Crunch Hype

A year ago, Google rolled out “.new” links that worked like shortcuts to instantly create new Google documents. For example, you could type “doc.new” (without the quotes) to create a new Google Doc or “sheet.new” to create a new spreadsheet. Today, Google announced it’s bringing the .new shortcuts to the rest of the web. Now, […]

The Los Angeles-based mobile game development studio Scopely has become America’s newest unicorn thanks to a $200 million financing which values the company at a whopping $1.7 billion. Scopely said it would use the capital to continue its strategy of developing and acquiring new games as it looks to continue its run of six consecutive […]

Datameer, the company that was born as a data prep startup on top of the open source Hadoop project, announced a $40 million investment and a big pivot away from Hadoop, while staying true to its big data roots. The investment was led by existing investor ST Telemedia . Other existing investors including Redpoint Ventures, […]

Huge networks like Facebook and LinkedIn have a huge gravitational force in the world of social media — the size of their audiences make them important platforms for advertising and those who want information (for better or worse) to reach as many people as possible. But alongside their growth, we’re seeing a lasting role for […]

Amid increased competition in the digital payments space, Venmo today announced its first-ever rewards program, Venmo Rewards, which will allow users to earn automatic cash back on purchases when they pay with their Venmo card at select retailers. The company is kicking off the program with limited-time cash back deals, including 5% back at Target, […]

It’s a wonder that Echo Buds didn’t arrive sooner. Earbuds (I still can’t write “hearables” without cringing a bit) are the clearest path to making Alexa work outside of the home. Amazon, after all, has been unable to crack the smartphone category. Half a decade later, the Fire Phone is little more than a historical […]

One of the toughest and earliest decisions many people make as an adult is where to spend thousands of dollars on a degree. Identifying a college or university with the right culture, campus, community and course of study for you can be a lot, especially with the resources provided on most University websites. The alternative […]

Webiny, a London startup developing a serverless content management system, announced a $347,000 (£247,000) seed round today led by EU investment firm Episode 1. Webiny founder Sven Al Hamad says that Webiny is the first full-feature content management built for a serverless environment. “That means that we built Webiny from the ground up, and architected […]

Amazon is turning up the heat once again in the world of groceries, and specifically grocery delivery, to make its services more enticing in face of competition from Walmart, as well as a host of delivery companies like Postmates. Today, the company announced that it would make Amazon Fresh — the fresh food delivery service […]

Think you have what it takes to be a TechCrunch hackathon champion? It’s time to put your creative code and confidence where your mouth is, my friends. Come to Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December and pit your skills, tenacity and endurance against some of the best creators from around the world. We’re limiting participation […]

TrueLayer, the London startup that’s built a developer API platform for fintechs and other adjacent companies to utilise open banking, has agreed a strategic and commercial relationship with Visa. The partnership sees Visa also take a minority stake in TrueLayer as part of the company’s $35 million Series C funding announced in June. The round […]

Milieu Insight, a Singapore-based market research and data platform, announced today that it has raised $2.4 million in pre-A funding. The round, led by MassMutual Ventures Southeast Asia, will be used on product development and to launch in four new Southeast Asian countries, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. The startup’s platform, called Milieu Surveys, […]

ByteDance has responded to a report in the Financial Times that said the Chinese Internet startup plans to go public in Hong Kong as early as the first quarter of next year. “There is absolutely zero truth to the rumors that we plan to list in Hong Kong in Q1,” said a spokesperson for the […]

We’re excited to announce that Extra Crunch is now available to readers in Austria, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland. That adds to our existing European support in Germany, France, Spain and the U.K. Extra Crunch is a membership program from TechCrunch that features how-tos and interviews on company building, intelligence on the most disruptive […]

Airbnb is best known as the place you go to find somewhere to stay that’s not a hotel when travelling. Now, it’s made an investment in a startup that points to its bigger ambition to be a go-to destination for experiences. Tiqets, a startup out of Amsterdam that has built a platform for booking tickets […]

In advance of Jumia’s November financial reporting, it’s worth revisiting the company’s second quarter results, the downside of which included some negative news beyond losses. The Africa focused e-commerce company — with online verticals in 14 countries — did post second-quarter revenue growth of 58% (≈$43 million) and increased its customer base to 4.8 million […]

A report by campaign group Avaaz examining how Facebook’s platform is being used to spread hate speech in the Assam region of North East India suggests the company is once again failing to prevent its platform from being turned into a weapon to fuel ethnic violence. Assam has a long-standing Muslim minority population but ethnic […]

