Crunch Hype

Stash, the fintech startup and app that aims to introduce new people to the world of investing, is unveiling some interesting new services while also announcing that it has raised more funding to expand its business. The company is introducing mobile-based banking accounts from Green Dot Bank; and alongside it, a new rewards program it […]

Pitched as “travel insurance for people who don’t like insurance,” U.K.-based Pluto Insurance is officially launching today with an online travel insurance product targeting millennials. Citing research that says 40 percent of millennials don’t actually buy travel insurance, mistakenly believing that it isn’t required, the mobile-first offering not only attempts to demystify travel insurance, but […]

Twitter today is joining the podcasting arena. This morning, the social network is launching its first-ever podcast series with a new show focused on Twitter’s advertising business, which it’s calling “Character Count.” The company says, for now, it’s testing the waters with five already-produced episodes of around 25 to 30 minutes in length. It plans […]

Editor’s note: Starting as a trial, the Extra Crunch Daily newsletter is going to be delivered Tuesday-Saturday, in order to faithfully analyze the happenings in the startup and financial world Monday-Friday. Open AI’s capped returns OpenAI announced yesterday that they are going to be offering a “capped return” security for investors as part of the […]

It’s a tricky proposition for a product launch: last year’s model, but with fewer features. But sometimes the rules of consumer electronic update cycles were made to be broken — or at the very least, a little bent. Last year’s Versa was itself a paring down from the company’s first true smartwatch, the Ionic. In […]

If nothing else, last week’s Fitbit event showed the world that the company had learned two key lessons in the past year. One: price is possibly the largest driver in the company’s recent smartwatch success — so it went even lower with the $160 Versa Lite. Two: there are just too damn many Fitbit models. […]

Everyone and their dog seems to have an email newsletter today, but what happens if and when yours takes off? Some have gone down the paid route, but another credible alternative is to turn it into a subscription media business. That’s a route that The Juggernaut, a new pay-to-play publication targeted at the Indian diaspora, […]

PayPal, a longtime alternative to directly using payment cards, cash and bank transfers to make payments for goods online and in stores with 267 million individual customer accounts and 21 million merchant accounts, is today adding in a new feature to help it tap into a wider range of customers such as gig economy workers […]

Hulu and Spotify today announced an expansion of their partnership on discounted streaming bundles, which lowers the price of Hulu’s ad-supported service to, well… nothing. Starting today, Spotify Premium subscribers can basically tack on a Hulu subscription for free on top of their existing $9.99 per month streaming music plan. In other words, for the […]

It’s not only SoftBank that’s eyeing up the opportunity to tap into the quickly expanding market for e-commerce in Latin America. MercadoLibre, a marketplace and financial services powerhouse based out of Argentina and serving 18 countries across the region, has announced that PayPal is investing $750 million, and VC Dragoneer another $100 million, as part of […]

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has published an open letter to mark the 30th anniversary of the day — March 12, 1989 — when he submitted his original proposal for an information management system that went on to underpin the birth of online services. The proposal, dubbed “vague but exciting” […]

Instacart has expanded its alcohol delivery to now be available in 14 states and Washington D.C. from nearly 100 different retailers. With the roll-out, Instacart alcohol delivery is currently available to 40 million homes in the U.S. and the number of alcohol deliveries on the platform has more than doubled since the same time last […]

Chinese startup Bytedance is finding itself surrounded by challengers as its empire of new media products, including global video app TikTok and Chinese news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, gather steam. Tencent tried to play catch-up with a handful of new short-video services, and a Facebook clone of TikTok was reportedly in the making. Less famous players also […]

This is the Palantir, Airbnb and Flexport backer's fourth growth-stage venture capital fund.

French premium TV channel Canal+ is facing increased competition from Netflix in France. The company is trying to reinvent itself with a new over-the-top offering called Canal+ Séries. The new service is launching today. As the name suggests, Canal+ Séries is focused on TV series — you won’t find any movie on the streaming service. […]

Vochlea Music, a U.K. startup and alumni of Abbey Road Red, the music tech incubator from Abbey Road Studios, is launching a crowdfunding campaign today for “Dubler Studio Kit,” a new device and app that turns your voice into a MIDI controller for synths, drum machines, DAWs and other music gear. Described as a “vocal […]

