Crunch Hype

Although it’s not the sexiest of industries, the hefty construction sector in 2018 attracted not only the attention but, more importantly, the dollars of investors.

According to a report from the WSJ, Visa and Mastercard are considering raising interchange fees on card transactions in the U.S. Visa and Mastercard generate most of their revenue from these small processing fees, and it could have implications for merchants and fintech startups. When you pay with a credit or debit card, merchants pay […]

Uber filed a lawsuit against New York City, The Verge reported. The company wants to overturn New York City’s rule that caps the number of new ride-hailing drivers. Last summer, the city approved legislation that halts the issuing of new licenses to drivers for 12 months. It has been a multi-year fight between Uber and […]

Welcome back to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. This is the second edition and seriously people, what happened this week? Too much. Too much! Never heard of TechCrunch’s Transportation Weekly? Catch up here. As I’ve written before, consider this a soft launch. Follow me on Twitter @kirstenkorosec to ensure you […]

Plus, e-scooter subscription services are a thing now, the Vision Fund is betting big on autonomous delivery and Facebook almost bought Unity.

Steve Jurvetson is staging a comeback, disclosing today that his new San Francisco-based, early-stage venture firm Future Ventures, has raised $200 million for its debut fund. “It’s good to be back in the saddle again,” says Jurvetson, whose career was somewhat derailed in the fall of 2017 when a former girlfriend wrote a Facebook post, […]

Apple has just bought up the talent it needs to make talking toys a part of Siri, HomePod, and its voice strategy. Apple has acquired PullString, also known as ToyTalk, according to Axios’ Dan Primack and Ina Fried. TechCrunch has received confirmation of the acquistion from sources with knowledge of the deal. The startup makes voice […]

Hotel chain giant Marriott will now let you check if you’re a victim of the Starwood hack. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that it has put in place “a mechanism to enable guests to look up individual passport numbers to see if they were included in the set of unencrypted passport numbers.” That follows a statement […]

Watch out, starwhales.

Thanks to environmentally conscious young buyers, throwaway culture is dying not only in the U.S., but also in Latin America — and startups are poised to jump in with services to help people recycle used clothing. GoTrendier, a peer-to-peer fashion marketplace operative in Mexico and Colombia, has raised $3.5 million USD to do just that. […]

When does "delete" really mean delete? Not always, or even at all, if you're Twitter.

The housing market is predicted to cool this year, but the market for startups selling houses? It seems to be heating up. Opendoor, the company that aims to bypass real estate agents and brokers by providing an online platform — by way of a mobile app — for people to buy and sell properties direct, has […]

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. Did New York lose anything with Amazon’s rejection? It’s complicated. Amazon announced yesterday that it’s taking its ball and going home, […]

NYC and Boston were handed huge setbacks this week when Amazon and GE decided to bail on their commitments to build headquarters in the respective cities on the same day. But it’s worth pointing out that while these large tech organizations were pulling out, Google was expanding in both locations. Yesterday, upon hearing about Amazon’s decision […]

Ahead of its anticipated initial public offering this year, Uber reported a net loss of $865 million in the fourth quarter. That figure, however, was aided by a tax benefit that saved the company from reporting a $1.2 billion net loss in the period. On an adjusted, pro-forma basis, Uber’s net loss in the final […]

Clarification hasn’t always been Twitter’s strong suit. Fittingly, there’s a bit of confusion around the longstanding suggestion that the service could add an “edit” button in order to save users from silly typos and, well, much, much worse. At a Goldman Sachs event this week, Jack Dorsey clarified that, rather than adding a controversial edit […]

Rivian, the electric automaker that debuted its first two vehicles just three months ago, has raised $700 million in a round led by Amazon . The news follows a report earlier this week by Reuters that GM and Amazon were in talks to invest in the electric vehicle company. “We’re inspired by Rivian’s vision for […]

For homeowners that want to go green, but have trouble figuring out how to do it, Palmetto Clean Technologies has the answer. The company has an army of salespeople to pitch the benefits of solar power and energy efficiency, and will connect would-be clean energy consumers with financing options, installers, and software to monitor and manage […]

