Crunch Hype

Another brick-and-mortar retailer is turning to Amazon to help save its struggling business. Today, discount chain operator Stein Mart announced it will install Amazon Hub lockers in nearly 200 stores as soon as next month. The lockers are self-serve kiosks that allow Amazon shoppers to take advantage of in-store pickup and returns. The deal will […]

In August of last year, Getaround scored $300 million from Softbank. Eight months later they handed that same amount to Drivy, a Parisian peer-to-peer car rental service that was Getaround’s ticket to tapping into European markets. Both companies shared similar visions for the future of car ownership, they were about the same size, both were […]

Roughly $165 billion worth of wholesale produce is bought and sold every year in the U.S. And while that number is expected to go up to $1 trillion by 2025, the business of agribusiness remains unaffected by technology advancements that have reshaped almost every other industry. ‘ Now Silo, a company which has recently raised […]

A week after Sonos added long-promised Google Assistant integration to a pair of speakers, Bose is following suit. The company’s bringing the popular smart home AI to a trio of existing models, the Home Speaker 500 and Soundbar 500 and 700. The forthcoming, pint-sized Home Speaker 300 will be hitting the market with the feature […]

Sun Basket, a provider of a healthy meal kit service, has raised another $30 million in venture capital funding.

Apple is updating its 15” MacBook Pro with new 8-core and 6-core processors and its 13” MacBook Pro with Touch Bar with 8th gen quad-core processors. Apple says that these boosts mean that the 15” MacBook Pro will run at double the speed of the previous quad-core models and hit 40% improvements over the 6-core […]

Turner ‘Tfue’ Tenney, one of the world’s premier streamers and esports pros, has filed a lawsuit against esports organization Faze Clan over a ‘grossly oppressive, onerous and one-sided’ contract, according to THR. The complaint alleges that Faze Clan’s Gamer Agreement relegates up to 80 percent of the streamer’s earnings from branded content (sponsored videos) to […]

It’s the worst kept secret in the world of startup funding. Series A rounds today are the equivalent of what used to be called Series B rounds. The checks are bigger, but so are the expectations around revenue and traction. That shift has created more of a vacuum for seed-stage companies. While there are plenty […]

For over 100 years entrepreneurs have come to Hollywood to try their luck in the dream factory and build an empire in the business of storytelling. Propelled by new technologies, new businessmen have been landing in Los Angeles since the invention of the nickelodeon to create a studio that would dominate popular entertainment. Over the […]

Earlier this spring, both Uber and Lyft introduced new safety features and policies following the death of a university student who was kidnapped and murdered after getting into a vehicle she believed to be her Uber ride. Today, Lyft is announcing an expanded set of safety features and programs, including those that help riders find […]

Many officials claim that governments should regulate Facebook and other social platforms, but few describe what it actually means. A few days ago, France released a report that outlines what France — and maybe the European Union — plans to do when it comes to content moderation. It’s an insightful 34-page document with a nuanced […]

Raisin, the pan-European fintech marketplace for savings and investment products, is headed to the U.S., announcing plans to roll out a similar offering across the pond. The German company, which is backed by the likes of PayPal, Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital and Thrive Capital, wants to bring greater competition and easier savings and deposit account […]

Consumer VR might not have taken off in the mainstream but it’s still fun to use, and it’s even more fun to use in groups. There is more of an arcade renaissance for VR going on right now, as well as location-based multi-user VR experiences. That’s the premise behind Munich-based HolodeckVR which is using proprietary […]

Adtech company The Trade Desk is announcing that it’s hired its very first chief revenue officer, Jonathan Carson. Carson’s past roles include serving as president of Mic, chief revenue officer at Vevo and CEO of digital for Nielsen. He told me he was excited to join The Trade Desk because it’s “a spectacular story” of […]

Growth marketing is critical to a startup’s survival, but it’s not always clear how to successfully pull it off. How do you jump the chasm from one to ten million customers? Should you recruit an in-house growth team or hire an agency? How do you actually get content marketing to work? How much money should […]

Two edtech companies, Zoobean and Unruly Studios, are the latest to receive investment from Amazon’s Alexa Fund — Amazon’s corporate venture fund focused on fueling innovation in voice technologies, and specifically, integrations with Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa. Zoobean, which you may recall from its Shark Tank appearance a few years ago, offers reading software to […]

