Crunch Hype

Africa focused tech talent accelerator Andela will cut 400 junior engineers across Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, CEO Jeremy Johnson told TechCrunch. The layoffs come as the startup released first time earnings figures indicating it will surpass $50 million in annual revenues for 2019. Yes, the news seems a bit disjointed. Not everything moves in the […]

Holidu, the Munich-headquartered holiday rentals search engine that is now active in 21 country markets, has raised €40 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Prime Ventures, with participation from coparion and MairDuMont Ventures. Existing investors, including EQT Ventures, Venture Stars, Senovo and business angel Chris Hitchen, also followed on. Founded in […]

Google said on Tuesday it is bringing a set of new features to Android TVs to improve the experience of users who rely on mobile hotspots to connect their giant devices to the internet. The features, developed by Google’s Next Billion Users team, will be first rolled out to users in India and then in […]

Missed the deadline to apply for Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2019? We get it. Founder life is tough. Well guess what, we’re extending applications by one week. The extension ends September 27th at 11:59pm (PT). It’s time to buckle down and apply to the Startup Battlefield right now! It’s easy and free to apply. Add your […]

Fieldwire, which makes task management software for construction teams on commercial projects that helps organize everyone involved so things don’t fall through the figurative (or literal) cracks, has raised $33.5 million in Series C funding. Menlo Ventures led the round, joined by Brick & Mortar Ventures, Hilti Group, and Formation 8. It isn’t a huge […]

Computer scientist and open software advocate Richard Stallman said he has resigned from his position as a visiting scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) after describing a victim of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein as “entirely willing” in emails sent to a department list. Stallman has also stepped down from his roles […]

Aspect Ventures, an early-stage, San Francisco-based venture firm founded five years ago very notably by two veteran VCs who happen to be women, is splitting up. Cofounders Jennifer Fonstad, formerly of DFJ, and Theresia Gouw, formerly of Accel, are launching separate firms, a source confirms. The WSJ reported the news earlier today. Fonstad tells the […]

The We Company, parent company of the short-term real estate property management and development company WeWork and other We-related subsidiaries, is reportedly shelving its plans for an initial public offering. The company’s plans for a public offering have been hampered by questions about its corporate governance and the ultimate value of a company that private […]

Waymo transported 6,299 passengers in self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans in its first month participating in a robotaxi pilot program in California, according to a quarterly report the company filed with the California Public Utilities Commission. In all, the company completed 4,678 passenger trips in July — plus another 12 trips for educational purposes. It’s a […]

How do you keep your startup secure? That’s the big question we explored at TC Sessions: Enterprise earlier this month. No matter the size, every startup is an enterprise. Every startup will grow in size as it builds out. But as a company expands, that rapid growth can lead to a distraction from the foundational […]

Apple Arcade seems purpose-built to make room in the market for beautiful, sad, weird, moving, slow, clever and heartfelt. All things that the action, shooter and MOBA-driven major market of games has done nothing to foster over the last decade. I had a chance to play a bunch of the titles coming to Apple Arcade, […]

If you’re running a beta version of iOS 13 or 13.1, chances are you can now open the App Store and subscribe to Apple Arcade. The company has been rolling out its new subscription service, as MacRumors spotted. It works on my iPhone running a public beta version of iOS 13.1. Apple Arcade requires iOS […]

The California state legislature has passed AB 1331, a criminal justice data bill that aims to improve the quality of criminal justice records and creates a pathway for courts to share data with researchers. The bill is awaiting a signature of approval by California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Authored by Assemblyperson Robert Bonta, the bill seeks […]

Netflix has just scored a major content deal that could help it stem the loss of subscribers as competition among streamers heats up. The company announced it has acquired the global streaming rights to the popular sitcom “Seinfeld,” which will bring all 180 episodes of the Emmy winner to Netflix subscribers starting in 2021. The […]

Getting paid for providing content online isn't simple, and as the ad-based economy continues to collapse pretty much everyone is looking for alternatives. One problem: While the web is great at moving images and audio and files around, it has a real problem with money. Coil, Mozilla, and Creative Commons hope to change that with a native web payments standard and $100M to get it off the ground.

