Crunch Hype

Fintech startup Revolut is launching its stock trading feature today. It’s a Robinhood-like feature that lets you buy and sell shares without any commission. For now, the feature is limited to some Revolut customers with a Metal card. While Robinhood has completely changed the stock trading retail market in the U.S., buying shares hasn’t changed […]

Got hardware? Well then, listen up, because our search continues for boundary-pushing, early-stage hardware startups to join us in Shenzhen, China for an epic opportunity; launch your startup on a global stage and compete in Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen on November 11-12. Apply here to compete in TC Hardware Battlefield 2019. Why? It’s your chance […]

Fitbit continued solid device growth for Q2, up 31%, year over year, representing a 5% bump in revenue. From that angle, the company’s long-term turnaround appears to be on track — but things weren’t all cheery this time out. Notably, the company’s stock is down in after-hours trading after it lowered guidance for annual revenue. […]

Encryption in space can be tricky. Even if you do everything right, a cosmic ray might come along and flip a bit, sabotaging the whole secure protocol. If you can't radiation-harden the computer, what can you do? European Space Agency researchers are testing two solutions right now in an experiment running on board the ISS.

Amazon has acquired Israeli storage tech startup E8 Storage, as first reported by Reuters, CNBC and Globes and confirmed by TechCrunch. The acquisition will bring the team and technology from E8 in to Amazon’s existing Amazon Web Services center in Tel Aviv, per reports. E8 Storage’s particular focus was on building storage hardware that employs […]

Lyft is pulling its e-bikes from the streets of San Francisco, as well as from those in the South Bay Area in light of two recently catching on fire. The first reported fire took place over the weekend, with the second happening today, according to the San Francisco Examiner. Don’t think I’ll be going on […]

Millions of people have been signing up to receive what they think is a $125 cash reimbursement from Equifax for its criminal mishandling and exposure of their personal and financial data. But the FTC warns that you may see only a small fraction of that, if any, because of the way the $575 million settlement with the company actually breaks down.

Hyperloop, the futuristic and still theoretical transportation system that could someday propel people and packages at speeds of more than 600 miles per hour, has been designated a “public infrastructure project” by India lawmakers in the state of Maharashtra. Wrapped in that government jargon is a valuable and notable outcome. The upshot: hyperloop is being […]

Get ready to dive into the fiercely competitive waters of enterprise software. Join more than 1,000 attendees for TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 on September 5 to navigate this rapidly evolving category with the industry’s brightest minds, biggest names and exciting startups. Our $249 early-bird ticket price remains in play, which saves you $100. But one […]

The dreaded 10x, or, how to handle exceptional employees The reality (myth?) is that there are engineers who are ten times more productive than other engineers (some would argue 100x, but okay). Jon Evans, who is CTO at HappyFunCorp, dives into the strengths and weaknesses of these vaunted people and how to manage them and […]

Anna Khan and Kristin Baker Spohn have joined CRV as a GP and a venture partner, respectively.

Space exploration nonprofit The Planetary Society is celebrating a stack of wins today, after announcing that its LightSail 2 spacecraft, which was funded in part through a crowdfunding campaign, has managed to successfully fly on the power of sunlight alone. It raised its orbit after initially being put into position by a Falcon Heavy launch […]

Amazon’s Alexa AI team has developed a new training method for the virtual assistant that could greatly improve its ability to handle tricky questions. In a blog post, team lead Abdalghani Abujabal details the new method, which combines both text-based search and a custom-built knowledge graph, two methods which normally compete. Abujabal suggests the following […]

The data breach at Capital One may be the “tip of the iceberg” and may affect other major companies, according to security researchers. Israeli security firm CyberInt said Vodafone, Ford, Michigan State University and the Ohio Department of Transportation may have also fallen victim to the same data breach that saw more than 106 million […]

A few years ago, Silicon Valley couldn’t stop using a trendy buzzword — the sharing economy. The good old top-down economic model with a clear separation between service providers and clients was falling apart. And huge tech companies disrupted entire industries, from Airbnb to Taskrabbit, Uber, Etsy and Getaround. When you retrospectively look at the […]

Facebook reveals its research into brain-controlled wearable devices (yes, really), iPhone sales dip and Samsung announces a new Galaxy Tab. Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 31, 2019. 1. Facebook is exploring brain control for AR wearables Facebook revealed that it’s working with UCSF to research a brain-computer interface as a way to control future […]

Aspire, a Singapore-based startup that helps SMEs secure working capital, has raised $32.5 million in a new financing round to expand its presence in several Southeast Asian markets. The Series A round for the one-and-a-half-year-old startup was funded by MassMutual Ventures Southeast Asia. Arc Labs and existing investors Y Combinator — Aspire graduated from YC […]

The warmth and quiet of the library have ever been a draw for those suffering from homelessness, but the past decade has piled more responsibilities on the shoulders of these institutions. The digital resources they provide are more important than ever for the homeless, but libraries have only warily embraced their new role.

