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Jonathan Johnson Contributor Share on Twitter Jonathan Johnson is president of Medici Ventures and CEO of Overstock.com. More posts by this contributor Three challenges facing blockchain technology The road to the blockchain revolution has not always been smooth. Most tech experts agree that the potential for new businesses and applications built on distributed ledgers is […]

A company building a very high-tech glove has just gotten its hands on some new money. HaptX is building a sensor-packed glove for VR and robotics applications that simulates haptic and resistance feedback for enterprise users. The Seattle startup has raised $12 million in new funding from Mason Avenue Investments, Taylor Frigon Capital Partners, Upheaval […]

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. Facebook acquires Madrid-based cloud gaming startup PlayGiga Facebook is building out its gaming business — earlier this year, the company added […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the grey space in between. Today, we’re digging into a host of data concerning the East Coast venture capital scene, specifically looking into the performance of its two key startup markets. It’s 12 degrees Fahrenheit as I write this in […]

MeWe, the subscription-based social network that emphasizes privacy and bills itself as the anti-Facebook, is launching a premium tier of its service and spinning up a business-focused product to take on enterprise networking and communication tools like Slack. Founded by Mark Weinstein, a gregarious serial entrepreneur who credits himself with being an early developer of […]

Google seems to be shopping for game studios as it courts consumer interest for its Stadia game-streaming platform, announcing Thursday that they had acquired Montreal-based Typhoon Studios. The young studio with 26 employees hasn’t released its first title yet, after being founded nearly three years ago, but their upcoming game “Journey to the Savage Planet” […]

Scott Wolfe, chief executive officer of Levelset, the New Orleans-based money management and payment startup for contractors in the construction industry, always thought he’d be in the grocery business. His family owned a number of grocery stores around New Orleans and he was readying himself to go into the family business when Hurricane Katrina hit. […]

Leapfin, a startup selling corporate finance tooling, announced a $4.5 million round this morning. The funding event was led by Bowery Capital, and included dollars from a number of former technology executives. Before its newly announced investment, the company had raised just a small seed round. The small capital amounts may seem inconsequential, but they’re […]

Amazon’s Ring is partnering with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the U.S. to publish missing child posters directly in the Neighbors app by Ring. The free app is used by local communities to share news about local crime and other safety incidents and is accessible to everyone, not just people […]

Facebook doesn’t want its hardware like Oculus or it augmented reality glasses to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. That’s why Facebook has tasked a co-author of Microsoft’s Windows NT named Mark Lucovsky with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according the The Information’s […]

Another legal blow for Uber in Europe: A regional court in Frankfurt has banned the company from sending ride-hailing requests to rental car companies via its app — with the court finding multiple competition violations. The ruling, over Uber’s dispatching process, follows a legal challenge brought by a German taxi association. In Germany, Uber’s ride-hailing […]

Extra Crunch community perks have a new offer from voice meeting notes service, Otter.ai. Starting today, annual and two-year Extra Crunch members can receive 25% off an annual plan for Otter Premium or Otter for Teams. Otter.ai is an AI-powered assistant that generates rich notes from meetings, interviews, lectures and other voice conversations. You can […]

Most in tech would agree that following the launch of Alexa and Google Home devices the ‘Voice Era’ is here. Voice assistant usage is at 3.3 billion right now; by 2020 half of all searches are expected to be done via voice. And with younger generations growing up on voice (55% of teens use voice search […]

Earlier this year, TiVo said it was preparing to split itself into two — a product and IP business — in order to make itself more attractive to buyers. Today, the company announced those plans have been put on hold as it has instead merged with technology licensor Xperi Corporation, in a $3 billion deal. […]

When we met up with Huawei at their Shenzhen headquarters earlier this year, details on the Mate X were hazy, at best. We did have the opportunity to play around with the forthcoming handset a bit over lunch, but the unit looked largely unchanged from what we’d seen at MWC earlier in the year. Release […]

“We were in the back washing blenders so they could keep taking Snackpass orders” recalls co-founder and CEO Kevin Tan. The team from order-ahead food startup Snackpass was willing to get their hands dirty to keep up with demand at one of their first restaurant partners, Tropical Smoothie Cafe on the Yale college campus. Why were […]

