Crunch Hype

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Yesterday after the bell, Zoom and CrowdStrike reported earnings. The two technology shops, members of the SaaS cohort of public companies that has performed so well this year, had high expectations to meet. This column […]

What price privacy? Zoom is facing a fresh security storm after CEO Eric Yuan confirmed that a plan to reboot its battered security cred by (actually) implementing end-to-end encryption does not in fact extend to providing this level of security to non-paying users. This Zoom ‘premium on privacy’ is necessary so it can provide law […]

As we continue to see protests across the US (and elsewhere) sparked by the killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota, SoftBank is announcing a new investment vehicle to back entrepreneurs of color, part of its contribution to trying to redress the imbalance of power as it has played out in the tech world. […]

Meet Watchful, a Tel Aviv-based startup coming out of stealth that wants to help you learn more about what your competitors are doing when it comes to mobile app development. The company tries to identify features that are being tested before getting rolled out to everyone, giving you an advantage if you’re competing with those […]

Lili, a startup building banking products to meet the needs of freelance workers, is announcing that it has raised $10 million in seed funding. The startup takes its name from its founders, CEO Lilac Bar David and CTO Liran Zelkha, who previously founded Israeli challenger bank Pepper. Bar David told me that while many neobanks have […]

Tembici, which says it owns 80% of the market share in Latin America’s micromobility space, now has $47 million more in capital to double down on its docked ebike offering. The Series B round was led by Valor Capital and Redpoint eventures. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank Group, and Joá […]

C4 Ventures, the Paris -based VC, has raised a new €80 million ($88 million) “Fund II”. The fund was founded by Pascal Cagni, a former Europe boss of Apple, and includes cofounder Raph Crouan, another Apple alumni previously with Startupbootcamp and is currently President of La FrenchTech. C4 is designed to be a “post-Series A” […]

Team8, the Israel-based firm founded by a team of intelligence vets and backed by the likes of Intel, Microsoft, Walmart and Cisco to develop and spin out cybersecurity startups, is announcing a step change in its business model that underscores the huge amount of activity we’re seeing these days in the sector. Alongside its studio model, […]

French VC firm Idinvest has compiled some data about the European tech ecosystem. The firm has decided to focus on consumer tech in general, and there are some interesting trends that I’m going to break out here. You can read the full report here. The team has analyzed and surveyed 1,500 companies over multiple months. […]

Over a fifteen year stretch, LanzaTech has developed technologies that can turn carbon emissions into ethanol that can be used for chemicals and fuel. Today, the company announced the spinout of LanzaJet alongside its corporate partners Mitsui, Suncor, and All Nippon Airways, to bring sustainable aviation fuel to the commercial market. The new company has […]

Facebook said on Wednesday it has entered into a global deal with Saregama, one of India’s oldest and largest music labels, to license its music for video and other social experiences across its eponymous service and Instagram. The partnership, which comes weeks after Swedish music giant Spotify also signed a deal with Saregama, will allow […]

Poka, a workforce training app and software service for industrial companies, has added SE Ventures, the venture capital arm of the European energy and automation conglomerate Schneider Electric to its roster of backers. The company has raised over $23 million in funding so far for its application and software services package that provides training and […]

Facebook and PayPal have made investments in GoJek, joining Google and Tencent among other high-profile technology firms that have backed the five-year-old Southeast Asian ride-hailing startup that also offers food delivery and mobile payments. Facebook, for which it is the first investment in an Indonesia-based firm, and PayPal did not disclose the size of their […]

Remove China Apps, an app that gained popularity in India in recent weeks and did exactly what its name suggests, has been pulled from the Play Store. The top trending app in India, which was downloaded more than 5 million times since late May and enabled users to detect and easily delete apps developed by […]

Bird has shut down scooter sharing in several cities in the Middle East, an operation that was managed by Circ, the micromobility startup it acquired in January. About 100 Circ employees have been laid off and as many as 10,000 Circ scooters have been sent to a third-party UAE-based company for recycling, according to multiple […]

Back in August 2019, the BBC made some waves with the news that it was developing a voice assistant called Beeb, an English language “Alexa” of its own that could interact with and control its array of radio and TV services, and its on-demand catalogue, and able to understand the array of accents you find […]

As protests against police brutality and economic manifestations of systemic racism in the U.S. continue, venture capital firms are joining the chorus of technology industry advocates lending their support to the cause. For the past three days, technology company executives and the investors who backed them have issued statements of support for the protests and […]

