Crunch Hype

The power of networking will be in full force at TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 on October 27. This day-long virtual gathering of the global SaaS community features the sector’s leading voices — established founders, top VCs and expert developers. That spells opportunity for early-stage founders who want to expand their network and drive their business […]

At least a portion of the neobanking world is financially stable enough to consider public offerings.

It has been over three months since Click Studios, the Australian software house behind the enterprise password manager Passwordstate, warned its customers to “commence resetting all passwords.” The company was hit by a supply chain attack that sought to steal the passwords from customer servers around the world. But customers tell TechCrunch that they are […]

Reserve Trust, a Denver-based financial services provider, has raised $30.5 million in a Series A round led by QED Investors. FinTech Collective, Ardent Venture Partners, Flywire CEO Mike Massaro and Quovo founder and CEO Lowell Putnam also participated in the financing, which included $17.9 million in secondary shares. It brings the startup’s total raised since […]

The California-based startup, which was founded in 2018, has raised $40 million in a Series B round led by Norwest Venture Partners.

The twice-issued recall for 2017 to 2019 Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles cost General Motors $800 million, the company said in its second quarter earnings statement Wednesday. Costs associated with fixing defective Bolt batteries make up the lion’s share of GM’s $1.3 billion in warranty expenses last quarter. CEO Mary Barra specified on an investor call […]

Amazon announced this morning it’s expanding its faster, same-day delivery service to half a dozen more U.S. cities. The service, which the retailer has been working to make same-day delivery even faster over the past year, now offers consumers in a number of markets the ability to shop up to 3 million items on Amazon.com, […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex hosted a PR roundtable. Yep, our promise back when Alex Konrad came on the program to chat funding rounds is being fulfilled. Here’s who joined us: Amy Widdowson, VP Corporate Communications at […]

The wild swing in the price of Robinhood today appears from our vantage point to be another stonk moment.

Who says there is no big money in software aimed at helping people? Private equity firm Apax Funds announced this morning that it is combining three social impact firms to create a platform of sorts in a deal valued at $2 billion. To build this social good juggernaut, Apax went out and purchased EveryAction from […]

Baleon Capital will invest in pre-Series A and Series A companies focused on health and medical care in the United States.

Zeni’s AI-powered finance concierge platform offers bookkeeping, accounting, tax and CFO services, essentially becoming a back-end controller for startups.

Buildots' technology automatically validates images captured by hardhat-mounted 360-degree cameras, detecting any gaps between the original design and what's actually happening on construction sites.

Even with all the years of work that have been put into improving how screen-based interfaces work, our experiences with websites, mobile apps, and any other interactive service you might use still often come up short: we can’t find what we want, we’re bombarded with exactly what we don’t need, or the flow is just […]

Amazon has become a lynchpin in the e-commerce machine over the years in part because it’s a site we consumers can visit to buy just about anything we want — sold either by Amazon or its 5 million+ third-party merchants — and easily get it delivered to our homes. But the system is not completely […]

Kuaishou Technology, a Chinese firm perceived as a ByteDance rival by many, said on Wednesday it will shut down its controversial short video app Zynn later this month. The app was only available in the U.S. The firm, which last month said it had amassed 1 billion monthly active users, didn’t offer an explanation for […]

South African insurtech platform Naked has raised $11 million in a Naspers-led round. Existing investors, Yellowwoods and Hollard, also participated in the funding round. This comes barely two weeks after Naspers, via its early-stage tech investment vehicle Naspers Foundry, invested in another South African insurtech platform Ctrl in its $2.3 million Series B round. Naked’s […]

More than one smartphone app startup has tried to convince you that by using their app you will miraculously stave off the ravages of age and flab. All I need to do is flip open my phone and real off a few: Gyroscope, MyFitnessPal, Welltory, ActivityTracker, SleepCycle. The list goes on. You name it, there’s […]

Elroy Air has raised a $40 million Series A, including financing from Lockheed Martin’s venture capital arm, to ramp up the build, testing and validation of its inaugural autonomous cargo drone. The funding round saw participation from Marlinspike Capital and Prosperity7, as well as existing investors Catapult Ventures, DiamondStream Partners, Side X Side Management, Shield […]

Today, customers start using products for free and either get value from it or not, but sales teams don’t have real-time data on their experience.

