Crunch Hype

Criteo faces a privacy investigation, an e-discovery startup raises $62 million and hackers hack other hackers. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 10, 2020. 1. Adtech giant Criteo is being investigated by France’s data watchdog Criteo is under investigation by the French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, following a complaint filed by privacy rights campaign […]

Monograph, a startup working on cloud-based software that makes project and cost management easier for architects, announced today that it has raised $1.9 million in seed funding. The round was led by Homebrew Ventures and Parade Ventures, with participation from Designer Fund, Hustle VC and angel investors. The San Francisco-based startup was founded last year […]

Augmented reality technology did not, it turns out, light the touch paper on a booming new industry. What we got instead were a few cute applications on smartphones and devices like Microsoft’s HoloLens, which has seen pretty limited success. Where AR has proved that it may have a future is in industry, allowing workers to […]

Postmates said that it will be creating a fund to cover the costs for doctor appointments and medical expenses related to the COVID-19 outbreak for its delivery fleet, and, for merchants, Postmates will waive commission fees for stores in impacted markets. The goal, the company said, is to give small business owners access to on-demand […]

We tried something new at last week’s TC Sessions: Robotics + AI. For the first time ever, we incorporated a pitch-off into the event. With a site as embedded in the startup world, it made sense to find a way to give some stage time to some early-stage startups. On Monday night, I was joined […]

The insurance industry depends on data to support a number of functions the average person in the street is usually completely unaware of such as “informed risk selection”, underwriting and claims management. Like many industries, it would like to automate much of this but it’s just not that simple. Synthesized is a UK startup that […]

Docker had an existential crisis last year when, in a matter of months, CEO Steve Singh stepped down, the company sold its enterprise business to Mirantis and long-time executive Scott Johnston took over as CEO. It was a lot to process. The organization that remained decided to regroup as a developer tools company, and today […]

Graphite is part of a new wave of growth marketing consultancies launched by former product leaders at successful startups. With a specialization in SEO, and a client list that has included Masterclass, Thumbtack, Honey, Personal Capital, and more, its goal is to help make the difference for an ambitious company with product-market fit. As founder […]

Facebook is continuing to open access to a data-porting tool it launched in Ireland in December. The tool lets users of its network transfer photos and videos they have stored on its servers directly to another photo storage service, such as Google Photos, via encrypted transfer. A Facebook spokesman confirmed to TechCrunch that access to […]

The apartment rental market in the US will be worth $174.1 billion this year, and today a startup that’s built a platform to help it along by connecting renters with rentals is announcing a round of funding to fuel its growth. Zumper, which provides listings of available rental properties and services (such as rent payments) […]

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome and Mastercard announced a new initiative yesterday to accelerate technologies designed to identify, assess, develop and scale treatments to the COVID-19 epidemic. The COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator will evaluate new and repurposed drugs and biologics to treat patients with COVID-19 in the immediate term, and other viral pathogens in […]

No-code tools are on the rise, and a YC-backed company called Snapboard is looking to join the fight. Snapboard, led by solo founder Calum Moore, started when Moore decided to build one product a week for a year as a personal challenge. In the second week, he realized just how many apps and services it […]

Everlaw is bringing modern data management, visualization and machine learning to eDiscovery, the process in which legal entities review large amounts of evidence to build a case. Today, the company announced a $62 million Series C investment. CapitalG (Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund) and Menlo Ventures led the round. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and K9 […]

After suffering its third outage in two weeks, Robinhood’s founders may need to take a deeper dive into the technology stack that powers their business. That’s because the outage the mobile asset-trading platform experienced yesterday was unrelated to previous issues that brought down the company’s trading platform last week, according to a company representative. The […]

BackboneAI, an early-stage startup that wants to help companies dealing with lots of data, particularly coming from a variety of external sources, announced a $4.7 million seed investment today. The round was led by Fika Ventures with participation from Boldstart Ventures, Dynamo Ventures, GGV Capital, MetaProp, Spider VC and several other unnamed investors. Company founder […]

Uber Advanced Technologies Group has resumed testing autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, two years after the company scaled back its testing program following a fatal crash in Arizona that killed a pedestrian. Uber’s self-driving vehicle unit is tiptoeing back into testing its autonomous vehicle technology on public roads. Uber ATG ended all testing on public roads after one […]

