Crunch Hype

Stripe, the payments powerhouse that is now valued at $22.5 billion, has made an acquisition to help it gear up for new regulations in Europe that will be rolled out later this year to improve security in online transactions. It has acquired Touchtech Payments, a startup out of Ireland that works with banks to help […]

Aidoc, the Tel Aviv startup using AI to analyse medical scans, has raised $27 million in Series B funding. The round is led by Square Peg Capital and brings total funding to date to $40 million. The company’s previous backers include Israeli VC TLV Partners, Magma Ventures and Emerge. Offering a solution aimed at radiologists […]

Engaging Care, the Swedish healthtech startup founded by Annica Belfrage and Charlotta Tönsgård (who was previously CEO of online doctor app Min Doktor), has raised €2.5 million in seed funding. The round is co-led by two European venture capital firms: Connect Ventures and Crowberry Capital. It follows the company’s €800,000 pre-seed funding in July from […]

Home owners in the US spend upwards of $300 billion annually on home repairs and maintenance — a huge sum that often comes with another, more hidden cost: the stress of finding reliable tradespeople, managing those jobs, and (in the worst-case scenario) picking up the pieces if things go wrong. Now, a startup called Super […]

Bizzabo, the New York and Tel Aviv-based events management platform, has raised $27 million in Series D funding. Leading the round is Viola Growth, along with new investor Next47. We’re also told that previous backers, including Pilot Growth, followed on. The new funding brings the total raised by the company to $56 million. Originally launched […]

Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors has come a long way since Qualcomm’s outsize $44 billion to acquire it fell through last year. In an announcement released on Tuesday, NXP said it’s agreed to back and partner with Hawkeye Technology, a Chinese company specializing in automotive radars, as part of an ambition to capture the rapid growth […]

Aptiv, the U.S. auto supplier and self-driving software company, is opening an autonomous mobility center in Shanghai to focus on the development and eventual deployment of its technology on public roads. The expansion marks the fifth market where Aptiv has set up R&D, testing or operational facilities. Aptiv has autonomous driving operations in Boston, Las […]

TED is unveiling the eight participants in the second year of The Audacious Project, a program aimed at helping nonprofits pursue their most ambitious goals. TED’s Chris Anderson told reporters yesterday that this is “an attempt to solve one of the most annoying things about the nonprofit world” — the fact that organizations have to […]

A Chinese student has filed a lawsuit against JD.com founder and chief executive Richard Liu, alleging the billionaire businessman raped her in Minnesota back in August, four months after local prosecutors decided not to press charges. The lawsuit, which was filed in Hennepin County on Tuesday, is seeking damages of more than $50,000. It identifies […]

Paul Orlando Contributor Share on Twitter Paul Orlando has operated startup accelerators on three continents and teaches entrepreneurship and runs the on-campus incubator at the University of Southern California. He writes about unintended consequences and startups. From “blitzscaling” to “move fast and break things,” startups are focused on growth and speed – that’s change at […]

Publishers don’t always love Google’s AMP pages, but readers surely appreciate their speed, and while publishers are loath to give Google more power, virtually every major site now supports this format. One AMP quirk that publisher’s definitely never liked is about to go away, though. Starting today, when you use Google Search and click on […]

Rao, Airbnb's former head of global operations, joined Clover Health as COO in 2017.

RRE Ventures has backed the New York-based fertility startup.

Cytora, a U.K. startup that developed an AI-powered solution for commercial insurance underwriting, has raised £25 million in a Series B round. Leading the investment is EQT Ventures, with participation from existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, Parkwalk and a number of unnamed angel investors. A spin-out of the University of Cambridge, Cytora was founded in […]

Sila Nanotechnologies and its battery materials manufacturing technology are now worth more than $1 billion. The company, which announced a $170 million funding led by Daimler and a partnership with the famed German automaker, started building out its first production lines for its battery materials last year. That first line is capable of producing the […]

No, you’re not misremembering the details from that young adult dystopian fiction you’re reading — Facebook really does sell a video chat camera adept at tracking the faces of you and your loved ones. Now, you too can own Facebook’s poorly timed foray into social hardware for the low, low price of $99. That’s a […]

Discs! What are they good for? Well, if they're nice if you don't want to be tied to an online-only ecosystem. But if you don't mind that, Microsoft's latest Xbox One S "All-Digital Edition" might be for you. With no slots to speak of, the console is limited to downloading games to its drive — which is how we've been doing it on PC for quite some time.

