Crunch Hype

It isn’t super common to find two entrepreneurs in one marriage, especially two entrepreneurs that want to work together. But married couple Rob and Monica Royer are making it happen with a new collaboration between Interior Define and Monica + Andy. Interior Define, founded by Rob Royer, looks to offer super customizable, high-quality furniture at […]

Aurora, the buzzy startup founded by early pioneers of self-driving car technology who led programs at Google, Tesla, and Uber, has raised more than $530 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia and includes “significant investment” from Amazon and T. Rowe Price Associates. The monster round pushes Aurora’s valuation near $2.5 billion. Aurora announced a $90 […]

Enterprises now amass huge amounts of data, both from their own tools and applications, as well as from the SaaS applications they use. For a long time, that data was basically exhaust. Maybe it was stored for a while to fulfill some legal requirements, but then it was discarded. Now, data is what drives machine […]

Last year, Match Group acquired a 51 percent stake in the relationship-focused dating app Hinge, in order to diversify its portfolio of dating apps led by Tinder. The company has now confirmed that it fully bought out Hinge in the past quarter, and today owns 100 percent of the app which has been gaining momentum […]

Optimus Ride, an MIT spinoff, is gearing up to deploy its self-driving vehicles within a mixed-use development located in Reston, Virginia. Thanks to a partnership with Brookfield Properties, Optimus Ride will deploy an autonomous vehicle service throughout Halley Rise, a development that features housing, retail, offices and public spaces in June. “We are pleased to announce […]

When Amazon unveiled a six-wheeled urban delivery robot called Scout a couple of weeks ago, its website was pretty definitive about who was behind it. “These devices were created by Amazon,” the page reads. “We developed Amazon Scout at our research and development lab in Seattle.” But that is only part of the story, TechCrunch […]

Weeks of leaks haven’t left much to the imagination. But for those waiting for the real thing, the latest iteration of Motorola’s budget G line just became officially official as of this morning — and with a few weeks to spare ahead of Mobile World Congress. Of course, the Moto G7 line isn’t really aimed […]

With traditional CRM tools, sales people add basic details about the companies to the database, then a few notes about their interactions. AI has helped automate some of that, but Gong.io wants to take it even further using voice recognition to capture every word of every interaction. Today, it got a $40M Series B investment. […]

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 Partech is doubling the size of its African venture fund to $143 million Zimbabwe’s government faces off against its tech community over internet restrictions A high court in Zimbabwe […]

After strong results from Facebook and Snap this quarter, all eyes were on Twitter to see if the other big, publicly listed social network could deliver a hat trick of growth. If we judged the company on financials alone, Twitter did not disappoint. The company reported Q4 revenues of $909 million (up 24 percent on […]

A lengthy antitrust probe into how Facebook gathers data on users has resulted in Germany’s competition watchdog banning the social network giant from combining data on users across its own suite of social platforms without their consent. The investigation of Facebook data-gathering practices began in March 2016. The decision by Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, announced […]

French startup Deepomatic just raised a new funding round of $5.1 million in equity funding and $1.1 million in debt. Hi Inov is leading the round, with Alven Capital and Bertrand Diard also participating. Deepomatic lets you build your own computer vision applications for your industrial needs. The company gives you all the tools to […]

Thanks to the rise of WhatsApp and other free calling and messaging apps, Skype is no longer the go-to service it once was for many people. But the company just added a new feature which might raise its appeal among users. The Microsoft-owned service’s latest addition is a screen-blurring feature designed to obscure your messy room […]

Musiio, a Singapore-based startup that uses AI to help digital music companies with discovery and creation, has pulled in a $1 million seed round. The capital comes from Singapore’s Wavemaker Partners, U.S. investor Exponential Creativity Ventures and undisclosed angels. The deal represents the first outside round for Musiio, which was founded at the Entrepreneur First program […]

Cluno, the Munich startup providing what it calls a “car subscription” service, has raised $28 million in Series B funding. The round is led by Valar Ventures, the U.S.-based venture capital firm founded by Peter Thiel. Acton Capital Partners and Atlantic Labs, which both backed the company’s Series A round, also participated. It brings total […]

