Crunch Hype

GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra said Thursday morning that the automaker is forming a joint venture with LG Chem to mass produce battery cells for its electric vehicles, a portfolio that will include a new battery-electric truck coming in the fall of 2021. The two companies said they will invest up to a total […]

Plexo Capital, the fund founded by former GV Partner Lo Toney, has closed its first fund of $42.5 million. The plan is to invest in both startups and emerging VC funds, with 60% to 65% of the capital going toward venture capital funds as a limited partner, and 35% to 40% going directly to startups, […]

SpaceX is keeping relatively close to schedule on one of the bold timelines pronounced by its CEO Elon Musk – an unusual but welcome twist from the company’s track record of sticking to its predicted timelines. Specifically, SpaceX notes that it has now completed seven system tests of the latest, upgraded version of the parachutes […]

It’s take two for SpaceX’s CRS-19 mission, the 19th Commercial Resupply Mission (see how that works?) it’s flying under contract with NASA. The goal of these missions is to ferry supplies, experimental materials and other equipment to the International Space Station, where it’ll be unloaded by the astronauts living and working aboard the orbiting research […]

Only 5% of the largest voting counties in the U.S. are protected against email impersonation and phishing attacks, seen as a key attack method by hackers who officials say want to disrupt the upcoming presidential election. The findings come less than a year before millions of Americans are set to go to the polls to […]

We’ve got a packed house for the TC Hackathon that kicks off at Disrupt Berlin 2019 in just six days. We may have limited the number of participants to 500 people, but there’s no limit on the skills, creativity and dogged determination of these coders. Hold up now, there’s still time to save money and buy […]

Walmart’s Flipkart has backed Indian startup Shadowfax in a new $60 million financing round as the retail giant works to strengthen its logistics network in the nation. Flipkart led the Series D financing round for the four-year-old Bangalore-based startup, Shadowfax co-founder and chief executive Abhishek Bansal told TechCrunch in an interview. Existing investors Eight Roads Ventures, […]

Huawei said today it is suing the Federal Communications Commission, asking to overturn a ban on carriers from using money from the Universal Service Fund (USF) to buy equipment from Huawei and ZTE. The $8.5 billion USF supports the purchase of equipment to build communications infrastructure, especially in rural communities. Huawei is asking the United […]

As music streaming apps struggle to differentiate, Apple is making concert video a more central part of its strategy with tonight’s big Billie Eilish show at its HQ’s Steve Jobs Theater. The Apple Music Awards concert will be streaming live and then on-demand to Apple Music’s 60 million subscribers. Apple would like to do more […]

When AWS announced Outposts last year, a private cloud hardware stack they install in your data center, there were a lot of unanswered questions. This week at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced general availability as the vision for this approach began to become clearer. AWS CEO Andy Jassy, speaking at a press […]

It didn’t take much for the founders of Cora, Brazil’s newest startup to tackle some aspect of the broken financial services industry in the country, to raise their first $10 million. Igor Senra and Leo Mendes had worked together before — founding their first online payments company, MOIP, in 2005. That company sold to WireCard […]

Qualcomm’s holding its big annual get-together this week in Hawaii, portioning off Snapdragon news, piece by piece. Yesterday’s event was the big unveiling of the Snapdragon 865 and 765, the chips that will power most of next year’s premium and mid-tier handsets, respectively. Today, the components came into sharper focus. Expect more from both tomorrow, […]

You may be able to exclude up to 100% of your federal capital gains taxes from selling the stake in a venture-backed tech startup.

URBAN-X, the accelerator program focused on companies developing technologies to increase the sustainability, resiliency and efficiency of cities, has selected seven companies for its latest cohort. Operating as a partnership between BMW’s Mini brand and the early-stage investment fund Urban.Us since 2017, the accelerator has backed 51 companies, which have raised more than $100 million […]

A contractor working for cell giant Sprint stored on an unprotected cloud server hundreds of thousands of cell phone bills of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile subscribers. The storage bucket had more than 261,300 documents, the vast majority of which were phone bills belonging to cell subscribers dating as far back as 2015. But the bucket, […]

VCs tout themselves as frontier technology investors, but most are using the same tools we've used for the past 20+ years — Excel and recent college grads searching Google.

