Crunch Hype

A state senator in California is introducing legislation designed to provide more direct oversight over direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies. The new regulations, introduced by Santa Ana’s Democratic Senator Thomas Umberg, builds on attempts in the California Consumer Privacy Act to regulate the ways data collected from genetic testing can be used by companies. “The fact […]

Spaceflight Industries, owner of both Spaceflight, Inc. and BlackSky, is selling the Spaceflight, Inc. portion of its business to Japanese industrial megacorporation Mitsui & Co, and Yamasa both of which will co-own the company in a 50/50 joint venture after its closing. The deal will see Spaceflight continue to operate as an independent business based […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. This afternoon we’re digging into Lyft’s earnings results, unpacking the company’s performance, the market’s expectations and why shares in the American ride-hailing giant are off in after-hours trading. Lyft’s earnings — following Uber’s own results that […]

SpaceX is gearing up for its historic first human spaceflight, with a crewed demonstration mission of its Crew Dragon spacecraft tentatively set for May 7 (though that date is flexible right now). The company on Tuesday showed a clip of the completed Crew Dragon spacecraft, which will carry astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, undergoing […]

The buyer beware adage is never more true than among early adopters. It was price, however, that made the Galaxy Fold such a difficult pill to swallow. When it was finally released to the public after numerous delays, the device came swaddled in warnings. It was a long list, and not exactly a vote of […]

Hyundai Motor Group said it will jointly develop an electric vehicle platform with Los Angeles-based startup Canoo, the latest startup tapped by the automaker as part of an $87 billion push to invest in electrification and other future technologies. The electric vehicle platform will be based on Canoo’s proprietary skateboard design, according to the agreement […]

Remember when “mobility” meant laptops and cell phones? Those were quaint times. Now the category encompasses the future of transportation — everything from flying cars and autonomous vehicles to delivery bots and beyond. There’s no better place to explore this rapidly moving industry than TC Sessions: Mobility 2020, our day-long conference in San Jose on […]

At least once a year, Samsung pulls hundreds of reporters, analysts and industry folk into one big room for an event it calls “Samsung Unpacked,” where the company shows off all of their latest flagship devices. The first Unpacked of 2020 was held this morning in San Francisco — and from $1,400 folding smartphones to […]

Apple’s built-in voice assistant won’t help you figure out who to vote for, but it will be able to update you on different races around the U.S. during election season, as well as deliver live results as votes are counted. The new feature, announced today, is part of Apple News’ 2020 election coverage, which also […]

Samsung did a surprisingly good job keeping the Galaxy Fold under wraps, surprising the world with its first foldable this time last year during the Galaxy S10 unveil. When it came to the Galaxy Z Flip, on the other hand, the company just went ahead and showed the whole thing off during an Oscar ad […]

The world will likely never see the Galaxy S11. Or the Galaxies S12-S19, for that matter. At an event this morning in San Francisco, Samsung announced that it was skipping a decade’s worth of handsets and going straight to the Galaxy S20. The new flagship debuted onstage today, in three flavors: the S20, S20+ and […]

Samsung’s Galaxy Buds have been one of the low-key success stories of the current Bluetooth earbud revolution. They don’t have the flash of an AirPod, but they get the mix of form and function just right. Fittingly, their successors just got a quick unveil alongside Samsung’s latest handsets. As the name implies, Galaxy Buds+ aren’t […]

Flagship prices that routinely top out well above $1,000 are among the chief factors in slowing smartphone adoption. Certainly Samsung has done something to address the phenomenon, both with a number of mid-tier products and the recent introduction of Lite versions of the Galaxy S10 and Note 10. At the other end of the spectrum […]

There was a lot of moving and shaking in the cybersecurity unicorn world in 2019. It was a year that saw two of the biggest exits in cybersecurity history: CrowdStrike went public valued at $3.35 billion and Cloudflare rocketed 20% in its first day on the stock market. Clearly, the cybersecurity market is booming. Recent […]

The U.S. mobile landscape is on track to look a whole lot different. A hotly contested $26 billion deal between T-Mobile and Sprint just got the go ahead from a U.S. district court judge. The merger would combine the country’s third and fourth largest mobile carriers, effectively reducing the number of key carriers from four […]

The engineers behind Google’s short-lived Bookbot — a robot created within the company’s Area 120 incubator for experimental products — have launched their own startup to bring the sidewalk delivery bot back to life. The secretive startup called Cartken was formed in fall 2019 after Google shuttered an internal program to develop a delivery robot […]

