Crunch Hype

If you haven’t heard, TechCrunch has officially launched a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and goods move from Point A to Point B — today and in the future — whether it’s by bike, bus, scooter, car, train, truck, flying car, robotaxi or rocket. Heck, maybe even via hyperloop. Earlier this year, […]

As cannabis dispensaries flourish across the country alongside the push to legalize medicinal and recreational marijuana use, demand for tools to manage the specificities of the weed retail business continues to increase. Looking to address that need, Flowhub, a cannabis retail management software vendor, has raised $23 million from a consortium of investors including e.ventures, […]

Twitter said it will restrict how users can interact with tweets from world leaders who break its rules. The social media giant said it will not allow users to like, reply, share or retweet the offending tweets, but instead will let users quote-tweet to allow ordinary users to express their opinions. The company said the […]

Craft Ventures, the venture firm launched in 2017 by serial entrepreneur David Sacks, has closed its second fund with $500 million in capital commitments, an amount the firm was said to begin targeting roughly a year ago. Craft’s debut fund had closed with $350 million. The outfit — which Sacks runs with other serial entrepreneurs […]

The Linux Foundation recently announced the launch of the Reactive Foundation. Its founding members are Alibaba, Lightbend, Pivotal and Netifi. So what exactly is this?

AMC Theatres announced a new service today called AMC Theatres On Demand — a marketplace where members of AMC’s Stubs loyalty program can buy or rent individual movies to watch at home. The launch of an iTunes-style, à la carte movie marketplace seems almost quaint at a time when all the major media companies seem […]

For healthtech founders and funders, scientific claims and conclusions are more than policy — business models depend upon the lucid appraisal of clinical problems, evaluating inadequacies in current standards of care, a clear understanding of disease pathways, and designing superior interventions. At each step along this value chain, founders stand on the shoulders of the […]

After the onstage presentation at Made by Google 2019, we got our hands on a Pixel 4. In this video, you can watch us do a quick run-through of the major new features — like Motion Sense, which provides gesture controls that don’t require you to touch your phone, and improved Night Sight, which allows […]

Subscription has been all the rage in media circles as the industry searches for new, sustainable business models. We’ve seen companies from infrastructure plays like Substack and Pico to brand verticals like Holloway and The Athletic receive venture funding, all with the goal of changing the economics of news, information and entertainment. Every day, I […]

ZeroDown launches a home search engine.

NASA revealed new spacesuits, specifically created for the Artemis generation of missions, which aim to get the first American woman and the next American man to the surface of the Moon by 2024. The new design’s toppling feature is greater mobility and flexibility, in basically every respect. NASA unveiled both a full suit designed for […]

Walmart will bring your groceries to you and put them away in the fridge, with the launch of its new service, InHome. The retailer is today debuting its new in-home grocery delivery service in three cities: Kansas City, (Missouri and Kansas); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Vero Beach, Florida. Customers in these markets can subscribe to InHome […]

The Chromebook has been a marked hit for Google — well, for Google’s hardware partners, at least. Low cost devices have flooded the market, with a stranglehold on the educational category in particular. Google’s own first party offerings, on the other hand, have been a bit more curious. Devices like the Pixelbook and Pixel Slate […]

Today, a new book called “Girls Who Run the World” hits real and virtual bookshelves, and for anyone with a middle-school aged kid or looking to inspire a high-schooler, it might be worth checking out. Featuring 31 women who are the CEOs of companies that they have created themselves — think Spanx, Glossier, Caribou Sciences, […]

In niche markets like aerospace, where the traditional VC model might not yield an abundance of available funding, corporate venture funds can offer entrepreneurs an interesting alternative. Unlike traditional VCs, firms like Lockheed Martin Ventures are in constant contact with internal business units about challenges they need solved, or improvements they’re seeking that cannot be […]

French company Kabuto is launching a Kickstarter campaign today for the second generation of its smart carry-on suitcase. The company was previously known as Xtend. If you think about smart suitcases, chances are you picture a suitcase with a battery pack in it and that’s it. In other words, they are not that smart. Kabuto […]

As TikTok continues its rapid U.S. growth, the company is being challenged to better explain its content moderation choices. Why, for example, is the short-form video app censoring the Hong Kong protests but not U.S. political content? Why is it banning political ads, but supports hashtags like #trump2020 and #maga, each with millions, or even […]

