Crunch Hype

Marketers get a lot of incoming from the data they have to deal with, bound up in hundreds of spreadsheets and reports, making it time consuming and tricky to get value out of. Tech companies like Datorama and Funnel.io have appeared to try and lighten this load. Adverity is a data intelligence platform also playing […]

Weengs, the U.K. logistics startup for e-commerce businesses that need a more convenient way of getting online orders to customers, has raised £6.5 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is venture capital firm Oxford Capital, with Weeng’s seed investors, including Local Globe, Cherry Ventures and VentureFriends, following on. Founded by Alex Christodolou and […]

Amazon has finally given up the fight with Chinese online shopping giants to capture the domestic market. On Thursday, the Seattle-based ecommerce company announced it will shut down its marketplace on Amazon.cn, which connects mainland Chinese buyers and sellers, while other units of its local venture will stay intact. “We are working closely with our […]

French startup Bankin’ is raising a new $22.6 million funding round (€20 million). The company has managed to attract 2.9 million users in France and wants to become the only app you need to manage your money. Overall, Bankin’ has raised over $32 million (€28.4 million). Investors include Omnes Capital, Commerz Ventures, Génération New Tech, […]

Remote driving startup Phantom Auto has raised $13.5 million of financing in a Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners — capital used to expand a logistics business targeting sidewalks, warehouses and cargo yards, all the places where autonomy and teleoperation are being deployed today. The startup, founded in 2017, has raised about $19 […]

Spotinst, the cloud automation and optimization startup founded in Tel Aviv but now with offices in San Francisco, New York, and London too, has acquired AWS partner StratCloud. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I’m hearing it combines both cash and stock and was somewhere in the region of $5 million. As part of […]

Coffee startup Luckin is continuing its fundraising spree as it sets its sight on becoming an alternative to Starbucks in China. The a-year-and-a-half old company announced on Thursday that it closed a Series B-plus raise totaling $150 million. The fresh proceeds valued Luckin at $2.9 billion post-money, up from $2.2 billion just four months ago. […]

Samsung has issued a statement about its new, folding phone as early photos of tech reviewers with their shiny new toys were replaced on social media (and in numerous columns) with complaints from those same tech reviewers about problems with the phone’s screen. Apparently a number of reviewers either mistakenly destroyed their phone screens or […]

Best Buy is partnering with the Israeli technology Tyto Care to become the official retailer for the company’s all-in-one digital diagnostics kit through its physical stores in California, the Dakotas, Ohio and Minnesota and through its online store. Tyto previously sold its technology through healthcare plans, making its handheld examination device with attachments that act […]

With a clinical version of PathAI‘s computer vision-based pathogen detection service still at least one year from coming to market, the diagnostic technology developer has snagged $60 million in its latest round of financing. The company’s tech is used by doctors to analyze cell samples taken from patients to determine the presence or absence of […]

Car2go, free-floating car-sharing service owned by Daimler, temporarily shut down its service in Chicago on Wednesday after dozens of Mercedes-Benz vehicles were stolen using the app. The Chicago Police Department was alerted by Car2Go that some of their vehicles may have been rented by deceptive or fraudulent means through a mobile app, a spokesperson wrote in […]

Pinterest will begin trading on the NYSE tomorrow.

Nothing scales like a horoscope. If you haven’t heard of Co-Star, you might just be in the wrong circles. In some social scenes it’s pretty much ubiquitous. Wherever conversations regularly kick off by comparing astrological charts, it’s useful to have that info at hand. The trend is so notable that the app even got a […]

A seemingly endless number of startups has attracted funding in recent years to make life easier for people with money to spend. They’re sold nice clothes, chic shoes, cool office space, on-demand car services, on-demand laundry services, on-demand cleaning services, anti-aging therapies. It goes on and on. Overlooked in the process is the overwhelming majority […]

I’ve not had any technical issues with my Samsung Galaxy Fold. So far, so good. A day or so in does, however, tend to be the time when the harsh light of day starts to seep in on these things.

