Crunch Hype

When it comes to fintech plays, small and medium businesses are not often the target audience: they’re too small and fragmented compared to big-spending corporates; and they’re too demanding compared to mass-market consumer users. But as a sector, they account for over 99% of all businesses in developed countries like the UK and USA, and that […]

Last Monday a group of millionaires and billionaires took a trip to an industrial site in Lancaster, Calif. to witness the achievement of what could represent a giant leap forward in the effort to decarbonize some of the world’s most carbon intensive industries. For Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab and brains behind the excursion, […]

CyCognito, a cybersecurity platform that aims to give visibility into a company’s security weak spots, has raised $23 million in its Series A round of funding. Lightspeed Partners led the fundraise, putting in $18 million, which included a personal investment from Lightspeed venture partner and former Microsoft chairperson John Thompson, and additional participation from Sorenson […]

A posthumous manifesto by Giovanni Buttarelli, who until his death this summer was Europe’s chief data protection regulator, seeks to join the dots of surveillance capitalism’s rapacious colonization of human spaces, via increasingly pervasive and intrusive mapping and modelling of our data, with the existential threat posed to life on earth by manmade climate change. […]

Perlego, the textbook subscription service, has raised $9 million in Series A funding. Backing the round is Charlie Songhurst, Dedicated VC, and Thomas Leysen (Chairman of Mediahuis and Umicore). Perlego’s existing investors including ADV, Simon Franks and Alex Chesterman also reinvested on a pro-rata basis. London-based Perlego says the additional funding will be used to […]

Playbuzz, a startup that helps publishers to add things like polls and galleries to their articles, has rebranded itself as Ex.co. Co-founder and CEO Tom Pachys told me the name stands for “the experience company,” and he said it reflects the company’s broader content marketing ambitions. Ex.co will continue working with news publishers, but Pachys […]

WeWork is reportedly being investigated by the New York State Attorney General. According to Reuters, the NYAG’s questions include if WeWork founder and former CEO Adam Neumann engaged in self-dealing. A WeWork spokesperson said in an email that “we have received an inquiry from the office of the New York State Attorney General and are […]

Data from the U.S. government sure seems to indicate that the Earth is warming (despite what the current leadership may say). Apparently, the globe just experienced the second-hottest October ever recorded and is on track for the second-hottest year to date on record, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Not only […]

Spending for consumer digital healthcare companies is set to explode in the next few years; the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is currently reviewing the requirements for data sharing with the Department of Health and Human Services, and their initiatives will unlock a wave of data access never before seen in […]

Mubi, a 12-year-old on-demand movie streaming and rental service, has arrived in India. Like other streaming services giants such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ and Disney’s Hotstar, Mubi is offering its service at a slightly lower price in the key overseas entertainment market. The London-headquartered firm is offering a three-month subscription in India […]

Capturing human performances in high-definition 3D is a complicated proposition, and among the many challenges is getting the lighting right. This impressive new project from Google researchers puts the subject in the center of what can only be described as an prismatic LED egg, but the resulting 3D models are remarkable — and more importantly, […]

In 2016, we profiled a then-24-year-old named Jeremy Fiance who had managed to pool together $6 million for a fund focused on his alma mater, UC Berkeley, where as a student he’d brought to campus Kairos Society, an organization for budding entrepreneurs, as well as created a student accelerator called Free Ventures. Fiance wasn’t waiting […]

Apple today is introducing a new resource for the over 23 million registered members of its developer community, with the launch of a dedicated Apple Developer mobile app. The new app is an expansion on the existing WWDC app for Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which it will now replace. Instead of only including information about […]

A year and a half after getting acquired by Salesforce for $6.5 billion, MuleSoft is beginning to resemble a Salesforce company — using its language and its methodologies to describe new products and services. This week at Dreamforce, as the company’s mega customer conference begins in San Francisco, MuleSoft announced a slew of new services […]

After what feels like years of rumors, it’s official: Valve is making a virtual reality Half-Life game. Official word of the new title comes via Valve’s (brand new, but verified) Twitter account, where the company is promising more details later this week: Tweets by valvesoftware While it’s a bit curious to drop news like this […]

The world is being mapped in 3D — one brick, one bench, one building at a time. For things like hyper-accurate augmented reality, autonomous robots and self-driving cars, 2D maps and GPS only get you so far. Apple is building its map with lasers strapped to the tops of cars. Niantic has talked about building […]

French startup Luko has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Accel (€20 million). Founders Fund and Speedinvest are also participating in today’s funding round. When you rent a place in France, you have to provide a certificate to your landlord saying that you are covered with a home insurance product. And, of […]

