Crunch Hype

When founders think about the venture firms most likely to invest in space or robotics or other bleeding edge technologies, a handful of firms tend to jump immediately to mind. One of these is Lux Capital, a venture capital firm that has offices in New York and Menlo Park, Ca., and whose bets include Zoox, […]

Poshmark, an online marketplace for buying and selling clothes, has reported a data breach. The company said in a brief blog post that user profile information, including names and usernames, gender and city data was taken by an “unauthorized third party.” Email addresses, size preferences, and scrambled passwords were also taken. Poshmark said it used […]

Six years of tracking a special class of star have yielded a new and improved 3D model of our galaxy, based on direct observation rather than theoretical frameworks. And although no one ever really thought the Milky Way was flat flat, the curves at its edges have now been characterized in better detail than ever before.

StockX, a popular site for buying and selling sneakers and other apparel, has admitted it reset customer passwords after it was “alerted to suspicious activity” on its site, despite telling users it was a result of “system updates.” “We recently completed system updates on the StockX platform,” said the email to customers sent to TechCrunch […]

The idea seemed simple: If you find yourself regularly ordering the same thing from Amazon — coffee, laundry detergent, whatever — why not replace the whole ordering process with a button you put somewhere in your house? Push a button, get a thing. And from that, Amazon’s Dash button was born. Announced one day before […]

Direct-to-consumer plant retailer Bloomscape has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding, with several high-profile D2C startup founders signing on as investors. Founder and CEO Justin Mast told me that his family has five generations of experience as greenhouse owners and operators, and that he first tried to get Bloomscape off the ground more than […]

The San Francisco Bay Area has become an enclave unattainable to all but the most privileged. Los Angeles doesn’t need to become another San Francisco.

The $10 billion, decade-long JEDI cloud contract drama continues. It’s a process that has been dogged by complaints, regulatory oversight and court cases. Throughout the months-long selection process, the Pentagon has repeatedly denied accusations that the contract was somehow written to make Amazon a favored vendor, but today The Washington Post reports President Trump has […]

DoorDash has reached an agreement with Square to purchase on-demand food delivery and catering business Caviar. DoorDash has agreed to pay Square $410 million in cash and preferred DoorDash stock. Square bought Caviar about five years ago in a deal worth about $90 million. Now, Caviar has found a new home with DoorDash, the on-demand […]

Forget the village, people. It takes an army to make TechCrunch Disrupt the well-oiled experience that savvy start-uppers have come to know and love. And we couldn’t do it nearly as well without our incredible volunteers. If you’re looking for a no-budget way to experience Disrupt San Francisco 2019 up-close-and-personal, sign up to volunteer for work […]

There are a lot of ugly fonts out there, but outside Papyrus, few illustrate a deeper sickness in our society. A new typeface called Ugly Gerry does just that: Each letter is formed from the shape of a single grotesquely gerrymandered district.

Let's not waste this time on conjecture. It's important to focus on the uncomfortable yet completely valid cloud security concerns while everyone is listening.

The latest bout in Las Vegas is not taking place in a raucous casino boxing ring, but in the hushed rooms of planning committees. The reigning champion, the Las Vegas Monorail, is facing upstart challenger The Boring Company, in a fight to decide the future of Sin City’s urban transportation. In May, the Las Vegas […]

Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, the biggest streamer ever, has today announced his intention to leave the Twitch platform in favor of Microsoft’s Mixer. Twitch is far and away the biggest video game streaming platform on the internet, claiming 72% of all hours watched, according to StreamElements. Mixer, by comparison, owns 3%, which is approximately 112 million […]

Google today highlighted a new feature that will bring voice-free emergency service interaction to Pixels and other Android devices. Designed for instances of injury, situations where speaking can present a danger and for users with speech impairments, the feature allows callers to communicate via touch menus. Once an emergency call is triggered, users can specify […]

“I don’t want more success. I don’t want more money.” When most hedge fund managers say something like that to you, you’d be justified in suspecting that they’re giving you their carefully crafted Davos riff. Because unlike many Silicon Valley billionaires who believe (or sort of believe) in the transcendence of their mission, the motives […]

