Crunch Hype

Sapphire Ventures invests in Series B to pre-IPO enterprise tech companies.

There’s an emerging body of research suggesting that electrical stimulation applied to the brain can help improve memory and cognitive function. A recent study conducted by researchers from Boston University this year found that 70 year-old participants in a clinical trial performed certain memory tasks as well as 20 year-olds after exposure to mild electrical […]

Make space for another dating app in your single life: Blindlee is Chatroulette for dating but with female-friendly guardrails in the form of a user-controlled video blur effect. The idea is pretty simple: Singles are matched randomly with another user who meets some basic criteria (age, location) for a three minute ‘ice breaker’ video call. […]

“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” is the ninth and final film in what Lucasfilm is calling The Skywalker Saga. It’s the end of the story — that’s both its greatest asset and its heaviest burden. Certainly, if you’re hoping that a single movie can effectively wrap up every storyline, complete every character arc and […]

One of India’s biggest tech startups is no longer losing money. Education tech startup Byju’s on Tuesday posted a net profit of $2.8 million on revenue of $188.8 million in the financial year that ended in March this year. During the same period, Byju’s revenue increased to $208 million, from $73.2 million a year ago. […]

Nigerian startup Rensource Energy has raised a $20 million Series A round co-led by CRE Venture Capital and the Omidyar network. The renewable energy company builds and operates solar powered micro-utilities that provide electricity to commercial community structures, such as open-air trading bazaars. Launched in 2016, the startup has shifted its operating strategy. “We’ve pivoted […]

The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut […]

Your chances of closing your first big sale are going to be directly related to how well you’re targeting prospective customers.

Like any burgeoning art form, podcasts have a complicated relationship with corporate America. The form’s appeal has long been its accessibility; for years, it’s been open to anyone with an idea, a little free time and a computer. The results haven’t always been stellar, but the medium’s potential is seemingly limitless. The exact beginnings of […]

Anyone who wants to eat a meatless burger has plenty of options — but what if you want to be a little healthier? Daring Foods will soon be offering an alternative, in the form of plant-based chicken made from five non-genetically modified ingredients — water, soy, sunflower oil, salt and natural flavoring (a mix of […]

OM1, a big-data analytics company for the healthcare industry, has raised $50 million in its latest round of financing to expand its sales and marketing and product development activities as it brings clinical insights to hospitals and big pharma companies alike. The new financing highlights just how important access to data is in the fight […]

It’s predicted the tech industry won’t near gender equality until closer to 2025, but progress is happening.

Earlier this year, PBS announced it had secured for its member stations streaming agreements on YouTube’s live TV service, YouTube TV. Today, that deal goes live. PBS says more than 100 of its local stations are now available on YouTube TV by way of dedicated live channels for both PBS and PBS Kids, as well […]

Hiring the right people may be the most important thing you do when you start a new company. But how much time should founders spend on hiring when there are so many other competing demands? Last week, we discussed team-building and several other issues during a panel on the Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt Berlin […]

We’re excited to announce a new community perk for Extra Crunch. Starting today, annual and two-year Extra Crunch members located in the United States can get free access to Avodocs from AXDRAFT. Avodocs provides free legal documents for startups, including NDAs, privacy policies, founders’ agreements, employee onboarding documents, terms of service and more. Founders and […]

In the wake of WeWork’s embarrassing IPO rout, you might imagine that startups working in similar markets would cool it for a bit. Perhaps they could work on cutting spending, improving their gross margins, and, say, shooting for profitability. Not so, at least in one case. Instead of doing those things, China-based Ucommune filed to go […]

When you play games on your PS4, it's fair to say that your thumbs and index fingers are generally doing most of the work. Why not put the rest of your lazy digits to work with this accessory that puts two programmable buttons on the rear of the DualShock 4 controller?