While large entertainment companies scramble to catch up to streaming content platforms, more fundamental upheaval is headed their way as a result of technological advances in artificial intelligence and 5G. Former ProSiebenSat.1 executive Kevin Baxpehler (based in Tel Aviv) and former Google Ventures partner Eze Vidra (based in London) launched Remagine Ventures earlier this year […]

Nearly a year and a half after the Cambridge Analytica scandal reportedly scuttled Facebook’s fledgling attempts to enter the healthcare market, the social media giant is launching a tool called “Preventive Health” to prompt its users to get regular checkups and connect them to service providers. The architect of the new service is Dr. Freddy […]

There’s probably no more hotly anticipated series from any new streaming service than “The Mandalorian” on Disney+ — and now the good folks at Disney have given us a new trailer to hypothesize about. There’s more action, more world-building, and much much more Werner Herzog (who could ask for anything more?). The Lucasfilm team has […]

Google and NASA have demonstrated that quantum computing isn’t just a fancy trick, but almost certainly something actually useful — and they’re already working on commercial applications. What does that mean for existing startups and businesses? Simply put: nothing. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore it forever. There are three main points that anyone […]

Submit campaign ads to fact checking, limit microtargeting, cap spending, observe silence periods or at least warn users. These are the solutions Facebook employees put forward in an open letter pleading with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company leadership to address misinformation in political ads. The letter, obtained by The New York Times’ Mike Isaac, insists […]

As robots and gadgets continue to pervade our everyday lives, they increasingly need to see in 3D — but as evidenced by the notch in your iPhone, depth-sensing cameras are still pretty bulky. A new approach inspired by how some spiders sense the distance to their prey could change that.

In 2004, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam, set aside some of the wealth they acquired after the online marketplace went public and created Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm “dedicated to harnessing the power of markets,” according to an official overview. Since then, the firm — which operates a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and […]

Our weekly round-up of what’s going on in space technology is back, and it’s a big one (and a day late) because last week was the annual International Astronautical Congress. I was on the ground in Washington, D.C. for this year’s event, and it’s fair to say that the top-of-mind topics were 1) Public-private partnerships […]

Denny’s signed an agreement with the plant-based food manufacturer Beyond Meat to use Beyond’s meat replacement in a new menu item — the Denny’s Beyond Burger. Beyond Meat and its largest rival, Impossible Foods, are engaged in a fierce competition to provide meat alternatives to some of the nation’s largest food companies, but increasingly Beyond […]

The DoD JEDI contract saga came to a thrilling conclusion on Friday afternoon, appropriately enough, with one final plot twist. The presumptive favorite, Amazon, did not win, stunning many, including likely the company itself. In the end, Microsoft took home the $10 billion prize. This contract was filled with drama from the beginning, given the […]

The Federal Communications Commission said it will move ahead with proposals to ban telecommunications giants from using Huawei and ZTE networking equipment, which the agency says poses a “national security threat.” The two-part proposal revealed Monday would first bar telecoms giants from using funds it receives from the FCC’s Universal Service Fund, used by the […]

Revolution, the investment firm co-founded 14 years ago by entrepreneur-investor Steve Case, has closed its second Rise of the Rest seed fund with $150 million in capital commitments, just like the debut fund it announced two years ago. Rise of the Rest — which funds startups outside of the biggest U.S. tech hubs in an […]

Sourcing ingredients in the restaurant industry is a dirty process that still relies heavily on voicemails and fax orders. More tech-forward solutions have been pushed but getting restaurants and suppliers to uniformly sign on to a platform has been a relatively daunting challenge. Choco is a young startup with plenty of momentum that’s aiming to […]

We’re still not at the point where autonomous vehicles systems can best human drivers in all scenarios, but the hope is that eventually, technology being incorporated into self-driving cars will be capable of things humans can’t even fathom – like seeing around corners. There’s been a lot of work and research put into this concept over […]

With $1.3 billion in assets under management and a $280 million early-stage fund that closed in 2018, Octopus Ventures is carving out a niche for itself in healthcare investments in the U.S., the U.K. and Asia. One of the key members of the Octopus team is Will Gibbs, an investor with the firm since 2013, […]

In 2017, when a destructive earthquake struck Puebla, Mexico, sending shockwaves to Mexico City and destroying buildings in the nation’s megalopolis and its surrounding suburbs, both public and private emergency services sprung into action. For multinational corporations operating in the city it was a test of their internal support services, which were established to meet […]