Mike Hudack, the former CTO of Deliveroo and most recently a founding partner at London venture capital firm Blossom Capital, has quietly joined joined Monzo as the challenger bank’s new Chief Product Officer. TechCrunch understands that Hudack had previously been advising Monzo on a part-time basis for the past 11 months, while simultaneously working part-time […]

Adtech giant Criteo is under investigation by the French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, following a complaint filed by privacy rights campaign group Privacy International. “I can confirm that the CNIL has opened up an investigation into Criteo . We are in the trial phase, so we can’t communicate at this stage,” a CNIL spokesperson […]

A newly discovered malware campaign suggests that hackers have themselves become the targets of other hackers, who are infecting and repackaging popular hacking tools with malware. Cybereason’s Amit Serper found that the attackers in this years-long campaign are taking existing hacking tools — some of which are designed to exfiltrate data from a database through […]

BMW will not bring the iX3, the automaker’s first electric crossover, to the U.S., the latest automaker to shift its EV strategy to Europe and China. BMW told Automotive News, the first media outlet to report the change, that at this time, it doesn’t have plans to bring iX3 to the U.S. market. The change […]

As Stanford, Princeton, Columbia and others shutter classrooms to limit the coronavirus outbreak, college educators around the country are clambering to move their classes online. At the same time, tech companies that enable remote learning are finding a surge in usage and signups. Zoom Video Communications, a videoconferencing company, has been crushing it in the […]

Just a few hours after the markets closed the books on one of its worst trading days since the dawn of the financial crisis, President Donald Trump and members of the coronavirus task force took to the podium in the White House press briefing room to tease an economic stimulus package in an effort to stabilize […]

In the age of coronavirus, we all have to resist the urge to touch our faces. It’s how the virus can travel from doorknobs or other objects to your mucus membranes and get you sick. Luckily, a startup called Slightly Robot had already developed a wristband to stop another type of harmful touching — trichotillomania, […]

We here at TechCrunch are watching the novel coronavirus situation closely, as most of you likely are. In addition to our editorial coverage of the effects of the novel coronavirus on the business of entrepreneurship — and the ways that technology can help — we have a number of events planned for 2020, including TC […]

When Zapier was founded in 2011, it was a side project for three friends from Missouri who wanted to make it easier to connect any one web app to another. Nine years, millions of users and around 300 employees later, it’s one of the most highly valued companies to ever go through Y Combinator — […]

On Monday, Facebook announced the addition of two new names to its board of directors, Nancy Killefer and Tracey T. Travis. Killefer brings potentially valuable government insight to Facebook, as she served in the U.S. Department of the Treasury during the Obama administration. With last year’s departure of former Clinton administration chief of staff Erskine […]

Cadillac has cancelled the upcoming debut of the Lyriq, an all-electric mid-sized SUV designed to be an entry point into luxury brand’s new EV lineup, over concerns about the COVID-19 outbreak. GM’s luxury brand had planned to reveal the Lyriq on April 2 at an event in Los Angeles. COVID-19, a disease caused by a […]

Today was an awful day for the stock market, with global and domestic equities falling sharply as the world digested a collapse in oil prices, and yet another weekend of the spread of COVID-19. All major U.S. indices were down, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq falling the least of the three, slipping a comparatively modest 7.29%, […]

At least it’s over. The markets endured their worst day of trading of this young year as the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 2,000 points to close at 23,850.79 — a 7.79% decline. The Nasdaq Composite Index fell 624.94, to close at 7,950.68, and losses to the S&P 500 triggered a temporary halt on trading in […]

A small consolation in the growing COVID-19 crisis is that some of our moderate germophobia has begun to feel like a minor super power. As I got settled for a cross-country flight last week, I took out my hand wipes and did a whole number on the screen, tray table and arm rests, and this […]

The novel coronavirus is raging across the planet. Millions are quarantined, the stock market is violently gyrating and one of the preeminent VC firms in the Valley is back to saying RIP Good Times. The daily stream of news is terrifying, and we are going to learn even more in the coming weeks. For founders, […]

Reddit, the popular discussion site visited by over 430 million people per month, is opening up some of its most valuable screen real estate to advertisers with the launch of its first trending ad product, the Trending Takeover. The new ad unit will allow brands to reach visitors on two of the most heavily visited […]

