Crunch Hype

ActionIQ co-founder and CEO Tasso Argyros knows that there are plenty of companies promising to help businesses use their customer data to deliver personalized experiences — as he put it, “The space has gotten very, very hot over the last couple of years.” But in the face of growing competition, ActionIQ (founded in 2014 and […]

FlashParking, an Austin-based developer of parking management software and services has raised $60 million in new financing from the private equity investment firm L Catterton. The company’s software, first launched in 2011, provides real-time data and variable pricing options for parking space providers. FlashParking’s chief executive, Juan Rodriguez, envisions his company’s software and services as […]

Consumers downloaded a record 204 billion apps in 2019, up 6% from 2018 and up 45% since 2016, and spent $120 billion on apps, subscriptions and other in-app spending in the past year. The average mobile user, meanwhile, is spending 3.7 hours per day using apps. This data and more comes from App Annie’s annual […]

More than half a year after Google said Android phones could be used as a security key, the feature is coming to iPhones. Google said it’ll bring the feature to iPhones in an effort to give at-risk users, like journalist and politicians, access to additional account and security safeguards, effectively removing the need to use […]

Verbit, a Tel Aviv- and New York-based startup that provides AI-assisted transcription and captioning services to professional users, today announced that it has raised a $31 million Series B round led by growth equity firm Stripes. Existing investors Viola Ventures, Vertex Ventures, HV Ventures, Oryzn Capital and ClalTech are also participating in the round, which […]

Zinier, a startup that is bringing automation to the field service management realm, announced today that it has raised $90 million in fresh funding as it looks to tackle new categories and court more clients. The San Francisco-based startup said its $90 million Series C financing round was led by ICONIQ Capital and saw participation […]

Network security giant Cloudflare said it will provide its security tools and services to U.S. political campaigns for free, as part of its efforts to secure upcoming elections against cyberattacks and election interference. The company said its new Cloudflare for Campaigns offering will include distributed denial-of-service attack mitigation, load balancing for campaign websites, a website […]

Not the city, the $57 million-funded cryptocurrency custodian startup. When someone wants to keep tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other coins safe, they put them in Anchorage’s vault. And now they can trade straight from custody so they never have to worry about getting robbed mid-transaction. With backing from […]

Submissions for The Europas Awards 2020 have now opened. We’re back for our 11th year of recognizing the hottest tech startups across the European tech scene, as supported by TechCrunch. The awards evening will be held on 25 June 2020 in London, UK, at the ‘Museum of the Home‘ (formerly known as the Geffrye Museum). […]

To kick off 2020, one of Europe’s newer — and more successful — investment firms has closed a fresh, oversubscribed fund, one sign that VC in the region will continue to run strong in the year ahead after startups across Europe raised between $35 billion and $36 billion in 2019. Felix Capital, the London VC […]

The venture-backed insurance world is more than the Lemonades and MetroMiles of the world. There’s more room in the industry for startups to shake things up. One such company, Cambridge-based Insurify, is out today with a new venture round that greatly expands its capital base. The startup, which had accepted just $6.6 million over two […]

Grover, the Berlin-based startup that offers “pay-as-you-go” subscriptions to the latest consumer tech, including e-scooters, has closed a new “asset-backed” financing deal, topping up an existing debt facility with Varengold Bank to a total of €250 million. The additional capital will fuel the next phase of growth as the German company has entered scale-up territory. […]

I there’s one thing I know, it’s that music is the best thing our species has every created. If there are two things I know, it’s the music thing and also that that rabbits aren’t hamsters. Listen, Spotify, I get the whole pet playlists thing. A curated playlist based on your listening preferences and a […]

Anyline, the Vienna-based provider of optical character recognition (OCR) technology that developers use to build OCR functions into their websites and apps, has raised $12 million in Series A funding. The company has also unveiled plans for a U.S. expansion. Leading the round is Berlin-based VC firm Project A, with participation from Anyline’s existing investors, […]

Oviva, the health tech startup that provides a digital solution for Type 2 diabetes treatment in Europe, has raised $21 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is MTIP, with participation by new investor Earlybird, and existing investors AlbionVC, F-Prime Capital, Eight Roads Ventures and Partech. Oviva says the new capital will be used […]

Last November, Axios reported that New Enterprise Associates partner Dayna Grayson was leaving the storied venture firm after roughly six years to launch her own shop in Washington, D.C. called Construct Capital. Today, we know Grayson has company, no pun intended. Rachel Holt, one of Uber’s first employees and until now its head of new […]

