Crunch Hype

I watched a lot of skate videos growing up. At some point, failures became as important a fixture as perfectly executed tricks. The spills and the injuries could be downright gnarly (there’s a reason, after all, that skateboarding culture gave the world “Jackass”), but as an aggressively mediocre skater myself, there was something comforting in […]

GSK Next, the innovation arm of GlaxoSmithKlein, is launching a new mentorship and business development program. Called the Re/Wire Health Studio, the program will eventually select six startups who will win access to nine weeks of mentoring, business development expertise, and cash grants. The Re/Wire Health Studio is designed for growth and early-stage startups focused […]

Robotic pizza has proven a surprisingly popular goal for startups. Over the past several years, some of those dreams have been more successful than others. Zume is probably the most notable story of a company that fell short, ultimately abandoning its robotic pizza trucks in early 2020 to pivot to sustainable packaging. Picnic has been […]

Micromobility company Bird has officially joined the ranks of e-scooter and e-bike operators that are integrated with Google Maps, which now surfaces nearby vehicles for users in the U.S. Bird’s announcement comes just a day after Spin also announced its integration with Google Maps and just a few weeks after Lime, which has been integrated with […]

As developers build applications, they often want to test new functionality on a limited set of users to blunt any possible negative impact or to gauge user reaction to the change before rolling it out more broadly. They use a technique called a feature flag, and Split.io, a startup that has built a platform to […]

The company raised a Series B earlier this year, a $25 million round led by GGV and Redpoint. Both Series B lead investors participated in Monte Carlo's Series C.

When Salesforce acquired Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, you had to figure that they had some big plans for the company, and today the CRM giant announced some initial integrations that should prove useful for Salesforce customers. Rob Seaman, SVP for Slack at Salesforce sees Slack as the communications […]

Hamburg’s state government has been formally warned against using Zoom over data protection concerns. The German state’s data protection agency (DPA) took the step of issuing a public warning yesterday, writing in a press release that the Senate Chancellory’s use of the popular videoconferencing tool violates the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) since […]

Travel tech company Hopper has raised a $175 million Series G, the company said today. That’s nearly the same amount it raised in a Series F round that closed earlier this year. These are indeed new funds, however, bringing its total raised to date to nearly $600 million, with the company now valued at over $3.5 […]

Unbundling financial data through APIs and driving data-driven insights with value-add products in Africa keeps getting more exciting as major players continue to raise more money for scale. Less than a year after its $3 million seed round, San Francisco- and Africa-based fintech Pngme has snapped up another $15 million for its financial data infrastructure […]

MOLOCO, an adtech startup that uses machine learning to build mobile campaigns, announced today it has raised $150 million in new Series C funding led by Tiger Global Management, taking its valuation to $1.5 billion. This is separate from the $20 million Series C round MOLOCO announced three months ago, which brought it to unicorn […]

Fintech Brex first partnered with Weav, a developer of a universal API for commerce platforms, last summer. In March, Brex launched Instant Payouts for Shopify sellers using the startup’s technology. The results were impressive enough that by April, Brex co-founders Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi participated in Weav’s $4.3 million seed round as strategic angel […]

Enterprise Resource Planning systems have traditionally been the preserve of larger companies, but in recent years the amount of data small medium sized businesses can generate has increased to the point where even SMEs/SMBs can get into the world of ERP. And that’s especially true for online-only businesses. At the beginning of the year we […]

For a while, there have been talks about revamping the outdated 2007 Act of Nigeria’s information and technology body, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA). Earlier this year, in March, the director-general Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi proposed the realignment of the Act with “tenets and ideals of the fourth Industrial Revolution” and Nigeria’s Digital Economy […]

News is vital to society, but it’s also incredibly expensive to produce. As ad rates have suffered across the industry (minus a positive blip this summer), publishers have increasingly turned to paywalls to make ends meet. There’s just one problem: the open internet which allowed readers to range over the entire thought of humanity has […]

It’s not even half a year since crypto exchange Bitpanda announced a $170M Series B — when, back in March, Austria’s first unicorn was being valued at $1.2 billion. Today it’s topping that: Announcing a $263M Series C, led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, with the fintech startup now valued at a whopping $4.1BN — […]

Fitness platform Ultrahuman has officially announced a $17.5 million Series B fund raise, with investment coming from early stage fund Alpha Wave Incubation, Steadview Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and Utsav Somani’s iSeed fund. A number of founders and angel investors also participated in the Bangalore-headquartered startup’s Series B, including Tiger Global’s Scott Schleifer, […]

Many Southeast Asian digital businesses run into obstacles when seeking early-stage growth financing. They might not want to sell equity in their company, but often struggle to secure working capital loans from traditional financial institutions. That’s where Singapore-based Jenfi comes in, providing revenue-based financing of up to $500,000 with flexible repayment plans that co-founder and […]

EV startup Canoo has hired hundreds of employees and is homing in on a production date, but critical milestones including landing a battery supplier remain, according to the company’s second quarter earnings report. Canoo’s earnings report comes just a few weeks after the company’s first investor relations day when it named Dutch company VDL Nedcar […]

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South Korea’s LG Energy Solution has entered into a six-year agreement with an Australian mining company for cobalt and nickel, securing a stable supply of key minerals to make electric vehicle batteries. LG Energy, a subsidiary of LG Chem, will purchase 71,000 dry metric tons of nickel and 7,000 dry metric tons of cobalt from […]

T-Mobile has confirmed “unauthorized access” to its systems, days after a portion of customer data was listed for sale on a known cybercriminal forum. The U.S. cell giant, which last year completed a $26 billion merger with Sprint, confirmed an intrusion but that it has “not yet determined that there is any personal customer data […]

As more fintech companies find their way to higher and higher valuations in both the private and public markets, expect to see more legacy banks and lenders be gobbled up by newer entrants.

