Crunch Hype

Ahead of the upcoming school year, Apple this morning announced it’s bringing contactless student IDs in Apple Wallet to several more U.S. universities. The expansion will allow over 100,000 college students to carry their student ID on their iPhone or Apple Watch, where it can be used for a variety of tasks including paying for […]

Walmart is dominating the U.S. online grocery market, according to new research out this week from the analysts at Second Measure. The nationwide retailer today offers grocery pickup and delivery in nearly every U.S. state, and had 62% more customers in June than its next nearest rival. And no, in this case, that rival is […]

Electronics manufacturers are no doubt breathing a collective sigh of relief this morning at the news that the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has delayed tariffs on a number of categories. A long list of exports, including livestock, foodstuff and clothing will have the additional 10 percent tariff imposed on September 1. Others, including “cell […]

Over the last couple of years, Spotify has made a big push into podcasts. The tip of the spear has been major investments, including acquisitions of companies like Gimlet and Anchor. It’s all part of the company’s attempt harness a massively growing category and build an audience beyond music. The other great thing about podcasts […]

The Roku Channel continues to expand beyond ad-supported movies and premium subscriptions, with today’s announcement of the addition of several more live TV channels available to anyone with a Roku streaming device or Roku TV. The company says today it’s adding five free live TV channels to this offering, including most notably, fubo’s Sports Network. […]

Creating backups for massive enterprise deployments may feel like a solved problem, but for the most part, we’re still talking about complex hardware and software setups. Clumio, which is coming out of stealth today, wants to modernize enterprise data protection by eliminating the on-premise hardware in favor of a flexible, SaaS-style cloud-based backup solution. For […]

Aaron Rasmussen, co-founder and former creative director of MasterClass, has a new startup called Outlier.org. Like MasterClass, Outlier is bringing education online, but with a key difference — these are college classes offering real college credit. The startup is launching a pilot version of its first two courses, Calculus I and Introduction to Psychology, for the […]

PlayGalaxy Link got fleetingly little stage time at last week’s Unpacked event. It’s true that Samsung had a lot of information to jam into the hour-long press conference, but the offering was glazed over during a brief segment on mobile gaming — a surprising choice given how big of an industry the category has become. […]

Nvidia’s GPU-powered platform for developing and running conversational AI that understands and responds to natural language requests has achieved some key milestones and broken some records that have big implications for anyone building on their tech – which includes companies large and small, since much of the code they’ve used to achieve these advancements is […]

As we noted last month, DJI’s camera stabilizer line began life as an offshoot of the company’s drone offerings. Since then, however, it’s grown into a pretty massive portfolio in its own right, spanning from SLR to standalone pocket offerings. For obvious reasons, the Osmo Mobile has been one of the more popular models. Designed […]

The notion of the corporate directory has been around for many years, but in a time of more frequent turnover and shifting responsibilities, the founders of Rimeto, a 3 year old San Francisco startup, wanted to update it to reflect those changes. Today, the company announced a $10 million Series A investment from USVP, Bow […]

Snap has introduced a third generation of its Spectacles wearable sunglass cameras, and these include new 3D effects for use in Snapchat. You can capture 3D snaps, with a slight side-to-side depth effect thanks to dual angle cameras; 3D filters, which add AR graphics effects to captured video; 3D lenses, which add stickers and characters […]

Nintendo looks set to release wireless SNES controllers for the Nintendo Switch, which likely means it’ll also be bringing classic SNES titles to its Nintendo Online virtual gaming library. The news comes via an FCC filing (hat tip to Eurogamer) , which includes a diagram of what looks very clearly to be the backside of […]

Dostavista, the “crowdsourced” same-day delivery service founded in Russia but operating in several countries, has raised a $15 million Series B. Leading the round is Vostok New Ventures, with participation from existing investors Flashpoint, and Addventure. Founded in 2012 by Mike Alexandrovski, after he initially considered creating a game where players would be asked to […]

When Fortnite reached stratospheric popularity early last year, there were undoubtedly an awful lot of VCs on the sidelines looking enviously at the massive platform and wondering what opportunities could be gleaned from its rapid rise. Epic Games went on to raise later that year at a nearly $15 billion valuation so some of those […]

Caterwings, the Rocket Internet-founded corporate catering marketplace that operates in 8 countries, has acquired German competitor Lemoncat. Terms remain undisclosed, although I understand from a source close to the company that it was an “8-digit all stock” deal and sees investors, which include Lukasz Gadowski, Target Global, Point 9, and Northzone, pick up shares in […]

