Crunch Hype

Global investor SparkLabs is adding another business line after it announced a new consultancy division that’s aimed at working with Fortune 500 companies and other global corporates keen to deepen their position in tech. Best known for its funds — which cover global deals, a crypto vehicle and a Korea-based fund — and over half a dozen accelerator programs worldwide, […]

Amazon’s formidable presence in the world of retail stems partly from the fact that it’s just not a commerce giant, it’s also a tech company — building solutions and platforms in house that make its processes, from figuring out what to sell, to how much to have on hand and how best to distribute it […]

French company Chauffeur-Privé is going to expand aggressively over the next couple of years. That’s why the company is changing its name to Kapten — a name that sounds less French. “We wanted to share with you a very important piece of news,” Kapten co-founder and CEO Yan Hascoet said in a press conference. “We […]

Rovio’s efforts to diversify beyond its Angry Birds franchise is getting a little investment boost today. The company announced that Japan’s NTT Docomo is taking a stake in Hatch, a Rovio subsidiary that describes itself as the “Netflix of gaming”, providing subscribers with a rotating mix of freemium games from a mix of publishers, with […]

The price of competing with e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com is immense. That’s evidenced by challenger Pinduoduo, commonly known as PDD, which is raising more than $1 billion in fresh capital just six months after it went public. The company announced plans to sell 37 million shares in a move that will raise over $1 billion, going […]

Raisin, the pan-European fintech marketplace for savings and investment products, is disclosing that it has raised $114 million in Series D funding. Existing investors Index Ventures, PayPal, Ribbit Capital and Thrive Capital all participated in the round, which brings the total raised to date to $200 million. Tellingly, the fast-growing Berlin fintech says it plans […]

In an open letter to YouTube creators today, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki admitted that even her kids think Rewind 2018 is “cringey.” Meant as a celebratory recap, the video has garnered a record-setting 15 million dislikes so far. “We hear you that it didn’t accurately show the year’s key moments, nor did it reflect the […]

Instacart is facing another class-action lawsuit pertaining to the way it pays its independent contractors, NBC News reports. Instacart guarantees its workers at least $10 per job, but workers are alleging Instacart offsets wages with tips from customers. The suit alleges Instacart “intentionally and maliciously misappropriated gratuities in order to pay plaintiff’s wages even though […]

Nostalgia for the NES is high following the success of Nintendo's classic mini consoles and the launch of its Switch Online service, which just got a couple more great additions to its selection of 8-bit games: Kirby's Adventure and the immortally weird Super Mario Bros 2.

It's that time again — time to hear what kind of state our precious union is in. For those of you inclined to watch the temporarily delayed speech by the President, you can of course watch it in a bar and invent your own drinking game, but you can also stay home and watch it on YouTube or C-SPAN. The drinks are cheaper — and stronger.

Over the years, businesses and their systems are getting more integrated, forming industry-specific trustless networks, and blockchain technology is in the foundation of this evolutionary step.

Tesla has had a brisk merch business for years now, thanks to its fervent owner base and fans, who are enthusiastic supporters of the company and its CEO Elon Musk. But until now, those Tesla-branded items — everything from water bottles and hats to jackets, chargers and once a surfboard — have been sold through […]

Google has shared its cloud revenue exactly once over the last several years. Silence tends to lead to speculation to fill the information vacuum. Luckily there are some analyst firms who try to fill the void, and it looks like Google’s cloud business is actually trending in the right direction, even if they aren’t willing […]

Does your Twitter timeline spark joy? If you’re like most people, probably not. Over the years, you probably politely followed back a few too many Twitter accounts, and now have a timeline filled with all sorts of random tweets from people you can’t even remember following in the first place. A new Twitter tool, Tokimeki Unfollow, […]

A gaggle of new emoji have just been approved by the Unicode Consortium, meaning they'll be standard across any platforms that choose to support them. This batch includes some much-needed representation for people with various disabilities, new animals from guide dogs to otters, food and many more objects.

