Crunch Hype

Since the launch of its first electric scooter in 2015, Gogoro co-founder and CEO Horace Luke has frequently been asked when the startup is going to expand beyond Taiwan. In its home country, Gogoro’s two-wheel vehicles, with their distinctive swappable battery system, are now the top-selling electric scooters. But Luke says the company has always […]

Startups looking to expand the reach of financial services continue to receive a nod from investors. Zeta, a fintech firm that runs a full stack neo-banking platform and offers enterprise payments solutions, said today its valuation reached $300 million in its maiden outside funding. Sodexo BRS funded Zeta’s Series C round to take a minority […]

Last call, startuppers! TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley summer soiree — a.k.a. the 14th Annual TechCrunch Summer Party — is nearly sold out. If you want to join the brightest members of the startup community on July 25 and celebrate your intrepid entrepreneurial spirit, you’d best buy a ticket while you can. It’s now o’clock, people! This […]

Thumbtack just closed a new funding round of $150 million. Sequoia is leading the round, and the company is now valued at $1.7 billion. TechCrunch’s Kate Clark previously reported that the startup was raising again, but that it was a tough process. In a candid blog post, co-founder and CEO Marco Zappacosta admits that the […]

Huawei this week cut 600 positions from its Futurewei Technologies U.S. research arm, which operates out of Silicon Valley, Chicago, Washington State and Dallas. The move, which represents 70 percent of the division’s 850 roles, follows the hardware giant’s blacklisting by the U.S. government. Reuters initially reported the news via a source from the company […]

Last July, Google announced its Contact Center AI product for helping businesses get more value out of their contact centers. Contact Center AI uses a mix of Google’s machine learning-powered tools to help build virtual agents and help human agents as they do their job. Today, the company is launching several updates to this product […]

Lyft is offering to the public a set of autonomous driving data that it calls the “largest public data set of its kind,” containing over 55,000 3D frames of captured footage hand-labeled by human reviewers, data collected by seven cameras and as many as three lidars depending on the car used, plus a drivable surface […]

CircleCI launched way back in 2011 when the notion of continuous delivery was just a twinkle in most developer’s eyes, but over the years with the rise of agile, containerization and DevOps, we’ve seen the idea of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) really begin to mainstream with developers. Today, CircleCI was rewarded with a […]

In addition to Samsung and Vizio, LG announced earlier this year that it would be adding support for Apple’s ecosystem to its TV operating system. According to a tweet from LG’s Australian account, the webOS update that adds support for HomeKit and AirPlay 2 will be released next week. Homekit is releasing in 1 week. […]

Inventables announced this morning that it has raised an $11.5 million Series C. The round, led by Cue Ball, alongside True Ventures, Greycroft, Pipeline Capital and Draper Associates, brings the Chicago-based startup’s total funding cup to 21 million, per Crunchbase. The company specializes in desktop 3D carving — or subtractive manufacturing (not to be confused […]

The TwelveSouth StayGo is a new USB-C dock from a company that makes a ton of great and unique Mac and iOS device accessories. True to the company’s track record, it offers a slightly different take on a popular accessory category – and ends up excelling as a result. The StayGo’s unique twist is an […]

Placed against our sci-fi expectations, robotics have large fallen short — with one notable exception. In 2019, automation is a mainstay in factories and warehouses. There the technology has been proven out in the field, and VCs are happy to invest millions. This morning Fetch Robotics announced a $46 million Series C raise. The round, […]

Mixhalo — the startup co-founded by Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger and his wife, violinist Ann Marie Simpson-Einziger — has raised $10.7 million in Series A funding. The company’s initial goal was to bring better sound quality to concerts. Instead of hearing music blasted out of speakers, users can connect their smartphone to a network (the […]

U.S. attorney general William Barr has said consumers should accept the risks that encryption backdoors pose to their personal cybersecurity to ensure law enforcement can access encrypted communications. In a speech Tuesday in New York, the U.S. attorney general parroted much of the same rhetoric from his predecessors and other senior staff at the Justice […]

Get ready for a British Trump: The UK will shortly have a new prime minister after the Conservative Party membership overwhelmingly voted to elect Boris Johnson as their new party leader, passing over his sole rival for the post, Jeremy Hunt. Johnson received 92,135 votes, a full 45,497 more than Hunt. He replaces Theresa May […]

