Crunch Hype

Didi Chuxing is making a further push into the financial arena as it looks to diversify its business amid huge losses. We reported in January that the company, which controls a dominant slice of China’s ride-hailing market, released financial and insurance products targeting riders and drivers. Its service offering just broadened after the startup launched […]

Trint, the London-based transcription startup founded by Emmy-winning journalist Jeff Kofman, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding. The round includes follow-on investment from Horizons Lab, the Hong Kong-based seed fund operated by the managers of Horizons Ventures, with participation from TechNexus, and The Associated Press. It brings total funding for Trint to $7.8 […]

Shedul, the online booking platform for salons and spas, has raised $20 million in Series B investment of, valuing the company at $105 million. The round was led by Paris headquartered VC Partech, with participation from Berlin-based Target Global, Dubai-based BECO Capital, and New York’s FJ Labs. In addition, a personal investment was made by […]

DHL is launching an e-commerce app called DHL Africa eShop for global retailers to sell goods to Africa’s consumers markets. The platform goes live today and brings more than 200 U.S. and UK retailers—from Nieman Marcus to Carters—online in 11 African markets: South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Mauritius, Ghana, Senegal, Rwanda, Malawi, Botswana, Sierra Leone, and […]

The development of the algorithm that made it possible to create the first image ever of a black hole was led by computer scientist Katie Bouman while she was still a graduate student at MIT. Bouman shared a photo on Facebook of herself reacting as the historical picture was processing. The algorithm, which Bouman named […]

Sometimes, reading a lawsuit, it’s tempting to pick sides, to judge who is more right than wrong based on its contents. But a new lawsuit involving two venture-backed companies — both of which are rooted in machine intelligence — makes both sides sound surprisingly careless given their line of work. The plaintiff is Quid, a […]

Google today announced that Google+ in G Suite, the last remaining remnants of what was once Google’s attempt to rival Facebook and Twitter, will now be called Currents. We don’t need to belabor the fact that Google+ was a flop and that its death was probably long overdue. We’ve done that. Now it’s time to […]

Silicon Valley may have dealt with some rough hubris throughout the saga of Theranos, but Hollywood is basking in its downfall. Weeks after the premiere of an HBO documentary chronicling Elizabeth Holmes’s grand blood-testing charade and in the midst of development of a film starring Jennifer Lawrence, Hulu has ordered its own Theranos limited series […]

DARPA wants to be able to launch anywhere, any time, and several times in a row. Is that too much to ask? Not for Vector Space, Virgin Orbit, and an unnamed startup that just qualified to take place in the agency's Launch Challenge, which will push their responsive and mobile launch capabilities to the limit.

When you buy cryptocurrencies on Coinbase, many users simply don’t know what to do with them. Customers in the U.K. can now get a good old plastic card and spend cryptocurrencies in-store and on any online website. This is a Visa card so it should work with any merchant on the Visa network. The company […]

Democratic lawmakers have proposed a bill to address the algorithmic biases lurking under the surface of tech’s biggest platforms. The bill, known as the Algorithmic Accountability Act, was introduced by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Representative Yvette Clarke (D-NY) will sponsor parallel legislation in the House. The bill is well timed. Over […]

The impending wave of San Francisco tech IPOs is substantial and will influence San Francisco real estate, but the hype about its impact is likely overblown.

GoDaddy is making it easier for small businesses to list their products across Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Jet and Walmart.com today with the launch of GoDaddy Marketplaces. As part of the launch, GoDaddy is also announcing that it has acquired Sellbrite, the company whose technology is powering these new capabilities. Greg Goldfarb, GoDaddy’s vice president of […]

Amazon has acquired Boulder, Colo.-based warehouse robotics startup Canvas Technology, TechCrunch has learned. The deal makes a lot of sense from the outside, adding another important piece to Amazon Robotics’ growing portfolio of fulfillment center machines. Amazon confirmed the acquisition with TechCrunch. “We are inspired by Canvas Technology’s innovations, and share a common vision for […]

Today InVision announced even deeper integrations with Jira, letting users embed actual InVision prototypes right within a Jira ticket. The company also announced the Jira app for InVision Studio, letting designers in Studio see interactive Jira tickets in real time. InVision has already had lighter integrations with Atlassian products, including Jira, Confluence and Trello. It’s […]

Bump, the Y Combinator-backed marketplace for streetwear, is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. Bump’s Jack Ryder told me that even before starting the company, he and his co-founder Sam Howarth were active in buying and selling streetwear and sneakers — but he admitted that it took several tries before […]

