Crunch Hype

Tesla appears to be ramping up installations of its solar tile roofs in the San Francisco Bay area and will eventually roll out to Europe and China, according to CEO Elon Musk who in a series of tweets provided the first substantial update since the company launched the third iteration of its product in October. […]

Over the last few years, Facebook has been busy building out AI capabilities in areas like computer vision, natural language processing (NLP) and ‘deep learning,’ in part by acquiring promising startups in the space. Understandably, this has seen the U.S. social networking giant look to the U.K. for AI talent, including an acqui-hire of NLP […]

SpaceX is getting very close to its goal of flying actual astronauts aboard its Crew Dragon spacecraft. After a successful in-flight abort (IFA) test in January, it had basically crossed off all the major milestones needed before flying people, first on a demonstration mission referred to as “Demo-2” by SpaceX and its commercial crew partner […]

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. As top exhibitors pull out of MWC, organizers implement stringent safeguards A couple of weeks before the event, the organizers of […]

Just a couple days after mobile analytics and marketing company Localytics was acquired by Upland Software, two of its founders are announcing their new startup, Demand Sage. CEO Raj Aggarwal and CTO Henry Cipolla previously co-founded and served in the same roles at Localytics, and they founded Demand Sage with Chief Product Officer Randy Dailey […]

The Trump White House today issued its fiscal 2021 budget request, and it included a 12% increase in requested funding to NASA’s coffers, as expected. That puts the total request for NASA at $25.2 billion, nearly half, or $12.3 billion, of which is earmarked specifically to support NASA’s efforts to return to the surface of […]

“It’s an open secret that every company is on fire,” says Kintaba co-founder John Egan. “At any given moment something is going horribly wrong in a way that it has never gone wrong before.” Code failure downtimes, server outages and hack attacks plague engineering teams. Yet the tools for waking up the right employees, assembling […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re exploring some fascinating data from Silicon Valley Bank markets report for Q1 2020. We’re digging into two charts that deal with the early-stage funding market, and after we unpack what the local Iron Bank […]

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re not changing it in the slightest. (Here’s last week’s episode, which included our first guest in a […]

U.S. prosecutors have charged four Chinese military hackers over the 2017 cyberattack at Equifax, which resulted in a data breach involving more than 147 million credit reports. The nine-charge indictment was announced Monday against Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei. The Justice Department said the four work for the Chinese People’s Liberation […]

Mobile adoption around the world is having a significant impact on the web’s traffic. According to a new report from SimilarWeb, out today, mobile web traffic has jumped 30.6% since 2017, while desktop traffic dropped 3.3%. But it’s not just the numbers that are changing. Mobile visitors also behave differently from their desktop web counterparts, […]

After years of development, an exciting new scientific research spacecraft has launched on its journey to study our solar system’s central player: the Sun. The Solar Orbiter, developed jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) and built by Airbus, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sunday night, launching […]

A report into the use of artificial intelligence by the UK’s public sector has warned that the government is failing to be open about automated decision-making technologies which have the potential to significantly impact citizens’ lives. Ministers have been especially bullish on injecting new technologies into the delivery of taxpayer funded healthcare — with health […]

Ever since Xerox set its sights on HP last November, the companies have been engaged in an ongoing battle. Xerox would like very much to take over the much larger HP, while the printer giant has so far rejected Xerox’s advances. Today, Xerox decided to sweeten the pot, raising its offer by two dollars per […]

A shortage of good teachers and carers is an acute problem in the world of education. Getting smart people into the profession is hard when the pay is not great and the stresses coming from above and below are very real and very persistent. And it turns out that challenge is compounded in the early […]

Arm today announced two new processors — or one and a half, depending on how you look at it. The company, which designs the chips that power the majority of the world’s cell phones and smart devices, launched both the newest Cortex-M processor (the M55) and the Arm Ethos-U55 micro neural processing unit (NPU). Like […]

Starling Bank, the U.K.-based challenger bank founded by banking veteran Anne Boden, has raised another £60 million from its existing investors, Merian Global Investors and Harry McPike’s JTC. The investment brings the total raised by Starling to £323 million and follows two funding rounds of £105 million in aggregate led by Merian in 2019. Boden […]

