Crunch Hype

MyGate, a Bangalore-based startup that offers security management and convenience service for guard-gated premises, said today it has bagged more than $50 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint in the nation. Chinese internet giant Tencent, Tiger Global, JS Capital and existing investor Prime Venture Partners funded the three-year-old […]

Over the past few years, gig economy companies and the treatment of their labor force has become a hot button issue for public and private sector debate. At our recent annual Disrupt event in San Francisco, we dug into how founders, companies and the broader community can play a positive role in the gig economy, […]

Amazon seemingly didn’t realize what it had on its hands with the original Echo. Released five and a half years back for a select number of Amazon Prime users, the first Alexa device ushered in a consumer electronics revolution. According to numbers from Canalys, 26.1 million smart speakers were shipped in Q2 2019. That’s a […]

The solar system has another interstellar visitor, but there's no question of this one being an alien spacecraft. It's a true comet and the first we've ever confirmed comes from interstellar space, and the Hubble Space Telescope captured some amazing imagery of it. Good thing, too — because it's never coming back.

The FrankOne coffee maker, fresh off a successful crowdfunding campaign, is now available for purchase, and I got a chance to test out one of the first run of these funky little gadgets. While it won't replace my normal pourover or a larger coffee machine, it's a clever, quick, and portable way to make a cup.

This morning, the Justice Department announced that it had brought charges against the administrator and hundreds of users of the “world’s largest” child sexual exploitation marketplace on the dark web. For me, it marked the end of a story I’ve wanted to write for two years. In November 2017, I was working for CBS as […]

Does TiVo has a future beyond the DVR? Dave Shull certainly hopes so. The former Weather Channel CEO joined the company as president and CEO back in May, and when I spoke to him last month, he insisted that he’s excited and optimistic about the company’s prospects. In fact, he said the DVR business “is […]

Netflix’s Q3 financial report has given the company’s stock a boost in after-hours trading, with profits significantly exceeding analyst expectations. The streaming giant reported revenue of $5.24 billion, up 31% year-over-year and more or less in line with predictions of $5.25 billion. More impressively, it reported GAAP earnings of $1.47 per share, compared to analyst […]

Bone, one of the finest comics to ever hit the shelves, is getting a Netflix series. Word of the project comes from Netflix’s official “See What’s Next” account: Jeff Smith’s award-winning comic book series “Bone” is being adapted into an animated kids series pic.twitter.com/ioT98OPm1O — See What's Next (@seewhatsnext) October 16, 2019 Sadly, just about […]

Volvo Cars introduced Wednesday the XC40 Recharge, an all-electric vehicle that CTO Henrik Green described as “a car of firsts and a car of the future.” The XC40 Recharge is hardly the first electric vehicle on the market. But for Volvo, the XC40 is a “car of firsts.” This is the company’s first all-electric vehicle. […]

Shondaland, the production company founded by “Scandal” and “Grey’s Anatomy” creator Shonda Rhimes, has signed a deal to create a new slate of podcasts for iHeartRadio over the next three years. As part of the deal, Shondaland is launching a new division called Shondaland Audio, with executive Sandie Bailey in charge of day-to-day operations. Rhimes […]

Volvo Cars used the unveiling of the XC40 Recharge, its first electric vehicle, to lay out an ambitious business strategy that includes introducing a new EV every year through 2025 and slashing by 40% the carbon footprint of the life cycle of every car and SUV it builds. All of the changes are aimed at […]

YouTube is partnering with Merchbar on a new integration that will allow artists to sell their official merchandise to their worldwide fans from a shelf just below the video. The addition is the latest deal focused on helping video creators make more money from their videos, beyond the revenue brought in through advertisements and subscriptions. […]

Today, the Federal Communications Commission formally approved the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile in a 3-2 vote falling along party lines, The Verge reports. We’ve reached out to the FCC for comment. In April, T-Mobile and Sprint announced the proposed $26 billion deal, which unsurprisingly garnered a lot of questions around anticompetitiveness pretty much immediately. […]

Volvo Cars introduced Wednesday the XC40 Recharge, its first electric car under a new EV-focused brand that kicks off a company-wide shift toward electrification. “It’s a car of firsts and it’s a car of the future,” CTO Henrik Green said. The Volvo XC40 Recharge is the first electric vehicle in the automaker’s portfolio. It’s also […]

&Open is a startup with an unusual name, and one that fills an unusual niche in the business world. It has built a gift giving platform, so that businesses can reward loyalty with a small token of appreciation. The gift depends on the business and the circumstances, but it could be something like a book […]

