Crunch Hype

Tesla slashed prices across its electric vehicle portfolio overnight as the automaker aims to boost sales in an economy beaten down by the COVID-19 pandemic. Reuters and Electrek were the first to report the changes. The base price of Model 3 standard range plus is now $37,990, a $2,000 reduction. But the biggest cuts were […]

Can a pair of socks help those with diabetes avoid foot amputations? That’s one of the ideas behind Siren, a company that’s building smart, washable fabric wearables — the first of which is a pair of socks meant to help those with diabetes monitor their foot health and detect dangerous injuries early. They’ve just raised […]

When Dapper Labs launched CryptoKitties back in November 2017, the company’s take on Tamagotchi was seen as the first popular use of blockchain-based applications. It was the first popular use case outside of Bitcoin as a speculative investment. Like all fads, CryptoKitties didn’t last, but the app proved that Dapper Labs could build a compelling […]

Google is introducing a new “quick settings” menu in Gmail aimed at helping users browse, discover and use different themes and settings to customize their Gmail experience. These options include the ability to change the density of text, select from different inbox types and add reading panes and options to theme your inbox. They are […]

Following a debate in the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament, deputies have voted in favor of the release of contact-tracing app StopCovid and the decree related to the app. While a vote in the parliament wasn’t a mandatory step, the government wants to rally as many people as possible around the […]

Otrium has raised a $26 million Series B funding round (€24 million), with Eight Roads Ventures leading the round. Existing investors Index Ventures and Hans Veldhuizen also participated. Otrium works with clothing brands to help them sell items when they reach the end-of-season status. Due to fast fashion, you have to regularly clear some space […]

Plenty of ideas have merit, but when it comes to which ones you move forward with, make sure you’re investing time and budget into the ideas with the highest probability of value and success.

RudderStack, a startup that offers an open-source alternative to customer data management platforms like Segment, today announced that it has raised a $5 million seed round led by S28 Capital. Salil Deshpande of Uncorrelated Ventures and Mesosphere/D2iQ co-founder Florian Leibert (through 468 Capital) also participated in this round. In addition, the company also today announced […]

Bang & Olufsen has an excellent reputation in home audio, and its original Beoplay E8 fully wireless headphones were a category leader when there was barely a category to lead. The company recently launched the third version of the E8, a new generation of hardware that comes with a number of improvements for better audio […]

The European Commission is proposing to direct billions of euros of financial relief into high tech and green investments to help the bloc recover from the coronavirus crisis. Technologies such as 5G, AI, cloud, cybersecurity, supercomputing and renewable energy look set to benefit from a €750BN pan-EU support package set out today — aligning with […]

WarnerMedia unveils its new streaming service, Donald Trump is mad at Twitter and GE Lighting has a new owner. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 27, 2020. 1. HBO Max launches today, here’s what you need to know At $14.99 per month, the service — initially available to subscribers in the United States — is […]

Instagram today is launching new tools that enable video creators to make money, including badges that viewers can purchase during Instagram Live videos and the introduction of IGTV ads. Both launches are considered a test as the company is limiting the features’ availability during its experimentation phase, it says. Badges will give viewers a way […]

The philanthropic arm of the Zuckerberg fortune is infusing $3.8 million worth of grants into nearly two dozen open source software projects in biomedical research. It’s the second such disbursement of funds, and a third will be open for applications next month. The grants range in size from $50,000 to $250,000 and any biomed-centric project […]

How do you get someone up to speed when you’ve never actually met them? How do you maintain culture when many people are never in the same place?

When it launched in April, Quibi carried the express mission statement of offering short-form videos designed to watch on-the-fly. The service’s narrow focus rubbed a lot of potential subscribers the wrong way, with many requesting a more traditional method for watching the service’s series. Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg blames coronavirus for the streaming app’s challenges […]

You don’t need a green thumb and a big backyard to grow baskets of fresh produce. In fact, according to Chicago-based Rise Gardens, you probably just need a bookshelf’s worth of space in your living room and an app. Rise Gardens, an indoor hydroponic gardening system, has raised $2.6 million in seed funding for home-grown […]

Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, is rolling out yet another new app today called Collab after having just launched a new group audio calling app, CatchUp, on Tuesday. With Collab, the focus has now returned to video, and specifically, the concept of watching, mixing, and matching original videos together, beginning with music. In Collab, […]