India welcomed Jeff Bezos this week with an antitrust probe. On top of that, thousands of small merchants who typically compete with one another are beginning to gather across the country to hold a protest against the alleged predatory practices by the e-commerce giant. But Amazon founder and chief executive’s love for one of the […]

Obvious Ventures, the firm co-founded by Medium CEO and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, announced today that it has closed its third fund “OV3” at $271,828,182, a number that the graphing calculator-owning among us may recognize as e or Euler’s number. When asked whether the firm had to return any LP money just so it could […]

For Silicon Valley’s potential startup millionaires, compensation packages staked on future promises of wealth are where the action is. But what happens when these employees get laid off or have to leave before an exit? When Wouter Witvoet left a startup that he had joined as employee #4, he felt relatively prepared, having set aside […]

In a little over a week, the travel metasearch engine Hipmunk will shut down. It’s an abrupt and disappointing end for a product acquired by SAP Concur around three and a half years ago. It didn’t have to go this way, though. We’re now hearing that Hipmunk co-founders Adam Goldstein and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman […]

Listen. Chargers aren’t sexy. You know it. I know it. Charger companies know it, regardless of what they tell you in their pitch deck. Honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to think of too many electronic accessories less utilitarian. Dongles, maybe? Cord wraps? But I want it known that I’m still capable of being excited about them […]

One of the enduring truths of big companies is that they aren’t innovative. They are “innovative” in the marketing sense, but fail to ever execute on new ideas, particularly when those ideas cannibalize existing products and revenues. So it often takes a real competitor to force these incumbent, legacy businesses to evolve in any meaningful […]

Earlier today, Instacart more widely rolled out its Pickup product, which enables customers to retrieve groceries directly from stores. The announcement comes just a day after Instacart shoppers unveiled their latest action to #DeleteInstacart, another step in the ongoing series of protests against the grocery startup’s wage and tipping practices. Next Monday, Instacart workers are […]

Rocket Lab is expanding its U.S. footprint, alongside the opening of its first launch site on Wallops Island, Va. The rocket launch startup will open a new corporate headquarters in Long Beach, Calif. at a facility that will also provide some production capabilities, and act as its second Mission Control Center, complementing its existing Mission […]

Google announced today that it is buying AppSheet, an eight-year-old no-code mobile-application-building platform. The company had raised more than $17 million on a $60 million valuation, according to PitchBook data. The companies did not share the purchase price. With AppSheet, Google gets a simple way for companies to build mobile apps without having to write […]

If you’re still using Hipmunk for trip planning, it’s time to find another site. Sooner than later, really. The Hipmunk team announced this afternoon that it’ll be shutting down in just about a week’s time. Come January 23rd, says the blog post, both the Hipmunk website and app will be shuttered. The team also tweeted: […]

For the first time, this year Delta Air Lines had a large presence at CES. The carrier used much of its space to highlight the “parallel reality” screens developed by Misapplied Sciences and Sarcos Robotics, which brought its latest Guardian exoskeleton. At the show, I sat down with COO Gil West, an industry veteran with […]

What would we do if we could visit our own pasts or futures? Are we more likely to change our timelines, or will our timelines actually project themselves back on to us more forcefully? This is the first discussion post of this beta-testing, informal TechCrunch book club, which is starting with the first short story […]

Tesla apparently isn’t afraid to embrace some of its more embarrassing moments when doing so will likely lead to moving lots of merch — the automaker is now selling a t-shirt emblazoned with a graphic of the shatter incurred in the Cybertruck’s driver-side window when the controversial pickup truck was officially unveiled at the end […]

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. Visa is acquiring Plaid for $5.3 billion, 2x its final private valuation You can compare what Plaid does to Stripe — […]

Microsoft has released a security patch for a dangerous vulnerability affecting hundreds of millions of computers running Windows 10. The vulnerability is found in a decades-old Windows cryptographic component, known as CryptoAPI. The component has a range of functions, one of which allows developers to digitally sign their software, proving that the software has not […]

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) today announced its first bug bounty program for Kubernetes, the ubiquitous container orchestration system originally built by Google. To run this program, the CNCF is partnering with Google and HackerOne and bounties will range from $100 to $10,000. Kubernetes already has a Product Security Committee that includes engineers from […]

Instagram will finally let you chat from your web browser, but the launch contradicts Facebook’s plan for end-to-end encryption in all its messaging apps. Today Instagram began testing Direct Messages on the web for a small percentage of users around the globe, a year after TechCrunch reported it was testing web DMs. When fully rolled […]

