Crunch Hype

Fintech startup Revolut is launching a new feature called Payday. It is an alternative to credit card debt and short-term credit as it lets you unlock a portion of your wage early. If a business decides to integrate with Revolut, users can then access the feature from the financial super app directly. Right now, the […]

The success of a fundraising process is entirely dependent on how well an entrepreneur can manage it. Here are five pointers that founders should consider while pitching to venture capitalists.

If your employer does any sort of charity donation matching, the system powering it might be… not great. Maybe it’s got an ancient interface; maybe it’s stuffed behind the VPN at some weird URL that takes a half hour to dig up every December when you remember there’s donation match money about to expire. Deed, […]

Rocket launch startup Astra has received a key license from the Federal Aviation Administration, giving the green light for the company’s first commercial orbital launch at the end of the month. Astra CEO Chris Kemp tweeted the news on Thursday, adding that the launch operator license through the FAA is valid through 2026. The new […]

Tabletop gaming is in the middle of a historic boom, despite recent restrictions imposed on in-person gatherings by COVID. The tools adopted by game masters and casual players to play remotely are powerful, but not always the easiest to use or adopt. Role hopes to change that with a super-accessible video platform focused on the […]

This January, Twitter acquired the newsletter platform Revue, but until now its integration into Twitter has been minimal; sometimes when you write Twitter threads, you’ll be greeted with a “Hello, wordsmiths” message that tells you about its newsletter tools. Starting today, Twitter is testing a feature that brings Revue newsletters more prominently into the Twitter […]

Chicago is an outlying benefactor from accelerating venture capital activity and the rise of remote investing.

Instead of an EV battery being something that needs to be recharged, like an iPhone, Ample wants to turn them into things that can be swapped out, like batteries in a digital camera.

Regardless of your startup’s stance on the topic, having a consistent compensation philosophy that you apply to your evolving workplace has a unicorn-sized influence on important growth metrics.

Emergency response is a time-sensitive business. When fires burn or a driver crashes their car, seconds can mean the difference between saving lives and watching a situation spiral rapidly out of control. For fire and police departments, getting teams on site can be challenging, what with the vagaries of traffic and bad routing. Houston-headquartered Paladin […]

First of all, we’ve got a fancy new name. While “Robotics Roundup” was nothing if not very technically accurate, it lacked the kind of panache one ought to strive for when rounding up robotics. Actuator, on the other hand — that’s a mover and shaker. It’s a name you can take to the bank (or […]

Reels are coming to Facebook in the U.S. The company this morning announced it will begin testing a new feature, Facebook Reels, which will give Facebook users the ability to create and share short-form video content directly within the News Feed or within Facebook Groups. The addition is an expansion of tests launched earlier this […]

India’s CRED, which rewards users for paying their credit-card bills on time, is broadening its offerings to help its 7.5 million members gain more from the service. The Bangalore-based startup said on Thursday that CRED users can now lend to one another at an interest rate of up to 9% annually. Kunal Shah, founder and […]

If you use AirPods Pro or AirPods Max, your mobile Netflix-watching is about to get a bit more immersive. Yesterday, Netflix confirmed that it has begun rolling out spatial audio support on iPhone and iPad on iOS 14 after the feature was spotted by a Reddit user. Netflix joins streaming competitors like HBO Max, Disney+, […]

Eaze this week announced significant plans to expand into one the U.S.’s largest cannabis delivery services. One of the original on-demand cannabis delivery services, the Bay Area-based company is set to acquire cannabis retailer and cultivator Green Dragon, which operates in the hot markets of Colorado and Florida. Combined with existing operations in California and […]

TikTok’s plans to collect biometric identifiers from its users has prompted concern among U.S. lawmakers, who are demanding the company reveal exactly what information it collects and what it plans to do with that data. In a letter sent earlier this month addressed to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John […]

Every country has its own bundle of laws, rules and regulations, and they change on a regular basis making it an enormous challenge to keep up with it all. That usually requires large staffs filling in spreadsheets and unwieldy processes, but Regology, an early stage startup wants to change that by putting some automation to […]

Bay Area-based Diamond Age this week announced that it has raised $8 million. The seed round is led by Prime Movers Lab and Alpaca VC and features a slew of additional firms, including Dolby Family Ventures, Calm Ventures, Gaingels, Towerview Ventures, GFA Venture Partners and Suffolk Construction. The startup looks to put a slew of […]

UIPath came seemingly out of nowhere in the last several years, going public last year in a successful IPO during which it raised over $527 million. It raised $2 billion in private money prior to that with its final private valuation coming in at an amazing $35 billion. UIPath CEO Daniel Dines will be joining […]

General Motors and AT&T will be rolling out 5G connectivity in select Chevy, Cadillac and GMC vehicles from model year 2024, in a boost that the two companies say will bring more reliable software updates, faster navigation and downloads, and better coverage on roadways. Executives said in a media briefing that the rollout of the […]

The push for renewable energy has brought offshore wind power to the forefront of many an energy company’s agenda, and that means taking a very close look at the ocean floor where the installations are to go. Fortunately Bedrock is here to drag that mapping process into the 21st century with its autonomous underwater vehicle […]

Consumer shift to buying online during the global pandemic — and keeping that habit — continues to boost revenue for makers of e-commerce developer tools.

Shared micromobility company Bird has unveiled a new consumer e-bike. This is the first time the company is selling private vehicles rather than relying on the shared model. It’s calling the bike the “Bird Bike,” which is the same name it’s using for the recently released shared e-bike the company launched in June. As with […]

Metabase spun out of venture studio Expa as an easy way for people to interact with datasets.

