Crunch Hype

Just under a week after Beyond Meat announced that it will be releasing a reworked version of its plant-based Chicken Tenders at restaurants in the U.S., the faux meat company has returned with a potentially sizable restaurant partnership. Starting July 26, select Panda Express restaurants in Southern California and New York City will offer an […]

Investors are buying into a creator-led future, and Nas Academy wants to turn that creator influence into a broad network of “virtual universities.” The Singapore startup is building out a platform for creators to monetize their knowledge, giving them the tools to create their own classes and academies that fans can attend online. The platform […]

Zero Motorcycles has been around for over a decade and in that time it’s consistently improved its fleet of electric bikes. With the new FXE, the northern California company has taken the thoroughly enjoyable FXS supermoto and transformed it into something a bit more futuristic looking with a new easier-to-parse display. The FXE likely isn’t […]

Consumer confidence and mass adoption of AVs go hand in hand. To start building this critical trust today, automakers should aim to accelerate the adoption of advanced driver assistance systems.

Electrify America, the entity set up by Volkswagen as part of its settlement with U.S. regulators over its diesel emissions cheating scandal, said it will double the number of its electric vehicle fast charging stations in the United States and Canada by the end of 2025. The commitment, if successful, means 1,800 fast charging stations […]

The addition of MagSafe to the iPhone 12 line introduced all manner of fun avenues for accessory makers, but there’s a strong case (so to speak) to be made that a snap on battery pack might be the most useful of all. A number of third-parties (notably Anker and Mophie) have introduced their own versions, […]

The best way you can get ahead is just by understanding how your stock options work, being prepared, and knowing what questions to ask your tax or financial professionals.

Despite studies, statistics and oh-so-many pledges, a vast number of companies continue to struggle with recruiting diverse talent. Some say that it’s not the pipeline problem, it’s an issue with how recruitment rounds and technical interviews are conducted. Others point to success with hiring entry-level diverse talent, but then companies fail to retain and reinvest […]

AttackIQ, a cybersecurity startup that provides organizations with breach and attack simulation solutions, has raised $44 million in Series C funding as it looks to ramp up its international expansion. The funding round was led by Atlantic Bridge, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (SAEV), and Gaingels, with existing vendors — including Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Salesforce […]

When it comes to big SaaS products, few are bigger than Google Workspace (formerly known as GSuite). So it’s maybe no surprise that one of the first people we contacted to speak at our SaaS conference on October 27 was Google’s Javier Soltero. Today, Puerto Rico-born Soltero is Google’s VP and GM in charge of […]

Instagram is tinkering around with a new test feature that changes the way users reshare content they like to their Stories. The test, which will only appear for a subset of users, lets users see a collection of content they’ve viewed recently when they’re in the Stories section of the app. That content will be […]

Sourcegraph, a late stage startup that wants to bring the power of search to code, announced a $125 million Series D investment today on a $2.625 billion valuation, a 3x growth from its previous valuation in December 2020, according to the company. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Insight Partners, Geodesic […]

Oakland-based Mighty Buildings, which is on a quest to build homes using 3D printing, robotics and automation, has raised a $22 million extension to its Series B round of funding. The additional capital builds upon a $40 million a raise the company announced earlier this year, bringing its total funding since its 2017 inception to […]

Brooklyn-based Looking glass today announced the release of a pair of second-gen holographic displays. Following up on late-last year’s release of the entry-level Portrait, the startup is offering new versions of the Looking Glass 4K and 8K systems, which sport 15.6- and 32-inch displays, respectively. In addition to sizes, there’s a pretty massive gulf in […]

It’s been almost exactly a year since we launched The TechCrunch List, a curated directory of venture capitalists designed to guide founders to the VCs most relevant to their startups. We had nearly 4,000 recommendations from founders — often with extensive documentation that in some cases exceeded 1000 words. From our initial edition to several […]

What’s driving the venture capital market in the United States to be as hot as it has proven to be? FOMO, plus the constituent belief that trying to time the market is a mistake.

