Crunch Hype

Back in 2013, Dropbox was scaling fast. The company had grown quickly by taking advantage of cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but when you grow rapidly, infrastructure costs can skyrocket, especially when approaching the scale Dropbox was at the time. The company decided to build its own storage system and network — a […]

2019 was a breakout year for the podcast industry, with major shifts in industry dynamics. Here’s a review of the state of podcasting as we conclude 2019.

California’s new privacy law is now in effect, allowing state residents to take better control of the data that’s collected on them — from social networks, banks, credit agencies and more. There’s just one catch: the companies, many of which lobbied against the law, don’t make it easy. California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) allows anyone […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re adding four new names to the growing $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) club. The firms — Sisense, SiteMinder, Monday.com, and Lemonade — add diversity to our current group of yet-private companies which […]

Google’s ex-head of international relations, Ross LaJeunesse — who clocked up more than a decade working government and policy related roles for the tech giant before departing last year — has become the latest (former) Googler to lay into the company for falling short of its erstwhile “don’t be evil” corporate motto. Worth noting right […]

Well, we got to January 2nd before the latest angry resignation published by a tech executive on Medium. Today’s installment comes from Ross LaJeunesse, who was head of international relations at Google and served for more than a decade in various roles at the company. He denounces what he sees as Google’s increasingly failed ambitions […]

It’s tough to be a competitive gamer once you’re an adult. Simply fitting tournament time into a busy schedule is challenge enough, but even if you can make the time, where do you go to find other adults who are competitively playing the games you love? That’s where Lowkey.gg comes in. Lowkey.gg is a tournament […]

In Marc Benioff’s book, Trailblazer, he tells the tale of how Steve Jobs planted the seeds of the idea that would become the first enterprise app store, and how Benioff eventually paid Jobs back with the gift of the AppStore.com domain. While Salesforce did truly help blaze a trail when it launched as an enterprise […]

Just over two years ago, PerceptIn announced an $8 million Series A. The funding followed a $2 million seed round, and found the startup essentially coming out of stealth to showcase the sensors it was building for a wide range of form factors, from cars to robot vacuums. The company’s been quite busy in the […]

It would be hard to top the 2018 enterprise M&A total of a whopping $87 billion, and predictably this year didn’t come close. In fact, the top 10 enterprise M&A deals in 2019 were less than half last year’s, totaling $40.6 billion. This year’s biggest purchase was Salesforce buying Tableau for $15.7 billion, which would […]

The business of selling consumer goods and services online is a relatively young endeavor across Africa, but ecommerce is set to boom. Over the last eight years, the sector has seen its first phase of big VC fundings, startup duels and attrition. To date, scaling e-commerce in Africa has straddled the line of challenge and […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. It’s finally 2020, the year that should bring us a direct listing from home-sharing giant Airbnb, a technology company valued at tens of billions of dollars. The company’s flotation will be a key event in […]

California's much-debated privacy law officially takes effect today, a year and a half after it was passed and signed — but it'll be six more months before you see the hammer drop on any scofflaw tech companies that sell your personal data without your permission.

Look, this is the last post I’m writing in 2019 and I’m tired. But I can’t let the year close without taking stock of how well tech stocks did this year. It was bonkers. So let’s mark the year’s conclusion with some notes for our future selves. Yes, we know that the Nasdaq has been […]

The Pallone-Thrune TRACED Act, a bipartisan bit of legislation that should make life harder for the villains behind robocalls, was signed into law today by the president. It’s still possible to get things done in D.C. after all! We’ve covered the TRACED Act several times previously, as robocalls are, in addition to being horribly annoying, […]

Welcome to the third annual TechCrunch Include Progress Report. Our editorial and events teams work hard throughout the year to ensure that we bring you the most dynamic and diverse group of speakers and judges to our event stages. And finally, at the tail end of 2019, we bring you … 2018 data. (You can […]

The income share agreement (ISA), a financing model where students pay for an education program with a certain percent of their income for several years after graduating, has been one of 2019’s new buzzwords among VCs and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. While still a nascent market that faces regulatory uncertainty in the US and abroad, […]