Alpha Foods, the vegetarian prepared food manufacturer, has raised $28 million in financing for its portfolio of vegetarian burritos, tamales, nuggets, pizzas, burgers, patties, and sausages. The Glendale, Calif.-based company was launched by Loren Wallis, the founder of the dairy substitute, Good Karma Foods, and Cole Orobetz, a former director with the agricultural debt lending […]

Sixgill, an Israeli cyber threat intelligence company that specializes in monitoring the deep and dark web, today announced that it has raised a $15 million funding round led by Sonae IM, a fund based in Portugal, and London-based REV Venture Partners. Crowdfunding platform OurCrowd also participated in the round, as did previous investors Elron and Terra […]

As the number of IoT devices proliferate, and machines conduct transactions with machines without humans involved, it becomes increasingly necessary to have a permissionless system that facilitates this kind of communication in a secure way. Enter the IOTA Foundation, a Berlin-based open source distributed ledger technology (DLT) project, which has hooked up with the Eclipse […]

There have been plenty of stories written about the so-called “Slack-lash” and the growing unrest among workers dealing with DM interruptions that take their attention away from the task at hand. Slack is a poster boy for the problem, but VCs have invested heavily in a number of collaboration tools over the past several years […]

Indiana-based rocket fuel startup Adranos has raised $1 million, after closing an oversubscribed round led by Archibald Cox Jr., chairman of private investment firm Sextant Group. The funding will be used to Adranos to build out its manufacturing capability, and to pursue additional key hires to build out its team. Adranos is building a new […]

Negotiatus, a SaaS business meant to optimize and streamline the purchasing and procurement process for businesses, has today announced the close of a $10 million Series A round. The funding was led by Rally Ventures, with participation from ERA, 645 Ventures, Green Visor Capital and Stage 2 Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to […]

Google Nest, the smart home brand for Google’s line of smart speakers, thermostats, smoke detectors and more, announced this morning that it will soon require all Nest users to enroll in two-factor authentication to further protect their account. The feature has long been available to Nest users, but was previously optional. Given that most users […]

There has been a proliferation of venture capital the past few years, as funds go up and down the stack looking for unique and high-return opportunities in the startup landscape. Large funds are increasingly investing in small rounds, which has forced seed investors to answer much more carefully why they should exist in the first […]

Following TechCrunch’s coverage of 500 Startups’ 25th batch (and numbers 24, 23, 22, and 21, in case you wanted to go back in time), today we’re saying hello to the accelerator’s 26th cohort. 500 Startups, in case you weren’t aware, is a seed-stage accelerator and a collection of venture funds. The group, now with a […]

What started out as a temporary pilot project to test a robotaxi service in Las Vegas has turned into a multi-year partnership between self-driving software company Aptiv and Lyft and a new milestone that suggests the operation is ramping up. The companies announced Tuesday that they’ve given 100,000 paid rides in Aptiv’s self-driving vehicles via […]

London’s tech scene is playing musical chairs. In people news from the investors scene, the UK’s Angel CoFund (ACF) has now made two key appointments to the team and board. Former ACF Chairman George Whitehead moves to the position of Partner. Alliott Cole, the current CEO of Octopus Ventures, joins the fund as non-exec Director. […]

Streaming eats up a big chunk of viewers’ time, though it’s still outweighed by traditional linear TV. That’s according to the latest Total Audience Report from Nielsen — its first Total Audience Report to use smart TV data from Gracenote, and one that’s particularly focused on “the flash point of the ‘streaming wars'” (as Senior […]

The world’s biggest mobile tradeshow, Mobile World Congress (MWC), is due to take place in Barcelona just under two weeks’ time, on February 24-27. The annual international telco industry event typically attracts more than 100,000 delegates from around 200 countries across the conference’s four days — with every major telco and tech giant exhibiting (with […]

Vezeeta, a healthcare platform operating in the Middle East and Africa, has raised a $40 Million Series D funding round led by UAE-based Gulf Capital, alongside further investment from existing Riyadh-based investor Saudi Technology Ventures (STV), which previously led Vezeeta’s Series C round in September 2018. Vezeeta’s other investors include BECO Capital, Silicon Badia, Vostok […]

MoEngage, a San Francisco and Bangalore-based startup that helps firms better understand their customers and improve their engagement, has raised $25 million in a new financing round as it looks to grow its network in North America and Europe. The new financing round, Series C, was led by Eight Roads Ventures . F-Prime Capital, Matrix […]