These past few years have seen the emergence of buy now, pay later services worldwide, with leading players raising buttloads of cash to serve an insatiable young adult population who don’t fancy credit cards or paying interest. In what seems to be a consolidation of some sorts, fintech juggernaut Square acquired Australian buy now, pay […]

Karan Bajaj, the founder and chief executive of WhiteHat Jr, is leaving the firm a year after selling the startup for $300 million to Indian edtech giant Byju’s. In an email to employees on Wednesday, Bajaj and Byju’s founder and chief executive Byju Raveendran said the departure follows a “mutually decided” decision made at the […]

Loship, the Vietnamese on-demand e-commerce platform that started as a reviews app, announced today it has raised $12 million in pre-Series C funding, bringing its valuation to $100 million. The round was co-led by BAce Capital, an Ant Group-backed venture firm, and the direct investment unit of Sun Hung Kai & Co Limited. Founded in […]

InstaCarro, a digital marketplace that connects used car sellers to dealers in Brazil, has raised $23 million in a Series B round of funding. Notably, U.S.-based firms co-led the investment, including J Ventures, FJ Labs and Rise Capital. Spain’s All Iron Ventures and Big Sur also participated in the financing, among others. With the latest […]

The main takeaways? "Buy now, pay later" may be effective at driving retail conversion, but scale matters and long-term margins look slim for BNPL startups.

A coalition of app-based ride-hailing and on-demand delivery companies including Lyft, Uber, Doordash and Instacart have filed a petition for a ballot initiative in Massachusetts that would keep gig economy workers classified as independent contractors as the industry takes a fight it won in California on the road. The ballot measure proposed by the Massachusetts […]

WhatsApp said that it would soon let users send disappearing photos and videos and this week the feature will be rolling out to everybody. Anyone using the Facebook-owned messaging app can share a photo or video in “view once” mode, allowing a single viewing before the media in question goes poof. Media shared with “view […]

Square paid around a quarter of its present-day value for Afterpay. That seems like a lot. But was it too much?

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

For mobile users, Discord is adding one new feature that you’d find on a more traditional social app. The company rolled out an option for users to customize their profiles across its iOS and Android apps Tuesday, following the feature’s release on the desktop version of Discord in late June. The new option lives in […]

Today after the bell, U.S. ride-hailing company Lyft reported its second quarter financial performance. In aggregate the company’s performance was a rebound from the year-ago second quarter, which was heavily impacted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns in the United States. Lyft also managed to produce positive adjusted EBITDA in the […]

There are very few marketing channels as well rounded as email newsletters. They provide a direct line of communication; nearly 40x ROI, are infinitely scalable and virtually free.

In the next year and a half, we’re going to see increasing adoption of technologies, which will trigger a broader industry shift, much as Tesla triggered the transition to EVs.

Indian fintech startup BharatPe has raised $370 million in a new round of financing as it looks to aggressively scale its business in the next two years. It’s the nineteenth Indian startup to become a unicorn this year (up from 11 last year) as several high-profile global investors double down in the South Asian market. […]

U.K. cybersecurity company Pen Test Partners has identified several vulnerabilities in the APIs of six home electric vehicle charging brands and a large public EV charging network. While the charger manufacturers resolved most of the issues, the findings are the latest example of the poorly regulated world of Internet of Things devices, which are poised […]

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. After a fittingly fleeting time in the wild, Twitter is banishing its ephemeral stories feature known as Fleets, which debuted in November 2020. Twitter began testing Fleets back in March of last year. The company thought that it might be able to lure people who were […]