After receiving approval from the Food and Drug Administration, Impossible Foods has cleared the last regulatory hurdle it faced to rolling out in grocery stores. The company is targeting a September release of Impossible products to join its competitor Beyond Meat on grocery store shelves. The news comes as the company said it inked a […]

Low-code programming is supposed to make things easier on companies, right? Low-code means you can count on trained administrators instead of more expensive software engineers to handle most tasks, but like any issue solved by technology, there are always unintended consequences. While running his former company, Steelbrick, which he sold to Salesforce in 2015 for […]

Google today announced that its Titan Security Key kits are now available in Canada, France, Japan and the UK. Until now, these keys, which come in a kit with a Bluetooth key and a standard USB-A dongle, were only available in the U.S. The keys provide an extra layer of security on top of your […]

DeepMind, the Google-owned U.K. AI research firm, has published a research letter in the journal Nature in which it discusses the performance of a deep learning model for continuously predicting the future likelihood of a patient developing a life-threatening condition called acute kidney injury (AKI). The company says its model is able to accurately predict […]

Lively, a lingerie business founded and led by former Victoria’s Secret executive Michelle Cordeiro Grant, has sold to intimate apparel brand Wacoal for $85 million. The deal includes up to an additional $55 million in performance-based payouts. Lively, headquartered in New York, had raised $15 million in venture capital funding, including a $6.5 million Series […]

Matt Heiman Contributor Matt Heiman is an investor at Greylock Partners. More posts by this contributor Predicting success in startup consumer brands Why ‘TAM’ doesn’t matter to me Atari founder Nolan Bushnell once said that the best video games are easy to learn and nearly impossible to master. I believe that a related concept holds for building […]

Raising venture capital isn’t easy; for some, it’s impossible. Clearbanc offers startups a fundraising alternative and in just a few short years, it’s become a household name in Silicon Valley circles. The company disrupts the startup funding process by providing companies cash to buy ads in exchange for a revenue share so those companies aren’t […]

That company disrupting venture capital just raised more venture capital. Clearbanc has attracted $300 million, including a $50 million equity investment led by Highland Capital with participation from Arcadia, iNovia and Emergence Capital, and another $250 million from limited partners for its third fund. Clearbanc declined to disclose its valuation, but noted the company was […]

It seems obvious that the best way to advertise a game is to let people play the game itself — and we’ve covered other startups tackling this problem, such as AppOnboard and mNectar. But Luna Labs co-founder and CEO Steven Chard said that for most developers, the creation of these ads involves outsourcing: “It might […]

The AWS DeepRacer is an almost toylike 1/18th scale race car. It comes with all of the sensors and software tools to help developers build machine learning models to drive the car around a course — or really do anything else they want it to do. The $399 DeepRacer launched at AWS’s massive re:Invent show […]

This morning Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent company) flipped the 5G switch on four additional cities. Washington DC, Atlanta, Detroit and Indianapolis join Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Providence in getting coverage for the carrier’s growing next-generation network. All of the usual caveats apply here. While the list of cities continues to grow, coverage varies from city […]

A group of sex tech startup founders, employees and supporters gathered outside of Facebook’s NY office in Manhattan to protest its advertising policies with respect to what it classifies as sexual content. The protest, and a companion website detailing their position we reported on Tuesday, are the work of ‘Approved, Not Approved,’ a coalition of […]

There’s plenty of reason to be excited for The Irishman. The Netflix-backed film teams Martin Scorsese with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci for a biopic based on the lives of organized crime-linked union figures Frank Sheeran and Jimmy Hoffa. But it’s the effects that have everyone talking. Granted, that’s not the kind […]

Leveraging new remote sensing and monitoring technologies and the willingness of corporate insurance programs to provide more preventative treatment to reduce longterm costs, Hello Heart has raised $12 million in new financing to further develop its business. The money came from Khosla Ventures and previous backer Blue Run Ventures. The company said it will use […]

