Crunch Hype

Adobe has a lot going on with Analytics and the Customer Experience Platform, a place to gather data to understand customers better. Today, it announced a new analytics tool that enables employees to work directly with customer journey data to help deliver a better customer experience. The customer journey involves a lot of different systems […]

When all of us are carrying phones that can snap a thousand photos a minute and are connected to cloud systems that can store millions, there’s an undeniable charm to physical photos. The ones deemed worthy; the ones so special that they must be transformed from bit to atom. While photo printers are nothing […]

Glance, a subsidiary of Indian mobile ad business firm InMobi, said today it has raised $45 million as it prepares to scale its business outside of India and bulk up its product offerings. The unnamed, maiden financing round for Glance was funded by Mithril Capital, a growth stage investment firm co-founded by Silicon Valley investors […]

Pento, a Danish startup working on a better payroll experience for companies and employees, has raised $2.8 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Point Nine Capital and Seedcamp, with participation from a number of smaller funds and angel investors, including departing Atomico Partner Mattias Ljungman. The company had previously raised $700,000 from the […]

SimShine, a computer vision startup based in Shenzhen, has raised $8 million in pre-Series A funding for SimCam, its line of home security cameras that use edge computing to keep data on-device. The funding was led by Cheetah Mobile, with participation from Skychee, Skyview Fund and Oak Pacific Investment. Earlier this year, SimShine raised $310,095 […]

Huawei has dropped a lawsuit against the Commerce Department and other agencies after the U.S. government released telecommunications equipment seized in September 2017. The suit was filed by the Chinese company’s U.S. subsidiary, Huawei Technologies USA, in June. In a statement, Huawei said it considers the return of the equipment, including servers and Ethernet switches, […]

Jack Ma stepped down as Alibaba’s chairman today, handing the role over to the company’s current CEO Daniel Zhang. The transition was announced a year ago. Ma will continue serving on Alibaba’s board until its annual general shareholders’ meeting next year. He also remains a lifetime partner of Alibaba Partnership, a group drawn from the […]

Running a payments business in India is not cheap. Just ask Paytm . One of India’s largest payment companies reported a net loss of Rs 3959 crore ($549 million) for the financial year that ended in March, up 165% over Rs 1490 crore ($206 million) in the same period last year. Undeterred from losses, Paytm […]

QuintoAndar, the Brazilian real estate technology developer, has secured a massive $250 million Series D led by SoftBank, as the Japanese conglomerate continues to deploy its $5 billion commitment to the Latin American region. The round is the latest sign that startups in Latin America can get money if they’re developing technologies in specific areas […]

The troubles for We Company and its main business WeWork are mounting as the Financial Times is reporting that the company’s main backer, Softbank, is pushing for the company to put its troubled public offering on hold. Citing sources familiar with the company and its main investor, the Financial Times said that the cool reception We Company has […]

Target today announced its new data-driven loyalty program, Target Circle, will launch nationwide on October 6th, following a year and a half of beta testing in select markets. The program combines a variety of features, including 1% savings on purchases, birthday rewards and personalized offers and savings designed to make the program more attractive to […]

The Food and Drug Administration has put vaping giant Juul on notice with a pair of letters calling the company out for misleading statements about its products and ongoing targeting of teens. It is demanding written answers to a boatload of pertinent questions and expects Juul to respond within two weeks or risk "even more aggressive action" by regulators.

Shopify, the shopping technology developer that’s quickly becoming the anti-Amazon, has taken another step up the sales supply chain with its $450 million acquisition of the warehouse automation and management technology developer, 6 River Systems. The acquisition will serve to boost efficiencies among Shopify’s Fulfillment Network service, which launched in June. The acquisition gives Shopify […]

Not all venture firms are long for this world. Though they tend to shut down exceedingly quietly, it sometimes happens when the returns just aren’t compelling or a firm grows too fast or there’s infighting or there’s not a solid succession plan. Foundation Capital, founded in 1995, had its own kind of reckoning in the […]

This fall, nearly half a million international students will begin or return to STEM programs at U.S. colleges and universities. If you’re among them, look forward to being wooed by talent-hungry...

