]

Waymo’s self-driving software footprint is expanding — this time in a partnership with Volvo Car Group. The two companies announced Thursday an “exclusive” partnership to integrate Waymo’s self-driving software into a new electric vehicle designed for ride-hailing. Volvo and Waymo provided few details on the partnership and what this might actually look like except that […]

YouTube is taking direct aim at TikTok. The company announced on Wednesday it’s beginning to test a new feature on mobile that will allow users to record 15-second long multi-segment videos. That’s the same length as the default on TikTok as well as Instagram’s new TikTok clone, Reels. Users in the new YouTube experiment will […]

The latest version of iOS adds a few smart features intended for use by people with hearing and vision impairments, but some of which may be helpful to just about anybody. The most compelling new feature is perhaps Sound Recognition, which creates a notification whenever the phone detects one of a long list of common […]

As perennial front-runner for the title of probably-the-most-evil tech company, Amazon has a long way to go to rehabilitate its image as a take-no-prisoners, industry-consolidating wealth machine. In a bold effort to do so, the company announced today that it would buy the rights to Seattle’s KeyArena, an aging stadium currently under redevelopment in the […]

As part of the Collision from Home conference, Aclima chief executive Davida Herzl released a new data set made in conjunction with Google. Free to the scientific community, the data is the culmination of four years of data collection and aggregation resulting in 42 million air quality measurements throughout the state of California. The company’s […]

Earlier today, insurtech unicorn Lemonade filed an S-1/A, providing context into how the former startup may price its IPO and what the company may be worth when it begins to trade. According to its new filing, Lemonade expects its IPO to price at $23 to $26 per share. As the company intends to sell 11 […]

The world is rife with me-too startups, which makes it all the more refreshing when a founder comes along that manages to find a broken market that’s hiding in plain sight. That’s what Mike Kennedy appears to be doing with Koala, a young outfit determined to update the stodgy world of property time-share management, wherein […]

Video chat has long been one of the chief selling points of smart screens like the Amazon Echo Show and Google’s Nest Hub Max (the regular Hub is still lacking a camera, mind). But until today, the latter only offered users the option for one-on-one calls. That’s all well and good for the most part, […]

SoftBank and Alibaba seem to be pulling apart, Amazon launches a no-code app builder and a new congressional bill takes a different approach to online protections. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 25, 2020. 1. Masayoshi Son resigns from board of Alibaba; defends SoftBank Group’s investment strategy SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son said he’s leaving […]

The best possible time to launch a UV phone sanitizer would have been about five months ago. The second best possible time, however, is right now. When the COVID-19 pandemic really started hitting the global community in earnest, there was a run on these once fairly niche products from companies with names like PhoneSoap. In […]

With iOS 14, Apple is going to update Apple Maps with some important new features, such as cycling directions, electric vehicle routing and curated guides. But the app is also going to learn one neat trick. In dense areas where you can’t get a precise location, Apple Maps will prompt you to raise your phone […]

If trends hold, our data forecasting models predict a return to 2019 levels of foot traffic sometime in September: September 6 for the U.S. at large, and the 19th for California in particular.

Calling all early-stage startup founders. You have a mere 48 hours left to save on your ticket to engage with leading experts at TC Early Stage 2020 on July 21-22. No one’s born knowing how to build a successful startup, and this online event provides the essential building blocks you need to flatten your learning […]

Apple unveiled macOS 11 Big Sur earlier this week and talked about some of the improvements for Safari. In addition to native extensions, Apple is adding support for web extensions. It’s going to make it much easier to port an existing extension from Chrome, Firefox or Edge. The company shared more details about how it’s […]

Apple’s Face ID and Touch ID have made it easier for users to log into their mobile devices like iPhones and iPads and on some Macs offering the Touch ID button. Now Apple is bringing Face ID and Touch ID to the web. At the company’s virtual Worldwide Developers Conference this week, Apple introduced a […]

Google announced today that it’s working on a “new news experience” that will launch later this year, for which it will pay publishers to license their content. Axios broke the news, with Google’s Brad Bender offering more details in a blog post, in which he said the project will first launch on Google News and […]

Facebook announced Thursday that it would introduce a notification screen warning users if they try to share content that’s more than 90 days old. They’ll be given the choice to “go back” or to click through if they’d still like to share the story knowing that it isn’t fresh. Facebook acknowledged that old stories shared […]

This morning, then, we'll catch up on Accolade's initial public offering and what its proposed pricing may tell us about the state of the IPO market.