Earlier today, Dubai’s International airport shut down flights for roughly half an hour, owing to the sighting of a drone flying nearby. Departures were halted from 10:13 a.m. to 10:45 a.m over “suspected drone activity,” though arriving flights were still able to land. The airport’s social team took to Twitter to update the situation, while […]

Three cities, three dead urban unicorn renewal projects. In just the past few days, we’ve had Foxconn renege on Wisconsin, Amazon renege on NYC and GE renege on Boston. Each followed the Anna Karenina principle that every unhappy economic development deal is unhappy in its own way: for Foxconn, it was trade tariffs and slowing […]

If you’re a Coinbase user, you may have seen some new tokens on your account. The Bitcoin Cash chain split into two different chains back in November. It means that if you held Bitcoin Cash on November 15, you became the lucky owner of Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin ABC. And Coinbase just started handing out […]

The Green New Deal has burst onto the American stage, spurring more conversation about – and aspiration for – ambitious climate policy than at any point in at least a decade.

3DEN is building spaces for what it calls the “in-between moments” of your day. The name (pronounced “Eden”) comes from the idea of the “third place” — a space that’s neither home nor work. Founder and CEO Ben Silver told me the goal is to create a space that people can use if, say, they’ve […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was a treat. We had TechCrunch’s own Connie Loizos in the studio along with your humble servant and General Catalyst’s Niko Bonatsos. A fine group for a busy week. We had to pare our topic list […]

Jake Bright Contributor Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa. More posts by this contributor Africa Roundup: Zimbabwe’s net blackout, Partech’s $143M fund, Andela’s $100M raise, Flutterwave’s pivot Partech is doubling the size of its African venture fund to $143 million Kenyan communications hardware […]

Bixby’s been on a bunch of phones and several appliances. Until now, however, Samsung’s smart assistant has been largely MIA on the company’s tablets. Of course, I’ve never pretended to have the faintest idea of the company’s strategy here. Anyway, just ahead of MWC and its own Unpacked (S10) event, the company just dropped a […]

Samsung’s newest product launch happens next week, but already the Korean tech giant has revealed its entire upcoming range of wearable devices that will seemingly be unveiled alongside the Galaxy S10. That’s because the company’s Galaxy Wearable’s app was uploaded today with support for a range of unreleased products which include wireless earbuds, a sports-focused smartwatch, and […]

ChargedUp, a U.K. startup that offers a mobile charging network that takes inspiration from bike-sharing, has closed £1.2 million in seed investment. Leading the round is Sir John Hegarty’s fund The Garage, and the ex-Innocent Smoothie founders fund JamJar. The funding will be used to grow the offering across the U.K. and for international expansion. […]

China’s largest ride-hailing firm Didi plans to let go 15 percent of its employees or about 2,000 people this year, sources told TechCrunch. The cut comes as the beleagured transportation giant copes with a stricter regulatory environment that puts a squeeze on driver supply and backlash from two high-profile passenger murders last year. Chief executive Cheng […]

Spotify doubled down on podcasts last week with a double deal to buy podcast networks Gimlet and Anchor. Those acquisitions were initially undisclosed, but Spotify has quietly confirmed that it spent €300 million, just shy of $340 million, to capture the companies. That’s according to an SEC filing — hat tip Recode’s Peter Kafka — which reveals that […]

Late last month, the venture firm Kleiner Perkins began an official reboot, with a new, $600 million fund, as well as some new faces blazing the trail for the outfit going forward, including Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman, investors who joined Kleiner from Social Capital and Index Ventures, respectively. Their roles at the 47-year-old firm […]

Ecommerce giant Alibaba is continuing its push into the world of youth culture after it scooped up an 8 percent stake in anime streaming and game publishing company Bilibili. According to a securities filing on Thursday, Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace has acquired about 24 million shares in Bilibili, the Shanghai-based firm that has captured 93 million monthly users […]

Alarming reports popped up on Twitter late Thursday of incident involving an armed individual at Netflix’s Hollywood office on Sunset Blvd. TechCrunch has confirmed with the Los Angeles Police Department that a call reporting a man with a gun first came in at 3:53 Pacific Time. According to the LAPD, there were no shots fired, […]

