Crunch Hype

Facebook’s major bet on Jio Platforms could create a headache for mobile payments services that have amassed tens of millions of users while struggling to find a business model in the world’s second-largest internet market. The $5.7 billion investment, Facebook’s second-largest to date, could also further its dominance in India — its biggest market by […]

AT&T gave a first look into how the pay TV business is faring amid the coronavirus pandemic…and it’s not great. The company reported today as a part of its Q1 2020 earnings that its traditional pay TV services, including DIRECTV and its newer streaming option AT&T TV, saw a combined net loss of 897,000 subscribers […]

The Los Angeles Cleantch Incubator is rebooting its incubator program and moving from rolling applications to a cohort model beginning with 16 new startups. Los Angeles’ not-for-profit incubator exchanges sweat equity in the form of services and office space, and the promise of $20,000 in funding for local pilot projects, for a 1.5% to 3% […]

Ask any woman and she will tell you that most of her bras do not fit her optimally. In fact, a majority of women end up wearing the wrong size. A large part of the problem is that sizing is standardized, unlike women’s bodies. With every passing year, more people are also shopping online, meaning […]

Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health has released updated projections of when we can expect U.S. case numbers of COVID-19 infections to peak and decline, based on different levels of social distancing measures. The updated projects, which take into account the most recent information, show that with around a 30% decrease in social contact […]

The tech industry (and the world at large) is not experiencing temporary anxiety — the uncertainty we’re all coping with is the new normal. Sudden shifts in behavior have made some startups targeting slow-moving, old-school industries more relevant than they could have imagined, such as those in telehealth, distance learning and remote work. Most, however […]

SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk said on Twitter on Wednesday that the cause of the failure of a single Merlin engine during the most recent Starlink launch (which didn’t prevent the launch from ultimately succeeding at its mission) was the result of an undetected, “small amount” of a learning fluid that ignited during the […]

Earlier this week, Facebook confirmed that it had begun pulling down select COVID-19 protests, citing violations of State-enforced social distancing. The social media giant was attempting a sort of diplomacy noting that all rallies/protests would be assessed on a case by case basis, and crosschecked with local government. CNET today noted that Eventbrite has begun […]

Apple will patch a newly discovered iPhone vulnerability that security researchers say hackers have already used to steal data from their victims’ devices. News of the vulnerability dropped Wednesday by security firm ZecOps. Zuk Avraham, the company’s chief executive, said the firm found the bug last year during a routine investigation. At least six organizations […]

Facebook today is introducing another feature aimed at making it easier to see who’s behind the posts published across Facebook and Instagram. The company says it will now display the location of the Facebook Page or Instagram account with a large audience on every post it shares, so end users have a better understanding of […]

It’s launch day for yet another batch of Starlink satellites, which will bring the total launched by SpaceX to 422. With each launch, there’s renewed discussion around the impact the growing constellation of low Earth orbit small satellites has on night-sky visibility and scientific research, and SpaceX has said it’s making changes to attempt to […]

A year ago, back in the days of in-person conferences, Google officially announced the launch of its Anthos multi-cloud application modernization platform at its Cloud Next conference. The promise of Anthos was always that it would allow enterprises to write their applications once, package them into containers and then manage their multi-cloud deployments across GCP, […]

Facebook makes a $5.7 billion investment in Reliance Jio, Netflix’s latest quarter was even better than expected and Patreon lays off 30 employees. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 22, 2020. (And happy Earth Day!) 1. Facebook invests $5.7B in India’s Reliance Jio As China’s fast-growing ByteDance (owner of TikTok) emerges as a formidable competitor […]

Two months ago, seemingly out of nowhere, CrowdStrike’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch decided it was time to depart. Alperovitch, who served as the cybersecurity giant’s chief technology office since its 2011 debut, said he was leaving to launch a non-profit policy accelerator. CrowdStrike named Michael Sentonas, who managed the firm’s tech strategy for three years, as […]

Workplace productivity software has had an insane year with slick subscription tools popping up seemingly each new day. VCs have been backing the tools en masse, and startups are continuing to find new holes in company workflows that can be patched with a new service. Hugo is a collaborative note-taking app focused on sharing meeting […]

Last month, Spotify announced that as part of its coronavirus relief efforts it would soon add new fundraising features for artists on its platform. Today, the company is following through with the launch of “Artist Fundraising Pick,” a feature that allows artists to fundraise for themselves, their crews, or one of the verified music relief […]

