Crunch Hype

The UK’s Department for Transport has said today that an expansion of drone ‘no-fly’ zones to 5km around airport runways will come into force on March 13. Anyone caught and convicted of flying a drone inside the restricted zones could face a fine and years in prison. Last month the government said it would tighten […]

Mobile World Congress, the mobile industry’s annual shindig, is next week but Xiaomi can’t wait reveal its newest top-end phone. The Chinese company instead picked today to unveil the Mi 9. Once again Xiaomi’s design ethic closely resembles Apple’s iPhone with a minimal bezel and notch-like front-facing camera but Xiaomi has gone hard on photography […]

China’s largest selfie app maker Meitu has been busy working to diversify itself beyond the beauty arena in China. On Wednesday, the Hong Kong-listed company announced in a filing that it has agreed to pay about HK$2.7 billion ($340 million) for a 31 percent stake in game publishing company Dreamscape Horizon. Dreamscape Horizon, a subsidiary of […]

Like virtually every big enterprise company, a few years ago, the German auto giant Daimler decided to invest in its own on-premises data centers. And while those aren’t going away anytime soon, the company today announced that it has successfully moved its on-premises big data platform to Microsoft’s Azure cloud. This new platform, which the […]

This is the year when the money spent on digital advertising will finally overtake spending on traditional ads — at least according to the latest forecast from eMarketer. The research firm is predicting that U.S. digital ad spend will increase 19.1 percent this year, to $129.3 billion, while traditional advertising will fall 19 percent, to […]

Resooma, the U.K. accommodation booking platform, is entering the fintech and utilities space with the launch of Resooma Bills, a new product to help “gen rent” manage household expenditure. The Cardiff, Wales-based company’s core offering is an accommodation marketplace primarily targeting students and other renters aged 18-30. Previously trading under the brand name of University […]

Allianz X, the venture capital arm attached to German insurance giant Allianz, has increased the size of its fund to €1 billion, around $1.1 billion, according to an announcement made today. The fund was initially €430 million, or around $490 million, when it launched in 2016. This new injection comes directly from parent Allianz SE, the 124-year-old […]

French startup StarOfService has recently switched its business model and has been profitable for the month of January 2019. The company operates a marketplace for independent contractors, a sort of Thumbtack for the rest of the world. If you’re looking for a plumber, a music teacher or a DJ for a wedding, StarOfService can help […]

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, has launched an initial version of its highly-anticipated decentralized trading service (dex) today which is available now at testnet.binance.org. The launch — which is initially a testnet as the URL suggests — has been a long time coming and it is designed to complement the main Binance exchange, which does […]

ViSenze, a startup that provides visual search tools for online retailers like Rakuten and ASOS, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series C. The round was co-led by Gobi Ventures and Sonae IM, with participation from other backers including returning investors Rakuten and WI Harper. Founded in 2012, ViSenze has now raised […]

It’s time for another hit off the juice box. Netflix announced today that it will release the remaining eight episodes of “Arrested Development’s” fifth season on March 5, ten months after the first half premiered. In the intervening time, however, the show has dealt with several controversies revolving around accusations of abusive behavior from star […]

The clean energy boffins in their labs are always upping the theoretical limit on how much power you can get out of sunshine, but us plebes actually installing solar cells are stuck with years-old tech that's not half as good as what they're seeing. This new design from Insolight could be the one that changes all that.

Porsche’s production forecast for its first all-electric vehicle may be too conservative, the company’s head of production said this week. Porsche has targeted 20,000 Taycan electric vehicles for the first year of production. But interest in the vehicle could push those estimates higher, Albrecht Reimold, Porsche’s board member in charge of production, said in an internally […]

Under the leadership of its newest chairman, Jay Clayton, the SEC has for the last two years made it clear that it wants more companies to go public already. A new proposal, revealed today, may get it closer to that objective. Specifically, the agency has proposed giving any company that’s exploring a potential IPO a […]

I recently talked to a group of kids about AI. I asked them to come up with ideas for how AI could be used. I was struck by their genuine interest in creating AI solutions that would help people.

On Tuesday, the FDA issued a warning to anyone who might be inclined to give their old bones a jolt with fresh blood harvested from the young. The idea is pretty far from mainstream, even in Silicon Valley, where the ultra-wealthy have a keen interest in the cutting edge of life-extension science. Still, there’s apparently […]

Orai, a startup building communication coaching tools, is announcing that it has raised $2.3 million in seed funding. CEO Danish Dhamani said that he co-founded the company with Paritosh Gupta and Aasim Sani to address a need in his own life — the fact that he was “held back personally and professionally” by lackluster “communications […]

Last week brought an extraordinary demonstration of the dangers of operating a surveillance state — especially a shabby one, as China's apparently is. An unsecured database exposed millions of records of Chinese Muslims being tracked via facial recognition — an ugly trifecta of prejudice, bureaucracy, and incompetence.