Arrcus has a bold notion to try and take on the biggest names in networking by building a better networking management system. Today it was rewarded with a $30 million Series B investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Existing investors General Catalyst and Clear Ventures also participated. The company previously raised a seed and Series […]

After years — decades even — of promises, the robotics industry is finally beginning to realize its potential. Nowhere is this phenomenon clearer than in the world of warehouse automation. Freedom Robotics, a new Bay Area-based startup, came out of stealth this week with plans to help ease the barrier of entry for companies to […]

Mumbai-based Haptik, which operates a conversational AI platform, has already won several high profile clients in India. Now the five-year-old firm, with newly found significant capital in the bank, is attempting to replicate its success in international markets. On Tuesday, Haptik announced it has acqui-hired Convrg, a Los Angeles-based startup that develops chatbots, to serve customers in […]

Since co-founding Heap, CEO Matin Movassate has been saying that he wants to take on the analytics incumbents. Today, he’s got more money to fund that challenge, with the announcement that Heap has raised $55 million in Series C funding. Movassate (pictured above) previously worked as a product manager at Facebook, and I interviewed him after […]

Tiffany Olson Kleemann Contributor Tiffany Olson Kleemann is the chief executive officer of Distil Networks. She formerly served in executive roles at Symantec and FireEye and was deputy chief of staff for cybersecurity operations under President George W. Bush. More posts by this contributor Bots distorted the 2016 Election. Will the midterms be a sequel? […]

Facebook’s messaging app for under 13s, Messenger Kids — which launched two years ago pledging a “private” chat space for kids to talk with contacts specifically approved by their parents — has run into an embarrassing safety issue. The Verge obtained messages sent by Facebook to an unknown number of parents of users of the […]

Customer reviews play a key role in helping people decide what to buy on consumer-focused marketplaces like Amazon or app stores, and the same tendency exists in the B2B world, where nearly half a trillion dollars is spent annually on software and IT purchases. TrustRadius, one of the startups capitalising on the latter trend with […]

A key change is in the works for Jukedeck, a pioneering AI startup out of the UK which was building technology to create music using AI — including the ability to interpret video and automatically set music to it. The London company has reportedly been acquired by hot social media music startup TikTok, owned by […]

Genie AI, a legal tech startup and Entrepreneur First alumni, has raised £2 million in funding. The round is a combination of equity and a U.K. government grant, and will be used to continue development of the company’s “intelligent” contract editor for law firms and an upcoming product targeting GDPR compliance. Leading the £1.2 million […]

We’ve reached a new milestone in the long road to getting AI-based self-driving systems to be truly autonomous. Daimler and Bosch have now received approval from German regulators to run their automated driverless parking function without a human safety driver behind the wheel — making this the world’s first fully automated driverless SAE Level 4 parking […]

Visionaries Club, a new European VC focussing on B2B, is disclosing that it has raised two micro funds of €40 million each, aimed at pre-seed/seed and Series B, respectively. The Berlin-based VC firm is founded by Sebastian Pollok and Robert Lacher. Pollok was a VC at e.ventures in San Francisco and also founded Amorelie, which […]

The cyber libel trial against Maria Ressa, the CEO and executive editor of independent media startup Rappler, started today in Manila, in a case that will be closely watched because of its implications for press freedom in the Philippines. Also on trial is Reynaldo Santos Jr, a former researcher and writer for the site. If […]

There’s a new fintech startup in the U.S. that is inching closer to the unicorn status. New York City-headquartered MoneyLion, which provides customers both financial advice and access to loans and other services, said today it has raised $100 million in a new round to accelerate its growth in the U.S. market. The Series C […]

Another high-level Tesla engineering executive has hopped over to Apple. Steve MacManus, who was vice president of engineering at Tesla, is now a senior director at Apple, according to an update on his LinkedIn profile. Bloomberg was the first to report MacManus had taken the position at Apple. MacManus, whose was in charge of interior […]

Weed may be legal in California, but the black market is still the top spot for buyers looking for bud on a budget. Flower Co. graduated from Y Combinator’s latest class on the promise that they could cut customers better deals by focusing on partnering with growers directly to create their own house brands while […]

Bird is raising a Series D round led by Sequoia Capital at a $2.5 billion valuation, TechCrunch has learned. Sources, however, did not indicate the size of the round. This round follows reports from The Information that Bird was looking to raise $200 million to $300 million by the end of this summer, at a […]

I would have had a review of the WF-1000XM3s up sooner, but they arrived while I was traveling. That was a bummer for two reasons. First and most obviously is the fact that I hate being late with a review. Second and more selfishly, I really wanted to try them out on those 16-hour flights […]

VCRs didn't really exist when the first men walked on the moon, but NASA was ahead of the curve and recorded the event for posterity on videotapes — which just sold at auction for $1.8 million. The Hasselblads may have captured more detail, but there's nothing else in the world quite like these tapes.