2019 was the year wireless earbuds went mainstream. The category has been around much longer, of course, and Apple really broke the whole thing open a full three years ago with the release of the first AirPods, but sales exploded in 2019. The category experienced a 183% YOY increase in shipments last quarter, according to […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today, the last day of 2019, we’re taking a second look at Boston. Regular readers of this column will recall that we recently took a peek at Boston’s startup ecosystem, and that we compiled a […]

InsightFinder, a startup from North Carolina based on 15 years of academic research, wants to bring machine learning to system monitoring to automatically identify and fix common issues. Today, the company announced a $2 million seed round. ​IDEA Fund Partners, a VC out of Durham, N.C.,​ led the round, with participation from ​Eight Roads Ventures​ […]

Shipfix, a relatively new startup aiming to drag the dry cargo shipping industry into the digital age, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Idinvest Partners, with participation from Kima Ventures, The Family, Bpifrance and strategic business angels. The company was founded in December 2018 by Serge Alleyne (CEO) and Antoine […]

As Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart spend billions to make a dent in India’s retail market and reel from recent regulatory hurdles, the two companies have stumbled upon a new challenge: Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man. Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio, two subsidiaries of Ambani’s Reliance Industries, said they have soft-launched JioMart, their e-commerce venture that […]

Postmates and Uber have filed a complaint in California federal district court, alleging that a bill limiting how companies can label workers as independent contractors is unconstitutional. The complaint, which includes two gig workers as co-plaintiffs, was filed in U.S. District Court on Monday, days before Assembly Bill 5 (AB-5) is due to go into […]

Huawei on Tuesday reported resilient revenue for 2019 as the embattled Chinese technology group continues to grow despite a prolonged American campaign against its business, but cautioned that growth next year could prove more challenging. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, wrote in a New Year’s message to employees that the company’s revenue topped 850 billion […]

Funding for tech startups has been on an inevitable upswing for years, a result of a virtuous circle where wildly successful tech companies on the public markets whet the appetites of investors and investors’ backers to find more diamonds, a push met by a pull from the rush of talent with entrepreneurial aspirations out to […]

Companies in Seattle raised a record $3.5B in VC funding this year.

2019 was a packed year for commercial space and space startups, but 2020 isn’t likely to see any kind of slowdown. In fact, it’s going to get a lot busier in a few key ways that could have the effect of driving even more enthusiasm, energy and funding into the emerging space tech industry. The […]

Robotics, AI and automation have long been one of the hottest categories for tech investments. After years and decades of talk, however, those big payouts are starting to pay off. Robotics are beginning to dominate nearly every aspect of work, from warehouse fulfillment to agriculture to retail and construction. Our annual TC Sessions: Robotics+AI event […]

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. VMware completes $2.7 billion Pivotal acquisition VMware is closing the year with a significant new weapon in its arsenal. (I restrained […]

Companies sold a lot of wireless headphones in 2019. You already knew that though, right? What you probably didn’t know was precisely how many constitutes the aforementioned “a lot.” New numbers from Canalys shed light on those successes. The research firm’s classification of audio products is a little wonky, but it drives the point home […]

The age of alternative meats is upon us. Beyond Meat is a $5 billion public company selling burgers in Canadian McDonald’s and American Carl’s Jr., breakfast sausages in Dunkin, and even chicken in a limited trial at KFC. Meanwhile, Impossible Foods has become a runaway hit at Burger Kings around the country. And the company […]

We’re excited to announce a new Extra Crunch community perk from Typeform. Starting today, annual and two-year members of Extra Crunch can get 25% off an annual Typeform Premium plan. Typeform lets you create beautiful, interactive experiences across your most important customer touchpoints. Everything from slick surveys, friendly forms and quizzes can all be easily […]

As big tech gets bigger, industry leaders have begun making more noise about helping homeless populations, particularly in those regions where high salaries have driven up the cost of living to heights not seen before. Last January, for example, Facebook and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, among other participants, formed a group called the Partnership for the Bay’s […]

Shares of NIO, a China-based electric car manufacturer, are soaring this morning after the company’s Q3 2019 earnings beat investor expectations. NIO’s surprise win comes directly on the heels of Tesla, a competitor, announcing the delivery of its first cars made in China, NIO’s home market. NIO went public on the New York Stock Exchange […]

