Crunch Hype

Startup Battlefield is known around the world as TechCrunch’s premier startup competition, and today we’re proud to announce that on November 11-12 we are producing our hardware-focused competition, Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen in that amazing heartland of hardware, Shenzhen, China. The event this November will be TechCrunch’s fifth Hardware Battlefield, but our first ever […]

As we asked back in February, “We’re ready for foldable phones, but are they ready for us?” The answer, so far, has been an enthusiastic, “not really.” The Galaxy Fold was pushed back after multiple review units crapped the proverbial bed. And just last week, Huawei noted that it was holding off on its own […]

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. Libra currently looks more like a fiat currency than a cryptocurrency Facebook unveiled a cryptocurrency called Libra yesterday. Romain Dillet looks […]

YouTube has teamed up with Universal Music Group to remaster nearly a thousand classic music videos, the companies announced today, including those from Billy Idol, Beastie Boys, Boyz II Men, George Strait, Janet Jackson, Kiss, Lady Antebellum, Lady Gaga, Lionel Richie, Maroon 5, Meat Loaf, No Doubt/Gwen Stefani, Smokey Robinson, The Killers, Tom Petty and […]

Startup founders need to decide how much salary is enough One of the great things about running your own startup is that you have the independence to make critical business decisions, but those decisions can get very complicated when you are the direct beneficiary. When it comes to ethics and optics, few early decisions are […]

NASA's X-59 QueSST experimental quiet supersonic aircraft will have a cockpit like no other — featuring a big 4K screen where you'd normally have a front window. Why? Because this is one weird-looking plane.

Four-day work week. Open-plan offices. Work-life balance. Remote work. There are endless ways to set up your team and company for success. And there’s evidence for and against all of these scenarios.

Kano, the London-based startup that builds hardware designed to teach younger people about computing and coding, is taking a significant step forward in its growth strategy today. The startup has inked a partnership with Microsoft that sees Kano launching the Kano PC, a new 11.6-inch touch-enabled, Intel Atom-powered computer, its first to run Windows — […]

Facebook unveiled its audacious Libra cryptocurrency and Calibra digital wallet on Tuesday through which it plans to transform financial services across the globe. The social juggernaut made clear of its ambitions when it said that it wishes to empower more than 1.7 billion people around the world who currently do not have a bank account. […]

Netflix has signed a development deal with “Pose” writer-producer-director Janet Mock. In its announcement, the streamer notes that Mock is the first black transgender woman to sign an overall deal with a major studio. Before joining “Pose” — an FX series about New York’s LGBTQ ballroom scene in the 1980s and ’90s — Mock began her […]

Earlier this year, Google announced plans to build a Chromebook App Hub designed to help teachers and other curriculum administrators more easily find educational tools and apps to use in the classroom. Today, as a part of Googe’s educational announcements at ISTE 2019, the company officially launched the App Hub with content from Epic!, Adode, […]

Another day, another shareholder suit. This time it’s Google in the spotlight. Shareholders have tabled a resolution which, if passed, would demand Google put the brakes on its controversial search engine efforts in China. The program, internally dubbed “Dragonfly,” is said to be a censorship-friendly search engine with the capability to hide results at the […]

Early-stage startup founders, we’re looking at you. Are you ready to launch your company and show the world what you’ve got? There’s no better launching pad than Startup Battlefield, and the next battle goes down at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 — in the city that gave birth to startup dreams. There’s no time to waste. […]

The old guard of advertising networks continues to swap hands. In the latest development, marketing company Fluent has announced that it is buying AdParlor, a company that built early inroads into advertising and advertising strategy on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. According to an 8-K filing, the deal is valued at $10 million: $7.5 million in […]

Quibi, the short-form video platform founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, hasn’t even launched but has already booked $100 million in advertising sales, according to a report from The WSJ this morning. The company, which aims to cater to younger viewers with premium content chopped up into “quick bites,” says it has already booked advertisers including Protector […]

Pretty much everything about making a self-driving car is difficult, but among the most difficult parts is making sure the vehicles know what pedestrians are doing — and what they’re about to do. Humanising Autonomy specializes this, and hopes to become a ubiquitous part of people-focused computer vision systems worldwide. The company has raised a […]

Seventy-two hours to save. That’s how much time remains on super-early-bird pricing for passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019, which takes place October 2-4. If you plan to attend TechCrunch’s flagship event dedicated to bold, early-stage startuppers — and why wouldn’t you — you have until June 21 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) to score the […]