Online used car startup Shift Technologies has tacked on another $40 million in equity funding, hired a new COO with Amazon and Enjoy roots and scaled up its engineering staff — all in the past several months — as the company aims to double its revenue this year. The recent activity, along with what executives […]

Tomorrow: Google Cloud Next conference call Join TechCrunch’s enterprise mavens Frederic Lardinois and Ron Miller as they discuss what’s happening on the ground and at the (I am sure, very exciting) parties this week at Google Cloud Next in SF. They will talk live tomorrow at 1pm EDT / 10am PDT, and be sure to […]

Instagram is home to plenty of scantily-clad models and edgy memes that may start to get fewer views starting today. Now Instagram says “We have begun reducing the spread of posts that are inappropriate but do not go against Instagram’s Community Guidelines”. That means if a post is sexually suggestive, but doesn’t depict a sex […]

It's finally launch day for the Falcon Heavy's first mission, and SpaceX's heavy-duty rocket platform is due to take off at 3:35 Pacific time. The launch will take a major communications satellite into orbit, and as an encore all three of the first stages will attempt to return to Earth and make soft landings. Success means the inauguration of a new era in spaceflight.

In just a few years, Niantic has evolved from internal side project into an independent industry trailblazer. Having reached tremendous scale in such a short period of time, Niantic acts as a poignant crash course for founders and company builders. As our EC-1 deep-dive into the company shows, lessons from the team’s experience building the […]

For the first time, Netflix is making its content available to another subscription media service. The company announced today it will bring segments from its popular stand-up specials, plus other original content, to Sirius XM’s new comedy station called “Netflix is a Joke,” beginning on April 15, 2019. The station will be offered on Sirius […]

Google is hosting its annual Cloud Next developer conference in San Francisco this week. While the event is still in full swing, with a mystery concert capping off most of the programming tonight, the flood of news has now subsided, so here is our list of the most important announcements from the event. Anthos What […]

No matter what your politics, beliefs, or even your sports team, we can all agree on one thing: robocalls are the scourge of modern times. These unsolicited auto-dialed spam calls bug you dozens of times a week — sometimes more — demanding you “pay the IRS” or pretend to be “Apple technical support.” Even the […]

The amount of research that gets published is more than any scholar can hope to keep up with, but soon they may rely on an AI companion to read thousands of articles and distill a summary from them — which is exactly what this team at Goethe University did. You can read the first work by "Beta Writer" here... though unless you really like lithium-ion battery chemistry, you might find it a little dry.

Cord-cutting services are starting to look a lot more like the services they replaced when it comes to price. After price bumps in the past couple months hit Hulu Live and DirecTV NOW, YouTube TV is now also seeing a pretty substantial $10-$15 monthly price hike for users, though the new pricing will come with […]

Artificial intelligence applied to information security can engender images of a benevolent Skynet, sagely analyzing more data than imaginable and making decisions at lightspeed, saving organizations from devastating attacks. In such a world, humans are barely needed to run security programs, their jobs largely automated out of existence, relegating them to a role as the […]

Prince Harry is the latest big name attached to Apple’s upcoming streaming service, Apple TV+, which was formally introduced last month. According to an announcement published to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s official Instagram account, Prince Harry and Oprah Winfrey are co-creators and executive producers on an Apple TV+ docuseries focused on mental health. “I […]

Earlier this week, Walmart announced a wide-scale expansion of in-store technology. The news came, of course, as the superstore chain is fighting Amazon’s encroachment with everything it has. The list includes several robotics technologies — a category in which Amazon has been invested for several years, beginning with the acquisition of Kiva systems in 2012. […]

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. Google Cloud’s new CEO on gaining customers, startups, supporting open source and more Thomas Kurian, who came to Google Cloud after […]

Google might not be Adobe or Salesforce, but it has a particular set of skills, which fit nicely with retailer requirements and can over time help improve the customer experience, even if that means just simply making sure the website or app is running, even on peak demand. Today, at Google Cloud Next, the company […]

A bill intended to restore 2015's net neutrality rules has passed in the House of Representatives 232-190, and will soon be in consideration in the Senate. The 'Save the Internet Act' may be doomed to an eventual veto, but its broad support among voters and the relatively bipartisan push in Congress make it an important one to follow regardless.