A stream of Chipotle customers have said their accounts have been hacked and are reporting fraudulent orders charged to their credit cards — sometimes totaling hundreds of dollars. Customers have posted on several Reddit threads complaining of account breaches and many more have tweeted at @ChipotleTweets to alert the fast food giant of the problem. […]

Salesforce announced today it’s buying another company built on its platform. This time it’s MapAnything, which, as the name implies, helps companies build location-based workflows, something that could come in handy for sales or service calls. The companies did not reveal the selling price, and Salesforce didn’t have anything to add beyond a brief press […]

The video conferencing business will go public on the Nasdaq tomorrow, the same day as fellow tech unicorn Pinterest.

There isn’t much left to be done in online networking apps. We are all familiar with professional (LinkedIn), social (Facebook), real time (Twitter) and dating (Tinder, Bumble, etc). But profile photos of the people you’re interacting with only get you so far. And we’ve all known that person who looked smart in the photo and […]

It’s super early-bird season for startuppers of every stripe, meaning it’s time to grab the lowest prices on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019, going down on October 2-4 at Moscone North. Check out all the different pass types that fit any level of needs and budgets. Register for your pass now to lock in […]

The FCC has proposed to deny an application from China Mobile, a state-owned telecom, to provide interconnect and mobile services here in the U.S., citing security concerns. It's another setback to the country's attempts to take part in key portions of American telecommunications.

Shared electric scooters are close to overtaking bike-sharing, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials. In 2018, of the 84 million micromobility trips taken, 38.5 million of those were on scooters. The other 45.5 million trips were on bikes — either ones from station-based bike-shares or dockless shared bikes. Rides on station-based bikes […]

Coinbase has been available in 42 countries around the world before today — mostly in North America, Europe, Australia and Singapore. Today, the company is aggressively expanding by opening 11 countries at once in Latin America and South East Asia. But there’s a trick — there’s no crypto-to-fiat conversions. Coinbase competitor Binance has taken the crypto […]

Investors have forked over $33 million in a new round of funding for Redox, hoping that the company can execute on its bid to serve as the link between healthcare providers and the technology companies bringing new digital services to market. The financing comes just two months after Redox sealed a deal with Microsoft to […]

With air quality not improving any time soon (hello pollution!) respiratory conditions are on the rise. This has created an opportunity for startups to employ smartphones to monitor respiratory diseases with apps and smart devices. ResApp’s smartphone app, called ResAppDx, diagnoses a wide range of respiratory illnesses accurately by using cough sounds. Healthymize listens for […]

Foxconn chairman Terry Gou officially announced on Wednesday that he will run for president of Taiwan. Gou will step down from leading the company (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd), one of Apple’s most important manufacturers, in order to campaign for the nomination of the Kuomintang, the pro-China opposition party. Taiwan’s economy […]

Quotes from articles are much more eye-catching than links on Twitter, so the social giant is scooping up the team behind highlight sharing app Highly. This talent could help Twitter build its own version of Highly or develop other ways to excerpt the best content from websites and get it into the timeline. Twitter confirmed […]

Thomas Kurian, the newly-minted CEO of Google Cloud, used the company’s Cloud Next conference last week to lay out his vision for the future of Google’s cloud computing platform. That vision involves, in part, a hiring spree to give businesses that want to work with Google more people to talk to and get help from. […]

What it means to be an 'undercorn' and should we care?

Walt Disney and dating app Badoo are the latest companies to pledge funds for the rebuilding of Notre-Dame after the historic cathedral sustained severe damage in a fire earlier this week. Disney is giving $5 million to help reconstruct the 800-year-old Parisian landmark, while Badoo will donate all of its April profits from its 22 […]

In 2009, the National Institutes of Health launched a five-year, $150 million project to stimulate research into a new field of medicine examining the connections between the millions of bacteria living in the human gut and overall human health. Spurred by the advancements in genetics from a decade earlier, this new field of research would […]

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. Apple and Qualcomm are ending their legal battles In a standoff that has been brewing since 2017, Apple argued that Qualcomm […]

Our live conference call on Google Cloud Next Last week at its conference in San Francisco, Google Cloud unveiled a bevy of new features, and we also got to hear for the first time from its head honcho, Thomas Kurian . TechCrunch was on the scene, with enterprise editor Frederic Lardinois and enterprise reporter Ron […]

Sick of pausing and rewinding YouTube tutorials to replay that tricky part? Jumprope is a new instructional social network offering a powerful how-to video slideshow creation tool. Jumprope helps people make step-by-step guides to cooking, beauty, crafts, parenting and more using voice-overed looping GIFs for each phase. And creators can export their whole lesson for […]

