Crunch Hype

SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son has repeatedly described the Vision Fund as a club for the world’s most exciting startups and, while even the fund’s own LP seem to disagree with some of its investment thesis, its portfolio companies do frequently come together. The latest Vision Fund partnership pairs two e-commerce firms in opposite corners of […]

Messaging apps have become the de facto way that many people today keep in regular contact with each other, and that trend has also found its way into the classroom. ClassDojo, a startup that has built a platform for teachers and parents to communicate small and big updates to each other, today is announcing that […]

LinkedIn has been forced to ‘pause’ a feature in Europe in which the platform emails members’ connections when they’ve been ‘mentioned in the news’. The regulatory action follows a number of data protection complaints after LinkedIn’s algorithms incorrect matched members to news articles — triggering a review of the feature and subsequent suspension order. The […]

Thailand’s government passed a controversial cybersecurity bill today that has been criticized for vagueness and the potential to enable sweeping access internet user data. The bill (available in Thai) was amended late last year following criticism over potential data access, but it passed the country’s parliament with 133 positives votes and no rejections although there […]

Ride-sharing isn’t just for transporting teenagers and adults anymore. Zūm, a ridesharing startup for kids, just raised a $40 million Series C round led by BMW i Ventures with participation from Spark Capital and Sequoia Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $70 million. Zūm is a mobile app that enables parents to schedule rides for […]

SoftBank’s Vision Fund is taking a bet on China’s auto market after it agreed to pour $1.5 billion into online car trading group Chehaoduo, which literally means “many cars” in Chinese. The Beijing-based company operates two main sites — peer-to-peer online marketplace Guazi for used vehicles, and Maodou, which retails new sedans through direct sales […]

French startup Mirakl raised a $70 million funding round. Bain Capital is leading the round with existing investors 83North, Felix Capital and Elaia Partners also participating. If you’ve bought a few products from a third-party seller on an e-commerce website that isn’t Amazon or Alibaba, chances are you’ve used Mirakl in the past. The company […]

Fortnite, the world’s most popular game right now with some 200 million players, has just announced that its much anticipated Season 8 is available. For those of you who don’t play Fortnite, the title takes on an episodic approach with new features, tools and maps released every few months. That keeps things fresh, gamers engaged […]

Looking for a high-paying, in-demand job as a programmer? Learning to code for blockchain applications is the way to go, according to a survey from the job placement organization, Hired. In a survey of 98,000 developers on the company’s platform, Hired assessed the kinds of jobs that are most in-demand; the languages that companies are […]

Nigerian fintech startup TeamApt has raised $5.5 million in capital in a Series A round led by Quantum Capital Partners. The Lagos based firm will use the funds to expand its white label digital finance products and pivot to consumer finance with the launch of its AptPay banking app. Founded by Tosin Eniolorunda, TeamApt supplies […]

NetEase, China’s second-biggest online games publisher with a growing ecommerce segment, is laying off a significant number of its employees, adding to a list of Chinese tech giants that have shed staff following the Lunar New Year. A NetEase employee who was recently let go confirmed with TechCrunch that the company had fired a large […]

The latest trailer is out for what could be the final installation in this iteration of the X-Men franchise — and things don’t look great (either for our heroes or for the franchise). The Dark Phoenix saga is one of the most famous (and well-loved) narrative arcs in the comic book series long history, and […]

Go-Jek is extending its reach in Southeast Asia after its Thailand-based unit made its official launch, which included the addition of a new food delivery service. Get, which is the name for Go-Jek business in Thailand, started out last year offering motorbike taxi on-demand services to a limited part of Thai capital city Bangkok, now […]

From the moment that Disney announced its acquisition of Lucasfilm, the question on every fan’s mind was “when will they build Star Wars in real life?” While most assumed that they would do it eventually, they probably weren’t aware that in 2013 even as work began on the first movie of the ‘final’ trilogy, work […]

Fortnite Season 8 is almost here. There’s a lot we don’t know — most things, really — but the long wait will be over soon. If you can’t stand the anticipation or the requisite server downtime, we’re here to speculate so you’ll be mildly less bored. It worked for us. If Fortnite’s snowy Season 7 […]

If you’re not the paying sort, Medium has a mile-wide new hole in its paywall that might interest you. (But really, you should be the paying sort.) On Wednesday, Medium CEO and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams announced that Medium is tearing down its paywall for readers that visit the site through Twitter. In tweets, Williams […]