This is the Pixel 4, the handset that literally everyone saw coming. Even by Google’s standards, the handset leaked like crazy. Some was almost certainly by design as the company looked to hype up its new flagship amid slowing smartphone sales. That said, showing up for preorder on two different sites in the past few […]

There’s always been something so annoying about people who found the need to stack additional challenges onto solving a Rubik’s Cube quickly, whether it was doing it blind-folded or while juggling or one-handed. While it might have just been a challenge for them, it also seemed like a need to show off. OpenAI is clearly […]

Uber, Lime and Spin have officially deployed their electric scooters on the streets of San Francisco as part of the city’s permitting program. Last month, the city announced Uber’s JUMP, Lime, Ford’s Spin and Scoot were granted permits to operate the shared electric scooter services. Scoot, however, has operated in the city since last year. […]

Applications to Spearhead's third cohort open this week.

Entrepreneur First (EF), the Greylock-backed “talent investor” that recruits and backs individuals pre-team and pre-idea to enable them to found startups, is pulling out of Hong Kong, TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, the London HQ’d company builder has told provisional candidates for its 2020 Hong Kong cohort that they should instead apply to one […]

Google ended today’s hardware event by going deep on the photo technology in its new Pixel 4, and brought out someone who’s actually been using the camera — legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz. The company announced that it’s working with Leibovitz back in October 2018. Today, she spoke about the experience of working with the Pixel 3 […]

Google’s new Pixel 4 camera offers a ton of new tricks to improve its photographic chops, and to emphasize the point, it had Professor Mark Levoy, who leads camera technology development at Google Research, up on stage to talk about the Pixel 4’s many improvements, including its new telephoto lens, updated Super Res Zoom technology […]

Google held its annual “Made By Google” hardware event this morning in New York City, where they launched all sorts of new gear back to back to back. Didn’t have time to watch the whole stream, but still want to know the bulletpoints of what’s new? We’ve got you covered. Stadia Stadia, Google’s cloud […]

French startup Strapi has raised a $4 million seed round led by Accel and Stride.vc. The company has been working on an open-source Node.js headless content management system. That’s a lot of technical words in a row, but it’s not that hard to understand what Strapi is. Content management systems, or CMS, are web applications […]

The Google Pixel 4 and Pixel XL smartphones, that Google just unveiled at a press conference in New York, won’t launch in India, one of the company’s most important overseas markets, the Android-maker said on Tuesday. The bottleneck lies with Project Soli, a radar-based motion-sensing technology baked into the new Pixel smartphones that relies on […]

At Google’s hardware event this morning, the company introduced a new voice recorder app for Android devices which will tap into advances in real-time speech processing, speech recognition and A.I. to automatically transcribe recordings in real-time as the person is speaking. The improvements will allow users to take better advantage of the phone’s voice recording […]

Google is updating the Nest Mini today, the device formerly known as Google Home Mini. And the company used this opportunity to announce an update to its home awareness product, Nest Aware. If you have Nest security cameras, you can subscribe to a Nest Aware plan. It currently costs $5 a month for 5-day video […]

Today at its Google hardware event, Google introduced new mesh routers called Nest Wifi. This is a successor tot he Google Wifi product it introduced a couple of years ago, but with a number of improvements. The new Nest Wifi consists of two types of devices, one a router that plugs into your modem, and […]

The rumors and leaks have been pretty relentless. In fact, over the past three days, the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL have gone up for preorder on at least two different sites. While it’s true that Google’s never been particularly great at keeping this stuff under wraps, this was pretty silly. Anyway, the Pixel […]

Ahead of the arrival of Apple TV+, the brand-new Apple TV app is launching on Roku devices, starting today. The app currently allows Apple customers to access their iTunes video library and subscribe to Apple TV channels directly from Roku devices. And, on November 1, it will also be home to the Apple TV+ streaming […]

The Green Hell, as the famed Nürburgring Nordschleife was nicknamed back in the late 1960s, is a 73-corner nearly 13-mile track in Germany that can challenge even the most accomplished professional race car drivers. Now, for about $164, thrill seekers can be a passenger for one lap. Jaguar announced a RACE eTAXI promotion that customers […]

As rumored, Google just dropped a little hint about its next generation Pixel Buds. The company unveiled a pair of fully wireless earbuds following the release of its promising, but fairly disappointing tethered earbuds. The new headphones are certainly nice looking, maintaining the same pastel color scheme it offers on its Pixel handsets. The headphones […]

