Crunch Hype

At the start of the year, it looked like Europe would be in for a “Summer E-Scooters / E-Bike War,” as both regional startups and U.S.-backed unicorns vied for the pockets of city commuters. Consolidation came when German startup Circ was taken over by U.S. competitor Bird at the start of the year. Still on […]

Spin, the electric scooter startup acquired by Ford in 2019 for nearly $100 million, has restarted operations in four U.S. markets as COVID-19 related closures begin to ease. The company has resumed operations in Orlando, Nashville, Columbus, Ohio and St. Louis. The ramp up of operations will depend on the city, the company said. In […]

The Consumer Technology Association penned an open letter alongside a number of other industry representatives asking the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office to loosen tariffs on a number of tech categories manufactured in China. The parties seek to widen current COVID-19-related exemptions beyond beyond health products like ventilator and oxygen masks. The list includes wide ranging […]

Free streaming service Pluto TV is expanding. The company has today gained access to streaming sports network, CBS Sports HQ, as a result of the ViacomCBS merger. It has also forged new distribution deals with Verizon and TiVo, both of which were detailed this week. The free streamer had been acquired by Viacom for $340 […]

In this episode: Sam Parr, co-founder and CEO of The Hustle, one of the fastest-growing email newsletters, and Rich Jaroslavsky, VP of Content and chief journalist at news aggregation startup SmartNews.

The last two decades have ushered in significant change and transformation. I believe the 2020s will be dispositive in redefining the pillars of our economy, and COVID-19 magnifies this greatly.

Xiaomi today launched a new e-commerce service in India that allows people in the nation to easily browse and order its handsets and other products from nearby physical retail stores as the Chinese giant rushes to kickstart its sales in its biggest overseas market. Dubbed Mi Commerce, the service allows people to locate nearby stores […]

"I was recently laid off but found another position at a growing biotech company. How long do I have to apply for a green card?"

This morning let's peek at Uber's numbers ahead of earnings and see what we can learn about its 2019 in the micro-mobility world.

M&A activity has generally slowed down in the weeks since the novel coronavirus took a grip on the world, but there have been some pockets of activity in the tech industry when the price is right or when the divestment/acquisition just makes sense. The world of messaging brings us the latest development in that theme: SAP, […]

Netflix has released the first trailer for its series Space Force, which is a parodic take on the newest branch of the U.S. armed forces. The project was announced pretty shortly after the space-focused military branch was made official, so it’s actually pretty impressive to see a trailer for what looks like a pretty polished […]

The world has changed dramatically since May 2019 when we last surveyed venture capitalists about the trends they were seeing in media, entertainment and gaming. Since then, COVID-19 and the resulting physical distancing measures have created plenty of demand for companies helping to inform and entertain us as we’re stuck at home. At the same […]

Cockroach Labs, the NYC enterprise database company, announced an $86.6 million Series D funding round today. The company was in no mood to talk valuations, but was happy to have a big chunk of money to help build on its recent success and ride out the current economic malaise. Altimeter Capital and Bond co-led the […]

China has launched a demonstration mission of its next-generation crew spacecraft, using the Long March 5B rocket. This is the first launch for that new rocket, an iteration of China’s Long March launcher that will also be used to take up the sections and components of the country’s forthcoming national orbital space station. This launch […]

Orca Security, an Israeli cloud security firm that focuses on giving enterprises better visibility into their multi-cloud deployments on AWS, Azure and GCP, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A round led by GGV Capital. YL Ventures and Silicon Valley CISO Investments also participated in this round. Together with its seed […]

Perennial action star Tom Cruise, who has a penchant for striving for ever bigger and more blustery stunts and set pieces, may be aiming for the crowning action movie achievement of them all: Shooting a movie in space. Deadline reports that Cruise is in early discussions with Elon Musk’s SpaceX about the possibility of filming […]

Zeitgold has raised a Series B round of $29.2 million (€27 million). Overall, the company has raised more than $54 million (€50 million). The company is building a software platform for small companies to automate bookkeeping as much as possible. Vintage Investment Partners is leading today’s round with existing investors Battery Ventures, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, […]

Fintech startup N26 now has a proper funding war chest to face the economic downturn. The Berlin-based startup has extended its Series D round with another $100 million of funding at the same valuation of $3.5 billion. In total, N26 has raised $570 million as part of its Series D round. N26’s Series D seems […]