When in 2015, Slack raised money at a $1 billion valuation, founder Stewart Butterfield spoke candidly about why it was important to him, and why if Slack wasn’t assigned a valuation north of that number at that point in time, Slack wouldn’t raise anything. Said Butterfield, speaking to Fortune, it “means that we’re a part […]

Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-headquartered “talent investor” that recruits and backs individuals pre-team and pre-idea to enable them to found startups, has raised a new fund of its own to continue scaling globally. The $115 million first close was led by a number of leading (mostly unnamed) institutional investors across the U.S., Europe and Asia, […]

iOS 12, Apple’s latest mobile software for iPhone and iPad, is out. The new software packs in a bunch of new security and privacy features you’ve probably already heard about. Here’s what you need to do to take advantage of the new settings and lock down your device. 1. Turn on USB Restricted Mode to […]

President Trump is expected to sign into creation the Space Force today, as a special branch of the military overseen by the Air Force Department, according to a report in The Washington Post. The President’s decision is considered a win for the Air Force and Defense Department broadly, which had argued against setting up an independent […]

Over the past few years, Amazon -owned Audible has been expanded beyond audiobooks to include more original content, like the short-form audio programming offered through Audible Channels, for example. Today, the company announced a new partnership for original comedy projects, in collaboration with Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video. The first production from this effort is “Heads Will […]

For the first time later this week, a privately developed moon lander will launch aboard a privately built rocket, organized by a private launch coordinator. It’s an historic moment in space and the Israeli mission stands to make history again if it touches down on the Moon’s surface as planned on April 11. The Beresheet […]

Audi has added a new feature to the vehicle-to-infrastructure technology embedded in its newer models that’s designed to help drivers catch every green light. The tech, called GLOSA or Green Light Optimized Speed Advisory, is part of the automaker’s built-in traffic light-reading technology. And Audi says it’s the first automaker to include this GLOSA feature in its […]

Macquarie Capital Venture Studio, the infrastructure-focused accelerator affiliated with the nearly $500 billion-dollar investment firm, Macquarie Group, has added three companies to its portfolio. The companies, AirMap, Envoy Technologies, and Teralytic, provide services in airspace management for drones; electric vehicle sharing services; and soil analysis, respectively. Through the venture studio, Macquarie tries to bring the […]

Samsung’s promised a much better look at its foldable phone at tomorrow’s big S10 event. We already caught a glimpse of the product late last year at the company’s developer conference, but among the many uncertainties with the product is what the hell the company will name the thing. After all, the device essentially represents […]

Last week, California governor Gavin Newsom announced that he was intending to aggressively scale back plans for the state’s high-speed rail system, which in its most ambitious routing would have connected Sacramento to San Diego. The immediate cause was ballooning costs, which have risen from $33 billion to $77 billion and looked likely to exceed […]

Google today announced that you can now register .dev domain names. Google acquired the .dev top-level domain when ICANN opened up the web to new generic top-level domains (gTLD) a few years ago. At the time, Google acquired gTLD’s like .app, .page and .dev (for some reason, Google also owns .soy). Right now, the .dev […]

Are you a student within striking distance of Berkeley, California? Do you have a burning passion for robots and artificial intelligence? We have great news for you. We’re offering deeply discounted student tickets to TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI 2019, which takes place at UC Berkeley on April 18. Immerse yourself in our day-long event […]

YouTube today announced a significant change to its strike system – the penalty system used when YouTube’s reviewers identify a video has violated the site’s Community Guidelines. These strikes could be issued against videos containing nudity or sexual content, violent or graphic content, harmful or dangerous content, hateful content, threats, spam, scams, or misleading metadata. […]

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. ‘There’s no way the U.S. can crush us,’ Huawei founder claims In a rare interview with the BBC, Ren Zhengfei defiantly […]

Nauto, the transportation company that aims to make human drivers safer and train autonomous vehicles for all types of scenarios, has acquired Newton Technologies for an undisclosed amount. Newton Technologies aims to reduce the number of driving-related deaths to zero by leveraging AI to create solutions geared toward connected mobility, safety mapping and driver behavior […]

