Crunch Hype

Before pivoting to smart glasses, Thalmic Labs (now North) tried its best to make its Myo gestural arm band controller the future of user input. Now, another startup is picking up the baton, acquiring patents related to the product and customer data. The IP is being bought by CTRL-labs, a New York-based startup full of […]

Amazon’s strategy to bring more brick-and-mortar options into its vast e-commerce empire, and its ambition to sell more pharmaceutical products, today may have found themselves a little more knitted together. The company announced a new service in the US called Counter, a free in-store pick-up service where Amazon shoppers can arrange to collect packages. And […]

Pavegen, a UK startup which harvests energy from people’s footsteps and also tracks that data, has raised £2.6m on its crowdfunding push having doubled its initial £950k target. The campaign secured funds from over 1,400 investors, including partnership and anchor investment from major global engineering conglomerate Hinduja Group and family investment firm Tamar Capital. The […]

Latin America-based Grow, which formed after micromobility companies Grin and Yellow merged earlier this year, has hit 10 million rides. Grin, which first started operating about one year ago in Mexico, has since expanded into 23 cities across Latin America. That is, of course, thanks in part to its mergers with Yellow and Ride. This […]

Bird’s somewhat weird but also very clever global expansion model is to let others handle it, and one of those others is bringing their service online this month. Bird Canada, which is a wholly Canadian-owned company entirely distinct from Bird, will begin offering on-demand electric scooter rental service in Alberta this month, with plans to […]

Two of Europe’s biggest on-demand laundry startups are merging today. Laundrapp from London and Zipjet from Berlin are confirming the completion of a previously-rumored merger through which the combined business will become the largest on-demand laundry business in the UK. Alongside this, the combined business has completed a funding round from existing investors including Toscafund, […]

Southeast Asia’s highest-capitalized startup is sitting on even more money from investors today after ride-hailing Grab announced it has raised $300 million from Invesco. The deal takes Singapore-based Grab $7.5 billion raised to date. The money is part of its ongoing — feels-like-everlasting — Series H round which was started last June via a $1 […]

Creative technology and innovative ideas know no boundaries, which is why thousands of early-stage startup founders, investors, innovators and entrepreneurs — from more than 50 countries — will convene at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. In keeping with an international focus, we’re searching for countries that want to shine a spotlight on their best […]

WeGift, the U.K. startup that has developed a platform to let businesses easily issue e-gift cards and other digital rewards, has closed £4 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Stride.VC — the relatively new early-stage venture capital firm founded by Fred Destin and Harry Stebbings — alongside a number of other investors […]

Founders Factory Africa and South African healthcare company Netcare will select 35 African health-tech startups for an acceleration and incubation program. The partnership includes an investment (of an undisclosed amount) by Netcare in Founder’s Factory Africa, or FFA. The Johannesburg located organization was formed in 2018 as an extension of Founders Factory in London—an accelerator […]

Talis Capital – an early investor in Darktrace, Pirate Studios, Luminance and iwoca – announces today that it’s raised $100m for 2019, a record for the firm to date as it passes it’s 10th year of operation. In those ten years it’s done $600m in transactions as it seeks to invest in the fast-growing tech […]

India may have plans to follow France’s footsteps in building a chat app and requiring government employees to use it for official communications. The New Delhi government is said to be pondering about the need to have homegrown email and chat apps, local news outlet Economic Times reported on Thursday. The rationale behind the move […]

Warburg Pincus, the private equity fund with over $60 billion under management, is doubling down on Asia after it announced a $4.25 billion fund dedicated to China and Southeast Asia. The firm has been present in China for 25 years, and it has invested over $11 billion in a portfolio of over 120 startups that […]

Alibaba and JD.com have been in a war over the Chinese e-commerce space for a decade or so, but a third player called Pinduoduo has managed to shake up the duopoly in recent times. The startup, which was founded in 2015 by an ex-Googler and went public on the Nasdaq last July, has further flexed […]

If you’re an Instagram user, chances are you’ve encountered a ton of ads for companies trying to sell products directly to consumers, using social networks as storefronts paired with online stores. French startup Taster is doing the same thing with restaurants built specifically for food delivery startups. The startup raised an $8 million funding round […]

