Crunch Hype

OnlyFans has suspended its decision to ban sexually explicit content after it received widespread backlash over the planned policy change. Although Onlyfans was not created specifically for porn, the content has become the platform’s most visible use case. “Thank you to everyone for making your voices heard. We have secured assurances necessary to support our […]

Level AI, an early stage startup from a former member of the Alexa product team, wants to help companies process customer service calls faster by understanding the interactions they’re having with customers in real time. Today the company launched publicly, while announcing a $13 million Series A led by Battery Ventures with help from seed […]

To celebrate its ten year anniversary, Messenger today announced a handful of new features: poll games, word effects, contact sharing, and birthday gifting via Facebook Pay. But beyond the fun features, Facebook has been testing a way to add voice and video calls back into the Facebook app, rather than on Messenger. “We are testing […]

Knoetic, a startup that has built a software analytics platform for chief people officers, emerged from stealth today with $18 million in Series A funding. For the unacquainted, chief people officers are also known as heads of human resources, or HR. Accel led the financing, which notably also included participation from over 100 angel investors, […]

Meditation app Headspace this morning announced plans to merge with on-demand mental health service, Ginger. Barring unforeseen regulatory roadblocks, the two companies will combine to form Headspace Health. The new organization would sport a combined value of $3 billion and a headcount of more than 800+. The merger comes during accelerated usage of both parties, […]

Los Angeles delivery robot startup Coco this week has announced $36 million in funding. The Series A was led by Sam Altman, Silicon Valley Bank and Founders Fund, with participation from Sam Nazarian, Ellen Chen and Mario Del Pero. It brings the company’s total funding up to around $43 million. “I strongly believe the delivery […]

Venture capital firm Myelin on Wednesday launched its second fund, Myelin II, that will invest in some 40 early-stage technology companies.

As Apple and Google continue to face increasing scrutiny over the rules they set for how third-party apps in their app stores charge for services, a significant development in that story is going down in South Korea. South Korea’s parliamentary committee passed on Wednesday (25 August) a landmark bill to prevent Google and Apple from […]

Xiaomi reported a second-quarter net income of $1.28 billion on revenue of $13.56 billion following the Chinese technology giant’s strong surge in smartphone market share globally. During the quarter that ended in June, Xiaomi said it saw a 64% year-on-year growth in revenue, and its net income surged over 80% from the same time a […]

BreachQuest, an early-stage startup with a founding team of cybersecurity experts building a modern incident response platform, has emerged from stealth with $4.4 million in seed funding. The investment was raised from Slow Ventures, Lookout founder Kevin Mahaffey, and Tinder co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, who described BreachQuest as having a “disruptive vision and […]

Last month, MaxAB, the Egyptian B2B e-commerce platform that serves food and grocery retailers, raised one of the largest Series A on the continent, to the tune of $40 million. Today, it has raised a $15 million extension from existing investors — RMBV, IFC, Flourish Ventures, Crystal Stream Capital, Rise Capital, Endeavour Catalyst, Beco Capital […]

Marathon Education was created after its founders realized after-school education in Vietnam hadn’t evolved much since they were kids. Some of the most popular tuition centers in big cities teach hundreds of students at once. “They’re packed like sardines and that really has not changed in the past one or two decades when I went […]

It hasn’t even been a week since Tesla hosted its AI Day, a livestreamed event full of technical jargon meant to snare the choicest of AI and vision engineers to come work for Tesla and help the company achieve autonomous greatness, and already CEO Elon Musk is coming in with some hot takes about the […]

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Developing new packaged foods and consumer goods can take a couple years as companies research, prototype and test products. In a society that runs on social media, however, people expect to see trends land on store shelves much more quickly. Founded in 2018, Ai Palette uses machine learning to help companies spot trends in real […]

When is the last time your doctor treated you at home?

