Crunch Hype

Lordstown Motors has hired Daniel A. Ninivaggi, a longtime automotive executive and former head of Carl C. Icahn’s holding company, as CEO and a board member. The appointment follows months of tumult at Lordstown, which became publicly traded via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. In June, founder and CEO Steve Burns and […]

A new report claims Peter Thiel's AI company Palantir had a glitch in its software used by the FBI that allowed unauthorized personnel to access private data for more than a year.

Porsche Cars North America has added its entire U.S. inventory of new cars to its online marketplace as the company seeks to keep up with customer demands and the industry's shift to digital commerce.

BreezoMeter has been on a mission to make environmental health hazards accessible to as many people as possible. Through its air quality index (AQI) calculations, the Israel-based company can now identify the quality of air down to a few meters in dozens of countries. A partnership with Apple to include its data into the iOS […]

Finding the right learning platform can be difficult, especially as companies look to upskill and reskill their talent to meet demand.

Tuna is on a mission to "fine tune" the payments space in Latin America.

Wildfires are burning in countries all around the world. California is dealing with some of the worst wildfires in its history (a superlative that I use essentially every year now) with the Caldor fire and others blazing in the state’s north. Meanwhile, Greece and other Mediterranean nations have been fighting fires for weeks to bring […]

Cloud security startup Monad, which offers a platform for extracting and connecting data from various security tools, has launched from stealth with $17 million in Series A funding led by Index Ventures. Monad was founded on the belief that enterprise cybersecurity is a growing data management challenge, as organizations try to understand and interpret the masses […]

The idea for the company was driven by Missouri almost closing its one abortion clinic.

Data is the new oil, as the saying goes, and today a startup that is helping companies mine for it is announcing a major funding round to expand its business on the back of strong growth. Atheneum, which provides a platform for companies to conduct and analyze research sourced through virtual interviews and surveys with […]

The acquisition of GrocerKey, which brings on board the company’s front-end consumer-facing sales engine and predictive analytics, puts the data and brand recognition back in the retailer’s hands.

Blue Origin’s last launch was its landmark first human flight, carrying Jeff Bezos, his brother, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen to suborbital space. Today, it’s flying New Shepard again — without any people on board, this time, but with a key payload from NASA that will test technologies the agency is using to develop a […]

The UK government has named the person it wants to take over as its chief data protection watchdog, with sitting commissioner Elizabeth Denham overdue to vacate the post: The Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) today said its preferred replacement is New Zealand’s privacy commissioner, John Edwards. Edwards, who has a legal background, […]

When companies create digital payments-facing solutions for African countries outside Nigeria and South Africa, building around mobile money is key. It’s literally a no-brainer. The concept is ubiquitous in East Africa, but since mobile money is a telecom operators-led initiative, there are technical complexities in creating a unified infrastructure for businesses that need it. PawaPay, […]

Copenhagen-based process automation platform Leapwork has snagged Denmark’s largest ever Series B funding round, announcing a $62 million raise co-led by KKR and Salesforce Ventures, with existing investors DN Capital and Headline also participating. Also today it’s disclosing that its post-money valuation now stands at $312M. The ‘no code’ 2015-founded startup last raised back in […]

Intellect, a Singapore-based startup that wants to make mental health care more accessible in Asia, announced it has raised $2.2 million in pre-Series A funding. It is taking part in Y Combinator’s current batch, which will hold its Demo Day at the end of this month. The round was led by returning investor Insignia Venture […]

A milestone for Jolla, the Finnish startup behind the Sailfish OS — which formed, almost a decade ago, when a band of Nokia staffers left to keep the torch burning for a mobile linux-based alternative to Google’s Android — today it’s announcing hitting profitability. The mobile OS licensing startup describes 2020 as a “turning point” […]

Meet Taktile, a new startup that is working on a machine learning platform for financial services companies. This isn’t the first company that wants to leverage machine learning for financial products. But Taktile wants to differentiate itself from competitors by making it way easier to get started and switch to AI-powered models. A few years […]