Oxx, a relatively new European venture capital firm founded by Richard Anton and Mikael Johnsson, has raised $133 million to back “Europe’s most promising SaaS companies” at Series A and beyond. Headquartered in London and Stockholm, the VC is pitching itself as a dedicated SaaS-focussed fund, and will invest broadly across software applications and infrastructure. […]

A U.S District court judge has rejected Uber and Postmates’ request for a preliminary injunction against a California bill mandating how independent contractors are classified. The request was made as part of lawsuit filed by the companies, along with two ride-sharing drivers, at the end of December. The lawsuit is still in progress. Assembly Bill […]

Revolut, the European banking and money transfer app that now claims over 10 million customers, has partnered with open banking API provider TrueLayer to add bank account aggregation features to its app. The new functionality means that Revolut’s U.K. customers — both consumer and business — can now connect their external U.K. bank accounts to […]

Google’s head of human resources is resigning, the company announced today. Google said Eileen Naughton, who joined Google in 2006 and became its vice president of people operations four years ago, will move to a different role at the company, but did not say when the transition will occur. In a statement to the press, […]

A/O PropTech is a European VC that officially launched last week after raising €250 million in what it describes as “permanent capital” to invest in companies disrupting the €230 trillion real estate industry. This approach sees the firm structured more like a corporation with various shareholders, rather than a traditional venture capital fund with a […]

Can’t afford Netflix and HBO and Spotify and Disney+…? Now there’s an app specially built for giving pals your passwords while claiming to keep your credentials safe. It’s called Jam, and the questionably legal service launched in private beta this morning. Founder John Backus tells TechCrunch in his first interview about Jam that it will […]

The Space Force will be taking one giant leap towards reality if the Department of Defense’s proposed budget and operations go through. $15 billion is requested, which would fund a number of missions and help establish the more than 10,000 personnel expected to join the new military branch over the next year. Estimates for how […]

Impala has raised another round of funding just a few months after raising an $11 million Series A round. This time, the startup is raising a $20 million Series B round led by Lakestar. Latitude Ventures is also participating in the round. The company is building a service that works pretty much like Plaid, but […]

Avoid costly hurdles and achieve the best results without reinventing the wheel for every launch.

You’ve been busy. I’ve been busy. But people are talking about Slack all over Twitter, so let me catch us both up. All the ruckus concerning Slack and its publicly traded stock appeared to kick off with a Business Insider story, which had the following headline: Slack just scored its biggest customer deal ever, as […]

This is how you stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice that’s hard to find elsewhere.

The venture capital world is investing more capital into software-as-a-service companies (SaaS), despite cutting the number of deals it executes within the startup category, according to Crunchbase data. The results echo other venture data we’ve explored recently, including a look into early-stage dealmaking that shows a rise in invested venture dollars inversely correlating with a […]

“I cannot think of a reason not to share this with the public,” Brianna Wu tweeted. “Two of my non-campaign Google accounts were compromised by someone in Russia,” she said. Wu isn’t just any other target. As a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Massachusetts’ 8th District, she has a larger target […]

U.S. femtech startup CurieMD is offering menopause diagnosis and treatment prescription via a telehealth platform — beginning in California, where it launched late last year. Founder Dr. Leslie Meserve says the goal is to widen access to treatment and support services for mid-life women, spying a business opportunity in offering an auxiliary digital service targeting […]

The new fiscal year 2021 budget proposal from the Trump administration would increase funding for research and development by $142 billion over the administration’s previous year’s budget, but will still reduce overall spending for science and technology from alternative proposals coming from the U.S. House of Representatives. Basic science funding would be hard hit under […]

Vanessa Bain (pictured above), a well-known gig worker-activist, has teamed up with fellow gig worker-activist Sarah Clarke (pseudonym) to form the Gig Workers Collective. It’s early days for the organization, which is a pending 501(c)(3) organization, but its ambitions are big. “We want to be the first responders that, whenever gig workers find out there […]

Amazon’s dominant position in the U.S. smart speaker market will continue through this year and the next, with rivals like Google and Apple only making slight dents in Amazon Echo market share, according to a report published today by eMarketer. The analyst firm estimates Amazon will easily hold onto its top spot through 2021, when […]

It’s time for enterprises to strategize seriously and realize they must move from firefighting to fireproofing.

It was a roller coaster ride — a short one. Brandless, a San Francisco-based e-commerce company that made and sold an assortment of “cruelty-free” products in beauty and personal care, household, baby and pet categories, has shut its doors less than three years after officially opening them in July 2017. In a statement provided to […]