Future autonomous vehicle and other machine intelligence systems might not need line-of-sight to gather incredibly detailed image data: New research from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Toronto and University College London has devised a technique for “seeing around corners.” The method uses special sources of light, combined with sensors and computer vision processing to […]

TextIQ, a machine learning system that parses and understands sensitive corporate data, has raised $12.6 million in Series A funding led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Sierra Ventures. TextIQ started as cofounder Apoorv Agarwal’s Columbia thesis project titled “Social Network Extraction From Text.” The algorithm he built was able to read a novel, like […]

Madeline Stein & Michael Stein Contributor Share on Twitter Madeline Stein is a first year Doctorate student at Saybrook University studying Applied Psychophysiology within the College of Integrative Medicine and Health Sciences. Michael Stein (@MichaelStein16) is an attorney and angel investor, with a focus on technology companies that want to make the world a better […]

Since 2001, Apple has staked its claim across the world with its own first-party brick and mortar locations. But the U.S. is a big country, and the 270 or so stores can only cover so much ground. In the past three years, the company says it has expanded repair coverage to three times as many […]

China-based Zhejiang Geely Holdings is tapping Zenuity, the joint venture between Volvo and Swedish technology company Veoneer, as its preferred driver assistance and autonomous vehicle software supplier for its range of car brands. The decision means Zenuity’s software will likely end up in vehicles under the brands Geely Auto, Geometry, Volvo Cars, performance brand Polestar, […]

China is losing its global lead in games. By the end of 2019, the U.S. will replace China as the world’s largest gaming market with an estimated revenue of $36.9 billion, says a new report from research firm Newzoo. This will mark the first time since 2015 that the U.S. will top the global gaming market, […]

Yesterday, Tally, the startup looking to automate consumers financial lives, announced it had raised a $50 million Series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz and with participation from Valley heavy hitters Kleiner Perkins, Shasta Ventures, Cowboy Ventures and Sway Ventures. On the back of the announcement, TechCrunch’s fintech contributor Gregg Schoenberg sat down with Tally’s […]

Whitebox, a startup that CEO Marcus Startzel said is working to “power the direct-to-consumer economy,” has raised $5 million in Series A funding. The company works with both startups and more established brands, giving them the tools they need to run direct-to-consumer e-commerce businesses. Customers include McCormick, Starbucks, KitchenAid, Bare Bones and Super Coffee-maker Kitu. As Startzel […]

For e-reader devotees, it doesn’t get better than the Kindle Oasis. Amazon’s the last giant player standing in the category (unless you consider what Barnes & Noble is doing “standing”), and the Oasis is ounce for ounce the best Kindle device it has produced. I reviewed the last iteration of the device back in late […]

Netflix has a tradition, in practice since 2015, of annually proclaiming which TVs, of all the TVs in the land, are best suited to serving you its content. The streaming company’s criteria for determining ‘best’ is different from what you’d expect from The Wirecutter or Consumer reports – but if you’re a Netflix ride-or-die level […]

Echo, the U.K. startup that offers an app to help you manage your medication and order repeat prescriptions for delivery, has been acquired by healthcare company McKesson, owner of LloydsPharmacy. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed. However, I understand the buyout sees all of Echo’s existing investors exit, with McKesson becoming the majority shareholder and […]

WeWork’s battle to win co-working in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, is intensifying after one of the U.S. firm’s key rival announced a slew of announcements to double down on its business. EV Hive, an Indonesia-based co-working startup, said today that it has raised $13.5 million and expanded into new verticals. The company […]

Postman, a five-year-old startup that is attempting to simply development, tests, and management of APIs through its platform, has raised $50 million in a new round to scale its business. The Series B for the startup, that began its journey in India, was led by Charles River Ventures (CRV) and included participation from existing investor […]

Facebook unveiled a cryptocurrency called Libra yesterday as well as the Libra Association, a not-for-profit that will oversee all things Libra. While Libra’s white paper draws a lot of inspiration from other cryptocurrencies, the current governance model and blockchain implementation remind me of banks more than bitcoin. Permissioned blockchain The Libra blockchain is designed like […]

$7 billion, that’s the valuation of UiPath following its latest funding round. Born in Romania and now headquartered in New York, the company represents a true European success story. That’s why I’m excited to announce that UiPath founder and CEO Daniel Dines is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. The reason why UiPath is growing […]

