Crunch Hype

It’s been a dizzying few weeks following all the China news emanating from Washington, DC these days. While a “phase one” trade deal with China has been signed and appears to be moving forward as of a month ago (we covered the origins of this trade war extensively on TechCrunch in 2018 and 2019), it […]

When Google announced that it was acquiring data analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion, it was a big deal on a couple of levels. It was a lot of money and it represented the first large deal under the leadership of Thomas Kurian. Today, the company announced that deal has officially closed and Looker is […]

With Google and Facebook yielding massive control over the online ad market, leaving only scraps for other ad platforms, perhaps it was only natural that tech startups would take a step back and start to look for opportunities in selling billboards. AdQuick, a marketplace for out of home (OOH) advertising, tells TechCrunch that it has […]

Moving data to the cloud from an on-prem data warehouse like Teradata is a hard problem to solve, especially if you’ve built custom applications that are based on that data. Datometry, a San Francisco startup, has developed a solution to solve that issue, and today it announced a $17 million Series B investment. WRVI Capital […]

It’s an end of an era, and you might just want to snap a photo and upload it for others to purchase. Jon Oringer, who founded New York City-based Shutterstock in 2003, announced today that he would be stepping away from his duties as CEO at the photo sharing and commerce company, effective in April. […]

Tesla said Thursday it plans to raise more than $2 billion through a common stock offering and will use the funds to strengthen its balance sheet and for general corporate purposes, despite signaling just two weeks ago that it would not seek to raise more cash. Tesla CEO Elon Musk will purchase up to $10 […]

YC-backed Astranis has raised $90 million of new combined debt and equity funding in a Series B round led Venrock, with a sizeable contribution by existing investor (and lead of their 2018 round) Andreessen Horowitz. The funding will be used to help the company launch its first commercial satellites, which will be the bedrock of […]

Tozny, a Portland, Oregon startup that wants to help companies more easily incorporate encryption into their programs and processes, introduced TozID today. It is an identity and access control tool that can work independently or in conjunction with the company’s other encryption tools. “Basically we have a Security as a Service platform, and it’s designed […]

By now we’re all familiar with text messaging groups for multi-person co-ordination. I’ve lost count of how many WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook messenger groups I’m on! Other apps like Threema have started to be used in a business context and startups like Staffbase have decided to become full-blown ‘workforce messaging’ platforms. The thinking now amongst […]

Intuition Robotics, the company best known for its ElliQ robot, a digital home companion for the elderly, today announced that it has raised a $36 million Series B round co-led by SPARX Group and OurCrowd. Toyota AI Ventures, Sompo Holdings, iRobot, Union Tech Ventures, Happiness Capital, Samsung Next, Capital Point and Bloomberg Beta also participated […]

Vedantu, a Bangalore-based startup that operates a learning app aimed at students aged between 12 to 18, has secured an additional $24 million as part of its Series C financing round as it looks to serve more students and make its brand a household name. The fresh infusion to Series C, which Vedantu first unveiled […]

Europe’s data protection laws are some of the strictest in the world, and have long been a thorn in the side of the data-guzzling Silicon Valley tech giants since they colonized vast swathes of the internet. Two decades later, one Democratic senator wants to bring many of those concepts to the United States. Sen. Kirsten […]

Facebook has been left red-faced after being forced to call off the launch date of its dating service in Europe because it failed to give its lead EU data regulator enough advanced warning, and it failed to demonstrate it had performed a legally required assessment of privacy risks. Yesterday, Ireland’s Independent.ie newspaper reported that the […]

Following the departure of its CTO last month, Tandem Bank, the U.K. challenger bank co-founded by fintech veteran Ricky Knox, has lost another key member of its team: chief product officer Matt Ford, who is departing for a career in venture. Ford joined Santander InnoVentures, the venture capital arm of the Spanish incumbent bank, in […]

KKR, the multi-billion dollar, multi-strategy investment firm, has closed on over $1.3 billion for companies focused on social and environmental challenges. KKR Global Impact says its fund will focus on identifying and investing in companies worldwide where preformance and social impact are intrinsically aligned. Specifically, the fund will invest in companies in the lower middle […]

As AI permeates the home, work, and public life, it’s increasingly important to be able to understand why and how it makes its decisions. Explainable AI isn’t just a matter of hitting a switch, though; Experts from UC Berkeley, SRI, and Fiddler Labs will discuss how we should go about it on stage at TC […]

Can a meme be redeemed? That’s the central question in Arthur Jones’ Feels Good Man — a documentary that premiered at Sundance this year charting the course of the creator of Pepe the Frog, a comic book character turned universally recognized meme, as he attempts to reclaim it from racists and shitposters. The sweet, gentle […]

While startup insurgents make a huge difference, big platforms may exert disproportionate influence over the future of AR.