Just months after graduating from Y Combinator, H1 Insights, the LinkedIn for the healthcare industry has raised $12.9 million in a new round of funding. “It’s a better way to connect the ecosystem,” says co-founder Ariel Katz. The company already has over 8 million profiles for healthcare professionals in its database and is generating multiple […]

SpaceX is launching another batch of 60 of its broadband internet satellites today – its fourth Starlink launch of 2020, and its seventh launch of a large batch of the satellites in total. This will put its total operational constellation size at 418, extending its lead as the world’s largest private satellite operator. The launch […]

M&A has largely slowed down in the current market, but there remain pockets of activity when the timing and price are right. Today, Medallia — a customer experience platform that scans online reviews, social media, and other sources to provide better insights into what a company is doing right and wrong and what needs to […]

January was great. February was good. March was a mess.

As we get further along in the new way of working, the new normal if you will, finding more efficient ways to do just about everything is becoming paramount for companies looking at buying new software services. To that end, Comet.ml announced a $4.5 million investment today as it tries to build a more efficient […]

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has published guidance for the use of location data and contacts tracing tools intended to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Europe’s data protection framework wraps around all such digital interventions, meaning there are legal requirements for EU countries and authorities developing tracing tools or soliciting data for […]

Online coding bootcamp Lambda School is the latest startup to announce layoffs, writing in a blog post that it’s made the “difficult decision” to cut 19 staff from roles across the company. The eight members of its executive team, including CEO and founder Austen Allred, are also taking a 15% pay cut, it said. Today […]

Facebook announced the launch of Messenger Kids in more than 70 new countries and new features that will gradually roll out in different markets. As schools around the world remain closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new features are designed to let kids increase their contacts on the app under parental supervision. The first […]

Africa focused payment startup PalmPay will waive transfer fees in Nigeria and offer direct payouts to customers who have contracted COVID-19 in the West African country. The venture — that launched in 2019 backed by China’s Transsion — has created the PalmPay Support Fund. The initiative will start with 100 million Naira (≈ $300K) and […]

Vivaldi, the browser launched by former Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner, has long positioned itself as a highly customizable alternative to Chrome and Firefox for power users. Today, the team is launching version 3.0 of its desktop browser, with built-in tracker and ad blockers, and it’s bringing its Android browser out of beta. I’ve long […]

Worldwide, there are numerous efforts underway to create a vaccine for COVID-19. Without one, we are likely to see some form of social distancing in place for the foreseeable future. And experts like Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, think it’ll take at least a year before we’ll […]

Facebook has agreed to block access to certain anti-government content to users in Vietnam, following months of having its services throttled there, reportedly by state-owned telecoms. Reuters, citing sources within the company, reported that Vietnam requested earlier in the year that Facebook restrict a variety of content it deemed illegal, such as posts critical of […]

Facebook has enjoyed unparalleled reach in India for more than a decade. But as China’s fast-growing ByteDance emerges as a formidable competitor in what has become the world’s second largest internet market, the American social media giant has found the horse it wants to bet on in the new decade. The world’s largest social media […]

Porsche is producing three variants of its all-electric Taycan sports sedan with base prices that range from a skosh over $105,000 to $185,000. Now, it seems the automaker is preparing to introduce a cheaper rear-wheel-drive version, according to an interview in Car Magazine with Porsche R&D chief Michael Steiner. This newer version, which will join […]

A new federal aid package designed to provide economic relief to businesses still immobilized by the coronavirus just passed in the Senate. The $484 billion in total aid passed after two weeks of negotiations between Republicans, who wanted to press additional small business funding forward without much reevaluation, and Democrats, who were eventually able to […]

Mattress company Casper is shutting down its European operations and laying off 78 people as it focuses on “achieving profitability,” according to a statement by the company. The layoff impacts 21% of its corporate workforce globally. In the statement, the company said that it is winding down European operations to “concentrate on the strength of […]

Swiggy is cutting about 1,000 jobs, most from its cloud kitchen division, as India’s top food delivery startup scales back some of its businesses in response to the coronavirus pandemic that has drastically affected millions of firms. In a statement, the Bangalore-based startup said it was “evaluating various means to stay nimble and focus on […]

There may be dark horses waiting to break out when this pandemic is over. Paraphrasing "A Tale of Two Cities," this is the worst time, but also maybe the best time.

