Crunch Hype

DocPlanner, the Poland-founded healthcare booking platform that now processes 1.5 million bookings every month globally, has closed €80 million in Series E financing. The round is led by One Peak Partners and Goldman Sachs Private Capital, with existing investors Piton Capital and ENERN Investments also participating, and brings total raised to date to around €130 […]

Pleo, the Danish fintech that offers a “business spending platform” that lets companies easily issue employees with cards and manage expenditure, has raised a hefty $56 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is Stripes, the New York-based growth fund, with participation from existing investors, Kinnevik, Creandum and Founders. I understand that the new […]

There’s big news for one of India and Southeast Asia’s longest-running early-stage investors after Gree Ventures, the fund attached to Japanese gaming firm Gree, announced the first close of its third fund, which is targeted at $130 million. Gree has been a fixture in Southeast Asia since 2012, but now the firm is rebranding to […]

In just three short days, some of the best hackers, coders, programmers and creative tech geniuses in the world will arrive in Paris to compete in the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 on 17-18 May. After the participants pour their heart, soul and skills into creating something amazing out of nothing, it will all come […]

Urban, the London-headquartered company that lets you book a growing range of wellness services on-demand — now including massage, osteopathy, facial, and nail services — has raised $10 million in Series B funding. The round, which includes an earlier $4.5 million equity crowdfund, is led by Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV). Two of Urban’s previous backers, […]

As Uber’s biggest shareholder, SoftBank Group had high hopes for the ride-sharing company’s stock market debut last week. Instead, the Japanese conglomerate’s shares have been sliding along with Uber’s following its disappointing initial public offering. SoftBank shares began sliding at the end of last week after Uber set its IPO price at the low end […]

This month, Amazon announced it’s investing $800 million in its warehouses and delivery infrastructure in order to double the speed of Prime shipping by reducing it to only one day. Now Walmart is following suit with a one-day shipping announcement of its own. The rival retailer says it will begin to offer free, NextDay delivery […]

The fire season is just a few weeks away here in California, and it’s expected to be worse than ever. But there’s a new plan in the works to help catch fires before they get out of control. XPRIZE is organizing a public competition for technology that can quickly find and extinguish wildland fires. Announced […]

WhatsApp just fixed a vulnerability that allowed malicious actors to remotely install spyware on affected phones, and an unknown number reportedly did so with a commercial-grade snooping package usually sold to nation-states.

Of the many categories in the tech world, none is more ferociously competitive than enterprise. For decades, SAP, Oracle, Adobe, Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce, to name a few of the giants, have battled to deliver the tools businesses want to become more productive and competitive. That market is closing in on $500 billion in sales […]

Shares of technology companies were hit hard as China retaliated against the U.S. in the latest salvo of the ongoing trade war between the two countries. The S&P 500 Index shed roughly $1.1 trillion of value while the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq Composite Index fell 2.38% and 3.41%, respectively. On Monday, China […]

It’s not looking great for ride-hailing giant Uber (NYSE: UBER). Today, Uber closed its second day of trading down more than 18.8% from its IPO price at $37.25 per share, with a market cap of $62.2 billion. Uber, which was previously valued at $72 billion by venture capitalists on the private market, priced its stock […]

How founders are taking on housing costs worldwide.

A look at hundreds of startups rebuilding affordable housing from the ground up.

Spotify is testing its own version of Stories — the sharing format popularized by social apps like Snapchat and Instagram that has since made its way to other apps like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and others. In Spotify’s case, it’s not called “Stories” but rather “Storyline,” and the focus is on allowing artists to share their […]

Since the launch of its IPO in mid-April, Zoom stock has skyrocketed, up nearly 30% as of Monday’s open. However, as the company’s valuation continues to tick up, analysts and industry pundits are now diving deeper to try to unravel what the company’s future growth might look like. TechCrunch’s venture capital ax Kate Clark has been […]

Twitter on Monday afternoon disclosed a bug that in certain conditions resulted in an account’s location data being shared with a Twitter partner — even if the user had not opted in to sharing that data. The bug only affected a portion of Twitter’s iOS user base, the company says, and they’ve since been notified […]

