Crunch Hype

Activant Capital, a seven-year-old, Greenwich, Conn.-based growth equity firm that’s still making a name for itself, has managed to secure $257 million in fresh capital commitments, despite that the U.S. economy appears to be headed into a recession. It’s something of a coup for founder Steve Sarracino. It also begs the question: Who is Steve […]

NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program is all about making high-risk, high-reward bets on unique — and sometimes eyebrow-raising — ideas for space exploration and observation. This year’s grants total $7 million and include one of the most realistic projects yet. It might even get made! NIAC awards are split into three tiers: Phase I, II […]

Jack Dorsey announced in a series of tweets today that he is shifting $1 billion in his Square equity to create a fund dedicated to COVID-19 relief. The Twitter and Square CEO is calling the fund Start Small and posting a tally of disbursements and recipients in a public spreadsheet. Dorsey said in his announcement […]

American equities closed down today, with the major domestic indices all losing ground after a wild trading cycle. After starting the day up sharply higher after strong Monday gains, those gains were erased as the day closed. It was a day of confusing movement; the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, to pick an example, had a range […]

A number of startups over the years have promised to re-invent email only to have fallen short. Even Google’s radical re-imagining, the Inbox app, finally closed up shop last year. Today, another company is announcing its plans to build a better inbox. Edison Software is preparing to launch OnMail, a new email service that lets […]

Sony has revealed the design of the PlayStation 5‘s controller — a follow-on to its popular DualShock line that takes on a new name for a new generation: DualSense. The DualSense controller is kitted out in black and white, and in some ways looks like a futuristic, plastic armor-plated robot companion more than a gamepad. […]

Pretty much everyone is getting socked by the Covid-19 shutdown. Among the latest to say so in a public way is Away, the trendy, five-year-old, New York-based travel brand that has raised roughly $180 million from investors over the years, including a $100 million round last year that pegged the company’s valuation at $1.4 billion […]

Want to let your kids poke around Netflix without them wandering their way beyond the kids section? Got a roommate who keeps inexplicably forgetting to use their profile and is totally screwing up your “Continue Watching” list? Good news! Netflix is now letting users set a PIN to keep individual profiles locked down. The new […]

Autonomous delivery startup Nuro has been granted a permit to begin driverless testing on California’s public roads, paving the way for the company to roll out commercial operations throughout the state. Nuro, which raised $940 million from SoftBank Vision Fund last year, is allowed to put two of its low-speed electric R2 delivery vehicles on […]

SpaceX and NASA are in the process of final preparations prior to launching their first crewed spaceflight mission — Demo-2, which is technically still a demonstration mission needed to validate SpaceX’s Crew Dragon for transporting humans during regular flight. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will be on board the historic flight, which will see […]

Would getting unemployment benefits hurt my or my spouse’s green card petition under the new public charge rule?

A payments processor used by local governments to collect court fines and utility bill payments from residents across Arkansas and Oklahoma mistakenly left a cache of data, representing years of transactions, exposed on its website. Security researcher Ashot Oganesyan found a cache of database files in a public and unprotected web directory on the website […]

Cloud Bigtable has long been Google Cloud’s fully-managed NoSQL’s database for massive, petabyte-sized analytical and operational workloads. At $0.65 per hour and node, it was never a cheap service to run, especially because Google Cloud enforced a minimum of three nodes per cluster for production workloads. Today, however, it is changing that and you can […]

Rae Witte Contributor Share on Twitter Rae Witte is a New York-based freelance journalist covering music, style, sneakers, art and dating, and how they intersect with tech. You can find her writing on i-D, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire and Forbes, among others. More posts by this contributor Nike is making footwear to improve athletes’ […]

A startup that has framed itself as an Instagram for websites is now squaring up against Shopify as it nabs new funding from Google’s venture capital arm. Brooklyn-based Universe has just closed a $10 million Series A from GV. The funding round was well in the works before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold stateside; nevertheless, […]

The pandemic crisis has pushed entrepreneurs and investors into unknown territory. Google’s GV just led a $10 million investment in Universe, a low-friction website builder that’s venturing into the world of commerce. Mobile website builder Universe raises $10M from GV as it ventures into commerce The investment was in the works before the COVID-19 pandemic […]

Hims, the startup consumer health brand providing out-of-pocket physician services online, has launched group therapy services through its Hims and Hers brands as part of an initial push into mental health services. The company first began exploring opportunities to expand into the mental health category around eight months ago, and accelerated its pace to respond […]