Facebook has denied contradicting itself in evidence to the UK parliament and a US public prosecutor. Last month the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee wrote to the company to raise what it said were discrepancies in evidence Facebook has given to international parliamentarians vs evidence submitted in response to the Washington, DC […]

Digital payments startup QFPay announced today that it has raised $20 million in new funding led by returning investors Sequoia Capital China and Matrix Partners. MDI Ventures, the investment arm of state-owned Indonesian telecom Telkom Indonesia, Rakuten Capital and VentureSouq also participated as new strategic investors. According to Crunchbase, this brings QFPay’s total raised so […]

Zhihu, the largest question and answer platform in China, has raised a $434 million Series F. This is not only the company’s biggest round since it launched in 2011, but also one of the largest secured over the past two years by a Chinese Internet culture and entertainment company, said China Renaissance, which served as […]

Porsche is upping its plug-in hybrid game with several new vehicles added to its lineup, including a power-packing 2020 Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid. The plug-in version of this flagship SUV combines a 14.1-kilowatt-hour battery and 134-horsepower electric motor with a 4.0-liter twin turbocharged V8 engine found in the traditional gas-powered Cayenne Turbo. The electric motor […]

Tumblr has been an millstone around the neck of its owners, first Yahoo and later Oath and Verizon Media, pretty much since it was acquired in 2013. They never found an answer to the question that new owner Automattic is presumably about to take a crack at: how to make this unruly erstwhile porn factory […]

Last week when Salesforce announced it was buying ClickSoftware for $1.35 billion you might not have realized it, but the law firm Shearman & Sterling was advising Salesforce throughout the deal. In fact, there are lawyers involved in every transaction of this sort, from the initial call to the closing. As you would expect, there […]

Exchanges like Coinbase have ballooned in size by taking the mechanics of equity markets and fitting them to cryptocurrency markets, but as the space expands in its scope and craftiness, new exchanges trading asset classes native to cryptocurrency are taking off and attracting the attention of top Silicon Valley VCs. Oh, and Coinbase, too. Blade […]

Six years after Yahoo purchased Tumblr for north of $1 billion, its parent corporation is selling the once-dominant blogging platform. WordPress owner Automattic Inc. has agreed to take the service off of Verizon’s hands. Terms of the deal are undisclosed, but the number is “nominal,” compared to its original asking price, per an article in […]

Most people don’t think twice about picking up a phone charging cable and plugging it in. But one hacker’s project wants to change that and raise awareness of the dangers of potentially malicious charging cables. A hacker who goes by the online handle MG took an innocent-looking Apple USB Lightning cable and rigged it with […]

Nio delivered just 837 electric vehicles in July, a nearly 38% drop from the previous month that was largely caused by a voluntary recall of its high-performance ES8 SUV. The Chinese automotive startup issued a voluntary recall in June of nearly 5,000 ES8 SUVs after a series of battery fires in China and a subsequent […]

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. Twitter’s latest test lets users subscribe to a tweet’s replies Many people already receive push notifications when selected accounts send out […]

It’s been almost a year since PopBase first launched on the Battlefield Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018. In the ensuing months the company has been working hard to sign up influencers and get its platform for social media stars ready for prime time. The company is launching its early access release today… enabling social […]

We spend a lot of time talking about new funds, and new startup venture raises, but we spend little time talking about the cash flow challenges of running a venture fund. Let’s change that today. Starting a new venture fund is extremely challenging. In addition to just the monstrous task of fundraising — which can […]

London-based edtech startup Pi-Top has cut a number of staff, TechCrunch has learned. According to our sources the company has reduced its headcount in recent weeks, with staff being told cuts are a result of restructuring as it seeks to implement a new strategy. One source told us Pi-Top recently lost out on a large […]

PayPal -owned payments app Venmo today announced support for instant transfers to U.S. bank accounts. The feature is an optional alternative to Venmo’s standard bank transfer service, which typically takes one to three business days to process transactions. With Instant Transfer, however, funds from your Venmo account can hit your bank account within minutes. As […]

Postmates is gearing up to makes its S-1 public in September, TechCrunch has learned