Time is Ltd., a Prague-based startup offering “productivity software analytics” to help companies gain insights from employees’ use of Slack, Office 365, G Suite and other enterprise software, has raised €3 million in funding. Leading the round is Mike Chalfen — who previously co-founded London venture capital firm Mosaic Ventures but has since decided to […]

Mounir Mahjoubi Contributor Share on Twitter Mounir Mahjoubi is the French Secretary of State for Digital Affairs. On March 12, 2019, we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the “World Wide Web”, Tim Berners-Lee’s ground-breaking invention. In just thirty years, this flagship application of the Internet has forever changed our lives, our habits, our way of […]

Amazon will stop forbidding third-party merchants who list on its e-commerce platform in the United States from selling the same products on other sites for lower prices, reports Axios. The company’s decision to end its price parity provision comes three months after Sen. Richard Blumenthal urged the Department of Justice to open an antitrust investigation […]

Elon Musk’s legal team responded late Monday, just before a deadline, to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s request to hold him in contempt of court over a tweet he made about Tesla’s production rate. In the filing submitted to a federal court in Manhattan, Musk’s lawyers say the tweet, posted last month, did not violate […]

Russia has told internet providers to enforce a block against encrypted email provider ProtonMail, the company’s chief has confirmed. The block was ordered by the state Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB, according to a Russian-language blog, which obtained and published the order after the agency accused the company and several other email providers of […]

Facebook’s gang that couldn’t shoot straight advertising department has made another blunder, this time by pulling Elizabeth Warren campaign ads touting the Senator’s proposal to break up big tech. The offending ads were pulled, according to Politico, over their use of the Facebook brand in their copy. Meanwhile, other ads that the Senator’s Presidential campaign […]

Rather than be sore about losing independence within Facebook, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom told me it was an inevitable sign of his app’s triumph. Today at South By South West, Systrom and fellow co-founder Mike Krieger sat down for their first on-stage talk together since leaving Facebook in September. They discussed their super hero origin […]

Big changes in DC could mean that more startups will need the government’s permission before foreign nationals do work at the company. In some cases, the foreign national will need to leave the company.

Multi-cloud architecture is a huge trend in enterprise, and today F5 made a big move to bring its own business closer to it. The company, which provides cloud and security application services, announced that it has acquired NGINX, the commercial company behind the popular open-source web server, for $670 million. We’d actually been hearing murmurs of […]

OpenAI may not be so open going forward. The former nonprofit announced today that it is restructuring as a "capped-profit" company that cuts returns from investments past a certain point. But some worry that this move — or rather the way they made it — may result in making the innovative company no different from the other AI startups out there.

Waymo would raise capital at a valuation "at least several times that of Cruise."

Tesla is using more than $13 million worth of stock to buy trucks and trailers that will transport its electric vehicles to customers, the latest effort by the automaker to improve its logistics and delivery services. Instead of using cash, Tesla issued $13.8 million in stock, a new securities filing posted Monday shows. Tesla used […]

Google paid a total of $105 million to Andy Rubin and Amit Singhal after they were accused of sexual harassment at the company, The Wall Street Journal first reported. This confirms The New York Times report that Google paid $90 million to Rubin and reveals Google also paid $15 million to Singhal, who left Uber […]

Taika Waititi, the comedic filmmaker best known for directing “Thor: Ragnarok,” has signed on to co-write and direct the pilot of a “Time Bandits” series currently in development for Apple. The series is being co-produced by Anonymous Content, Paramount Television and Media Rights Capital. Deadline broke the news of Waititi’s involvement. The “Time Bandits” series was first […]

GM Cruise plans to hire hundreds of employees over the next nine months, doubling its engineering staff, TechCrunch has learned. It’s an aggressive move by the autonomous vehicle technology company to double its size as it pushes to deploy a robotaxi service by the end of the year. Arden Hoffman, who helped scale Dropbox, will […]

One of the last top-tier venture firms to resist coming to San Francisco has apparently decided that it’s time to make the move. According to a source familiar with the thinking of Andreessen Horowitz, the firm is opening a San Francisco office later this year. The WSJ had reported on Friday that the firm has […]

Apple sent out invites to reporters this afternoon for a March 25 special event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino. Reports have suggested that the company will focus its keynote on the content side of its business. The invite offers some pretty heavy-handed hints that the video content service will be on full display […]

When you love anything and everything related to robots and artificial intelligence, the only thing better than going to TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI is saving $100 on the price of admission. But our $249 early-bird price flies the proverbial coop in just four days, on March 15, so buy your ticket now and keep […]

Tidal may be a distant competitor to Apple Music and Spotify, but much like Neil Young’s PonoMusic, Tidal is keeping its high-fidelity music service going far past its expected expiration date. Tidal’s most premium-est audio vision, Tidal Masters, gives your tunes a studio-quality kick (typically 96 kHz / 24 bit), a substantial bump beyond what […]

Bottomless, one of the 200-plus startups in Y Combinator's latest batch, uses a smart scale to automatically restock your java supply.