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. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is taking over as CEO of Alphabet Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced that Google CEO […]

Fancy websites and services come and go, but Craigslist endures. And now one of its main shortcomings is fixed: there's an official app. Currently available for iOS and in beta for Android, the app provides a true-to-form Craigslist experience: useful, unfussy, and anonymous.

Nintendo today noted that the Switch just had its best-ever sales week in the States. Over the course of Thanksgiving week, the three-year-old console moved more than 830,000 units. That brings the system up to a combined 17.5 million units in the U.S., by Nintendo’s count. It’s pretty impressive momentum for a mature console. Back […]

YouTube is warning creators they may see their subscriber numbers decline this week as the result of a purge that will remove closed accounts from YouTube metrics. Closed accounts could refer to those that were willingly shut down by users or those that YouTube shut down for policy violations — like spam or abuse, for […]

Data breaches that could cause millions of dollars in potential damages have been the bane of the life of many a company. What’s required is a great deal of real-time monitoring. The problem is that this world has become incredibly complex. A SANS Institute survey found half of company data breaches were the result of […]

Korean e-commerce giant Coupang has a new chief financial officer. The company announced today that it has hired Alberto Fornaro, who previously served the same role at International Gaming Technology (IGT PLC), the multinational gaming machine company. Fornaro succeeds Richard Song, who joined Coupang in 2011 and is retiring. Coupang is Korea’s largest e-commerce platform. […]

Instagram is done playing dumb about users’ ages. After nine years, Instagram is finally embracing more responsibility to protect underage kids from the problems with social media. It will now ask new users to input their birth date and bar users younger than 13 from joining. However, it won’t be asking existing users their age, […]

In a year-end retrospective released this morning, Reddit says its user base grew 30% this year to reach 430 million monthly active users, as of the end of October. Its users also contributed 199 million posts, 1.7 billion comments, and 32 billion upvotes, the company says. Last year, Reddit reported 330 million monthly active users […]

Enterprise AI company Dataiku has announced some changes in its capitalization table. CapitalG (formerly Google Capital), Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund, is investing in the startup by buying out some of Serena Capital’s shares. Serena Capital has been an investor in Dataiku since 2014. “Serena was looking for a bit of liquidity. They invested in […]

May Mobility, a Michigan-based startup that is operating autonomous shuttle services in three U.S. cities, has has raised $50 million in a Series B round led by Toyota Motor Corp. The funding, which comes less than a year after May Mobility raised $22 million, will be used to expand every aspect of the company, including […]

Kustomer, a CRM startup that’s taking on the likes of Zendesk, Salesforce, and many other bigger and older providers, has closed yet another round of funding — no less than its third fundraise of the year — as it continues to double down on its new approach to managing customers in today’s digital world. The […]

A lot of companies talk about the value of your data, and about helping you get more control over the information you share, but Toronto-based Delphia is unique in aiming to build a viable, sustainable and scalable way to take a person’s data and turn that into real monetary gain. It’s not aiming to do […]

Plex today is launching its own ad-supported streaming service, a rival to The Roku Channel, Tubi, Crackle, Vudu’s Movies on Us, and others that offer a way to stream movies and TV for free without a subscription. The service will feature several thousand movies and shows from studios like MGM, Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution, […]

Pandora’s redesigned mobile app experience is today available to all users, following a limited rollout that began in October. The update expands on Pandora’s personalization capabilities with the addition of a new “For You” tab offering an entirely unique experience for each Pandora user, along with more station customization features, and other changes. Pandora hopes […]

Flow, a startup that helps brands and retailers build a cross-border e-commerce business, has raised $37 million in Series B funding. CEO Rob Keve said that thanks to the magic of social media and digital marketing, many direct-to-consumer brands are reaching consumers around the world. However, the actual shopping experience for those consumers often leaves […]

Google is expanding its suite of “Digital Wellbeing” tools for Android devices with a new feature, Focus Mode, launching today. This feature allows users to turn off distractions — like social media updates or email notifications — for a period of time, so you can get things done without interruption. Focus Mode was first announced […]

SpaceX is set to launch its 19th Commercial Resupply Mission (CRS) for the International Space Station today, with a liftoff time scheduled for 12:51 PM EST (9:51 AM EST). The launch will take off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, and will use a Dragon cargo capsule that SpaceX has already flown twice […]

