Crunch Hype

The developers behind Fleksy have launched an SDK for Android and iOS to scale demand for white labelling of their AI keyboard software which bakes in privacy-safe next-word prediction. Swipe-style input (which it calls Fleksywave) is also in beta and slated to roll out soon. Fleksy competes for smartphone users’ digits with giants like Google’s Gboard […]

The global health pandemic has shed new light on how essential it is to have accurate data about an individual’s situation to assess the severity of his or her condition, and for those responding to emergencies to have it as instantly as possible to make the right choices in terms of care. Today, a startup […]

On June 5, Alexis Ohanian announced he was stepping down from Reddit’s board of directors. “I believe resignation can actually be an act of leadership from people in power right now,” the site’s founder and former CEO announced. “To everyone fighting to fix our broken nation: do not stop.” The move came as communities across […]

One of the huge challenges companies like enterprise SaaS vendors face with new customers is getting customer data into their service. It’s a problem that Flatfile founders faced first hand in their jobs, and they decided to solve it. Today, the company announced a healthy $7.6 million seed investment to expand on that vision. The […]

Platforms still aren’t doing enough to tackle disinformation related to the coronavirus crisis, the European Commission said today. In a Communication it is pressing tech platforms to produce monthly reports about their efforts in this area, asking for more detailed data on actions being taken to promote authoritative content; improve users’ awareness; and limit coronavirus […]

Figma is one of the fastest-growing companies in the world of design and in the broader SaaS category. So it goes without saying that we’re absolutely thrilled to have Figma CEO Dylan Field join us at Early Stage, our virtual two-day conference on July 21 and 22, as a speaker. You can pick up a […]

A lot of founders start building one idea and in the process, find another one that is more alluring. Perhaps the most well-known example is Tiny Speck, a game publisher of a relatively uninteresting MMORPG where the founders grew sufficiently frustrated with their internal team communications tools that they migrated from game building to designing […]

Online fraud costs people and organizations billions of dollars each year — with one aspect alone, identity fraud, a $16.9 billion problem in 2019, says Javelin Research, and each dollar of spend online estimated to cost $3.13 in fraud recovery, according to LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Today, a startup that’s built a platform to identify and prevent […]

Innovation Department, a startup building a portfolio of direct-to-consumer brands, is announcing that it has raised its first outside capital in a $3.7 million funding round It’s only launched one of those brands so far — WellPath, which offers customized nutritional supplements. But the next, a pet wellness brand called Finn, is scheduled to launch […]

The hits keep on coming with Extra Crunch Live: Next week, we’ll have Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra live for a chat on Tuesday, June 16 at 2 PM EDT/11 AM PDT. Extra Crunch members get the chance to ask Vohra questions directly, so be sure to sign up ahead of the call. Superhuman […]

Five-month-old Indonesian startup Ula that aims to help small retailers solve inefficiencies that they face in supply chain, inventory, and working capital, said today it has raised $10.5 million in a new financing round to grow its business in the Southeast Asian market. The Seed round was led by Sequoia India and Lightspeed India. SMDV, […]

Online payments are often synonymous with card payments, but today a startup that’s built a profitable alternative, based around making and taking payments by way of a bank transfer, is announcing a round of funding amid a surge of growth. Trustly, a startup from Sweden that has built a platform to make it as easy […]

For years, Chinese e-commerce exporters have been learning the ins and outs of ad placement on Facebook, Instagram and other mainstream social media platforms to reach customers around the world. But they recently spotted a new way to grab people’s attention, one that has never felt more familiar. Video influencers. Shopping via videos is currently […]

This is one [expletive deleted] tough time to be an early-stage startup founder. But giving up simply isn’t part of startup DNA. Instead, it’s time to do whatever it takes to catch the eyes and imagination of investors, media and other tech and business influencers. Here’s an easy way to begin. Apply to be a […]

Uber is launching its Uber Cash digital wallet feature in Sub-Saharan Africa through a partnership with San Francisco based — Nigerian founded — fintech firm Flutterwave. The arrangement will allow riders to top up Uber wallets using the dozens of remittance partners active on Flutterwave’s Pan-African network. Flutterwave operates as a B2B payments gateway network […]

No one likes to talk about urinary incontinence, but the loss of bladder control is something that impacts millions of people around the globe. Women are especially prone to developing related issues because of pregnancies, childbirth, and menopause, all of which can affect the urinary tract and the muscles that support it. According to a […]

