Crunch Hype

China’s massive fintech industry took a beating in recent months as the government continued to wind down online lending nationwide, rattling investor confidence. Funding for fintech startups shrank 87.6 percent year-over-year to $192.1 million during the first quarter of 2019, a new report from data provider CB Insights shows. India, which recorded $285.6 million raised […]

Perkbox, the London-based startup now calling itself an “employee experience platform,” has raised a further £13.5 million in funding. The round is led by existing investor Draper Esprit, alongside a number of previous Perkbox angels. Prior to this, the company, which launched in 2015, had raised £11 million. Targeting companies of all sizes, from SMEs […]

Remember Prisma? The Moscow-based team behind the app that sparked a style transfer craze in 2016 has raised a $6 million Series A, led by early stage artificial intelligence focused VC firm, Haxus. While one of Prisma’s original co-founders left the company in the middle of last year, taking some team members with him, to […]

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on TechNode, an editorial partner of TechCrunch based in China. It may have lost its original founding team, but the wheels are still rolling for embattled electric vehicle (EV) maker Faraday Future. The company, famous for lavish promotions but little substance, has received yet another financial lifeline in the wake […]

Samsung’s Q1 earnings are in and, as the company itself predicted, they don’t make for pretty reading. The Korean giant saw revenue for the three-month period fall by 13 percent year-on-year to 52.4 trillion KRW, around $45 billion. Meanwhile, operating profit for Q1 2019 came in at 6.2 trillion KRW, that’s a whopping $5.33 billion but […]

Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem is set to get a massive injection of funds after Jungle Ventures reached a first close of $175 million for its newest fund, TechCrunch has come to learn. Executives at the Singapore-based firm anticipate that the new fund, which is Jungle’s third to date, will reach a final close of $220 […]

Alphabet’s Q1 earnings were a disappointment for Wall Street, courtesy primarily of ad revenue shortcomings. The hardware team met with some difficulties, as well, owing in part to a stagnating global smartphone market that has impacted virtually all players. CEO Sundar Pichai cited “year over year headwinds” when referring to the company’s smartphone line, following […]

We’re deep in IPO news, and last week was no different. When this happens, Equity’s Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm fire up their mics and wax financial about the news we can’t possibly fit into the regular episode of the popular TechCrunch podcast. Last week the duo discussed Uber’s IPO pricing and Slack’s S-1. On […]

Twitter is unveiling a number of new content deals and renewals tonight at its NewFronts event for digital advertisers. It’s only been two years since Twitter first joined the NewFronts. At the time, coverage suggested that executives saw the company’s video strategy as a crucial part of turning things around, but since then, the spotlight has […]

Amazon announced today it has begun to ask customers to participate in a preview program that will help the company build a Spanish-language Alexa experience for U.S. users. The program, which is currently invite-only, will allow Amazon to incorporate into the U.S. Spanish-language experience a better understanding of things like word choice and local humor, […]

At the Open Infrastructure Summit, which was previously known as the OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth used his keynote to talk about the state of open-source foundations — and what often feels like the increasing competition between them. “I know for a fact that nobody asked to replace dueling vendors with dueling foundations,” he […]

With news that the We Company (formerly known as WeWork) has officially filed to go public confidentially with the SEC today, there’s a big question on everyone’s mind: Is this the next massive startup win or a house of cards waiting to be toppled by the glare of the public markets? No company I follow has […]

Mobile marketing company ManyChat has raised $18 million in Series A funding. The startup, co-founded by CEO Mikael Yang, is currently focused on Facebook Messenger. It offers tools for creating a bot on Messenger while also supporting live human chatting (ManyChat says its approach is a “smart blend of automation and personal outreach”), and additional […]

No one ever said consumer robots were easy. But Anki’s actually made a pretty strong go of it, all things considered. After wowing the world at Apple’s 2013 WWDC keynote with its Drive cars, the company went all in on robotics, first with Cozmo, then Vector. After earlier reports of an understandably emotional Monday morning […]

How Menlo Ventures landed a stake in Uber worth billions.