Tesla cars can now take on human players in a game of chess, thanks to a software update it pushed out to vehicles earlier this month. Its programmers likely didn’t imagine they were designing a chess program to take on the best players in the world, however: U.S. no. 1 ranked chess player Fabiano Caruana […]

Today on Extra Crunch, TechCrunch fintech contributor Gregg Schoenberg went deep beneath the surface with an insider profile of investor Ray Dalio. While Dalio is certainly a celebrity in the world of financial services, some outside of Wall Street might need a quick refresher on Dalio, his career and his influence. Dalio built his reputation […]

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. Lyft pulls e-bikes in light of apparent battery fires Lyft recently won the right to launch its pedal-assist bikes in San […]

The FCC is taking measures to make the launches of small satellites (but not large constellations) easier on the growing private space industry. The new licensing process should be simpler, easier, and more likely to yield a green light from the agency.

Microsoft today announced the preview launch of Azure Dedicated Host, a new cloud service that will allow you to run your virtual machines on single-tenant physical services. That means you’re not sharing any resources on that server with anybody else and you’ll get full control over everything that’s running on that machine. Previously, Azure already […]

The original Versa was precisely the hit a stumbling Fitbit needed. The device was a simple and affordable Apple Watch alternative, helping the company finally break into the one bright spot in the wearable field. According to yesterday’s earnings, the Versa Lite has so far failed to recapture the Versa’s success by offering a fewer […]

In light of a so-far successful electric scooter pilot program in San Francisco, the city has opened up the application process for service providers to deploy their respective scooters as part of a more permanent program. However, the permits will only be valid for about one year, “reflecting the rapid pace at which the scooter […]

The somewhat zany mash-up of Ikea and Sonos ended up providing great results, in the form of the Symfonisk line of wireless speakers, including the $99 Symfonisk shelf speakers and the $179 Symfonisk table lamp speaker. The speakers are both on sale today, starting at retail stores first, with online availability to follow later. In […]

Featured snippets are surely one of the most useful features that Google added to its search engine in recent years. Today, the company announced that it has recently updated the algorithm that powers these snippets to prioritize more recent information. In Google’s example, the search engine would previously regularly feature outdated data because it didn’t […]

High-priced, handmade boutique sports cars typically make their debut where the well-heeled and the media gather. Pagani took a different approach this time around. The Italian supercar manufacturer unveiled its new nearly $3.5 million Huayra Roadster BC in CSR2, the mobile game produced by Zynga . The physical car will eventually get its moment. Pagani […]

Newsflash! President Donald Trump is planning to deport naturalized US citizens, force H-1B visa holders to return to their home countries, and revoke the green cards of lawful permanent residents...

Electric-vehicle chargers today are designed for human drivers. Electrify America and San Francisco-based startup Stable are preparing for the day when humans are no longer behind the wheel. Electrify America, the entity set up by Volkswagen as part of its settlement with U.S. regulators over the diesel emissions cheating scandal, is partnering with Stable to […]

Amazon said the U.S. government asked more data from the company during the first-half of 2019 than on the previous six-month period. The latest figures landed in the company’s transparency report, published quietly on its website late Wednesday, said the number of subpoenas it received went up by 14% and search warrants went up by […]

Verizon reported its second quarter earnings this morning, and while revenue fall short of analyst predictions, the company had strong profits and subscriber growth. Verizon reported consolidated revenue of $32.1 billion in Q2, down 0.4% year-over-year and lower than analyst estimates of $32.4 billion. However, it also reported adjusted earnings per share of $1.23, compared […]

Founders need to get smart quickly about the many nuanced aspects of building a company, from understanding weird language in a big term sheet to hiring a key software developer. But the best practical advice is scattered across blog posts, podcasts and books, and it gets outdated quickly as industry norms evolve. Even experienced founders […]

In the context of a term sheet, pro rata rights (or pro rata) govern whether investors may continue to invest in subsequent rounds of funding in proportion with their ownership...

