Crunch Hype

Today at its special hardware event, Microsoft unveiled the new Surface Pro 7. The new Surface Pro finally brings USB-C to the convertible laptop category of Microsoft hardware, which will be a welcome addition for fans who’ve been waiting for the company to adopt this now-prevalent connection technology. The latest generation Surface Pro starts at […]

The UK Court of Appeal has unanimously overturned a block on a class-action style lawsuit brought on behalf of four million iPhone users against Google — meaning the case can now proceed to be heard. The High Court tossed the suit a year ago on legal grounds. However the claimants sought permission to appeal — and […]

The rumors for this morning’s Microsoft event are one-for-one. The first piece of hardware shown off this morning in New York is the latest version of the company’s very good Surface Laptop — arguably the strongest entry in the line. We're pleased to bring you the new Surface Laptop 3 from #MicrosoftEvent pic.twitter.com/Y7lH94NbQK — Microsoft […]

In October of 2018, Y Combinator published a mega list of the top 101 companies to have gone through the accelerator, as sorted by each company’s valuation. This morning they updated the list. Valuation as a ranking metric has its faults, of course. It’s a measurement largely of perception; a projection of a company’s […]

Sidecar is great. It’s my favorite software thing Apple has introduced in years. I’m using it right now, as I type this, in fact. For a handle of app developers, however, the feature’s arrival with macOS Catalina was an expected, but still potentially devastating piece of news. We spoke to Duet Display and Astropad about […]

Fresh of its recent raise of $135 million, Lightricks, the maker of popular selfie editor Facetune and several other top consumer-focused photo editing applications, is branching out. The company this morning announced the launch of a suite of new mobile apps aimed at small businesses that want professional content creation tools to help them with […]

Multiplayer games are more fun when you get to play with the same crew regularly. Playing with the same people means better cooperation, deeper strategies, and, if all goes well, more wins. But what if none of your friends play the game you want to play? Rune, a company out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 […]

Update: Twitter has said it’s “just about fixed” the partial outages that hit its apps for around seven hours today, limiting the content users could post or access. Users should be able to Twitter as normal now or very shortly, per an update sent via its support account. It suggests anyone still experiencing problems should […]

Meet Impala, a London-based startup that wants to make it easier to interact with hotel data. The startup is building a layer on top of legacy hotel systems to standardize everything with a modern REST API. And Impala has just raised an $11 million Series A funding round from Stride.VC, Xavier Niel/Kima Ventures, Jerry Murdock, […]

An Indian startup that is attempting to improve the way how millions of people in the nation lease or buy an apartment — by not paying any brokerage — just raised a significant amount of capital to further expand its business. NoBroker said on Wednesday it has raised $50 million in a new financing round. […]

“It’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in leaked audio of him describing TikTok during an all-hands meeting. But it’s not. TikTok represents a new form of social entertainment that’s vastly different from the lifelogging of Instagram where you can just take a selfie, show something […]

With so many scandals around the quality of tap water these days, especially in the U.S., many people are turning to bottled water to drink. But this requires single-use plastics that are wreaking havoc on the environment. One startup in Europe, Mitte, thinks it has the answer: filtering water direct from the tap. It has […]

European peer-to-peer car rental service Drivy has a new name. It is now called Getaround, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been following Drivy’s recent news. Back in April, Getaround announced the acquisition of Drivy for $300 million to expand to Europe. And Drivy is now 100% part of Getaround as the company is unifying […]

Comodo, which bills itself as a “global leader in cybersecurity solutions,” said its forum was hacked. The admission came in no less than a forum post, which confirmed a hacker exploited a recently disclosed vulnerability in vBulletin, a popular forum software used by Comodo. The flaw, which requires little skill to exploit, allows an attacker […]

Tesla has acquired DeepScale, a Silicon Valley startup that uses low-wattage processors to power more accurate computer vision, in a bid to improve its Autopilot driver assistance system and deliver on CEO Elon Musk’s vision to turn its electric vehicles into robotaxis. CNBC was the first to report the acquisition. TechCrunch independently confirmed the deal […]

A few months back we took a look at Cloosiv, a company aiming to provide smaller coffee shops a mobile ordering solution that can compete with those of the mega coffee chains. Today the Cloosiv team is announcing that they’ve raised a $1M seed round. Most coffee shops want to be able to offer […]

The FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules has been significantly weakened by a federal appeals court, which ruled that the Commission could not preempt state laws like those pending in California. And although the repeal largely survived otherwise, one judge called the logic on which it is based “unhinged from the realities of modern broadband […]

NASA has announced the total funding it will distribute to the 14 companies it’s chosen to work with on developing key, innovative technologies that will be instrumental in helping get the agency to the Moon through the Artemis program, and potentially to Mars and beyond later on. The U.S. space agency is awarding $43.2 million […]

Education is a $4 trillion market globally in urgent need of overall — so where within education are top venture capitalists optimistic about startups building large businesses by providing new solutions? According to EdSurge, $1.45 billion of venture capital (a mere 1.1% of the $130 billion in US venture funding) was invested in education startups […]

Sports have always been the ultimate unifier -- transcending geographic borders, rising above partisan politics and enabling multiple audiences to find alignment. The secret to this? Technology.

A new telescope will seek out planets that resemble Earth from a height of around 125,000 feet, using special optical technology that will filter out light from the stars they orbit to provide a better view. The telescope is the product of UMass Lowell, and took off on Tuesday morning from Fort Sumner, New Mexico […]

It’s hardware season, and now it’s Microsoft’s turn to deliver the goods. The company will be holding its big Surface event bright and early tomorrow morning in New York. If past years’ events are any precedent (and they generally are), there’s going to be a lot of stuff shown off in the Big Apple this […]

Presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren has responded publicly to a leaked attack on her by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying she won’t be bullied out of taking big tech to task for anticompetitive practices. I'm not afraid to hold Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon accountable. It's time to #BreakUpBigTech: https://t.co/o9X9v4noOm — Elizabeth […]

There’s been a heap of China in Africa coverage over the last decade, but very little of it is focused on tech. In part, because the country’s engagement with African startups is light compared to its deal-making on infrastructure and commodities. Now, that all looks to be shifting. TechCrunch has tracked moves by a number […]

Salesforce announced this week that it’s building another shiny tower. This one will be in Sydney with views of the harbor and the iconic Sydney Opera House. The company has also committed to adding 1000 new jobs in the next five years and to building the tower in a sustainable fashion. In fact, Salesforce is […]

Catalyte, the Baltimore-based coding training and placement service, has launched a new software service designed to take its machine learning-based skills-assessment and training program to companies around the country. With revenues already approaching nearly $100 million for its outsourced software development services, Catalyte is hoping to take the lessons and tools it has learned and […]

Micromobility has taken off over the last couple of years. Between electric bike-share and scooter-share, these vehicles have made their way all over the world. Meanwhile, some of these companies, like Bird and Lime, have already hit unicorn status thanks to massive funding rounds. Horace Dediu, the well-known industry analyst who coined the term micromobility […]

Can you never find a scooter to rent when you need one? Here’s a radical idea. Buy one. While Bird, Lime, Skip, Scoot, Uber, Lyft and more compete for on-demand micromobility, a new startup invented a vehicle worthy of ownership. The Unagi looks downright futuristic with its classy paint jobs, foldable body, LED screen, and […]

GoPro has released new versions of both its hero line, and its newer 360-degree ruggedized action cameras. The $399 GoPro Hero8 Black’s most significant change is that it gains a new body design that incorporates GoPro’s signature mounting system right into the case, so that you no longer need add-on frames to attach it to […]

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. WeWork withdraws its S-1 filing, will delay its IPO The move was widely expected, but The We Company (which owns WeWork) […]

Apple is launching an early look at its new Deep Fusion feature on iOS today with a software update for beta users. Deep Fusion is a technique that blends multiple exposures together at the pixel level to give users a higher level of detail than is possible using standard HDR imaging — especially in images […]

There weren’t many scenarios where consumer were deciding between buying the original Skydio R1 autonomous drone and something from DJI. The R1 was the second drone in your arsenal, it was a couple grand and it gave users an experience that was technically impressive, occasionally useful and a little bizarre. It was exciting but it […]

The workers strike against General Motors — now in its third week — has cost the automaker more than $1 billion during the third quarter, according to a research note from J.P. Morgan analyst Ryan Brickman. And those losses are accelerating with each passing week. GM lost about $480 million during the first week of […]

UPS announced today that it is the first to receive the official nod from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate a full “drone airline,” which will allow it to expand its current small drone delivery service pilots into a country-wide network. In its announcement of the news, UPS said that it will start by […]

