Crunch Hype

Google is giving Gmail a new right-click menu. And it’s about time. While you’ve long been able to right-click on any email in your inbox, your options were always limited. You could archive an email, mark it as read/unread and delete it, but that was about it. Now, as the company announced today, that’s changing […]

A grand mission to Mars that was always light on details has come to a decidedly terrestrial end. Mars One, a controversial space exploration project that made it as far as the “highly produced videos” stage of space colonization, has quietly filed for bankruptcy, according to a liquidation listing spotted by a Redditor on r/space. […]

For years, the popular accelerator program Y Combinator has interviewed applicants to its program in the Bay Area, reimbursing teams for their travel expenses. It will continue to do so, but the outfit tells us they are for the first time also hosting interviews in New York, on February 23rd, and that plans to interview […]

MGM-owned Epix is joining other premium networks like HBO, Showtime and Starz with the launch of its own over-the-top streaming service aimed at cord cutters. The service, called Epix Now, offers access to Epix’s original series and thousands of Hollywood movies and classic films for $5.99 per month, and supports offline viewing and 4K video, […]

The City of Paris first warned Airbnb, and it is now taking action. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, told the JDD that the city is suing the company for 1,010 illegal listings. The fine could be worth as much as $14.2 million (€12.625 million). Based on current legislation, you can’t rent an apartment more […]

Ask me in a couple of months what I think about the Moft. Right now, I’m actually digging it. Granted, I didn’t have particularly high hopes for a $19 (for Kickstarter early-birds) fiberglass and faux leather gizmo you slap on the bottom of the laptop, but I’m into it. The “invisible” stand is pretty silly […]

Aditya and Aarti Kochhar Kaji didn’t set out to start the snack food business Taali Foods when they were studying for their business degrees at Harvard. The couple both hail from Mumbai and met at the University of Pennsylvania . They were married before starting at Harvard’s Business School and initially were interested in other areas […]

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. SoftBank’s next bet: $940M into autonomous delivery startup Nuro Nuro has raised $940 million in financing from the SoftBank Vision Fund, […]

Zeta Global, the well-funded marketing technology company founded by CEO David A. Steinberg and former Apple CEO John Sculley, has hired its first chief privacy officer — Ben Hayes, who was previously chief privacy officer at Nielsen. Steinberg said the company already has a “global privacy team” and has been taking the issue “very seriously.” […]

Last week TechCrunch reported that Reddit was raising $150 million from Chinese tech giant Tencent and up to $150 million more in a Series D that would value the company at $2.7 billion pre-money or $3 billion post-money. After no-commenting on our scoop, today Reddit confirmed it’s raised $300 million at $3 billion post-money, with […]

Cars are now essentially computers on wheels — and like every computer, they are susceptible to attacks. It’s no surprise then that there’s a growing number of startups that are working to protect a car’s internal systems from these hacks, especially given that the market for automotive cybersecurity could be worth over $900 billion by […]

When Apple issued revised guidance for its quarterly earnings last month, the company singled out China as a primary driver for its disappointing result. Sure enough, iPhone revenue declined 15 percent year over year, and now IDC’s got some more insight into the role the Chinese market may have played in that decline. New figures […]

Google today announced the general availability of a new API for Google Docs that will allow developers to automate many of the tasks that users typically do manually in the company’s online office suite. The API has been in developer preview since last April’s Google Cloud Next 2018 and is now available to all developers. […]

Apple announced this morning it has partnered with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to make the Health Records feature on iPhones available to veterans. The deal will allow the veterans to view their medical information across participating institutions, including the VA, organized in the Apple Health app. These health records include allergies, conditions, immunizations, […]

Facebook has been called upon to provide good faith researchers with an API to enable them to study how political ads are spreading and being amplified on its platform. A coalition of European academics, technologists and human and digital rights groups, led by Mozilla, has signed an open letter to the company demanding far greater […]

Samsung’s not telling us anything we don’t already know with its latest teaser. But before I hop on yet another flight to San Francisco, it’s good to know I’m getting a little more bang for my (well, Verizon’s) buck. In addition to the Galaxy S10, Samsung will also be offering a much better glimpse of […]

Nuro, the autonomous delivery startup, has raised $940 million in financing from the SoftBank Vision Fund, a whopping amount that will be used to expand its delivery service, add new partners, hire employees and scale up its fleet of self-driving bots. Nuro has raised more than $1 billion from partners, including SoftBank, Greylock Partners and […]

