Crunch Hype

Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration chief, became known during his tenure for his efforts to regulate the tobacco and e-cigarette industries — and for his particular focus on Juul, the fast-growing e-cigarette company that Gottlieb squarely blames for creating a “youth epidemic” of e-cigarette use by teenagers. Indeed, when he announced that […]

Eight Microsoft interns have developed a new language learning tool that uses the smartphone camera to help adults improve their English literacy by learning the words for the things around them. The app, Read My World, lets you take a picture with your phone to learn from a library of more than 1,500 words. The […]

Aurora, the self-driving car startup backed by Sequoia Capital and Amazon, is in an acquiring mood. The company, founded in early 2017 by Chris Urmson, Sterling Anderson and Drew Bagnell, announced Thursday that it acquired lidar company Blackmore. The Blackmore purchase follows another smaller, and previously unknown, acquisition of 7D Labs that occurred earlier this […]

Unprotected left-hand turns are tough for robots and humans alike. The compounding variables of crossing in front of oncoming traffic make it one of the toughest maneuvers in driving. It’s one of the toughest challenges for self-driving platforms — even more so as drivers often look for non-verbal cues from other drivers to when it’s […]

Breaking into the launch industry is no easy task, but New Zealand's Rocket Lab has done it without missing a step. The company has just completed its third commercial launch of 2019, and is planning to increase the frequency of its launches until there's one a week. It's ambitious, but few things in spaceflight aren't.

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. Indiegogo hires Reddit’s Andy Yang as new CEO CEO David Mandelbrot is stepping down, and according to sources close to the […]

Amazon and Walmart’s problems in India look set to continue after Narendra Modi, the biggest force to embrace the country’s politics in decades, led his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party to a historic landslide re-election on Thursday, reaffirming his popularity in the eyes of the world’s largest democracy. The re-election, which gives Modi’s government another […]

Amazon probably knows everything else about you at this point, so why not let it track your emotions, too? The company is said to be working on a wearable wellness device said to be able able to determine a user’s emotional state. Word arrives from a Bloomberg story based on “internal documents.” This comes on […]

Just a bit shy of a year ago, Patrick Stewart blew the minds of Star Trek fans everywhere by taking the stage at the Las Vegas Star Trek convention to announce he was returning to the role of Jean-Luc Picard. His return would come in the form of a series made for CBS’ streaming service, […]

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Longreads, Simplenote and a bunch of other cool things, is acquiring a small startup called Prospress. Among other things, Prospress has developed WooCommerce Subscriptions, a recurring payment solution specifically designed for WooCommerce. Given that physical and digital subscriptions are taking over the e-commerce world, it makes sense that Automattic […]

Just ahead of the launch of the Apple Card, a startup that has its own take on modernizing the credit card industry, Zero, is announcing the close of its $20 million Series A. The new round of funding was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), and brings Zero’s total raised to date to $35 million, […]

Facebook has just released its latest community standards enforcement report and the verdict is in: people are awful, and happy to share how awful they are with the world. The latest effort at transparency from Facebook on how it enforces its community standards contains several interesting nuggets. While the company’s algorithms and internal moderators have […]

Calling all code whisperers, rock-star programmers and code poets. If you want to compete in the TechCrunch Hackathon at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4, do not wait. We’re limiting the hackathon to only 800 participants, and half of those spots are already gone, baby, gone. Don’t miss your chance for glory, cash and prizes. […]

Google today announced that it is launching the ability to order food delivery directly from Google Search, Maps and the Assistant. Google itself isn’t getting into the delivery game, though. Instead, it is partnering with companies like DoorDash, Postmates, Delivery.com, Slice and ChowNow. Support for Zuppler and others is ‘coming soon.’ The ordering experience, though, […]

DoorDash has raised another $600 million in venture capital funding.

