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This post and podcast contain spoilers for “Game of Thrones.” Our original co-host Darrell Etherington returns for this week’s Original Content podcast, which is all about “Game of Thrones” — specifically “The Bells,” an episode that seems to have prompted more fan outcry than anything in the last seven-and-a-half seasons. The controversy, of course, comes […]

It’s been a long night at VivaTech. The building hosted a very special competition — the TechCrunch Hackathon in Paris. Hundreds of engineers and designers got together to come up with something cool, something neat, something awesome. The only condition was that they only had 36 hours to work on their projects. Some of them […]

In this week's newsletter: Amazon takes a bite of Deliveroo and Away packs on $100M

The two people who sat down in reception without an appointment would not leave the startup’s office until the end of the day. Two months later, a letter followed informing the company it had been suspended from the United Kingdom’s register of licensed sponsors, the database of companies the government has approved to employee foreign […]

The United Kingdom’s current government has ended up restricting high-skill immigration as part of its larger drive to decrease all immigration. While it pays lip service to being a startup hub, we just published an article examining how one promising high-profile startup, Metail, has been cut off from hiring more key workers over a rather […]

On the heels of Clutter announcing a large growth round of $200 million earlier this year, the storage startup is cleaning up the competitive field. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Clutter has purchased the storage business of erstwhile rival Omni. Omni will remain an independent company, which will now instead focus on rentals of personal […]

With a valuation of over $1 billion and $190 million in new financing, Zipline has become the latest contender to be the leader in the game of drones. The competition to be a leading vendor of delivery drone services is fierce, but Zipline has already built its billion-dollar business selling its hardware and services as […]

Even as Quibi, the short form video platform from Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo, reportedly looks to raise another $1 billion, rival service Fiction Riot continues to steadily build out its pipeline of short form serials. The Los Angeles-based company has already launched a beta version of its streaming service, Ficto, and yesterday announced a host of […]

Let’s get the bad out of the way first, shall we? For starters, that charging case is huge. There’s no way around it. It’s something that’s become more and more apparent as the weather is warmer and I no longer have jacket pockets to carry it around in. If you shell out the money for […]

Shares of Luckin Coffee jumped 20% in its first day of trading on the Nasdaq stock market. After opening at $17.00, shares of the Chinese Starbucks competitor climbed as high as $25.96, or more than 50%, before settling back down to $20.38 at the market’s close. The company has a market cap north of $5 […]

Alleged cryptocurrency exchange Goxtrade bills itself as a “trusted platform for trading bitcoins,” but its staff page is filled with photos of people pulled seemingly at random from the internet. The alleged exchange, which claimed to debut in 2017 yet its website is only a little more than a week old, used photos taken from […]

Netflix is launching its own take on Project Runway, and it’s bringing in Queer Eye’s Tan France to host. While Project Runway has grown to become one of the most popular fashion-focused reality shows to ever hit TV, the franchise, now on Season 17, is getting a little long in the tooth — and in […]

DNA Script has raised $38.5 million in new financing to commercialize a process that it claims is the first big leap forward in manufacturing genetic material. The revolution in synthetic biology that’s reshaping industries from medicine to agriculture rests on three, equally important pillars. They include: analytics — the ability to map the genome and […]

In an age of online misinformation and clickbait, how do you know whether a publication is trustworthy? Startup Credder is trying to solve this problem with reviews from both journalists and regular readers. These reviews are then aggregated into an overall credibility score (or rather, scores, since the journalist and reader ratings are calculated separately). So […]

Sometimes you need scrambled eggs. And with that thought, today at the Overland Expo in Flagstaff, AZ, Rivian announced a major accessory for its electric pickup: A camp kitchen. The unit slides out from the Rivian R1T’s so-called gear tunnel that lives between the bed and cab. The kitchen includes storage and a stove that’s […]

Princess Leia’s hologram message to Obi-Wan is getting closer to reality, at least augmented reality. Magic Leap announced yesterday that they’ve agreed to acquire Belgian startup Mimesys. The team has been working on bringing Star Wars-esque volumetric video calls to the Magic Leap platform, and it seems that the Florida AR startup liked what they […]

From viral TikTok sensation to music’s number one smash hit, “Old Town Road” has taken the top spot in music’s cultural firmament relying on an incredible Nine Inch Nails sample, some old-fashioned controversy (it was barred from country music charts) and a remix with Billy Ray Cyrus. So it’s only natural that the song that […]

Eleven aerospace companies will share more than $45 million in funds from NASA to design and test prototypes for the Artemis moon missions, the agency announced today. Among the established names like Northrop Grumman and Sierra Nevada are relative newcomers SpaceX and Blue Origin, looking to make a place for themselves on the agency's biggest push in decades.