It’s not every day that you read a headline with both Google and Microsoft. Google is announcing today that its managed database service Cloud SQL will soon support Microsoft SQL Server. The company showed a sneak preview at its Google Cloud Next conference. The message is clear — if your company uses Microsoft SQL Server database, […]

Uber is reportedly making its S-1 publically available tomorrow, according to Reuters. According to the IPO paperwork, Uber will sell around $10 billion worth of stock, Reuters sources say. If true, Uber’s IPO would be one of the G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) in the tech industry since Alibaba’s 2014 IPO. While previous reports have […]

With each new set of technologies comes a new set of terms. In the containerized world, applications are broken down into discrete pieces or micro services. As these services proliferate, it creates a service mesh, a network of services and the interactions that take place as they interact. For each new technology like this, it […]

Google is announcing several updates to its data analytics products at its Google Cloud Next developer conference today. The company wants to make it easier to move data to Google’s cloud, manipulate data and turn this data into insights. First, Google wants to make it easier to access all your data from Google’s platform. The […]

Love it or hate it, Microsoft’s Active Directory remains one of the most-used identity services in the enterprise. Google’s Cloud Platform has long allowed you to manually set up an Active Directory deployment, but today, Google is taking this a step further by announcing the beta of a managed service. As the name implies, Google […]

Google today launched a number of security updates to G Suite, its online productivity and collaboration platform. The focus of these updates is on protecting a company’s data inside G Suite, both through controlling who can access it and through providing new tools for prevening phishing and malware attacks. To do this, Google is announcing […]

As expected, Google used the second day of its annual Cloud Next conference to shine a spotlight on its AI tools. The company made a dizzying number of announcements today, but at the core of all of these new tools and services is the company’s plan to democratize AI and machine learning with pre-built models […]

At its Cloud Next conference, Google today launched a new archival cold storage service. This new service, which doesn’t seem to have a fancy name, will complement the company’s existing Nearline and Coldline services for storing vast amounts of infrequently used data at an affordable low cost. The new archive class takes this one step […]

Anyone who has dealt with bad customer service has felt frustration with the lack of basic understanding of who you are as a customer and what you need. Google and Salesforce feel your pain, and today the two companies expanded their partnership to try and create a smarter customer service experience. The goal is to […]

It shares a name with the biggest little city in the world, and fittingly, the Oppo Reno appears to have a lot going for it. Top level, there’s a nutty pop up camera wedge for selfies, 10x zoom, a 48 megapixel camera, in-display fingerprint reader and an optional 5G version. It’s got a whole lot […]

Creativity knows no geographical borders, which is why we’re inviting countries from around the globe to bring their very best early-stage tech startups to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Join more than 1,000 startups and exhibit your country or region’s innovative tech, talent and expertise in Startup Alley — in your own country […]

Amazon Go convenience stores will begin to accept cash, according to a report this morning from CNBC, which Amazon confirmed. The retailer didn’t say when cash would be added to existing stores as a payment option, however, only that it was planned. The issue with the cashierless, automated Amazon Go stores is that they require […]

Say hello to the black hole deep inside the Messier 87, a galaxy located in the Virgo cluster some 55 million light years away. It may seem underwhelming at first, but it’s one of four images of the supermassive spacetime deforming structure — marking the first time such an object has been photographed. The shots […]

In October 2017 online giants Twitter, Facebook, and Google announced plans to voluntarily increase transparency for political advertising on their platforms. The three plans to tackle disinformation had roughly the same structure: funder disclaimers on political ads, stricter verification measures to prevent foreign entities from posting such ads, and varying formats of ad archives. All […]

BentoBox, which helps restaurant owners build mobile-friendly websites, has raised $16.4 million in Series B funding. This might not seem like the biggest opportunity, particularly since consumers are connecting with restaurants in so many other places online — reading reviews on Yelp, making reservations on OpenTable, ordering delivery on GrubHub and so on. But founder […]

OverActive Media, the company that owns Splyce esports org and the Overwatch League’s Toronto Defiant team, have announced that The Weeknd (real name: Abel Tesfaye) has invested in the company. In the world of esports, OAM is a big organization — the Toronto-based company, which launched in 2017, has teams in the League of Legends […]

The Echo Link takes streaming music and makes it sound better. Just wirelessly connect it to an Echo device and plug it into a set of nice speakers. It’s the missing link. The Link bridges the gap between streaming music and a nice audio system. Instead of settling for the analog connection of an Echo […]

The Echo Link Amp is designed to give Echo owners options. Instead of settling for the sound from a couple of Echo speakers, this amp lets owners use a set of nice bookshelf speakers. Best yet, this replaces a large receiver generally needed to power speakers. At $299 the Echo Link Amp lives in a […]