The tradition of sitting through a barrage of ads in exchange for being entertained began with radio, flourished with the arrival of television and followed the mass migration online. As the massive $35 billion in advertising revenue captured by YouTube and Instagram in the last quarter indicated, online advertising around social media, influencers and streamers […]

Facebook’s latest colonization of Instagram has begun. Facebook is testing the option to cross-post Stories to Instagram, instead of just vice-versa. Hopefully, that means the two apps will finally sync up the ‘already viewed’ status of cross-posted Stories so we don’t have to watch re-runs any more, as I harped about in January. If fully […]

Two years ago, dormmates Justin Wenig and Nicholas Diao struggled to get into a popular computer science class at Columbia University . The duo eventually got into that class, but after the initial frustration around class scheduling, they decided “it was an obvious problem for a computer to solve.” Wenig and Diao are the founders […]

The Royal Air Force delayed safety warnings about the first transatlantic flight of a new Reaper aircraft in 2018, over fears that they could tip anti-drone protestors to its arrival in the U.K.

The disinformation wars are heating up as the U.S. barrels toward the 2020 presidential election, leaving tech companies again uncomfortable in the role of referee. On Monday, Facebook joined Twitter in flagging a video shared by White House Direction of Social Media Dan Scavino, marking it as “partly false” and limiting its ability to spread […]

According to a report from 9to5mac, Apple could be working on full cursor support for the next major version of iOS and iPadOS. The report is based on code of an early version of iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. If Apple ships that new feature, it means that you’ll be able to use a Bluetooth […]

A security researcher said he was forced to take down a blog post describing an apparent bug in Talkspace’s website that gave him a year’s subscription for free, after the company rejected his findings and sent the researcher a legal threat. John Jackson said he was able to sign up to Talkspace, a popular therapy […]

Google VP Vint Cerf has voiced support for a single set of standards for Internet platforms to apply around political advertising. Speaking to the UK parliament’s Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee today, the long time Googler — who has been chief Internet evangelist at the tech giant since 2005 — was asked about the targeting […]

Everything that trades is down, and sentiment is in the toilet. Even Robinhood is undertaking its ritual downtime. What does this mean for startups?

When it comes to the space launch revolution, Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab is by far the fastest emerging contender in that crowded field of startups. It’s also one of the few space unicorns, backed by a who’s who of space investors, which is why we’re beyond delighted to announce that Beck will be joining us […]

Spotify has been slowly rolling out a redesigned mobile app in small sections — first with an update to podcast pages, then to other parts of the experience. Today, the company is revamping the most critical part of the Spotify app: the home screen. Now, when Spotify users launch the app, they’ll notice the new […]

Investors using the trading app from Robinhood were once again locked out of trading after the app went down on another heavy (bad) day of trading on Wall Street. After about an hour of downtime, functionality on the app has now been partially restored. Trading has been partially restored on Robinhood and our team is […]

TFLiving, looking to bring amenities to residential and commercial spaces, has today announced the close of a $4.8 million seed financing led by Camber Creek. Courtside Ventures, and other strategic investors, also participated in the round. TFLiving uses technology to connect service providers, like massage therapists, yoga instructors and dog walkers, with property managers and […]

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re not changing the main show. (Here’s last week’s episode with Danny Crichton, in which we took a look […]

Amazon on Monday announced it will now offer its cashierless store technology called “Just Walk Out,” to other retailers. The technology uses a combination of cameras, sensors, computer vision techniques, and deep learning to allow customers to shop then leave the store without waiting in line to pay. This is the same technology that today […]

Welcome to the bloodbath. This morning trading was halted on the major stock exchanges after the S&P 500 fell to 7% triggering what are one of the so-called circuit breakers to stop an absolute market rout. Within seconds of opening stocks fell sharply lower, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 872.42 (or 3.37%) to 24,9992.36, […]

After a week in which it looked like activist investor Elliott Management might try to force out Jack Dorsey as CEO of Twitter to help boost the social platform’s flagging growth, it looks like we have a truce of sorts between the two. Today, Twitter announced that it has received a $1 billion investment from […]

Momentus, the in-space shuttle service for payloads, has bought six spaces on SpaceX SmallSat Rideshare Program missions. The launches include five trips to Sun-Synchronous orbit and one to mid-inclined low Earth orbit, and after delivery, Momentus’ small space shuttles will carry customers’ payloads to customized drop-off altitudes and orbits. The company’s Vigoride vehicles already have […]