Ten months ago London startup Duffel hinted that it would be “a new way to book travel online, aiming at the booking experience ‘end to end’”, and announced a healthy $4.7M funding round, but not much else. Today it goes further, announcing a $21.5m in Series A funding from US VC giant Benchmark, which also […]

Cherry Ventures, the Berlin-based investor that backs European companies predominantly at seed-stage, has raised a third fund. The new “Cherry Ventures III” has closed at €175 million and will continue to be focused on seed, although the firm has historically invested at pre-seed and Series A, too. It will remain fairly industry agnostic, backing promising […]

Robotic process automation — which lets organizations shift repetitive back office tasks to machines to complete — has been a hot area of growth in the world of enterprise IT, and now one of the companies that’s making waves in the area has acquired a smaller startup to continue extending its capabilities. Blue Prism, which […]

Microsoft today announced that is first data center regions in the Middle East are now online. The data centers are located in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and will offer local access to the usual suite of services, including Azure’s cloud computing services and Office 365. Support for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft’s Power Platform will arrive […]

Chances are you always look at photos before you order food in your favorite food delivery app, or before you book a hotel room. French startup Meero wants to make the web and mobile apps look beautiful by helping businesses get good photos. And the company just raised a $230 million funding round. Eurazeo, Prime […]

Update: An earlier version of this post said Twitter is removing location tagging in tweets. In fact, it is only removing the ability to share precise location details like latitude and longitude. In an announcement today from its support account, Twitter said it is removing the option to tag precise locations in tweets. The feature […]

San Francisco is getting closer to banning the sale of e-cigarettes in the city in a bid to prevent minors from accessing them—but the new legislation may also hurt adult smokers who are trying to quit cigarettes. The city’s Board of Supervisors today voted unanimously to approve two proposals: legislation that would ban the sale or […]

Earlier this week, music lyrics repository Genius accused Google of lifting lyrics and posting them on its search platform. Genius told the Wall Street Journal that this caused its site traffic to drop. Google, which initially denied wrongdoing but later said it was investigating the issue, addressed the controversy in a blog post today. The […]

After a year of teasing out Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Niantic (the company behind Pokémon GO) and WB Games have at long last announced an official release date for the game: June 21st. The news came this evening at a press event held just outside of Universal Studios’ Wizarding World (where else?). Though details were […]

Everyone’s worried about Mark Zuckerberg controlling the next currency, but I’m more concerned about a crypto Cambridge Analytica. Today Facebook announced Libra, its forthcoming stablecoin designed to let you shop and send money overseas with almost zero transaction fees. Immediately, critics started harping about the dangers of centralizing control of tomorrow’s money in the hands […]

Good news for Apple Watch owners who don’t want to clutter up their Watch with unused apps. With the release of the new watchOS 6 operating system later this year, Apple will allow Apple Watch device owners to remove many more of the built-in, first-party apps from their smartwatch — including previously unremovable apps like […]

Slack, the popular workplace messaging company, is expected to list on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday in the second major direct listing in the U.S. after Spotify introduced the concept to investors in April of last year. At this point, plenty of industry observers think it makes sound sense for Slack to embrace […]

There are a number of key differences between Apple’s AirPower and lookalike knockoff, AirUnleashed. The most pertinent one, however, is that one of the two is actually available for purchase. Apple gave up the AirPower ghost back in March, after having gone silent on the product for some time, citing an inability to “achieve [its] […]

Take away my toolbox and ask me to be a carpenter. This is what Google and Apple are asking of Iran’s budding entrepreneurship sector by barring access to essential platforms and software.

Few companies have changed the way developers work as profoundly as Atlassian. Its tools like Jira and Confluence are ubiquitous, and over the course of the last few years, the company has started to adapt many of them for wider enterprise usage outside of developer teams. To talk about Atlassian’s story from being a small […]

How best to untangle the Gordian knot that is navigating your own healthcare? It’s a tricky question, and one that seems to have become only more complicated as technology improves, in many regards — systems don’t necessarily speak to one another, and it’s still hard for an ordinary patient without specialist knowledge to make sense […]

IOActive may not be a household name but you almost certainly know its work. The Seattle-headquartered company has been behind some of the most breathtaking hacks in the past decade. Its researchers have broken into in-flight airplanes from the ground and reverse engineered an ATM to spit out gobs of cash. One of the company’s […]

Probably Genetic hopes to provide families of children on the autism spectrum with more complete diagnoses.