Crunch Hype

Raisin, the well-capitalised fintech startup that offers a pan-European marketplace for savings and investment products, has acquired Fairr, a German startup disrupting the pensions industry. Terms remain undisclosed, although I understand the price was in the “double-digit Euro millions” range. The majority of the deal was cash, although some Fairr investors exited with a mixture […]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Smartphone sales are down. Again. After years of growth, the smartphone market’s recent slide has continued into the second quarter of 2019, per numbers from analyst group, Gartner. At 1.7% year over year, it’s not a huge slice of the overall pie, but it does point to […]

Festicket, the U.K.-headquartered festival booking platform, has acquired U.K.-based ticketing and cashless point-of-sale (POS) platform Event Genius. The sale also includes Event Genius’s consumer facing brand, Ticket Arena, while further terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. Founded by Reshad Hossenally, Event Genius offers a complete event solution for event organisers, spanning things like online […]

Beam, a telepresence robot with a screen that a person can remotely control and use to communicate via video, became a breakthrough success in the world of robotics in part because of its role in helping high-profile, but movement-limited, people like Edward Snowden better communicate with the outside world, and disability rights activists meet with world […]

Edited: Updated to clarify that this feature began rolling out in Western regions in February 2018, but just extended to Hong Kong, too. Days after Google said YouTube was used in a coordinated effort to spread misinformation about protesters in Hong Kong, the platform has begun adding information panels to videos on its Hong Kong-facing […]

When is a game not a game? When you never win. For years, virtualization software maker Parallels offered the chance to win a free product key if you “stump the KeyGenie,” a virtual robot which users can play against. Normally, users must buy a product key to run the software beyond its two-week free trial. […]

PredictLeads collects data to help venture capital firms and sales teams identify high growth companies.

The automotive industry has been promoting self-driving cars as a kind of panacea that will solve numerous problems that modern society is grappling with right now, from congestion to safety to productivity (you can work while riding!). Unfortunately, a very big question that has been almost entirely overlooked is: how long will these cars last? […]

You really have to give Oracle a lot of points for persistence, especially where the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract procurement process is concerned. For more than a year, the company has been complaining across every legal and government channel it can think of. In spite of every attempt to find some issue with the […]

Kentucky Fried Chicken is going beyond chicken with its latest partnership. As other chicken chains vie for chicken sandwich dominance, KFC is doing its bit for the planet and taking its first fledgling steps to move beyond the chicken coop with a plant-based chicken nugget in partnership with Beyond Meat. The first nuggets are going […]

Entrepreneurship in consumer packaged goods is being democratized. This article focuses on customer acquisition, particularly Amazon and online advertising, for the direct-to-consumer CPG venture...

John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, announced today his plans to retire effective October 1, 2019. Donovan has for the past two years led AT&T’s largest business unit, which services 100 million mobile, broadband and pay-TV customers in the U.S., as well as millions of business customers, including nearly all the Fortune 1000. The news […]

Many Silicon Valley companies and fintech startups in India today share a common mission: They all want to bring their financial services to the next billion users. Dozens of fintech startups that we have spoken to in recent months have told us that they all want to address much of India, one of the last […]

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. Bedding startup Boll & Branch raises $100M The company sells sustainably sourced sheets, pillows, mattresses and towels. Until now, it had […]

Bell Helicopter’s catchily named Autonomous Pod Transport 70 (aka APT 70) has managed a major milestone, performing its first autonomous flight during a test at its Forth Worth proving ground. The aircraft is a small vertical take-off and landing craft that users four rotors to provide lift and propulsion once it’s in the air, and […]

Apple has fixed a security flaw for a second time after it accidentally reintroduced an old bug in a recent software update. iOS 12.4.1, released Monday, contains a security fix that was first patched months earlier in iOS 12.3. Apple rolled out a fix in May, but accidentally undid the security patch in its latest […]

Usually when someone in tech says the word "quantum," I put my hands on my ears and sing until they go away. But while IBM's "quantum computing safe tape drive" nearly drove me to song, when I thought about it, it actually made a lot of sense.

