Crunch Hype

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the grey space in between. Today we’re starting off with a venture capital Q&A, a quick look at Slack’s share price stability and some thoughts on direct listings and their possible future frequency. Bu before we do, I wanted to […]

Arcona Music took to the stage at Disrupt Berlin today to showcase its adaptive music service. The local startup utilizes machine learning to create musical beds capable of adapting to different contexts in real-time. The user simply needs to input a handful of parameters, and the service will adjust accordingly. “Give it a style, an […]

Keith McCarty could have retired after Microsoft bought Yammer. Instead, he founded Eaze to address cannabis delivery. He lead the company through its B round and then stepped back, but last year, he founded Wayv, a new cannabis startup to address an even more significant challenge for the industry: supply chain logistics. So far, it’s […]

A recent study showed that the boards of 60 percent of the most heavily funded venture-backed startups don’t include a single woman.

Uber is launching a new feature aimed at skiers and snowboarders. The ride-hailing company said Wednesday that beginning December 17 an Uber Ski icon will pop up on the app that will let customers order a ride with confirmed extra vehicle space or a ski/snowboarding rack. Uber is launching the feature in 23 U.S. cities […]

Another startup hoping to capitalize on the fintech opportunity in Mexico has closed on a new sum of funding. Mexican challenger bank Albo has secured a $19 million extension to its Series A financing, led by U.S.-based Valar Ventures. The neobank previously raised $7.4 million at the beginning of 2019, bringing the company’s total Series […]

As companies try to figure out how to comply with regulations like GDPR, ISO or Sarbanes Oxley, they face a huge challenge just getting started. Hyperproof, a Bellevue, Washington startup, is launching a new product to help companies build a workflow to get them in compliance in a more organized way. Company co-founder and CEO […]

Blue Origin will be looking to launch one of its New Shepard sub-orbital spacecraft today – a second attempt after weather didn’t cooperate yesterday. Conditions are looking much better at the company’s West Texas launch site, so the Jeff Bezos-founded space venture is much more optimistic that today’s launch will go off as planned. This […]

I’ve been following Estonia-headquartered Jobbatical and its founder, Karoli Hindriks, for years. Part of the vanguard of startups working on infrastructure for digital nomads, the startup has been building the base platform to help global job seekers hire and fire their governments. Digital nomads are hiring and firing their governments As Jobbatical has worked with […]

China launched the Gaofen-7 imaging satellite in November, and the country has just shared the first of its high-resolution, 3D shots. The satellite is sensitive enough to height that it should be able to spot a single person from 500 kilometers up. Gaofen-7 is the latest in a planned series of 14 satellites intended to […]

Audi Business Innovation is testing out a ride sharing service in Southern Germany called BITS that uses both gasoline and electric vehicles in its fleet. To manage the service, Audi has turned to Fleetonomy, a fleet management service that offers white labeled ride hailing app services and fleet management technology. The company develops technology to […]

The success stories of failed gaming startups that went onto strip elements of their infrastructure and pivot into wider markets like Slack has led plenty of game developers to “platformize” their tech to varying degrees of success. Teeoh is looking to create an avatar-based events platform centered around startup culture. The startup is launching its […]

Few areas of health tech appear as untapped as the technology around how we sleep. Far too many people spend much of their waking hours obsessed with how to maximize their hours in bed. Nyxo is building an app-based sleep-coaching program to help users track and improve their quality of sleep in a four-week program. […]

If city governments had a block-by-block understanding of their city’s own ever changing air quality, how might it impact the decisions they make? Thats the concept behind Hawa Dawa, the first company pitching today in the TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin Startup Battlefield. Hawa Dawa combines data sources like satellites and dedicated air monitoring stations to […]

A fleet of Mercedes-Benz S Class vehicles are now plying the roads of San Jose, California as part of a robotaxi pilot project that Daimler and Bosch have been developing for two and a half years, but the launch itself could be chalked up as a mere blip on the autonomous vehicle scene. At last […]

