Crunch Hype

“I don’t feel good about that. That sucks” Chrys Bader-Wechseler reflects when asked about the bullying that went down on the anonymous app Secret he co-founded in 2013. After $35 million raised, 15 million users, and a spectacular flame out two years later, the startup was dead. “Since I left secret I feel alive and […]

This year marks our first-ever TC Sessions: Space event, and what better way to kick things off than with the head of NASA: Administrator Jim Bridenstine will join us onstage on June 25 in LA. NASA has been more open than ever before to working with startups and entrepreneurs, and we’ll hear directly from the […]

Apple says the coronavirus outbreak will hurt its manufacturing and sales, Jeff Bezos makes a big commitment to fighting climate change and SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 18, 2020. 1. Apple will miss revenue forecast as coronavirus impacts its manufacturing and sales In a letter to investors, Apple said […]

Jaguar Land Rover has introduced a new concept vehicle that cuts a very different figure relative to its usual fare: It’s a four-wheeled electric urban mobility concept called “Project Vector” that looks more like a low-floored airport shuttle train car than a traditional car. This is a look that has increasingly become popular among automakers […]

Video editing startup InVideo has new funding and a new product. The San Francisco-headquartered company bills itself as the easiest way for anyone to create professional-quality videos, using a drag-and-drop interface, along with a library of templates and stock photos and videos. The resulting videos can then be optimized for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other […]

In early December, Spotify launched its annual personalized Wrapped playlist with its users’ most-streamed sounds of 2019. That has become a bit of a tradition and isn’t necessarily anything new, but for 2019, it also gave users a look back at how they used Spotify over the last decade. Because this was quite a large […]

Spotify’s ongoing investments in the podcast-streaming side of its business helped boost podcast listening on its service by 200% last year. But today, only 16% of Spotify’s monthly listeners are engaging with podcats — a number the company today hopes to nudge higher by redesigning the podcast side of its streaming app. The new layout […]

Robotic process automation — the ability to automate certain repetitive software-based tasks to free up people to focus on work that computers cannot do — has become a major growth area in the world of IT. Today, a startup called Aisera is coming out of stealth that has taken this idea and supercharged it, by […]

Facebook may make it easier to escape its ranking algorithm and explore the News Feed in different formats. Facebook has internally prototyped a tabbed version of the News Feed for mobile that includes the standard Most Relevant feed, the existing Most Recent feed of reverse chronological posts that was previously buried as a sidebar bookmark […]

SpaceX has a new partner for commercial private astronaut flights aboard its Dragon spacecraft: Space Adventures, a private space tourism company that has already launched private astronauts including Anousheh Ansari, Guy Laliberté and Mark Shuttleworth to space. Space Adventures has worked with seven clients across high serrate missions to the International Space Station (ISS) for […]

Let's explore China's Q4 2019 venture capital results and pull in fresh data from 2020 to get a handle on what's happening in the country today.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is once again sounding a warning note regarding the development of artificial intelligence – the executive and founder tweeted on Monday evening that “all org[anizations] developing advance AI should be regulated, including Tesla.” Musk was responding to a new MIT Technology Review profile of OpenAI, an organization founded in […]

Egnyte announced today it was combining its two main products — Egnyte Protect and Egnyte Connect — into a single platform to help customers manage, govern and secure the data from a single set of tools. Egynte co-founder and CEO Vineet Jain says that this new single platform approach is being driven chiefly by the […]

As we all saw in Oscar-winning short film Hair Love, black hair is beautiful, but it’s also notoriously difficult to manage. One of the first hair memories Naza founder and CEO Natanya Montgomery has is of her mom brushing her hair into three afro puffs on the top of her head. When she was seven, […]

Air mobility startup Volocopter will be working together with on-demand transportation, food delivery and payments company Grab on a feasibility study around air mobility in Southeast Asia. The joint study is part of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by the two companies that covers exploration of the potential deployment of air taxi services in […]

