Crunch Hype

Companies may soon be able to raise capital through a direct listing.

Gorgias, a startup offering artificial intelligence tools for customer service and support, is announcing that it has raised $14 million in Series A funding. Co-founder and CEO Romain Lapeyre told me that the startup is taking advantage of a broader shift as brands are looking to sell directly to consumers, rather than going through intermediaries […]

The launch of Disney+ has been successful in terms of sign-ups and adoption, but the user experience wasn’t quite up to par with what you get from other streaming services out the gate. Most noticeable was the lack of an easy way to pick up streaming where you left off – but that changes with […]

Why are we all trapped in enterprise chat apps if we talk 6X faster than we type, and our brain processes visual info 60,000X faster than text? Thanks to Instagram, we’re not as camera-shy anymore. And everyone’s trying to remain in flow instead of being distracted by multi-tasking. That’s why now is the time for […]

Earlier this year, American Express announced it was acquiring Resy, the New York-based restaurant reservation platform whose software was used by 4,000+ restaurants across 10 countries. This week, the company has taken the next step to now integrated Resy’s system within the Amex Mobile App. In a new restaurant booking feature, Resy’s inventory will be […]

Organizations are always looking for new ways to work more efficiently, but too often the problem is that, in a digital-first environment, they have to get in line to ask their in-house IT experts (or even more expensively, external consultants) to build those solutions for them. To underscore the demand for a better approach, today […]

Kasada, an anti-bot startup we profiled earlier this year, has raised $7 million in its Series A led by In-Q-Tel, the non-profit venture arm of the intelligence community. The Sydney and Chicago-based company helps to fight online bots using its proprietary anti-bot platform Polyform. Bots don’t just pummel websites with junk traffic to try to […]

Disrupt Berlin is right around the corner. And there is plenty to look forward to. Join us December 11 and December 12 to hear from industry leaders, investors and bright stars in the startup world. We’ll sit down with CEOs from big-name companies such as UIPath, Samsung, and Naspers, as well as leading investors from […]

As Amazon moves further into the healthcare market, the company today is rolling out a medication management feature for Alexa owners. The feature will allow customers to set up their own medication reminders and request voice refills using their prescription information. At launch, these capabilities are only available to customers of Giant Eagle Pharmacy, a […]

Coralogix, a startup that wants to bring automation and intelligence to logging, announced a $10 million Series A investment today. The round was led by Aleph with participation from StageOne Ventures, Janvest Capital Partners and 2B Angels. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $16.2 million, according to the company. CEO and co-founder Ariel Assaraf […]

Vivun, a startup that wants to help companies keep better track of pre-sales data announced a $3 million seed round today led by Unusual Ventures, the venture firm run by Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal. Vivun founder and CEO Matt Darrow says that pre-sales team works more closely with the customer than anyone else, delivering demos […]

Indian ride-hailing giant Ola said today it will begin operations in London “in the coming weeks,” a day after the local authorities revoked Uber’s license to operate in one of the world’s most lucrative cities. The Indian firm, which entered portions of the UK last year, has started to sign up drivers in London ahead […]

The International Space Station is crewed by more than astronauts these days – NASA activated a free-floating autonomous robot called ‘Bumble’ earlier this year, and now Bumble has a new companion called Honey. Both are Astrobee robots, cube-like “robotic teammates” for ISS astronauts, which ar designed to help with experiments, day-to-day activities and more. These […]

Nigerian founder Sim Shagaya is back with a new startup — uLesson — that has raised a $3.1 million seed round led by TLcom Capital. The venture is integrating mobile platforms, SD cards, culture-specific curriculum and a network of tutors to bridge educational gaps for secondary school students in Nigeria and broader Africa. Founded in […]

In some corners, the smartphone market is showing its first signs of life in some time. Recent figures from Canalys indicate a small but notable uptick in the European market as shipments grew 3%, year-over-year in Q3. The analyst firm put global growth at 1% globally in another recent report. Generally, such numbers wouldn’t warrant […]

Leavy.co, the Paris-born startup that offers a travel app for millennials to help them travel more without getting into further debt, has quietly raised $14 million in funding. The investment — which is pegged as a seed round and actually closed in January! — is led by Dutch investor Prime Ventures, with participation from angel […]

