Crunch Hype

Facebook confirms it won’t fact check politicians’ speech or block their content if it’s newsworthy even if it violates the site’s hate-speech rules or other policies. This cementing of its policy comes from Facebook’s head of global policy and communication Nick Clegg, who gave a speech today about Facebook’s plans to prevent interference in the […]

Comscore, a company that’s performance metrics are widely touted in the media world, has settled with the SEC following charges of inflating its own metrics. The company and its former CEO Serge Matta have been charged with fraud by the SEC and have agreed to pay $5 million and $700,000 respectively, in a settlement. Matta […]

Since the days of BigDog, the quadrupedal robots of Boston Dynamics have impressed and repelled us. But while the early, bulky robots never felt like something we’d see in real life, the company’s latest and greatest creation, Spot, is not only quite real but now for sale — in fact, some people have had them […]

Apple is warning users of a bug in iOS 13 and iPadOS involving third-party keyboards. In a brief advisory posted Tuesday, the tech giant said the bug impacts third-party keyboards which have the ability to request “full access” permissions. iOS 13 was released last week. Both iOS 13.1 and iPadOS 13.1, the new software version […]

Lyft is rolling out an update that makes it possible to access bikes, scooters, transit and car rentals within the app. Uber, however, did something similar more than one year ago. With Lyft’s update, customers can more easily see all of the transportation modes available to them. “At Lyft, we’re working toward a future where […]

Attention all current and future pass holders to Disrupt SF 2019! Our CrunchMatch platform is up, operational and ready for you to create your profile and get down to the business of connecting with the people who can move your business to new heights. Hold up a sec’. If you don’t already have one, stop what […]

Wang was most recently the COO at Color Genomics.

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. Facebook buys startup building neural monitoring armband Facebook has talked a lot about working on a non-invasive brain input device that […]

Investors are betting on gaming platforms as an area of consumer tech with plenty of room left to grow. Today, Manticore Games, a stealth gaming startup announced that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding from Benchmark Capital, Correlation Ventures, BITKRAFT Esports Ventures, M Ventures, Arrive, Sapphire Sport, Tuesday Capital, and SV Angel. The […]

WeWork's Adam Neumann to become executive chairman.

Kapwing is a laymen’s Adobe Creative Suite built for what people actually do on the internet: make memes and remix media. Need to resize a video? Add text or subtitles to a video? Trim or crop or loop or frame or rotate or soundtrack or… then you need Kapwing. The free web and mobile tool […]

Apple has just released iOS 13.1. This updated brings everything new in iOS 13 in case you haven’t updated yet, as well as many bug fixes. I would recommend updating to iOS 13.1 to get a more stable phone. But that’s not all. iPadOS and tvOS are finally making the jump to version 13 with […]

So you thought there were 800 million Windows 10 Devices that will get Microsoft’s most recent out-of-band emergency patch? Think again. As the company announced on Twitter today, Windows 10 now runs on over 900M devices. That’s a bit of bad timing, but current security issues aside, the momentum for Windows 10 clearly remains steady. […]

Running a sex tech company is hard, so it’s worth calling out when companies overcome the many barriers to running one. Cute Little Fuckers, a gender-inclusive sex toy company, just launched a $13,500 campaign on Kickstarter. “This is the first one that has been approved for a while,” Kickstarter Senior Outreach Lead of Design & […]

MegaBots is bankrupt. The Bay Area-based fighting robot startup noted in a video that “this is the end of MegaBots in its current form,” marking the occasion by selling the 15-ton Eagle Prime ‘bot on eBay. Bids started at $1, but as of this writing, a few dozen bidders have pushed it up past $50,000. […]

After releasing a brief “date announcement” and an equally brief commercial at the Emmys, Netflix has finally launched the full trailer “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie.” The trailer shows the film following directly from the “Breaking Bad” finale, with Aaron Paul returning to the role of Jesse Pinkman, the former-student-turned-meth-cooking-partner of Bryan Cranston’s Walter […]

In recent months, Grammarly started expanding beyond its core grammar and spellchecking tools by adding features like a more detailed clarity score, for example. Today, it’s expanding on this work by launching the first beta of its new tone detector that makes sure your email or document sounds just like you want it to. You may […]

Vista Equity Partners, which likes to purchase undervalued tech companies and turn them around for a hefty profit, has purchased web content management and digital experience company, Acquia in a deal valued at $1 billion. Robert F. Smith, who is founder and chairman of Vista Equity Partners, says that increasingly brands understand that delivering a […]