One of Mobile World Congress’s most anticipated reveals isn’t a phone at all. Microsoft is expected to announce the next generation HoloLens headset at an already-announced event on February 24, and the company’s doing a bit more to stoke the flames. Granted, there’s really not much to see in this new teaser. Vague forms of […]

Bumble, currently Tinder’s biggest rival in the dating app market, today launched its own version of Tinder’s “Boost” feature. On Bumble, it’s being called “Spotlight” and allows users to pay to bump their profile up to the front of the queue, in order to be seen by more people than they would otherwise. Very much […]

This weekend, the Trump administration shed more light on the “American A.I. Initiative,” a plan the President is set to sign today, in hopes of helping keep the U.S. at the forefront of innovation. The executive order highlights, in its own words, “bold, decisive actions” for maintaining American’s role in developing the artificial intelligence set […]

Lunar Way, the Nordic banking app that’s riding new EU regulation to help inject more competition into the region, has raised €13 million in new funding. The round is led by SEED Capital, with participation from Greyhound Capital, Socii Capital and a number of individual investors from the financial services industry. It also comes shortly […]

In the world of blockchain, it is the sector of Fintech where most think Satoshi’s invention will have the greatest impact. And in finance there are few more elite worlds than those of asset management. So it’s of some significance that a two-year long project to disrupt and open up this world using blockchain has […]

We know by now that modern website attacks are typically automated, as armies of bots knock on doors until they inevitably find vulnerabilities and take advantage. PerimeterX, a San Francisco startup wants to protect sites from these automated assaults. Today, it announced a $43 million Series C. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners […]

The UK government has said it could legislate to require age verification checks on users of dating apps, following an investigation into underage use of dating apps published by the Sunday Times yesterday. The newspaper found more than 30 cases of child rape have been investigated by police related to use of dating apps including Grindr and Tinder […]

Facebook co-founder Sean Parker bankrolled Brigade to get out the vote and stimulate civic debate, but after five years and little progress the startup is splitting up, multiple sources confirm to TechCrunch. We’ve learned that Pinterest has acqhired roughly 20 members of the Brigade engineering team. The rest of Brigade is looking for a potential […]

Artificial intelligence is widely heralded as something that could disrupt the jobs market across the board — potentially eating into careers as varied as accountants, advertising agents, reporters and more — but there are some industries in dire need of assistance where AI could make a wholly positive impact, a core one being healthcare. Despite […]

China’s Soocas continues to jostle with global toothbrush giants as it raises 200 million yuan ($30 million) in a series C funding round. The Shenzhen-based oral care manufacturer has secured the new capital from lead investor Vision Knight Capital, with Kinzon Capital, Greenwoods Investment, Yunmu Capital and Cathay Capital also participating in the round. The new […]

In his extraordinary Medium post last week accusing American Media Inc of “extortion and blackmail,” Bezos hinted (but did not explicitly state) that there may be a connection between Saudi Arabia and the publication of his personal messages with Lauren Sanchez. Now Saudi Arabia’s minister of foreign affairs has denied it was involved, stating during […]

You might not think of self-driving technologies and politics having much in common, but at least in one way, they overlap meaningfully: yesterday’s enemy can be tomorrow’s ally. Such was the message we gleaned Thursday night, at a small industry event in San Francisco, where we had the chance to sit down with Chris Urmson, the cofounder […]

It’s bad enough that dating sites are a pit of exaggerations and inevitable disappointment, they’re also a hot target for hackers. Dating sites aren’t considered the goldmine of personal information like banks or hospitals, but they’re still an intimate part of millions of people’s lives and have long been in the sights of hackers. If […]

Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo and writer-director Dan Gilroy — who worked together on the creepy crime thriller “Nightcrawler” — have reunited for a new Netflix Original film, “Velvet Buzzsaw.” While “Nightcrawler” wasn’t perfect, it was tense and unsettling, filled with eerily beautiful shots of nighttime L.A., plus a career-best performance from Gyllenhaal. It’s hard to […]

Despite the fact that supergiant venture capital rounds have become an almost everyday occurrence, the age at which companies close their first nine-figure funding deal hasn’t really changed.