What’s happening in consumer tech? At TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco last week, Extra Crunch managing editor Eric Eldon sat down with Andrew Chen, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Andrew focuses on consumer tech, with investments in companies like Barkbox, Boba Guys, Tinder, Substack and more. They talked about everything from design trends, to marketing, […]

In our oceans the scale of disasters is measured in millions, billions, and trillions, while solutions amount to single digits: individuals or institutions working to impact a chosen issue with approaches often both brilliant and quixotic. Putting such individuals in close contact with both whales and billionaires is the strange alchemy being attempted by the Sustainable Ocean Alliance's Accelerator at Sea.

Hulu says it’s working on several product changes to make its service more personalized to viewers. It recently launched an enhanced recommendation engine that now accounts for not just what you watch, but also when. And today, it’s introducing the first of what will be many more personalization-focused improvements, with the addition of Like 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. LinkedIn gets physical, debuts Events hub for people to plan in-person networking events LinkedIn is bringing its professional networking features into […]

DoNotPay helps you get out of parking tickets and cancel forgotten subscriptions, and now it can call you when it’s your turn in a customer service phone queue. The app today is launching “Skip Waiting On Hold.” Just type in the company you need to talk to, and DoNotPay calls for you using tricks to […]

Uber wants to become a super app by providing multiple services in a single app. That’s why the company is announcing an integration with French startup Cityscoot. Cityscoot is a free-floating electric scooter service (moped scooters). Just like other free-floating mobility services, you can open an app, locate the nearest vehicle around you, unlock it […]

Autify, a platform that makes testing web application as easy as clicking a few buttons, has raised a $2.5 million seed round from Global Brain, Salesforce Ventures, Archetype Ventures and several angels. The company, which recently graduated from the Alchemist accelerator program for enterprise startups, splits its base between the U.S., where it keeps an […]

Microsoft today announced two new open-source projects: Dapr, a portable, event-driven runtime that takes some of the complexity out of building microservices, and the Open Application Model (OAM), a specification that allows developers to define the resources their applications need to run on Kubernetes clusters and which Microsoft developed in cooperation with Alibaba Cloud. As […]

The chief executive of Foursquare, one of the largest location data platforms on the internet, is calling on lawmakers to pass legislation to better regulate the wider location data industry amid abuses and misuses of consumers’ personal data. It comes in the aftermath of the recent location sharing scandal, which revealed how bounty hunters were […]

Very few modern tech companies have executed on their mission as consistently, and at such a high level of quality as Analogue. Analogue’s obsessively engineered modern consoles for old-school physical cartridge video games are museum-quality hardware design, housing specially tuned processors that offer pitch- and pixel-perfect play of all NES, Sega Genesis, SNES and other […]

Instagram is slowly rolling out a new feature that will help better protect your personal data from being accessed by your long discarded, third-party applications — that is, any app you had once authorized to access your Instagram profile over the years. This may include websites you used for printing your Instagram photos, various dating apps, […]

Quentin Clark resigned a couple of weeks ago as the CTO of Dropbox at the same time that the storage company announced two other execs — Bharat Mediratta and Tim Young — were joining its leadership team in Clark’s stead. Now we know where Clark was headed — into the world of venture capital and, […]

A controversial UK government scheme to introduce mandatary age checks for accessing online pornography has been dropped — for now. Introduction of the measure, which was intended to protect children from accessing inappropriate content online, had already been delayed by several months this year, most recently after a bureaucratic oversight. The technical and regulatory challenges […]

A day after NASA debuted the space suits set to be worn by the first woman on the moon, Virgin Galactic showed of its own gear at an event in New York. Created in collaboration with fitness wear company, Under Armour, the gear is designed for wear by Virgin’s private astronauts. The getup includes a […]

The Justice Department says it’s dismantled one of the largest child exploitation sites on the dark web. With the help of international partners in the U.K. and South Korea, U.S. prosecutors have brought charges against a South Korean citizen, Jong Woo Son, for conspiracy to advertise, product, and distribute child abuse imagery. Son was charged […]

Canva, the Australian-based design tool maker, has today announced that it has raised an additional $10 million to bring its valuation to $3.2 billion, up from $2.5 billion in May. Investors in the company include Mary Meeker’s Bond, General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Blackbird and Sequoia China. Alongside the new funding and valuation, Canva is […]