NTWRK, is a fascinating experiment in live video shopping for the iPhone set. It’s been described as a blend of QVC and Twitter and Twitch and they just got a new slice of money from investors like Drake and Live Nation to expand into physical events. There’s been a bunch of attempts at this kind […]

Soundtrap, the music and podcast software maker that Spotify acquired in 2017, is improving its free tier by adding unlimited storage. Previously, Soundtrap’s free users were limited to storing five projects at a time. In addition to introducing unlimited storage, the company is also more-than-doubling the amount of music available to free users, who now […]

AUrate, a startup selling gold jewelry directly to consumers, announced today that it has raised $13 million in Series A funding. The company’s co-founders Bouchra Ezzahraoui and Sophie Kahn said that AUrate’s prices range from $50 to $3,000, but they’re really aiming for what Ezzahraoui called “this new market sweet spot” of $300 to $500. […]

Skubana, a startup promising to help e-commerce business manage what can be a dizzying array of logistical challenges, is announcing that it has raised $5.4 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Defy Partners, with participation from Advancit Capital and FJ Labs. Early Skubana backer Brian Lee — who co-founded The Honest […]

Apple has clearly spent the last several years dreaming of a world where it didn’t have to rely on third-parties to create its components. The hardware giant has already taken a number of steps in that direction with its own in-house chips, and a recent hire points at an even bigger push. Per his LinkedIn […]

The next service marketplace wave: Vertical market networks B2B service marketplaces (think translation as a service) are an extraordinarily lucrative startup category. But despite the incredible potential of these platforms to generate outsized returns, many fail. Why? Ivan Smolnikov, the CEO and founder of translation service startup Smartcat, investigates why certain marketplaces seem to grow […]

New efforts could automate the role of an analyst.

Google has always argued that the data it collects does more than provide power for its targeted ad empire — it also makes its services more useful. But not everyone thinks that Google should be able to suck up a never-ending stockpile of personal data on its users. Today, Google is taking a step towards […]

Okay do you know how we can taste things and that was pretty special? It’s not special anymore, because researchers at UC Davis working with colleagues Carnegie Mellon have developed a way for an experimental soft robotic gripper to ‘taste’ things as well, using bacteria engineered to allow it to detect a specific chemical. The […]

Ready to tackle the colossus that is enterprise software? Join us and more than 1,000 attendees for TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 on September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. We’re talking founders, technologists and investors digging deep into the challenges facing established and emerging enterprise companies today. Get your […]

Could you use a little summer startup fun? We’re rolling out our next round of tickets to the TechCrunch Summer Party at Park Chalet, San Francisco’s coastal beer garden. If you want to join your startup peers to eat, drink and be merry, don’t delay. These limited-release tickets will be snapped up before you can say […]

It’s not every day the three biggest competitors in a space join forces to denounced political action. Of course, this isn’t the first time the Trump administration has had this impact on a category. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony (collectively known as gaming’s “big three) penned a joint letter noting the harm the industry stands to […]

Reddit’s r/The_Donald subreddit has been a lingering issue for the site’s leadership. The community, which was organized in the lead-in to Trump’s presidential run, has come to represent much of the site’s failures in uniformly enforcing content policies. Add in Russian election interference and a dollop of racism, sexism and xenophobia and you have the […]

Compensation is the most intimate way a company can interact with its employees. For far too long, compensation managers and committees have operated behind closed doors, keeping pay guidelines...

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. San Francisco takes the final steps toward becoming the first U.S. city to ban vaping product sales San Francisco’s Board of […]

Despite Google employees petitioning San Francisco Pride to exclude the company from participating in the Pride parade this weekend, SF Pride says Google will be allowed to march in the parade. Earlier today, about 100 Google employees urged SF Pride to ban the company from participating in this weekend’s Pride parade and drop the company […]

Brandless, a direct-to-consumer purveyor of food, beauty, and personal care products, says that every item it makes is non-genetically modified, kosher, fair-trade, gluten-free, often organic and, in the case of cleaning supplies, EPA “Safer Choice” certified. Beginning with its 2012 launch, items were also priced at $3 across the board. That changed in January, when […]

Startups in the AR space see a bright future for bringing retail experiences into the home, but there haven’t been a ton of convincing examples of companies carrying out this vision effectively. Wannaby is using AR to help sneaker heads visualize their next purchase by letting them try on the shoes virtually. The company launched […]