NASA has added five companies to the list of vendors that are cleared to bid on contracts for the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. This list, which already includes nine companies from a previous selection process, now adds SpaceX, Blue Origin, Ceres Robotics, Sierra Nevada Corporation and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems. All of these […]

Uber Chief Product Officer Manik Gupta announced today he is leaving the company. Gupta’s last day will be December 13, he wrote in a note to Uber’s product team today. “After a few discussions with Dara as well as with my family—and now that we’ve made it through the IPO and an important year for […]

Like many things found on today’s social media platforms, Twitter’s Lists feature was introduced without thinking about the impact it could have on marginalized groups, or how it could otherwise be used for abuse or surveillance if put in the hands of bad actors. Today, Twitter is taking a step to address that problem with […]

Since the election of president Emmanuel Macron in 2017, Paris has experienced a surge of momentum as a startup hub. Investor interest had been building for years, but Macron’s government has aggressively focused on adopting more business-friendly regulations and heavily courted the startup and VC community. In September, he announced a €5 billion initiative to […]

Just a few months back, Google announced a partnership with a company called CloudSimple to help more enterprise teams move their on-site operations to the cloud. Now Google is outright acquiring them. So what is CloudSimple? It lets businesses run VMware vSphere workloads on the cloud, allowing them to take their existing on-premises tools 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. John Legere is stepping down as CEO of T-Mobile, succeeded by deputy Mike Sievert on May 1 Sievert, who’s currently T-Mobile’s […]

SpaceX is going to launch a payload for client Nanoracks aboard one of its new rideshare missions, currently targeting late 2020, that will demonstrate a very ambitious piece of tech from the commercial space station company. Nanoracks is sending up a payload platform that will show off how it can use a robot to cut […]

The scale of supercomputing has grown almost too large to comprehend, with millions of compute units performing calculations at rates requiring, for first time, the exa prefix — denoting quadrillions per second. How was this accomplished? With careful planning... and a lot of wires, say two people close to the project.

The practice of Chaos Engineering developed at Amazon and Netflix a decade ago to help those web scale companies test their complex systems for worst-case scenarios before they happened. Gremlin was started by a former employee of both these companies to make it easier to perform this type of testing without a team of Site […]

Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller was a breath of fresh air in a gaming world that has largely failed to consider the needs of people with disabilities. Now Logitech has joined the effort to empower this diverse population with an expanded set of XAC-compatible buttons and triggers. Logitech’s $100 Adaptive Gaming Kit comes with a dozen […]

Gett, the ridesharing company backed by Volkswagen and valued at around $1.5 billion, is putting the brakes on a major part of its growth strategy. Today, the company announced that it is closing down its operations in New York, which operates under the Juno brand, effective today. The company has a substantial business serving enterprise […]

Good news: even if you have a small company and can’t afford a banker, you can synthetically and cheaply replicate one.

Venture capitalists often mutter, “I haven’t seen anything I like lately”. Founders frequently complain that “investors are back-seat drivers who won’t get their hands dirty.” A $55 million fund with a fresh approach is aiming to address both those issues. Steve Jang and Kanye Maquebla are two exceedingly smart and sweet guys who couldn’t help […]

BMW just took the wraps off its first purely electric premium mid-size sedan. Appropriately called the i4, the vehicle is powered by the company’s fifth-generation eDrive platform and is just part of the company’s upcoming onslaught of EVs. But put down the credit card. This car isn’t coming until late 2021 at the earliest. Right […]

On March 3 next year, TechCrunch will host the fourth annual TC Sessions: Robotics + AI at UC Berkely’s Zellerbach Hall. This time around we’re adding a new twist to the incredible line-up of speakers, breakout sessions and Q&As: It’s a pitch off for early-stage companies in the robotics and AI space. How it works: […]

Google Maps will soon begin testing a new feature that’s more common to social networks like Facebook, rather than a maps app: the ability to find and follow other users. In Google Maps’ case, it’s specifically rolling out the ability to follow top “Local Guides” — its community members who actively review business and share […]

BBQ legend Weber is getting into the connected cooking game with their new SmokeFire grill, which uses wood pellets for fuel and which incorporates technology developed by Weber in partnership with appliance startup June for WiFi-enabled smart cooking. The SmartFire grill, which will be available for pre-order in the U.S. starting on Cyber Monday and […]

When former SAP CEO Bill McDermott announced that he was stepping down in October after a decade in the position, it was pretty unexpected. He indicated at that point, he would stay until the end of the year to help with the transition to new leadership — then ServiceNow hired him to be its CEO just […]