Massachusetts-based smart home company Savant Systems this morning announced a deal to require GE Lighting. The division has existed as part of General Electric since 1911, with its origins reaching back even further to Thomas Edison’s work in the space. Today’s GE Lighting portfolio still largely revolves around bulbs, with some push into more modern […]

Extra Crunch Live is on fire, and the hits keep rolling! Next week, we’ll sit down with Initialized’s Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan. You can catch the chat live on Tuesday, June 2 at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT. Alexis Ohanian is the founder and former CEO of Reddit, and his investment portfolio includes Flexport, […]

Toro’s founders started at Uber helping monitor the data quality in the company’s vast data catalogs, and they wanted to put that experience to work for a more general audience. Today, the company announced a $4 million seed round. The round was co-led by Costanoa Ventures and Point72 Ventures with help from a number of […]

Once again, Trump has doubled down. Following the addition of a fact-checking warning label added to his tweet about mail-in ballots, Trump took to the platform yet again to denounce it. In what may be his strongest words to date against a service that has largely given him free rein to this point, the President […]

HBO Max, the HBO -plus-other-stuff streaming service from WarnerMedia, is finally here. At $14.99 per month, the service — initially available to subscribers in the United States — is more expensive than competing offerings like Netflix and Disney+. But from another angle, it’s still a pretty sweet deal, since you’re getting HBO, plus a whole […]

Companies spend inordinate amounts of time and money building data warehouses and moving data from enterprise applications. But once they get the data in, how do they get specific information like product data back out and distribute it to business operations, who can use it to better understand customers? That’s where Census comes in. It […]

Kentik, the company once known as CloudHelix, today announced that it has raised a $23.5 million growth funding round led by Vistara Capital Partners, with existing investors August Capital, Third Point Ventures, DCVC, and Tahoma Ventures also participating. With this round, Kentik has now raised a total of $61.7 million. The company’s platform allows enterprises […]

Newly released documents show U.S. immigration authorities have used a secretive cell phone snooping technology hundreds of times across the U.S. in the past three years. The documents, obtained through a public records lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and seen by TechCrunch, show that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deployed cell site […]

Google is rolling out a series of updates aimed at helping local businesses adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic while continuing to serve their customers across Google Maps and Search. Since the outbreak, Google has made it possible for businesses to communicate to customers things like their revised operating hours or temporary closures, among other things. […]

Student loans are both a trillion-dollar debt category and also one of the most popular mini-verticals out there in fintech startup investing right now. There are dozens if not hundreds of companies in the space, and they all mostly do one of two things: either they help students think through their student loan options before […]

Virgin Orbit performed a demonstration of its full launch system on Monday, and while it didn’t go quite as planned, with the mission cut short just a few seconds after Virgin’s LauncherOne separated from its Cosmic Girl carrier aircraft, the company says it still learned a lot – and a lot went right, too. Spaceflight […]

With the U.K. government set to accelerate trials of e-scooter rentals in a bid to reduce crowding on public transport and support social distancing during the coronavirus crisis, Europe’s e-scooter companies are gearing up to be ready. The latest move sees Sweden-headquartered Voi Technology recruit Richard Corbett to head up its U.K., Ireland and Benelux […]

Cryptocurrency exchange company Coinbase has announced plans to acquire Tagomi, an advanced cryptocurrency brokerage platform specifically targeted at professionals and institutional investors. Terms of the deal are undisclosed and the acquisition is still pending regulatory approval. While Coinbase is a well-known name for retail investors who are just getting started in the cryptocurrency space and […]

JD.com, the online retailer that is Alibaba’s long-time nemesis, announced Wednesday a strategic partnership with Kuaishou, the main rival of TikTok’s sibling in China, Douyin. The collaboration is part of a rising trend in the Chinese internet where short video apps and e-commerce platforms increasingly turn to each other for monetization synergies. The thinking goes […]

When AbCellera won a $30 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop therapeutic countermeasures against viral outbreaks two years ago, it’s safe to assume that no one thought the technology would be so vitally important so soon. The work AbCellera was doing was part of a high-priority initiative from DARPA’s Biological […]

ChatableApps is launching its hearing assistance app on iOS today, with a wider Android release to follow shortly. Backed by Mark Cuban, and based on the work of auditory neural signal processing researcher Dr. Andy Simpson, the app removes background noise in near real-time so that one-to-one conversations can be heard more clearly. And, unlike […]