Risk and compliance startup Osano, which earlier this year debuted on the Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, has raised $5.4 million in its Series A round. The company told TechCrunch that the round was led by LiveOak Venture Partners and Next Coast Ventures, both of which invested in the company’s seed round. Its Series […]

Despite near-miraculous advances in the treatment of cancer in the U.S. and around the world, the disease remains the second leading cause of death in America. The problem is that every manifestation of the disease is unique to the patient that is afflicted by it, because everyone’s body is actually different. Most cancer treatments are […]

Like it or loathe it, Uber changed the face of modern urban transportation by providing a relatively pain-free way to order a car to take you from A to B. But the company’s growth has done more than catapult Uber into the ranks of the biggest (and most-watched) tech companies: it’s helped open the door […]

UK-based mental health startup eQuoo has become the only game in the UK’s National Health Service App Library and is set to shortly close it’s seed funding round. The app is an emotional fitness game that aims to teach healthy psychological skills. The NHS announcement means a UK doctor can now formally refer eQuoo to […]

Facebook tried to block the referral but today an influential advisor to Europe’s top court has issued a legal opinion that could have major implications for the future of the EU-US Privacy Shield personal data transfer mechanism. It’s a complex opinion, dealing with a fundamental clash of legal priorities around personal data in the EU […]

Huel, the European purveyor of nutritional bars, supplements and meal-replacement shakes, is bringing its snack bars to the U.S. The company, which has been selling the bars in Europe for a while, is launching with two flavors in the U.S.: chocolate and salted caramel. The bars contain 27 vitamins and minerals and are 200 calories […]

Speechly, a startup out of Helsinki that boasts an experienced team of speech recognition and “natural language understanding” experts, has raised €2 million in seed funding to make it easier for developers to add a voice UI to their products. The round is led by Berlin’s Cherry Ventures, with participation from Seedcamp, Quantum Angels, Joyance […]

Spain’s Glovo, an on-demand delivery app platform which operates in Europe, LatAm and Africa delivering food but also other urban conveniences from groceries to pharmaceuticals, has bagged another €150 million (~$166M) in a fast-following Series E round led by Abu Dhabi state investment company, Mubadala. The raise follows a €150M in Series D that was […]

Facebook has acquired PlayGiga, a Madrid-based cloud gaming startup. The company confirmed the deal to CNBC today, the week after Cinco Dias reported it was in talks to buy PlayGiga for about 70 million euros ($78 million). PlayGiga was founded in 2013 and received Series A funding from Adara Ventures, according to Crunchbase. In May, […]

As the number of privately held companies continues to grow — and privately held companies stay private longer than ever — public market shareholders who’d earlier benefited from the growth of companies like Google and Amazon are missing out, fears the Securities & Exchange Commission. Toward that end, the agency today proposed amendments to the […]

One of America’s largest banks has just poured some money to help millions of Indians without a credit score secure loans and make purchases online for the first time in their lives. Bangalore-based ZestMoney announced today that it has raised $15 million from Goldman Sachs and existing investors Naspers Fintech, Quona Capital, and Omidyar Network. Lizzie […]

Uber has agreed to pay a $4.4 million fine to settle a 2017 charge from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission pertaining to sex discrimination and retaliation. The investigation found reasonable cause to believe that Uber “permitted a culture of sexual harassment and retaliation against individuals who complained about such harassment,” the EEOC wrote in […]

When it comes to smart home stuff, once you start, it's hard to stop. As soon as you've got one light that you can turn on and off from your phone, you'll want five.As such, smart home gear can make great gifts for anyone who's already started making their way down that rabbit hole.

Blaming the “volatile state of the global mobility landscape” and rising infrastructure costs, Share Now, the car sharing service owned by Daimler and BMW, has announced that it is pulling out of North America as of February 29, 2020. On the same date — citing “low adoption rates” — Share Now will also cease operating […]

Amazon is ramping operations for its Kuiper project, its forthcoming high-speed satellite internet product, with a new HQ and R&D facility. From a small satellite constellation operating in low Earth orbit, Kuiper will provide internet connectivity to underserved communities — and in some cases, to people without any access at all. If that tune sounds […]

It’s a good time to look back at the year and analyze a few firms that should reach the mythical $1 billion in revenue at some point.