Maybe you love the sound of your alarm clock blaring in the morning, heralding a new day full of joy and adventure. More likely, though, you don’t. If you prefer a more gentle wake-up (and have invested in some smart home technology), here’s some good news: Google Home now lets you use your Philips Hue […]

Five years ago, Dynamic Yield was courting an investment from The New York Times as it looked to shift how publishers paywalled their content. Last month, Chicago-based fast food king McDonald’s bought the Israeli company for $300 million, a source told TechCrunch, with the purpose of rethinking how people order drive-thru chicken nuggets. The pivot […]

While billions of people are now online, thousands of companies large and small are using every channel they can to reach them. Companies like Slack, Airbnb, Pinterest, Instagram, and Dropbox have become dominant players in their market in the course of a few years, but how did they do it? As traditional marketing channels, like […]

Apple is working to combine its tracking apps, “Find My iPhone” and “Find My Friends” into one unified app available on both iOS and Mac, according to a new report from the Apple news site 9to5Mac. In addition, the report says, Apple is developing a hardware product that can be attached to other items that […]

Apple Pay has been a payment option in Uber’s app since fall 2014, but the payment option hadn’t made its way over to Uber’s food delivery app, Uber Eats. Now, that’s changing. Uber today announced that users who want to use Apple Pay can finally do so using FaceID or TouchID in the Uber Eats […]

EAT Club, the lunch delivery service that counts companies like Facebook, Postmates and others as customers, has acquired meal delivery service Taro. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Taro’s business model worked by shipping pre-made meals directly to consumers. With the acquisition, however, Taro will no longer serve customers directly. Instead, it will […]

It’s often said that the dramatic fall of crypto prices last year ushered in a new era for technology-focused startups in the blockchain space, and the same argument can be made for the venture capitalists who fund them. Proof of Capital is the latest fund to emerge after it officially announced a maiden $50 million […]

A few months ago, researchers at Cisco’s Talos cybersecurity unit sounded the alarm after discovering a previously undiscovered hacker group targeting a core part of the internet’s infrastructure. Their alarm was heard: FireEye quickly came out with new intelligence warning of a “global” domain name hijacking campaign targeting websites of predominantly Arab governments. The campaign, […]

We’ve known Microsoft had something new and Surfacey up its sleeve for this week. Turns out the company’s finally ready to unveil the long promised Surface 2S. The successor to 2015’s Windows 10-based interactive whiteboard is all about making things more portable. It’s a bit of a counterintuitive product category that brings nothing to more […]

Airbase is a startup with a plan to change the way you think about accounting around spending. Instead of multiple workflows, it wants to create a simpler one involving, well, Airbase. It’s a bold move for any startup to take on something as entrenched as financials, but it’s giving it a shot, and today the […]

Wattpad, the online storytelling community whose authors’ works have been turned into Netflix movies, TV shows for Hulu and projects for other studios both in the U.S. and worldwide, announced today a new partnership with Sony Pictures Television. The deal gives Sony a first-look option for up-and-coming Wattpad stories — in other words, a way […]

French startup Alsid has raised a $14.7 million funding round (€13 million). The company is working on a security solution to protect your Microsoft Active Directory installation and make sure a hacker can’t access your system. Idinvest Partners is leading today’s round. Existing investors 360 Capital Partners and Axeleo Capital are also participating. If you […]

I’m excited to announce that The Europas Awards for European Tech Startups is really shaping up! The awards will be held on 27 June 2019, in London, UK on the front lawn of the Geffrye Museum in Hoxton, London — creating a fantastic and fun, garden party atmosphere in the heart of London’s tech startup […]

Lyric, a platform for folks who struggle to decide between a hotel and an Airbnb, has today announced the close of a $160 million Series B financing led by none other than Airbnb . Other investors who participated in the round include Tishman Speyer, RXR Realty, Obvious Ventures, SineWave, Dick Costolo, Adam Bain, as well […]

Evernote has fixed a vulnerability that could have allowed an attacker to run malicious code on a victim’s computer. Dhiraj Mishra, a security researcher based in Dubai, reported the bug to Evernote on March 17. In a blog post showing his proof-of-concept, Mishra showed TechCrunch that a user only had to click a link masked […]