“When They See Us” has been viewed by more than 23 million Netflix accounts worldwide, according to writer-director Ava DuVernay, who tweeted that the streaming service had shared the numbers with her. “Imagine believing the world doesn’t care about real stories of black people,” DuVernay wrote. “It always made me sad. So when Netflix just […]

It was in January that Twitter announced that it would be rolling out a new, simplified desktop redesign to its users. Hopefully, no one was holding their breath for the big official reveal. Six months later, we can confirm that Twitter is… still rolling out tests as it tinkers with a new look for its Twitter.com […]

YouTube today announced a series of changes designed to give users more control over what videos appear on the Homepage and in its Up Next suggestions — the latter which are typically powered by an algorithm. The company also says it will offer more visibility to users as to why they’re being shown a recommended […]

Ever since the notch was first added to smartphones, everyone in the world except the deeply deluded and my editor have wished it gone. Oppo has done it — or at least shown that it can be done — with a demonstration unit at Mobile World Congress in Shanghai. iPhone users can console themselves that Oppo kind of sounds like Apple.

Verizon (disclosure: the company that owns the company that owns TC) celebrated an FCC victory this week, as the agency approved a request for a temporary network lockdown on new phones. The carrier request the feature in February as part of a “safety check period.” The ruling presents a kind of temporary waiver on an […]

When Facebook unveiled Libra a few days ago, the company also announced the Libra Association, a not-for-profit that will oversee all things Libra. Facebook wants to make sure that everyone is aware that Libra was created by Facebook but isn’t controlled by Facebook. And yet, given Facebook’s reputation, it seems useful to evaluate the project […]

International money transfer service TransferWise, has made a significant incursion into the US market today, launching a MasterCard debit card alongside a multicurrency account. Mirroring the card it has already launched in the UK and Europe last year, the card will work in over 40 currencies without balance limits, and conversion fees will be competitive […]

Last year Shopify announced Shopify Ping, a free unified messaging platform for merchants to communicate directly with customers in a chat context. Today, it announced it’s adding support for Apple Business Chat to Shopify Ping. The real benefit to this is that users can not only use Apple’s business chat product to communicate with customers, […]

Automaker Tesla is looking into how it might own another key part of its supply chain, through research being done at a secret lab near its Fremont, CA HQ, CNBC reports. The company currently relies on Panasonic to build the battery pack and cells it uses for its vehicles, which is one of, if not […]

Two months ago, we reported that Carbon was set to raise up to $300 million, bringing the 3D printing company’s valuation up to a lofty $2.5 billion. The real numbers released this week by the company aren’t quite so lofty, but are impressive nonetheless. The Series E fetched $260 million, putting its valuation at closer […]

D-Wave, one of the earliest quantum computing startups, today announced the general availability of D-Wave Hybrid, it’s open-source hybrid workflow platform that makes it easier for developers to build — you guessed it — hybrid quantum applications that combine classical and quantum computing. D-Wave Hybrid is part of the company’s Ocean software development kit, which […]

Despite a slight price increase in April, Philo’s live TV streaming service is still one of the more affordable options on the market because of its strategic decision to not stream sports. That helps keep its costs down while providing an option for cord cutters who mainly want access to the traditional cable TV networks […]

There’s a mythology around today’s factories that says everything is automated by robotics, and while there is some truth to that, it’s hard to bring that level of sophistication to every facility, especially those producing relatively small runs. Today, Bright Machines, a San Francisco startup announced its first product designed to put intelligence and automation […]

An independent expert group tasked with advising the European Commission to inform its regulatory response to artificial intelligence — to underpin EU lawmakers’ stated aim of ensuring AI developments are “human centric” — has published its policy and investment recommendations. This follows earlier ethics guidelines for “trustworthy AI”, put out by the High Level Expert […]

Half of Instagram’s billion-plus users open its Explore tab each month to find fresh content and creators. Now the Facebook-owned app will do more to carry its weight by injecting ads into Instagram Explore for the first time. But rather than bombard users with marketing right on the Explore grid, Instagram will instead only show […]

HER, the app that provides safe space for queer women to meet, has today revamped the app’s profiles. The updated profiles allow users to express themselves more fully in the categories of gender, sexuality, pronouns, diet preferences, star signs, drinking, smoking and cannabis habits, among others. HER has also added space for a text bio, […]