Techstars has got the stars in its eyes, and space on the brain as it doubles down on investment programs that aim to enable the commercial space industry to boldly go where it has never gone before. On the heels of SpaceX’s historic mission last weekend taking astronauts to the International Space Station, the space […]

A Swiss startup called HMCARE, spun out of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, has raised a million Swiss Francs (equivalent to about $105 million) to commercialize its transparent and relatively eco-friendly surgical masks. The founders were inspired by healthcare workers in the 2015 Ebola outbreak and at children’s hospitals around the world working closely […]

The IBM Cloud is currently suffering a major outage, and with that, multiple services that are hosted on the platform are also down, including everybody’s favorite tech news aggregator, Techmeme. It looks like the problems started around 2:30pm PT and spread from there. Best we can tell, this is a worldwide problem and involves a […]

Unlike most sectors, edtech has been booming over the last few months. Flashcards startup Quizlet is now a unicorn, digital textbook company Top Hat is finding unprecedented surges in usage and student success business Edsights raised nearly $2 million from high-profile investors, all from inbound interest. Investors are so confident that homeschooling might become a […]

Conspiracy theories claiming a connection between 5G technology and the coronavirus have been around since the pandemic’s early days, and apparently they’re still going strong. So strong, in fact, that Twitter began applying a label to some tweets about COVID-19 and 5G, encouraging users to “get the facts” about the virus. As Business Insider reported, […]

We're tired of holding back anger and sadness as we talk about these issues, knowing our industry isn’t even doing the bare minimum to support Black investors.

In the past few weeks, several venture capital firms have published different variations of the same pledge: we’ll do a better job supporting the Black community. My timeline, and I’m assuming yours too, has been filled with statements from non-Black venture capitalists saying that they will rethink how to be more inclusive with their hiring […]

Podhero is offering listeners a new way to pay their favorite podcasters. The startup behind the app is led by Pete Curley and Garret Heaton, who previously founded HipChat (sold to Atlassian) and launched Swoot last year, which was focused on helping you find new podcasts through sharing. In a Medium post published today, Curley wrote […]

We’re just 24 hours away from the second installment of Pitchers & Pitches. If you want to whip your elevator pitch into shape, select your favorite beverage and join us for an interactive pitch-off and feedback session. We kick off tomorrow, June 10 at 4pm ET / 1pm PT. It won’t cost you a penny, […]

On May 29, the president of the United States of America tweeted, simply, “REVOKE 230!” The message was all caps, with an exclamation mark for good measure. The message was nothing, if not direct, following the issuing of an executive order, which, among other things, seeks to strip away key protections under Section 230 of […]

Nikola Motor Company, the Arizona startup that made its debut as a publicly traded company June 4, will open reservations later this month for a hydrogen fuel cell electric pickup truck that was designed to compete with the Ford F-150. Reservations, or pre-orders, will open June 29 for the hydrogen-electric pickup truck known as the […]

Grow Credit, the startup that launched last year to help customers build out their credit scores by providing a credit line for online subscriptions like Spotify and Netflix, has added Mucker Labs as an investor and closed its seed round with $2 million in total commitments. The Los Angeles startup founded by serial entrepreneur Joe […]

Two men embodying the zenith of human villainy have admitted to making approximately a billion robocalls in the first few months of 2019 alone, and now face an FCC fine of $225 million and a lawsuit from multiple attorneys general that could amount to as much or more — not that they’ll actually end up […]

Axiom, a startup that helps companies deal with their internal data, has secured a new $4 million seed round led by U.K.-based Crane Venture Partners, with participation from LocalGlobe, Fly VC and Mango Capital. Notable angel investors include former Xamarin founder and current GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins. The company is […]

Amazon has promised vigilance against third-party price gouging since COVID-19 achieved global pandemic status. The company’s efforts have had mixed success, however, due in part to the sheer volume of vendors that utilize the company’s massive commerce platform. In a suit filed in California this week, 3M claims the seller was charging massively inflated prices […]

Facebook News, the social network’s dedicated section devoted to journalism, is today launching for all users in the U.S. The feature was first introduced in October 2019 as a limited test in the U.S. The product represents Facebook’s much-debated new effort in wooing publishers to its platform with the promise of increased distribution. In addition to […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This time around we’re recording what we call an Equity Shot, a single-topic show that we pull together whenever there’s a news item of sufficient weight that it demands we break our regular cadence and record a little […]