There is no shortage of coverage about the sprawling entertainment industry. There is a shortage of coverage for die-hard fans of reality TV shows, according to Kate Ward and Lindsay Mannering. That opening in the market is why the two — former colleagues at the women’s website Bustle, where Ward was the founding editor-in-chief and […]

As much of the world has ground to a temporary halt over stay at home orders, Amazon has continued churning. The retail giant is nothing if not an essential business for many in the U.S. and abroad, as everyday tasks like going to the supermarket and drugstore have become hazardous. While the company has continued […]

How big a hit is Netflix’s “Tiger King”? In its latest earnings release, the streaming company says 64 million households have “chosen to watch” the docu-series its first four weeks of release. You’ll note that it isn’t claiming that 64 million people actually watched the whole show (which tells the story of Joe Exotic, a […]

Creative platform Patreon has laid off 30 employees, which is 13% of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned. “It is unclear how long this economic uncertainty will last and therefore, to prepare accordingly, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with 13% of Patreon’s workforce,” a Patreon spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. […]

Software as a service companies, modern software firms often referred to by the acronym “SaaS,” had a tough day in the public markets. The basket of companies, as tracked by Bessemer’s cloud index, dropped 4.49% during regular trading hours. The losses gave back some of the software industry’s recent gains, advances that had followed a […]

Houzz, an online platform for home renovation and design, has laid off 155 employees, roughly 10% of its staff, per an internal memo obtained by TechCrunch. Executive salaries also took a cut. The company, last valued at $4 billion, confirmed the content of the memo in a statement to TechCrunch. “Due to the impact of […]

Epic Games is finally settling its feud — kind of — with Google and putting Fornite onto the Google Play Store, but the studio sounds pretty pissed about it. When Fortnite launched on mobile in 2018, Epic Games very notably sidestepped the Google Play Store and pushed users to download the title directly from their […]

Astronauts may make a second home of space, but even they have a first time going up. NASA is hoping to better prepare its crews for the challenges of space by sending them on suborbital flights from the likes of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin — suggesting a potentially huge new market for the nascent […]

GM’s experiment with car sharing is over. The automaker Tuesday said its Maven car-sharing service, which launched in 2016, will shut down for good. Maven had paused service due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company sent an email to customers Tuesday that after examining the business, the car-sharing industry and COVID-19, it decided to shutter […]

BoostVC has been an accelerator known for the unconventional bets it has chased — and is still chasing — trends like blockchain and AR/VR that other investors have long sworn off. Its accelerator program has been as classical as it comes, offering perks like office space and living quarters for a relatively tight group of […]

Seattle-based Pulumi has quickly made a name for itself as a modern platform that lets developers specify their infrastructure through writing code in their preferred programming language — and not YAML. With the launch of Pulumi 2.0, those languages now include JavaScript, TypeScript, Go and .NET, in addition to its original support for Python. It’s […]

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech industry has yet again found itself in a vulnerable state. As we saw in the dot-com era, when the economy takes a hit, so do companies, and they need to make critical decisions — whether it’s laying off or furloughing employees, pausing operations in select markets, taking on additional […]

Trading and IPOs on the New York Stock Exchange will continue through any economic tremors the COVID-19 crisis may cause. That’s according to the NYSE’s vice chairman, John Tuttle, who spoke to TechCrunch on business continuity and how the coronavirus pandemic could impact future operations of the world’s largest stock market. Like much of the […]

AWS and Facebook today announced two new open-source projects around PyTorch, the popular open-source machine learning framework. The first of these is TorchServe, a model-serving framework for PyTorch that will make it easier for developers to put their models into production. The other is TorchElastic, a library that makes it easier for developers to build […]

In a surprising move, SAP ended its co-CEO experiment yesterday when the company announced Jennifer Morgan will be exiting stage left on April 30th, leaving Christian Klein as the lone CEO. The pair took over at the end of last year when Bill McDermott left the company to become CEO at ServiceNow, and it looked […]

Google is making a change to its product search offering, meaning that unpaid listings picked by algorithm will dominate results displayed on the Google Shopping tab instead of mostly paid product listings. In a blog post announcing the move, Bill Ready, president of Google’s commerce division, cited the coronavirus pandemic as a catalyst for Google […]