Angela Ahrendts will depart Apple in April, almost exactly five years after taking on a role as the company’s senior vice president of retail. Apple says Ahrendts is leaving “for new personal and professional pursuits.” Ahrendts joining Apple in 2014 was massive news, with her having just served as the CEO of the luxury fashion […]

Snapchat isn’t growing again, but at least it didn’t hemorrhage any more users in its Q4 earnings report. The company stayed flat at 186 million daily users after falling from 191 million in Q1 to 188 million in Q2 to 186 million in Q3. It exceeded an expected quarterly count of 184.2 million user, though 186 […]

Snap has finally begun publicly testing the engineering overhaul of its slow and buggy Android app that for years has cost Snapchat users. Promising early results and reduction in app startup time could help Snapchat fix its growth problem after daily active users sank in Q2 and Q3 before staying put at 186 million in […]

Visual assessment is critical to healthcare -- whether that is a doctor peering down your throat as you say “ahhh” or an MRI of your brain.

A neutral hearing officer in the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has denied Uber -owned JUMP’s appeal regarding the SFMTA’s decision to not provide JUMP a permit to operate shared electric scooters in the city. “We are pleased the hearing officer validated our permitting process, which above all, prioritized the public interest,” SFMTA Communications Manager […]

Just last month, Google showed off an “Interpreter mode” that would let Google Home devices act as an on-the-fly translator. One person speaks one language, the other person speaks another, and Google Assistant tries to be the middleman between the two. They were only testing it in select locations (hotel front desks, mostly) at the […]

A NASA mission that sent two tiny spacecraft farther out than any like them before appears to have come to an end: Cubesats MarCO-A and B (nicknamed WALL-E and EVE) are no longer communicating from their positions a million and two million miles from Earth respectively.

It may not seem like it takes a lot of smarts to play a game like Pictionary, but in fact it involves a lot of subtle and abstract visual and linguistic skills. This AI built to play a game like it is similarly complex, and its interpretations and creations when you play it (as you can now) may seem eerily human — but it's refreshing to have such an agent working in collaboration rather than trying to beat you.

The P&G acquisition of This is L., a startup retailer of period products and prophylactics, shows just how profitable investing in women’s healthcare brands and products can be. A person with knowledge of the investment put the price tag at roughly $100 million — a healthy outcome for investors and company founder Talia Frankel. But just as […]

Do you have a Flickr account? Does it have over 1,000 photos? Go back them up, or you might lose a bunch of them forever. We’ve known for a few months now that Flickr was prepping to drop its storage limit for non-Pro accounts from 1TB to just 1,000 photos following its acquisition by SmugMug […]

The long and litigious saga of Hippo Technologies may finally be over now that the company is finally launching its service to sell discounted prescription drugs to members just three months after settling a lawsuit with its chief competitor, Blink Health. Hippo and Blink were locked in a lawsuit for much of last year with […]

Reddit is raising $150 million to $300 million to keep the front page of the Internet running, multiple sources tell TechCrunch. The forthcoming Series D round is said to be led by Chinese tech giant Tencent at a $2.7 billion pre-money valuation. Depending on how much follow-on cash Reddit drums up from Silicon Valley investors […]

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. Facebook now lets everyone unsend messages for 10 minutes For up to 10 minutes after sending a Facebook Message, the sender […]

French startup Workwell has released a major update to its platform. The company now provides an app to manage as many things related to your office building as possible from your phone. The company started with a sort of intranet replacement. You could book meeting rooms, get a map of the office and contact your […]

Target is expanding access to its new loyalty program that rewards shoppers for returning to its stores by offering 1 percent back on their next trip, among other perks. The program, called Target Circle, is still in beta testing following its initial launch in March of last year. At the time, the program was called […]

Apple has released a new beta version of iOS 12.2 yesterday. While the final version isn’t available just yet, here’s what you should expect: new Animojis and a fake 5G logo if you’re an AT&T customer. If you have an iPhone X, XS, XS Max or XR, you’ll see new animals in the Animoji collection. […]

The search is on! We’re looking for exceptional early-stage robotics or AI companies to demo their technology onstage at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI on April 18 at UC Berkeley. Our day-long event takes a deep dive into these world-changing technologies, and features interviews, workshops, demos and networking with leading robotics and AI technologists, founders, […]

Talia Goldberg didn’t know what venture capital was, growing up around professionals in the medical field whose favorite dinner-time game was to describe a symptom, then ask those around the table to guess the diagnosis. Goldberg, who half-kiddingly describes herself today as a hypochondriac, says things changed during her college career at the University of […]

