Crunch Hype

CleverTap, an India-based startup that lets companies track and improve engagement with users across the web, has pulled in $26 million in new funding thanks to a round led by Sequoia India. Existing investor Accel and new backer Tiger Global also took part in the deal, which values CleverTap at $150-$160 million, the startup disclosed. […]

Innovation Endeavors, the fund backed by Google’s Eric Schmidt, has for years now been taking a novel approach to working on difficult and still-evolving problems like cybersecurity and food shortages: it sets up incubators that bring together different stakeholders to identify, develop and fund ways of tackling these issues. Today, Innovation unveiled the latest of […]

Publicly traded sensor technology developer, FLIR Systems, is investing in a strategic round of funding for the outsourced drone imaging company, DroneBase. The two companies are also partnering to provide FLIR’s thermal imaging technology and training services to DroneBase’s stable of pilots. Terms of the investment were not disclosed. “Our investment in DroneBase helps expand […]

It’s taken some time to come around, but Naspers — the early Tencent investor that’s also behind the world’s top listings service — finally has a piece of Southeast Asia’s Carousell. TechCrunch broke news of talks between the two sides last year, and today Tech In Asia reported that Naspers-owned OLX Group has put $42 […]

Defy founders Trae Vassallo and Neil Sequeira have upped the ante.

YieldStreet — which raised $62 million in February to further open up alternative investments in areas like shipping, real estate, legal finance and commercial loans to a wider base of investors — is today announcing its first acquisition to expand into a new asset class. It is paying $170 million to acquire Athena Art Finance, which provides loans to […]

Madrid-based micromobility startup Movo has closed a €20 million (~$22.5M) Series A funding round to accelerate international expansion. The 2017 founded Spanish startup targets cities in its home market and in markets across LatAm, offering last mile mobility via rentable electric scooters (e-mopeds and e-scooters) plotted on an app map. It’s a subsidiary of local […]

Yesterday, the opening keynote for Google’s Cloud Next conference was packed with news, from Google’s hybrid cloud platform Anthos to Google’s new product to turn a container into a URL. At 9 AM PT, 12 PM ET, 5 PM GMT, Google is opening day 2 of its conference with the product innovation keynote. Later at […]

Tunisia based private equity firm Africinvest has teamed up with Cathay Capital — a global private equity firm based in Paris — to launch a new Africa tech fund with a target raise of $168 million. Details are still forthcoming, but the Cathay Africinvest Innovation Fund will focus primarily on series A to C stage […]

Amazon's Kindle is of course the brand most think of when they consider buying an e-reader, but competition does exist and the truth is it makes the company's newest entry-level device look like a poor bargain. The price may be low, but this budget reader just doesn't meet the bar.

ShopBack, a Singapore-based startup that offers cashback and consumer rewards in Asia Pacific, has closed a $45 million round led by new investors Rakuten Capital and EV Growth. Founded in 2014, the startup had been relatively under-the-radar until late 2017 when it announced a $25 million investment that funded expansion into Australia among other things. […]

A highly capable malware reportedly used in a failed plot to blow up a Saudi petrochemical plant has now been linked to a second compromised facility. FireEye researchers say the unnamed “critical infrastructure” facility was the latest victim of the powerful Triton malware, the umbrella term for a series of malicious custom components used to […]

Udacity, the $1 billion online education startup, has laid off about 20 percent of its workforce and is restructuring its operations as the company’s co-founder Sebastian Thrun seeks to bring costs in line with revenue without curbing growth, TechCrunch has learned. The objective is to do more than simply keep the company afloat, Thrun told […]

Flying cars definitely sound cool, but whether they're actually a good idea is up for debate. Fortunately they do seem to have some surefire benefits, among which you can now count improved efficiency — in theory, and on long trips. But it's something!

After Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s recently minted CEO, joined the company, he took hundreds of meetings to learn what the company’s prospective and current customers were looking for. The overarching theme of those conversations was always similar, he told me during an interview at Google’s Cloud Next conference: “Love the technology — amazed at it. […]

Expanse, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based company that helps its clients understand and monitor what it calls their “global internet attack surface,” has received a $70 million vote of confidence from its earlier backers, as well as some notable individual investors. Previous investor TPG Growth led the Series C round, with participation from other earlier investors […]

Thanks to pressure from tax preparation industry, Congress is getting ready to ban the Internal Revenue Service from ever building a free electronic tax filing system. As ProPublica reports, the effort is a bipartisan one. The House Ways and Means Committee, led by Massachusetts Democrat, Richard Neal, passed the Taxpayer First Act. The bill would […]

This year at Google Cloud Next, the theme is all about supporting hybrid environments, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Apigee, the API company it bought in 2016 for $265 million, is also getting into the act. Today, Apigee announced the beta of Apigee Hybrid, a new product designed for hybrid environments. Amit […]

I flew to Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake to help treat children. Along with my stethoscope, my computer and smartphone quickly became essential tools in my medical bag.

One of the top use cases for Amazon Alexa is its ability to quickly summarize the day’s headlines via its customizable “Flash Briefing” skill. Now, Amazon is rolling out a new feature that will allow Alexa device owners to get more in-depth news from their preferred news provider, with this week’s launch of “long-form news.” […]

At today’s House Judiciary hearing addressing “Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism,” hate appears to have prevailed. As the hearing’s live stream aired on the House Judiciary’s YouTube channel, comments in the live chat accompanying the stream were so inflammatory that YouTube actually disabled the chat feature mid-hearing. Many of those comments were […]

As Google Cloud Next opened today in San Francisco, Accenture announced its intent to acquire Cirruseo, a French cloud consulting firm that specializes in Google Cloud intelligence services. The companies did not share the terms of the deal. Accenture says that Cirruseo’s strength and deep experience in Google’s cloud-based artificial intelligence solutions should help as […]

A new piece of bipartisan legislation aims to protect people from one of the sketchiest practices that tech companies employ to subtly influence user behavior. Known as “dark patterns,” this dodgy design strategy often pushes users toward giving up their privacy unwittingly and allowing a company deeper access to their personal data. To fittingly celebrate […]

The lower house of the French parliament has voted in favor of the new tax on tech giants without any modification. Big tech companies that generate significant revenue in France will be taxed on their revenue generated in France. Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire has been lobbying other European countries so that big tech companies […]

Labelbox, a provider of services to create, manage and maintain data sets for machine learning applications, has raised $10 million in a new round of funding. The financing came from Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund, with participation from previous investors Kleiner Perkins, First Round Capital and Sumon Sadhu, an angel investor. Labelbox manages the process […]

Texas may have suffered a heartbreaking defeat during last night’s NCAA men’s championship basketball game, but the state does have something to celebrate today. Local outfit LiveOak Venture Partners, a venture firm focused exclusively on Texas-based startups, has closed a new fund with $105 million in capital commitments. It’s the second vehicle for the firm, […]

UpCodes wants to fix one of the building industry’s biggest headaches by streamlining code compliance. But the Y Combinator-backed startup now faces a copyright lawsuit filed against it by the International Code Council, the nonprofit organization that develops the code used or adopted in building regulations by all 50 states. The case may have ramifications […]

Everything you know about the cost of transportation is wrong.

Some of the first users of autonomous taxis are senior citizens living in a massive retirement community in Florida. It’s there, in a 40-square-mile area known as The Villages, that autonomous driving startup Voyage has planted its flag. Once the door-to-door self-driving taxi service is fully operational, all 125,000 residents will have the ability to summon […]

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. Regulators in China are weighing a ban on Bitcoin mining Cryptocurrency mining has become the latest target for the Chinese government […]

Walmart is doubling down on its technology innovations in its brick-and-mortar stores in an effort to better compete with Amazon. The retailer today announced the expanded rollout of several technologies — ranging from in-store Pickup Towers to help customers quickly grab their online orders to floor-scrubbing robots. These jobs were, in many cases, previously handled […]

Google’s Cloud Next conference is taking over the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week and TechCrunch is on the scene covering all the latest announcements. Google Cloud already powers some of the world’s premier companies and startups, and now it’s poised to put even more pressure on cloud competitors like AWS with its newly-released […]

Jumbo could be a nightmare for the tech giants, but a savior for the victims of their shady privacy practices. Jumbo saves you hours as well as embarrassment by automatically adjusting 30 Facebook privacy settings to give you more protection, and by deleting your old tweets after saving them to your phone. It can even […]