He’s reportedly not going to take over WeWork, but John Legere is definitely on his way out of the CEO role at T-Mobile, the carrier that is currently merging with SoftBank-controlled Sprint. Today the carrier and Legere confirmed that Mike Sievert — currently T-Mobile’s COO — will succeed Legere as CEO on May 1 of […]

Private equity firm Vista Equity Partners has acquired Sonatype, a cybersecurity-focused open source automation company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Sonatype said the acquisition will help to build out its Nexus platform, an enterprise ready repository manager and library with access to analysis on 65 million open source components. The platform helps […]

Last year at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s enormous annual customer conference, Apple and Salesforce announced the beginnings of a partnership where the two organizations would work together to enhance Salesforce products running on Apple devices. Today, as this year’s Dreamforce conference begins, the companies announced the fruits of that labor with general availability of two new tools […]

Chalk up another win for European data protection: Microsoft has announced changes to commercial cloud contracts following privacy concerns raised by European Union data protection authorities. The changes to contactual terms will apply globally and to all its commercial customers — whether public or private sector entity, or large or small business, it said today. […]

Bolt Bikes, the Sydney, Australia-based startup founded in 2017, is taking its electric bike platform designed for gig economy delivery workers to the U.S. and UK. The company is expanding on the heels of a $2.5 million seed round led by Maniv Mobility, European e-mobility firm Contrarian Ventures, individual investors and former executives of Uber […]

Fertility tech startup Mojo is coming out of stealth to announce a €1.7 million (~$1.8M) seed round of funding led by Nordic seed fund Inventure. Also participating are Doberman and Privilege Ventures (an investor in Ava), plus a number of angel investors including Josefin Landgard (founder and ex-CEO of Kry) and Hampus Jakobsson (venture partner […]

E-commerce continues to gain momentum — a trend we’ll see played out in the next two months of holiday shopping — and with that comes more consolidation. Today, Elavon, the payments company that is a subsidiary of US Bancorp, announced that it will acquire Sage Pay, one of the bigger payment processors in the UK […]

We’re one month out from Disrupt Berlin (11-12 December) and no matter which part of the startup ecosystem you inhabit, Disrupt Berlin is a huge opportunity to learn, network and gain inspiration. Consider these five reasons why you should buy a pass to Disrupt Berlin and join thousands of founders, investors and technologists for two […]

Ride-hailing service Heetch has added a new investor to its $38 million Series B round. AfricInvest is investing another $4 million in the startup — in total, Heetch has raised a $42 million Series B round. Previous investors in the Series B round include Cathay Innovation, Idinvest and Total Ventures. Heetch first started as a […]

MMC Ventures, the London-based VC that typically invests at Seed and Series A via the various funds it manages, has launched a new £100 million “Scale Up” fund to provide expansion capital to its later-stage portfolio companies. This is a move we are seeing a number of early-stage European VCs make, such as LocalGlobe with […]

Ford finally showed the world its highly anticipated all-electric crossover, the Mustang Mach-E. The vehicle, which was unveiled Sunday at the Hawthorne Airport and in Tesla’s backyard, marks a series of firsts for Ford and the Mustang badge. It’s the first vehicle to come out of Team Edison, the automaker’s dedicated electric vehicle organization. It’s […]

Africa focused fintech startup OPay has raised a $120 million Series B round backed by Chinese investors. Located in Lagos and founded by consumer internet company Opera, OPay will use the funds to scale in Nigeria and expand its payments product to Kenya, Ghana and South Africa — Opera’s CFO Frode Jacobsen confirmed to TechCrunch. […]

SoftBank Corp announced today that it has reached an agreement to merge with Z Holdings (the SoftBank subsidiary formerly known as Yahoo Japan) and Line Corp, in a move they hope will better position them against competitors. The merger, which was first reported by Nikkei last week, is expected to be completed in October 2020. […]

Ford unveiled Sunday ahead of the LA Auto Show the Mustang Mach-E, the highly anticipated all-electric crossover and the first vehicle to come out of Team Edison, the automaker’s dedicated electric vehicle organization. In short: the Mustang Mach-E is different from any other Ford vehicle without ignoring its roots. It’s undeniably a Mustang with its […]

Ford unveiled Sunday the newest Mustang in its lineup that marks a number of firsts for the automaker. Not only is this the first all-electric Mustang, it’s also an SUV and the first vehicle to come out of Team Edison, Ford’s dedicated electric vehicle organization. Here’s a closer look at the vehicle inside and out. […]