Cape Town based startup Zindi has registered 10,000 data-scientists on its platform that uses AI and machine learning to crowdsolve complex problems in Africa. Founded in 2018, the early-stage venture allows companies, NGOs or government institutions to host online competitions around data-oriented challenges. Zindi opens the contests to the African data scientists on its site […]

Gojek has paid $30 million to take a minority stake in Blue Bird, one of the largest taxi operators in Indonesia, according to Bloomberg, which first reported that the deal was in progress last month. Gojek’s stake in Blue Bird is worth $30 million. The taxi operator’s holding company disclosed in a regulatory filing earlier […]

SumUp, the London-based fintech company that enables small businesses to take card payments via its device and online, is launching its own pre-paid card in partnership with Mastercard. Dubbed “SumUp Card,” the new offering will enable merchants to gain quicker to access funds collected via SumUp as it will no longer require money to be […]

Atomico, the European venture capital firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, has announced that it has closed its fifth fund — “Atomico V” — giving it another $820 million to invest in European startups. The London-headquartered VC firm’s previous fund closed at $765 million, so this is an increase over three years ago. However, the […]

Design-driven "luxury UI/UX" will continue to power the success of many startups, but it's not the only way to build a great business.

It’s suspiciously convenient that Facebook already fulfills most of the regulatory requirements it’s asking governments to lay on the rest of the tech industry. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in Brussels lobbying the European Union’s regulators as they form new laws to govern artificial intelligence, content moderation and more. But if they follow Facebook’s suggestions, […]

Despite the rapid growth of e-commerce in India, Southeast Asia and other emerging markets, the vast majority of retail transactions there still happen offline in small stores that also serve as neighborhood hubs. The central role these stores play in their communities led GGV Capital to develop what the firm refers to as its mom-and-pop […]

It was a drama-filled week with a hearing on the hill in DC about autonomous vehicle legislation, Uber tipped its hat to the past, EV startup Lucid started to lift the veil on its Air vehicle and more.

After WeWork exploded there was — at least supposedly — a change in sentiment among investors and founders alike. Gone were the days of easy nine-figure rounds, expensive growth, negative unit economics and the rest of the excess that Startupland has enjoyed over the past half-decade. Inside this purported sentiment shift, I presumed, was a […]

Today Apple announced that its prior financial forecast, provided during its January earnings cycle, is no longer valid. In a letter to investors today, the technology giant said that it “do[es] not expect to meet the revenue guidance we provided for the March quarter” due to impacts stemming from the coronavirus that has shuttered large […]

Remember when Zenefits imploded, and kicked out CEO Parker Conrad. Well, Conrad launched a new employee onboarding startup called Rippling, and now he’s going after another HR company called Gusto with a new billboard, “Outgrowing Gusto? Presto change-o.” The problem is, Gusto got it taken down by issuing a cease & desist order to Rippling […]

The word “algorithm” has worked its way into the vernacular of non-nerds talking about their Facebook feeds or why their Insta post isn’t doing well.

The most critical part of posting to TikTok is your authority ranking, which is: “how much of an influencer are you?”

This week turned out to be a surprisingly busy one in space news – kicked off by the Trump administration's FY 2021 budget proposal, which was generous to U.S. space efforts both in science and in defense.

China’s annual auto show in Beijing has been postponed because of novel coronavirus, as the number of cases of people infected surpass 71,000. The Beijing International Automotive Exhibition, which was scheduled to begin April 21, is the latest high-profile event that has been either cancelled or postponed over concerns of coronavirus. A new date will […]

A once-mighty trivia app says goodbye, we try out Samsung's new foldable phone and Google shuts down its free Wi-Fi program in India. Not even Presidents' Day can stop your Daily Crunch.