The well-known tech startup routine of coming up with an idea, raising money from VCs in increasing rounds as valuations continue to rise and then eventually going public or getting acquired has been around for as long as the myth of Silicon Valley itself. But the evolution of Mailchimp — a notable, bootstrapped outlier out […]

Luckin Coffee is the most energizing IPO in recent memory, and not just because it sells caffeine. Most venture-backed startups can take a decade to reach the public markets. Luckin cut that time down to about 18 months. Founder Jenny Qian Zhiya opened a trial coffee shop in Beijing, with a focus on rapid coffee […]

A new feature rolling out to Uber drivers offers a semi-customized look at their “journey” with the company. On the face of it, the video is similar to the sort offered up by Facebook on the occasion of anniversaries. Here, it pairs a driver’s stats with jaunty music and animation, highlighting how long they’ve been […]

Facebook has been repeatedly (and rightly) hammered for its treatment of the content moderators who ensure the site doesn’t end up becoming a river of images, videos and articles embodying the worst of humanity. Those workers, and the hundreds (if not thousands) of other contractors Facebook employs to cook food, provide security and provide transportation […]

Boost Mobile, a virtual mobile network owned by Sprint, has confirmed hackers have broken into an unknown number of customer accounts. The company quietly posted a notification of its data breach almost exactly two months after March 14, when Boost said the breach happened. “Boost.com experienced unauthorized online account activity in which an unauthorized person […]

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 offers employees $10K and 3 months’ pay to start their own delivery businesses Amazon’s partner program, first announced last year, […]

Spotify has launched a more slimmed-down version of its streaming music app in India, only months after its public debut in the country. The Android-only app, Spotify Lite is only 11 MB in size compared with 30 MB for the main app — a change that’s common to apps targeting emerging markets where bandwidth and […]

Slack discloses latest earnings, plans NYSE direct listing for June 20.

We may be poised on the precipice of a new era of spaceflight, but leaping prematurely off it would be a costly mistake — which is why the delays and failures of SpaceX's Crew Dragon, the new spacecraft that will likely be soonest to take humans to space, are a matter for concern but not worry. In space, you expect the unexpected.

A report by The Wall Street Journal last week revealed a secretive U.S. military weapon designed explicitly to reduce civilian casualties in targeted strikes. Unlike a traditional hellfire missile dispatched from an aerial drone, the missile variant packs no payload, no explosive. The catch? It drops 100 pounds of metal on a target, shredding them […]

It’s only been a few months since Adobe launched its Commerce Cloud, based on its $1.6 billion acquisition of Magento. Today, at its Imagine 2019 conference, the company announced a number of updates to Magento that focus on expanding the platform’s reach for the small- and mid-size businesses that use the service. When Adobe acquired […]

Here’s a big Apple TV update. Not THE big Apple TV update. The whole Apple TV+ thing is still forthcoming, but this major update to the app should go a ways toward setting the stage for its arrival in the fall. The new version of the app arrives today across a slew of different platforms, […]

After being crowned by Burger King as the first meat replacement patty to roll out nationally with one of the largest fast food chains, Impossible Foods has raised $300 million in capital. The financing brings the company’s total equity raise to $750 million — and provides a sizable pool of funds to draw from as […]

Whether you like it or not, facial recognition tech to check in for your flight will soon be coming to an airport near you. Over a dozen U.S. airports are already rolling out the technology, with many more to go before the U.S. government hits its target of enrolling the largest 20 airports in the […]

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against Apple on Monday on a case involving whether or not a group of iPhone users will be allowed to bring an antitrust lawsuit against the company regarding its App Store practices. The iPhone owners allege that Apple’s 30 percent commission on App Store sales is passed along to […]

Mailchimp, a bootstrapped startup out of Atlanta, Georgia, is known best as a popular tool for organizations to manage their customer-facing email activities — a profitable business that its CEO told TechCrunch has now grown to around 11 million active customers with a total audience of 4 billion (yes, 4 billion), and is on track […]

After introducing a six-second “Bumper” ad format back in 2016, YouTube is unveiling a new tool that uses machine learning to automatically pull out a six-second version from a longer ad. It might seem a little ridiculous to try to compress (say) a 90-second video into a six-second message. In fact, Debbie Weinstein, Google’s vice […]