Figma, the startup looking to put design tools in the cloud, has today announced new plugins for the platform that will help users clean up their workflows. Figma cofounder and CEO Dylan Field says that plug-ins have been the most requested feature from users since the company’s launch. So, for the last year, the team […]

This, friends, is the Samsung Galaxy Dongle. The NSFW photo arrives courtesy of SamMobile. The story isn’t the image itself, so much as what it represents. It’s the end of an era. A last key flagship smartphone maker acknowledging the death of the 3.5mm jack. It’s been years in the making, of course. Apple took […]

In an amazingly quick turn-around for a deal of this scope, Salesforce announced today that it has closed the $15.7 billion Tableau deal announced in June. The deal is by far the biggest acquisition in Salesforce history, a company known for being highly acquisitive. A deal of this size usually faces a high level of […]

Smartphone sales have continued their global decline. New numbers from Gartner forecast a drop of 2.5 percent down to 1.5 billion. The biggest hits to the industry are Japan, Western Europe and North America, which saw drops of 6.5, 5.3 and 4.4 percent, respectively. It’s all part of a continued trend we’ve highlighted several times […]

TikTok is the breakout hit in social media apps at the moment — it’s currently ranked first in entertainment, and 12th overall in terms of download popularity on iOS, and 8th on Android in the US — and today it’s starting a partnership that should give it an even wider profile, with the added benefit […]

Asana, the work management platform led by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, today launched Workload, a new feature for its paying users that aims to help prevent burnout. It does so by making it easier for businesses to fairly distribute work across their teams and, if necessary, redistribute it. “The most productive and happiest teams are […]

Part of the reason Silicon Valley has become so powerful is that it supports a wide variety of these wider ecosystem players, and doesn’t just dole out cash to raw entrepreneurs who often are pretty experienced in company and brand building. Europe, it seemed, was finally growing up. Four years on and, I decided it […]

IBM’s massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat closed a few weeks ago and today, the two companies are now announcing the first fruits of this process. For the most part, today’s announcement further IBM’s ambitions to bring its products to any public and private cloud. That was very much the reason why IBM acquired […]

The healthcare and fintech-focused outfit has raised its largest fund yet.

As two of the largest players in online-food ordering and delivery in Europe work on a $10 billion merger to expand their footprint and economies of scale, one of its biggest rivals has made an acquisition to expand its own tech muscle. Deliveroo, the London-based food delivery startup backed by Amazon that is itself valued […]

There’s a new hacking group on the radar targeting telecommunications and oil and gas companies across Africa and the Middle East. Industrial security company Dragos, which discovered the group, calls it “Hexane,” but remains largely tight lipped on its activities. The security company said Thursday, however, that that the group’s activity has ramped up in […]

It’s been more than a year since Facebook announced that it would be funding a Local News Subscriptions Accelerator. Now the company is sharing some of the ways in which program has led to new initiatives at different publishers. The accelerator is administered by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, and in an email, the institute’s […]

Starting in one week, the Impossible Foods plant-based Impossible Burger will be available at Burger King restaurants across the country. The world’s second largest fast food chain is rolling out the Impossible Whopper nationwide at all of its 7,200 U.S. locations for the next month as it tests the potential demand for the meaty-tasting meatless […]

China’s ByteDance, which owns popular video sharing app TikTok, is already working to enter the smartphone business and the music streaming space. It appears the world’s most valued startup also has ambitions about developing its own search engine. Kind of. A company spokesperson told TechCrunch on Thursday that it has introduced a search function in ByteDance’s […]

Former British Prime Minister Theresa May once said “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”. And while that sentiment would be considered risible by just about anybody who works in today’s outward-looking technology industry, if you are a digital worker of the world, you may well […]

Ride-sharing and transportation platform Didi Chuxing announced today that it has formed a joint venture with BP, the British gas, oil and energy supermajor. to build electric vehicle charging infrastructure in China. The charging stations will be available to Didi and non-Didi drivers. The news of Didi and BP’s joint venture comes one week after […]

Pearson, the London-based educational software maker, said today that thousands of school and university accounts, mostly in the United States, were affected by a data breach. The company added that it has notified affected users already and that the vulnerability has been fixed. The Wall Street Journal reports that the data breach happened in November […]

In May, venture capitalist Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital warned in a Financial Times column that Amazon’s recent $575 million investment in the London-based delivery service Deliveroo could prove ominous for local restaurants. Wrote Moritz: “Amazon is now one step away from becoming a multi-brand restaurant company — and that could mean doomsday for many […]