Streamlit, a new machine learning startup from industry veterans who worked at GoogleX and Zoox, launched today with a $6 million seed investment and a flexible new open-source tool to make it easier for machine learning engineers to create custom applications to interact with the data in their models. The seed round was led by […]

Books on tape were the lifeblood of self-help. But e-learning startups like Khan Academy and Coursera demanded our eyes, not just our ears. Then came podcasts that make knowledge accessible, yet rarely focus on you retaining and applying what they teach. Today, a new startup called Knowable is launching to provide gaze-free audio education at […]

With $140 million in new financing, Relativity Space is now one step closer to fulfilling its founders’ vision of making the first rockets on Mars. Tagging along for the ride are a motley assortment of millionaires and billionaires, movie stars and media moguls that are providing the money the rocket launch services provider and manufacturer […]

Pandora is doubling down on personalization and revamping its app in order to better compete with rivals like Spotify and Apple Music. Today, the company is introducing a new mobile experience which includes a dedicated “For You” tab where a continually updated feed of content is presented to users, including both music and podcast recommendations […]

The software industry is no spring chicken, and that fact has now brought us to an interesting moment in technology. Some of the biggest legacy apps — ubiquitous as they may be — are getting revisited by smaller and more fleet-of-foot startups, who are building new apps that they hope will disrupt their respective Goliaths. […]

WhatsApp users may soon get the ability to have their messages self-destruct after a set period of time. That’s according to a highly-reliable tipster who spotted the feature combing through the code of a beta version of the app. Twitter user WABetaInfo said on Tuesday that the recently released public beta of WhatsApp for Android […]

Aero, a new air travel startup backed by Garrett Camp’s startup studio Expa, is officially announcing the appointment of its first CEO: Uma Subramanian, who previously launched Airbus’ helicopter service Voom.Flights. The startup is also revealing that it’s raised a total of $16 million in funding. In addition to Expa, GGV Capital also invested. Aero said […]

The digital payments market is forecast to balloon to $3 trillion by 2023, and today a startup that lets businesses implement not just payments, but also the many other related (and necessary) services that go along with them, by way of a single API, has raised a big round of funding to meet that demand. Rapyd, […]

Europe’s top court has ruled that pre-checked consent boxes for dropping cookies are not legally valid. Consent must be obtained prior to storing or accessing non-essential cookies, such as tracking cookies for targeted advertising. Consent cannot be implied or assumed. It’s a decision that — at stroke — plunges websites into legal hot water in […]

A team of security researchers found they could tap into Webex and Zoom video meetings because many weren’t protected with a code. Researchers at Cequence, a startup focused on protecting applications from scraping and account takeovers, programmed a bot to cycle through lists of valid meeting IDs and get access to active conference calls. The […]

Rhino, the insurtech startup incubated by Kairos and co-founded by Kairos CEO Ankur Jain, has today announced the close of a $21 million Series A round led by Kairos and Lakestar. Rhino was founded in 2017 with the goal of putting the billions of dollars that are locked up in cash security deposits to renters, […]

Meet DataHawk, a French startup that wants to build a sort of App Annie for Amazon listings. The company lets you track products and search results so that you can learn more about your competitors and your space. This sort of products is becoming increasingly relevant as more and more products sold on Amazon are […]

If you’ve been to an airport recently, you’ve probably spotted a ton of iconic Away suitcases. The company has built one of the most successful consumer brands in recent years, and it’s just getting started. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Away co-founder and Chief Brand Officer Jen Rubio will join us at TechCrunch […]

Great news for time-strapped early-stage startup founders across Europe and beyond! We’re extending our application deadline to the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. If you’re ready to launch your startup on a global stage and complete for glory, cash, media attention and investor love, it’s time to act. Apply to Startup Battlefield before […]

If you could digitize whole, real-world locations you’d automatically improve the planning for big infrastructure projects that require buildings, bridges tunnels and the like. Some $94 trillion in infrastructure investment is required by 2040 globally to sustain global growth predictions, yet infrastructure is one of the least digitized sectors in the global economy. SenSat is […]

Fintech startup Bunq is launching in 22 additional markets today. It is now going to be available in all European Union markets as well as Norway and Iceland. Overall, users can sign up in 30 countries. In addition to today’s geographic expansion, the company is enabling Apple Pay and Google Pay support for Travel Card […]