Most startup origin stories don’t begin on an NFL field, but that’s where founder, CEO and offensive tackle Jason Fox conceptualized the idea behind Earbuds. As he watched first overall draft pick Cam Newton warm up before a game in 2011, dancing to music, Fox couldn’t help but wonder what the future NFL MVP was […]

Fontinalis Partners, a 12-year-old, Detroit-based venture firm that was among the earliest early-stage venture outfits to focus squarely on mobility, has collected $104 million in capital commitments for its third and newest fund. Investors in the vehicle include Ford Motor Corp., whose executive chairman, Bill Ford, cofounded Fontinalis and continues to help manage the fund. […]

Founders JT Garwood and Jack Miller started Bttn after seeing the challenges medical organizations had during the global pandemic to not only find supplies, but also get fair prices for them.

In May 2020, a trio of friends rented a home in Tulum, Mexico and invited their internet friends. The project was dubbed The Launch House, and the 18 entrepreneurs who came to live there had to do the following: pay rent, launch projects, and build their company in public. Other homes began popping across the […]

Facebook’s journey toward making virtual reality a thing has been long and circuitous, but despite mixed success in finding a wide audience for VR, they have managed to build some very nice hardware along the way. What’s fairly ironic is that while Facebook has managed to succeed in finessing the hardware and operating system of […]

Needing to get your car fixed is like having a toothache: It’s painful, hard to ignore and likely means someone messing around under the hood. RepairSmith, launched in 2019, wants to make that process a little smoother through its mobile auto repair service that sends a mechanic right to the driver’s home. The startup is […]

Amazon has rolled out India’s first celebrity voice feature on Alexa with the nation’s biggest movie star Amitabh Bachchan as the company makes a push to lure more users in the world’s second-most populated nation. The company, which rolled out the voice of Samuel Jackson on Alexa in the U.S. in 2019, said users in […]

Effectively leveraging email analytics and data to inform future emails and multichannel campaigns requires marketers to start preparing now.

Facebook is out with a new report collecting the most popular posts on the platform, responding to critics who believe the company is deliberately opaque about its top-performing content. Facebook’s new “widely viewed content reports” will come out quarterly, reflecting most viewed top News Feed posts in the U.S. every three months — not exactly […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex and Danny had colleague Tage Kene-Okafor on the show to chat about the burgeoning African startup scene. Tage has become TechCrunch’s key correspondent in the area, chronicling the continent’s expanding venture capital totals, […]

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

Databricks, the open-source data lake and data management powerhouse has been on quite a financial run lately. Today Bloomberg reported the company could be raising a new round worth at least $1.5 billion at an otherworldly $38 billion valuation. That price tag is up $10 billion from its last fundraise in February when it snagged […]

Two Democratic senators have asked the new chair of the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Tesla’s statements about the autonomous capabilities of its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems. The senators, Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), expressed particular concern over Tesla misleading customers into thinking their vehicles are capable of fully autonomous driving. “Tesla’s […]

Three to five people is an ideal starting point for an advisory board, depending on the size and stage of your company.

Twitter is rolling out changes to its newly rebuilt API that will allow third-party developers to build tools and other solutions specifically for its audio chatroom product, Twitter Spaces. The company today announced it’s shipping new endpoints to support Spaces on the Twitter API v2, with the initial focus on enabling discovery of live or […]

Apple has encountered monumental backlash to a new child sexual abuse material (CSAM) detection technology it announced earlier this month. The system, which Apple calls NeuralHash, has yet to be activated for its billion-plus users, but the technology is already facing heat from security researchers who say the algorithm is producing flawed results. NeuralHash is […]

The irony is that there’s never been a better time to be an inception investor given lower capital needs of getting from idea to Series A milestones.

Waze might have a way to keep your kids entertained during a drive without handing them a tablet: distract them with your navigation app. The company has added a PAW Patrol experience.

Satellite operator Planet Labs is beefing up its existing partnership with Google Cloud. Under a new agreement, Planet customers can use Google Cloud to store and process data, and access Google’s other products such as its data analytics warehouse BigQuery. The two companies’ collaboration stretches back to 2017, when Google sold its satellite imaging business, […]

I’m on an H-1B in the U.S. I’ve been looking at the EB-1A and EB-2 NIW. I’m not sure if I would qualify for an EB-1A, but since I was born in India, I face a longer wait for an EB-2 NIW. Any tips?

Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving arm, is building a dedicated trucking hub in Dallas and partnering with Ryder for fleet management services in a two-pronged move to seriously scale up its autonomous trucking operations across Texas, Arizona and California. This news comes just a couple of months after Waymo announced a $2.5 billion raise that it would […]

Apple is slowly walking back its controversial decision to redesign mobile Safari in iOS 15 to show the address bar at the bottom of the screen, floating atop the page’s content. The revamp, which was largely meant to make it easier to reach Safari’s controls with one hand, had been met with criticism as Apple’s […]

Last time I was in Hong Kong, a startup gave me a jar of mealworms as a snack. They were crunchy and a bit odd looking (as one might expect from a jar full of baked larvae). They really didn’t offer much in the way of flavor, though, so maybe supply your own seasoning. For […]

Accord’s application provides shared next steps and milestones for buying and selling teams to align on so that the right people are looped in at the right time.

During today’s Pokémon Presents livestream, The Pokémon Company announced that Pokémon Unite will become available for iOS and Android on September 22. The strategic battle game came out for Nintendo Switch in late July, but its arrival on mobile devices will expand the game’s potential user base. For users already playing on Nintendo Switch, fear […]

Sequoia is one of the most prestigious and successful venture firms to ever exist. The firm’s portfolio includes Airbnb, 23andMe, Docker, Dropbox, Figma and GitHub — and that barely covers the first half of the alphabet. (The Sequoia website lists portfolio companies in alphabetical order.) So it should go without saying that we are absolutely […]