“The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society,” quoth Wikipedia, “held in common, not owned privately.” We live in an era of surveillance capitalism in a symbiotic relationship with advertising technology, quoth me. And I put it to you that privacy is not just a virtue, or a […]

The German Federal Cartel Office’s decision to order Facebook to change how it processes users’ personal data this week is a sign the antitrust tide could at last be turning against platform power. One European Commission source we spoke to, who was commenting in a personal capacity, described it as “clearly pioneering” and “a big deal”, […]

Fitbit has a new fitness tracker, but it’s one that you can’t buy in stores. The company quietly uncorked the Inspire on Friday, releasing its first product that is available only to corporate employees and health insurance members. The idea is to offer a fully subsidized wearable that helps the company dig deeper into the […]

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: 2019 just might be the year that smartphones get fun again. After years of similar form factors and slight upgrades, the mobile industry’s back is against the wall. For the first time ever, sales are down, owning to economic factors and slower upgrade cycles. Most people […]

Freshman Congresswomen and meme queen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is headed to Netflix. The streaming service said this week that it has snapped up ‘Knock Down the House,’ a Sundance award-winning documentary profiling the campaigns of four female progressive candidates, including Ocasio-Cortez, in the 2018 midterm election. The documentary raised money via a Kickstarter campaign last year and it […]

It’s not often that you hear about a startup from Singapore with ambitions to expand to the U.S, but that’s exactly the goal for event booking service Delegate. Founded in August 2015, the company aims to be a one-stop shop for booking an event, that covers corporate and professional functions, celebrations like weddings and more personal events […]

For years, decades even, startup names have been getting weirder. This isn’t a scientific verdict, but it is how things have seemed to someone who spends a lot of hours perusing this stuff.

This week in startups: Turvo takes center stage, a mental health unicorn emerges and Reddit rakes in cash.

If you're craving a truly different sound with which to slay the crew this weekend, look no further than System Beeps, a new album by shiru8bit — though you may have to drag your old 486 out of storage to play it. Yes, this album runs in MS-DOS and its music is produced entirely through the PC speaker — you know, the one that can only beep.

Welcome to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. I cover all the ways people and goods move from Point A to Point B — today and in the future — whether it’s by bike, bus, scooter, car, train, truck, robotaxi or rocket. Sure, let’s include hyperloop and eVTOLs, or […]

A decade ago, about a dozen or so engineers gathered at Google’s main Mountain View campus on Charleston Road to work on Project Chauffeur, a secret endeavor housed under the tech giant’s moonshot factory X. Project Chauffeur — popularly know as the “Google self-driving car project” — kicked off in January 2009. It would eventually […]

If you've ever seen a lamp or chair that you liked and wished you could just take a picture and find it online, well, GrokStyle let you do that — and now the company has been snatched up by Facebook to augment its own growing computer vision department.

Lyft, which has faced at least one lawsuit pertaining to its alleged discrimination against people with physical abilities, announced today it has expanded its wheelchair-accessible vehicle (WAV) service in New York City. Details on the blog are very scarce (we’ve reached out to Lyft for more info) but Lyft now has more than 20 partners in […]

The head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is calling Altria and Juul to meet in Washington to discuss their tie-up and how it impacts the companies’ plans to combat teen vaping. Earlier this year, Altria invested $12.8 billion investment in Juul. “After Altria’s acquisition of a 35 percent ownership interest in JUUL Labs, Inc., […]

As massive cross-platform gaming titles become even larger time-sucks for a lot of people, it’s probably worth reflecting on how to savor your in-game accomplishments. Streaming of esports celebrities on sites like Twitch has taken off like no one imagined, but for the most part the toil-heavy editing process has left this attention largely focused […]

Amazon is taking on QVC with the launch of Amazon Live, which features live-streamed video shows from Amazon talent as well as those from brands that broadcast their own live streams through a new app, Amazon Live Creator. On the live shows, hosts talk about and demonstrate products available for sale on Amazon, much like they do on QVC. […]

Baillie Gifford & Co., the second-biggest shareholder of Tesla stock, has increased its stake in the electric automaker and energy storage company. A regulator filing posted Friday shows Baillie increased its stake in Tesla from 7.64 percent at the end of the third quarter to 7.71 percent at the end of the fourth quarter. That doesn’t sound like […]

British startup OakNorth has raised a $440 million funding round from SoftBank’s Vision Fund as well as the Clermont Group. The company is creating a digital bank and focuses on loans for small and medium enterprises and the technology behind those loans. Today’s funding round is the biggest funding round in a European fintech company. […]