Japanese electronics firm Sony is the latest phone maker to announce it’s withdrawing from the Mobile World Congress (MWC) tradeshow — citing concerns about the coronavirus outbreak. “As we place the utmost importance on the safety and wellbeing of our customers, partners, media and employees, we have taken the difficult decision to withdraw from exhibiting […]

It was South Korea’s — rather than Netflix’s — night at the Oscars, thanks to Bong Joon-ho’s biting class satire Parasite, which won a well-deserved best picture gong. But tech giant Samsung appears to have been hoping to steal a little of the national limelight: The Korean phone maker chose a prime Oscars ad slot […]

Amazon is the latest company to cancel its plans for the Mobile World Congress, which will take place later this month in Barcelona, over coronavirus-related concerns. In a statement emailed to TechCrunch, an Amazon spokesperson said “due to the outbreak and continued concerns about novel coronavirus, Amazon will withdraw from exhibiting and participating in Mobile World Congress […]

Although Netflix received 24 nominations (the most of any studio) at this year’s Oscars, its films only ended up winning two awards. Laura Dern was named Best Actress in a Supporting Role for playing Nora, a flashy divorce attorney in “Marriage Story” — the only award that “Marriage Story” won from its six nominations. And “The […]

Facebook receives plenty of pointed criticism from numerous corners, including for refusing to police political speech on Facebook, its seemingly endless string of privacy breaches, and its apparent coziness of late with the Trump administration. One of the platform’s most prominent critics, somewhat unexpectedly, has become comic, writer, and actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Indeed, his […]

“Miss Americana,” a new Netflix documentary about Taylor Swift, is worth watching — if you go in with the right expectations. At least, that’s according to two out of three hosts of the Original Content podcast. Darrell was the holdout; he didn’t hate the movie or think it was poorly made, but he’s much more […]

Convertible notes are not just for early stage startups any more. These promissory notes, which are structured as debt that convert into equity upon a specific event like a certain date or the closing of a priced investment round, are increasingly being adopted by established companies that have already raised millions of dollars in venture […]

When Ubisoft first approached “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” stars Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day about creating a new show set in the video game industry, McElhenney said they weren’t interested — at least, not initially. “Anything that we had ever seen in the past, from a movie or television show perspective, the industry was […]

A couple of weeks out, Mobile World Congress organizer, the GSMA, has issued some fairly sweeping safeguards over growing concerns around the coronavirus. After a number of high profile back outs, including ZTE, LG, NVIDIA and Ericsson, the company issued a new list, including a ban of visitors originating from the Hubei province, whose capital […]

U.K. startup Daye is rethinking female intimate care from a woman’s perspective, starting with a tampon infused with cannabidiol that tackles period pain. It’s also quietly demolishing the retrograde approach to product design that women are still subjected to in the mass market “femcare” space — an anti-philosophy that not only peddles stale and sexist […]

Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehouse company, doesn’t tend to do small rounds. On Friday night word leaked out about its latest mega round. This one was for $479 million on a $12.4 billion valuation. That’s triple the company’s previous $3.9 billion valuation from October 2018, and CEO Frank Slootman suggested that the company’s next finance […]

There are two – that’s right two – launches happening this Sunday, and both are set to broadcast live on NASA’s official stream above. The first is a NASA International Space Station resupply mission, with a Norhtrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft launching aboard an Antares rocket from Wallops Island in Virginia at 5:39 PM EST (2:39 PM […]

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory designs, builds, and operates billion-dollar spacecraft. That makes it a target. What the infosec world calls Advanced Persistent Threats — meaning, generally, nation-state adversaries — hover outside its online borders, constantly seeking access to its “ground data systems,” its networks on Earth, which in turn connect to the ground relay stations […]

[Editor’s note: Want to get this weekly review of news that startups can use? Just subscribe here.] Asana may get more attention than the average SaaS company due to the Facebook pedigrees and outspoken views of its founders, but in practice it’s a low-profile, cash-efficient machine. Today, the productivity toolmaker does not need to raise […]

"We've been lucky that our government have really sent a message that technology companies are welcome here."