After disclosing a breach earlier this week, Stack Overflow has confirmed some user data was accessed. In case you missed it, the developer knowledge sharing site confirmed Thursday a breach of its systems last weekend, resulting in unauthorized access to production systems — the front-facing servers that actively powers the site. The company gave few […]

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 Kate Clark sat down with Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of video communications startup Zoom, to go behind the curtain on the company’s recent IPO process and its path […]

Canva, the design and publishing platform taking on Adobe, PowerPoint, and others, has acquired the free stock image providers Pexels and Pixabay and launched a new subscription service for its premium image marketplace, Photos Unlimited. Taken together, the new strategic moves represent a concerted effort by the company to add more graphic options to its […]

For anyone following Spotify, this no doubt felt like an inevitably. As the streaming service looks to diversify, the company’s already had some loose partnerships with hardware companies like Mighty. Now it’s looking to build its own thing. That thing being “Car Thing.” The piece of automotive hardware isn’t a consumer device exactly. Spotify is […]

Fan reaction to Game of Thrones’ final season may be mixed, but the show has been undeniably good for HBO’s network — and for its over-the-top streaming service, HBO NOW. The Season 8 premiere drew in 11.8 million live viewers and 17.4 million viewers across all platforms on the day of airing, as well as […]

Shares of Fastly, the service that’s used by websites to ensure that they can load faster, have popped in its first hours of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The company, which priced its public offering at around $16 — the top of the estimated range for its public offering — have risen more […]

Last week, SoftBank Group Corp. — Masayoshi Son’s holding company for his rapidly expanding collection of businesses — reported its fiscal year financials. There were some major headlines that came out of the news, including that the company’s Vision Fund appears to be doing quite well and that SoftBank intends to increase its stake in […]

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. Amazon leads $575M investment in Deliveroo Amazon is taking a slice of Europe’s food delivery market by leading a $575 million […]

It’s a busy time for Postmates — the logistics and delivery company is prepping for its IPO on the back of a fresh $100 million raise in February. However, founder and CEO Bastian Lehmann is still carving some time out of his schedule to join us at Disrupt SF in October. Before Postmates, Lehmann cofounded […]

Slowly but surely, Wing is spreading. Just last month, the one-time Google moonshot started deliveries for select locales in Australia’s capital city, Canberra. Now it’s moving into Finland, taking on that country’s own capital, Helsinki. Drone deliveries will start just month — which may just make the “spring” timeframe it announced late last year. Like […]

Indians can already use Amazon to pay for their mobile bills and borrow money to purchase items, but now there’s more. This week, the ecommerce giant quietly introduced an additional feature to its shopping site: flight tickets. Amazon has partnered with local travel service Cleartrip to add flight booking option to its payment service — […]

Microsoft is investing in certification and training for a range of AI-related skills in partnership with education provider General Assembly, the companies announced this morning. The goal is to train some 15,000 people by 2022 in order to increase the pool of AI talent around the world. The training will focus on AI, machine learning, […]

Earlier this month, Canalys used the word “freefall” to describe its latest reporting. Global shipments fell 6.8% year over year. At 313.9 million, they were at their lowest level in nearly half a decade. Of the major players, Apple was easily the hardest hit, falling 23.2% year over year. The firm says that’s the “largest […]

HPE announced it was buying Cray for $1.3 billion, giving it access to the company’s high-performance computing portfolio, and perhaps a foothold into quantum computing in the future. The purchase price was $35 a share, a $5.19 premium over yesterday’s close of $29.81 a share. Cray was founded in the 1970s and for a time […]

European restaurant delivery giant Deliveroo this morning announced that Amazon would be gobbling up a share in the company, by leading a new $575 million round of funding in it. But it looks like the e-commerce giant may be facing a little indigestion ahead. Tom Watson, MP and deputy leader of the Labour Party, today […]

When your game tops a hundred million players, your thoughts naturally turn to doubling that number. That's the case with the creators, or rather stewards, of Minecraft at Microsoft, where the game has become a product category unto itself. And now it is making its biggest leap yet — to a real-world augmented reality game in the vein of Pokemon GO, called Minecraft Earth.