Yulu, a Bangalore-based electric bike sharing platform that maintains a partnership with Uber, said today it has won the backing of one of the country’s largest automakers. The two-year-old startup said it has entered into a strategic partnership with Bajaj Auto, which has also funded Yulu’s $8 million Series A financing round. As part of the […]

Alibaba share price increased as much as 7.7% during its first morning of trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Soon after the market opened, the shares climbed from their listing price of HKD $176 (a 2.9% discount from their closing price on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday) to HKD $189.50. Each of […]

Instagram has posted an article describing the behind-the-scenes machinery that fills the Explore tab in Instagram with new, interesting stuff every time you open it. It's a bit technical, so here are five takeaways.

Artificial intelligence continues to be the theme of the moment in enterprise software, and today a company out of Asia that has built a suite of AI-powered marketing and ad tools is announcing a round of funding. Appier, a Taipei-based startup that provides an artificial intelligence engine to brands and retailers to help improve customer […]

AWS seems to be using this week to get some news out ahead of its annual re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas next week. In addition to new IoT services and updates to its Rekognition AI service, the company also today announced that it is bringing 22 new languages to its AWS Translate service and […]

Back in April at our robotics event at UC Berkeley, Boston Dynamics head Marc Raibert showed off video of the company’s Spot robot in a number of different real world scenarios. Some, like construction and first responders, were familiar to anyone who has been following the company — and automation in general. Another scenario, which […]

Establishing an enduring presence on the Moon will mean making a lot of landings — and NASA researchers want to make those landings as reliable and cheap as possible. This robotic "pallet lander" concept would be a dead simple (as lunar landers go) way to put up to 300 kilograms of rover and payload onto the Moon's surface.

Profitability is tied to growth. You can have one or the other, but rarely both simultaneously.

Computer scientists agree that artificial intelligence will have a stunning impact on the future of humanity. And more often than not, futurists depict a dystopian outcome – a world where we are at best subservient to machines and at worst exterminated by them. Computer scientist Stuart Russell, one of the world’s top experts on AI […]

Google has terminated Rebecca Rivers, an employee activist the company put on indefinite administrative leave this month, Rivers tweeted this afternoon. Google declined to comment but confirmed an internal note published by Bloomberg, which said Google fired a total of four employees for repeatedly violating its data-security policies. Earlier this month, Google put Rivers and […]

After pounding the side of his new Cybertruck with a sledgehammer with not a mark left behind, Elon Musk turned his focus to the “Tesla Armor Glass”. As we all saw, the glass did not fare so well. A toss of a steel ball into the window caused it to splinter, catching everyone on stage […]

Over the years, Trinity Ventures has racked up many exits for its limited partners. Through deals in consumer brands like Starbucks and Zulily and enterprise companies like TubeMogul and New Relic, the Menlo Park-based fund has found repeated success, but as it retrenches with a pared-down investment team and a much smaller new fund, Trinity’s […]

Amazon announced a new capability today called Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels to help customers train machine learning models to understand a set of objects when there is a limited set of information. Typically, machine learning models have to work on large data sets to learn something like what’s a picture of a dog, as opposed […]

CBS’s over-the-top streaming service, CBS All Access, is the latest to counter the threat from Disney+ by investing in children’s programming. Today, the company is launching a kids’ programming lineup including original shows and other library content. Plus, in one of the first major content integrations ahead of the ViacomCBS merger, the CBS streaming service […]

Apple has released its annual holiday ad, just in time for Thanksgiving. Named “The Surprise,” the ad focuses on two young girls who spend a lot of time playing with an iPad. The ad focuses on a family that travels across the country to visit the mother’s father. Like many families, the parents hand them […]

In other news, Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds has invested an undisclosed amount in a company selling prepaid phone plans called Mint Mobile. It all sounds like a weird sponsored Instagram post, but a source tells TechCrunch that Reynolds now owns more than 25% of the company with this recent investment. What he invested is thoroughly […]

AWS today announced a number of IoT-related updates that, for the most part, aim to make getting started with its IoT services easier, especially for companies that are trying to deploy a large fleet of devices. The marquee announcement, however, is about the Alexa Voice Service, which makes Amazon’s Alex voice assistant available to hardware […]