It costs a staggering 50-100 percent more in the U.S. to create a company valued at $1 billion than in Europe.

Netflix just released its earnings letter for the first quarter of 2019. The company says it saw growth of 9.6 million paying subscribers, up 16 percent year-over-year. That’s significantly ahead of the 8.9 million new subscribers that analysts had predicted. On the financial side, the quarter came in right at expectations, with revenue of $4.5 […]

Developers building voice-enabled applications for Amazon Echo and other Alexa-powered devices will now have a new way to validate their abilities, with Amazon’s launch of a new AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder – Specialty certification. This is the first time Amazon has offered a certification program for Alexa developers, the company says. Certification programs are […]

Qualcomm stock surged after the announcement that the company has settled its multi-billion-dollar lawsuits with Apple. At market close Qualcomm’s stock price settled at $70.45 after opening at $57.46. The stock surge showcases just how surprising the resolution is, especially given how wholeheartedly Apple appeared to be moving forward with Intel to keep Qualcomm tech […]

The years-long legal battle between Apple and Qualcomm appears to be coming to an end. In a standoff that has been brewing since 2017, Apple argued that Qualcomm was charging too much for patent licensing. After Apple shifted to using Intel chips, Qualcomm moved to get iPhone imports banned in countries around the world for […]

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. Unfolding the Samsung Galaxy Fold After eight years of teasing a folding device, Samsung finally pulled the trigger with an announcement […]

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took the stage today at the TED conference. But instead of giving the standard talk, he answered questions from TED’s Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers. For most of the interview, Dorsey outlined steps that Twitter has taken to combat abuse and misinformation, but Anderson explained why the company’s critics sometimes […]

KZen is about to release ZenGo, a mobile app to manage your cryptocurrencies securely and more easily. There are already countless crypto wallets out there, but the startup thinks they’re all either too complicated or too insecure. If you own cryptocurrencies, chances are they’re sitting on an exchange, such as Coinbase or Binance. If somebody […]

Logitech has a long history of serving AV nerds with its advanced line of universal remotes. In an age of eight million set-top boxes, dongles and video-on-demand services, the Harmony line has done a good job streamlining users’ needs into a single device. As the name suggests, the Harmony Express isn’t designed for as serious […]

With its Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google Cloud has long offered a managed service for running containers on its platform. Kubernetes users tend to have a variety of needs, but so far, Google only offered a single tier of GKE that wasn’t necessarily geared toward the high-end enterprise users the company is trying to woo. Today, […]

The ethics of technology is not a competition. But if aliens happened to descend upon our planet right this moment, Arrival-style, demanding to speak with our top tech ethicist, Douglas Rushkoff would be a reasonable option. Rushkoff — a prolific writer, broadcaster, and filmmaker once named by MIT as “one of the world’s ten leading intellectuals,” […]

Waymo is making its ride-hailing app more widely available by putting it on the Google Play store as the self-driving car company prepares to open its service to more Phoenix residents. The company, which spun out to become a business under Alphabet, launched a limited commercial robotaxi service called Waymo One in the Phoenix area […]

In February, Twitter confirmed its plans to launch a feature that would allow users to hide replies that they felt didn’t contribute to a conversation. Today, alongside news of other changes to the reporting process and its documentation, Twitter announced the “Hide Replies” feature is set to launch in June. Twitter says the feature will […]

According to a report from 9to5mac’s Guilherme Rambo, Apple is working on a feature that would let you pair your iPad with your Mac to turn your iPad into a secondary Mac display. That feature codenamed Sidecar could ship with macOS 10.15 this fall. If you’ve been using Luna Display or Duet Display, you’re already […]

Lead architect for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita Mark Cerny gave a lengthy interview to Wired’s Peter Rubin and shared some details about Sony’s next-gen console — the console that is likely to be called the PlayStation 5. The next PlayStation will be based on an AMD architecture just like the PlayStation 4 and […]

Yesterday, Salesforce .com announced its intent to buy its own educational/non-profit arm, Salesforce.org for $300 million. On its face, this feels like a confusing turn of events, but industry experts say it’s really about aligning educational and non-profit verticals across the entire organization. Salesforce has always made a lot of hay about being a responsible […]

Brex turns to debt to fuel its next stage of growth.