Volkswagen introduced Monday the ID.3, the first model in its new all-electric ID brand and the beginning of the automaker’s ambitious plan to sell 1 million EVs annually by 2025. The ID.3 debut, which is ahead of the IAA International Motor Show in Frankfurt, is an important milestone for Volkswagen. The company upended its entire […]

More than 50% of the Fortune 500 companies are now using the open-source Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service project — either directly or through vendors like Pivotal — to build, test and deploy their applications. Like so many other projects, including the likes of OpenStack, Cloud Foundry went through a bit of a transition in recent years […]

We’re excited to announce an addition to the Extra Crunch community perks. Starting today, annual Extra Crunch members can get 100,000 Brex Rewards points after signing up for a Brex corporate credit card. This offer is worth about $1,000 in credit card points. Brex’s corporate credit card is designed for startups, and Extra Crunch was […]

Fifty attorneys general are pushing forward with an antitrust investigation against Google, led by the Texas state attorney general, Ken Paxton. In an announcement on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building, Paxton and a gathering of attorneys general said that the focus of the investigation would be on Google’s advertising practices, but that […]

In 2001, Naspers, a media company that launched in 1915 and later evolved into a media holding company with pay TV interests, agreed to invest $32 million for a 46.5% stake in Tencent. The China-based company had been founded just three years earlier, and, as Quartz notes in a 2014 story about the deal, Tencent […]

Former New York Yankees all-star Alex Rodriguez is racking up quite an impressive batting average in his new career as an investor and has added Fitplan to his roster of portfolio companies. The Los Angeles-based workout app launched by Landon Hamilton and Cam Speck has closed on $4.5 million led by A-Rod and Corazon Capital, […]

Root Insurance, an Ohio-based car insurance startup that uses smartphone technology to understand individual driver behavior, said Monday it has raised $350 million on a $3.65 billion valuation in a Series E funding round. The amount of the round was reported last month by Axios, citing anonymous sources. This official announcement fills in the remaining details, […]

Ad platforms create equal opportunities for businesses but not equal outcomes. They’re mostly marketed as self-service and easy to use, however, there are new features added regularly and...

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. Joi Ito resigns as MIT Media Lab head in wake of Jeffrey Epstein reporting Joi Ito and the MIT Media Lab […]

Microsoft several years ago acquired the popular iOS app Wunderlist with the intention of building out its own list-making productivity app that brings the best of Wunderlist’s feature set to a larger group of mobile consumers. This is a similar path as Microsoft took with email app Accompli, which later became Microsoft Outlook for mobile […]

Uber Freight is establishing its headquarters in Chicago as part of Uber’s broader plan to invest more than $200 million annually in the region, including hiring hundreds of workers. Uber said Monday it will hire 2,000 new employees in the region over the next three years; most will be dedicated to Uber Freight . Uber […]

That Apple has used its App Store to offer itself a competitive advantage is nothing new. TechCrunch and others have been reporting on this problem for years, including those times when Apple chose to display its apps in the No. 1 position on the Top Charts, for example, or when it stole some of the […]

AI startup Adarga has closed a £5 million Series A fundraising by Allectus Capital. But this news rather cloaks the fact that it has been building up a head of steam since its founding in 2016, building up what they say is a £30 million-plus sales pipeline through strategic collaborations with a number of global […]

Mobile messaging app Telegram has fixed a bug allowing users to recover photos and videos “unsent” by other people. Telegram, which has more than 100 million users, has an ephemeral messaging feature that allows users to “unsend” sent messages from other people’s inboxes, such as when a message is sent by mistake. But one security […]

Visual search has become a key component for how people discover products when buying online: if a person don’t know the exact name of what he or she wants, or what they want is not available, it can be an indispensable tool for connecting them with things they might want to buy. Now, one of […]

Spotify users can now share their favorite music and podcasts with friends on Snapchat, the company announced this morning, with added support for sharing a song, playlist, artist profile or podcast either directly to your friends on Snapchat or to your Snapchat Story. Snapchat is now one of several destinations that Spotify users can share […]

Brave Care, the YC-backed urgent care clinic for kids, has today announced the close of a $5 million seed round of funding. The company graduated out of the recent batch of Y Combinator companies but sat out of demo day because this round was already oversubscribed, according to co-founder Darius Monsef . Investors that participated […]

The Versa didn’t single-handedly save Fitbit, but it gave the struggling wearable company a way forward. The smartwatch demonstrated the potential for life beyond the fitness tracker. It also proved that Fitbit was finally ready to offer a product that could compete with the utterly dominant Apple Watch. Last year’s Versa Lite was, by all […]

Fully autonomous cars may (or may not) be just around the corner, but in the meantime, a startup that’s building in-car apps to help human drivers pass the time when behind the wheel has raised a round of funding. Drivetime — which makes voice-based trivia quizzes, games and interactive stories that people can play while driving […]