Karma Automotive is laying off 60 workers at its Irvine, Calif., headquarters, just three months after cutting 200 workers, according to documents filed with the California Employment Development Department. The Chinese-backed California-based startup filed the notice under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires employers to alert the state of mass layoffs. The […]

We believe the future of aviation requires new ways of thinking to accomplish scale requirements and the need for mass adoption.

A surge in funding for Latin American startups is having an effect on companies in the region’s smaller markets.

Undisclosed influencer marketing posts on social media should trigger financial penalties, according to a statement released today by the Federal Trade Commission’s Rohit Chopra. The FTC has voted 5-0 to approve a Federal Register notice calling for public comments on questions related to whether The Endorsement Guides for advertising need to be updated. “When companies […]

Last year, Microsoft launched a preview of Project xCloud, its ambitious game streaming service that aims to deliver games to any screen — console, PC or mobile. However, the service until now has only been available to mobile users on Android. Today, that changes as Microsoft is bringing the Project xCloud preview to iOS devices […]

A lawsuit filed by the Massachusetts attorney general includes new details about how the company intentionally marketed illegally to teens, including advertising on websites for Seventeen Magazine, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. The suit from Attorney General Maura Healey makes good on the 2018 announcement from her office that she would investigate the company’s […]

On-orbit manufacturing startup Made In Space has tapped Colorado’s Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) to help support its Archinaut One demonstration mission contracted by NASA, which is currently set to take place in 2022. The mission will see Made In Space show off the assembly of two 10-meter solar arrays on orbit, which will then be […]

The GSMA, the organization behind MWC, the world’s largest mobile trade show, has announced that it is officially canceling the show. MWC usually attracts more than 100,000 attendees from 200 countries to Barcelona. This year’s show was supposed to take place on February 24-27. Several publications received a statement about the cancellation. “The GSMA has […]

Essential was supposed to disrupt the smartphone industry. And when it was done with that, it was coming for the smart home. The company came out of stealth with a $330 million funding round and grandiose plans for a new brand of handset, led by none other than Android head, Andy Rubin. But bad timing, […]

Matteo Franceschetti, CEO of Eight Sleep, would prefer that you don’t call his startup a mattress company. Eight Sleep does sell mattresses, albeit smart ones packed with sensors and temperature regulation controls. The company has raised north of $70 million from backers including Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. A great deal of this funding surrounds […]

Last February we launched Extra Crunch, and today we’re celebrating its one-year anniversary. As a token of appreciation to our readers, we’re offering a limited-time deal for annual Extra Crunch membership. From now until the end of February, new users signing up for Extra Crunch in the U.S. can get a full year of membership […]

Swiftmile, the startup that wants to become the gas station for micromobility vehicles, is getting into advertising. Swiftmile already supplies cities and private operators with docks equipped to park and charge both scooters and e-bikes. Now, the company is starting to integrate digital displays that attach to its charging stations to provide public transit info, […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. This morning we’re exploring Airbnb’s march to the public markets. The popular DIY hospitality startup promised last year that it would go public in 2020. That timeline means that its 2019 performance will be included […]

‘Whatever your symptom, WebMD says you have cancer.’ It’s a long-running joke that underscores the distrust of perhaps the top source of medical advice, stemming from a confusing site clogged with ads that’s been criticized for questionable information and pushing pills from its sponsors. Health Guide is the new medical handbook for the internet where […]

Headspace, the Los Angeles-based mindfulness and meditation company locked in a bitter competitive struggle with Calm for leadership in the mental wellness world, has raised new capital to try and take the pole position. The company has just closed on $93 million in new equity and debt financing from a slew of investors as it […]

Spotify is launching a new feature called songwriter pages, which allows songwriters to showcase a list of the songs they’ve written, alongside their most frequent artist collaborations. The pages will also include a new “Written By” playlist of the songwriter’s songs, allowing listeners to stream their songs, follow their new material, and surface the songwriters’ […]