Intel’s strategy to build out its FPGA processor business continues apace. Today the company announced that it was acquiring Omnitek, a company based out of England that has developed FPGA solutions specifically geared to video and AI applications. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed but from what I understand the price is not […]

SiriusXM hasn’t wasted any time in capitalizing on its acquisition of streaming service Pandora. Following an exec shakeup and the launch of a Pandora-powered music station across both services, SiriusXM is today bringing some of its top talk shows to Pandora, where they’ll be listed as “podcasts.” At launch, content from nearly two dozen SiriusXM […]

The profitable video conferencing business will charge between $33 and $35 per share.

In a tweet this morning, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said the company would be donating to rebuilding efforts to restore Notre-Dame. We are heartbroken for the French people and those around the world for whom Notre Dame is a symbol of hope. Relieved that everyone is safe. Apple will be donating to the rebuilding […]

More like day 1.5, honestly. I spent most of yesterday sick in bed, with fever dreams of flexible displays. This morning, however, I’m already at the airport. Out of the the frying pan and into the fire, as it were. Point is, after spending an hour or so with the phone yesterday, I now find […]

Salesforce yesterday announced a move to reposition how it provides software to and works with non-profits like educational institutions and charities: the company announced that it would integrate Salesforce.org — which had been a reseller of Salesforce software and services to the nonprofit sector — into Salesforce itself as part of a larger, new nonprofit and […]

In an effort to inform the public of the health risks breaking out all over the world (or just to scare the bejeezus out of already paranoid people) the startup Metabiota has released a free-to-use epidemic tracker for all of the outbreaks monitored publicly around the world. The San Francisco-based company frames its tool as […]

Walmart is getting into subscription-based fashion with today’s announcement of a partnership with Kidbox — a sort of “StitchFix for kids” where parents receive a personalized, curated box of children’s clothing on a seasonal basis. The deal will see Kidbox offered to Walmart.com’s online shoppers, where they can fill out a short style quiz, then […]

Electronic Arts has fixed a vulnerability in its online gaming platform Origin after security researchers found they could trick an unsuspecting gamer into remotely running malicious code on their computer. The bug affected Windows users with the Origin app installed. Tens of millions of gamers use the Origin app to buy, access and download games. […]

Competition in the Chinese internet has for years been about who controls your mobile apps. These days, giants are increasingly turning to offline scenarios, including what’s going on behind the dashboard in your car. On Tuesday, Alibaba announced at the annual Shanghai Auto Show that it’s developing apps for connected cars that will let drivers […]

The design world is in a state of full-fledged competition. Never in history have designers and their respective teams had so many options to choose from. As both demand and supply grow, design players are working to build out the most comprehensive experience possible for their users. Adobe, the incumbent in the space, is today […]

Techstars - Boston is celebrating its tenth anniversary today. Over the years, it has helped contribute to the Boston startup ecosystem, graduating 155 startups over that time, some of which have gone onto successful exits, while raising over $1 billion in funding. Among those, the biggest is PillPack, the online pharmacy that Amazon acquired last […]

Move over, Flexport. There is another player looking to make waves in the huge and messy business of freight logistics. Zencargo — a London startup that has built a platform that uses machine learning and other new technology to rethink how large shipping companies and their customers manage and move cargo, or freight forwarding as […]

Just Eat — the marketplace for online food delivery which IPO’d but which is now under increasing pressure from several avenues, not least Uber and Deliveroo — has decided to add to its ‘quiver of arrows’ by acquiring Practi, a software service that provides independent restaurants and small chains with tablet-based Point of Sale (PoS) […]

TikTok, the user-generated video sharing app from Chinese publisher Bytedance that has been a global runaway success, has stumbled hard in one of the world’s biggest mobile markets, India, over illicit content in its app. Today, the country’s main digital communications regulator, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, ordered both Apple and Google to […]

Most work involving computers is highly repetitive, which is why companies regularly have developers write code to automate repetitive tasks. But that process is not very scalable. Ideally, individuals across an entire business would be able to create automated tasks, not just developers. This problem has created a new category called process automation. Startups in […]