IMDb TV, the free ad-supported streaming service launched by Amazon-owned IMDb at the beginning of the year (originally called Freedive), is today arriving on mobile devices. With the updated version of iOS and Android IMDb app rolling out now, users can stream from the app’s growing library of free movies and TV series. Prior to […]

Y Combinator-backed startup Astranis is now set to launch its first commercial telecommunication satellite aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, with a launch time frame currently set for sometime starting in the fourth quarter of next year. Astranis aims to address the market of people who don’t currently have broadband internet access, which is still a […]

What can you do with virtual reality when you have complete control of the physical space around the player? How “real” can virtual reality become? That’s the core concept behind The Void. They take over retail spaces in places like Downtown Disney and shopping malls around the country and turn them into virtual reality playgrounds, […]

Online education startup Udacity has hired former LendingTree executive Gabriel Dalporto as its new CEO, an appointment that follows months of layoffs and a restructuring directed by the company’s co-founder and executive chairman Sebastian Thrun. Dalporto comes to Udacity after seven years at LendingTree, where he served in numerous positions, including chief marketing officer and […]

During a news briefing at the Group of Seven summit, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that U.S. President Donald Trump and Macron have agreed on a compromise regarding the controversial tax on tech giants. France is still going to tax big tech companies. But the French government promises that it’ll scrap the French tax as […]

In four months time, Windows 7 will reach end-of-life and will no longer receive security updates. That’s going to be a problem for some enterprises which still run the decade-old operating system. Starting January 14, 2020, Windows 7 computers will stop receiving security patches, leaving enterprises vulnerable to malware. According to latest data, some 37% […]

For the longest time, even while scientists were working to make it a reality, quantum computing seemed like science fiction. It’s hard enough to make any sense out of quantum physics to begin with, let alone the practical applications of this less than intuitive theory. But we’ve now arrived at a point where companies like […]

The global smart speaker market grew 55.4% in the second quarter to reach 26.1 million shipments, according to a new report from Canalys. Amazon continued to lead the race, accounting for 6.6 million units shipped in the quarter. Google, however, fell to the third spot as China’s Baidu surged ahead. Baidu in Q2 grew a […]

Facebook has succeeded in blocking a pioneering order by Germany’s Federal Cartel Office earlier this year that would have banned it from combining data on users across its own suite of social platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — without their consent. Pioneering because the antitrust regulator had liaised with EU privacy authorities during a […]

With the App Store’s big makeover in fall 2017, Apple attempted to shift consumers’ attention away from the Top Charts and more towards editorial content. But app developers still want to make it to the No. 1 position. According to new research from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower, it’s become easier for non-game apps […]

The Boeing-built X-37B space plane commissioned and operated by the U.S. Air Force has now broken its own record for time spent in space. Its latest mission has lasted 719 days as of today, which is one day longer than its last mission, which ended in 2017, as noted by Space.com. It’s not an overall […]

Presight Capital, the international venture arm of Apeiron Investment Group, is announcing that it’s closed its first fund of $80 million. Apeiron is the family office of German entrepreneur Christian Angermayer (pictured above), who previously co-founded pharmaceutical company Ribopharma — which is now the publicly-traded company Alnylam. Angermayer told me he sees his investments as […]

Boll & Branch, which sells sustainably-sourced sheets, pillows, mattresses and towels, is announcing that it has raised $100 million in a strategic investment from L Catterton’s Flagship Buyout Fund. This looks like a big change from the company’s previous approach to funding. It was self-funded for its first two years (resulting in what CEO Scott […]

Disney showed off some exciting new footage from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the final instalment of the newest Star Wars movie trilogy at its D23 expo this past weekend. Now, that footage is available online for everyone else to see. The clip includes a swelling montage of clips from the previous two trilogies, […]

At VMworld today in San Francisco, VMware introduced a new set of services for managing virtual machines and containers in a single view called Tanzu. The product takes advantage of the knowledge the company gained when it acquired Heptio last year. As companies face an increasingly fragmented landscape of maintaining traditional virtual machines, alongside a […]