U.K. space accelerator Seraphim Space Camp appeared last year as the first ever UK SpaceTech accelerator and being, frankly, the only accelerator of its type, it has quickly shored-up a number of partnership links and hoovered up many of the startups in the… space. As is traditional with accelerators, it’s unveiled its latest cohort of […]

Services meshes. They are the hot new thing in the cloud native computing world. At Kubecon, the bi-annual festival of all things cloud native, Microsoft today announced that it is teaming up with a number of companies in this space to create a generic service mesh interface. This will make it easier for developers to […]

The real estate industry is experiencing a bit of a rejuvenation. After years resisting the influence of tech, the industry is now feeling the entrance of e-buyers, as well as a variety of software to streamline the process. One such tech company looking to infiltrate real estate is FlareAgent, which launches today out of Y […]

The best salespeople like to pride themselves on having both a sixth sense when it comes to closing a deal, and a healthy amount of persuasive magic to get a sale over the line. Now, a startup that says it can help any salesperson be like those top people, and help those top people be […]

Future Family is a startup aiming to make fertility services like IVF and egg freezing more accessible. They work with doctors and clinics to make the pricing of these services more predictable and upfront, then offer monthly payment plans to help customers spread the cost (often in the tens of thousands of dollars) over […]

Customer engagement service Freshworks, which you may still remember under its old name of Freshdesk, today announced that it has acquired Natero, a customer success service with some AI/ML smarts that helps businesses prevent churn and manage their customers. The acquisition, Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham told me, will help the company complete its mission to […]

Meet French startup Kard, a challenger bank that works a lot like N26 or Revolut. But Kard is all about convincing teens that their first bank account is going to be a Kard account — a bit like Step in the U.S. When I talked with Kard co-founder and CEO Scott Gordon, he kept saying that […]

Mozilla is currently rolling out Firefox version 67 on Windows, macOS and Linux. And the team is detailing a few changes in a blog post. With today’s new version, users should expect better performances across the board. Firefox is now better at loading essential content first and delaying non-essential scripts, not loading the auto-fill module […]

Adobe launched Premiere Rush, its newest all-in-one video editing tool that is essentially a pared-down version of its flagship Premiere Pro and Audition tools for professional video editors, in late 2018. At the time, it was only available on iOS, macOS and Windows. Now, however, it is also finally bringing it to Android. There is […]

The medical industry has long been considered one of the most promising sources of growth for industrial 3D printing. It makes sense — getting a good fit requires the sort of exact measurements that can be accommodating by scanning and printing. Dental in particular has been a key driver, perhaps most notably in the case […]

Startups that are disrupting and unlocking the lucrative world of financial services continue to unlock big fund funding rounds for themselves. Today, Marqeta — which helps third parties like Square, Affirm, DoorDash, Kabbage and Instacart build and offer card services to their customers — announced that it has raised a Series E of $260 million […]

Generation Investment Management, the firm co-founded by environmentalist and former Vice President Al Gore, was built on the premise of backing sustainable startups. Now, as the idea of sustainability starts to gain wider traction, the firm is doubling down on the concept. Today, Generation is announcing that it has closed a $1 billion Sustainable Solutions […]

ZenHub, a project management tool for GitHub, today announced the launch of Workspaces, a feature that makes it easier for teams to use its service — and GitHub — by allowing them to tweak the service to the needs of specific teams while still using GitHub as the ground truth for their work. With Workspaces, […]

After raising at least $20 million last year from the likes of Amazon, Disney and Bose for a mobile app that offered workouts led by professional, human trainers, Aaptiv is now taking a tech turn. Today, the startup is beginning a pilot of a new service it calls Aaptiv Coach, an AI-based assistant that builds personalised […]

A study carried out by academics at Oxford University to investigate how junk news is being shared on social media in Europe ahead of regional elections this month has found individual stories shared on Facebook’s platform can still hugely outperform the most important and professionally produced news stories, drawing as much as 4x the volume […]

It’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon this week and in the slew of announcements, one name stood out: Atlassian . The company is best known as the maker of tools that allow developers to work more efficiently and now as a cloud infrastructure provider. In this age of containerization, though, even Atlassian can bask in the glory […]

TuSimple, the self-driving truck startup that reached unicorn status earlier this year with a $1 billion valuation, is getting two weeks to prove its tech to the United States Postal Service. The company announced Tuesday that it was awarded a contract to complete five round trips, for a two-week pilot, hauling USPS trailers more than […]