Cadoo, a US-startup that’s gamifying fitness by turning it into a betting opportunity, using the prospect of winning (or losing) cold hard cash to motivate people to get off the couch, has collected $1.5 million in seed funds from Sam & Max Altman’s Apollo VC and the student-focused Dorm Room Fund. The app itself has […]

Small and medium-sized businesses in Latin America finding it difficult to get the funds they need to export their goods to the United States is a gap Marco Financial is looking to bridge.

Ask any employee and they’ll tell you one of their least favorite things to do is file expenses. And for companies, the process of managing corporate spend is one of their biggest challenges. Corporate credit cards help ease that pain, so it’s no surprise that the competition between startups in the space is heating up […]

Volkswagen will ramp up its software, mobility as a service and battery tech to stay competitive in the coming decades, as it and other automakers prepare for the largest transition in personal mobility since the invention of the car. Laying out the company strategy Tuesday, Chief Executive Officer Herbert Diess emphasized a top-to-bottom transformation in […]

Ring, the video doorbell maker dubbed the “largest civilian surveillance network the U.S. has ever seen,” is rolling out new but long overdue security and privacy features. The Amazon-owned company’s reputation was bruised after a spate of account breaches in late 2019, in which hackers broke into Ring user accounts and harassed children in their own […]

Cookies and other third-party data sources are going the way of the dodo bird for many companies, regulators and platforms, and that’s giving a new emphasis on technology that will help companies better manage their customer data on their own steam. Today, one of the companies building tools for that end is announcing a big […]

WebOps SaaS platform Pantheon, which started out as a Drupal and WordPress hosting service many years ago, today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E round solely funded by the Softbank Vision Fund. With this round, Pantheon has now reached unicorn status, with a valuation of over $1 billion. Pantheon co-founder and […]

Affiliate marketing may have started as a kind of side hustle for bloggers and others that were making the majority of their revenues through advertising or other channels, but with the rise of influencers and the huge profusion of spon-con on social media, the idea of leveraging a person’s own presence to make some money […]

ZoomInfo announced this morning it intends to acquire conversational sales intelligence tool Chorus.AI for $575 million. Shares of ZoomInfo are unchanged in pre-market trading following the news, per Yahoo Finance data. Sales intelligence, Chorus’s market, is a hot space that uses AI to “listen” to sales conversations to help improve interactions between salespeople and customers. […]

On the heels of raising $775 million earlier this year, Perch has made a big acquisition that will bring on a number of new brands and operations infrastructure to enhance its position in the race to roll up smaller merchants that sell and fulfill sales through Amazon. The company has acquired Web Deals Direct, an […]

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from some of our favorite YouTube shitty robots, it’s that human-robot interaction can be a tricky business. Developing methods to get rigid robotic arms to perform delicate tasks around soft human bodies is easier said than done. This week, a team at MIT’s CSAIL department is showcasing its work […]

Arctic Wolf, a managed cybersecurity company that offers “security operations-as-a-concierge” service, has raised $150 million at Series F. This round was led by Viking Global Investors, Owl Rock, and other existing investors, and lands less than a year after the company’s last round of investment when it became the first managed detection and response (MDR) […]

Female Founders Fund announced Tuesday the closing of its Fund III after raising $57 million to create what it considers “the largest fund for seed capital specifically for female founders.”

Shared micromobility operator Veo has raised $16 million in new funding as the company ramps up its expansion plans in the United States. The Series A funding round, which follows permit awards in Santa Monica, San Diego and New York, will be used to expand Veo’s fleet and focus on developing city and community partnerships. […]

Endgame, enabling software companies to turn customer observations into go-to-market strategies, raised a total of $17 million raised in back-to-back seed and Series A funding rounds.