If you can’t stop dreaming about NoSQL databases, Google’s Cloud Next conference is the closest thing to heaven that you’ll find today. At 9 AM PT, 12 PM ET, 5 PM GMT, some of the brightest minds in cloud computing are going to introduce the upcoming features of Google Cloud. Along with Amazon Web Services […]

In 2007, Emily Heyward, JB Osborne, and Simon Endres began their own entrepreneurial journey began and they left their corporate jobs to start a brand design agency called Red Antler. They not only believed in the power of branding to drive growth and scale, but they also wanted to work exclusively with startups. Since then, […]

Google today announced that it has partnered with a number of top open-source data management and analytics companies to integrate their products into its Google Cloud Platform and offer them as managed services operated by its partners. The partners here are Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs. The idea here, Google says, […]

Google’s Cloud Services Platform for managing hybrid clouds that span on-premise data centers and the Google cloud, is coming out of beta today. The company is also changing the product’s name to Anthos, a name that either refers to a lost Greek tragedy, the name of an obscure god in the Marvel universe, or rosemary. […]

At Google Cloud Next today, the company announced it is bringing two brand new data centers online in the 2020 timeframe with one in Seoul, South Korea and one in Salt Lake City, Utah. The company, like many of its web scale peers, has had the data center building pedal to the medal over the […]

Teeth straightening startup Candid has raised another $63.4 million Series B round from Greycroft, Bessemer, e.ventures and others. The new injection of cash brings its total funding to $90 million. Candid, which 3D prints its FDA-approved aligners, is designed for people who need mild to moderate orthodontic work. The modeling kit costs $95, and then […]

Slack’s goal of integrating enterprise tools in the chat interface has been a major differentiator from the giant companies it’s competing with like Microsoft and Facebook. Last year, it bought Astro, specifically with the goal of integrating enterprise productivity tools inside Slack, and today it announced new integrations with Microsoft OneDrive and Outlook. Specifically, Slack […]

We love a good bag here at TechCrunch. Heck, it’s a dirty little secret that Bag Week can happen several times in a given year, if we’re so inclined. Generally I prefer a bit of minimalism in my bags, though I’ve been known to go in for something a bit more complex, if it strikes […]

Indian social commerce startup GlowRoad announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series B. The round was led by CDH Investments, a Chinese investment firm, with participation from returning investor Accel Partners. GlowRoad’s last funding, a $2 million Series A led by Accel, was announced in September 2017, a few months after it […]

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has released a new report about future Apple products — 9to5mac obtained the report. The company could be working on a new 31.6-inch external display with a 6K resolution that could work particularly well with the Mac Pro. New iPad and MacBook Pro models with better displays are also in the works. Apple […]

Google X graduate Wing has begun making drone deliveries in a trio of suburbs just outside Canberra, Australia’s capital city. The Alphabet-owned company says it has tested the service 3,000 times over the past 18 months and is set to start the rollout to “a limited set of eligible homes.” The service will be open […]

It’s been a long time since the original ten members of Meow Wolf’s art collective had to scrounge in dumpsters for the raw materials to bring their galaxy spanning visions to life. Now, with well over $18 million in financing behind them, the story of a troupe of misunderstood, hardscrabble artists trying to create something […]

Mozilla is adding a new feature to protect you against web annoyances in future releases of Firefox. The new feature is currently available in the beta version of Firefox 67, and the nightly version of Firefox 68. They will be available in the stable release of Firefox in a few weeks. The cryptomining and fingerprinting […]

Mobile shopping startup Dote is announcing $12 million in new funding, as well as a new feature called Shopping Party. Founder and CEO Lauren Farleigh said her initial goal was to create “a truly native mobile experience” that made it “easy to check out across a lot of different stores.” Over time, recommendations from social […]

A new map of nearly all of Africa shows exactly where the continent's 1.3 billion people live down to the meter, which could help everyone from local governments to aid organizations. The map joins others like it from Facebook created by running satellite imagery through a machine learning model.

There’s been a huge boom in the last decade of applications and services that rely on on real-time notifications and other alerts as a core part of how they operate, and today one of the companies that powers those notifications is announcing a growth round. PubNub, an infrastructure-as-a-service provider that provides a real-time network to send and […]

Facebook has agreed to amend its terms and conditions under pressure from EU lawmakers. The new terms will make it plain that free access to its service is contingent on users’ data being used to profile them to target with ads, the European Commission said today. “The new terms detail what services, Facebook sells to […]