Synchronize your watches, dust off your passports and pack your bags, startuppers. Disrupt Berlin 2019 kicks off in just seven short days. Thousands of you — representing more than 50 countries — will arrive in Berlin ready to learn, exhibit, compete and network for two action-packed days. Good news for professional procrastinators and last-minute decisions […]

Prolific, a U.K.-based startup that wants to make it easier to conduct online research, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding. The round is co-led by Silicon Valley-based Pioneer Fund, and Altair Capital, with support from various angel investors based in the Bay Area. Prolific is also a graduate of Y Combinator and presented at […]

Otta, one of the latest startups aiming to fix what it sees as a broken job search and recruitment market, has picked up £850,000 in seed funding. Backing the young London company is LocalGlobe, along with a number of U.K. angel investors and founders. The latter includes Paul Forster (co-founder of Indeed), Shakil Khan (an […]

Learn from top European and U.S. venture capitalists at Disrupt Berlin next week.

After launching nearly a dozen Echo speaker models in India in two years, Amazon said on Wednesday it is adding a new variant to the mix that addresses one of the most requested features from customers in the nation: Portability. The e-commerce giant today unveiled the Echo Input Portable Smart Speaker Edition, a new variant […]

Carbon dioxide emissions, one of the main contributors to the climate changes bringing extreme weather, rising oceans, and more frequent fires that have killed hundreds of Americans and cost the U.S. billions of dollars, are set to reach another record high in 2019. That’s the word from the Global Carbon Project, an initiative of researchers around […]

AWS today quietly brought spot capacity to Fargate, its serverless compute engine for containers that supports both the company’s Elastic Container Service and, now, its Elastic Kubernetes service. Like spot instances for the EC2 compute platform, Fargate Spot pricing is significantly cheaper, both for storage and compute, than regular Fargate pricing. In return, though, you […]

Private equity and venture capital investors are copying our counterparts in the hedge fund world: we’re trying to automate more of our job.

Figuring out just what an AI is good at is one of the hardest thing about understanding them. To help determine this, OpenAI has designed a set of games that can help researchers tell whether their machine learning agent is actually learning basic skills or, what is equally likely, has figured out how to rig […]

Noted Silicon Valley venture capital fund Sequoia Capital has raised nearly $1 billion for later-stage U.S. investments and roughly $2.4 billion for venture and growth deals in China, according to paperwork filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. The firm, famous for its investments in U.S. companies like Google, Instagram, Dropbox, LinkedIn, […]

Fronted, a new London-based startup aiming to make life easier for renters, is breaking cover today. The company, founded by Jamie Campbell, Simon Vans-Colina and Anthony Mann — former employees at Bud, Monzo and Apple, respectively — will launch early next year with a fintech product to help renters finance their rental deposits. The plan […]

Instagram dodges child safety laws. By not asking users their age upon signup, it can feign ignorance about how old they are. That way, it can’t be held liable for $40,000 per violation of the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. The law bans online services from collecting personally identifiable information about kids under 13 without […]

2019 offered a blistering catalog of books to peruse, on top of the prodigious publishing schedules of the past few years (if you think we are at Peak TV, you might want to check out your local bookstore for a counterpoint). We already checked in with Extra Crunch readers and did a sort of reader’s […]

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin just announced that Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be replacing Page as the CEO of parent company Alphabet. In addition, Brin is stepping down from his role as Alphabet’s president. Alphabet first came into existence in 2015 as “a collection of companies” that separates Google from “other bets” […]

Global aerospace and defense accelerator Starburst shared a deck that outlines trending opportunities the company sees in terms of the industry’s development.

NASA is going to be sending something it calls a “robot hotel” to the International Space Station aboard the next commercial resupply mission, which is set to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket this week. The robot hotel is more formally known as the “Robotic Tool Stowage” unit, or the RiTS for short, because […]

Books are fundamentally about stories, and 2019 (and really, the past decade) has been the story of technology’s domination of every industry and function of society. Founders and tech executives are more powerful than ever, and how we use that power for good or evil will deeply shape the future of our world. Whether it’s […]