Crunch Hype

Tens of thousands of Indians move to the United States to pursue higher education each year. But like many others who have arrived from a foreign land, they can’t secure education loans or personal loans from the banks at interest rates on par with those levied on local students. The reason why these students — […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. After a long Shot hiatus, things keep happening that demand our attention. So, after digging into Tesla’s near-miss of the $1,000 share-price mark, we’re back to dig into Elliott Management’s imposition into Twitter’s world after sticking its nose […]

Robinhood, the popular trading app with a purported 10-million-strong user base and a $7.6 billion valuation, said it will offer compensation for yesterday’s outage on a case-by-case basis, according to a company spokesperson. The company issued a statement early Tuesday documenting that the outage began at around 9:30 AM Eastern when the company experienced what […]

Most developers think of Stack Overflow as a question and answer site for their programming questions. But over the last few years, the company has also built a successful business in its Stack Overflow for Teams product, which essentially offers companies a private version of its Q&A product. Indeed, the Teams product now brings in […]

Years ago, Teel Lidow arrived at the airport to take a standard, eight-hour flight from Santiago, Chile to New York City. The journey ended up taking three days, and involved an emergency landing, and passengers entering two countries (Ecuador and Peru) they never planned to enter. When they finally arrived in New York, the airline […]

SmartNews, the news aggregation app that hit a unicorn valuation last year, has spent its time growing its local news feature. With the United States presidential election underscoring both the importance of local news and its challenges, SmartNews has a huge opportunity to gain new users. In early 2019, SmartNews had 40 local partners. Over […]

Amazon this morning announced another step it’s taken to speed up same-day deliveries. The company has installed what it’s calling “mini-fulfillment centers” closer to where customers live in select U.S. markets, including Philadelphia, Phoenix, Orlando, and Dallas. The new facilities allow Amazon to reduce same-day delivery times down to just a few hours for Prime […]

Brooklinen, a startup that sells bedding and other home goods online, has raised $50 million in new funding from growth equity firm Summit Partners. Recent headlines are spurring bigger questions about the direct-to-consumer retail business, with Blue Apron exploring a potential sale and Casper also disclosing disappointing growth and persistent losses. Co-founder and CEO Rich […]

I was honestly a surprised to find out from Sensel that the company is only just recently raising its Series A. The Sunnyvale-based hardware startup has been around since 2013, bringing its first product, the modular music and computing Morph peripheral, to market a few years back. Over the past few years, however, the company’s […]

Ampere, the chip startup run by former Intel President Renee James, announced a new chip today that she says is designed specifically to optimize for cloud workloads. Ampere VP of product Jeff Wittich says the new chip is called the Ampere Altra, and it’s been designed with some features that should make it attractive to […]

Data management company Datastax, one of the largest contributors to the Apache Cassandra project, today announced that it has acquired The Last Pickle (and no, I don’t know what’s up with that name either), a New Zealand-based Cassandra consulting and services firm that’s behind a number of popular open-source tools for the distributed NoSQL database. […]

DocSend has become one of the most popular tools for sharing venture fundraise decks, not only because of the control it offers, but also because of the analytics it can provide founders on how VCs read decks and where they might get stuck as they are perusing from slide to slide. The company has been […]

Shasta Ventures, a venture capital firm that has raised more than a half-dozen funds in its life, announced a new program this morning designed to help its portfolio companies scale to $10 million of annual recurring revenue (ARR) from $1 million ARR or less. The project, a collection of workshops, in-person help and more, called […]

“The best-kept secret in quantum computing.” That’s what Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) CEO Ilyas Khan called Honeywell‘s efforts in building the world’s most powerful quantum computer. In a race where most of the major players are vying for attention, Honeywell has quietly worked on its efforts for the last few years (and under strict NDA’s, […]

Nubank, the Brazilian digital bank valued at $10 billion, is launching its Nu credit card in Mexico – a country where the unbanked population counts 36 million people. The Sao Paulo-based fintech company, known for its fully-mobile digital bank and credit card, has raised $820 million across seven rounds of investment and has amassed nearly […]

RTP Global, the VC firm founded by Russian entrepreneur and investor Leonid Boguslavsky, is announcing a new $650 million fund to continue backing early-stage tech startups, primarily at Series A but also some late seed deals and Series B. Of note, the VC’s last fund was launched in December 2017 and totalled $200 million, so […]

iPrice Group, which helps comparison shoppers in Southeast Asia by pulling together prices from different e-commerce platforms, has closed a $10 million Series B. Led by ACA Investments, the round also included participation from Daiwa PI Partners and returning investors Line Ventures, Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund. The company’s last funding announcement, from Line’s venture […]