Nature is a good source of inspiration for roboticists, but it's rare that nature's elegance and genius can be replicated in any real way. Still, we're getting closer. This tiny insect-like robot is made of soft materials and weighs less than a gram, yet can move quickly and with some intelligence — and is robust enough to survive a pounding from a fly swatter.

Small-satellite launch company Rocket Lab just officially declared its second launch pad open, but it has already broken ground on a third. The new one will be located in New Zealand on the Mahia peninsula, right next to its first launch pad at the company’s original launch facility — which is already the first and […]

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. Amazon, Apple, Google and Zigbee join forces for an open smart home standard The Connected Home over IP project seeks to […]

As we reach the end of 2019 and approach crunch time for everyone who has procrastinated holiday gift buying, we wanted to highlight a few more great reads that might add value to your life or are just plain old fun.Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve asked Extra Crunch members and the TechCrunch editorial staff for their favorite books of the year. Responses covered a huge mix of genres, narrative structures and formats, with titles that would fit the interests of anyone from your techno-nerd co-founder to your craziest second-cousin that you only see around the holidays.

One of the more notable startups using artificial intelligence to understand and fight cancer has raised $45 million more in funding to continue building out its operations and inch closer to commercialising its work. Paige — which applies AI-based methods such as machine learning to better map the pathology of cancer, an essential component of […]

Spotify is prototyping a new way to see what friends have been listening to, called “Tastebuds.” Despite how discovering music is inherently social, Spotify has no features for directly interacting with friends within its mobile app after axing its own inbox in 2017 and keeping its Friend Activity ticker restricted to desktop. It seemed like […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the grey space in between. Today we’re exploring the 2019 IPO cohort from a capital-in perspective. How much did tech companies going public in 2019 raise before they went public, and what impact that did that have on their valuation […]

Parents buy their children GPS-enabled smartwatches to keep track of them, but security flaws mean they’re not the only ones who can. This year alone, researchers have found several vulnerabilities in a number of child-tracking smartwatches. But new findings out today show that nearly all were harboring a far greater, more damaging flaw in a […]

Four months after the news broke that veteran VCs Theresia Gouw and Jennifer Fonstad were going separate ways after forming their own venture firm in 2014, Gouw says her new firm, aCrew Capital, has closed its debut fund with an impressive $250 million in capital commitments. The firm, with offices in both San Francisco and […]

Amazon’s original Echo Wall Clock was mostly fine. Some consumers ran into connectivity issues with the device, but it was mostly okay. It’s one of the most passive members of the Echo family of devices, mostly doing its wall clock thing, until you need a time set. The latest addition to the line has something […]

The UK’s competition regulator has raised concerns about the market power of digital ad platform giants Google and Facebook in an interim report published today, opening up a consultation on a range of potential inventions — from breaking up platform giants, to limiting their ability to set self-serving defaults, and enforcing data sharing and/or feature interoperability […]

Bird, Coinbase backer Tusk Venture Partners secures $70M.

Before you decide what’s right for your company, here are a few things you need to know about direct listings.

It’s a bad day in the world of cryptocurrency. After recovering some during the summer, the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are sharply down over the last several weeks. Looking back a month, bitcoin was worth around $8,500 a coin. Today it’s worth nearly $2,000 less. The value of ether is off 6% in […]

The biggest names in the connected home category are reaching across the aisle to create an open source standard. Marquee names Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance are leading the charge here. There are a number of key partners on the board, as well, including IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, […]

Autonomous aircraft transportation seems like a sure thing at this point – in particular for cargo, where safety concerns around potential harm to people isn’t as much of an issue. One company pursuing this goal is Elroy Air, which has developed a hybrid-electric vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft that can carry over 300 lbs […]

The European Space Agency (ESA) launched a satellite early this morning, aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket that took off from the Guiana Space Center in French Guyana. Atop the Soyuz is the so-called “Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite” (CHEOPS for short) that will deploy to orbit around Earth, where it’ll have a better view of nearby stars […]

Katie Jacobs Stanton plans to invest in "underrepresented and underestimated" founders.