Crunch Hype

[Editor’s note: Want to get this weekly review of news that startups can use by email? Just subscribe here.] My colleague Alex Wilhelm has been researching the companies that are both getting impressive valuations and also generating annual recurring revenues of around $100 million on more. These are the sorts of companies that any savvy […]

“Not gonna lie. This f*cking sucks. This is the last HQ ever!” yelled host Matt Richards . And it just got crazier from there.The farewell game of HQ Trivia before it shut down last night was a beautiful disaster. The hosts cursed, sprayed champagne, threatened to defecate on the homes of trolls in the chat […]

I've always thought and believed that you need the public sector and then you need the risk capital that taxpayer money shouldn't be going to.

When you think about how a technology is designed, whether in Facebook or, let's say, with industrial automation robots, engineers are not talking to the workers for obvious reasons.

The Galaxy Z Flip ships with the same “Care Instructions” as the Fold. It’s a five-item list with the following basic points: Don’t scratch the screen with a pen or fingernail Don’t stick stuff between the screens when folding Don’t get it dusty, wet or feed it after midnight Don’t stick stickers to the screen […]

The International Astronomical Union has issued the preliminary results from a study on the potential effects of multi-thousand satellite constellations like that being built by StarLink. Finding that Earth-based astronomical observations may be "severely affected," the body warned that mitigations and rules had better be formed sooner rather than later.

HQ Trivia is dead. Today the company laid off its full staff of 25 and will cease operation of its trivia, sports and word guessing games, a source close to the company confirmed. You can watch the insane, drunken final episode here HQ Trivia had a deal in the works to be acquired, but the […]

Launch startup Rocket Lab has been awarded a contract to launch a CubeSat on behalf of NASA for the agency’s CAPSTONE experiment, with the ultimate aim of putting the CAPSTONE CubeSat into cislunar (in the region in between Earth and the Moon) orbit — the same orbit that NASA will eventually use for its Gateway […]

Shares of Vodafone Idea fell by more than 23% on Friday after India’s apex court ordered the country’s second-largest telecom operator and Airtel, the third-largest telecom network, to arrange and pay billions of dollars in dues in a month. In a strongly worded judgement, the Supreme Court rejected telecom networks’ application to defer paying historic […]

Just two weeks ago Facebook settled a lawsuit alleging violations of privacy laws in Illinois for the considerable sum of $550 million. Now controversial startup Clearview AI, which has gleefully admitted to scraping and analyzing the data of millions, is the target of a new lawsuit citing similar violations.

Want to spice up the bedroom without paying for pills or awkward visits to a sex therapist? A new app called Lover lets you take a sexual personality quiz, explore carnal knowledge tutorials and discretely figure out which turn-ons you share with your partner. Built by board-certified sexual medicine clinical psychologist Dr. Britney Blair, Lover […]

SpaceX has moved its Crew Dragon commercial astronaut spacecraft to Florida, the site from which it’ll launch in likely just two to three months if all goes to plan. The Crew Dragon capsule is now going to undergo final testing and checkouts in Florida before its departure from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where it’ll […]

In case you haven’t heard, VCs are loving on workplace software as of late, and productivity tools that help teams collaborate seem to be a particular frothy area of investment. A smattering of top VC firms and angels, including General Catalyst, First Round Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Biz Stone and Ellen Pao, are throwing their confidence […]

“If I was running Clearbanc by myself, it probably would have gone off the cliff eight times at this point,” says Clearbanc co-founder Andrew D’Souza. “If I were running the company by myself, it would be half its size,” adds Michele Romanow, Clearbanc’s other co-founder. In addition to starting the $420 million-backed fintech company together, D’Souza […]

Seed fundraising is rarely easy, but it certainly used to be a lot less complicated than it is today. In a simpler world, a seed investor (or maybe two) would lead a round, which meant that they would write the terms of the deal in a term sheet and then pass that document to their […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. As I write to you, SaaS and cloud stocks are busy setting fresh all-time highs and as we’ve seen, venture interest in modern software companies is pushing more money into the sector. But despite it appearing […]

Tesla has priced its secondary common stock offering at $767, a 4.6% discount from Thursday’s share price close, according to a securities filing Friday. Tesla said in the filing it will sell 2.65 million shares at that discounted price to raise more than $2 billion. Lead underwriters Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have the option […]