After warning investors that it would be taking a $1.7 billion (€1.5 billion) charge this quarter due to a fine from the European Commission over anticompetitive advertising practices, today Google parent Alphabet reported its quarterly earnings for Q1. Overall it’s a tough quarter for the company that speaks to struggles with its growth. Alphabet reported revenues […]

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. Last week, TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha gave us his recap of the TED2019 conference and offered key takeaways from the most interesting talks and provocative ideas shared at the event. Under the theme, “Bigger Than […]

Last night's episode of "Game of Thrones" was a wild ride and inarguably one of an epic show's more epic moments — if you could see it through the dark and the blotchy video. It turns out even one of the most expensive and meticulously produced shows in history can fall prey to the scourge of low quality streaming and bad TV settings.

Netflix’s early experiments with interactive content may not have always hit the mark. Its flagship effort on this front, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, was a frustrating experiment — and now, the subject of a lawsuit. But the industry has woken up to the potential of personalized programming. Not only is Netflix pursuing more interactive content, including […]

WeWork has submitted confidential documents to the SEC, the first step toward another highly anticipated unicorn IPO.

The popular iOS podcasts app Overcast wants to make it easier for people to share across social media clips from their favorite shows. The feature will likely be well-received by podcasters looking to expand their show’s audience, as they’ve previously been limited to sharing their podcast by way of links or audio-only snippets, for the […]

As spring takes its sweet time rolling across the northern hemisphere, October may not be the first thing on the minds of early-stage startup founders. But it should be. The experience that is Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place October 2-4, and now is precisely the time to make a move that could change the trajectory […]

Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference is taking over the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose this week and TechCrunch will be on the ground covering any and all announcements. The week is sure to have its fair share of fireworks as the company’s top brass takes the stage to talk about the future of Facebook’s […]

Daimler is ending sales of its diminutive all-electric smart fortwo cars in the U.S. and Canada, officially pulling the plug on a vehicle that has struggled to gain ground in North America as the German automaker prepares to bring the brand to China, TechCrunch has learned. Smart won’t be sold in the U.S. and Canada […]

Facebook has been accused of blocking the ability of independent researchers to effectively study how political disinformation flows across its ad platform. Adverts that the social network’s business is designed to monetize have — at very least — the potential to influence people and push voters’ buttons, as the Cambridge Anaytica Facebook data misuse scandal […]

The Impossible Whopper’s debut at Burger King has gone from a not-April-Fool’s-joke to a nationwide rollout by year-end. Originally launched on April 1st at 58 restaurants in St. Louis, the Impossible Burger will be on Burger King menus in additional markets soon and will be available at every Burger King by the end of the […]

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. Spotify Q1 hits 100M paying users, 217M overall, beats on sales but loss widens to $47M Basically, Spotify’s user growth is […]

Airbnb is about to face some more competition in the U.S. with Marriott’s reported entrance into the home-sharing business. On the heels of a successful home-sharing pilot in Europe, Marriott is gearing up to launch a home rentals product in the U.S., according to the Wall Street Journal. Marriott is expected to make the plans […]

Your last 10 emails with a recruiter before an onsite interview probably shouldn’t be about rebooking your canceled flight. Pana is a Denver startup now setting its sights on the corporate travel market, with a specific eye towards killing the back-and-forth email or spreadsheet coordination. The startup, founded in 2015, first tried to gain an […]

Seven years ago, Rachel Haurwitz finished her last day as a student in the University of California laboratory where she helped conduct some of the pioneering research on the gene editing technology known as CRISPR, and became employee number one at Caribou Biosciences, a company founded to commercialize that research. In those seven years, the […]

Mirantis, the company you may still remember as one of the biggest players in the early days of OpenStack, launched an interesting new hosted SaSS service today that makes it easier for enterprises to build and deploy their on-premises clouds. The new Mirantis Model Designer, which is available for free, lets operators easily customize their […]

The New York Times’ popular podcast “The Daily” is continuing to grow. The news media organization this morning announced its show — which today is ranked No. 7 on Apple’s Top Charts for Podcasts — now reaches 2 million listeners per day, and has expanded to a staff of 17 people up from the four […]

Just a few months after acquiring video streaming service Pluto TV, Viacom says it will be bringing its major networks to the ad-supported streaming service, with a whole lineup of new channels launching on May 1. The company is making this announcement in advance of its NewFronts presentation for advertisers later this afternoon. Viacom Digital […]

Over the course of the last year and a half, the OpenStack Foundation made the switch from purely focusing on the core OpenStack project to opening itself up to other infrastructure-related projects as well. The first two of these projects, Kata Containers and the Zuul project gating system, have now exited their pilot phase and […]

