Crunch Hype

In a blockbuster deal that rocks the fintech world, Square announced today that it is acquiring Australian buy now, pay later giant Afterpay in a $29 billion all-stock deal. The purchase price is based on the closing price of Square common stock on July 30, which was $247.26. The transaction is expected to close in […]

The digitization of your haircut may not have been on your 2020 bucket list, but 2021 has an even more surprising line item: Tech-powered barbershops are now a business proposition valued at nearly a billion dollars. Squire is a back-end barbershop management tool for independent businesses. I first covered it in the early months of […]

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment.

Duolingo landed onto the public markets this week, rallying excitement and attention for the edtech sector and its founder cohort. The language learning business’ stock price soared when it began to trade, even after the unicorn raised its IPO price range, and priced above the raised interval. Duolingo’s IPO proves that public market investors can […]

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. The tech industry in China has had quite a turbulent week. The government is upending its $100 billion private education sector, wiping billions from the […]

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. […]

A few years from now, the organizations that succeed will be the ones that resisted the urge to race everyone back to the office and instead rethought how their workforce operates.

TuSimple, the self-driving truck company that went public earlier this year, has partnered with Ryder as part of its plan to build out a freight network that will support its autonomous trucking operations. Under the deal announced this week, Ryder’s fleet maintenance facilities will act as terminals for TuSimple’s freight network. TuSimple’s so-called AFN, or […]

Nearly two years ago, contractors for Google’s Pittsburgh operations voted to join the United Steelworkers union in a bid to secure more labor rights representation. It was an early example of a building union movement for tech workers across the spectrum. But as other hard-fought battles have been waged among blue and white collar workers […]

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

Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle technology startup backed by Ford and VW, has landed a permit in California that will allow the company to give people free rides in its self-driving vehicles on the state’s public roads. The California Public Utilities Commission issued the so-called Drivered AV pilot permit earlier this month, according to the […]

Deliveroo said it is considering leaving the Spanish market, citing limited market share and a long road of investment with 'highly uncertain long-term potential returns' on the horizon.

A change of command is one of the most delicate moments in the life cycle of any organization. If mishandled, the transition from one CEO to the next can result in massive downsides.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week; have a great weekend.

"We will need to raise more money, as you pointed out, that's certainly no secret, but I think that we have multiple options to do that."

“The best thing a startup can do, and I’m seeing it happen more and more, is investing in community early on,” growth marketing expert Max van den Ingh of Unmuted tells us. “When I was leading growth at MisterGreen, we created a community for the first thousand Tesla Model 3 owners in the Netherlands. Everyone […]

I learned about Yat in April, when a friend sent our group chat a link to a story about how the key emoji sold as an “internet identity” for $425,000. “I hate the universe,” she texted. Sure, the universe would be better if people with a spare $425,000 spent it on mutual aid or something, […]

Early Bird Tickets to Disrupt end today, Friday, July 30. Book your tickets now!

What happens after a developer or engineer lands that sweet gig? Are they able to harness their skills and grow in interesting and challenging new directions?

A 13-tonne Tesla Megapack caught fire on Friday morning at a battery storage facility in south-east Australia. The blaze occurred during testing at 10 - 10.15am local time.

Elon Musk is siding with Epic Games in the App Store monopoly case, with the Tesla CEO firing off a tweet Friday morning that called Apple’s Store fees “a de facto global tax on the Internet,” also adding that “Epic is right.” Epic Games legal battle with Apple is sure to last years and the […]

The Government Accountability Office said that it was denying both Blue Origin’s protest and a separate challenge filed by Dynetics.

At Early Stage 2021, design expert Scott Tong walked us through some of the ways founders should think about design, what design means and the steps that come before focusing on the pixels.

Robinhood says it went public because it was ready. And our read of the markets is that it's an appealing time for high-growth tech companies with a history of losses to do so. Yet it's underwater.

Don’t miss your chance to experience TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 — the startup world’s must-attend event of the season — for less than $100. Why not get the best ROI of your time while simultaneously learning about the latest industry trends and mining for opportunities that can take your startup to new levels of success? Disrupt […]

Outvio offers online stores of any size a post-purchase shipping setup, which seeks to replicate an Amazon-style experience where customers can also return packages.