Movies Anywhere, an app that allows you to centralize your digital movie collection from across services, is rolling out a new feature that will help you make better sense of your growing library. The company today introduced an AI-powered feature called “My Lists,” which automatically groups movies together based on any number of factors — […]

Linktree, the popular “link in bio” service with more than 16 million users, is partnering with PayPal to expand its recently launched “Commerce Links” tools for direct payment on Linktree globally. The Melbourne-based startup says creators in over 200 countries where PayPal operates can now accept payments through the transaction tools. Launched in March, Commerce […]

ForgeRock filed its form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this morning as the identity management provider takes the next step toward its IPO. The company did not provide initial pricing for its shares, which will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol FORG. The IPO is being led by […]

Following its announcement late last month, Facebook’s new 128GB model of the Oculus Quest 2 is now available to buy, for the same $299 price as the previous 64GB base model.

From a high level, all of the recent deal-making in corporate cards and spend management shows that it’s not enough to just help companies track what employees are expensing these days.

Flockjay, a bootcamp startup that helps laid off people and job seekers break into tech, cut half of its own employees amid a broader pivot to a B2B SaaS platform, TechCrunch has learned from sources close to the company. The layoffs impacted every nontechnical team at Flockjay, including admission advisers, biz ops and development, partnerships, […]

Fika Ventures is a five-year-old, LA-based seed-stage fund that has been funding mostly business-to-business startups, as well as fintech companies and a sprinkling of healthcare IT startups — as long as they don’t involve hardware or FDA approval. The firm’s investors apparently think it’s doing a decent job. After raising $41 million for its debut […]

Microsoft is moving into the next phase of its plan to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to as many devices as possible, bringing it to Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One consoles this holiday season.

Nearly every top investment bank is chasing Byju’s and nudging the most valuable Indian startup to seriously explore the public markets as soon as next year. Most banks have given Byju’s a proposed valuation in the range of $40 billion to $45 billion, but some including Morgan Stanley have pitched a $50 billion valuation if […]

Boston is benefiting from larger changes to the U.S. venture capital market, helping close historical gaps in its startup funding market and access funds that previously might have skipped the region.

Ispace, a Japanese space startup that aims to lead the development of a lunar economy, has unveiled its design for a large lander that could go to the moon as early as 2024. Tokyo-based ispace said this next-gen lander, dubbed Series 2, would be used on the company’s third planned moon mission. The lander is […]

We’re less than one month away from kicking off our flagship global event, TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. And we’re feeling the adrenaline rush that can only come when more than 10,000 startup icons, experts, founders, investors and makers gather to learn, inspire, connect, collaborate, compete and network. Buy your pass here and brace yourself for three […]

Paxos, the company behind the Paxos Standard stablecoin (PAX), has announced that it is changing the name of its crypto asset. Paxos Standard is now Pax Dollar, and you’ll soon be able to identify it on your favorite cryptocurrency exchange, wallet or explorer under the USDP ticker. Other than the name, USDP remains fundamentally identical […]

“In order to become a better writer, read your written words out loud.” That’s one of the first, and best, writing tips I ever received. I always found the advice ironic because it required me to change the medium of my writing to become a better writer. Still, all these years later, it’s true: Vocalizing […]

California is not going to resolve this issue. Congress is not going to resolve this issue because it almost never resolves anything. So the game comes down to individual states.

A quick survey of many of the most highly valued electric vertical take-off and landing companies shows one thing in common: All of them are developing aircraft powered by batteries. But a growing suite of aviation companies, turned off by what they see as the energy density limitations of lithium-ion batteries, are turning instead to […]

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said on Tuesday the company plans to offer free temporary housing to 20,000 Afghan refugees around the world amid the Taliban’s rise to power in Afghanistan. Chesky said the company will cover the costs for the housing, using funds from contributions to its nonprofit Airbnb.org and a specific Refugee Fund established […]

