Crunch Hype

Notion Capital today announces a new $150M fund in a bid to bolster its claim to being the go-to investor for European B2B tech. Launched ten years ago after the $700M exit of MessageLabs by co-founders Ben and Jos White, this new fourth fund will continue its previous focus on Series A SaaS and enterprise […]

It’s been a strange year for Mithril Capital Management, the venture firm cofounded in 2012 by Peter Thiel and his longtime associate Ajay Royan. Though Mithril enjoyed its biggest exit to date in February, when Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay $3.4 billion — plus another potential $2.35 billion in payments — for the surgical […]

Two of Africa’s powerhouse tech incubators joined forces in September. Nigerian innovation center and seed-fund CcHub acquired Nairobi based iHub. The purchase amount was undisclosed, but CcHub will finance the deal out of its real-estate project to build a new 10-story HQ in Lagos, CcHub CEO Bosun Tijani told TechCrunch. Details are emerging on how the […]

Halle Tecco is no stranger to conception struggles. The Rock Health founder and former CEO has been public about her journey on social media, including two rounds of IVF, eventually leading to a healthy baby girl. Now, she wants to help others make babies, too. To get there, Tecco has joined a class of new […]

Many expectant mothers are told that breastfeeding will come naturally, but it is often a fraught and confusing experience, especially during the first few weeks after birth. Parents often worry about if their babies are getting enough nutrition or if they are producing enough milk. MyMilk Labs wants to give nursing mothers more information with […]

Say you’re a pharmaceutical company. You’ve figured out that a novel molecule could be effective in treating an illness — but that molecule only exists in a simulation. How do you actually make it, and enough of it, to test in the real world? Molecule.one is a computational chemistry platform that helps bring theoretical substances […]

The demand for orbital launches is increasing steadily, and the industry is nowhere near keeping up. Leo Aerospace thinks they can help with a launch technique that's more efficient and requires far less infrastructure than an ordinary rocket: a hot air balloon. With a rocket attached to it, of course. It sounds wacky at first, but it could prove to be an economical and flexible way of getting to orbit.

Imagine this. Instead of giving away your personal data so web giants can show you ads, you cut out the middle person and allow advertisers to pay you directly for your data. It’s a novel idea for a new startup that bills itself as a “data privacy” company. OzoneAI says it preserves users’ privacy by […]

Clean drinking water is one of the most urgent needs in developing countries and disaster-stricken areas, but safety tests can take days — during which tainted water can infect thousands. OmniVis aims to make detection of cholera and other pathogens as quick, simple, and cheap as a pregnancy test. Its smartphone-powered detection platform could save thousands of lives.

Samsung this morning confirmed with Reuters that it has shuttered handset production in China. The move comes as the company continues to struggle in the world’s No. 1 smartphone market. As we noted in a deeper dive into China’s smartphone sales back in August, the Korean hardware giant has struggled to maintain a market share […]

Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, announced a new crypto-related startup school at TechCrunch Disrupt today in San Francisco. Dixon says that the firm is not looking for equity, but really wants to provide a way to teach some best practices in the emerging field of crypto currency. “We are going to run […]

Actor and Hollywood media mogul Will Smith surprised the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019 audience this afternoon by announcing he would invest $10K in a startup that pitched to him onstage as part of an “elevator pitch” contest, where the winner would get to take a selfie with the star. The company, Socionado.com, helps companies with […]

It was a big day for startup Render, which participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield today. It also announced some upgrades to its managed cloud platform. First of all, it announced the ability to spin up object storage in the cloud, while greatly simplifying the tasks associated with adding storage. CEO and founder Anurag […]

Brex announces its newest product, Brex Cash, onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Tesla said Wednesday it delivered a record 97,000 electric vehicles in the third quarter, a nearly 2% increase from the previous period, but still short of analysts’ expectations. Tesla shares fell nearly 6% in after market trading on the news. The company reported Wednesday that it produced 96,155 vehicles in the third quarter, a 10% […]

Mutiny, a personalized marketing startup for businesses that sell to other businesses, is taking the stage today at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield, where it’s announcing new funding and new features. CEO Jaleh Rezaei told me that she and co-founder Nikhil Mathew created Mutiny to solve a problem they saw as early employees at HR services company […]

Render, a participant in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, has a big idea. It wants to take on the world’s biggest cloud vendors by offering developers a cheaper alternative that also removes a lot of the complexity around managing cloud infrastructure. Render’s goal is to help developers, especially those in smaller companies, who don’t […]