We love parties almost as much as we love startups, but we go absolutely bonkers for a hot startup/party mashup. That’s why we’re returning to host our 3rd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party in San Francisco on Friday, February 7. Even better news, party-goers — additional (the second batch) coveted tickets to this wild winter romp […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. It’s the second to last day of 2019, meaning we’re very nearly out of time this year; our space for repretrospection is quickly coming to a close. Before we do run out of hours, however, […]

It’s the slowest week of the year for gadget news. Christmas is in the rearview, and it’s a few days until the new year. After that, it’s a straight shot to CES and then MWC. Meantime, best we’ve got going for us are a handful of rumors, including a peek at what Google’s next budget […]

VMware is closing the year with a significant new component in its arsenal. Today it announced it has closed the $2.7 billion Pivotal acquisition it originally announced in August. The acquisition gives VMware another component in its march to transform from a pure virtual machine company into a cloud native vendor that can manage infrastructure […]

Satellite industry giant Maxar is selling MDA, its subsidiary focused on space robotics, for $1 billion CAD (around $765.23 million USD), Reuter reports. The purchasing entity is a consortium of companies led by private investment firm Northern Private Capital, which will acquire the entirety of MDA’s Canadian operations, which is responsible for the development of […]

The holidays might be a time of slowed activity for most companies in the tech sector, but for SpaceX, it was a time to ramp production efforts on the latest Starship prototype – “Starship SN1” as it’s called, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. This flight design prototype of Starship is under construction at SpaceX’s […]

2019 brought more global attention to Africa’s tech scene than perhaps any previous year. A high profile IPO, visits by both Jacks (Ma and Dorsey), and big Chinese startup investment energized that. The last 12 months served as a grande finale to 10 years that saw triple digit increases in startup formation and VC on […]

Grab and Singtel, one of the largest telecoms in Singapore, announced today that they are applying for a digital full bank license together. If approved, the license will allow them to offer simple credit and investment products, before progressing to a full-functioning bank if they meet the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) criteria. Grab will […]

Indian tech startups have never had it so good. Local tech startups in the nation raised $14.5 billion in 2019, beating their previous best of $10.6 billion last year, according to research firm Tracxn . Tech startups in India this year participated in 1,185 financing rounds — 459 of those were Series A or later […]

When you look at all of the tech trend stories of the past decade, one important saga that’s likely to be overlooked is the platformization of gaming. In the 2010s, the value of video games was realized in a way that completely transformed how the majority of users experienced sitting down with their favorite FPS […]

Happy New Year! It’s been another wild and wacky ride of a year in the tech world: breakthroughs and disgraces, triumphs and catastrophes, cryptocurrencies and starships, the ongoing rise of utopian clean energy and dystopian cyberpunk societies, and most of all, the ongoing weirding of the whole wide world. In other words it was another […]

Snapchat’s most popular yet under-exploited feature is finally getting the spotlight in 2020. Starting in February with a global release, your customizable Bitmoji avatar will become the star of a full-motion cartoon series called Bitmoji TV. It’s a massive evolution for Bitmoji beyond the chat stickers and comic strip-style Stories where they were being squandered […]

A security researcher has found several vulnerabilities in a number of Ruckus Wireless routers, which the networking giant has since patched. Gal Zror told TechCrunch that the vulnerabilities he found lie inside in the web user interface software that runs on the company’s Unleashed line of routers. The flaws can be exploited without needing a […]

Over the weekend, media and digital brand holding company IAC announced that it had agreed to buy Care.com, which describes itself as “the world’s largest online family care platform,” in a deal valued at about $500 million. Despite being the best-known marketplace in the United States for finding child and senior caregivers, Care.com has spent […]

It’s easy to see “The Witcher” as Netflix’s answer to “Game of Thrones,” thanks to its impressive special effects and its big movie star lead (Henry Cavill, previously best known as Superman in the recent DC films) — not to mention its willingness to put blood, guts and naked female bodies on-screen. But in other […]

TechCrunch occasionally reviews cars. Why? Vehicles are some of the most complex, technical consumer electronics available. It’s always been that way. Vehicles, especially those available for the consumer, are the culmination of bleeding-edge advancements in computing, manufacturing, and material sciences. And some can go fast — zoom zoom. Over the past 12 months, we’ve looked […]