We’re announcing a big addition to the Disrupt SF Agenda: Will Smith and director Ang Lee will be joining us to discuss their upcoming film “Gemini Man.” They’ve both had long careers in the movie business — Lee’s titles include “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Brokeback Mountain” (which won him an Academy Award for Best Director) […]

YouTube commenters will now have their channel loyalty — or their tendency to troll — exposed, thanks to a new feature called profile cards, now in testing. Recently announced by way of YouTube’s Creator Insider channel, where the company shares updates and changes with its creator community, these new profile cards would appear whenever you […]

Google will reveal the next Pixel in greater detail at an event happening October 15 in New York, the company confirmed via invites sent to media today. We already know the Pixel 4 will be revealed at this event, because Google has already dropped some official images and feature details for the new Android smartphone, […]

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. Salesforce doubles down on verticals, launches Manufacturing and Consumer Goods Clouds Salesforce unveiled two new business units today as part of […]

Ten years ago this week, Adobe acquired Omniture for $1.8 billion. At the time, Adobe was a software company selling boxed software like Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop to creatives. Many people were baffled by the move, not realizing that purchasing a web analytics company was really the first volley in a full company transformation to […]

The main stage at Disrupt SF doesn’t make time for audience questions, but we know everyone has questions to ask our speakers. So we have a separate Q&A stage where many of our speakers appear a second time to take direct questions from Disrupt attendees, with the help of a moderator, of course. Ask Sebastian […]

Seems like everything is going to the cloud these days, so why should movie making be left out? Today, Walt Disney Studios announced a five-year partnership with Microsoft around an innovation lab to find ways to shift content production to the Azure cloud. The project involves the Walt Disney StudioLAB, an innovation work space where […]

Even before the 2016 election, political polarization was increasing, with Americans so entrenched in the news sources they rely on that the Pew Research Center said “liberals and conservatives inhabit different worlds.” Now SmartNews, the news aggregation app that recently hit unicorn funding status, wants to give users a way to step out of their […]

Facebook on Monday announced a number of updates aimed at video creators and publishers, during a session at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) taking place in Amsterdam. The updates involve changes to live video broadcasting, Facebook’s Watch Party, and Creator Studio, and they include enhancements to tools, expanded feature sets, and improved analytics, among other […]

Automated check-out systems in supermarkets, where cashiers are replaced by barcode-readers and touchscreen interfaces for taking payments, have become a commonplace fixture in many parts of the world. But today, a startup that’s building many believe will be the next generation of such systems — computer-vision-powered platforms that monitor what you take from the shelves […]

As more enterprise developers make use of open source, it becomes increasingly important for companies to make sure that they are complying with licensing requirements. They also need to ensure the open sources bits are being updated over time for security purposes. That’s where FOSSA comes in, and today the company announced an $8.5 million […]

The Android tablet market isn’t exactly a hotbed of excitement and activity, which makes it all the more impressive that Samsung continues to iterate its own tablet lineup in smart, meaningful ways that push the technology forward and deliver a stellar experience. Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab S6 (starting at $649.99) is no exception, and this […]

As legacy industries make the migration to cloud-based, digital solutions to run and grow their businesses, Salesforce is hoping that it will get a cut of the action when it comes to their IT investments. The CRM giant has been doubling down on building specialised solutions for individual industry verticals, and today, it is unveiling new […]

When Plaid announced its $250 million Series C investment, last year, it left out a couple of key investors. Today it revealed that Mastercard and Visa had also quietly participated in the round. For a company like Plaid, which builds APIs to enable customers to access their bank accounts inside applications in a seamless way, […]

Privacy-minded changes to smartphone operating systems which foreground the background activity of third party apps are helping to spotlight more of the surveillance infrastructure deployed by adtech giants to track and profile human eyeballs for profit. To wit: iOS 13, which will be generally released later this week, has already been spotted catching Facebook’s app […]