One of the major challenges facing engineers as they develop more agile robots is helping them move through space while avoiding collisions, especially in a dynamic environment. RealTime Robotics, a Boston-based startup announced an $11.7 million Series A investment to help solve this problem. SPARX Asset Management led the round with participation from some strategic […]

NASA has a new contract extension in place with Boeing, which will cover rocket stages for its Space Launch System (SLS) beyond Artemis I and Artemis II, the missions covered under the current contract it holds with the aerospace company. The new contract includes production of the core stage of the rocket for Artemis III, […]

Live Caption, Google’s automatic captioning system first introduced at its I/O developer conference this May, is now officially available, alongside the launch of the new Pixel 4. But unlike some of the other technologies highlighted at the company’s Pixel hardware event yesterday, Live Caption won’t be limited to Google’s new smartphone alone. After the initial […]

When Arianna Huffington stepped down from her role at the Huffington Post to start Thrive Global, she said the goal of her new business was to help a generation “avoid the burnout that all too often comes with success today.” In practice, that has meant creating a business that sells mindfulness and general health and […]

Data privacy for apps is typically part of the purview of compliance teams — a model that isn’t always perfect, judging by the number of breaches and the extensive regulation that’s been (and still being) put in place to force companies and organizations to behave better. Now, in an effort to improve how apps manage […]

Europe has ordered chipmaker Broadcom to stop applying exclusivity clauses in agreements with six of its major customers — imposing so called ‘interim measures’ based on preliminary findings from an ongoing antitrust investigation. The move follows a formal statement of objections issued by the Competition Commission in June. At the time the regulator said it would […]

All Raise has established new chapters in Los Angeles and Boston.

A fully autonomous ship called the ‘Mayflower’ will make its voyage across the Atlantic Ocean next September, to mark the 400-year anniversary of the trip of the first Mayflower, which was very much not autonomous. It’s a stark way to dive home just how much technology has advanced in the last four centuries, but also […]

Amazon Pay users in India can now use voice command with Alexa to pay their utility, internet, mobile, and satellite cable TV bills, the e-commerce giant said on Wednesday. This is the first time, the company said, it is pairing these functionalities with Amazon Pay in any market. The e-commerce giant, which competes with Walmart’s […]

What are the best strategies today for raising your startup’s first funding round, finding users and building your team? How can you best handle major new challenges like Brexit and global trade wars? These are the some of the key questions we will be answering this year at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, as part of a […]

Ebanx, the newly minted Brazilian financial services unicorn, expects to process $2 billion in payments by the end of the year and is looking to expand its offerings into domestic payments as it grows. Since its launch in 2012, Ebanx has primarily focused on helping international merchants sell locally in Brazil. The Brazilian business accounts […]

Deadline countdowns are relentless, and the application window to our TC Top Picks program is rapidly shrinking. The countdown ends and the window slams shut in just three days on 18 October at 12 p.m. (PT). If you want a shot at winning a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package at Disrupt Berlin 2019, then take […]

Booqed, a Hong Kong-based platform for booking short-term work spaces, announced today that it has raised $1.675 million in seed funding. Participants included Colliers International, the commercial real-estate management company, Techstars and Lazard Korea. The company participated in Proptech Accelerator, the Toronto-based accelerator program for property and real estate startups run by Colliers and Techstars, […]

Healx, a Cambridge, U.K.-based startup using AI to help discover new treatments for rare diseases, has raised $56 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is London-base VC firm Atomico, with participation by Intel Capital, Global Brain and btov Partners. All previous investors, including Balderton Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, and Jonathan Milner have also […]

Databricks, the big data analytics service founded by the original developers of Apache Spark, today announced that it is bringing its Delta Lake open-source project for building data lakes to the Linux Foundation and under an open governance model. The company announced the launch of Delta Lake earlier this year and even though it’s still […]

Two years after the release of the Home Mini, Google’s back with the sequel. Well, “sequel” might be a bit strong. The Nest Mini is more like one of those 1.5 movies they release on home video with a little extra footage than the theatrical release. That’s not a compliant, exactly. The truth is there […]

SpaceX has filed documents with the International Telecommunication Union, which governs international use of global bandwidth, to launch up to 30,000 more satellites for its Starlink global broadband constellation, SpaceNews reports. That’s on top of the 12,000 it already has permission to launch. Why so many? SpaceX says that it’s about ensuring its network can […]

LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social network for the working world with around 650 million users, is known best as a place where people connect with each other online either to build work connections, for recruitment, or for professional development. Now, the company is taking a step to bring its networking features into the physical world: the […]