Branding is an essential component of every startup. It’s more than publishing a tagline or a mission statement; it’s how your company comes alive in the eyes of customers. Some companies make it look easy, but designing and successfully launching a brand can be a daunting endeavor. How do you develop a brand strategy? What’s […]

In a small corner on the second floor of a roughshod maker space in Philadelphia, the founders of Hava Health are plotting the launch of what they call the first vaporizer designed for smoking cessation. Robots roam the open floors of the offices at NextFab, where Josh Israel and Devin Serago, two serial entrepreneurs and […]

The community perks for Extra Crunch members just got better with an upgrade to our offer from Brex. Earlier this month we announced that annual Extra Crunch members can get 100,000 Brex Rewards points after signing up for a Brex corporate credit card. Now the offer includes an airline miles transfer program headlined by JetBlue TrueBlue […]

We’re going to try something new at Disrupt Berlin this year, based on the great response we’ve been getting to our startup how-to coverage. We’re going to put experts who work closely with startups on our Q&A stage, where you can talk to them in intimate workshops about key topics like growth, fundraising and recruiting. […]

Spotify is expanding its selection of personalized playlists with this morning’s launch of two new additions: On Repeat and Repeat Rewind. Both are focused on helping you revisit the songs you have kept replaying at various times. The former, On Repeat, will deliver your current obsessions — that is, the tracks you’ve played the most […]

Microsoft has warned Windows users to install an “emergency” out-of-band security patch. The software giant said in an advisory that a security flaw in some versions of Internet Explorer could allow an attacker to remotely run malicious code on an affected device. A user could be stealthily infected by visiting a malicious web page or […]

Boston Dynamics has been teaching its old bots new tricks – Atlas, its humanoid robot that walks on two legs, can now do a surprisingly elegant gymnastics routine, tumbling into a handstand, followed by cartwheels and including a jump twist. This level of athleticism (can a robot express ‘athleticism’?) is incredibly impressive, given that this […]

Spotify this morning is rolling out an updated version of its app for artists, across both iOS and Android. The new app includes a refreshed design, as well as new analytics like real-time stats on how many people are playing artists’ songs around the world, most notably. Educational materials are also for the first time […]

Paperspace has always had a firm focus on data science teams building machine models, offering them access to GPUs in the cloud, but the company has had broader ambition beyond providing pure infrastructure, and today it announced a new set of tools to help these teams pass the model off to developers and operations in […]

PagerDuty, the service that helps everybody from startups to enterprises manage incidents when they inevitably arise, today announced the launch of two new features that both use the company’s machine learning smarts to help teams respond to issues faster and more efficiently. The first of these services is Intelligent Triage, which is part of the […]

London’s transport regulator, TfL, has given Uber a temporary reprieve to continue operating in the UK capital. The ride-hailing giant’s current (provisional) licence expires tomorrow but there’s no return to normality for Uber in its most important European city — with TfL issuing just a two-month extension on its private hire vehicle licence — not […]

Back in 2017, Tulip raised a $13 million Series A, with help from NEA, Pitango Venture Capital and a handful of investors who were already on board for its seed round. Now the Somerville, Mass. startup is back with a Series B that’s three times that. Germany tool maker DMG MORI has joined the ranks […]

Cycode, an Israeli security company that aims to protect enterprises’ source code, today announced that it has raised a $4.6 million seed led by YL Ventures. Among others, Andy Grolnick, the former president and CEO of LogRhythm, Justin Somaini, the former CSO of SAP, and Eyal Gruner, the founder and CEO of Cynet, also participated. […]

Adobe today announced that Fresco (previously also known under its codename Project Gemini), it’s long-awaited next-generation drawing and painting app, is now available on the iPad. If you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber, you should be able to download it right now, but unlike some of Adobe’s other products, Fresco will also come in a free […]

Fivetran, a startup that helps companies move data from disparate repositories to data warehouses, announced $44 million Series B financing today, less than a year after collecting a $15 million Series A round. Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) led the round with participation from existing investors Matrix Partners and CEAS Investments. As part of the deal, Martin […]

NASA has placed an order for a minimum of six, and as many as 12 Orion spacecraft from Lockheed Martin. The Orion is a spacecraft that Lockheed Martin designed and built specifically for the purpose of flying crewed missions to space, and the first Orion recently completed construction ahead of testing and preparation for its […]