Snapchat is hoping to attract new advertisers (and make advertising easier for the ones already on the platform) with the launch of a new tool called Instant Create. Some of these potential advertisers may not be used to creating ads in the smartphone-friendly vertical format that Snapchat has popularized, so Instant Create is to designed […]

Once again, the rumors proved to be true, with Samsung going straight from the S4 to S6 for its premium tier. Vaguely confusing naming conventions aside (there’s also the lower cost S5E), the company’s got another solid entry on its hands, going after the same slice of creatives targeted by the iPad Pro and various […]

An exposed database at automotive giant Honda allowed anyone to see which systems on its network were vulnerable to unpatched security flaws, potentially giving hackers insider knowledge of the company’s weak points. The server contained 134 million rows of employee systems data from the company’s endpoint security service, containing technical details of each computer and […]

Porsche Digital, the subsidiary of carmaker Porsche, is opening its second U.S. location, after launching its first in 2017 in Silicon Valley. The second North American office for this software and digital product-focused wing of Porsche will open in Atlanta, which is also the seat of Porsche’s North American cars business. Porsche Digital cited proximity […]

Jamf has been widely known as an enterprise Mac deployment and management tool company, but it has been looking for ways to expand beyond those core capabilities. One thing it heard from customers was that there was a dearth of native Mac security tools. It checked that box today, announcing it has acquired Digita Security, […]

Ahead of Apple launching its big video streaming initiative Apple TV+ this autumn, a integration is going live today that brings Apple closer to working with third-party TV makers and making its services available on a wider array of devices. Today Vizio said it would start to roll out support for AirPlay2 and HomeKit to […]

Spotify added 8 million subscribers in the quarter that ended in June, slightly below the estimated 8.5 million figure, the streaming giant reported today. The top music streamer said it had amassed 232 million monthly active users and 108 million paying subscribers at the end of June, up from 217 million users and 100 million […]

Globally, millions of cameras are in deployed by companies and organizations every year. All you have to do is look up. Yes, there they are! But the petabytes of data collected by these cameras really only become useful after something untoward has occurred. They can very rarely influence an action in “real-time”. Trueface is a […]

Visa is pitching a new way for startups in the fintech space to get to market faster by using its rails and a group of pre-approved partners. The Fast Track program, a variant of an investment commitment and ecosystem of services the company has already launched in other geographies around the world, comes to the […]

Facetune, a photo editing app that empowers users to cover their gray hairs, refine their jaw lines, and reshape their noses, was first introduced around six years ago, and it quickly climbed to the top of the download charts, becoming Apple’s most popular paid app of 2017. Despite stiff competition, it has remaining highly popular, […]

Station F is the world’s biggest startup campus and it’s based in Paris. Director Roxanne Varza first unveiled Station F at TechCrunch Disrupt back in December 2016. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Station F director Roxanne Varza is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to give us an update and tell us about […]

Nairobi based internet hardware and service startup BRCK and Egyptian ride-hail venture Swvl are partnering to bring WiFI and online entertainment to on-demand bus service in Kenya. BRCK will install its routers on Swvl vehicles in Kenya and run its Moja service, which offers free public WiFi—internet, music, and entertainment—subsidized by commercial partners. Founded in […]

As it forecast earlier this month, Samsung reported a steep drop in its second-quarter earnings due to lower market demand for chips and smartphones. The company said its second-quarter operating profit fell 55.6% year-over-year to 6.6 trillion won (about $5.6 billion), on consolidated revenue of 56.13 trillion won, slightly above the guidance it issued three […]

There’s a double standard when it comes to the sexualities of men versus women, trans and gender non-conforming folks. Unbound and Dame Products, two sex tech startups, have teamed up to bring attention to the issue. By launching a website, “Approved, Not Approved” and staging a protest outside Facebook’s NYC headquarters, the two startups hope […]

A serious crash by a delivery drone in Switzerland have grounded the fleet and put a partnership on ice. Within a stone's throw of a school, the incident raised grim possibilities for the possibilities of catastrophic failure of payload-bearing autonomous aerial vehicles.

NASA has opened up a call for companies to join the ranks of its nine existing Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) providers, a group it chose in November after a similar solicitation for proposals. With the CLPS program, NASA is buying space aboard future commercial lunar landers to deliver to the surface of the Moon […]

With the demise of some robot makers, it’s fair to wonder if there will be a time when robots have a real place in our lives. But some robots are finding a home in a counterintuitive place: schools.