Samsung overnight released its earnings guidance for the first quarter of 2020, stating that it expected sales of $45.4 billion and an operating profit of roughly $5.3 billion. The company’s fiscal year is aligned to the standard calendar year, and it will announce official earnings results on April 23. Those numbers are slightly up from […]

NASCAR drivers can now lose real-world sponsors for conduct in virtual competition. That’s what happened to Bubba Wallace on April 5 when he rage-quit a race in the eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational — a substitute for the sport’s live rubber-to-pavement action during the COVID-19 pandemic. As live audience sports organizations have paused playoffs and closed stadiums, […]

Securitization is a critical function of the modern financial system. Banks “package” individual loans, say a mortgage or an auto loan, into a group with similar characteristics and sell them to other investors. That gets the debt off the originator’s balance sheet so that they can offer more loans, while also offering private investors alternative […]

CircleCI, an early adherent to the notion of continuous delivery when it launched in 2011, announced a $100 million Series E investment today. It comes on top of a $56 million round last July. The round was led by IVP and Sapphire Ventures. Under the terms of the deal, Cack Wilhelm will be joining the CircleCI […]

Quibi, the oddly-named mobile streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, was downloaded over 300,000 times on launch day, according to preliminary data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That’s only 7.5% of the approximately 4 million installs Disney+ saw when it launched in the U.S. and Canada on November 12, 2019. However, it was […]

Spot & Tango, the D2C pet food brand, has today announced the launch of a new line of pet food called UnKibble. Alongside the announcement of the launch, the company has also closed on a $4.2 million seed funding round led by Guild Capital. Spot & Tango launched 2018 with a line of fresh, wet […]

Shipt shoppers, which began organizing in February, are staging their first action today. Yesterday, a group of Shipt shoppers, who shop and deliver orders from Target and other stores, announced their plans to walk off today. The walk-off is in protest of the way Shipt has treated its shoppers amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Vice first […]

Last year, The Information reported that CNN was working on a new digital news service to compete with the likes of Apple and Facebook. Today, some of those plans are taking shape. The Turner-owned news broadcaster has acquired Canopy, an all-purpose content personalisation that uses human curation, on-device machine learning and differential privacy to help […]

The decade-old New Media Ventures investment fund, which backs startup businesses and non-profits developing technologies to improve access to government, said it is raising a “Crisis Innovation Fund” aiming to provide matching grants for startups advancing democracy and centering marginalized communities. The fund will offer grants and investments of between $25,000 and $250,000 to entrepreneurs […]

WorkClout, a graduate of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 cohort, announced today that it has shifted its focus from manufacturing automation to manufacturing performance support and has raised a $2.3 million seed round. The funding was led by Spider Capital with participation from Y Combinator, Liquid 2, Soma Capital, Pioneer Fund, Mehta Ventures and several […]

HubSpot, the Boston-based inbound marketing firm, announced today it is launching a standalone content management system designed to make it easy for marketing personnel to add and update content. While content management, in a sense, has been core to HubSpot from the beginning — many companies use their blogging platform, for example — the company […]

This morning, Utah-based SaaS startup Podium announced that it has closed a $125 million Series C led by Y Combinator’s Continuity fund, with participation from Sapphire Ventures. Prior investors Alkeon, IVP, GV, Summit, Accel and Recruit Co. also took part in the funding event. The new capital values Podium at around $1.5 billion, and brings […]

As the COVID-19 pandemic makes health officials urge us all to stay at home, truckers are doing the exact opposite of that to help us live our lives inside. Now, more than ever, package delivery and stocked grocery shelves are luxuries we rely on – and the trucking industry is working hard to keep it […]

The latest confirmation of the online tracking industry’s continued flouting of EU privacy laws which — at least on paper — are supposed to protect citizens from consent-less digital surveillance comes by via Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC). The watchdog did a sweep survey of around 40 popular websites last year — covering sectors including […]

A lot of attention is focused on how some tech services are seeing a big boost in demand during the coronavirus pandemic — for example, streaming services and other online media, and anything to do with food delivery, are all seeing unprecedented levels of use. Today comes news from another startup highlighting another important aspect […]

Over the last several years, delivery services have become a key component of how retailers, or anyone selling or distributing products and services, do business. Now, with a global health pandemic in full swing keeping people indoors (and away from physical storefronts), delivery has become an essential must-have if you want your business to stay […]