The biggest players in online stock trading all just copied Robinhood by removing their fees for stock and ETF trading. Charles Schwab announced yesterday it would drop its $4.95 fee, leading to plummeting share prices for it as well as competitors. By the end of yesterday, Ameritrade announced it too would axe its $6.95 fees, […]

Meet Sendmi, a fintech startup that is launching today in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Sendmi works pretty much like a 401k or a Flexible Spending Account. But instead of saving money for later, you set it aside to send it to your family abroad. And this mix of payroll and remittance is […]

If your home is in a wildfire area, insurance companies tend to not want to go anywhere near it. But “wildfire areas” tend to be pretty broad. What if companies could evaluate the risk on a more granular level — tapping things like satellite imagery and machine learning combined with wind, weather and topology data, […]

At some unspecified time, somewhere down the road, Traptic would love to expand its robots to pick a wide variety of crops. For now, however, the South Bay-based team is focused solely on strawberries. With roughly 88 percent of the fruit’s total U.S. yield occurring in California, the berries represent ample opportunity for disruption. A […]

Thousands of miles away from the U.S., where technology giants, cable networks, and studios are locked in an intense multi-billion dollar battle to court users to their video streaming services, a startup in Bangladesh has already won the local video streaming market. And it did all of this in six years with just $10 million. […]

Volvo is teasing its upcoming, and first all-electric car, with some initial sketches and a few details of the XC40 SUV. The upshot: Volvo is emphasizing a simpler design that discards some of the features found on gas-powered vehicles. The XC40 SUV won’t have tailpipes, for instance. The traditional front grille, which is used to […]

API and microservices platform Kong today announced that it has acquired Insomnia, a popular open-source tool for debugging APIs. The company, which also recently announced that it had raised a $43 million Series C round, has already put this acquisition to work by using it to build Kong Studio, a tool for designing, building and […]

YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan gave an update on all things YouTube at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. He touched on many different subjects, from YouTube Music updates to advertiser-friendly guidelines and tweaking YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. Mohan started right away with an update on YouTube Music. YouTube has accidentally become one of the biggest music streaming […]

Ten years later, Foursquare is far past its scrappy consumer days as it builds out its B2B services, but its latest announcement is thrusting it back into the scrappy consumer business. Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley announced that the company is launching a free version of their Pilgrim SDK, which allows […]

Demand for the all-electric Porsche Taycan sports car has prompted the German automaker to add 500 more jobs at its headquarters in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen. The move, which will boost jobs dedicated to the Taycan by one third to 2,000, is designed to give Porsche the flexibility it might need to boost production. “With the Taycan, we […]

After committing to having a first crewed launch of its rocket ship in 2019, Blue Origin, the rocket manufacturer and launch services company backed by Jeff Bezos, is likely going to have to push that timeline back to 2020. Speaking onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, Blue Origin chief executive Bob Smith said that the […]

YouTube Music is preparing to better challenge Spotify and others with the launch of three new personalized playlists, Discover Mix, New Release Mix, and Your Mix, said YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan, in an on-stage interview this morning at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019. Discover Mix, YouTube Music’s version of Spotify’s Discover Weekly, had already […]

The multi-hyphenate actor-director-entrepreneur, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (best known for roles in “3rd Rock from the Sun,” “Inception,” “Snowden” and, “10 Things I Hate About You,”) came to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019 this morning to talk about his startup, the collaborative media platform HitRecord. Specifically, he addressed how HitRecord differs from other platforms for creators. In doing […]

As part of San Francisco’s program to operate shared electric scooters in the city, it’s requiring providers to pilot adaptive scooters to ensure people with disabilities are not left out from this new form of transportation. Companies are expected to deploy these adaptive scooters within the first three months of the permit, which begins this […]

Back in March, Aria Insights suddenly went dark. The news was a bit of a surprise from a startup that had just announced a name change and pivot in tech focus. Today, thermal imaging company Flir announced that it has acquired the intellectual property and some operating assets from the former company. Flir, best known […]

Cloud services and the adoption of apps that rely on them are continue to grow in popularity, but a persistent theme in enterprise technology has been that a lot of organizations still continue to use legacy software and architectures, for reasons of cost, migration headaches and simply because sometimes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix […]

Udaan, a three-year-old business-to-business e-commerce platform in India, has raised more than half a billion dollars in a new financing round as it looks to bring more kirana stores, chemists and other small businesses online through its marketplace. The startup said today it has raised $585 million in a Series D round from Tencent, Altimeter, […]

It’s been four years since TechCrunch published my blog post The SaaS Adventure, which introduced the concept of a “T2D3” roadmap to help SaaS companies scale — and, as an aside, explored how well my mom understood my job as an “adventure capitalist.” The piece detailed seven distinct stages that enterprise cloud startups must navigate to achieve $100 million in annualized revenue. Specifically, the post encouraged companies to “triple, triple, double, double, double” their revenue as they hit certain milestones.