French startup Le Wagon has raised its first round of funding after many years of bootstrapping. The company closed a $19 million funding round (€17 million) a few months ago. Cathay Capital is leading the round with AfricInvest also participating. “We’ve always bootstrapped since 2013, and we’ve always been profitable since day one,” Le Wagon […]

In a move that other states might want to emulate, New York State Governor Andrew M. Cuomo said that the state’s Department of Financial Services is requiring health insurers in the state to waive cost sharing associated with testing for the new coronavirus, COVID-19. The initiative paves the way for low-cost emergency room, urgent care, […]

Popular music app publisher MWM has raised a $55.9 million (€50 million) funding round. Blisce/ is leading the round with Idinvest Partners, Bpifrance (Large Venture fund), Aglaé Ventures and Xavier Niel also participating. Some of MWM’s apps include edjing Mix, Beat Maker Pro, Drum Machine, Beat Snap 2, TaoMix 2, Guitar and Drums. The company […]

Legal services giant Epiq Global has been hit by a ransomware attack. The company, which provides legal counsel and administration that counts banks, credit giants, and governments as customers, confirmed the attack hit on February 29. “As part of our comprehensive response plan, we immediately took our systems offline globally to contain the threat and […]

Robinhood, the startup with a stock trading app valued upwards of at least $7.6 billion, suffered one of its worst outages on one of the busiest trading days of the year. As the Dow Jones Industrial Average enjoyed the single biggest point-gain since 2009, Robinhood’s application fell prey to an error that locked users out […]

Sonantic, a U.K. startup that has developed “human-quality” artificial voice technology for the games and entertainment industry, has raised €2.3 million in funding. Leading the round is EQT Ventures, with participation from existing backers, including Entrepreneur First (EF), AME Cloud Ventures and Bart Swanson of Horizons Ventures. I also understand one of the company’s earlier […]

Google today announced that it is canceling the physical part of Cloud Next, its cloud-focused event and its largest annual conference by far with around 30,000 attendees, over concerns around the current spread of COVID-19. Given all of the recent conference cancellations, this announcement doesn’t come as a huge surprise, especially after Facebook canceled its […]

Last week, I sat down with Connie Chan, a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz who focuses on investing in consumer tech. She joined the firm in 2011 after working at HP in China. From her temporary offices located in a modest skyscraper with unobscured views of San Francisco, we talked about where she sees the […]

TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI is tomorrow and we have one more exciting speaker announcement to share. Jinnah Hosein, the vice president of software engineering at self-driving vehicle startup Aurora, is coming to TC Sessions: Robotics + AI at UC Berkeley on March 3. Hosein will join Ike Robotics CTO and co-founder Jur van den Berg […]

Apple Inc. has agreed to pay a settlement of up to $500 million, following a lawsuit accusing the company of intentionally slowing down the performance of older phones to encourage customers to buy newer models or fresh batteries. The preliminary proposed class action lawsuit was disclosed Friday night and would see Apple pay consumers $25 […]

Waymo, the former Google self-driving car project that is now a business under Alphabet, said Monday it raised $2.25 billion in a fundraising round led by Silver Lake, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Mubadala Investment Company. This is the company’s first external investment, which also included Magna, Andreessen Horowitz and AutoNation and its parent […]

So much for that correction! After a desolate week, the United States saw its major indices rally on Monday, pushing the value of domestic and domestically listed securities higher. The gains came despite a rising number of infections in the country of the novel coronavirus, now known as COVID-19. Last week, rising concern about an […]

Throughout this series on the rise of multiverse virtual worlds, I have outlined the collision of gaming and social media into a new multiverse era of social media within virtual worlds due to technological and cultural changes. The result will be a healthier ecosystem of social media than what currently exists and the economic development […]

Cyan Banister is leaving Founders Fund to become a member of a new early-stage investment and operations-focused firm called Long Journey Ventures. The move, first reported by Axios, brings Banister back to their early-stage roots as an investor after years at the multi-strategy and multi-stage investment fund founded by Peter Thiel. Banister’s departure comes weeks […]

TC Sessions: Mobility is back in San Jose on May 14, and we’re excited to give the first peek of what and who is coming to the main stage. We’re not revealing everything just yet, but already this agenda highlights some of the best and brightest minds in autonomous vehicles, electrification and shared mobility. We’ve […]