It was the Lehman Brothers of blockchain. 850,000 Bitcoin disappeared when cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox imploded in 2014 after a series of hacks. The incident cemented the industry’s reputation as frighteningly insecure. Now a controversial crypto celebrity named Brock Pierce is trying to get the Mt. Gox flameout’s 24,000 victims their money back and build a […]

Tink, the European open banking platform headquartered in Sweden, has deposited €56 million in new funding. Leading the round is U.S.-based Insight Venture Partners. Existing backers Sunstone, SEB, Nordea Ventures and ABN AMRO Digital Impact Fund also participated. A number of other investors have been added to Tink’s cap table, too. They include Christian Clausen, […]

UK startup Fabula AI reckons it’s devised a way for artificial intelligence to help user generated content platforms get on top of the disinformation crisis that keeps rocking the world of social media with antisocial scandals. Even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has sounded a cautious note about AI technology’s capability to meet the complex, contextual, messy […]

If you’ve got a Flickr account, hopefully you’re already aware: the free 1 terabyte plan is going away. If you’re on a free Flickr account, the company is only going to let you keep 1,000 photos at a time. Anything past that will be auto deleted, starting with the oldest stuff. The deadline for saving […]

Facebook head of communications Caryn Marooney is leaving for greener pastures, she announced today, on Facebook of course. She joins the growing number of executives and high-level employees departing the company during and after what may be its toughest year.

At the tail end of its shareholder letter for Q1 2019, Sonos disclosed that the company’s chief financial officer, Mike Giannetto, will be retiring “later this year.” Giannetto has been with Sonos for seven years, helping to guide the company through its IPO back in August of 2018. As for who will take over the […]

Many major companies, like Air Canada, Hollister and Expedia, are recording every tap and swipe you make on their iPhone apps. In most cases you won’t even realize it. And they don’t need to ask for permission. You can assume that most apps are collecting data on you. Some even monetize your data without your knowledge. […]

Weather and climate-related disasters cost the U.S. economy $80 billion last year — and have hit the nation’s bottom line to the tune of roughly $100 billion per year over the last five years, according to a new survey from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That tally comes as NASA reported that 2018 was […]

Podcasting revenues hit $314 million in 2017, according to a third-party survey released last summer. It’s a large number for what’s been historically regarded as a niche and difficult to monetize medium, but still pales in comparison to the additional $400-$500 million Spotify says it’s willing to spend on the space this year alone. Two […]

Mike McNamara retired from the electronics manufacturing giant and services business Flex last December after 12 years as CEO of the company — and another 12 working his way up to the corner office — but he didn’t say at the time where he was headed. As it turns out, McNamara had decided to join […]

Facebook’s crack down on non-consensual ad targeting last year will finally produce results. In March, TechCrunch discovered Facebook planned to require advertisers to pledge that they had permission to upload someone’s phone number or email address for ad targeting. That tool debuted in June, though there was no verification process and Facebook just took businesses […]

Young founders who want to start companies while still in school have an increasing number of resources to tap into that exist just for them.

After we broke the news in November that Oculus’s former CEO had left the company partially due to disagreements on the company’s PC hardware direction, including the cancellation of a high-end “Rift 2” in favor of a more iterative “Rift S” headset, new details are emerging that confirm Facebook’s directional shift for its flagship headset. […]

Blue Apron is introducing a lower-cost version of its meal kits, initially only for Jet.com shoppers in the greater New York City metro area. The new kits, called “Knick Knacks,” still require refrigeration, but require customers to supply their own protein and produce to complete the meal. But by dropping the two most expensive ingredients […]

On the heels of a recently filed class-action lawsuit over wages and tips, as well as drivers and shoppers speaking out about Instacart’s alleged practices of subsidizing wages with tips, Instacart is taking steps to ensure tips are counted separately from what Instacart pays shoppers. In a blog post today, Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta said […]

One of the most important upcoming events in the space industry is undoubtedly the advent of SpaceX and Boeing's competing crew-bearing capsules, which the companies have been working on for years. But today brings yet another delay for both programs, already years behind schedule.

Back in 2016 we had Robin up on stage demonstrating the possibility of a robotic mower as a service rather than just something you buy. They're still going strong, and just introduced and patented what seems in retrospect a pretty obvious idea: an automatic door for the mower to go through fences between front and back yards.