TVs this year will ship with a new feature called "filmmaker mode," but unlike the last dozen things the display industry has tried to foist on consumers, this one actually matters. It doesn't magically turn your living room into a movie theater, but it's an important step in that direction.

California’s new privacy law was years in the making. The law, California’s Consumer Privacy Act — or CCPA — became law on January 1, allowing state residents to reclaim their right to access and control their personal data. Inspired by Europe’s GDPR, the CCPA is the largest statewide privacy law change in a generation. The […]

Scape Technologies, the London-based computer vision startup working on location accuracy beyond the capabilities of GPS, has been acquired by Facebook, according to a regulatory filing. Full terms of the deal remain as yet unknown, although a Companies House update reveals that Facebook Inc. now has majority control of the company (more than 75%). However […]

Uber facilitated 14 million rides a week in India last year, the American ride-hailing firm said as it claimed the tentpole position in the key overseas market. In a report (PDF) published on the sidelines of its quarterly earnings Thursday afternoon, Uber said that it commanded over 50% of the ride-hailing market in India — among […]

There’s this brilliant feeling on Fridays if you’re a reporter when you think that all the things you have to write about are complete. You kickstart some work for Monday. Maybe you tighten up a to-do list. Hell, you might even read some email. But then on Fridays like today, something eye-catching happens and the […]

Donny Hall, the chief executive and co-founder of the used car certification service, SureSale, knows used cars. The serial entrepreneur built and sold a previous business, CarSure, which was an insurance plan for vehicle repairs. After selling that business in 2017 to Innovative Aftermarket Systems, Hall decided that his next venture would be to take […]

The White House is pushing to dedicate an additional billion dollars to fund artificial intelligence research, effectively the budget for that purpose outside of Defense Department spending, Reuters reported today, citing people briefed on the plan. Investment in quantum would also receive a major boost.

SoftBank, the technology conglomerate that transformed the venture capital industry and made waves in the technology world with its $100 billion Vision Fund, may not be able to repeat the performance or sustain its revolutionary approach to tech investing, The Wall Street Journal reports. According to the Journal, SoftBank may only be able to raise […]

B Capital Group, formed in 2015 by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and Raj Ganguly, formerly of Bain Capital, has been quietly building its business since closing its first fund with $360 million in capital commitments, anchored by the management consulting giant Boston Consulting Group. Already the firm, which is investing out of its second $410 […]

Four senators, including Ted Cruz (R-TX), have asserted that, as a consequence of sanctions placed on Iran, Twitter must cease providing its services to Ayatollah Khamenei and other leaders in the country. “The Ayatollah enjoys zero protection from the United States Bill of Rights,” he wrote in a letter to the company. Although the move […]

Trust, not data, is the most valuable currency for businesses today. But current data practices do nothing to earn that trust, and we can’t count on regulation alone to change that.

With Casper’s public offering earlier this week, we’ve closed the book on the first two venture-backed IPOs of note in 2020. Casper, joined by One Medical, carried over $870 million of private capital, venture and otherwise, across the finish line. Even though each IPO featured an unprofitable tech-enabled business that had posted sub-30% growth and […]

Payments and lending spring to mind as “classic” fintechs, but other models like regtech, compliance, human resources and marketing are on the ascent.

The American Civil Liberties Union plans to fight newly revealed practices by the Department of Homeland Security which used commercially available cell phone location data to track suspected illegal immigrants. “DHS should not be accessing our location information without a warrant, regardless whether they obtain it by paying or for free. The failure to get […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Yesterday Uber reported its Q4 2019 financial performance. Today, following the news, shares of the ride-hailing giant are up over 9%, pushing Uber’s stock above $40 per share. While Uber’s shares are still under its […]

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. Netflix’s horrible autoplay previews can be turned off Netflix’s autoplay trailers are now optional. That’s it. That’s the news. And here’s […]

A startup called Our.News is working to make its users smarter consumers of the news. In other words, it’s confronting some big, seemingly intractable problems. For one thing, there’s a tremendous amount of disinformation online — as Our.News founder and CEO Richard Zack put it, “Unfortunately, you have thousands of people all over the world […]