TechCrunch recently dug into Atlassian’s IPO deck, detailing how the company prepped the document and took it on the road. It’s worth your time. Read it. It’s always interesting to dig into a company’s IPO documents and decks after they’ve debuted, as with the benefit of passed time we can learn quite a lot. This […]

An executive order from the White House targeting Twitter for moderating one of the president’s posts is being challenged in a new lawsuit from a digital rights group. The president signed the order last week after Twitter added a fact-checking label to one of his tweets that made false claims about mail-in voting. The order, […]

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, few companies seemed more poised to receive a usage bump than Zoom and its enterprise-grade video chat platform, but it turns out Zoom’s growth has outpaced those expectations. In the company’s quarterly earnings release, Zoom delivered a beat that represented 169% year-over-year revenue growth, but they did so on the back […]

Today after the bell, video-chat service Zoom reported its Q1 earnings. The company disclosed that it generated $328.2 million in revenue, up 169% compared to the year-ago period. The company also reported $0.20 per-share in adjusted profit during the three-month period. Analysts, as averaged by Yahoo Finance, expected Zoom to report $202.48 million in revenue, […]

New numbers from Canalys project a 7% drop in global PC sales, owing to financial strains. The category is one of countless impacted by the COVID-19-related shutdowns, but the group notes that the virus’s direct impact is mostly behind the industry, due to the rebounding of China’s supply chain. A resulting global recession, on the […]

Since announcing in March that they were extending for a short time the free trial of their digital subscription from 30 to 90 days, Peloton has been rolling out more support for TV screens, adding Android TV back in April and announcing today that they’ve launched an official Apple TV app. Shelter-in-place and the associated […]

In 2015, Atlassian was preparing to go public, but it was not your typical company in so many ways. For starters, it was founded in Australia, it had two co-founder co-CEOs, and it offered collaboration tools centered on software development. That meant that the company leaders really needed to work hard to help investors understand […]

Like many parents, Zigazoo founder Zak Ringelstein worries about his children’s screen time. His worries only grew when COVID-19 led to school shutdowns and kids came home to a world of remote learning. Now, as lockdowns extend, Ringelstein is learning to embrace screen time as a way to sneak education and entertainment into his kids’ […]

French startup Majelan is pivoting a year after launching a podcast player and service. The company, created by former Radio France CEO Mathieu Gallet and Arthur Perticoz, is ditching the podcast aggregation side of its business and focusing on premium audio content going forward. Like many podcast startups, Majelan faced some criticism shortly after its […]

To be truly inclusive — of gender, culture and background — we must be intentional in how we inspire and support entrepreneurs. We must speak to both instincts: the hero and the helper.

Facebook staff protests the social network’s stance on Trump posts, Volkswagen finalizes its $2.6 billion investment in Argo AI and we examine complaints about the layoff process at events and travel startup Pollen. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 2, 2020. 1. Facebook employees stage virtual walkout in protest of company’s stance on Trump posts […]

The European Commission is asking for views on how online platforms should be regulated in future, launching a public consultation today on the forthcoming Digital Services Act (DSA). This pan-EU legislative proposal, due before the end of the year, is slated to rework the regional rule book for digital services, including tackling controversial issues such […]

After weeks of intense debate, the French government has released its contact-tracing app StopCovid. While it was supposed to be released on both iOS and Android 6 hours ago, it is only available on the Play Store right now. It’s unclear what’s the bottleneck on iOS as the government sent me a beta version of […]

Apple has quietly expanded its original podcast efforts with Friday’s launch of The Zane Lowe Interview Series, available on Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and via RSS. Though technically not Apple’s first-ever podcast, the new series is the first series aimed at Apple’s consumers that focuses exclusively on entertainment content. The episodes in the series will […]

Atlassian today launched a slew of DevOps-centric updates to a variety of its services, ranging from Bitbucket Cloud and Pipelines to Jira and others. While it’s quite a grab-bag of announcements, the overall idea behind them is to make it easier for teams to collaborate across functions as companies adopt DevOps as their development practice […]

Overjet, a startup focused on using AI to help dentists and insurance companies understand dental scans, today announced that it has raised $7.85 million in what it describes as a seed round. According to Overjet’s CEO Wardah Inam (an MIT PhD in electrical engineering and computer science), the company raised the funds from Crosslink Capital, […]