Kurly, a startup that operates a grocery delivery service in Korea, has secured $150 million in a new financing round months after reports claimed that the firm might be acquired soon. Sequoia Capital, Hillhouse Capital and Digital Sky Technologies invested in the Korean startup’s Series E financing round, which according to news outlet Korean Investors, […]

Just a few months after closing a new $185 million fund to continue backing early-stage European startups, Blossom Capital, the VC firm founded by Ophelia Brown, is announcing a new angel investment program seeking to back European unicorn alumnus. Dubbed “Cultivate,” the new program looks to create a 30-strong angel network made up of founders […]

WhatsApp is imposing additional restriction on how frequently a message can be shared on its platform in its latest effort to curtail the spread of misinformation. The Facebook -owned instant messaging service said today that any message that has been forwarded five or more times will now face a new limit that will prevent a […]

DeHaat, an online platform that offers full-stack agricultural services to farmers, has raised $12 million as it looks to scale its network across India. The Series A financial round for the eight-year-old Patna and Gurgaon-based startup was led by Sequoia Capital India. Dutch entrepreneurial development bank FMO, and existing investors Omnivore and AgFunder, also participated […]

Boeing has confirmed what many suspected following the partial failure of their original Starliner capsule Orbital Flight Test (OFT) – the company will re-fly the mission, once again seeking to test and demonstrate the Starliner’s launch, flight, Space Station docking and landing capabilities prior to flying a version of the mission with actual astronauts on board. […]

Boeing said Monday it will suspend all 787 operations at its South Carolina factory following a stay-at-home order issued by the governor, effectively putting the company’s entire commercial airplane production on hiatus. The closure will start at the end of the second shift April 8. Boeing announced the production suspension on the same day it […]

The international community has struggled for decades to formalize rules regarding the collection and use of resources in space and on the Moon. While the U.S. and all spacefaring countries declined to endorse the most famous attempt, the 1979 “Moon Treaty,” the new Moon race has spurred the White House to announce it is open […]

Business at Tushy is booming. While the circumstances that led to the boom are sobering, the bidet company needed to adapt its strategy after seeing an uptick in business amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Other companies in this cohort include video conferencing service Zoom, meal kit service Blue Apron and Facebook, thanks to its social network, […]

AngelList, a platform that connects angel investors to startups and has roughly $1.8 billion assets under management, has laid off a sizable number of staff and cut executive salaries across all departments, according to a source familiar with the company. AngelList declined to share the number of people who were laid off. The layoffs, which […]

The FCC has denied a request that it investigate and take action on a broadcast the petitioners allege has made material and deadly contributions to the spread of COVID-19: President Trump's frequent press conferences.

Social distancing requirements amid the COVID-19 pandemic may have canceled kids’ birthday parties, but parents are finding new ways to take the celebrations online. While video chat apps like Zoom, Google Hangouts or FaceTime are an option for gathering kids together in the virtual space, there’s still the challenge of what to do once there. […]

Starting today, some U.S. Facebook users will see a new pop-up on the app asking them to complete a survey about COVID-19. The survey, from Carnegie Mellon University’s Delphi epidemiological research center, is one of many new symptom mapping projects that seek to anticipate where the next wave of the virus will hit as COVID-19 […]

“Our real focus is on democratizing mental healthcare,” says SonderMind co-founder chief executive, Mark Frank. His company, founded back in 2017, is having a moment. With the restrictions and economic stresses caused by the government’s efforts to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in the US, demand for mental health services is soaring. And […]

Airbnb said Monday that it has raised $1 billion in debt and equity from private equity firms Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners, even as the online rental marketplace has seen its business plummet due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. It’s unclear how this funding might alter Airbnb’s previously […]

Looks like things haven’t gone completely smoothly with Quibi‘s launch. The issue appears to have been resolved, but the Quibi customer support account tweeted this afternoon that “some users may be experiencing problems with the Quibi app,” only to add an hour later that “Users should once again be able to use the Quibi app […]

Stocks rallied Monday, with all major indices snapping back into positive territories as investors seized on any positive developments in the fight to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The stock market is, of course, not the economy. And this is likely a dead-cat bounce — a temporary recovery after […]

“The U.S. and Germany are pushing the growth," says CEO Thibaud Hug de Larauze. "They are the main two drivers of the boom of Back Market."