TechCrunch is launching something a little different today. We’re going to help startup founders find the best outside experts to work with — so you can build a better company, faster. From lawyers to accountants to executive coaches and a dozen more categories, the mesh network of service providers in Silicon Valley and other startup […]

In late December, we launched our startup lawyer survey and to date we’ve received more than 1700 responses from startup leaders about hundreds of lawyers around the country and the world. Today we begin to publish the results of that survey, beginning with our first verified expert, a seasoned Silicon Valley attorney who has been […]

Founders are a special breed — independent, self-reliant, and resourceful. Yet these same attributes, critical in taking an idea from zero to one, can eventually cause first-time founders to misjudge situations and tackle problems without appropriate guidance. This is particularly true (sometimes tragically so) in the legal arena, where founders generally have little or no […]

Google today announced its intention to acquire Alooma, a company that allows enterprises to combine all of their data sources into services like Google’s BigQuery, Amazon’s Redshift, Snowflake and Azure. The promise of Alooma is that handles the data pipelines and manages for its users. In addition to this data integration service, though, Alooma also helps […]

Ask any attorney what kind of lawyer they are and they’re likely to respond, “the good kind.” Certainly, there are “good” lawyers and there are “bad” lawyers, but aside from avoiding the truly unscrupulous scriveners, much of the issue here is simply making sure you have grabbed the right tool for the job and by […]

Vincross, the company behind the six-legged robot Hexa, said on Tuesday that it’s picked up $10 million in a Series A+ funding round led by Lenovo Capital, the startup fund managed by Lenovo Group. Returning investor GGV Capital and newcomer Seekdource Capital also participated. The company declined to disclose its latest valuation but said the […]

Last year, Spotify took a stake in music distribution service DistroKid. Apple acquired Platoon. And today, SoundCloud announced it’s adding its own music distribution tools to its premium accounts aimed at artists, SoundCloud Pro and SoundCloud Pro Unlimited. With SoundCloud Premier distribution, artists can upload their tracks to all major music services, including Amazon Music, […]

Palo Alto Networks announced today that it intends to acquire security startup, Demisto, for $560 million. The company sees a tool that can help enhance the Palo Alto security portfolio by adding a higher level of automation. “The addition of Demisto’s orchestration and automation technologies will accelerate Palo Alto Networks Application Framework strategy and serve […]

As online gaming becomes the new social forum for living out virtual lives, a new startup called Medal.tv has raised $3.5 million for its in-game clipping service to capture and share the Kodak moments and digital memories that are increasingly happening in places like Fortnite or Apex Legends. Digital worlds like Fortnite are now far more […]

If you think you knew everything there’s to know about the Samsung Galaxy S10, the company’s Norwegian ad has now leaked on YouTube. The Verge first spotted the ad — a Verge reader was watching TV and it accidentally aired on commercial TV. It matches up with devices that have already leaked over the past couple […]

Walmart this morning posted strong holiday sales growth for its holiday quarter, with U.S. sales up 4.2 percent over the same time last year, and a 43 percent rise in Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce sales. The retailer topped analyst expectations, with $138.8 billion in revenue for the quarter, just ahead of the forecasted $138.76 billion; and […]

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many emails can you replace with a video? As offices fragment into remote teams, work becomes more visual, and social media makes us more comfortable on camera, it’s time for collaboration to go beyond text. That’s the idea behind Loom, a fast-rising startup that equips enterprises […]

After raising $24 million in funding led by Salesforce in April 2018, the startup IFTTT — which provides an API platform so that people can create short scripts for apps to work together — has announced that its co-founder Linden Tibbets has stepped down as CEO after 10 years leading the company. Chris Kibarian, who […]

Movable Ink has always helped marketers create highly customizable, visually interesting emails. Today, the company announced a new capability for marketers who want to introduce light-weight augmented reality (AR) to their campaigns. Movable Ink co-founder and CTO Michael Nutt says the company was looking for a way to provide customers with AR experiences with less […]

The gig economy has been under much scrutiny as of late due to the way it pays — or, skirts around paying — its independent contractors. Thumbtack, a platform for finding professionals to do anything from home maintenance do DJing a party, is now offering benefits to some of its independent contractors. “In a time […]

Kairos, the facial recognition startup that found itself in turmoil following the ouster of founder and then-CEO Brian Brackeen last October, has raised $4 million in funding from E. Jay Saunders, CEO of Domus Semo Sancus. This brings Kairos’s total funding to $17 million. As of November, Kairos had just enough money to get through […]