Israel-based AI healthtech company, DiA Imaging Analysis, which is using deep learning and machine learning to automate analysis of ultrasound scans, has closed a $14 million Series B round of funding. Backers in the growth round, which comes three years after DiA last raised, include new investors Alchimia Ventures, Downing Ventures, ICON Fund, Philips and […]

Waymo, the self-driving vehicle company under Alphabet, has launched a robotaxi service that will be open to certain vetted riders in San Francisco. On Tuesday, the company officially kicked off its Waymo One Trusted Tester program in the city with a fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACEs equipped with the company’s fifth generation of its autonomous […]

Greenfly is building a workflow to provide sourcing, creation and automated distribution of short-form photos and videos created for social media.

When Salesforce acquired Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, the deal seemed on its face to make sense, given that the coronavirus pandemic accelerated already growing demand for tools that enable people to work remotely and that roughly 90% of Slack’s enterprise customers already used Salesforce. Today, the question is: How well are things going? […]

Walmart today announced of a new delivery service business called Walmart GoLocal, which allows other merchants, both large and small, to tap into Walmart’s own delivery platform to get orders to their customers. Merchants can choose to the use the service for a variety of delivery types, including scheduled and unscheduled deliveries, including same-day delivery, […]

The revitalization of the childcare sector would benefit from an ambitious and galvanizing “moonshot” goal, like providing universal, free childcare for all Americans.

Subscription newsletter platform kingpin Substack shared today that they’ve acqui-hired the team behind Cocoon, a subscription social media app built for close friends. We covered the Y Combinator-backed startup’s initial $3 million seed raise led by Lerer Hippeau back in November 2019, shortly before the pandemic dramatically reconfigured how people used social media to communicate […]

Last year, Instagram unveiled Shops as part of Facebook’s larger pivot toward e-commerce. Shops is front-and-almost-center on the app’s bottom navigation bar, even more readily accessible than the button to upload a new photo. Now, after testing in the U.S. earlier this month, Instagram will introduce ads on the Instagram Shop tab globally, rolling them […]

Imagine typing out of a series of steps in plain English that would reflect a list of actions a human QA tester would undertake to test an app, then turning that list into an automated testing script. That’s exactly what testRigor, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2021 cohort has done. Today the early […]

Two Sigma Ventures led the financing event, putting in $10 million, with prior investors completing the round.

Crop steering turns growing carrots or cannabis from an art into a science. Indoor growers have long turned to this practice to improve yields, which involves precisely controlling and manipulating three variables: light, climate, and irrigation. If tweaked properly, growers can force taller plants, larger flowers, and quicker grow times. Today Trym is announcing its […]

TikTok is moving into e-commerce. The company announced this morning an expanded partnership with e-commerce platform Shopify, as well as a pilot test of TikTok Shopping among select Shopify merchants across the U.S., U.K., and Canada in the weeks to come. The social video platform first announced its plans to partner with Shopify last October, […]

The Latin America startup ecosystem is having a great year, with mega-rounds being announced at breakneck speed and new unicorns minted almost monthly. This is mostly due to the clearly maturing startup scene in the region, with proven successes such as Nubank, Cornershop, Gympass and Loggi helping to bolster LatAm’s credibility. Interestingly, many of the […]

Back in 2015, researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek remotely hacked into a Jeep Cherokee driven by a Wired reporter, Andy Greenberg, in an attempt to warn the auto industry of potential pitfalls in their software and inspire legislation around automotive cybersecurity. It did that and more. Fiat Chrysler, which owns Jeep, ended up recalling […]

Spotify is today opening up access to Podcast Subscriptions to all podcast creators in the U.S., after first launching the service for testing with a smaller number of creators back in April. Through Spotify’s podcast creation tool Anchor, podcasters of all sizes will now able to mark select episodes as subscriber-only content, then publish them […]

Tango is designed to help employees get back as much as 20% of their workweek spent searching for that one piece of information or tracking down the right colleague to assist with a task.