Crunch Hype

Defy, the early-stage venture investment firm founded by Neil Sequeira and Trae Vassallo, is putting a new twist on the venture partner model as it brings Brian Lee and Sujal Patel on board to help out with investing and guiding companies in the firm’s portfolio. Just don’t call them venture partners. Vassallo and Sequeira prefer […]

Bragi was a promising early contender in the Bluetooth earbud space. The company came to prominence in 2014 with a massively successful $3.3 million Kickstarter. And to its credit, it actually brought to market products like the Dash and Dash Pro, offering a compelling “smart” alternative to other devices. Last month, however, the German company […]

A new biography of Apple chief executive Tim Cook out this month describes the moment — and the deliberations — after the FBI issued an unprecedented legal order demanding Apple undermine the security of its flagship product. The new book, “Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level” by Leander Kahney, offers […]

Since its launch on our stage way back in 2010, Cloudflare has focused on making the internet faster and more modern — but the mobile internet has until recently been beyond its reach. Today the company introduced a new service called Warp described as "the VPN for people who don't know what VPN stands for."

Radio ads broadcast a message to listeners, but Pandora’s new voice ads will allow listeners to respond by speaking aloud — either to get more information about the product being advertised, or to skip the ad if it’s not of interest. The company confirmed it has an agreement to test interactive voice ads where listeners […]

In the six weeks since we launched Extra Crunch, we’ve seen that readers and subscribers really want the latest practical tips and warnings about building a company — from the people on the cutting edge. So we want to feature subject-matter experts, writing about what they learn from working with startup clients. You may remember, […]

It’s the morning of March 31st, 2014, and the Google Maps team is about to release its April Fools’ Day gag to the world. It wasn’t the first time this team had goofed around with an April Fools’ day joke. Google, as a whole, goes wild on April 1st. Maybe it’s for the resulting publicity. […]

Soaring college tuition prices have left Americans drowning in debt without a correspondingly enhanced set of professional skills to show for it. In the past 11 years, US student debt has increased by 157% and 1 in 10 borrowers are over 90 days delinquent. Universities are incentivized to be unaffordable and don’t have a direct […]

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Jetpack, is launching a new suite of products focused on the future of work — Happy Tools. Automattic is a remote company with more than 850 employees working from 68 countries. And the company has built a bunch of products over the years to communicate, collaborate and work. […]

French startup ManoMano is raising a new funding round of $125 million (€110 million). The company operates an e-commerce website and marketplace focused on home improvement and gardening. ManoMano is part of the great unbundling of general e-commerce platforms. By focusing on a vertical in particular, the company can provide a large product offering, competitive […]

The tech world sure does love a good prank. While some sat out on April Fools’, a number of big tech companies embraced the opportunity to waste time this way. So without any further ado, here are the April Fools’ pranks from around the web: The good 1) Google Tulip Google Tulip, in my humble […]

Mailgun, an email API delivery service, announced today that it was selling a majority stake in the company to private equity firm Thoma Bravo. The companies did not share terms, but this is the second owner in the company’s eight-year history. Mailgun provides API services for building email functionality into applications. It has more than […]

In November, Facebook announced its plans to create an external content oversight board that would serve as something of a “supreme court” for Facebook’s more controversial content policy decisions. With the release of a draft charter in January, the company took the first steps to describe how this content review board would function. Today, Facebook is […]

Tinder today announced it has hired Facebook vet Ravi Mehta as its new chief product officer, as the company continues to shift Tinder’s focus to the younger demographic still enjoying the “single lifestyle.” Mehta’s background includes more than 20 years in the industry, including time at Facebook, TripAdvisor and Microsoft. Most recently, Mehta had served […]

Xing, the business networking platform that has been described as Germany’s answer to LinkedIn, has made an acquisition to beef up its recruitment business ahead of a rebrand of the business as “New Work.” The company has acquired Honeypot, a German startup that has built a job-hunting platform for tech people, for up to €57 […]

The meat substitute manufacturer Impossible Foods and fast food giant Burger King are launching an Impossible Whopper. According to a report in The New York Times, Burger King is launching the Impossible Whopper in stores in the St. Louis area with plans for a broader rollout later — and not as part of some elaborate […]