ByteDance’s TikTok app, which has gained hundreds of millions of users in India with its short-form videos, is facing criticism in its biggest overseas market after disturbing videos surfaced on the platform. Phrases such as BanTikTok, DeleteTikTok, and BlockTikTok have trended on Twitter in India in the past three weeks after numerous users expressed disgust […]

Aircall has raised a $65 million Series C round (€60.2 million) with DTCP leading the round, Adam Street participating and existing investors eFounders, Draper Esprit, Balderton and NextWorld injecting more money in the company. Overall, Aircall has raised $106 million. Aircall is building a software-as-a-service company around phone calls. You could use it to operate […]

Ola Electric, the EV business that spun out of the ride-hailing giant Ola last year, has acquired an Amsterdam-based electric scooter startup as the Indian firm looks to locally produce and launch its own line of two wheelers as soon as this year. The Indian firm said Wednesday it had acquired Etergo, a Dutch firm […]

YouTube Kids, the video platform’s version of its service that lets families set age categories, viewing timers and other controls, is now available on Apple TV. Country availability is listed here, with more to be added later. YouTube says that safety controls still need to be set through the mobile version of the app. YouTube […]

Drones are being deployed in the fight to curb COVID-19 in the U.S. Novant Health and California based UAV delivery startup Zipline have launched distribution of personal protective gear and medical equipment in North Carolina. Novant is a non-profit healthcare provider with a network in the Southeastern United States. Through the partnership, Zipline’s drones will […]

In a blog post, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gave an overview of the company’s plan to return its workforce to some semblance of normalcy—or at least a new normal. Google will begin opening some of its office buildings in various cities starting on July 6, allowing a small amount of its employees who […]

Walmart is continuing its foray into fashion e-commerce, announcing a strategic partnership with fashion resale marketplace thredUP to list a large number of the items on Walmart’s digital storefront. With this partnership over 750,000 items from thredUP will be available on walmart.com/thredup, starting today. Notably, only clothing items and shoes marked as “new” or “like […]

Delman, a Jakarta-based data management startup, has raised $1.6 million in seed funding. The round was led by Intudo Ventures, with participation from Prasetia Dwidharma Ventures and Qlue Performa Indonesia, and will be used to establish a research and development center and hire software engineers and data scientists. Delman was founded in 2018 by chief […]

Commonwealth Fusion Systems closed on its latest $84 million in new funding two weeks ago. The U.S. was still very much in the lockdown phase and getting a deal done, especially a multi-million dollar investment in a new technology aiming to make commercial nuclear fusion a reality after decades of hype, was “an interesting thing” […]

Singapore-based fintech startup GoBear has raised $17 million from returning investors Walvis Participaties, a Dutch venture capital firm, and Aegon N.V., a life insurance and asset management provider. The funding brings GoBear’s total funding so far to $97 million, and will be used to expand its consumer financial services platform, which is available in seven […]

Mercedes-Benz is now selling its EQV 300 all-electric premium van in Europe, the second EV to come out of the automaker’s initiative to produce a line of battery-powered models under its new EQ brand. A concept version of the EQV was first shown in March 2019. But unlike so many concepts destined for nonexistence, this […]

As AI has grown from niche to mission-critical technology, the companies that enable it have multiplied and in many cases prospered. A good example of that success is DefinedCrowd, which has gone from the Disrupt stage to globe-spanning AI toolkit to the Fortune 500 in just a couple of years. The company just raised a […]

A growing number of tech companies is telling their employees they can work from anywhere, even after this pandemic has passed. A looming question, however, is how. Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees that Facebook will adjust the pay of those who choose to move out of the Bay Area and work in […]

Simple: Amazon offers up the content free of charge. The company has been on the offensive in recent weeks when it comes to how it has handled the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon’s offered all sorts of blog posts, public statements and made the subject a centerpiece of its recent shareholder letter and earnings report. It also […]

If only Facebook had been using the kind of technology that TechCrunch Startup Battlefield alumnus D-ID was pitching, it could have avoided exposing all of our faces to privacy destroying software services like Clearview AI. At least, that’s the pitch that D-ID’s founder and chief executive, Gil Perry, makes when he’s talking about the significance […]

Introduced as short-term fixes to the immediate threat of coronavirus, widespread data-sharing, monitoring and surveillance could become fixtures of modern public life.

Audi fired Daniel Abt from its Formula E racing team after learning he had a professional sim driver race for him during a virtual competition called the “Race at Home Challenge” held over the weekend. The automaker said in a statement via Formula E that Abt had been suspended from Audi Sport “with immediate effect.” […]