Justin Berman has one of the most important jobs at Dropbox . As head of security, he oversees the company’s cybersecurity strategy, its defenses and works daily to keep its more than 600 million users’ data private and secure. No pressure, then. Berman joined the file storage and workspace giant a year ago during a […]

Blue Origin is opening its new rocket engine production center in Huntsville, Ala. on Monday, the company said today on Twitter. The new Huntsville facility will be able to produce its rocket engines at a much higher rate than is currently possible, which will be useful as the company is using its in-development BE-4 engine […]

Instagram is changing its advertising rules to require political campaigns’ sponsored posts from influencers to use its Branded Content Ads tool that adds a disclosure label of “Paid Partnership with.” The change comes after the Bloomberg presidential campaign paid meme-makers to post screenshots that showed him asking them to make him look cool. Instagram provided […]

Popular photo printing app PhotoSquared has exposed thousands of customer photos, addresses and orders details. At least 10,000 shipping labels were stored in a public Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage bucket. There was no password on the bucket, allowing anyone who knew the easy-to-guess web address access to the customer data. All too often, these […]

Too often, people are asked to give away their insights and time for free. Jen Horonjeff, founder and CEO of healthcare startup Savvy, knows this first hand and is trying to change that by applying a cooperative model to her business. As an infant, Horonjeff was diagnosed with juvenile idiopathic arthritis. Since then, she has […]

Last month, Tradeshift, a platform for supply chain payments which has achieved unicorn status in recent years, had some good news and some bad news. It announced a Series F funding round of $240 million in equity and debt, raised from a combination of existing and new investors. It’s now raised a total of $661 […]

Alibaba issued its latest earnings report yesterday, and as part of that the Chinese e-commerce giant reported that cloud revenue grew 62%, to $1.5 billion U.S., crossing the RMB10 billion revenue threshold for the first time. Alibaba also announced that it had completed its migration to its own public cloud in the most recent quarter, […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. After having a good time with NEA’s Rick Yang last week, we thought we’d bring on another venture capitalist. So this week Danny and I had Elliott Robinson from Bessemer swing over for the show. As it turned […]

Virgin Galactic is one crucial step closer to actually flying paying customers to space: The space tourism company just relocated its SpaceShipTwo vehicle, the VSS Unity, from its Mojave, California manufacturing facility to Spaceport America in New Mexico, where it will begin flights with a goal of at least sending company founder Richard Branson to […]

Venture capital has been flooding the various subverticals under the robotics umbrella in recent years, and the construction space is one of the largest beneficiaries. Last November, we surveyed 13 of the top robotics-focused VCs to find out which areas of robotics are exciting them most going into 2020. One of the most common areas […]

​Tamatem, the leading mobile games publisher in the Arabic speaking market, has raised $3.5 million in additional funding — essentially an extension of the startup’s earlier Series A. The round was led by existing investor ​Wamda Capital, with participation from Modern Electronics Company (a subsidiary of AlFaisaliah Group) and North Base Media. Tamatem says the […]

Instagram users who miss the reverse chronological feed might get a new way to see the most recent pics and videos from who they follow. Instagram has been spotted internally prototyping a “Latest Posts” feature. It appears as a pop-up over the main feed and brings users to a special area showing the newest content […]

The holy grail for technology companies working in the healthcare industry is becoming the gateway for all healthcare data. Big legacy providers like Epic and Cerner are trying to reach out to hospital networks to hoover up all of their data. Google is interested in it. Salesforce is interested in it. Everyone wants to be […]

Simsim, a social commerce startup in India, said on Friday it has raised $16 million in seven months of its existence as it attempts to replicate the offline retail experience in the digital world with help from influencers. The Gurgaon-based startup said it raised $16 million across seed, Series A and Series B financing rounds […]

In case you haven’t heard, TC Sessions: Mobility is back for second year. This one-day event, which will be held May 14 in San Jose, promises to feature some of best and brightest engineers, policymakers, investors, entrepreneurs and innovators, all of whom are vying to be a part of this new age of transportation. Attendees […]

Building a technical solution without doing the user-research to see what people really need runs the risk of reducing credibility and further eroding trust.

