Crunch Hype

A new acquisition should help Fandango expand its streaming efforts, Apple brings its digital services to new countries and new research suggests a higher-than-expected infection rate for COVID-19. 1. Walmart is selling its on-demand video service Vudu to Fandango Details as to how Fandango will specifically leverage Vudu weren’t immediately disclosed, but the company currently […]

There is massive momentum in fintech right now: regulations are finally opening up, APIs are more widely available than ever before and there is a sense that existing products — both financial and technical — are just not doing the job that consumers and financial professionals demand. With excitement like that, fintech has unsurprisingly seen […]

AT&T’s WarnerMedia announced last fall its plan was to launch the new streaming service HBO Max in May 2020 for $14.99 per month. Today, we have a solid launch date: May 27th. AT&T has also now revealed its initial programming slate for the new direct-to-consumer service, which includes over 10,000 hours of premium content from […]

When you lay off employees on an H-1B or TN visa, they will have 60 days or the visa end date plus 10 days — whichever is shorter — to find a comparable job or another visa to remain in the U.S.

Uber Eats customers have given $3 million in direct contributions to restaurants using a new feature on the app designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The milestone caps off a related campaign by Uber Eats to match up to $3 million in contributions made by customers. Uber Eats is sending its $3 million in […]

“If your kids aren’t sleeping, you aren’t sleeping,” says Moshi founder and CEO Ian Chambers. As mindfulness apps grow increasingly popular among adults, Moshi is looking to bring mindfulness and meditative techniques to children. The app today announced the close of a $12 million Series B financing led by Accel, with participation from Latitude Ventures […]

In the time many of us live in now, we all know our online media consumption is — to state the obvious — going through the roof. Subsequently, the amount of data pertaining to online marketing is, equally, reaching stratospheric heights and in recent years tech companies like Datorama and Funnel.io, SuperMetrics and Adverity have appeared to […]

LabCorp’s at-home COVID-19 test, which is called ‘Pixel,’ has received the first Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for such a test missed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The test is an at-home collection kit, which provides sample collection materials including a nasal swab to the user, who then uses the included shipping package […]

Last week, Lightspeed Venture Partners announced that it had closed on $4.2 billion in new capital across three distinct funds — an $890 million early-stage venture fund, a $1.83 billion later-stage fund and a $1.5 billion “opportunity fund.” With offices in the U.S., China, India, South East Asia, U.K. and Israel, the firm certainly has […]

More departures are taking place at Bó, the digital bank developed by RBS-owned Natwest. Following the departure of Bó CEO Mark Bailie in January, the latest to seek a new opportunity is chief product officer Ollie Purdue, TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, Purdue is joining Antler, the company builder and early-stage venture capital firm […]

In recent years, fintech’s revolution has felt like a rising tide. Behemoths like Stripe and Square edged out banks while newbies like Brex nonchalantly raised nine-figure rounds. Today, however, the state of the financial technology industry feels more wobbly — some healthy startups in the genre are faring better than ever, while others are feeling […]

Cruise, the subsidiary of GM that also has backing from SoftBank Vision Fund, automaker Honda and T. Rowe Price & Associates, is turning to a heavy hitter to head up its legal team. The autonomous vehicle technology company has hired Jeff Bleich, board chairman of utility Pacific Gas & Electric, as its chief legal officer. […]

Disruptor Beam, the mobile gaming startup behind Star Trek Timelines, has a new name and a new business. It’s now calling itself Beamable, and it’s selling a set of tools to help game developers add commerce and social functionality to their titles. The company’s direction became clear earlier this year when it sold Timelines to […]

For better or worse, digital identity management services — the process of identifying and authenticating users on networks to access services — has become a ubiquitous part of interacting on the internet, all the more so in the recent weeks as we have been asked to carry out increasingly more of our lives online. Used […]

As people move into months of sheltering in place, many are doubling down on cooking at home. But not everyone is always happy about it. Today, a company that makes products that can help them bypass at least some of that effort but still eat nutritiously is announcing a fundraising to continue growing its business. […]

Apple said today it is launching its services App Store, Apple Podcasts, iCloud, and Apple Music to dozens of additional markets in Africa, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Middle East among others in what is one of the biggest geographical expansions for one of the world’s biggest firms. The App Store, Apple Arcade, Apple Podcasts, and iCloud […]

Samsung Electronics announced today that its blood pressure monitoring app for Galaxy Watches has been approved by South Korean regulators. Called the Samsung Health Monitor, the app will be available for the Galaxy Watch Active2 during the third quarter, at least in South Korea, and added to upcoming Galaxy Watch devices. TechCrunch has contacted Samsung […]