Good morning, and welcome to another Disrupt! Today, we come to you from beautiful (and cold) Berlin, Germany, for Day 1 of Disrupt Berlin. On the Main Stage, we’ll hear from European tech leaders like Hiroki Takeuchi (GoCardless), Sebastian Siemiatkowski (Klarna) and the senior partners at Atomico, including Sophia Bendz, Siraj Khaliq, Hiro Tamura and […]

It was just a couple of months ago that Tines, the cybersecurity automation startup, raised $4.1 million in Series A funding led by Blossom Capital, and now the Dublin-based company is disclosing an $11 million extension to the round. This additional Series A funding is led by venture capital firm Accel, with participation from Index […]

Twitter is changing the way it processes uploaded images, and the new way of doing things will be much-appreciated by any photographers sharing their work on the platform. Twitter engineer Nolan O’Brien shared that the platform will now preserve JPEG encoding when they’re uploaded via Twitter on the web, instead of transcoding them, which results […]

Every year, TechCrunch dives deep into the international startup scene to find innovative startups to compete in Startup Battlefield – TechCrunch’s famous global startup competition. Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2019, 14 companies will face off for the infamous Disrupt Cup, $50,000 USD equity free prize money and the attention of investors and press from […]

Wayv is taking a big step towards mainstreaming the cannabis industry. Wayv Payments, launching today, is said to be the first digital, compliant payment solution for the cannabis supply chain. From growers to distributors to consumers, this solution should reduce the entire industry’s reliance on stacks of cash by providing a credit-card like transaction to […]

Wefox Group, the Berlin-based insurtech startup behind the consumer-facing insurance app and carrier One and the insurance platform Wefox, is disclosing $110 million in a second tranche of Series B funding. Sources tell TechCrunch that this gives the company a pre-money valuation of $1.65 billion. WeFox Group declined to comment on the financials. The Series […]

We're excited to announce the launch of an advice column with answers for all your questions on attracting, hiring and retaining immigrant employees.

Electric vehicle startup Nio is laying off 141 people at its North American headquarters. According to a filing from Employment Development Department of California, the employees at its San Jose office received notice on December 6. Nio, whose global headquarters are in Shanghai, announced last month that it is partnering with Intel’s Mobileye to develop […]

Carsome, a Malaysia-based marketplace for trading users cars, has closed a new $50 million financing round to fend off its rivals and grow its business in Southeast Asian markets. The new financing round, dubbed Series C, was funded by MUFG Innovation Partners (MUIP), the corporate venture capital arm and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mitsubishi UFJ […]

According to Atomico’s recent “State of European Tech, 2019” – widely considered by the European tech industry to be a reliable annual study – at present, 92 in every 100 dollars invested in Europe goes to all-male teams, 83% founders are white, 82% are university educated, in the UK, a quarter of investment committees saw […]

D-Wave Systems announced a partnership with Japanese industrial giant NEC today to build what they call “hybrid apps and services” that work on a combination of NEC high-performance computers and D-Wave’s quantum systems. The two companies also announced that NEC will be investing $10 million in D-Wave, which has raised $204 million prior to this, […]

Hello and welcome to a lightweight series I’m writing while I recapture my footing at TechCrunch. It’s lovely to be back, and I’m excited to chat about what’s going on with private companies, public markets and the space between the two. I wonder what the average revenue (trailing, say) of a unicorn is today, and […]

An update to Apple’s iOS operating system, out today, will give parents a new set of tools to fight back against kids’ iPhone addiction. With the release of iOS 13.3, parents will for the first time be able to set limits over who kids can talk to and text with during certain hours of the […]

Zetwerk, an Indian business-to-business marketplace for manufacturing items, has closed a significantly large financing round as it scales its operations in the nation and also helps local businesses find customers overseas. The 18-month-old startup said on Wednesday it has raised $32 million in a Series B financing round led by Lightspeed and Greenoaks Capital. Zetwerk […]

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. Away CEO is stepping down in light of reports of toxic culture Steph Korey is stepping down from her role as […]