Despite the proliferation of recipe websites and apps, finding and organizing the recipes you want to cook has somehow become more difficult over the years. Recipe sites are overrun with ads and long-winded personal stories, while many apps ignore the fact that many of today’s consumers want to shop for groceries online, not by making […]

Airbnb has well and truly disrupted the world of travel accommodation, changing the conversation not just around how people discover and book places to stay, but what they expect when they get there, and what they expect to pay. Today, one of the startups riding that wave is announcing a significant round of funding to […]

YouTube Music is taking on Spotify, Apple Music and others with the launch of three personalized playlists, including its own version of Spotify’s Discover Weekly, called Discover Mix, as well as a New Release Mix and Your Mix. Discover Mix had been spotted in the wild during testing, but now all three are globally available […]

In a world where ad rates are declining for traditional broadcast media, the corporations responsible for making the fictions that millions devour daily need to find a new business model. Subscription services are on the rise — with every major broadcaster launching an on-demand service — and so are ad-supported video streaming services to replace […]

Over the years, Google’s various whitepapers, detailing how the company solves specific problems at scale, have regularly spawned new startup ecosystems and changed how other enterprises think about scaling their own tools. Today, the company is publishing a new security whitepaper that details how it keeps it cloud-native architecture safe. The name, BeyondProd, already indicates […]

TrialJectory, which is developing a new technology service to match cancer patients with clinical trials, has raised $2.7 million to finance its continued growth. Led by Contour Venture Partners, the new financing will be used to accelerate TrialJectory’s operations by adding more clinical trials for different cancer types and expanding the company’s outreach to caregivers, […]

Hugging Face has raised a $15 million funding round led by Lux Capital. The company first built a mobile app that let you chat with an artificial BFF, a sort of chatbot for bored teenagers. More recently, the startup released an open-source library for natural language processing applications. And that library has been massively successful. […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the grey space in between. Today we’re looking into Uber’s bike bet and what the push could mean for Lime and other micromobility companies working to find a sustainable business model. As profitability comes back into vogue among investors at […]

LogMeIn announced this morning that it has agreed to be sold for $4.3 billion to affiliates of Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation, the private equity affiliate of Elliott Management Corporation. The purchase price comes out to $86.05 per share in an all-cash deal. The company had a 52-week high of $96.87 per share […]

Luminary, a startup building a “Netflix for podcasts,” is now trying a new tack to gain subscribers for its premium service. The company is today launching an Alexa skill that will allow podcast listeners to stream content on Echo speakers and other Alexa-powered devices, using voice commands. In addition, Luminary is also becoming the first […]

Entrepeneur First, the London headquartered “talent investor” and company builder backed by Silicon Valley’s Greylock, is losing long-time employee Matt Wichrowski to a career in venture capital. TechCrunch has learned that Wichrowski, who is currently running EF’s “Launch” programme in Europe and is an angel investor, is joining Berlin-based Fly Ventures where he’ll be giving […]

Belgium-based all-in-one business software maker Odoo, which offers an open source version as well as subscription-based enterprise software and SaaS, has taken in $90 million led by a new investor: Global growth equity investor Summit Partners. The funds have been raised via a secondary share sale. Odoo’s executive management team and existing investor SRIW and […]

Oto, a startup spun off from research at SRI International to help customer service operations understand voice intonation, announced a $5.3 million seed round today. Participants in the round included Firstminute Capital, Fusion Fund, Interlace Ventures, SAP.iO and SRI International . The startup has raised $6.5 million including a previous $1 million seed round, according […]

Skyryse is a three-year old transportation startup that is approaching the future of aviation from a different angle when compared to most. You often see startups building new kinds of aircraft, with electric powertrains, multiple rotors for vertical take-off and landing, and more: Skyryse thinks the smarter approach is to start at a more fundamental […]

For years, startups have been encouraged to grow at all costs. That hasn’t always turned out so well, and founders are feeling pressure for the first time in a long time to do a better job of keeping track of their spending — and their return on investment. Enter Pepper, an L.A.-based company that has […]

Estate planning in the U.S. is a $180 billion industry and unlike many of the other areas in the multi-trillion dollar financial services market, it’s one that has yet to see a slew of technology companies come in to try and improve efficiencies. One notable exception is Trust & Will, the San Diego-based startup that […]

Open source has become a critical building block of modern software, and today a new startup is coming out of stealth to capitalise on one of the newer frontiers in open source: using it to build and manage distributed application environments, an approach being used increasingly to handle large computing projects, such as those involving […]