There were two standout features I really appreciated off the bat about the original Nest (nee Google Home) Hub: its compact size and its lack of camera. The new Nest Max has decidedly neither of those things. After releasing a model that offered an interesting alternative to the Echo Show, Google’s taking Amazon’s flagship smart […]

AI now touches every aspect of how a company operates — from forming the core of the service itself, through to customer interactions, building new things, and helping with mundane paperwork and other back-office tasks. Today, one of the faster-growing startups in the latter category is announcing a round of funding as it continues on […]

Uizard, the Copenhagen-based startup that is using “machine intelligence” to quickly turn app sketches into prototypes, has raised $2.8 million in seed funding. The round is led by Nordic VC firm byFounders, with participation from LDV Capital, av8 Ventures, and New York Venture Partners. A number of individuals are also investing, including Scott Kurnit, Julia […]

Vivaldi has long billed itself as a browser for advanced users who want to be able to customize their browser to their heart’s content. With that mission, it managed to get a foothold in the desktop market, but until now, the browser company co-founded by Opera’s former CEO Jon von Tetzchner, didn’t have a presence […]

DHL has expanded its DHL Africa eShop business to 13 additional markets, upping the presence of the global shipping company’s e-commerce platform to 34 African countries. DHL went live with the digital retail app in April, bringing more than 200 U.S. and U.K. sellers — from Neiman Marcus to Carters — online to African consumers. Africa eShop […]

Italian startup Freeda Media has raised a $16 million Series B round. Existing investor Alven is leading the round, with Endeavor Catalyst, UniCredit and others also participating. UniCredit is also granting the company a debt facility of $3 million. The company has managed to attract millions of followers on Instagram, Facebook and other social media […]

The series of tariffs imposed by the United States on Chinese goods has impacted both U.S. and China-based Amazon vendors, but U.S. sellers are taking a bigger hit to their sales, according to data from cross-border e-commerce analytics company SellerMotor. The gap has widened since the round of tariffs on Chinese goods announced in the […]

French startup Spendesk has raised another $38.4 million Series B round with existing investor Index Ventures leading the round. The company has raised $49.4 million (€45 million) over the years. Spendesk is an all-in-one corporate expense and spend management service. It lets you track expenses across your company, empower your employees with a clear approval […]

Rohan Malhotra and Arjun Malhotra left their jobs in London and Silicon Valley to explore opportunities in India in late 2013. A year later, the brothers launched Investopad to connect with local startup founders and product managers and built a community to exchange insight. Somewhere in the journey, they wrote early checks to social-commerce startup […]

The promise of flying cars has become an idea more synonymous with the tech world’s shortcomings than its exciting potential, but today one of the startups that has been focused on actually trying to make small, airborne vehicles a reality is announcing a fundraise and says it’s on track for a commercial launch in two to […]

HackerOne, the seven-year-old, San Francisco-based company that mediates between hackers and companies interested in testing their online vulnerabilities, has raised $36.4 million in Series D funding that brings the company’s total funding to date to $110 million. The deal was led by Valor Equity Partners, which was joined by the company’s earlier investors, including Benchmark, […]

Alice Lloyd George Contributor Share on Twitter Alice Lloyd George is an early stage investor based in New York and the host of Flux, a series of podcast conversations with leaders in frontier technology. More posts by this contributor Elysium and the quest to bottle the fountain of youth One billion 3D views and counting […]

Before he founded the plant-based burger company Impossible Foods, Patrick Brown, who spent 25 years as a biochemistry professor at Stanford, also co-founded a Hayward, Ca.-based food company called Kite Hill that has developed numerous nut milk and cheese products that it says are healthier and more sustainable than their dairy counterparts. Investors seem to […]

Jesse Lawrence Contributor Jesse Lawrence has been in media and tech for 20 years. Prior to TicketIQ, he worked at MediaMath and IAC. He started his career as a writer. More posts by this contributor In 2018 the ticketing industry finally killed the ‘sold-out’ show The Golden Knights, live gambling and the future of live […]

A friend and MIT grad wrote to me yesterday, “I don’t know if the Media Lab is redeemable at all.” This in the wake of the bombshell Ronan Farrow piece in the New Yorker, reporting that the Media Lab under its director Joi Ito had covered up a much closer relationship with Jeffrey Epstein than […]

Hello subscribers. 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 Apple’s Siri apology. The big story For all […]