A year ago Instagram made a bold bet with the launch of IGTV: That it could invent and popularize a new medium of long-form vertical videos. Landscape uploads weren’t allowed. Co-founder Kevin Systrom told me in August that “What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing […]

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois and Ron Miller discuss major announcements that came out of the Linux Foundation’s European KubeCon/CloudNativeCon conference and discuss the future of Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. Nearly doubling in […]

PlanetScale’s founders invented the technology called Vitess that scaled YouTube and Dropbox. Now they’re selling it to any enterprise that wants their data both secure and consistently accessible. And thanks to its ability to re-shard databases while they’re operating, it can solve businesses’ troubles with GDPR, which demands they store some data in the same […]

When Pi Charging (winner of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017) rebranded as Spansive last month, the company also dropped plans for its previously-shown cone-shaped charger capable of charging phones placed within a few inches around it. That charger would’ve required special cases for each device — and as the world quickly adopted built-in wireless charging […]

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Nook. Barnes & Noble’s e-reader was more than just a rare competitor to Amazon’s steamrolling Kindle, it was a nice device with an interesting design — and one of the first in its class to now standard technologies like front lighting. But good readers never really die, […]

French startup Yousign is partnering with startup studio eFounders. While eFounders usually builds software-as-a-service startups from scratch, the company is trying something new with this partnership. eFounders wants to create all the tools you need to make your work more efficient. The startup studio is behind many respectable SaaS successes, such as Front, Aircall or […]

When Ezra first launched about six months ago, the company was using magnetic resonance imaging machines to test for prostate cancer in men. But the company’s founder, Emi Gal, always had a larger goal. “One of the biggest problems in cancer is that there’s no accurate, fast, painless, way to scan for cancer anywhere in […]

Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes is taking additional steps to confirm that audience members actually see a movie before leaving a rating or review. The site’s Audience Scores — distinct from the Tomatometer, which is based on professional reviews — have become a target for supposed fans looking to voice their discontent around big releases. That’s […]

Live sports streaming service fuboTV today announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with daily fantasy sports provider FanDuel, which will see the latter’s betting data integrated into fuboTV’s streaming platform. The deal also includes a media buy and a carriage agreement that brings FanDuel -owned horse-racing networks TVG and TVG2 to fuboTV, as well. The deal is […]

Next week, New York City’s Metro Transit Authority will be adding contactless payment support for Google Pay. In the meantime, Google’s getting ready by bringing a key new commuting feature to Android. Starting today, NYC straphangers can use Google Assistant to find out the ETA of the next train. Saying, “Hey Google, when is the […]

Oh boy, there’s another Terminator movie on its way. I haven’t watched any of the franchise’s big-screen installments since “Terminator 2” — not “Rise of the Machines,” “Salvation” or the hilariously-named “Genisys.” But I remember the hype cycle around the latter films, with the excitement that maybe this time we’d see a return to the […]

When Tencent announced it had formed a new education brand this week, the internet giant wasn’t just flexing the muscles to conquer China’s booming online education sector. The new initiative is also an early result of Tencent’s long plan to foster more internal collaboration at a time when its core businesses, the lucrative video gaming […]

Indiegogo has a new chief. Andy Yang will take over for outgoing CEO David Mandelbrot who is stepping down. According to sources close to the company, several other Indiegogo employees are also leaving. Indiegogo has yet to confirm this claim or state the number or reason for their departure. Mandelbrot announced the move on LinkedIn, […]

There’s no darth of Trello-style project management services, but while the core of Zenkit is exactly that, it’s also far more flexible than most and offers plenty of ways to adjust the service to your style of work (and beyond Kanban). Today, the company is launching version 3.0 of its service and with that, it’s […]

Hunters.ai, a Tel Aviv-based startup that built an AI-based threat hunting solution, today announced that it has raised a $5.4 million seed funding round led by YL Ventures and Blumberg Capital. Threat hunting has traditionally been a rather manual practice, where analysts try to actively identify potential threats to their systems. This has always been […]

Investment in LA tech startups is on the rise.