Beekeeper, the Switzerland and U.S.-based startup that provides a mobile-first communications platform for employers that need to communicate with blue-collar and service-oriented workers, has raised $45 million in Series B funding. The round was co-led by Thayer Ventures and Swisscanto Invest by Zürcher Kantonalbank, with participation from previous backers including Atomico, Alpana Ventures, Edenred Capital […]

Mitto, a debit card and app designed for “Generation Z” teens, has raised €2 million in seed funding. Backing the round is Spanish bank Banco Sabadell via its innovation and venture arm InnoCells, along with Athos Capital, and Spanish social media influencers “AuronPlay” and “Wismichu”, amongst others. Claiming to plug a gap in existing payment […]

French startup Leeto provides a service for French works councils, better known as comités d’entreprise. The fintech startup lets you hand out perks to employees using a simple web service combined with a payment card. Leeto recently raised a $2.2 million funding round (€2 million) from Founders Future and various business angels, such as Thomas […]

We’ve aggregated the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.

Every founder knows you gotta find market fit. Almost no one gets it right on the first try, which means iterating quickly and decisively is the difference between greatness and the void. On the Extra Crunch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, we have a jam-packed panel filled with leading product builders to discuss just how […]

“The Family” is a new documentary series on Netflix, based on the work of journalist Jeff Sharlet — whose books promise to expose “the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power” and “the fundamentalist threat to American democracy.” Sarah Perez joins us on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast to discuss the series […]

I really wish I hadn’t had cause to write this piece, but it recently came to my attention, in an especially unfortunate way, that death in the modern era can have a complex and difficult technical aftermath. You should make a will, of course. Of course you should make a will. But many wills only […]

Hey all. This is Week-in-Review, where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure. Last week, I talked about shifting Facebook user habits and their play to […]

In its first half-decade of existence, PopSocket has grown into one of the most popular — and imitated — smartphone accessories on the market. In 2018 alone, the company generated $90 million in profit. Not to bad for a little Colorado-based upstart. So, where does an utterly dominated accessory maker go from here? Beverages, naturally. […]

Julian Shapiro Contributor Share on Twitter Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing agency that trains you to become a marketing professional. He also writes at Julian.com. More posts by this contributor How to get your ads working, and whether PR is worth it How to work with top influencers and avoid […]

It’s hard to find the expert help you need right at the clutch moment when you’re building your startup. We’re trying to solve that problem through a product we’ve been developing this year, called Verified Experts — and we’d like to get some more input on it from startup people like you. As in real […]

There was a time when brick-and-mortar mom and pops framed their first $1 on the wall, but in the SaaS startup the equivalent milestone is $1 billion revenue run-rate. Salesforce is the SaaS revenue king reporting $4 billion in revenue for its most recent quarterly report, and there are many other relatively new SaaS companies, […]

Tech startups want to destigmatize sex Sex, despite being one of the most fundamental human experiences, is still one of those businesses that some advertisers reject, banks are hesitant to financially support and some investors don’t want to fund. That’s TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey discussing the rise of “sextech”, a movement among technologists and product […]

In this week's newsletter: Part & Parcel is bringing plus-sized clothing out of the dark corners of department stores.

Shares of Cloudflare rose 20% today in its first day of trading on the public market, opening trading at $18 after it priced its IPO at $15 a share yesterday and holding steady through the day. Put another way, the performance of the nine-year-old company — which provides cloud-based network services to enterprises — was relatively […]

Disney CEO Bob Iger has resigned from Apple’s board of directors, according to a just-published SEC filing. Neither company has given any reason for the departure — the explanatory text of the SEC filing is literally just “On September 10, 2019, Bob Iger resigned from the Board of Directors of Apple Inc.” — but with […]

MoviePass’ all-you-can-watch movie theater membership always seemed too good to be true. After multiple price hikes, business model changes, temporary shutdowns and raising a mountain of money less than a year ago, the company seems to be calling it quits. MoviePass has issued an announcement letting customers know that the service will stop working as […]

We’ve aggregated the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.

Prosthetic limbs are getting better every year, but the strength and precision they gain doesn't always translate to easier or more effective use, since amputees have only a basic level of control over them. One promising avenue being investigated by Swiss researchers is having an AI take over where manual control leaves off.