Figure, a 13-month-old, San Francisco-based company that says it uses blockchain technology to provide home equity loans online in as little as five days, has raised a whole lot of money in not a lot of time: $120 million to date, including $65 million in fresh funding from RPM Ventures and partners at DST Global, […]

When you think of MWC Barcelona, chances are you’re thinking about the newest smartphones and other mobile gadgets, but that’s only half the story. Actually, it’s probably far less than half the story because the majority of the business that’s done at MWC is enterprise telco business. Not too long ago, that business was all […]

An arbitrator has awarded $179 million in damages to the stars and creative team behind the Fox show “Bones.” As laid out in an in-depth Hollywood Reporter story, the ruling could have bigger implications for the streaming world, particularly as the major media companies are looking to launch their own streaming services, which will presumably […]

By most common sense measurements, Box had a pretty good earnings report today, reporting revenue up 20 percent year over year to $163.7 million. That doesn’t sound bad, yet Wall Street was not happy with the stock getting whacked, down more than 22 percent after hours as we went to press. It appears investors were […]

Andrew Erskine has developed his legal career along with the rise of the tech startup scene in Los Angeles. Today, as a partner at Orrick in its Santa Monica office, he works with companies large and small in the area and beyond. His approach: “The way that I practice and the philosophy I have is […]

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration issued new rules designed to protect air passengers from the potential dangers of lithium ion batteries. The new interim final rule disallows lithium ion cells and batteries in the cargo area of passenger airplanes. The rule also sets new guidance for lithium ion […]

BlackBerry, the former smartphone maker, is suing Twitter for alleged patent infringement. If this sounds familiar, it may be because BlackBerry filed a patent infringement suit against Facebook last year. In its complaint, BlackBerry alleges Twitter has infringed and continues to infringe on six of its patents, which cover things like push notifications, silencing notifications […]

As many as 1 in 5 people today are mooching off of someone else’s account when streaming video from Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Video, according to a new study from CordCutting.com. Of these, Netflix tends to be pirated for the longest period — 26 months, compared with 16 months for Amazon Prime Video or 11 […]

We’ve still barely caught up with the Red Angel, whatever it is, but CBS just confirmed that Star Trek: Discovery will be coming back for a third season. Discovery will also add Michelle Paradise as a co-showrunner alongside Alex Kurtzman, making her the fifth showrunner to come aboard the Discovery in its relatively short tenure […]

The “restaurant of the future” may elicit thoughts of a chrome diner with robot servers and an otherwise hefty amount of Tokyo futurist kitsch, but the fact is that the forthcoming sit-down dining experience may just end up looking a lot like ordering from a takeout app. Presto is working with restaurants to update the […]

After four years and more than $2 billion in funding, OneWeb is ready to launch the first six satellites out of a planned constellation of 650 with which it plans to blanket the world in broadband. The Arianespace-operated Soyuz rocket will take off at 1:37 Pacific time from Guiana Space Center.

Earlier this week, Microsoft used its MWC press conference to announce the next version of its HoloLens mixed reality visor. When it demoed the first version back in 2015, quite a few pundits assumed that the company had somehow faked the demos because this kind of real-time tracking and gesture recognition, combined with a relatively […]

Party planning can be fun if you have the time for it and happen to know what you’re doing. For the rest of us, it can be a daunting, time-consuming endeavor, one that requires visits to numerous websites, in-store visits when those products invariably don’t arrive in time, then return visits to pick up those […]

A watchlist of risky individuals and corporate entities owned by Dow Jones has been exposed, after a company with access to the database left it on a server without a password. Bob Diachenko, an independent security researcher, found the Amazon Web Services-hosted Elasticsearch database exposing more than 2.4 million records of individuals or business entities. […]

Compass, the real estate tech platform that is now worth $4.4 billion, has made an acquisition to give its agents a boost when it comes to looking for good leads on properties to sell. It is acquiring Contactually, an AI-based CRM platform designed specifically for the industry, which includes features like linking up a list […]

A significant FTC ruling issued today will see video app TikTok fined $5.7 million for violating U.S. children’s privacy laws, and will impact how the app works for kids under the age of 13. In an app update being released today, all users will need to verify their age, and the under 13-year-olds will then […]

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. Spotify launches its streaming service in India Just for India, Spotify users who do not pay for a subscription can play […]