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will launch a cargo of experiments, supplies and small satellite payloads to the International Space Station today at 12:05 PM EDT (1:05 AM JST / 9:05 AM PDT). The payload will be delivered via a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) H-IIB rocket, packed in an H-II Transport Vehicle (HTV) unpiloted […]

Sentry, a startup that provides bug-monitoring software for app developers, announced today that it has raised a $40 million Series C led by returning investor Accel, with participation from New Enterprise Associates. The funding brings the San Francisco-based company’s total raised to about $66.5 million. Its last round of funding, a $16 billion Series B, […]

How do you attract the attention of a prince? Aside from being Meghan Markle, of course. One answer came recently in the form of Prince Harry’s backing of a new initiative designed to make offsetting the carbon from your airline flights a properly mainstream idea. For Harry, the initiative had a double whammy. It might […]

Got an early stage fund? Then grab an Investor pass, pack your bags and head to Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. We’ll host hundreds of exhibiting startups, which makes this tech conference prime prospecting territory for investors looking to add only the best early-stage startups to their portfolio. Buy your Investor pass and join thousands […]

Credit cards have become all but ubiquitous for consumer transactions, and it isn’t hard to see why. By intermediating payments, networks like Visa allow buyers and sellers to exchange money for goods and services without knowing the financial risk profile of the counter-party. Rather than applying for credit at every merchant you shop at, you […]

As Samsung and Huawei double down on their foldable smartphone lineups, and other handset vendors try to hide the notch, Chinese giant Xiaomi today chalked out a different path altogether. The company unveiled the Mi Mix Alpha, a smartphone with a front display that fully wraps around the back, save for a strip. The Mi […]

Accounting is one of the cornerstones to building a business, but for most companies, getting it right is more of a necessity than it is one of their core competencies. That has created a vacuum, and now, a company called Tipalti — which has developed a popular solution to automate accounting for businesses that are not […]

Cluno, the Munich startup providing what it calls a “car subscription” service, is disclosing that it has raised €140 million in debt financing. Two asset-backed financing deals totalling €80 million were signed recently, adding to €60 million of debt previously secured — ie it’s not all entirely new money. Separately, the company raised €25 million […]

The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that Google doesn’t have to de-reference results related to the so-called right to be forgotten at a global scale. Europe’s top court also reminds Google and other search engines that it doesn’t change anything when it comes to the right to be forgotten in Europe. […]

The Galaxy Fold comes in a nice box. It’s a thing I rarely, if ever, mention in product write-ups, because, if done right, shipping containers are generally the least interesting thing about a product. But Samsung, to its credit, has taken great care. That’s been one of the constants across this admittedly bungled product launch: […]

A recently revealed mobile malware campaign targeting Uyghur Muslims also ensnared a number of senior Tibetan officials and activists, according to new research. Security researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab say some of the Tibetan targets were sent specifically tailored malicious web links over WhatsApp, which, when opened, stealthily gained full access to […]

Jellysmack originally started as a social media company with popular brands on Facebook and other social platforms, such as Beauty Studio, Oh My Goal, Gamology and Riddle Me This. The company is now branching out and expanding with a different product, the ‘Creator’s Program.’ The startup is going to partner with popular YouTube creators and […]

Cledara, a startup that has developed a SaaS to help companies manage their SaaS spending — as if things couldn’t get any more meta — has picked up pre-seed backing from the recently announced Anthemis/BBVA strategic partnership, and others. In total, the startup has raised $930,000. This includes completing the Techstars London accelerator, along with […]

Honestbee, the Singapore-based grocery delivery startup that has been struggling with financial issues, owes 217 employees a total of almost USD $1 million in unpaid salary. The Strait Times reported that the figure was revealed in an affidavit filed in court on Sept. 20 by Honestbee CEO Ong Lay Ann as part of the startup’s […]

Kik Interactive CEO Ted Livingston announced today that the company is shutting down Kik Messenger to focus on its cryptocurrency Kin, the target of a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company’s team will be reduced to 19 people, a reduction that will affect over 100 employees, as it focuses on converting […]

If you’re a VC or founder in London, Bangalore or San Francisco, you’ll likely interact with some part of Africa’s tech landscape for the first time — or more — in the near future. When measured by monetary values, the continent’s tech ecosystem is small by Shenzhen or Silicon Valley standards. But when you look […]