Depending on who you ask, Citizen is either a useful urban safety tool or a menacing glimpse into a self-surveilled police state, but either way, the app is coming to Baltimore. Citizen, formerly known as Vigilante, is a crime tracking app that offers geo-targeted alerts that notify users of dangers lurking nearby, from carjackings to […]

An extra special copy of Super Mario for NES just sold for a mind-boggling $100,150. Before you go digging through the attic to find your old copy to throw up for auction, you should know: the version in question here is super, super rare. So what makes it special? Super Mario has been released and […]

If you’re a video creator in 2019, you’re probably thinking about a long list of publishing destinations: YouTube, of course, but also Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and more. StayTuned Digital is a new startup trying to help video creators and publishers push their content to multiple platforms. The company, which bills itself as “content’s best […]

Email is certainly not dead, despite many such exclamations, but there’s no question that it’s a bloated, seeping hog of a platform on which it’s incredibly difficult for businesses to develop meaningful relationships with customers. Postscript, a startup launching out of Y Combinator’s latest class, wants to learn from what email marketing got right and […]

Today, Zendesk announced it has hired three new executives — Elisabeth Zornes, former general manager of global support for Microsoft Office, as Zendesk’s first chief customer officer; former Adobe executive Colleen Berube as chief information officer and former Salesforce executive Shawna Wolverton as senior vice president, product. The company emphasized that the hirings were about […]

Like the initial HQ2 plan, today’s news that Amazon will no longer be setting up shop in Queens has been met with a flood of mixed reactions. Business advocacy and real estate are decrying the retail giant’s decision to pack up and leave. I know I’ve been flooded with responses from various corners all afternoon. […]

The Washington Post is reporting that Facebook’s row with the FTC could result in fines an order of magnitude larger than any levied against a tech company by the regulatory body before. While the talks appear to be ongoing, The Washington Post spoke with two people familiar with the situation who said the FTC is […]

TikTok is testing a new ad product: a sponsored video ad that directs users to the advertiser’s website. The test was spotted in the U.S. TikTok app, where a video labeled “Sponsored” from the bike retailer Specialized is showing up in the main feed, along with a blue “Lean More” button that directs users to […]

So you’re a startup founder. Or you’re in charge of a new project at a big company. (Or maybe you just imagine being either of these things.) And you suddenly realize: you have to make a whole slew of massive decisions right now, based on imperfect information, which will reverberate for months or years, and […]

On Thursday, the Senate voted to confirm Trump nominee William Barr as the next head of the Justice Department. Barr was nominated to replace former Attorney General Jeff Sessions who fell out of favor with the Trump administration and resigned last year. Barr will step in for acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who controversially stepped […]

Not all validation is created equal. It is crucial that founders differentiate between meaningful validation and vanity “wins” that do little more than make you feel good.

Now that Amazon has said that it’s taking its ball and going home rather than deal with mean, pushy New Yorkers, outside observers are giving off the sense that the city (and its local politicians) are losing out for their recalcitrance. They’re wrong. New York City is running at about a 4.3 percent unemployment rate […]

Boston and New York have been sporting rivals for decades, constantly fighting over bragging rights across all four major sports, but today the two cities had something in common neither was probably hoping for. Both had major tech companies back out of massive deals on the same day. It turns out, however, the two cities […]

Software is eating the world, and today a startup that’s taking this maxim to the world of telecoms has raised a big round of funding as it comes out of stealth. DriveNets, a company out of Israel that builds cloud-based networking services that provide a cheaper and simpler alternative to the functions of traditional routers […]

Uber Freight, which helps truck drivers connect with shipping companies, has made two high-profile hires this month as it continues to scale up its app and plans for a global expansion. The company has hired Andrew Smith, one of Box’s early employees, to head up global sales at Uber Freight, and Bar Ifrach, formerly of Airbnb, to lead […]

Peltarion, a Swedish startup founded by former execs from companies like Spotify, Skype, King, TrueCaller and Google, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by Euclidean Capital, the family office for hedge fund billionaire James Simons. Previous investors FAM and EQT Ventures also participated, and this round brings […]