Today, both the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Manish Lachwani, cofounder of a mobile app testing company Headspin, with fraud. The SEC says he violated antifraud provisions, and the civil penalties it’s seeking include a permanent injunction, a conduct-based injunction, and to bar him for serving as a corporate […]

Connecting to all the services and microservices that a modern cloud native enterprise application requires can be a complicated task. It’s an area that startup Solo.io is trying to disrupt with the new release of its Gloo Mesh Enterprise platform. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Solo has had focus since its founding on a concept known as […]

While the rocket launch sector is quickly becoming crowded, the same can’t be said for companies developing suborbital spaceplanes. This means there’s plenty of room to grow for startups like Dawn Aerospace, which has now completed five test flights of its Mk-II Aurora spaceplane that is designed to fly up to 60 miles above the […]

Peter Beck’s earliest memory is standing outside with his father in his hometown of Invercargill, New Zealand, looking up at the stars and being told that there could very well be people on planets orbiting those stars looking right back at him. “For a three or four year old, that was a mind-blowing thing that […]

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

Using strategically focused AI, brands can identify what their audiences are doing when they are not engaged in a purchase or using a product or service. The secret here is understanding context.

Like so many other aspects of the robotics world, the pandemic has dramatically accelerated interest in the automated kitchen. After all, the food and restaurant industry was deemed essential amid global shutdowns, but finding kitchen staff proved a problem for many, especially early on when questions remained around COVID’s transmission. This week, California-based fast casual […]

Hims & Hers co-founder and CEO Andrew Dudum said Thursday that his company is in the process of distributing 10,000 primary care and mental health visits to displaced Afghan refugees. Founded in 2017, San Francisco-based Hims & Hers has built out a multi-specialty telehealth platform that connects consumers to licensed healthcare professionals. In a blog […]

YouTube has removed 1 million videos for dangerous COVID-19 misinformation since February 2020, according to YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mahon in a new blog post.

I received a conditional green card after I got married in 2019. We decided to divorce, but I want to remain in the U.S. Is it still possible for me to complete my green card based on my marriage?

A London-headquartered startup called LOVE, valued at $17 million following its pre-seed funding, aims to redefine how people stay in touch with close family and friends. The company is launching a messaging app that offers a combination of video calling as well as asynchronous video and audio messaging, in an ad-free, privacy-focused experience with a […]

Just days after Elastic announced the acquisition of build.security, the company is making yet another security acquisition. As part of its second-quarter earnings announcement this afternoon, Elastic disclosed that it is acquiring Vancouver, Canada based security vendor CMD. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed. CMD‘s technology provides runtime security for cloud […]

Astroscale hit a major milestone Wednesday, when its space junk removal demo satellite that’s currently in orbit successfully captured and released a client spacecraft using a magnetic system. The End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration (ELSA-d) mission was launched in March, with the goal of validating the company’s orbital debris removal tech. The demonstrator package, which was […]

Climate change is affecting farming all over the world, and solutions are seldom simple. But if you could plant crops that resisted the heat, cold or drought instead of moving a thousand miles away, wouldn’t you? Avalo helps plants like these become a reality using AI-powered genome analysis that can reduce the time and money […]

Kanye (or “Ye,” as it were) is going all out in the promotion of his upcoming tenth studio album, “Donda” (named for his late-mother, Donda West). In July, there was a massive listening party at New Orleans’ Mercedes-Benz Stadium (where he also took up residence in a locker room). For an upcoming listening party in […]

Can an old Terminal learn new tricks? Fig, a company out of Y Combinator’s S20 class, has raised a $2.2M seed round to prove that it can. Their goal: augment (but don’t try to replace) the command line terminal that so many people use every day and make it more powerful and easy to use […]

Canalys released its quarterly U.S. PC sales today, and while the news was quite good with sales overall up 17% YoY, the growth slowed significantly from the prior quarter when sales soared to 74% pushed by the pandemic. Perhaps that is also due the widely reported worldwide chip shortage. HP retained top spot for the […]

More than 10 companies currently compete across Europe with an instant grocery delivery business model. Half of them were established in 2020, the year of the pandemic.