Stylitics, a startup powering outfit-based shopping recommendations for online retailers, is announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding. The company was initially known for ClosetSpace, a mobile app that provided consumers with outfit recommendations and inspiration. While the app is still live, Stylitics’ focus has shifted to its retailer tools — […]

Nvidia today announced that it has been working with VMware to bring its virtual GPU technology (vGPU) to VMware’s vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS. The company’s core vGPU technology isn’t new, but it now supports server virtualization to enable enterprises to run their hardware-accelerated AI and data science workloads in environments like VMware’s vSphere, […]

FreshToHome, a Bangalore-based e-commerce startup that sells fresh vegetable, fish, chicken, and other kinds of meat, has raised $20 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint in the nation. The Series B round for the startup was led by Iron Pillar, with Joe Hirao, the founder of Japan’s ZIGExn […]

BharatPe, a New Delhi-based firm that is enabling hundreds of thousands of merchants to start accepting digital payments for the first time each month and also giving them access to working capital, has raised $50 million as it looks to scale its business in the nation. The Series B round for the one-year old startup was […]

Megvii Technology, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup known in particular for its facial recognition brand Face++, has filed for a public listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Its prospectus did not disclose share pricing or when the IPO will take place, but Reuters reports that the company plans to raise between $500 million and […]

Hostinger said it has reset user passwords as a “precautionary measure” after it detected unauthorized access to a database containing information on millions of its customers. The breach is said to have happened on Thursday. The company said in a blog post it received an alert that one of its servers was improperly accessed. Using […]

“The Red Sea Diving Resort,” a new film on Netflix, is based on the true story of Mossad agents who took over an abandoned holiday resort in Sudan to smuggle Jewish Ethiopian refugees out of the country. As we explain in the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, the film feels like it’s made […]

Kyle Dent Contributor Kyle Dent is a Research Area Manager for PARC, a Xerox Company, focused on the interplay between people and technology. He also leads the ethics review committee at PARC. Artificial intelligence is now being used to make decisions about lives, livelihoods, and interactions in the real world in ways that pose real risks to […]

Cryptocurrencies are a religion as much as they are a technology. They almost have to be, given their adherents’ gargantuan ambition of fundamentally changing how the world works. This means they attract charlatans, lunatics, frauds, and false prophets, and furious battles are waged over doctrinal hairspliitting; but it also means they inspire intransigent beliefs which […]

Hey. 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 Snap’s bizarre decision to keep pursuing hardware without really […]

It’s hard at times not to feel sorry for Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, given all that he inherited when he became the ride-share giant’s top boss back in April 2017. Among his many to-do items: take public a money-losing company whose private-market valuation had already soared past what many thought it was worth, clean-up the […]

Editor’s note Due to bad travel logistics (thanks SFO), I wasn’t able to get the mid-week edition of the Extra Crunch roundup newsletter out. Sorry about that. Instead, here is everything we published this week on Extra Crunch in one fell swoop — and my, we covered a lot of ground. Hope you enjoy some […]

You can tell a lot about a service by what it prioritizes on its home screen. With the new Disney + service the focus is initially organized by fan base, with different silos for the company’s various studios and the fans that follow them. As the company gets the service off the ground — and […]

The VW electric ID Buggy concept is delightful and bright, stout and smiling. It’s a vehicle fit for the sunshine and sand dunes, or perhaps a less committing slow roll along the beach. And so my first drive in a prototype of the all-electric buggy — along the coast near Spanish Bay in Monterey, Calif., […]

In this week's newsletter: Andreessen Horowitz's latest investment, Pietra, is tackling the $250 billion jewelry market.

It’s easy to forget that Silicon Valley starts with ‘silicon’, and that there would be no technology innovation without innovation at the silicon level. And Graphcore is well aware of that as the Bristol-based company is designing its own dedicated AI chipset. That’s why I’m glad to announce that Graphcore co-founder and CEO Nigel Toon […]

The rumors have been suggesting it for a while now, and fans have been pretty much begging for it… and it’s happening: Ewan McGregor will return to the role of Obi-Wan for a new Disney+ series. Disney dropped the news at a panel during D23 this evening, almost immediately after premiering the trailer for its […]