Financial technology company Affirm, which offers consumers an alternative to cash and credit when paying for large purchases, has scored a notable new partner: Walmart. The companies announced this morning that Affirm’s financing options would be made available in over 4,000 Walmart Supercenters across the U.S., and will roll out to Walmart.com in the weeks […]

It’s telling that HTC opted to set up shop in Hall 7 at MWC. Rather than holding court alongside the Samsungs and Huaweis of the world, the company mingled among the peripherals and accessories makers. While it’s true there was news around the Exodus 1 blockchain handset, the Vive was its real star of the […]

Against a backdrop of public backlash and looming federal regulations, the world’s biggest e-cigarette manufacturer has released video of the original thesis presentation that launched Juul, with the hopes of making the case that its purpose is to do no harm — or at least less harm. The founders of Juul have told their story […]

Recently in a conversation, the length of term sheets came as a topic (I assure you, it was a riveting conversation). The complaint was that a term sheet which had recently been received was too long, and therefore the VC who sent it wasn’t being founder friendly. The travails of successfully raising money! Actually though, […]

On the heels of news that TikTok has reached 1 billion downloads, the company today is launching a new initiative designed to help inform users about online safety, TikTok’s various privacy settings and other controls they can use within its app, and more. Instead of dumping this information in an in-app FAQ or help documentation, […]

French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is launching a new set-top box to access its cloud gaming service — the Shadow Ghost. I’ve been playing with the device for a couple of weeks and here’s my review. The Shadow Ghost is a tiny little box that doesn’t do much. The true magic happens in […]

Cequence Security, a startup that helps companies protect applications against business logic attacks, announced a $17 million Series B investment today. The round was by led by Dell Technologies Capital with participation from Shasta Ventures, the firm that had led the company’s $8 million A round last year. Today’s investment brings the total raised to […]

The rapid rise of Slack has ushered in a new wave of apps, all aiming to solve one challenge: creating a user-friendly platform where coworkers can have productive conversations. Many of these are based around real-time notifications and “instant” messaging, but today a new startup called Threads coming out of stealth to address the other […]

D-Wave, the well-funded quantum computing company, today announced its next-gen quantum computing platform with 5,000 qubits, up from 2,000 in the company’s current system. The new platform will come to market in mid-2020. The company’s new so-called Pegasus topology connects every qubit to 15 other qubits, up from six in its current topology. With this, […]

Following my report from yesterday, Apple has removed many of the apps I pointed out. When you try to find them on the App Store, they are no longer available. App Store Review Guidelines are very clear when it comes to app duplicates. According to rule 4.3, you can’t release the same app multiple times […]

Trust is a fundamental building block of any healthy relationship, whether that’s between individuals or companies and customers. If you can’t trust the company you are doing business with to do the right thing by you, it’s hard to continue the relationship. Too often, we have seen this trust broken when it comes to data […]

Volvo’s standalone electric performance brand Polestar introduced Wednesday its first all-electric vehicle — a five-door fastback that is gunning for the Tesla Model 3. In the past few years, every time an electric vehicle — concept, prototype, or production version — has been unveiled, the term “Tesla killer” has been tossed about regardless of whether […]

FedEx is a courier delivery and logistics company; and in 2019, that means it must also have an autonomous delivery bot. The delivery services company, known for its overnight shipping, unveiled Wednesday an autonomous delivery device called SameDayBot. The bot, which will be tested this summer in select markets including FedEx’s hometown Memphis, is being […]

CES 2019 was a dud. It happens. Some years are more exciting than other. The world of technology ebbs and flows. Time is a flat circle. All that glitters is gold. Only shooting stars break the mold. MWC, on the other hand — I’ve actually been pretty excited about this show for while now. The […]

Fintech startup N26 plans to launch its retail banking service in Brazil soon. The company announced the news on stage at MWC in Barcelona. N26 has already announced that its next market would be the U.S. at some point during the first half of 2019. Brazil should launch after that. Right now, N26 is available […]

Jun-Sheng Li Contributor Jun-Sheng (Jun) Li is an Executive in Residence at Canvas Ventures and was the former senior vice president of Walmart's global e-commerce supply chain. As SVP of Walmart’s global ecommerce supply chain for five years until 2018, I had a front row seat to how brick-and-mortar retailers were responding to Amazon’s dominance […]