Apple has released iOS 13.2 and iPadOS 13.2 for the iPhone and iPad. This update features the usual bug fixes and security improvements. But Apple is also adding a handful of new features to its operating system. First, iOS 13.2 brings a ton of new emojis. The company now officially supports Unicode 12.0. You can […]

Identity Verification-as-a-Service (“IVAAS”?!) is a pretty tortuous phrase. But it’s now established as key tech area for the tech industry as startups like Onfido, Jumio and others have proved with large funding raises in the last few years. Verifying ID is now also a key part of the gig-economy. Joining them today is a German […]

The American Cancer Society’s online store has become the latest victim of credit card stealing malware. Security researcher Willem de Groot found the malware on the organization’s store website, buried in obfuscated code designed to look like legitimate analytics code. The code was designed to scrape credit card payments from the page, like similar attacks […]

The new all-electric Mini Cooper SE, the first Mini designed from the ground up as an electric car, is going to retail in the U.S. starting at $29,900 (plus an $850 Destination and Handling fee) — before any tax incentives are applied. That puts final pricing as low as around $17,900 when you consider federal […]

Entrepreneurs, founders, investors and all startup fans in between — take heed. The days for saving serious dough on tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2019 are seriously numbered. Right now, early bird pricing starts at €445 + VAT and, depending on the type of pass you purchase, you can save up to €500. But this bird takes flight […]

Kandji, a new Apple MDM solution that promises to go far beyond Apple’s base MDM protocol and other solutions on the market, emerged from stealth today with a $3.375 million seed investment. The product is also publicly available for the first time starting today. The round, which closed in March, was led by First Round […]

Searchable.ai wants to solve an old problem around search in the enterprise. The stealthy startup announced a $2 million seed round. Defy Partners led the round with a slew of other participants including Paul English, co-founder of Kayak; Wayne Chang, co-founder of Crashlytics; Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot; Jonathan Kraft, president and COO […]

The X-37B, a test vehicle operated by the U.S. Air Force, has returned from orbit and landed successfully at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, more than two years after it originally launched on its latest mission aboard a SpaceX rocket. The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, as it’s formally known, was on its fifth mission, […]

NVIDIA has a new family of Android TV-based streaming devices, as tipped early via a couple of leaks from online stores. The new NVIDIA Shield TV ($149) and Shield TV Pro ($199) replace the existing Shield TV generation of hardware, which debuted in 2017. Both new Shields offer new Tegra X1+ processors, which outperform the […]

Veronica Chou’s family has made its fortune at the forefront of the fast fashion business through investments in companies like Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfiger . But now, the heiress to an estimated $2.1 billion fortune is launching her own company, Everybody & Everyone, to prove that the fashion industry can be both environmentally sustainable […]

Having trouble pitching your startup to investors? This year at Disrupt Berlin, we’re going to help you solve that problem. We’ve invited a panel of experts to tear down real pitchdecks live on stage, to help any founder in the room learn about the right way to tell a startup’s story. If you’re attending, you […]

Instagram has expanded a ban on graphical self-harm imagery to include a broader range of content depicting suicide, including fictional illustrations of self-harm and suicide methods such as drawings, cartoons and memes. “This past month, we further expanded our policies to prohibit more types of self-harm and suicide content. We will no longer allow fictional […]

Huge travel platforms that run airline booking systems like Sabre and Amadeus were invented eons ago and are so large and cumbersome that innovating with them is no easy feat. In the same way that challenger banks have come along to re-invent the banking software Starck, UK startup Duffel has done the same in the […]

Kenya’s Twiga Foods has raised a total of $30 million from lenders and investors led by Goldman Sachs. The B2B food distribution company financed $6.25 million of the funding in convertible debt and $23.75 million in equity, classified as a Series B round. IFC, TLcom Capital, and Creadev joined Goldman on the VC side. Twiga […]

Koyo, a fintech startup using open banking to offer loans to people with “thin” credit files and currently poorly served by the market, has closed $4.9 million in funding. The round — a mixture of debt and equity funding — is led by Forward Partners, with participation from Seedcamp. Other investors include Christian Faes (founder […]

French startup Welcome to the Jungle has raised a new $22.3 million funding round (€20 million). The startup is both a media company and a tech startup that wants to empower tech companies when it comes to recruitment. It doesn’t find the right candidate for you, it helps you get exposure, track application and facilitate […]

As I write this, massive fires are erupting all over California, and massive protests are erupting all over the world. Is the former a facet of the climate crisis? Is the latter a symptom of hyperpolarization caused by hyperconnectivity? Yes, I mean no, I mean it’s impossible to say. That’s what it means to live […]