Continuing its investment in India, Amazon today announced the launch of person-to-person (P2P) payments via Amazon Pay for Android users in the country. Customers can now make instant bank-to-bank transactions through the UPI platform on the localized version of the Amazon app, allowing them to settle bills and other expenses with friends, lend or return […]

Earlier this month, Beats unveiled its long-awaited answer to AirPods. The Powerbeats Pro feature far longer battery life, better sound and an improved fit. The Apple subsidiary promised a May release, and now we’ve got something more concrete. The fully wireless earbuds go up for pre-order in the U.S. and Canada the morning of May […]

So it’s come to this. After years of letter boxes and angry commenters, the electronics world is finally giving in and developing hardware designed to view vertical videos. Time to pack it in, the portrait mode shooters have won, and their prize is this ridiculous 43 inch TV from Samsung. The Sero joins a handful […]

This could be the upcoming Motorola Razr revival. The images purporting to be the upcoming smartphone appeared online on Weibo and show a foldable design. Unlike Galaxy Fold, though, Motorola’s implementation has the phone folding vertical — much like the original Razr. This design offers a more compelling use case than other foldables. Instead of […]

Edtech and recruitment continue to converge. London-based online degree platform, FutureLearn, is taking £50 million (~$64.6M) from Australian-based online job matching group, Seek, in exchange for a 50 per cent stake in the business — just days after the same group led a massive Series E in U.S. online learning giant Coursera. U.K. distance learning […]

The Audi RS 5 Sportback is an animal. Tamed, sure, but not domesticated. It’s important to remember as one day, maybe next week or next year or both, the RS 5 will revert to its natural state and become fervid, wild and unforgiving. The RS 5 sedan shares a similar look to the everyday Audi […]

As Amazon reportedly gears up to offer its own hi-fi music streaming service, Spotify has posted its Q1 figures. One significant milestone: the world’s currently biggest music streaming service reported that it now has 100 million paying users (up 32 percent on a year ago) and 217 million subscribers overall in 79 markets, picking up […]

Tray.io, the startup that wants to put automated workflows within reach of line of business users, announced a $37 million Series B investment today. Spark Capital led the round with help from Meritech Capital, along with existing investors GGV Capital, True Ventures and Mosaic Ventures. Under the terms of the deal Spark’s Alex Clayton will […]

A war of words in the coffee world is brewing after the CEO of Starbucks claimed Chinese upstart Luckin can’t last just days after it filed for a U.S IPO. Kevin Johnson, who leads the American coffee giant, told CNBC that competitors in China including Luckin have adopted a strategy of building market share using […]

Hundreds of the world’s top hackers, coders, developers and creative makers will descend upon TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 on 17-18 May. They’ll burn through two intense days competing to build something amazing. Do you have what it takes to go up against the best? Competing in the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech is free, but […]

Apple is defending its removal of certain parental control apps from the app store in a new statement. The company has come under fire for its removal of certain apps that were pitched as tools giving parents more control over their children’s screen-time, but that Apple said relied on technology that was too invasive for […]

Brooks Rainwater Contributor Share on Twitter Brooks Rainwater is the director of the Center for City Solutions and Applied Research at the National League of Cities. More posts by this contributor Cities that didn’t win HQ2 shouldn’t be counted out As tasks wane, skills rise Autonomous vehicles will soon be ubiquitous on city streets. Before […]

As we head into the summer travel season, GetYourGuide, which lets people search for and book tours and other experiences in their destinations of choice from a catalog of some 35,000 activities, is raising a big round of funding, which we understand is not get closed but in the works. German blog Deutsche Startups this weekend reported that […]

In its opening weekend, “Avengers: Endgame” made breaking box office records look like a snap. The last film in what Marvel Studios dubbed phase three of its rollout of characters and plots in an ever-expanding cinematic universe is a box office marvel raking in an estimated $1.2 billion at the box office. Thanos will snap […]

Whatever happened to the ethics of engineering? We’ve seen just one disastrous news story after another these past few years, almost all knowable and preventable. Planes falling out of the sky. Nuclear power plants melting down. Foreign powers engorging on user data. Environmental testing thrashed. Electrical grids burning states to the ground. The patterns are […]

What a complicated week for Tesla. The electric car-maker announced this week that it had lost more than $700 million in the first quarter of 2019, an unpleasant surprise for investors that came during its quarterly earnings report. But that was just like the 3rd or 4th most interesting piece of Tesla news that took […]