It’s that time of year again. Disrupt has descended upon San Francisco, with thousands of founders, investors and technophiles pouring into the Moscone Center. We’ll kick off the day with a fireside chat with Blue Origin’s Bob Smith on the Main Stage and a panel on how to build a billion-dollar SaaS company with Neeraj […]

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase wants to foster USDC adoption by letting you earn rewards when you keep USDC on your Coinbase account. Essentially, if you’re a U.S. customer, your Coinbase account has become an uninsured savings account with a 1.25% APY rewards rate. If you’re not familiar with USDC, it’s a stablecoin backed by CENTRE, a […]

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. Zuckerberg misunderstands the huge threat of TikTok In leaked audio of a Facebook all-hands meeting, Mark Zuckerberg described TikTok as “almost […]

Think Jack Dorsey’s jobs are tough? Well, Tom Chavez is running six startups. He thinks building businesses can be boiled down to science, so today he’s unveiling his laboratory for founding, funding and operating companies. He and his team have already proven they can do it themselves after selling their startups Rapt to Microsoft and […]

This morning’s Surface event was all about “flow.” It was hard to miss, honestly. The company must have collectively uttered the word dozens of times on stage in New York. The word of the day was largely a reference to cross device ecosystems and a couple of surprise dual-screen products shown off at the end. […]

TechCrunch is excited to announce the 20 startups competing in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Over the next three days, these elite companies will compete on tech’s biggest stage for the Disrupt Cup, the attention of global press and investors and $100,000 in equity-free prize money. The selection process for Startup Battlefield […]

Google today announced Action Blocks, a new accessibility tool that allows you to create shortcuts for common multi-step tasks with the help of the Google Assistant. In that respect, Action Blocks isn’t all that different from Shortcuts on iOS, for example, but Google is specifically looking at this as an accessibility feature for people with […]

Google today announced a handful of new consumer privacy tools for some of its most-used products, including Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Assistant. The tools are meant to better allow users to control, manage and erase the data Google collects from those who use its services or prevent Google from collecting that data in the […]

At its annual Surface hardware event in New York, Microsoft announced the expected set of updates to its existing hardware lineup. The biggest surprise, though, was surely the announcement of the company’s dual-screen Surface Neo, which will go on sale before the 2020 holiday season. To make this kind of dual-screen device possible, Microsoft also […]

Rumored in 2008 and officially canceled two years later, Courier is one of the great “what ifs” of the consumer hardware space. Somewhere out there is an alternative timeline where the dual screen booklet PC preempted the whole two-in-one tablet/PC boom. In this universe, however, the dual screen PC has been more of a curiosity. […]

In spite of everything else leaking out at this morning’s Surface event, Microsoft was still able to save one big surprise for the end. The company’s getting back into phones. Not only that, it’s introducing a foldable. Though, as with the Neo, the Duo doesn’t actually have a foldable display like the Galaxy Fold. Instead, […]

Canadian technology holding company Tiny, home to companies like Dribble, Flow and Unicorn Hunt, today announced that it has acquired Meteor, the JavaScript-centric open-source app platform. Meteor launched back in 2011, and, while it was a developer darling for a while, its momentum stalled a bit in recent years as other technologies rose to the […]

At its annual Surface hardware event, Microsoft today announced the long-rumored ARM-based Surface, the first time Microsoft itself has launched a device with an ARM-based processor inside. The 13-inch device will use Microsoft’s own custom SQ1 chip, based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and an AI accelerator, making it the first Surface with an integrated AI engine. […]

Microsoft just introduced the followup to its good Surface headphones — and get this, they’re designed specifically to work with Office. Priced at lofty $249, the wireless earbuds have a number of onboard productivity features, including Powerpoint slide forwarding, voice transcription and live translation (in 60 languages). The earbuds are, in a word, huge. They […]

As Facebook prepares to launch a “news tab” this month featuring news stories curated by humans to complement the headlines that appear in your social feed generated by your friends’ shares, paid promotions and algorithms, a new report paints a damning picture of how social media is viewed as a news platform today. A survey from […]