Apple has fixed a bug in iOS 13.3, out today, which let anyone temporarily lock users out of their iPhones and iPads by forcing their devices into an inescapable loop. Kishan Bagaria found a bug in AirDrop, which allows users to share files between iOS devices. He found the bug let him repeatedly send files […]

We’ve talked about securing your startup, the need to understand phishing risks and how not to handle a data breach. But we haven’t yet discussed one of the more damaging threats that all businesses large and small face: the insider threat. The insider threat is exactly as it sounds — someone within your organization who has […]

Today, Microsoft announced a public preview of Microsoft Teams for Linux, the first Office 365 tool that’s available for the open-source operating system. The hope is that by making it available for preview, the company can get feedback from the community and improve it before it becomes generally available. “Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available […]

Today's devices have been secured against innumerable software attacks, but a new exploit called Plundervolt uses distinctly physical means to compromise a chip's security. By fiddling with the actual amount of electricity being fed to the chip, an attacker can trick it into giving up its innermost secrets.

Facebook is making its line of Portal-branded smart video calling devices more relevant to consumers, including those who don’t even have a Facebook account. The company today says its Portal family of products will now work with just a WhatsApp account, allowing users to make video calls to friends and family, as well as access […]

Back in 2017, Y Combinator began offering a 10-week, once-a-year online course called Startup School. Part forum community and part video classroom, the program offers a variety of lectures on topics like raising money or evaluating startup ideas, as led by YC partners and other entrepreneurs from their network. Three years and 40,000+ students later, […]

Alarm clocks were one of the most obvious implementations since the introduction of the smart screen. Devices like Lenovo’s Smart Clock and the Amazon Echo Show 5 have demonstrated some interesting in the bedside display form factor, and Google has worked with the former the refine the experience. Lenovo Smart Clock review This morning, the […]

Open source is a great source of free tools for developers, but as these projects proliferate, and some gain in popularity, the creators sometimes look for ways to monetize successful ones. The problem is that it’s hard to run a subscription-based, dual-license approach and most developers don’t even know where to start. Enter Israeli startup […]

Passport, a mobility management platform, just raised a $65 million Series D round from Rho Capital Partners, H.I.G. Growth Partners and ThornTree Capital Partners. This round brings its total funding to $125 million. The plan is to use the funding to further invest in Passport’s mobility software platform and expand into digital parking payments. In […]

Pear, a six-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based seed-stage firm whose bets on nascent startups are closely watched by early stage investors, has closed on $160 million in capital commitments from a wide array of backers, including a previous investor, the University of Chicago. It’s more than twice the $75 million that the firm raised for its […]

Digitally-native, vertically-integrated brands pool resources, operational costs and institutional knowledge to accelerate growth and achieve profitability at a faster rate.

Walmart this morning announced a new pilot program that will test autonomous grocery delivery in the Houston market starting next year. The retailer is partnering with autonomous vehicle company Nuro, a robotics company that uses driverless technology to deliver goods to customers. Nuro’s vehicles in this case will delivery Walmart online grocery orders to a […]

A startup that’s built cross-channel growth marketing platform — used by businesses to capture customers across whatever digital media they happen to be using — is today announcing funding to do some growing of its own. Iterable — which uses email, push and in-app notifications, SMS and other sources to interact with users and deliver […]

Unsplash has built up a library of 1 million stock photographs, all available to use for free. Now it’s ready to start making money — and to help its photographers earn additional income in the process. Don’t worry: The company isn’t about to start charging for its photos, which CEO Mikael Cho said risks “stalling […]

As the world of digital payments continues to wait and see what kind of impact cryptocurrencies will have on the wider market (if any), consolidation continues apace among those that have built tools for today’s payment needs. Payoneer — a provider of cross-border payment services to millions of businesses in some 200 markets that’s valued […]

Rylo had raised roughly $38 million in VC funding at a $120.25 million valuation.

Apple is today launching a new feature for Apple Card which allows cardholders to purchase a new iPhone then pay it back over 24 months with no interest. The company had already announced its plans for the program during its October earnings call, but now the program is actually opening up to all Apple Card […]