Homebuilding is not for the faint of heart, particularly those who want to build something custom. Selecting the right architect and designer, the myriad of contractors, the complexity of building codes and siting, the regulatory approvals from local authorities. It’s a full-time job — and you don’t even have a roof built over your head. […]

Back in 2013, Robin McGraw, wife of U.S. television personality Dr. Phil, launched an app to help domestic violence victims covertly signal for distress. It was quickly heralded as a potential lifesaver for those in harm’s way. Aspire News, which claims over 300,000 downloads, is disguised to look like an innocuous news reading app that […]

Even before the pandemic pushed most employees to work from home, sales people often worked outside of the office. Salesforce introduced a new tool today at the Trailheadx Conference called Salesforce Anywhere that’s designed to let teams collaborate and share data wherever they happen to be. Salesforce VP of product, Michael Machado says that the […]

In the first few minutes of pitching his new company, Candidate Labs, Jonathan Downey admitted that he’s operating in a market that is “done to death”: recruitment technology. But Downey, whose previous startup Airware shut down after burning $118 million, remains optimistic because of a little company named Zoom. “There were lots and lots of […]

Restaurants, hotels and other public venues where we spend leisure and business time have started to reopen in many parts of the world after a period of going dark to try to slow down the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Now, a startup called SevenRooms, which builds software to help those venues with their guest […]

The new, Los Angeles-based online professional network for Black talent, Valence, has launched a new initiative called the Valence Funding Network to link Black entrepreneurs with top partners at firms including Accel, Sequoia, GGV, First Round Capital, Bessemer Ventures, Greylock, Upfront Ventures, and Collab Capital. “For years, Black entrepreneurs have been told that Silicon Valley […]

The coronavirus pandemic has bruised and battered many technology startups, but it has also boosted a small few. One such company is Zoom, which has shouldered the task of keeping us connected to one another in the midst of remote work and social distancing. So, of course, we’re absolutely thrilled to have the chance to […]

Digital marketing has left billboards in the dust, making it far easier to reach people online. But that doesn’t mean brands should ignore the principles that made billboards work in the first place.

Frank Patterson, president and CEO of Pinewood Atlanta Studios, said that in March, his studio was “utterly full” with two major films and three streaming shows in production. (Pinewood doesn’t disclose what’s currently shooting on its 1 million-plus square feet of studio and office space, but past films made at the Atlanta studio include “Ant-Man […]

Entrepreneurs-turned-investors are in a truly unique position in the tech world, with experience on both sides of the table and unique insights into how businesses should operate and grow. Alexa von Tobel takes that breadth of experience and those unique insights to a new level, as a founder who has pretty much exclusively started her […]

NASA is working with two other of its largest global space agency partners, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on a combined effort to collect satellite-based Earth observation data and provide it via a dashboard in order to help monitor the impacts of COVID-19. The dashboard combines data collected […]

NASA is getting ready for its Artemis program, which seeks to return Americans to the Moon and help establish a permanent presence for humans on the lunar surface, with a new crowdsourcing competition launched in partnership with HeroX, seeking designs for a better way for astronauts to pee and poo on the Moon. Specifically, the […]

This morning Hopin, a London-based startup building virtual events technology, announced that it has raised a $40 million Series A led by IVP. According to the company, Salesforce’s corporate venture arm Salesforce Ventures also took part in the round, as did a number of its prior investors, including Slack’s venture capital group the Slack Fund, […]

Storyblocks, the subscription-based stock media service, today announced that it has been acquired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners. The firm previously backed companies like Wayfair (and then exited that specific investment in 2017) and Custom Ink. Great Hill also acquired Gizmodo Media Group in 2019. Storyblocks and Great Hill did not disclose the […]

New Enterprise Associates has launched a new investment initiative with the Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency. The new partnership, called Connect Ventures, said it will identify and accelerate the growth of early-stage, consumer-focused businesses formed in the wake of the global pandemic. In a world where everything is a commodity and nothing is more […]

We last surveyed VCs about their advertising and marketing investment strategies back in January — which is to say, in a completely different world, before the coronavirus pandemic began to wreak havoc on the global economy. While there don’t appear to be any comprehensive numbers yet about the effect on digital advertising (which is, after […]

European lawmakers are eyeing binding transparency requirements for Internet platforms in a Digital Services Act (DSA) due to be drafted by the end of the year. But the question of how to create governance structures that provide regulators and researchers with meaningful access to data so platforms can be held accountable for the content they’re […]