Microsoft launched a new ad campaign for its Office suite today. Usually, that’s not something especially interesting, but this one is a bit different. Instead of simply highlighting the features of Word and Excel, Microsoft decided to pitch Office 365 and Office 2019 against each other (as an extra gimmick, it used twins to do […]

An investigation by Consumer Reports may force electric scooter businesses to double back on safety measures.

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 buys Gimlet and Anchor in podcast push, earmarks $500M for more deals Spotify is going after podcasts in a major […]

Last month, Viacom picked up free streaming service Pluto TV for $340 million in cash. This week, the company spoke in more detail about its plans for Pluto TV — including its potential for ad-supported streaming as well as the ability to market Viacom’s various subscription video properties directly to consumers, similar to how Amazon […]

Microsoft’s Build developer conference is returning to Seattle May 6 to 8. This is a bit of a surprise since Microsoft itself leaked May 7 to 9 as Build’s dates last month, after all. But then Google’s announced exactly those dates for its I/O confab and like last year, Microsoft probably had to scramble a bit… […]

Lime just announced it has raised a $310 million Series D round. Led by Bain Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Ventures, GV and IVP, the round values Lime at $2.4 billion. “This new investment demonstrates the fundamental strength of our business and the increasingly rapid adoption of Lime,” Lime CEO Toby Sun wrote in a blog […]

Last May, Google introduced Asylo, an open source framework for confidential computing, a technique favored by many of the big cloud vendors because it allows you to set up trusted execution environments that are shielded from the rest of the (potentially untrusted) system. Workloads and their data basically sit in a trusted enclave that adds […]

Today’s news that the (failing?) New York Times reported net income of $55.2 million, after losses a year earlier — and that its digital business raked in $709 million — is just one indicator that some of the nation’s oldest media properties are finally crossing the bridge into the 21st century. The Times managed to turn […]

I remember watching MIT professor Andrew McAfee years ago telling stories about the importance of data over gut feeling, whether it was predicting successful wines or making sound business decisions. We have been hearing about big data and data-driven decision making for so long, you would think it has become hardened into our largest organizations […]

Disney’s soon-to-launch streaming service and Netflix competitor, known as Disney+, will include non-Disney programming at launch, Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed in a call with investors following Disney’s earnings on Tuesday. The company had already licensed a CBS show for its service, which led to questions about Disney’s content strategy for the new service. Iger […]

Uber Freight co-founders Charlie Bergevin and Brian Cristol have left for Turvo, a venture-funded collaborative logistics platform.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and CIV:LAB – a nonprofit dedicated to connecting urban tech leaders – have announced the launch of The Grid, a member-based partnership network for New York’s urban tech community. The goal of the network is to link organizations, academia and local tech leaders, in order to promote collaboration […]

Six months after an episode of “Homeland” showed hackers exploiting security vulnerabilities in the (fictional) Vice President’s pacemaker, Mike Kijewski, the founder of a new startup security company called Medcrypt, was approached by his (then) employers at Varian Medical Systems with a unique problem. “A hospital came to the company and said we are treating […]

The UK government has announced it’s working on a process to support so-called ‘advanced trials’ of autonomous vehicles — i.e. trials without human safety drivers. It also says it will be beefing up the existing Code of Practice for testing driverless cars to provide a framework to support the evolution of the tech, saying it’s on […]

Calm, the meditation and wellness app that launched back in 2012, has today announced the close of an $88 million Series B financing with a valuation of $1 billion. (We have not been able to clarify whether the valuation was post- or pre-money.) The funding was led by TPG Growth, with participation from CAA and […]

Spotify continues to see growing uptake for its all-you-can-eat streaming music (and increasingly podcast) services, even as it fell short of analyst expectations on sales in its earnings. In Q4 results reported today alongside the blockbuster news that it was acquiring Gimlet and Anchor to step up its podcast push, the company said that monthly active […]

Spotify is going after podcasts in a major way in 2019. The music streaming service today confirmed that it has snapped up two podcast networks — Gimlet and Anchor — in undisclosed deals. But that’s not all, the firm said it has plans to spend a further $400-$500 million “on multiple acquisitions in 2019” to get […]

As more organizations move to cloud-based IT architectures, a startup that’s helping them secure that data in an efficient way has raised some capital. vArmour, which provides a platform to help manage security policies across disparate public and private cloud environments in one place, is announcing today that it has raised a growth round of […]