Does the overcrowded and cut-throat music streaming business have room for an additional player? The world’s most valuable startup certainly thinks so. Chinese conglomerate ByteDance, valued at over $75 billion, is working on a music streaming service, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The company, which operates popular app TikTok, has held discussions […]

Ravin.ai, an Israel and U.K.-based startup developing AI to autonomously inspect vehicles for damage, has closed a $4 million seed round. The investment is led by Pico Venture Partners, with participation from Shell Ventures and “automotive entrepreneur” Adam Draizin. It marks Shell Ventures’ first Israel investment. Founded in 2018 and based in Haifa and London, […]

Facebook -owned Oculus is shipping its latest VR headgear from today. Preorders for the PC-free Oculus Quest and the higher end Oculus Rift S opened up three weeks ago. In a launch blog Oculus touts the new hardware’s “all-in-one, fully immersive 6DOF VR” — writing: “We’re bringing the magic of presence to more people than […]

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, the bi-annual gathering of cloud-native computing boffins, Google today announced that it now offers three release channels for its Google Kuberentes Engine (GKE): Rapid, Ragular and Stable. With these, Google Cloud users can decide whether they want the freshest release or the most stable one — or easily evaluate the latest […]

Spending on artificial intelligence systems in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to reach $5.5 billion this year, an almost 80 percent increase over 2018, driven by businesses in China and the retail industry, according to IDC. In a new report, the research firm also said it expects AI spending to climb at a compound annual […]

Like any ambitious cloud infrastructure player, Digital Ocean also recently announced a solution for running Kubernetes clusters on its platform. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Barcelona, the company today announced that Digital Ocean Kubernetes is now generally available. With this release, the company is also bringing the latest Kubernetes release (1.14) to the platform […]

Despite disappointing many longtime fans of the show, the “Game of Thrones” series finale set a new record for HBO as the most viewed episode in the network’s history. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the episode reached 13.6 million viewers during its initial airing on Sunday night, which rose to 19.3 million once replays and […]

I spent much of last week at blockchain conferences, and I’m about ready to never hear the word again. This despite the fact I’ve been supporting decentralized software, as a counterweight or at least alternative to the growing power of governments and megacorps, for years now. Do you think blockchains are no answer? Great, let’s […]

IPO-bound Postmates is under fire right now after making some changes to its payments structure for its delivery workers. Organizers at Working Washington say these changes can reduce pay for typical jobs by up to 30 percent. Up until this past weekend, Postmates guaranteed its delivery workers at least $4 per job. Postmates has since […]

GM is scaling back its Maven car-sharing company and will stop service in nearly half of the 17 North American cities in which it operates. A spokesperson who confirmed Maven was shutting down in some cities, without identifying the locations or number that will remain, said the company plans to focus on markets that have […]

Snap has another appointment in the apt saga of its ephemeral CFOs. Four months after losing its CFO Tim Stone following a reported “personality clash” between Stone and CEO Evan Spiegel, Snap has promoted its VP of Finance Derek Andersen to the role, the company said Monday. Andersen is the company’s third CFO since March […]

Got a few thousand bucks and a good deal of engineering expertise? You're in luck: Stanford students have created a quadrupedal robot platform called Doggo that you can build with off-the-shelf parts and a considerable amount of elbow grease. That's better than the alternatives, which generally require a hundred grand and a government-sponsored lab.

Two steps forward, one step back. The Trump administration has seemingly been trying to calibrate its strategy around its intensifying trade dispute with China. Last week, it effectively banned Huawei from importing U.S. technology, a decision that forced several American companies, including Google, to partly sever their relationships with the Chinese handset and telecom provider. […]

The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut […]

Quadric.io, a startup founded by some of the folks behind the once-secretive bitcoin mining operation “21E6,” has raised $15 million in a Series A round that will fund the development of a supercomputer designed for autonomous systems. The round was led by automotive Tier 1 supplier DENSO and its semiconductor products arm NSITEXE, which will also […]

With the Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X currently in limbo for very different reasons, PC makers are apparently jumping at the chance to make their own foldable display ambitions known. It’s been clear, of course, for as long as flexible screens have been a viable technology, that hardware manufacturers would be experimenting with any […]

Maisie Williams’ time on Game of Thrones may have come to an end, but her talent discovery app Daisie is just getting started. Co-founded by film producer Dom Santry, Daisie aims to make it easier for creators to showcase their work, discover projects and collaborate with one another through a social networking-style platform. Only 11 […]