Following news of Amazon’s plans to reduce Prime shipping down to one day, the company this morning announced an expansion of its Delivery Service Partner program, which now includes a new incentive that encourages existing Amazon employees to start their own package delivery company. The partner program, first announced last year, includes access to Amazon’s […]

In a carefully framed deal, ServiceNow announced this morning that it has acquired the intellectual property and key personnel of mobile analytics company Appsee for an undisclosed price. Under the terms of the deal, the co-founders and R&D team will be joining ServiceNow after the deal closes. It’s worth noting that ServiceNow did not acquire […]

Uber is piloting a new PIN feature at the Portland International Airport that will give riders a one-time six-digit numeric code in an effort to speed up pickup times and reduce traffic congestion. The PIN, or personal identification number, feature kicks off Monday at the Portland Airport, which can average around 400 Uber rides an […]

Locus, an Indian startup that uses AI to help businesses map out their logistics, has raised $22 million in Series B funding to expand its operations in international markets. The financing round for the four-year-old startup was led by Falcon Edge Capital and Tiger Global. Existing investors Exfinity Venture Partners and Blume Ventures also participated […]

Sweden’s prosecution authority has reopened a preliminary investigation into Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on an allegation of rape dating back to 2010. It said today it will issue a European Arrest Warrant for Assange, and submit an application for a detention order to Uppsala District Court — as the suspected crime took place in Enköping municipality. […]

Another day, another episode of Equity. This time it was an emergency episode, because Uber (finally) went public and a lot of financial folks were quite looking forward to how it would perform on opening day. Turns out it didn’t do so well. Kate and Alex had a lot of questions about why? Was it […]

Captain Kirk and neo-Dadaists. Repugnant markets and legendary cryptographers. “Digital couture” auctioned by CryptoKitties developers. Distributed autonomous art organizations. A keynote speech looking back from 2047 at the near-apocalypse of 2026, from which we were saved by a new, fully tokenized economy. Yes, that’s right: NYC Blockchain Week has begun. Where to begin? I suppose […]

The human race has broken another record on its race to ecological collapse. Congratulations humanity! For the first time in human history — not recorded history, but since humans have existed on Earth — carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has topped 415 parts per million, reaching 415.26 parts per million, according to sensors at the […]

Two years ago today, a powerful ransomware began spreading across the world. WannaCry spread like wildfire, encrypting hundreds of thousands of computers in over 150 countries in a matter of hours. It was the first time that ransomware, a malware that encrypts a user’s files and demands cryptocurrency in ransom to unlock them, had spread […]

Indian video streaming giant Hotstar, owned by Disney, today set a new global benchmark for the number of people an OTT service can draw to a live event. Some 18.6 million users simultaneously tuned into Hotstar’s website and app to watch the deciding game of the 12th edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket […]

Women and seniors are joining the cannabis movement, and that’s presenting new investing opportunities, according to a panel of cannabis investors who we interviewed several days ago at an event organized by the cross-border venture firm DCM. Specifically, they say, expect to see an uptick in products of all types that make it easier to […]

Choice for consumers compels fair treatment by corporations. When people can easily move to a competitor, it creates a natural market dynamic coercing a business to act right. When we can’t, other regulations just leave us trapped with a pig in a fresh coat of lipstick. That’s why as the FTC considers how many billions […]

After Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy mea culpa at F8 last week, Google got its turn at I/O to promise consumers that their data wasn’t going anywhere that they didn’t want it to go. In short: they aimed to take a page from Apple. For Google, a clear strategy at the event was essentially highlighting how it […]

Not everyone gets a second chance in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneur Hosain Rahman has been given many more than that. Though his last company, Jawbone, which produced wireless speakers and Bluetooth earpieces, went kaput in 2017 after burning up $1 billion in venture funding over the course of ten years, Rahman has managed to raise $65.4 […]

Dale Stephens Contributor Share on Twitter Dale Stephens was one of the first Thiel Fellows and ran an education company for six years. These days he works an executive coach, helping entrepreneurs and executives grow as fast as their companies. These days, most days are good days. My clients are founder and executives, I set […]

Happy Blockchain Week to you and yours. HTC helped kick off this important national holiday by announcing the upcoming release of the HTC Exodus 1s. The latest version of the company’s intriguing blockchain phone shaves some of price off the Exodus 1 — which eventually sold for $699 when the company made it available in […]