For the first time, Hulu has started adding support for HDR viewing, years after some of its competitors. The gradual rollout of HDR support began on August 19, Hulu told TechCrunch, and should be available to all users with HDR-compatible devices in the coming days. So far, Hulu has only enabled HDR viewing on high-profile […]

Those at risk are always vigilant for the signs of a stroke in progress, but no one can be vigilant when they’re sleeping, meaning thousands of people suffer “wake-up strokes” that are only identified hours after the fact. Zeit Medical’s brain-monitoring wearable could help raise the alarm and get people to the hospital fast enough […]

Netflix has announced Tudum, a global virtual fan event set for September 25 that will showcase exclusive news and first looks at some of the streaming giant’s original content. Tudum, which is named after the sound users hear when they press play on Netflix, will feature stars and creators from over 70 Netflix series, films […]

Meet Shares, a new European startup that wants to add a social twist to financial investment — in that case, the company means ‘social’ as in ‘social network’. The startup has been developing its product under the radar for a few months already. It is also moving at a fast pace. It has assembled a team […]

Estonia-based Membo — which is backed by Y Combinator and will be presenting at the incubator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day next week — is aiming to take a slice of the premium end of grocery shopping in Europe and a bite out of supermarket giants’ continued dominance of the traditional weekly food shop. On-demand food […]

Flink, a Mexico City-based neobroker, has raised $57 million in a Series B round of funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The financing comes just over six months after Flink raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Accel. Existing backers Accel, ALLVP, Clocktower and new investor Mantis Venture Capital (founded by The […]

Don’t call Jane Technologies the Amazon of weed. Instead, think of Jane Technologies as the Shopify of weed, and it’s an important distinction. While other startups attempt to build a destination marketplace like Amazon, Jane Technologies is trying something more powerful. The company is building the backends for dispensaries that are quickly taking their cannabis […]

Warby Parker has two main sales channels, largely attractive economics, falling losses and rising adjusted profitability. You could even argue it handled the pandemic well. So what's it worth?

Mindset, a platform featuring personal story collections from recording artists, announced today that it raised $8.7 million in seed funding. As co-founders of the K-pop-focused podcast production company DIVE Studios, brothers Brian Nam, Eric Nam and Eddie Nam noticed that the studio’s best-performing content came from podcast episodes where stars discussed how they handle struggles […]

Aileen Lee is one of the most prestigious and successful venture capitalists of the past decade. Before starting her own firm in Cowboy Ventures, Lee was a partner at KPCB for more than 12 years. Her portfolio includes DocSend, Ironclad, Philz Coffee, StyleSeat and many, many more. So it should come as no surprise that […]

In a blog post this morning, Alphabet drone delivery company Wing announced that it is set to hit 100,000 customer deliveries over the weekend. The news comes on the second anniversary of the service’s pilot launch in Logan, Australia, a city of roughly 300,000 people in the Brisbane metropolitan area. It also, notably, arrives a […]

Balance, a payments platform aimed at B2B merchants and marketplaces, has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Ribbit Capital. Avid Ventures participated in the financing, in addition to existing backers Lightspeed Ventures, Stripe, Y Combinator Continuity Fund, SciFi VC and UpWest. Other individual investors that put money in the round […]

Productivity has been a focal point for many enterprise businesses since before the pandemic hit, and even more so since its onset. But Macro founders Ankith Harathi and John Keck are taking a different tack. The startup’s Zoom SDK-powered product has been reimagined by its team, and is relaunching today. When Macro first launched into […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex and Danny had colleague Amanda Silberling on the show to help us parse through OnlyFans’ precedent-setting move to ban sexually-explicit content on its service. The decision was a bolt from the blue for many of […]