Apple may have written a check and signed a deal with Qualcomm in order to ensure a 5G iPhone wasn’t late to market, but it’s clear the Cupertino hardware giant wasn’t interested in burying the hatchet too deep. Apple is in “advanced talks” to buy Intel’s smartphone modem business for “$1 billion or more” according […]

Thanks to a rash of YouTube videos of traffic stops, wild crashes and wacky antics, dashcams are becoming more and more popular with drivers. But does the world need one that shoots at 1080p and beams every minute of your drive back to a central storage device and can work as a Wi-Fi hotspot? PureGear […]

Amid ongoing concerns about security risks posed by the involvement of Chinese tech giant Huawei in 5G supply, the U.K. government has published a review of the telecoms supply chain, which concludes that policy and regulation in enforcing network security needs to be significantly strengthened to address concerns. However, it continues to hold off on […]

Uber and Lyft aren’t designed to transport people who need a little help getting out of the house or need someone to help get them from the doctor’s waiting room back to their home. While Uber, for example, has launched Uber Health to help patients get to their appointments, the drivers are not vetted with […]

VidCon caters to online creators, their fans and the brand marketers and entertainment companies that want to leverage their influence.

When Microsoft reported its FY19, Q4 earnings last week, the numbers were mostly positive, but as we pointed out, Azure earnings growth has stalled. Productivity and business, which includes Office 365, has also mostly flattened out. But slowing growth is not always as bad as it may seem. In fact, it’s an inevitability that once you […]

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. Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI in new multiyear partnership OpenAI was founded three years ago by Elon Musk, Sam Altman […]

Google Cloud today announced Spinnaker for Google Cloud Platform, a new solution that makes it easier to install and run the Spinnaker continuous delivery (CD) service on Google’s cloud. Spinnaker was created inside Netflix and is now jointly developed by Netflix and Google. Netflix open-sourced it back in 2015 and over the course of the […]

Uber is actively testing a monthly subscription pass that combines rides, Eats, bikes and scooters. In this pilot phase, Uber is testing a few different iterations in San Francisco and Chicago, but each version includes a fixed discount on every ride, free Uber Eats delivery and free JUMP (bikes and scooters) rides. The pass costs […]

While iOS 13 is right around the corner with a ton of new features, it isn’t quite ready just yet. Apple has just released iOS 12.4, a new stable update. There aren’t many radical changes, but this is the first version that theoretically supports the Apple Card — the feature isn’t enabled just yet. Apple […]

If you are, for some reason, an avid Walkie Talkie user on the Apple Watch, you will be pleased to learn that the functionality is back in the latest watchOS update today. The watchOS 5.3 release notes specify that the update “[p]rovides important security updates including a fix for the Walkie-Talkie app.” The feature was […]

A new project called AI Portraits from MIT’s IBM Watson AI Lab can capture your essence in the artistic style of some of the world’s great masters, using AI powered by a generative adversarial network (GAN) to actually rebuild your mug from scratch, which goes above and beyond the old trick many other apps used […]

Pinterest wants to help its users relax.

Robinhood, the popular free stock trading app, this morning announced a massive $323 million round led by DST Global. The Series E financing values the Menlo Park-headquartered business at $7.6 billion, up from its Series D valuation of more than $5 billion. Ribbit Capital, NEA, Sequoia and Thrive Capital have also participated in the round, […]

Demo Day season is upon us.

Employee engagement isn't just about the morale of individual workers—it also enables broader workforce productivity and leads to better business outcomes...

TechCrunch Sessions is back! On September 5, we’re taking on the ferociously competitive field of enterprise software, and thrilled to announce our packed agenda, overflowing with some of the biggest names and most exciting startups in the enterprise industry. And you’re in luck, because $249 early-bird tickets are still on sale — make sure you […]