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. Uber has again been denied licence renewal in London over safety risks With Uber’s two-month license extension in London coming to […]

Huawei and Devialet have unveiled a new speaker specifically designed for the Chinese market, the Huawei Sound X. French startup Devialet has been looking at ways to license its technology and patents to consumer electronics manufacturers, such as Sky, Iliad, Altice USA and Renault. While Devialet only sells very premium speakers under its own brand, […]

Facebook is launching a new market research, task, and product testing program that lets users earn money. Starting today, people in the US who are over 18 can download Viewpoints and participate in a well-being survey so Facebook can learn to “limit the negative impacts of social media and enhance the benefits.” Other opportunities include completing […]

New York-based Frame.io, a video review and collaboration platform now used by over a million customers, has raised $50 million in Series C funding to further expand its investment in cloud-based video workflows. The round was led by Insight Partners, and included participation from existing investors Accel, FirstMark, SignalFire, and Shasta Ventures. Itai Tsiddon, co-founder […]

Our partnership is not romantic — we’re both married to other people — yet as co-equal parents of a venture-backed startup, we live our professional lives under similar strain.

Europe bucked global smartphone stagnation in the third quarter, marking an 8% year over year growth in device shipments. That number, provided by Canalys, puts the region at the top of smartphone growth figures, beating out Asia/Pacific’s six percent. Once again, Samsung was the biggest winner here. The Korean manufacturer saw a healthy 26%, year […]

Engineer.ai combines AI with crowdsourced teams of designers and developers to build bespoke digital products faster that it would take to create a team.At least that’s what they say. Last year it raised one of Europe’s largest Series A investments at $29.5 million, led by Lakestar and Jungle Ventures, with participation from SoftBank’s DeepCore. So […]

Nike is the latest company to offer 3% cash back to Apple Card users, when they make an Apple Pay purchase using the card across Nike’s retail platforms, including its stores, Nike.com, SNKRS, Nike Training Club, Nike Running Club and on the Nike app. The addition is one of what’s still a small number of […]

Following the recent news about the Badoo and Bumble and Badoo exit there is more consolidation in the dating app space. It seems many dating apps are running for the exits ahead of the launch of dating on Facebook. The Dating.com Group – an investment of SDVentures – has acquired Dil Mil, a San Francisco-based dating app for expats from […]

eBay this morning announced it’s selling its ticket marketplace StubHub to Swiss ticket reseller viagogo for a cash price of $4.05 billion. The deal will merge StubHub U.S.-based marketplace with viagogo, which serves a worldwide audience as a ticket marketplace for live, sport, music, and entertainment events for fans in Europe, Asia, Australia, and Latin […]

A security researcher has found an exposed database on the internet belonging to online printing giant Vistaprint. Security researcher Oliver Hough discovered the unencrypted database last week. There was no password on the database, allowing anyone to access the data inside. The database was first detected by exposed device and database search engine Shodan on […]

Lime will become the first major micromobility operator to launch scooters in Africa. Early next year, Lime will roll out electric scooters in Cape Town, South Africa. Unlike its model in the U.S. and Europe where it deploys scooters on public sidewalks, Lime will deploy its initial fleet of scooters at privately-owned locations throughout the […]

Shuttl, a startup that runs an app-based bus aggregator service in India, said on Monday that it has raised $18 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its business in the country. Toyota Tsusho Corporate and SPARX Group, through its Mirai Creation Fund II, funded Shuttl’s Series C financing round, the four-year-old […]

In a letter released this morning from the HP, Inc. board of directors to Xerox, Corp, the company summarily rejected Xerox’s latest take-over offer, saying it significantly undervalues the company. At the same time, it left the door open for further negotiation. In the letter, HP made it clear, it is not desperate for a […]

Rocket Lab is getting ready to fly its tenth mission, which the first official launch window during which it could happen set for this week on November 29. Aside from being a milestone 10th mission (dubbed ‘Running Out of Fingers,’ ha), this will be the first time that Rocket Lab includes technology designed to help […]

Seventeen, lieblings. That’s how many days stand between you and Disrupt Berlin 2019, which takes place on 11-12 December. Here’s a pro tip for savvy investors. Use this time to jumpstart your networking strategy and make the most of your two days at Disrupt. How? We have a plan for that. More on that in […]