Fear is back with the deadly combination of pandemic politics and a vicious variant. The good news is that if enough people took the shots we could cut the damage to something manageable. The other good news is progress on the twin issues of Trump and social media. In both cases some semblance of balanced […]

Luxembourg’s National Commission for Data Protection (CNPD) has hit Amazon with a record-breaking €746 million ($887 million) GDPR fine over the way it uses customer data for targeted advertising purposes. Amazon disclosed the ruling in an SEC filing on Friday in which it slammed the decision as baseless and added that it intended to defend […]

Xepelin is built on a SaaS model designed to give SMEs a way to organize their financial information in real time.

The development is projected to add 12,000 new jobs, 2 million square feet of offices and 3,700 new homes.

The week brought together both this quarter's earnings cycle and the Q3 IPO rush. So, it was just a little busy!

Any DevOps team can use Porter to manage applications in the cloud, delivering the full flexibility of Kubernetes through a Heroku-like experience.

Gopuff said it plans to use the funding to continue expanding in North America, the U.K. and Europe, among other things.

Catch is working to make sure that every gig worker has the health and retirement benefits they need.

Qatar Holding LLC, an affiliate of Qatar Investment Authority, the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar, is set to invest $200 million into AMC BV through a secondary purchase of shares from Airtel Africa.

If this coalition gets all the relationships right, doesn’t get greedy and understands that there is a social good component here, this could be as impactful as the SAFE was.

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

Last quarter, Chromebooks saw 275% year-over-year growth up to 12 million units. The figure isn’t quite as unwieldy for Q2, but a 75% year-over-year growth is still extremely respectable, with the category hitting 11.9 million shipments, per the latest figures from research firm, Canalys. Chromebooks joined the rest of the PC market in getting an […]

Varda Space Industries has raised a $42 million Series A to bring to manufacturing a key capability that can only be found off-world: microgravity. The eight-month-old startup is looking to establish its first manufacturing facility in space as early as 2023, and by doing so, bring back to Earth advanced products that can only be […]

As companies grow, their security and reliability needs evolve. When working with large customers, having empathy for these needs will go a long way.

Pinterest’s shares had popped last week when Snap posted its best quarter in four years, as investors were betting Pinterest’s image-based social app would also see a return in advertiser spending. Those expectations now appear to be correct, as Pinterest beat on earnings with second-quarter revenue of $613.2 million and earnings per share of 25 […]

Once the U.S. consumer investing and trading app began to allow investors to trade its shares, they went down sharply, off more than 10% in the first hours of its life as a floating stock.

Horizon Blockchain Games is — as the name implies — a company building games on the blockchain, along with tools to help others do the same. The company announced today that it has raised another $4.5 million, bringing its total raised to a little over $13 million. Horizon’s first game is Skyweaver, a competitive digital […]

Kuldeep Singh Rajput, the founder of Boston-based Biofourmis, is imagining a future where heart failure patients go home with a prescription, a wearable sensor and an app. Today, a new FDA designation gets the company one step closer to that goal. Founded in 2015, Biofourmis is a digital therapeutics company that develops software to “augment” […]

The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) has awarded Zūm, a startup that wants to upgrade student transportation, a five-year $150 million contract to modernize its transport service throughout the district. Zūm, which already operates its rideshare-meets-bus service in Oakland, much of Southern California, Seattle, Chicago and Dallas, will be responsible for handling day-to-day operations, […]

Indian budget hotel chain Oyo may have lost a significant portion of its business amid the pandemic, but it is inching closer to finding a new investor: Microsoft. Microsoft is in advanced stages of talks to invest in Oyo, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The size of the investment and the valuation are […]

Livestreaming is a new pillar that brands must consider when building omnichannel marketing strategies, joining the trinity of in-store experiences, traditional e-commerce and social media.

With Scarlett Johansson’s time as an Avenger seemingly in the rearview, the “Black Widow” star has filed a breach of contract suit against Marvel-owner Disney. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court this week, alleges that the studio breached its agreement with the star when it released the film on Disney+ alongside its theatrical […]

As we’ve known for about a week, today was the day Panic’s charming/whacky/curious/all-of-the-above Playdate gaming device (and its crank!) went up for pre-order. The buzz around the little retro-inspired handheld seemed strong — but would that translate into actual sales? The answer, it seems, is a hard yes. Panic committed to making 20,000 units for […]

Epic Games is teasing the biggest in-game event since Travis Scott psychedelically stomped through Fortnite’s virtual meadows. The mysterious new event, which Fortnite-maker Epic is calling the “Rift Tour,” will kick off on Friday, August 6 and run through Sunday, August 8. In the teaser announcement, Epic invites players to “take a musical journey into […]