Twitter’s ambitious upstart decentralized social media working group “bluesky” took an important step Monday as the social media company appointed a formal project lead who will direct how the protocol develops moving forward. Crypto developer Jay Graber was tapped by Twitter to helm the initiative, which the company hopes will eventually create a decentralized social […]

Spin users planning trips in 84 cities, towns and campuses across the U.S., Canada, Germany and Spain will be able to view Spin's electric scooters and bikes on the app while planning their trip.

Tinder announced this morning that in the “coming quarters,” users will be able to verify their ID on the app. This feature was first rolled out in Japan in 2019, where Tinder users must verify that they are at least 18 years old. Aside from places like Japan, where this is mandated by law, ID […]

We must eventually find a halfway point between those with valid concerns about the anonymity crypto assets provide and those who see regulation as prohibitively restrictive on crypto.

Pearson, a London-based publishing and education giant that provides software to schools and universities has agreed to pay $1 million to settle charges that it misled investors about a 2018 data breach resulting in the theft of millions of student records. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced the settlement on Monday after the agency found […]

Roblox is using M&A to bulk up its social infrastructure, announcing Monday morning that they had acquired the team at Guilded that has been building a chat platform for competitive gamers. The service competes with gaming chat giant Discord, with the team’s founders telling TechCrunch in the past that as Discord’s ambitions had grown beyond […]

Blue Origin, the space company helmed by billionaire Jeff Bezos, is taking NASA to court. The company filed a complaint with a federal claims court on Monday over the agency’s decision to award a lunar lander contract solely to rival company SpaceX. The complaint, which Blue Origin successfully petitioned to have sealed, says NASA’s evaluation […]

The pandemic was a catalyst for showing companies looking to cut costs, just how much they were spending on their software tools.

Six years ago, I sat in the Google self-driving project's Firefly vehicle — which I described, at the time, as a "little gumdrop on wheels" — and let it ferry me around a course in Mountain View.

Nuro doesn't have a typical Silicon Valley origin story. It didn't emerge after a long, slow slog from a suburban garage or through a flash of insight in a university laboratory.

Nuro's autonomous vehicles (AVs) don't have a human driver on board. There's no room in the narrow chassis for a driver's seat, no need for a steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedals.

Pandemic pizza was definitely a thing. U.S. consumers forked out a record-breaking $14bn to have pizza delivered to their doors in 2020, and nearly half of that was spent with one brand: Domino's.

The first sign that your town is about to welcome a horde of Nuro robots will be the appearance of a fleet of human-driven Toyota Priuses modified with cameras, lidars and radars.

Understanding why investors are so willing to buy small stakes in dozens of private companies worth billions of dollars is key to grokking the crush of investment we see among younger tech startups.

Cisco announced on Friday that it’s acquiring Israeli applications monitoring startup Epsagon at a price pegged at $500 million. The purchase gives Cisco a more modern microservices-focused component for its growing applications monitoring portfolio. The Israeli business publication Globes reported it had gotten confirmation from Cisco that the deal was for $500 million, but Cisco would […]

Amanda DoAmaral was an educator herself before she decided to found a tech company aimed at improving the education system. That’s a surprisingly rare credential for a startup founder in this area to possess — despite the obvious benefits of real, first-hand experience. Her company, Fiveable, focuses on modernizing (including a remote-first approach) a key […]

U.S. auto regulators have opened a preliminary investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot advanced driver assistance system, citing 11 incidents in which vehicles crashed into parked first responder vehicles while the system was engaged. The Tesla vehicles involved in the collisions were confirmed to have either have had Autopilot or a feature called Traffic Aware Cruise Control […]

Entrepreneurs require guideposts when building large companies, and customer and revenue expectations can be established by looking at what successful cybersecurity companies have accomplished.

Shopistry enables customers to create personalized commerce experiences accessible to all.

The $10 million Swiftarc Beauty Fund supports female founders leading the next wave of beauty and wellness brands.

California-based Baffle, a startup that aims to prevent data breaches by keeping data encrypted from production through processing, has raised $20 million in Series B funding. Baffle was founded in 2015 to help thwart the increasing threats to enterprise assets in public and private clouds. Unlike many solutions that only encrypt data in-transit and at-rest, Baffle’s […]

If you injure your elbow, surgery can help. If you lose a leg, prostheses are available. But problems within the brain are more difficult to treat, and for stroke victims rehabilitation is largely left to the body’s own repair mechanisms. BrainQ aims to change that with a device that stimulates the damaged part of the […]

Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Two housekeeping slash teasers … Stay tuned this week for a series of articles on Nuro reported by investigative science and tech reporter Mark Harris with assistance from […]

Rapido, a bike taxi aggregator in India, said on Monday it has raised $52 million in a new financing round as the six-year-old startup looks to find space in a category dominated by Ola and Uber in the South Asian market. The six-year-old startup’s new funding — Series C — was financed by Shell Ventures, […]

No choice we make will be perfect, and all the frameworks in the world won’t eliminate risk entirely. But we don’t need perfection or freedom from risk. We just need to take the next step.

Whether or not you've ever dabbled with Unity, you've almost certainly interacted with something built with Unity. It's the 2D/3D engine that powers so, so many of the video games out there, regardless of what console or platform we're talking about. Studios use it to make animated movies. Automakers use it to help design cars.

The military is rightly described as a cross-section of the United States, and supporting those who serve is a Silicon Valley tradition, good business practice and the right thing to do.