Glance, which serves media content, news, and casual games on the lock screen of Android -powered smartphones, has amassed 100 million daily active users, it said today. The subsidiary of ad-firm InMobi Group reached the milestone in 21 months in what appears to be the shortest duration for any popular internet service to gain their […]

French startup Back Market has raised a new $120 million funding round from Goldman Sachs, Aglaé Ventures and Eurazeo Growth. The company operates a marketplace for refurbished smartphones and electronics devices. Back Market doesn’t refurbish devices in house. Instead, it partners with certified sellers and let them list their items on the site. The startup […]

Omilia, a company headquartered in Cyprus that has built a conversational AI for customer support, has raised $20 million in its first ever funding round, having been bootstrapped since 2002. Backing comes from Grafton Capital and will be used to invest in further growth, after Omilia grew revenue by “more than” 100% in 2019, with […]

Ninja Van, a Singapore-based logistics startup, has secured an additional $279 million in fresh funding as it works to scale its operations to keep up with the surge in e-commerce deliveries in six Southeast Asian countries. Europe’s GeoPost, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group, Monk’s Hill Ventures, Carmenta, Golden Gate Ventures Growth Fund, Intouch […]

At its Think Digital conference, IBM and Red Hat today announced a number of new services that all center around 5G edge and AI. The fact that the company is focusing on these two areas doesn’t come as a surprise, given that both edge and AI are two of the fastest-growing businesses in enterprise computing. […]

Brothers Martin, Meti and Massi Basiri all left Iran to study abroad in Canada. After struggling with every aspect from the visa process to grade conversions, the brothers saw an opportunity to make the transition to study internationally more seamless. So, they started Applyboard in 2015 at University of Waterloo’s Velocity Garage. ApplyBoard has two […]

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann accused SoftBank Group of abusing its power in a new lawsuit filed Monday that alleges breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty for pulling a $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares. The lawsuit, filed in Delaware Court of Chancery, included a motion to consolidate his case with a lawsuit […]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has awarded Formlabs an emergency use authorization (EUA) for a 3D-printed part designed to convert BiPAP machines designed for sleep apnea into much-needed ventilators. The offering was one of dozens of ventilators and accessories granted such authorization over the weekend. The company plans to devote 150 3D printers at its […]

Just like American workers are turning to crowdfunding to pay for the medical procedures that can keep them alive, the Securities and Exchange Commission is telling small businesses that everyday citizens may provide them with the lifeline that the U.S. government won’t. After two multi-billion dollar stimulus packages which have largely failed to reach the […]

Tumblr is making a change to how it deals with hate speech on its blogging platform. The company announced today it will also remove the reblogs (repostings) from any blogs that were suspended for violating its policies around hate speech. Already, the company says it’s identified nearly 1,000 blogs that were banned for blatant violations […]

While Jackbox clearly owes a great deal of its current popularity to the shelter-in-place policies, they've also been honing their craft for years. It's worth looking at what makes them work.

If you’ve got kids with you through this stay-at-home stretch, there’s a good chance you’re running low on new ways to keep them entertained. All the coloring pages have been colored in; the freeze dances frozen; the stickers stuck. Good news! Your iPhone is now a cat (congratulations!) You need to help your new cat […]

To this day, the Roomba remains the one successful mainstream home robotic. It was a feat iRobot achieved after a decade or so of throwing concepts against the wall, ultimately achieving success through a combination of outward-facing simplicity and under-the-hood sophistication. That other robots haven’t achieved those heights isn’t for lack of trying. The field […]

Building a brand new spacecraft means knowing when to innovate and when to stick to flight-proven methods, and for Crew Dragon, SpaceX decided to ditch the buttons and dials and go full touchscreen. The astronauts who will fly it later this month have had likewise to ditch years of training and muscle memory — but […]

API-powered startups are having a good year, with Plaid’s mega-exit to Visa still fresh in mind. And digital video-powered startups are also having a good year, as the world stays home more than before and work shifts to a more remote-friendly landscape. What about a company that does both? Well, they’d probably raise money and […]

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox. Hi readers. Welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to the future (and present) of transportation. I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch […]