Sonos is partnering with Sonance for a new lineup of passive speakers. You can now pre-order in-ceiling, in-wall and outdoor Sonos speakers. These are weird products as you still need to connect those speakers with a Sonos Amp. In other words, you can’t control those speakers from the Sonos app without the Sonos Amp. But […]

Amazon today is one of the biggest retailers of gear for babies and other parenting aides, and today the company is taking another two steps into that business and how it might develop in the future. Amazon today announced that it would be launching a new Baby Skill Activity API, so that baby apps and […]

Smart speakers had a good holiday. Amazon already said its Echo Dot outsold all other items on its site this holiday season, which hinted toward the sizable growth for the voice-powered speaker market. Today, research firm CIRP is reporting the U.S. installed base for speakers grew to 66 million units in December 2018, up from […]

There is “no evidence to date” that any foreign government had a material impact on voting machines or infrastructure during the 2018 midterm elections, according to a new classified report sent to the president. That’s the view from the Justice Department and Homeland Security, which were commissioned to report back following an order from President […]

Facebook has finally made good on its promise to let users unsend chats after TechCrunch discovered Mark Zuckerberg had secretly retracted some of his Facebook Messages from recipients. Today Facebook Messenger globally rolls out “Remove for everyone” to help you pull back typos, poor choices, embarrassing thoughts, or any other message. For up to 10 […]

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has agreed to hear a legal challenge to the use of bulk data collection surveillance powers by UK intelligence agencies. Last September a lower chamber of the ECHR ruled that UK surveillance practices violated human rights law but did not find bulk collection itself […]

Bots are ruining the internet. When they’re not pummeling a website with usernames and passwords from a long list of stolen credentials, they’re scraping the price of hotels or train tickets and odds from betting sites to get the best data. Or, they’re just trying to knock a website offline for hours at a time. […]

Football fans didn’t tune into this year’s Super Bowl coverage on TV in as large numbers as in years past. According to Nielsen, the big game drew an average televised audience of around 98.2 million viewers. CBS, however, said the big game was watched across all platforms – including digital and streaming – by a […]

The startup, backed by Vaultier7 and Kairos, has delivered 1 million meals across the U.S. in the last year.

Signal Sciences, an LA-based firm that helps customer secure their web applications, announced a $35 million Series C investment today. Leading Edge Capital led the round (which seems appropriate, given its name). CRV, Index Ventures, Harrison Metal and OATV also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to around $52 million, according to the company. […]

Single-use plastics are the scourge of the environment, which is why many lawmakers are working to eliminate them. Today, a new brand is launching to try and eliminate single-use plastic in the area of personal care. With $4 million in seed funding led by Lerer Hippeau (with participation from Red Sea Ventures, BoxGroup, SV Angel, […]

A year ago, renowned investor Roger McNamee had much of Silicon Valley baffled. McNamee had made his name as a tech investor in the ’80s and ’90s before cofounding the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, then cofounding the venture capital firm Elevation Partners with singer Bono. A musician himself, McNamee had taken to spending […]

Ritual is backed by Norwest Venture Partners, Forerunner Ventures and Founders Fund.

Nayeem Islam spent nearly 11 years with chipmaker Qualcomm, where he founded its Silicon Valley-based R&D facility, recruited its entire team and oversaw research on all aspects of security, including applying machine learning on mobile devices and in the network to detect threats early. Islam was nothing if not prolific, developing a system for on-device machine […]

BetterCloud began life as a way to provide an operations layer for G Suite. More recently, after a platform overhaul, it began layering on a handful of other SaaS applications. Today, the company announced, it is now possible to add any SaaS application to its operations dashboard and monitor usage across applications via an API. […]

Ike, the autonomous trucking startup founded by veterans of Apple, Google, and Uber Advanced Technologies Group’s self-driving truck program, has raised $52 million in a Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Redpoint Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, Basis Set Ventures, and Neo also participated in the round. Bain Capital Ventures partner Ajay Agarwal has joined […]

Connected car service provider Vinli today announced it closed a $13.5 million Series B financing round. The company says this infusion of capital allows it broaden its mobility services and integrations as it attempts to connect cars around the world. The funding came from new and existing investors and brings the total amount the company […]