A quiet little update from Microsoft overnight, as the company bumped up a key spec on its 13.5-inch Surface Book 2. The 2017 two-in-one powerhouse is getting a nice little boost to Intel’s 8th gen quad-core i5 chip. That model run $1,499 and includes 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. Bumping up to the […]

Discovery and BBC this morning announced an extensive,10-year content partnership deal for a new streaming service focused on natural history and factual programming. The subscription video service is expected to cost under $5 per month, and will be owned by Discovery. It will operate in all territories outside the U.K., Ireland and China when it […]

Google’s Android, now 10 years old, has not been a stranger to security issues over the years. But with the mobile operating system now installed on over 2 billion devices globally, Google has been taking an increasingly firmer grip on trying to bring the problem under control. Now, the company has published its lengthy annual update […]

Airbnb is continuing to widen its focus beyond ‘unconventional’ hotels as it gets ready for a much-anticipated IPO. Following its acquisition of HotelTonight last month, the company has picked today (April Fool’s Day) to confirm that it invested in India’s OYO — a startup that manages budget hotels and other stays. The deal has been […]

Despite not being Brazilian and having their first exposure to the country only a few years ago, the two co-founders of Escale have managed to raise $22.6 million for their company, which provides customer acquisition services to companies in telecommunications and healthcare across Brazil. Their secret? A knowledge of search engine optimization technologies honed through […]

Exactly fifteen years ago, Google decided to confuse everybody by launching its long-awaited web-based email client on April 1. This definitely wasn’t a joke, though, and Gmail went on to become one of Google’s most successful products. Today, to celebrate its fifteenth birthday (and maybe make you forget about today’s final demise of Inbox and […]

The internet is often lauded for the potential to increase the impact of a range of primary services in emerging markets, including education, commerce, banking and healthcare. While many of those platforms are now being built, a few are finding that a hybrid approach combining online and offline is advantageous. That’s exactly what Jio Health, […]

News just in: We’re getting reports the board of Krablr has voted overwhelmingly to jettison the sole remaining founder, Wilson Poney, and install an interim CFO to take the company in a new old direction. “We’re going to make Krablr great again,” said chairman of the board, Goldie Seamann. “We’re not 100% sure what’s been […]

Calling all hackathon fans across Europe and beyond. It’s time once again to put your creative coding skills to the test at the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019, which returns to Paris on May 17-18. Brush up on your parlez-vous français, stock up on RedBull and get ready to compete against some of the best […]

Facebook announced today that it is adding a feature called “Why am I seeing this post?” to News Feeds. Similar to “Why am I seeing this ad?,” which has appeared next to advertisements since 2014, the new tool has a dropdown menu that gives users information about why that post appeared in their News Feed, […]

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately, and I’ve been watching the rise of Lambda School — which I think is fantastic, incidentally — and the combination has me wondering two things: how educated do software engineers need to be? And how well does that map to what they actually learn from formal education? […]

How’s your weekend going? Good, good. Now, here, have a billionaire’s super autotuned rap track about a famous deceased gorilla: Tesla/Space X/Boring Company guy, Elon Musk has apparently uploaded a SoundCloud track titled “RIP Harambe,” about the 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla who was shot to death at a Cincinnati zoo in 2016 after a three-year-old […]

Fast, affordable food delivery service has been life-changing for many working Chinese, but some still prefer to whip up their own meals. These people may not have the time to pick up fresh ingredients from brick-and-mortar stores, so China’s startups and large companies are trying to make home-cooked meals more effortless for busy workers by […]

When you’ve been doing this job long enough, you start to develop strange interests (though some might compellingly argue that strange interests are a prerequisite). Lately for me it’s been power banks. Quite possibly the least sexy product in all of consumer electronics outside of the ever-ubiquitous dongle. I don’t know what to tell you. […]

It’s been a busy day for Facebook exec op-eds. Earlier this morning, Sheryl Sandberg broke the site’s silence around the Christchurch massacre, and now Mark Zuckerberg is calling on governments and other bodies to increase regulation around the sorts of data Facebook traffics in. He’s hoping to get out in front of heavy-handed regulation and […]