FX content is coming to Hulu . The company announced today the launch of a new FX hub on the streaming service that includes over 40 FX Networks TV shows, new original linear series and other FX originals that will now be exclusive to Hulu. The addition is made possible thanks to Disney’s acquisition of […]

Tech’s darling is out. On Sunday, the 38-year-old Democratic presidential contender stepped out of the race, clearing a path for moderates to coalesce around another candidate on the eve of Super Tuesday’s broad contest for delegates. Buttigieg, a previous political unknown, ran a surprisingly successful long-shot presidential campaign, making history as the first gay candidate […]

Welcome to Equity on Extra Crunch, a semi-regular series of interviews between the Equity team, venture capitalists, and operating executives at the neatest startups. The goal of this irregular medium is to dig into topics that don’t fit inside of the standard Equity format, but are still critical to understanding what’s happening in the private […]

Nvidia has canceled its GPU Technology Conference, which would have brought more than 10,000 people to San Jose three weeks from now. The company cited “growing concern over the coronavirus” for its decision, and said it will attempt to host as much of the content online as possible. In an update to the GTC page, […]

One of the benefits of owning a Pixel smartphone is that it improves over time as Pixels are first to receive updates that deliver the latest fixes and improvements. The first round of new features arrived in December, including a filter for robocalls, more photo controls, improved Duo calls, and more. Today Google says Pixel […]

Presidential candidate Joe Biden is likely to throw a fundraising lifeline to Silicon Valley donors after his commanding South Carolina victory and going into the next wave of primaries. A pro-Biden Super PAC, Unite the Country — whose past backers include senior tech figures — is picking up efforts to tap wealthy donors, Treasurer Larry […]

What’s a Corvette? To me, the formula is simple: Loads of power in an affordable package that can hold two golf bags. For the past 62 years, that meant putting the engine in the front and a stick shift on the floor. And now it’s all different, and it’s the start of something great. For […]

Nokia announces a big leadership change, an AT&T streaming service expands and we look at how our jobs may have to evolve during to the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 2, 2020. 1. Rajeev Suri to step down as Nokia CEO; Pekka Lundmark to take over The company, like its rivals Sweden-based […]

I see far more research articles than I could possibly write up. This column collects the most interesting of those papers and advances along with notes on why they may prove important in the world of tech and startups. This week: advances in rocketry, machine learning, wireless transmission and more. Firing up new rockets In […]

In uncertain times, people go looking for answers in unusual places. And in 2019, many U.S. consumers found their answers in the stars — or, more specifically, in a group of increasingly popular astrology apps offering horoscopes, fortunes, palm-reading and mobile access to psychics, among other things. According to new data from Sensor Tower, the […]

AT&T is expanding its streaming strategy with the launch of a new, nationwide TV service, AT&T TV, delivered over the internet. Not to be confused with AT&T TV Now — AT&T’s over-the-top live TV service aimed at cord-cutters, previously called DirecTV Now — the new service is more of an alternative to AT&T’s DirecTV. The […]

Now that the world is swimming in data we may be able to address the climate and environmental risks to the planet. But while there is plenty of capital to invest in things like ClimateTech, a lot of the data that’s needed to tackle this big issue is badly applied, leading to a big misallocation […]

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, going over the huge Roblox round and what […]

mParticle, which helps companies like Spotify, Paypal and Starbucks umanage their customer data, is announcing that it has raised $45 million in Series D funding. Co-founder and CEO Michael Katz told me that the company has benefited from broader shifts — like new privacy regulation and the shift away from cookie-based browser tracking — that […]

AudioTelligence, a startup that spun out of University of Cambridge-funded CEDAR Audio, has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding for its “autofocus for sound”. Leading the round is Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, Cambridge Enterprise, and CEDAR Audio. Founded in 2017 and based in Cambridge, U.K., the company has […]

Spinny, an online platform for selling used cars, has secured $43.7 million from a cohort of influential investors in a new financing round as it looks to expand to more Indian cities. The Series B financing round for the Gurgaon-based startup was led by the Fundamentum Partnership, the growth-capital fund backed by tech veterans Nandan […]

Rajeev Suri, the chief executive of Nokia, is stepping down from his leadership role after overseeing the Finnish networking giant for more than half a decade. Pekka Lundmark, the outgoing President and CEO of energy firm Fortum, has been elected as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Nokia, the Finnish company announced on Monday. […]

The world of consumer banking has seen a massive shift in the last ten years. Gone are the days where you could open an account, take out a loan, or discuss changing the terms of your banking only by visiting a physical branch. Now, you can do all this and more with a few quick […]