Uber is planning to require drivers and riders to wear face masks as it prepares to ramp its ride-hailing business back up after being hobbled by the COVID-19 pandemic. CNN was first to report that executives approved a new policy that would require drivers and riders to wear face masks or coverings in some markets, […]

Lyft has slimmed down its internship program from 12 weeks to eight weeks, cut some intern salaries by half and rescinded its housing stipend, TechCrunch has learned. The company confirmed that it has shortened the internship and that it only cut some intern salaries. It did not define which roles and departments were specifically affected. […]

Google Meet — the video call service formerly known as Hangouts Meet, which itself was an offshoot from Hangouts, not to be confused with Google Chat, Duo, Allo or any of the company’s other communications products — is finally making its debut on Gmail accounts, where it probably should have been since 2010. Everyone with […]

Last week was a fairly busy week in space news, but the dominating story was preparation for the first-ever Commercial Crew launch that will actually carry human astronauts to space. This is, in many ways, the culmination of years of work and billions of dollars spent by partners NASA and SpaceX on their part of […]

The UK’s data protection watchdog confirmed today the government still hasn’t given it sight of a key legal document attached to the coronavirus contacts tracing app which is being developed by the NHSX, the digital transformation branch of the country’s National Health Service . Under UK and EU law, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) […]

AWS today announced the launch of the Elemental Link, a small hardware device that makes it easy to connect a live video source to the AWS Elemental Media Live service for broadcast-grade live video processing in the cloud. The $995 Link, which weighs in at less than a pound, is meant to allow Media Live […]

Careem, the Dubai-based ride-hailing and delivery company that was acquired by Uber last year, is cutting its workforce by 31% and suspending its mass transportation business due to affects from the COVID-19 pandemic. The layoffs will affect more than 530 employees. Employees who are laid off will receive at least three months’ severance pay, one […]

The economic effects of COVID-19 could delay Africa’s next big IPO — that of Nigerian fintech unicorn Interswitch. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time the Lagos-based payments company’s plans for going public were postponed; the tech world has been anticipating Interswitch’s stock market debut since 2016. For the continent’s innovation ecosystem, there’s a […]

Music streaming service Soundcloud is capitalizing on consumer demand for live entertainment amid the COVID-19 quarantine with the launch of its own slate of originally produced live programming. The company today announced its plans for a new Twitch channel where it will air live chat series and other panel conversations, plus music sets and shows […]

As expected, Robinhood has closed a new round of capital. The late-stage, consumer investing app announced today that it has closed a $280 million Series F funding at an $8.3 billion valuation. This closely tracks prior coverage that the firm was hunting for a nine-figure round at a valuation of around $8 billion. Robinhood raised […]

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is resulting in big shifts across industries, but the development of more long-term solutions that address a future in which what we need to do is mitigate the impact of the new coronavirus seems like a worthwhile place to invest time and effort. Projects like a new one from Northwestern University […]

Nvidia today announced its plans to acquire Cumulus Networks, an open-source centric company that specializes in helping enterprises optimize their data center networking stack. Cumulus offers both its own Linux distribution for network switches, as well as tools for managing network operations. With Cumulus Express, the company also offers a hardware solution in the form […]

As the quarantine dramatically transforms social and romantic lives, a new dating app advised by Grindr founder Joel Simkhai and former YC chief Sam Altman is aiming to capitalize on the skyrocketing popularity of video chat. CEO Brenden Strauss hopes his NYC-based startup Curtn can approach video calling in a mindful way during a time […]

With Windows 10X, Microsoft introduced a new version of its flagship operating system last October that was specifically designed for dual-screen devices. The original plan was to launch the first set of Windows 10X dual-screen devices before the 2020 holidays and in February of this year, it announced a slew of tools to help developers […]

Taika Waititi already reinvigorated the Thor franchise. Now he’s looking to do the same for Star Wars. Waititi is probably best-known for directing “Thor: Ragnarok” — easily the best of the Thor movies and one of the most delightful films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. More recently, he wrote and directed the Nazi comedy “Jojo […]

There are some startups that behave like sprinters, and others that run a marathon. I came across Instabug when I was in Cairo in 2013. Born during the chaotic era of the Arab Spring, this plucky startup managed to make it to TechCrunch Disrupt, then Y Combinator in 2016, then a $1.7M in Seed round […]