Cloud native models using containerized software in a continuous delivery approach could benefit from serverless computing where the cloud vendor generates the exact amount of resources required to run a workload on the fly. While the major cloud vendors have recognized this and are already creating products to abstract away the infrastructure, it may not […]

The only way to beat laziness is with guilt, so that’s what Future sells. It assigns you an actual human trainer who builds personalized workout plans and messages you throughout the day to make sure you’re doing them. It even gives you an Apple Watch to track your activity and ensure you’re not lying. Future […]

GitHub today launched Sponsors, a new tool that lets you give financial support through recurring monthly payments to open source developers. Developers will be able to opt into having a “Sponsor me” button on their GitHub repositories and open source projects will also be able to highlight their funding models, no matter whether that’s individual […]

Savvy early-stage startuppers of every stripe have their sights set on attending TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Why? This showcase event draws the most innovative startups, technologists, founders and investors across Europe and beyond. Registration doesn’t open until June, but we have a way for you to save big right now. All you […]

Beautystack, the London startup that’s creating a beauty professional booking app with heavy focus on social, has quietly picked up £4 million in seed funding led by Index Ventures. The company had previously raised pre-seed funding from LocalGlobe (led by Suzanne Ashman) and counts David Rowan (ex-Wired), Julien Codorniou (Facebook Workplace) and Audrey Gelman (The […]

A San Jose-based semiconductor startup being sued by Huawei for stealing trade secrets has hit back in court documents, accusing the Chinese firm’s deputy chairman of conspiring to steal its intellectual property, reports the Wall Street Journal. In court filings, CNEX Labs, which is backed by the investment arms of Dell and Microsoft, alleges that […]

Fintech startup Revolut is making vaults collaborative. You can now create a vault with someone else and use it like a normal vault. Originally, vaults were an alternative to savings accounts without any interest rate. You could create vault in any currency (including supported cryptocurrencies) and set some money aside. You can round up your […]

The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunneling and transportation startup, has landed a $48.7 million project to shuttle people in an underground Loop system around the Las Vegas Convention Center. This is the company’s first commercial contract. The initial design for the project, dubbed Campus Wide People Mover or CWPM, will focus on the Las Vegas […]

While much of the world remains fixated on the competition to build autonomous cars, there’s another race that’s gaining momentum fast. It centers on supersonic jets that can fly faster than the speed of sound, or 767 miles per hour. Indeed, while most commercial airliners today fly at between 400 and 650 miles per hour […]

Machine learning researchers have produced a system that can recreate lifelike motion from just a single frame of a person's face, opening up the possibility of animating not just photos but also of paintings. It's not perfect, but when it works, it is — like much AI work these days — eerie and fascinating.

Music streaming giant Spotify has notified an unspecified number of users that the company has reset their account password, but has left dozens of users asking why. In an email, some Spotify users were told their password was reset “due to detected suspicious activity,” but gave no further details. Anyone else getting emails from Spotify […]

When Google launched Duplex with a demo at I/O last year, the audience was left wondering how much of the call was staged. The AI-based reservation booking service seemed almost too impressive to be a machine. Now that it’s been used for real-world reservations, Google has revealed that it frequently isn’t. The company recently told […]

Tired of your smartphone games, and don't want to take the Switch with you on the train today? Panic, renowned creator of useful Mac apps and more recently publisher of interesting games, has created a tiny handheld console that goes anywhere and receives a regular trickle of new games. It's called Playdate.

Paris startup campus Station F and Le Studio Next have teamed up once again for a second season of Foundation, a documentary series about building a startup. If you liked the first season, you’ll feel right at home. A video team followed the entrepreneurs working for three startups through their work issues, their personal life […]

Modsy has raised some new cash as the computer vision startup looks to get physical and build more of the furniture it recommends. The startup announced they have closed $37 million in Series C funding led by TCV. They’ve now raised north of $70 million to date. The service combines computer vision tech with human […]

If there’s a special place in your heart for single-purpose utilities that solve a nagging problem, then you’re going to want to skip your daily Starbucks coffee and instead buy yourself a copy of the new iOS contacts utility Vignette. The new app is focused on doing one thing well: finding photos for your contacts […]

Like many of you, I’m assuming, my desk was purchased at Ikea and is the center of my life. Such as it is, the desk is littered with bits of crackers, memory cards, branded Moleskin notebooks and countless coffee cups. I’m not a slob. I just live here. The desk is clean enough. Then Dyson […]

Who helped your startup grow? Nominate a growth marketing agency. For those who have been members of Extra Crunch for a while now, you have seen us go through two cycles of Verified Experts, covering startup attorneys and brand designers. Now, we turn our attention to our third community of startup professionals: growth marketers / […]