Health at Scale, a startup with founders who have both medical and engineering expertise, wants to bring machine learning to bear on healthcare treatment options to produce outcomes with better results and less aftercare. Today the company announced a $16 million Series A. Optum, which is part of the UnitedHealth Group, was the sole investor […]

As its once-strong mobile division continues to slide, LG is picking up its focus on emerging tech. The company has pushed automotive, and particularly its self-driving capabilities, and today it doubled down on its smart home play with the announcement of its own artificial intelligence (AI) chip. LG said the new chip includes its own […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Tutor House, a U.K.-based startup that operates a marketplace to let parents find an online or in-person tutor for their children, has raises £2 million in funding. Backing the round, the first for the young company, is Fuel Ventures, the London-based VC and startup builder set up by Mark Pearson of MyVoucherCodes fame. Fuel Ventures […]

While U.S. government officials celebrate what they must consider to be a win in their battle against the low-cost, high-performance networking vendor Huawei and other Chinese hardware manufacturers, the country is at risk of falling seriously behind in the broader, global competition for telecom tech and customers. It may be a race that the U.S. […]

For the third year as president, France’s president Emmanuel Macron talked to the French tech ecosystem at VivaTech in Paris. This time, he used this opportunity to defend his policies so far and say that tech startups have nearly everything they need to succeed Frichti’s Julia Bijaoui, TransferWise’s Flora Coleman, OpenClassrooms’ Pierre Dubuc, Vinted’s Thomas […]

Another week, another cash-burning tech IPO in the U.S. Following on from Uber’s high-profile listing, ambitious Chinese startup Luckin Coffee has raised up to $650.8 million on the Nasdaq after it priced its shares at $17. Despite concern at its high losses and little chance of near-term profitability, Luckin seems to have been greeted positively […]

Amazon is taking a slice of Europe’s food delivery market after the U.S. e-commerce giant led a $575 million investment in Deliveroo . First reported by Sky yesterday, the Series G round was confirmed in an early UK morning announcement from Deliveroo, which confirmed that existing backers including T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Management and Research […]

Facebook cloning Snap to death may be old news, but others are only just following suit. Line, the Japanese messaging app that’s popular in Asia, just became the latest to clone Snap’s ephemeral story concept. The company announced today that it is adding stories that disappear after 24-hours to its timeline feature, a social network like […]

Following a week-long release from an Alexandria, Virginia detention center, Chelsea Manning is back in jail. Manning was jailed in March for her refusal to cooperate with a grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks. Manning has made her position on the grand jury well known and refuses to cooperate with its proceedings on principle. Her release […]

Baidu, heralded as the Google of China, felt the heat from its continued spending on artificial intelligence and other next-gen technologies that have yet to reach the mass market as it unveiled troubled first-quarter financials on Thursday. The company logged a net loss attributable to shareholders of $49 million in the quarter ended March 31, […]

Premium smartphone manufacturers have moved the needle on pricing, but 2019 may well go down as a kind of golden age for budget flagships. Apple, Google and Samsung are all in that business now, and OnePlus has once again shown the world how to offer more for less. And then there’s the new ZenFone. It’s […]

Retail Zipline, a startup aiming to improve communication between retail stores and corporate decision makers, announced today that it has raised $9.6 million in Series A funding. CEO Melissa Wong previously worked in corporate communications for Old Navy, where she said she saw “such a disconnect between what was decided in headquarters and what was […]

Developer knowledge sharing site Stack Overflow has confirmed hackers breached its systems, but said customer data is unaffected. “Over the weekend, there was an attack on Stack Overflow,” wrote Mary Ferguson, vice president of engineering. “We have confirmed that some level of production access was gained on May 11.” “We discovered and investigated the extent […]

Over the past 5 years, there has been a clear drop in seed investing. From 2010-2014 there was an influx of “micro” VCs, well-equipped to deploy seed capital. Since then, we've seen a gradual decline.

Contrary Capital is raising $35 million to invest between $50,000 and $200,000 in students and recent college dropouts.