Facebook is adding another app to its group of experimental projects from the NPE Team, an initiative it announced last year focused on rapidly trying out new ideas in social to see how users react. This week, the team released its fourth app experiment with the launch of Hobbi, a photo and video sharing app […]

Major artificial intelligence and graphics chipmaker Nvidia reported its 2020 Q4 financials today (the company’s fiscal quarter ends on January 26th, 2020). The company announced revenues of $3.11 billion for the quarter, a jump of 41% from the year-ago quarter and a small bump from the third quarter. Even more importantly, the company’s gross margin […]

Soylent, the once high-flying Los Angeles-based meal replacement startup that has raised $72.4 million in financing from investors including Google Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and Andreessen Horowitz, has shaken up its executive team. This week, the company announced in a blog post that the company’s chief financial officer, Demir Vangelov, would be taking over the top […]

It’s par for the course that major tech platforms will launch a lot of services, then sunset those that are less popular. But this week comes one that especially smarts (for me and some of my TechCrunch coworkers at least). LinkedIn has announced that on March 18, it will shut down Sales Navigator for Gmail, an […]

A team at MIT’s CSAIL demonstrated a new kind of “skin” designed to bring a sense of touch and place to soft robotic arms. The findings, which debuted in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters this week, find the researchers covering a soft robotic “trunk” in flexible sensors made from material used for “electromagnetic interference […]

Tinder is testing a series of new social features designed to boost conversations between users on its service. One of the new features is a conversational prompt, first teased during parent company Match Group’s recent earnings. The prompt encourages users to respond to questions or finish a sentence in order to better showcase their personality […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re adding five names to the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) club and listing all preceding members in a single post. This series, which was a bit of an accident, if I’m being honest, […]

Automated license plate readers, ALPRs, would be controversial even if they were responsibly employed by the governments that run them. Unfortunately, and to no one’s surprise, the way they actually operate is “deeply disturbing and confirm[s] our worst fears about the misuse of this data,” according to an audit of the programs instigated by a […]

Earlier this week, much was made of the e-commerce business Brandless deciding to shutter its doors. Industry observers found its fate particularly interesting, given that Brandless was only a few years old and had raised substantial funding, including $100 million from the SoftBank Vision Fund alone. Still, Brandless is far from alone in having tried […]

A sealed order from a judge today has halted the $10 billion, decade long JEDI project in its tracks until AWS’s protest of the contract award to Microsoft can be heard by the court. The order signed by Judge Patricia E. Campbell-Smith of the US Court Federal Claims stated: The United States, by and through […]

For two years running, Samsung played the same trick and front-loaded its annual event by announcing a new foldable. Last year’s announcement of the Fold was a huge one — the first viable (relatively speaking, of course) foldable handset from a major manufacturer. Of course, some stuff has happened in the intervening months, taking a […]

GPS increasingly runs the entire planet. Supply chains, oceanic shipping, port docking, and even our daily movements in cars, on bikes, and walking around cities is dependent on a constellation of satellites hovering above us to make all this activity work in synchronicity. Increasingly though, GPS is under attack. GPS spoofing, where the signals from […]

Walmart is shutting down its personal shopping service, Jet black, on February 21, after struggling to find adoption or additional investment. The service had allowed New York-area customers to text message orders for home delivery. According to its website, Jet black will now no longer accept new orders and will refund its customers their most […]

Ratcheting up its pressure campaign against Huawei and its affiliates, the Department of Justice and the FBI announced today that it has brought 16 charges against Huawei in a sprawling case with major geopolitical implications (you can read the full 56-page indictment here). Huawei is being charged with conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and […]

That couch you’re thinking about sure would look good in your living room… or would it? To drag up a decade-old (!) catchphrase: There’s an app for that. There are a ton of apps for that, really. Seeing what furniture might look like in a room is one of the go-to examples of what augmented […]

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. GSMA cancels Mobile World Congress due to coronavirus concerns “The GSMA has cancelled MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding […]

As the streaming battles heat up, Netflix is hoping a new partnership with Samsung will help it fend off rivals. At Samsung’s Unpacked event this week, the mobile device maker announced a deal with Netflix that will bring exclusive bonus content associated with several Netflix original shows to its Galaxy smartphones in the months ahead. […]