Reference docs and spreadsheets seemingly make the world go ’round, but what if employees could just close those tabs for good without losing that knowledge? One startup is taking on that complicated challenge. Predictably, the solution is quite complicated as well from a tech perspective, involving an AI solution that analyzes everything on your PC […]

If making an Android alternative was easy, we’d have a lot more of them. Huawei’s HarmonyOS won’t be replacing the mobile operating system for the company any time soon, and Huawei has made it pretty clear that it would much rather go back to working with Google than go at it alone. Of course, that […]

The U.S. Air Force is looking to lock in its launch providers for national security satellite missions to take place between 2022 and 2026, and the bids for this so-called “Phase 2” procurement contract are now in. The field of competitors looking to become one of the two companies chosen is a who’s who of […]

Disrupt SF 2019 is set to be the biggest and best Disrupt yet. We’ve got a little something for everyone, including space chats with Lockheed Martin’s Marillyn Hewson and Blue Origin’s Bob Smith, a word from Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, a fireside chat with two of 2019’s big VC winners, Ann Muira-Ko and Theresia Gouw, […]

Attentive, a startup helping retailers personalize their mobile messages, is announcing that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding. The startup was founded by Brian Long and Andrew Jones, who sold their previous startup TapCommerce to Twitter. When they announced Attentive’s $13 million Series A last year, Long told me the startup is […]

A week after gaming platform Roblox announced its new milestone of 100 million monthly users — topping Minecraft — the company said at its fifth annual developer conference that its developer community is on track to earn $100 million in 2019. Roblox also introduced a new set of developer tools for building immersive, more realistic […]

Ro hires Todd Levy after four years at BuzzFeed.

Although 3D TVs may have grabbed all the headlines a decade ago at CES, the tech never found a useful inroad into consumers’ homes. Not everyone has given up on them, though they look a bit different now. Light Field Lab, a Bay Area startup that emerged from stealth two years ago, wants to build […]

Just in time for back-to-school shopping, Nike today officially announced its entry into the subscription service market with the launch of a “sneaker club” for kids called Nike Adventure Club. The new program is specifically designed to make shopping easier for parents who struggle to keep up with their quickly growing children’s shoe needs. Instead […]

If the sheer amount of information that we can tap into using the internet has made the world our oyster, then the huge success of Google is a testament to how lucrative search can be in helping to light the way through that data maze. Now, in a sign of the times, a startup called Lucidworks, […]

Even the most enterprising startup founders can suffer a bout of procrastination or last-minute decision making. We get it. That’s why we’re extending the early-bird deadline for TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 in San Francisco on September 5. You now have until August 16 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) to save $100 on this day-long conference focused on […]

Twitter in more recent months has been focused on making conversations on its platform easier to follow, participate in, and in some cases, block. The company’s latest test, announced via a tweet ahead of the weekend, will allow users to subscribe to replies to a particularly interesting tweet they want to follow, too, in order […]

German auto industry giant Bosch is developing new technology that will add glasses-free 3D imaging to future versions of its in-car digital display technology. These 3D displays use passive 3D tech, which means you won’t need to wear glasses to see the effect, and it also skips eye tracking, which is a key ingredient for […]

UK on-demand food delivery startup Deliveroo is pulling the plug on its service in Germany. The startup expanded into the market more than four years ago. But in an email sent to users it writes that — “regrettably” — it will be exiting Germany on August 16. “This was not an easy decision and one […]

India’s richest man’s Reliance Jio, which has disrupted the local telecom and features phone markets in less than three years of its existence, is ready to foray into many more businesses. In a series of announcements Monday, that included a long-term partnership with global giant Microsoft, Reliance Jio said it will commercially roll out its broadband […]

Meesho, a Bangalore-based social commerce startup, has raised $125 million in a new financing round to expand its business in the country and change the way millions shop online. The Series D round was led by Naspers, and existing investors SAIF, Sequoia, Shunwei Capital, RPS and Venture Highway participating as well. Facebook also participated in the […]

ByteDance has taken another step into search with the launch of a new search portal today. Called Toutiao Search, the portal is part of the website for Toutiao, the news aggregator owned by ByteDance, and currently optimized only for mobile. Though it is part of Toutiao’s website, the portal is separate from the Toutiao’s own […]

The competition for control of the burgeoning market for burger replacements (and other alternatives to animal proteins) continues to heat up. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods the two leading contenders for top purveyor of plant-based patties (and other formulations) have spent most of the typically sleepy summer months jockeying for the position as top supplier […]