Google dropped a bit of news right off the bat at this morning’s Made by Google event: Stadia, its on-demand cloud game streaming service, will launch on November 19th. Stadia is Google’s experiment in changing up the way we play video games; rather than rendering video games on a console or a powerful local PC, […]

TiVo’s answer to The Roku Channel, TiVo Plus, is launching today. The company had already unveiled its plans for ad-supported streaming earlier this month with the debut of two new models of its DVR, the TiVo Edge. Like The Roku Channel, TUBI, Vudu’s Movies on Us, and others, TiVo Plus is available to stream for […]

Google is about to unveil its new smartphone lineup, the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL. And if you’re an Android fan, you know that the Pixel is one of the most interesting Android phones out there thanks to a bloatware-free operating system and some incredible cameras. The conference starts at 10 AM Eastern Time […]

Beats this morning announced that it will be bringing its excellent noise-cancellation technology to its Solo line of on-ear headphones. The Solo Pro are the official followup to the Solo 3, a branding shift that’s in line with its other technologies. The noise canceling is the same introduced with the Studio over-ear line, way back […]

After approximately 48 hours offline, Fortnite has returned from its black hole hiatus with a brand new map for the launch of Chapter 2. The new map features 13 points of interest, and also includes a web of rivers that allow for new water gameplay, such as swimming, fishing, and armed motorboats that seem awfully […]

Charles Hudson, Annie Kadavy and Russ Heddleston offer pro tips.

Interior design platform Havenly is raising $32 million in new funding to create its first private label brand as the startup aims to integrate its own products into its design recommendation engine. The Denver-startup is an online interior design consultancy of sorts which pairs users looking to redesign their homes or apartments with expert designers. […]

Just how Android is the operating system for a number of mobile phones, Tortoise wants to be the operating system for micromobility vehicles, its co-founder Dmitry Shevelenko, who previously served as Uber’s director of business development, told TechCrunch. Given the volume of micromobility operators in the space today, Tortoise aims to make it easier for […]

Elastic acquired Endgame Security in June for $234 million, and as a result of that deal, today the company announced Elastic Endpoint security to help customers secure laptops and servers. It also announced the acquisition has officially closed. Elastic CEO and co-founder Shay Banon says that the company has already been helping threat hunters inside […]

Toggle, a Brooklyn-based robotics startup, announced today that it scored $3 million in seed funding. The early-stage round was led by Point72 Ventures’ AI Group, with participation from Mark Cuban and VC Twenty Seven Ventures. The series follows a 2018 pre-seed round of $570,000 from its Urban-X accelerator, Urban Us, Accelerate NY / Empire State […]

The timing of the original Portal’s launch was less than ideal. The company reportedly pushed things back as the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit full broil, only to be hit with another data breach disclosure. If there’s a lesson to be learned with this year’s sequel, it’s that there may just not be a good time […]

Algolia, one of the group of startups that provides search as a service for websites and apps as an alternative to Google and other search engines, is announcing a major round of funding today to fuel its growth. The startup — which already has over 8,000 customers, including big names like Twitch, Slack, Discovery and […]

Wheels, the startup founded by Wag founders Jonathan and Joshua Viner, just announced a $50 million round led by DBL Partners. This round brings Wheels’ total funding to $87 million. Wheels currently operates in six markets, including San Diego, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Scottsdale, Ariz., Salt Lake City and Cleveland. The plan is to use […]

India’s Flipkart is entering the food retail business as the e-commerce giant looks to expand its reach in the nation, its chief executive said on Tuesday. Flipkart, which sold majority stake in the company to Walmart for $16 billion last year, has registered an entity called ‘Flipkart Farmermart Pvt Ltd’ — in compliance with local […]

Thimble, which offers flexible, short-term insurance to small businesses and freelancers, is announcing that it has raised $22 million in a Series A funding round led by IAC. Until today, the startup was known as Verifly, a name tied to the company’s initial aim of providing insurance to drone pilots. However, founder and CEO Jay […]

Germany is resisting US pressure to shut out Chinese tech giant Huawei from its 5G networks — saying it will not ban any supplier for the next-gen mobile networks on an up front basis, per Reuters. “Essentially our approach is as follows: We are not taking a pre-emptive decision to ban any actor, or any company,” […]