Redbox has entered the ad-supported streaming market with the launch of Redbox Free Live TV. The company, best known for its DVD rental kiosks, has been dabbling with streaming for years as consumer demand for DVD rentals has simultaneously declined. But despite its name, Redbox’s new streaming service isn’t offering “live TV” similar to what […]

Jeff Bezos (one of the world’s richest men) announced on one of the world’s largest social media platforms (Instagram) that he’s creating a $10 billion fund to combat climate change. In a post on Monday morning Bezos announced that the Bezos Earth Fund will finance “scientists, activists, NGOs — any effort that offers a real […]

In December, The New York Times reported a popular messaging app called ToTok was actually a spying tool used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to track users’ conversations, location, and social connections. The app was removed from the Google Play store in December, while Google investigated, then reinstated in early January. Google […]

Late last week two Boston-based companies raised big rounds. The size of the two investments — each over the $100 million mark — and their rapid succession made them stand out.

This morning brought a look at some of what we’re missing at this year’s Mobile World Congress. The show may have been called off on account of coronavirus concerns, but the news goes on. We knew that TCL was planning to show off a number of “alternative” smartphone form factors, and one just showed up […]

Americans are saddled with $1.2 trillion in auto loans, according to data collected by the Federal Reserve. And while that debt can be refinanced, even U.S. car owners who know it’s an option face a complicated task. MotoRefi, a new fintech startup that was born out of QED Investors in 2017, says it has developed […]

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is in Europe this week — attending a security conference in Germany over the weekend, where he spoke about the kind of regulation he’d like applied to his platform, ahead of a slate of planned meetings with digital heavyweights at the European Commission. “I do think that there should be regulation […]

SpaceX has launched a batch of 60 Starlink satellites to orbit, marking its fifth overall launch of a group of 60 of the small spacecraft and its third this year alone. This launch brings the total constellation to 300 satellites for Starlink on orbit, extending SpaceX’s lead as the largest commercial satellite operator in the […]

Global smart speaker sales hit a record high last year with shipments of 146.9 million units, up 70% over 2018, according to a recent report on the state of the smart speaker market from Strategy Analytics. Though Amazon still leads in the U.S. by a wide margin, its portion of the worldwide market is now […]

Turning to the news, global growth concerns stemming from the coronavirus outbreak are starting to come true, with Singapore changing its own forecasts. Singapore now expects either slower growth, or negative expansion in 2020. That's bad news.

PullRequest, a startup that provides code review as a service, announced today that it was buying Moonlight, an early-stage startup that has built an online platform for hiring remote developers. The companies did not share the terms. Lyal Avery, founder and CEO at PullRequest, says that he bought this company to expand his range of […]

SpaceX is launching another batch of 60 Starlink satellites to join its existing constellation, which will bring the total to 300 and be the third Starlink launch this year already. The launch will also be a potentially record-setting demonstration of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 reusability, with the shortest turnaround time for a Falcon 9 first stage […]

Google said on Monday that it is winding down Google Station, a program as part of which it worked with a number of partners to roll out free Wi-Fi in more than 400 railway stations in India and “thousands” of other public places in several additional pockets of the world. Caesar Sengupta, VP of Payments […]

On Monday, budget-lodging startup Oyo reported a loss of $335 million on $951 million revenue globally for the financial year ending March 31, 2019, and pledged to cut down on its spending as the India-headquartered firm grows cautious about its aggressive expansion. The six-year-old startup’s growing revenue, up from $211 million in financial year ending […]

There’s plenty to like about “Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet,” a new series on Apple TV+ — its sympathetic-but-critical portrayal of the video game industry, its goofy-but-likable characters and a couple of big surprises that come at the end of the season. But what really stood out to us — as we discuss on the latest […]

For the next installment of the informal TechCrunch book club, we are reading the fourth story in Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. The goal of this book club is to expand our minds to new worlds, ideas, and vistas, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects doesn’t disappoint. Centered in a future world where virtual worlds and generalized […]

Ultimately, it's a question of human dignity. To what degree are people given the opportunity to realize their potential, to create themselves?

The informal TechCrunch book club (which is now a whole week off schedule thanks to the news cycle — let’s see if we can catch up here shortly!) is now venturing into the very, very short story What’s Expected of Us, the third piece in Ted Chiang’s Exhalation collection. If you’re one of those people […]