Meet Ramp, a new startup that offers corporate credit cards with 1.5% cash back on everything. The company thinks that a cash-back program combined with an analysis of your payments to help you spend less is more valuable than alternative corporate card offerings. Ramp is launching publicly today and has raised $25 million in funding […]

For decades, the best urban planning simulation wasn’t a simulation for urban planners at all, but the wildly popular city building game, SimCity, says Peter Calthorpe, an expert in the field and the co-founder of UrbanFootprint. Calthorpe began his career as an urban planner and designer in the late seventies, and in the mid-eighties he […]

Student loan debt in the U.S. totals $1.5 trillion, and more than 44 million Americans have outstanding student loan debt. According to research by Jason Iuliano, Villanova law professor, a million student loan debtors have filed for bankruptcy in the past five years. However, 99.9 percent of them did not include their student loan debt […]

Model9, an Israeli startup launched by mainframe vets, has come up with a way to transfer data between mainframe computers and the cloud, and today the company announced a $9 million Series A. Intel Capital led the round with help from existing investors including StageOne, North First Ventures and Glenrock Israel. The company reports it […]

The worlds of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity have become deeply entwined in recent years, as organizations work to keep up with — and ideally block — increasingly sophisticated malicious hackers. Today, a startup that’s built a deep learning solution that it claims can both identify and stop even viruses that have yet to be identified, […]

Pick any app on your phone, and there’s a greater than average chance that it’s tracking your location right now. Sometimes they don’t even tell you. Your location can be continually collected and uploaded, then monetized by advertisers and other data tracking firms. These companies also sell the data to the government — no warrants […]

Last year we embarked on a mission to democratize information for startups, and today we are celebrating the one-year anniversary of our membership program, Extra Crunch. Since launching Extra Crunch, we’ve published more than 1,000 articles, onboarded a few new hires, overhauled our technical infrastructure, expanded into five new European countries, made a handful of […]

Battery Ventures, the now 37-year-old investment firm, just closed on two new funds that — at $2 billion in capital commitments — nearly double the record-breaking $1.2 billion that the firm closed on exactly two years ago. It sounds very typical of the broader trend in recent years of firms that rush back to market […]

The UK government has taken the next step in its grand policymaking challenge to tame the worst excesses of social media by regulating a broad range of online harms — naming the existing communications watchdog, Ofcom, as its preferred pick for enforcing rules around ‘harmful speech’ on platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok in […]

Eye-witness photos and videos distributed by news wire Reuters already go through an exhaustive media verification process. Now the publisher will bring that expertise to the fight against misinformation on Facebook. Today it launches the new Reuters Fact Check business unit and blog, announcing that it will become one of the third-party partners tasked with […]

More big names are stepping away from the world’s biggest phone and telecom trade fair, they announced today, prompting the organizers to urgently decide what they wish to do going forward. Nokia, one of the omnipresent firms at major tech trade conferences, won’t be attending this year’s Mobile World Congress, it said Wednesday citing health […]

Europe has emerged as a key region for hatching and scaling fintech companies, and today one of the bigger hopefuls is announcing a large round of funding, from a mix of strategic investors, to keep growing its business. Fenergo, a startup from Dublin that builds solutions for banks and other financial management companies to help […]

To get a better sense of what lies ahead for the European startup ecosystem, we spoke to several investors and entrepreneurs in the region about their impressions and lessons learned from 2019, along with their predictions for 2020. We asked for blunt responses — and we weren’t disappointed. These responses have been edited for clarity […]

Nigeria’s commercial hub of Lagos has shaken up its transportation order. At the center are the West African country’s motorcycle taxis — referred to locally as okadas — which face newly enforced regulatory restrictions on their movement. That’s creating speedbumps for Nigeria’s two-wheel ride-hail startups, operating in Africa’s most populous nation with the continent’s largest […]

It often feels like half of the new security startups that receive funding are from Israel. As YL Ventures’ Yoav Leitersdorf and Ofer Schreiber wrote last month, investments in Israeli cybersecurity startups increased to $1.4 billion last year, with average seed rounds of $4.7 million, up 30.5% from 2018. I spent some time on the […]

In a day and age when everyone seems to have their own seed-stage venture fund, it’s hard to stand out. But Tuesday Capital, the San Francisco-based outfit formerly known as CrunchFund, thinks it has found a way. Today, the firm announced a new partner in Frog, the renowned design firm whose past clients include the […]