Voyage has cleared a regulatory hurdle that will allow the company to expand its self-driving service from the private roads of a retirement community in San Jose, Calif. to public roads throughout the rest of the state. The California Public Utilities Commission issued a permit Monday that gives Voyage permission to transport passengers in its […]

Over the weekend, Silicon Valley leader Marc Andreessen broke his usual silence and gave some advice to Silicon Valley: It’s time to build. The famed investor urged CEOs, entrepreneurs and investors alike to welcome new companies into their circles. The blog post details high-flying pieces of advice that could each land in a unique angle […]

Vestiaire Collective just closed another big round of funding in the middle of an economic crisis — the round closed in early April. The startup raised $64.2 million (€59 million) and the company has raised more than €209 million in total, according to Crunchbase. Vestiaire Collective operates a marketplace of pre-owned fashion items. Users can […]

A lot of startups have answered the call for more personal protective equipment (PPE) and other essentials to support healthcare workers in their efforts to curb the spread and impact of COVID-19. One of those is direct-to-consumer 3D-printed eyewear brand Fitz, which is employing its custom-fit glasses technology to build protective, prescription specs for front-line […]

Could the coronavirus crisis — and the way different countries have responded — make Silicon Valley VCs more bullish on European startups? That’s the thesis put forward by Salman Ullah, co-founder and managing director of Merus Capital. As COVID-19 spreads globally, he argues that countries with national healthcare — along with fiscal and monetary policies […]

Uber argued in a recent court filing that former employee Anthony Levandowski committed fraud, an action that frees the company from any obligation to pay his legal bills, including a judgment ordering the star engineer to pay Google $179 million. The court filing was first reported by Bloomberg. Uber’s fraud claim was part of its […]

Levi’s is leveraging its advertising partnership with TikTok to connect online shoppers with the denim brand amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced retailers to close their doors — including most of Levi’s own stores. The company announced today its success as one of the first retailers to use TikTok’s “Shop Now” buttons that allow consumers […]

A new study conducted by the University of Southern California along with the LA County Department of Public Health indicates the presence of antibodies for COVID-19 in between 2.8 and 5.6% of the population of LA County, suggesting that between 221,000 and 442,000 individuals had the infection — up to 55 times more people than […]

COVID-19 commanded an understandably outsized presence in Jeff Bezos’s annual shareholder letter last week. The Amazon exec laid out the company’s plans for addressing the pandemic on a number of different levels, including building a testing lab for employees, along “with regular testing of all Amazonians, including those showing no symptoms.” It has become a […]

Facebook confirmed this week that it will be pulling down a number of posts promoting stay-at-home protests. CNN was the first to report the news, which finds the social media giant pulling down events in a variety of different states, including California, Nebraska and New Jersey. The news follows a spike in events across the […]

A new project designed to help address the growing need for ventilator hardware in order to treat the most serious cases of COVID-19 achieved an important milestone today, getting FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for its units to be used and scaled for production. The hardware, dubbed ‘Spiro Wave,’ is an emergency automated resuscitator that […]

The new Extra Crunch Live series is taking flight this week. Today we’re talking to Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee and Ted Wang. This Thursday we’re keeping the parade of well-known investors coming, when Charles Hudson will join Natasha Mascarenhas and I for a deep-dive into all things pre-seed and seed. Extra Crunch Live Episode 2: […]

Movie ticketing company Fandango has agreed to buy Walmart’s on-demand video streaming service, Vudu, for an undisclosed sum. The video service today reaches more than 100 million living room devices across the U.S., including smart TVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles and other over-the-top streaming devices, as well as Windows 10 and Mac computers, and iOS […]

Building a startup is hard enough. But COVID-19, our generation’s worst plot twist, gives new meaning to uncertainty and stress. No one had “pandemic” on their early-stage startup’s radar, which begs the question: How do you move your business forward in unprecedented times? It’s a huge challenge, and we’ve worked hard to find a way […]

It would be easy to assume that Verizon’s purchase last week of video-conferencing tool BlueJeans was an opportunistic move to capitalize on the sudden shift to remote work, but the ball began rolling last June and has implications far beyond current work-from-home requirements. The video-chat darling of the moment is Zoom, but BlueJeans is considered […]