On our final day in Pittsburgh, we find ourself in a decommissioned coal mine. Just northeast of the city proper, Tour-Ed’s owners run field trips and tours during the warmer months, despite the fact that the mine’s innards run a constant 50 degrees or so, year round. With snow still melted just beyond the entrance, […]

Welcome back to this week’s transcribed edition of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast that unpacks the numbers behind the headlines. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts the words of our wildly popular venture capital podcast, Equity, in your eyes instead of your ears. This week, Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm recorded […]

In an open letter published by the New Zealand Herald, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg finally addressed the shocking mass shootings that left 50 dead at two Christchurch mosques. The first of part of the deadliest mass shooting in modern new Zealand history was live-streamed on Facebook by the attacker. But while the site’s technology was […]

In 1995, Yoshi had his moment. The character’s Super Mario World debut was so strong, Nintendo handed the dinosaur sidekick his own sequel. A surprise divergence from the Mario franchise found the character escorting a baby version of the plumber in search of his kidnapped twin. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island was regarded as […]

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor To get big faster, younger unicorns start buying startups sooner Small VC funds continue to raise, despite pressure from above After years of fierce competition as private companies, Uber and Lyft are going public on U.S. markets. […]

An interesting decision came out of Poland’s data protection agency this week after the watchdog issued its first fine under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). On the surface the enforcement doesn’t look so remarkable: A ‘small’ ~€220K fine was handed to a Sweden-headquartered European digital marketing company, Bisnode, which has an office in Poland, […]

Whether you call it the Genesis or the Mega Drive, Sega’s 16 bit system holds a special place in the hearts of many a gamer who came of age in the 80s and 90s. Like the NES and Super Nintendo before it, the console that gave us a ring-hoarding hedgehog is about to get miniaturized. […]

Niantic EC-1 Greg Kumparak published the first part of his planned four part EC-1 series on Niantic yesterday, focusing on the founding story of the AR/gaming unicorn from Keyhole and Google Earth to a complicated spinout from Alphabet. Lots of great nuggets on how companies get formed and built, but one I particularly enjoyed was […]

Amid calls for a dozen different global cities to replace Silicon Valley — Austin, Beijing, London, New York — nobody has yet nominated “nowhere.” But it’s now a possibility. There are two trends to unpack here. The first is startups that are fully, or almost fully, remote, with employees distributed around the world. There’s a […]

In this week's newsletter: Casper raises big bucks, more podcast M&A and Uber's Careem deal.

As of 2017, there were roughly 7,000 people living without homes in San Francisco, a number that comprises minors — a lot of them. The San Francisco Unified School District estimates that as of 2017, roughly 2,100 of the children in the school system were homeless — a number that it said looked to be […]

Valve is ready to sell its own full VR hardware getup. The gaming giant behind some classic titles and the ubiquitous Steam store has revealed a teaser image on its site of a VR headset called the Valve Index. Alongside the photo, text reads “Upgrade your experience. May 2019” suggesting a near-term full announcement or […]

Restaurant sales hit $825 billion last year in the U.S., but with margins averaging at only three to five percent per business, they’re always looking for an edge on efficiency and just generally running things in a smarter way. A startup called Toast, which has built a popular platform for restaurant management, has closed a […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

“Works with AirPower mat”. Apparently not. It looks to me like Apple doesn’t treat customers with the same “high standard” of care it apparently reserves for its hardware quality. Nine days after launching its $199 wireless charging AirPods headphones that touted compatibility with the forthcoming Apple AirPower inductive charger mat, Apple has just scrapped AirPower […]

Pink confetti fell from the ceiling Friday as Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer celebrated their company’s IPO. The stock offering was a bona fide success, with shares selling for $87.24 apiece Friday morning — 21 percent higher than Lyft’s initial $72 share price — and closing at $78.29 per share. Lyft raised roughly […]

No. No. Absolutely not.

One of the great things about enterprise chat applications, beyond giving employees a common channel to communicate, is the ability to integrate with other enterprise applications. Today, Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise collaboration and communication application, and ServiceNow announced a new chatbot to make it easier for employees to navigate a company’s help desks inside Workplace Chat. […]

Apple has canceled the AirPower product completely, citing difficulty meeting its own standards. “After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project. We apologize to those customers who were looking forward to this launch. We continue to believe that the future is wireless and are committed to push […]