For many of us, going to work these days no longer means going into a specific office like it used to; and today one of the startups that’s built a platform to help cater for that new, bigger world of employment — wherever talent might be — is announcing a major round of funding on […]

France has hit Google with a fine of half a billion euros after finding major breaches in how it negotiated with publishers to remunerate them for reuse of their content — as is required under a pan-EU reform of digital copyright law which extended neighbouring rights to news snippets. The size of the fine is […]

Moving services giant Updater is bringing on the team from Dolly as the New York company looks to expand its scope of offerings with the acquisition of the on-demand startup known for helping consumers execute small-scale moves. Dolly connects users in need of moving a large item like a piece of furniture with a contractor […]

United Arab Emirates-based shared micromobility operator Fenix is expanding the use of its electric scooters and back-end logistics to not only move people, but also to move goods. On Tuesday, the company announced the launch of a 10-minute fresh grocery delivery service on Reem Island, a dense, mixed-use development off the coast of Abu Dhabi. […]

The pandemic’s effect on the global app market has not been hard to miss. In the first quarter and first half of this year, consumer spending in mobile apps hit new records at $32 billion and $64.9 billion, respectively. In Africa, it can be tough to call out exact numbers on consumer spending because the […]

As financial crime has become significantly more sophisticated, so too have the tools that are used to combat it. Now, Quantexa — one of the more interesting startups that has been building AI-based solutions to help detect and stop money laundering, fraud, and other illicit activity — has raised a growth round of $153 million, […]

Those who’ve followed Nintendo with any sort of frequency over the years know the gaming giant has a tendency to be extremely protective with its IP. Ultimately, it’s probably for the best that the market wasn’t flooded with cheap Mario knickknacks the way it easily could have been. In recent years, however, the company has […]

It’s clear that there is an enormous and growing appetite amongst consumers to switch to products and services which address some of the biggest issues of our era, whether it be climate change or problems with society. So we’ve seen the rise of ethical investing apps, or ways to reduce our carbon footprint, or shop […]

Southeast Asia’s car marketplace wars are going into high drive. Today Carsome Group, one of the region’s largest online used car marketplaces, said it plans to acquire listings platform iCar Asia in a transaction worth more than $200 million. Carsome has agreed to acquire 19.9% of iCar Asia from Malaysia internet conglomerate Catcha Group. In […]

If you follow startup news from Indonesia, you know that the country’s estimated 60 million small businesses are a hot target for tech companies. BukuKas and BukuWarung, for example, both recently raised large rounds to fuel their race to digitize SMEs’ operations. Founded in November 2020, Vara is focused specifically on making staff management easier […]

Nasir Qadree entered the world of venture capital six years ago, beginning with a role at Village Capital in Washington, then as an associate director of social investments at AT&T. Qadree encountered even more opportunities to join established venture firms recently. In fact, he says that after deciding early last year to embark on launching […]

The skies are on the cusp of getting busier — and louder — as drone delivery and electric vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft startups move from moonshot to commercialization. One former NASA engineer and ex-director of Uber’s air taxi division is developing tech to ensure that more air traffic doesn’t equal more noise. Mark […]

Carbon tracking is very much the new hot thing in tech, and we’ve previously covered more generalist startups doing this at scale for companies, such as Plan A Earth out of Berlin. But there’s clearly an opportunity to get deep into a vertical sector and tailor solutions to it. That’s the plan of Vaayu, a […]

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In nearly every Google algorithm update in recent memory, Google has rewarded old, megatraffic sites, sending their search rankings soaring at the expense of smaller, newer sites.

Both bits of news should help us get a handle on how the Q3 2021 IPO cycle is shaping up at the start.

Allan Jones dropped out of college and spent a decade learning how to run a startup. In 2016, that education resulted in the launch of Los Angeles-based Bambee, which helps small companies by acting as their HR department with the goal of keeping them in compliance with government rules and regulations. But he found getting […]

Jake Rothstein is the co-founder of Papa, a Miami-based company that offers care and companionship to seniors. The business, which pairs elderly Americans with uncertified-yet-vetted pals, helps offer casual services, such as technology support, grocery delivery or even a fun conversation. It has raised upwards of $91 million in venture capital to date. While Rothstein […]

Legitimately streamlining TTFC results in a larger market potential of better-educated users for the later stages of your developer journey.