This morning ProdPerfect, a technology startup focused on web application testing, announced a $13 million Series A led by Anthos Capital. Anthos is perhaps best known for investing in Honey, a startup which recently sold to PayPal for several billion dollars. ProdPerfect, a remote-focused company, closed a $2.6 million Seed round earlier in 2019. Fika Ventures and Eniac Ventures took part in the Series […]

Ask almost any startup founder and they’ll tell you that business banking is mostly broken. Legacy banks typically provide a clunky user experience trapped in the past. New challenger banks show a lot of promise on the UX front but often come with an immature feature set that hits a wall as soon as a […]

New developments in sensor technologies, computer vision and machine learning technologies are combining to drive medical diagnostics further into the home and the latest company to make a move to push services deeper into the home is the online contact lens retailer, 1-800 Contacts. The Utah-based company has acquired 6over6 Vision for an undisclosed amount. […]

The top cryptocurrency companies have quietly begun to outsource their infrastructure problems to a tiny stealth startup. It’s called Alchemy. Today it’s making the big public reveal of it’s technology that could help developers finally build the killer use case atop Bitcoin or Ethereum. If the operating system connected computers and software, and if browsers […]

French startup, EfficientIP, a network security and automation specialist, has secured an $11 million Series B investment from Jolt Capital in Paris. The investment will drive international expansion. EfficientIP’s software discovers the DNS issues which are the primary cause of DDoS attacks. These are typically the largest types of attacks. It’s platform is designed to […]

African cross-border fintech startup Chipper Cash has raised a $6 million seed-round led by Deciens Capital. The San Francisco-based company offers mobile-based, no fee, P2P payment services in six countries: Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Kenya. Chipper Cash will use the capital to grow its team and move into new geographic areas, according to […]

Singapore’s fashion startup Zilingo has acquired Sri Lanka’s SaaS startup nCinga in a $15.5 cash and stock deal, the two said today. nCinga, founded in 2014, offers an IoT platform to enable real-time production monitoring on factory floors and data analytics tools. Its acquisition is one of Sri Lanka’s largest tech exits in recent times, […]

Third-party vendors were told by Amazon over the weekend that they are barred from using FedEx’s ground delivery services for Prime shipments. The Wall Street Journal reports that a message sent by Amazon to merchants on Sunday said the ban will last “until the delivery performance of these ship methods improves.” The e-commerce platform will […]

SpaceX has successfully launched its 13th rocket this year, and its 11th Falcon 9 (the company also flew two Falcon Heavy missions in 2019). The launch included the re-use of a twice flown Falcon 9 booster stage, which it recovered again with a landing at sea aboard one of its droneship landing pads, and a […]

HungerBox, an Indian food tech startup that has courted 10 of the 11 largest companies in the country to use its services, today announced it has raised $12 million from Paytm and others as it looks to sign clients in Southeast Asia. The three-year-old startup’s new financing round, a Series C, was funded by a […]

Carbon today announced the expansion of its partnership with Lamborghini. The white-hot 3D-printing startup will manufacture central and lateral dashboard air vents for the carmaker’s Sián FKP hybrid sports car. The move follows the deal announced earlier this year that found Carbon printing a fuel cap and an air duct clip for Lamborghini’s Urus SVU. […]

Most tech companies — particularly B2B companies — either don’t understand the power of a brand, or do a really poor job of creating one.

Today the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed at an all-time record high of 8,814.23, up 0.91% on the day. The Nasdaq is up more than 32% on the year. Turning the clock back, the Nasdaq Composite is up around 60% from the end of 2016. Compared to the anti-records set in 2009 during the doldrums that […]

Instagram is giving politicians the same free rein to spread misinformation as its parent company Facebook. Instagram is expanding its limited fact-checking test in the U.S. from May and will now work with 45 third-party organizations to assess the truthfulness of photo and video content on its app. Material rated as false will be hidden […]

Plenty of the ocean remains unexplored, even though it’s a huge trove of potentially valuable information. Current methods for mapping and gathering ocean data, especially deep-ocean data, generally require humans in the mix (even if controlling vehicles remotely), are immensely expensive and are not designed for long periods of operation. Startup Terradepth, founded by two […]