In a new letter addressed to executive leadership, a group of Microsoft employees is demanding that the Seattle-area company end its existing law enforcement contracts. As reported by OneZero, the letter, sent via email, emerged out of a Facebook group for young employees at the company. It addresses Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Executive Vice […]

The brutal police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, has prompted one of the greatest civil uprisings of the modern day. In the weeks following Floyd’s death, the conversation around diversity and inclusion, as well as tech’s role in upholding white supremacy, has returned to the forefront. But it is action, […]

This week saw protests spread across the world sparked by the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis last month. The U.S. hasn’t seen protests like this in a generation, with millions taking to the streets each day to lend their voice and support. But they […]

IBM’s CEO takes a stand on mass surveillance, Apple may soon make a big chip announcement and Google Maps gets new features to help users navigate transit safely. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 9, 2020. 1. IBM ends all facial recognition business as CEO calls out bias and inequality IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced […]

Nintendo has almost doubled the number of user accounts compromised by hackers in the past few months. The Japanese gaming giant originally said that 160,000 Nintendo accounts were compromised, exposing personal information like the account owner’s name, email address, date-of-birth and their country of residence. In an updated statement, the company said another 140,000 Nintendo […]

The protests and unrest of the last week have produced enormous volumes of footage documenting police brutality and other crimes. Where is the platform for this important evidence to be collected, collated, and made public? If a major tech company doesn’t step up to the plate soon it can only be attributed to hypocrisy and […]

It’s a winner-takes-all economy. More and more labor markets act as lotteries, where a couple of “superstar” workers make extremely outsized returns relative to their peers — who may well have started from the exact same starting line. In the tech world, two JavaScript engineers can potentially earn billions of dollars in differential compensation by […]

In January, personalized news app Flipboard announced it was expanding into local news. From the new “Local” tab in the app, Flipboard users can now keep up with their local news publications, including newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, college news sites and even blogs. Today, Flipboard says it’s expanded the local news feature to cover […]

Like many industries in the wake of the global pandemic, real estate seems to be completely frozen. Without viewings, housing sales are dipping; without customers, commercial leases aren’t getting signed; and without economic growth, property prices are declining as investors wait for clarity in the weeks and months ahead. On the tech side though, real […]

The Razer Kishi mostly got buried in a deluge of Razer announcements during CES (it was just too difficult to compete with 5G routers and a massive racing simulator). It’s not the first smartphone gaming peripheral — heck, it’s not even the first to adopt this particular form factor. But a company like Razer lending […]

Facebook is launching a new inbox on Messenger today to make it easier for business owners to respond to incoming customer messages from the same app they use to message friends and family. The update will allow businesses to manage all their communications from a single app, instead of having to toggle back and forth between apps […]

Twitter said Tuesday it is bringing Fleets, its version of Stories that lets users post ephemeral content to its social network, to India. The company says it is still testing the feature, which is also available to users in Brazil and Italy. Fleets aren’t private stories, but it’s Twitter’s way to allow users to share […]

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned these last few months, it’s that life rarely works out as planned. One minute you’re the sole two members of the band whose music has been prophesied to heal the world and usher in a new era of peace, and the next you wake up middle-aged playing some barstool […]

What can I say? It’s a Bentley. It’s lovely. The Bentley new Flying Spur is a luxury super sedan. It packs a larger engine than most sports cars, has four heavenly seats and glides over the road like soap on a shower floor. This example costs $279,000, so I would expect nothing less. This sedan […]

Our company has never sponsored anyone for a visa. What type of visa should we pursue, how much will it cost, how long will it take, and what should we keep in mind?

Honda has confirmed a cyberattack that brought parts of its global operations to a standstill. The company said in a brief statement Tuesday that the attack caused production issues outside of its headquarters in Japan. “Work is being undertaken to minimize the impact and to restore full functionality of production, sales, and development activities,” according […]

Yesterday evening, Vroom, a digital used car retailer, priced its IPO at $22 per share, a figure that was a full $7 above the low end of its first proposed IPO price range. The venture-backed firm first proposed a $15 to $17 per-share IPO price range, which it later raised to $18 to $20 per […]