“The time is over for Unity,” Ubiquity6 CEO Anjney Midha says. “It’s just not the future.” Even though 2019 was a rough year for augmented reality startups, Ubiquity6 remains ambitious as one of the better-capitalized players in the space. In 2018, the startup closed $27 million from Benchmark and Index Ventures; they’ve raised $37.5 million […]

Tradeshift — the startup which set out to disrupt the traditional arena of supply chain payments and marketplaces when it first appeared in 2008 – has today announced a new funding round of $240 million in equity and debt, raised from a combination of existing and new investors. The funding will be used to help […]

Google today announced its plans to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within the next two years. The fact that Google will drop support for these cookies, which are typically used to track users across the web, doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise, given Google’s announcements around privacy in Chrome, including its proposed […]

U.S. consumers have shown strong interest in Disney’s new family-friendly streaming service, Disney+, according to new data from Sensor Tower, which focused app trends in the final quarter of 2019. Following the app’s mid-November launch in the U.S., Disney+ was downloaded over 30 million times in Q4 2019 — that’s more than double its next […]

The internet of things (IoT) market is expanding at a rate where distinguishing it as a separate category is beginning to seem a bit absurd. Increasingly, new products — and updates of existing ones — are smart and/or connected. One company is changing the fundamental calculus behind this shift by lowering the barrier considerably when […]

Google has been on a long-term mission to build inroads into the world of e-commerce by working more closely with brick-and-mortar retailers, and now it looks like it plans to extend that work a little further. The search giant is acquiring Pointy, a startup out of Dublin, Ireland, which has built hardware and software technology […]

Instacart announced today a series of new features for its Pickup service, as well as the appointment of a new General Manager, Sarah Mastrorocco, to lead the Instacart Pickup product and team. The grocery pickup service has been steadily growing alongside Instacart delivery, having tripled the number of states and doubled the number of grocery […]

Robots were everywhere at CES, as has been the case for at least a decade. But there’s a different tenor to the robots shown off at the recent annual consumer tech event: they’re designed for home use, and they’re shipping products, not just concepts intended strictly for trade show glam. Home robots have already had […]

Space launch startup Orbex has secured a customer for its forthcoming Prime space launch vehicle: TriSept, a provider of launch integration services for both commercial and government customers. TriSept has booked the full capacity of a rideshare mission aboard an Orbex Prime rocket to take off sometime in 2022, which should work schedule-wise provided Orbex […]

Spotify is ending its year-long dispute with Warner Music’s publishing firm. The world’s largest music streaming service said on Tuesday that it has inked a global licensing agreement with Warner Chappell. The announcement today marks the end of their litigation before the Bombay High Court, where Warner Music was seeking an injunction to prevent Spotify from using […]

We may have moved on from a nearly-daily cycle of news involving tech giants sparring in courts over intellectual property infringement, but patents continue to be a major cornerstone of how companies and people measure their progress and create moats around the work that they have done in hopes of building that into profitable enterprises […]

Travel aggregator Omio, which operates a multimodal transport planning and booking platform for intercity and long distance tips, has hopped over the pond to launch in North America — its first market outside its home base of Europe. From today, consumers in the U.S. and Canada can use Omio’s website or app to compare prices, […]

Comcast NBCUniversal believes its can access startup innovation while supporting future Olympic gold-medalists. The American mass media company launched its new SportsTech accelerator today, based in part, on that impetus. TechCrunch attended a briefing with Comcast execs at 30 Rock NYC to learn more about the initiative. The SportsTech accelerator is a partnership across Comcast […]

Sony Interactive Entertainment will skip E3 again this year and participate instead in “hundreds of consumer events across the globe,” the company told GamesIndustry.biz today. The company, which is preparing to launch the PlayStation 5 before this holiday season, missed the show for the first time last year, after two decades of being one of […]

Codagenix, a company developing vaccines and viral therapies for illnesses ranging from the flu and respiratory viruses to dengue fever has raised $20 million in a new round of financing. The company’s new investment round was led by Adjuvant Capital with additional participation from Euclidean Capital and Topspin Partners . Codagenix will use the funds […]

Amblyopia, commonly called lazy eye, is a medical condition that adversely affects the eyesight of millions, but if caught early can be cured altogether — unfortunately this usually means months of wearing an eyepatch. NovaSight claims successful treatment with nothing more than an hour a day in front of its special display.

Oscar Health, the upstart healthcare insurance company and technology developer, expects to have roughly 400,000 members insured under its healthcare plans, who collectively will bring in roughly $2 billion in revenue for the company by the end of 2020, according to slides of a presentation from the JP Morgan Healthcare conference seen by TechCrunch. Those […]