Advanced Technology Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with more than $1.8 billion in assets under its management, was hit by a ransomware attack in July that saw cybercriminals steal personal information on the company’s private investors, or limited partners (LPs). In a letter to the Maine attorney general’s office, ATV said it became […]

In May of this year, Snap suspended two Snapchat-integrated apps that allowed users to send anonymous messages, Yolo and LMK, following a lawsuit filed on behalf of a mother whose son died by suicide after being bullied through messages on the apps for many months. In the wake of the suspensions, another anonymous messaging app […]

Google Maps announced today three feature updates to its iOS app. With live location sharing in the iMessage app, a traffic widget for the home screen and dark mode, Google Maps is positioning itself as a stronger competitor against iOS’ native Apple Maps. Live location sharing was already possible in Google Maps — by tapping […]

Last year, movie ticketing and discovery business Fandango, a division of NBCUniversal, bought the on-demand video streaming service Vudu from Walmart, after the retailer had failed to capitalize on the service it had first acquired in 2010 for $100 million. Today, Fandango is taking the next steps with Vudu by merging the service with its […]

With the pandemic wreaking havoc amongst early years education amid school lockdowns, it’s no wonder edtech startups have piled into the space. But it has also served to highlight the abysmal nature of early years teaching: Some 40 million teachers across the globe are leaving the sector, according to the World Bank. Of the 1.5 […]

Startup Alley is the place to be at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23. The sold-out expo area is the virtual home to hundreds of innovative startups ready to demo their tech and talent. While exhibiting offers plenty of opportunity for all, a VIP experience kicked off in July for 50 startup exhibitors the TechCrunch […]

Nikola, the electric truck startup that went public via a SPAC merger, warned Tuesday that supply chain constraints are causing numerous delays forcing it to slash its vehicle delivery projections in half. The company, which is still in pre-production, said in its second-quarter earnings call that its plans to produce 50 to 100 electric semi […]

Inspiration4 is getting its own documentary. Netflix said Tuesday it would be releasing a five-part series on the mission, its first documentary to cover an event “in near real-time,” in five parts in September. “Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space” will follow the first all-civilian Inspiration4 crew as they prepare for and undergo a three-day flight […]

"Draper Esprit’s model enables it to deploy them right back into new investments, ensuring more of Europe’s best startups can raise funding."

Rani Therapeutics, a San Jose-based company developing a pill to replace medical injections, went public on Friday. According to S-1 filings, shares were estimated to price between $14 and $16 last week. On Friday, shares debuted slightly lower, around $11. Rani raised about $73 million in its debut. Rani’s debut comes amidst a flurry of […]

YouTube earlier this year announced its plans to significantly invest in original creator content for its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, with the introduction of a $100 million YouTube Shorts Fund. The fund will reward creators for their most engaging and most viewed short-form videos over the course of 2021 to 2022, with the goal of quickly […]

Substack announced last week that it acquired Letter, a platform that encourages written dialogue and debate. The financials of the deal weren’t disclosed, but this acquisition follows Substack’s recent $65 million raise. Newsletters are all the rage — Facebook launched its exclusive, celeb-studded Bulletin platform last month, and Twitter acquired the newsletter startup Revue earlier […]

Thoma Bravo-owned Sophos has announced its second takeover in as many weeks with the acquisition of Seattle-based DevSecOps startup Refactr. Refactr was founded in 2017 and offers an automation platform that helps cybersecurity and DevOps teams to collaboratively operate. The platform, which is used by the nonprofit Center for Internet Security and the U.S. Air […]

Marvell announced this morning it has reached an agreement to acquire Innovium for $1.1 billion in an all-stock deal. The startup, which raised over $400 million according to Crunchbase data, makes networking ethernet switches optimized for the cloud. Marvell president and CEO Matt Murphy sees Innovium as a complementary piece to the $10 billion Inphi […]