Over the weekend, music industry execs Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang called on fellow industry members to protest police violence against black people by pausing operations for the day. The pair created the site and hashtag #theshowmustbepaused, which spread quickly throughout social media as people looked for a way to offer solidarity with nationwide and […]

Cybersecurity is by far the most important area in any industry. Without it, we would be in hacker open season. But cybersecurity is difficult to get right. One wrong move and you can leave the door open for data breaches, ransomware and nation state-backed espionage. That’s why there’s such an intense focus on cybersecurity from an […]

Roku is expanding its free live, linear channel lineup that’s part of its free movies and TV hub, The Roku Channel. In the U.S., Roku customers will now be able to stream from more than 100 live channels, including those offering free access to news, sports, movies, TV, kids and family programming, lifestyle content and […]

It was a busy week in security. Newly released documents shown exclusively to TechCrunch show that U.S. immigration authorities used a controversial cell phone snooping technology known as a “stingray” hundreds of times in the past three years. Also, if you haven’t updated your Android phone in a while, now would be a good time […]

TVSmiles, a Berlin-based mobile native advertising app whose users earn digital currency in exchange for engaging with branded content such as quizzes, apps and videos, has suffered a data breach. Security researcher UpGuard disclosed in a report today that it found an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket online last month — containing personal and device data […]

The COVID-19 pandemic will have a profound impact on robotics, as more companies look to automation as a way forward. While wide-scale automation had long seemed like an inevitability, the pandemic is set to accelerate the push as corporations look for processes that remove the human element from the equation. Of course, Locus Robotics hasn’t […]

Facebook is introducing a new tool to help users batch-delete old posts and shrink their digital footprint on the aging social network. Called “Manage Activity,” the new feature lets users prune their posts in bulk, making it less of a headache to delete content aging badly or anything else unnecessary that’s built up from years […]

I’m eligible to receive a visa and a work permit under my husband’s visa. Can I form my own startup with that dependent visa and work permit or do I need to find a job with an American company?

Alibaba.com is introducing new tools targeted specifically at U.S. merchants. It sounds like the Chinese e-commerce giant has already been making inroads in the United States. John Caplan, the North American and European president of Alibaba.com (the B2B marketplace that serves as the core business of Alibaba Group), said at an online press briefing that […]

Meal kits have had a rush of interest in recent months, with people turning to them to vary the pace of (and in some cases, completely replace) making meals at home, or ordering take out, at a time when many of us are spending a lot of time at home. Now a startup that has […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Used-car marketplace Vroom continued its march towards going public yesterday with the release of an updated IPO filing. The documents it filed provides pricing information for a somewhat odd public offering. As a business, the heavily […]

LinkedIn is announcing some new features for advertisers — retargeting capabilities tied on video ads and lead generation forms, as well as new brand safety integrations for the LinkedIn Audience Network. Abhishek Shrivastava, the senior director of product for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, told me that his team has been shifting its product plans in response […]

OurCrowd, the Israeli crowdfunding venture investment platform, today announced the launch of its Pandemic Innovation Fund, with plans to raise a total of $100 million. The money will be invested in “urgent technological solutions for the medical, business, educational and social needs triggered by global pandemics and other health emergencies.” The fund will invest in […]

“Employee Wellbeing” SaaS platforms have been around for some time. Both regulation and increasing stress levels and health problems in the workplace have fed the rise of this sector of tech, and with many corporates painting long-term contracts with providers, it’s a lucrative business. Furthermore, with the COVID-19 pandemic ongoing, large remote-workforces look here to […]

Pollen, the U.K.-headquartered travel and events marketplace, describes its company culture as built on principles of “freedom” and openness, including a well-publicised pay transparency policy. However, that doesn’t appear to always be the case with regards to the treatment of recently departing employees. When the word-of-mouth marketing company laid off 69 staff from its various […]

With the renewed push for more of the services we use everyday to be accessible online and in a non-physical way, a company out of Switzerland that builds tools for financial services companies to interact better with their customers via the web is today announcing a round of funding to expand its operations. Appway, which […]

Volkswagen Group finalized Tuesday its $2.6 billion investment into Argo AI, the Pittsburgh-based self-driving car startup that came out of stealth in 2017 with $1 billion in backing from Ford. The deal turns Argo into a global company with two customers — VW and Ford — as well as operations in the U.S. and Europe […]