Editor’s Note: Our writer Galen Moore (who previously wrote an analysis of STOs) attended the MIT Bitcoin Expo this weekend. These are his field notes on his interviews with a bunch of the leading thinkers in the Bitcoin community, along with links to the full audio if you want to go deeper. ~ Danny Crichton The MIT Bitcoin […]

The latest policy recommendations for regulating powerful Internet platforms comes from a U.K. House of Lord committee that’s calling for an overarching digital regulator to be set up to plug gaps in domestic legislation and work through any overlaps of rules. “The digital world does not merely require more regulation but a different approach to […]

Twitter’s new prototype application is rolling out to the first group of testers starting today, the company announced this afternoon by way of a tweet. The app, which Twitter is calling “twttr” as a throwback to its original name, was first introduced at the CES conference this January. It aims to offer Twitter a more […]

Unmind, a U.K.-based startup that offers a mental health platform for the workplace, has raised £3 million in new funding. The round is led by London-based venture capital firm Felix Capital, with co-investment from Michael Whitfield and Chris Bruce, the founders of Thomsons Online Benefits. Founded in 2016, Unmind is a B2B service that provides […]

NBC will launch a free, streaming news service called NBC News Now in early May, which will include eight hours of daily programming and live hourly updated. The service, which was announced by NBC News President Noah Oppenheim at SXSW this weekend, will rival existing streaming news efforts from CBS and ABC, which today operate […]

It’s time to saddle up and ride, startup fans. Registration for Disrupt San Francisco 2019 is officially up, running and open for business. TechCrunch’s flagship event — focused on early-stage tech startups — takes place on October 2-4 at Moscone North Convention Center, and 10,000+ people are expected to attend. We also believe in rewarding action […]

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. NVIDIA to buy supercomputer chipmaker Mellanox for $6.9B, beating out Intel and Microsoft The news caps off what the media had […]

TechCrunch reported last Friday that Mobike has scrapped operations across the Asia Pacific region as a key step towards a long-term plan to scale back its international business. On Monday, its parent company Meituan confirmed that the pioneer in China’s bike rental sector will shut down most of its foreign markets. “Mobike international business is […]

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said in December the company would soon adjust the content mix on its DirecTV Now streaming service and raise the monthly subscription to around the “$50 to $60” point – meaning, at least $10 per month more than it is today. This week, AT&T is preparing to follow through on those […]

Breaking up tech giants should be a measure of last resort, the European Union’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, has suggested. “To break up a company, to break up private property would be very far reaching and you would need to have a very strong case that it would produce better results for consumers in the […]

Among true crime shows, “Murder Mountain” clearly has the best title. It’s memorable, mysterious and alliterative — it was a real struggle not to just say “Murderrrrrrr Mountainnnnnnn” throughout this whole episode of the Original Content podcast, where we review the show. “Murder Mountain” (the local nickname for the town of Alderpoint) tells the story […]

Nigerian startup Gloo.ng is dropping consumer online retail and pivoting to B2B e-procurement with Gloopro as its new name. The Lagos-based venture has called it quits on e-commerce grocery services, shifting to a product that supplies large and medium corporates with everything from desks to toilet paper. Gloopro’s new platform will generate revenues on a […]

Amazon is expanding to new markets in Europe (France, Italy and Spain) its program that directly pays Alexa developers in cash for building valuable, quality voice apps. Originally launched in the U.S. in 2017 for those developers building game skills, the Alexa Developer Rewards program has since expanded to include a broader selection of Alexa […]

Niantic's follow-up to the absurdly popular Pokémon GO, the long-awaited Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, has one major drawback: unlike its predecessor, you can't explain it in a single sentence. There's so much to do in this game that it may repel some casual players — but while its depths of systems and collectibles may be nigh endless, don't worry: you still basically just walk around doing wizard and witch stuff.