After being forced to quickly shift plans and stage a remote demo day last month following the outbreak of COVID-19 stateside, Y Combinator announced today that they will officially be fully moving their next batch to a remote format. In a post today on Y Combinator’s site, YC CEO Michael Seibel announced the move. “We […]

The new Magic Keyboard is good, Uber launches new delivery services and Facebook releases its Gaming app ahead of schedule. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 20, 2020, a totally regular date with no cultural significance whatsoever. Also, just a reminder: We’re holding our first Extra Crunch Live session, with Aileen Lee and Ted Wang, […]

Research institutes Inria and Fraunhofer have shared details on their contact-tracing protocol that could be used by the French and German governments in the coming weeks. It is named ROBERT for ROBust and privacy-presERving proximity Tracing protocol. Inria and Fraunhofer are members of the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) project. On Friday, PEPP-PT said that […]

The European Commission has launched a data portal for scientists studying the SARS-CoV-2 virus to speed up access to data sets and tools in order to bolster research efforts by encouraging data reuse and open science. The COVID-19 Data Portal is intended to accelerate regional efforts to combat the virus by creating a central repository […]

Hi and 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. What you’re reading here is an abbreviated version of The Station. To get the complete newsletter, which comes out every weekend, go here and click The Station. […]

Musicians have been quickly turning to Twitch to support themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic, as they’re no longer able to make money from live gigs and touring. Now Twitch is staffing up to turn this ad hoc use of Twitch into more of a formal product. The company today announced it hired Spotify’s Tracy Chan […]

Many, many symptom trackers have launched during the coronavirus pandemic, but few have the potential to reach even a bucketful of Facebook’s vast ocean of users. Facebook launched a symptom tracking partnership with Carnegie Mellon University’s Delphi epidemiological research center early this month, and now the company plans to expand the project outside of the […]

Plasma taken from the blood of recovered COVID-19 patients stands a real chance of being one of the more effective short-term measures feasible in the ongoing effort to control the global coronavirus pandemic. The FDA has issued a broad call for donations from eligible individuals, and now Microsoft has built an online screening tool on […]

Uber is introducing two new types of services, the company announced this week, including Uber Direct and Uber Connect. Direct is a delivery platform for retail items, while Connect is a peer-to-peer package delivery service, for sending goods to family and friends. This marks the most aggressive foray yet for Uber into courier services, after […]

Facebook’s dedicated Gaming app is now live on Android, months before its planned June release. The social media giant pushed the app out two months prior to its scheduled unveiling amid a global pandemic that’s left people all over the world isolated at home, rapidly burning through entertainment options. The New York Times announced the […]

Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a brief jumpstart for your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop each and every Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re only adding. In fact, last week’s show (with Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas) was a blast, […]

When I was 10 years old, my dad took me to Fenway Park for the first time. I remember quite clearly walking up the runway and seeing the brilliant green lawn and being totally and completely amazed. Now that’s a great customer experience. I was hooked simply by the beauty of the ballpark, even before […]

Over the past two years, I’ve typed nearly every word I’ve written while traveling on the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard Folio. For more on why you can see my iPad Pro review here. For the purposes of this look at the new Magic Keyboard, though, you should probably just know two things: It was reliable, […]

Hundreds of academics across the world have welcomed efforts to introduce privacy-friendly contact tracing systems to help understand the spread of coronavirus. A letter, signed by nearly 300 academics and published Monday, praised recent announcements from Apple and Google to build an opt-in and decentralized way of allowing individuals to know if they have come […]

Today’s a big day! Extra Crunch Live: Episode 1 featuring Aileen Lee and Ted Wang airs today at 1:30pm ET/10:30am PT and we could not be more excited to have such esteemed guests for the launch of this new speaker series for Extra Crunch members. The coronavirus has gripped the nation for the past five […]

Facebook has expanded Fundraisers to India and is working with several additional state governments to provide authoritative information about the coronavirus to more people in the country, it said today. Fundraisers, which was available in the U.S., Europe and dozens of other markets prior to Monday’s announcement, allows people to collectively contribute towards the community. […]

Alibaba Cloud announced today that it will invest another RMB 200 billion (or about $28 billion) into its infrastructure over the next three years, prompted in part by increased demand for services like video conferencing and live streaming as businesses adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic. The investment will focus on expanding Alibaba Cloud’s technology, including […]

French startup Alan has raised a $54.4 million (€50 million) Series C funding round. Temasek is leading the round with existing investors (such as Index Ventures) also participating. Overall, Alan has raised $136 million (€125 million) over the past four years. Alan has built a health insurance product for the French market. The company first […]