Crunch Hype

Last year, a startup called Suppose TV entered the market to help consumers find the best deal on TV services. The site offers an online tool that lets you compare different services – including things like channel selection and pricing. But doing so still took a lot work in terms of entering your criteria, setting your channel […]

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. Uber Rewards is rolling out; here’s how the perks work Uber Rewards calculates how much you’ve spent on Uber and Uber […]

Hard to believe, but we’re only a few months out from the next TC Sessions: Robotics. As we get ready for our third year, take a trip down robotic memory lane with these highlights from last year’s big event. We’ll be returning to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall in April, this time with an added focus […]

We’re nearing 1,000 submissions from startup founders and leaders in Silicon Valley and across the world about the best early-stage tech lawyers to work with. As we’ve sorted through survey responses and begun scheduling interviews with the first qualified nominees, we’ve gotten a bunch of questions. We love questions. First of all, why are we […]

Travel financing startup Uplift is announcing that it has raised $123 million in Series C funding. Uplift has been relatively quiet about its business until now. Its founder and CEO is Brian Barth, who previously sold his travel startup SideStep to Kayak for $200 million. “We’ve been exceedingly low-profile, because it’s a really good idea […]

One of China’s top bike rental apps is entering a new phase. Mobike, which neighborhood services giant Meituan-Dianping gobbled up last April, is changing its name to Meituan Bike as part of an ongoing integration with its parent, according to an internal letter from Meituan senior vice president Wang Huiwen to staff. There’s no timeline for when the […]

Confluent, the commercial company built on top of the open source Apache Kafka project, announced a $125 million Series D round this morning on an enormous $2.5 billion valuation. The round was led by existing investor Sequoia Capital with participation from Index Ventures and Benchmark, who also participated in previous rounds. Today’s investment brings the […]

London-based edtech startup, pi-top, has unboxed a new flagship learn-to-code product, demoing the “go anywhere” Pi-powered computer at the Bett Show education fare in London today. Discussing the product with TechCrunch ahead of launch, co-founder and CEO Jesse Lozano talked up the skills the company hopes students in the target 12-to-17 age range will develop and […]

Intel is showing off a new RealSense camera with a specific focus on enabling hardware-makers to help their products understand where they are in the world. The RealSense Tracking Camera T265 is designed to easily present robotics and AR/VR hardware with inside-out tracking tech. The Tracking camera utilizes SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) tech to […]

Epic Games announced this morning that they’ve acquired Serbia-based 3Lateral, a game studio focused on designing more realistic computer-generated human characters. The team of 60+ will be continuing their work with existing partners and maintaining their presence in Serbia. 3Lateral founder Vladimir Mastilovic will lead Epic Games’ worldwide digital humans efforts, the company says. No details […]

While Netflix is raising prices, Hulu is lowering its own. In a move to better compete with streaming rivals – and pick up new customers who think Netflix just got too expensive – Hulu this morning announced it’s lowering the cost of its streaming service by $2.00 per month. Currently, the service is $7.99 monthly. […]

Some call it madness. Others call it the next logical step in smartphone evolution. Meizu calls it, fitting, the “Zero.” It’s equal parts fascinating and maddening. And while being “totally seamless” with “a truly uninterrupted design” is probably not going to enough in and of itself to get people to purchase the thing, it’s hard […]

Andela, the company that connects Africa’s top software developers with technology companies from the U.S. and around the world, has raised $100 million in a new round of funding. The new financing from Generation Investment Management (the investment fund co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore) puts the valuation of the company at somewhere between […]

Wag founders Jonathan and Joshua Viner are leaving dogs behind for bikes. Wheels, the Viner brothers’ new electric bike-share startup, is announcing $37 million in funding from Tenaya Capital, Bullpen Capital, Naval Ravikant and others. The Viner brothers departed dog-walking startup Wag last year to start a fund focused on consumer startups. The departures came […]

Electric.ai, the NY-based startup that offers chat-based IT support, has announced the close of a $25 million Series B round led by GGV. As part of the deal, partner Jeff Richards will be joining the board. Founder Ryan Denehy launched Electric in 2016. Previously, he’d run two startups which were sold to USA Today Sports […]

DoorDash has hired Ryan Sokol, a former Uber employee credited with leading and scaling its food delivery arm Uber Eats, as its vice president of engineering.

Healthy oceans are on the minds of Marc and Lynne Benioff, and they showed it today with a $1.5 million donation to the Sustainable Oceans Alliance, a new non-profit attempting to promote and incubate conservation-focused startups. The money will considerably expand the organization's upcoming Ocean Solutions accelerator.

Desktop Metal announced this morning that it’s raised $160 million. That Series E brings the Burlington, Massachusetts-based metal 3D printing company up to a whopping $438 million. The startup’s tagline reads says the company “is reinventing the way design and manufacturing teams print with metal” — and now it undoubtedly has the money to do […]

Blippar seems to have avoided a total collapse following its dramatic descent into administration after it failed to pull together an emergency funding deal. One of the AR startup’s main investors, Candy Ventures, has acquired the company’s assets in a patent sale and will be keeping the brand alive underneath the leadership of founder Ambarish […]

Facebook has agreed to plough more resource into combating the use of its advertising platform by scammers, saying it will do more to tackle scam ads that use well-known public figures to try to trick consumers. It plans to launch a dedicated scam ad report button in the UK, slated to go live in around […]

Lumigo, an Israeli startup, announced a healthy $8 million seed round today, as it emerged from stealth to help companies monitor serverless architecture. Investors included Pitango Venture Capital, Grove Ventures and Meron Capital. The company was started by a couple of ex-Checkpoint execs, Erez Berkner and Aviad Mor. They decided to head out on their […]

Adobe today announced that it has acquired Allegorithmic, the French company behind the Substance tools for creating textures that are widely used by AAA game creators, as well as visual effects artists, animators and designers. Over time, Adobe will bring many of Allegorithmic’s technologies to its various Creative Cloud tools, many of which already offer […]

I’m not allowed to tell you exactly how Anchorage keeps rich institutions from being robbed of their cryptocurrency, but the off-the-record demo was damn impressive. Judging by the $17 million Series A this security startup raised last year led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Khosla Ventures, Max Levchin, Elad Gil, Mark McCombe of Blackrock, and […]

Just ahead of this year’s Super Bowl, Google’s live TV streaming service YouTube TV is rolling out nationwide, the company announced this morning. The service has been steadily expanding since its April 2017 debut, and became broadly available a little less than a year ago when it then reached the top 100 U.S. markets, or […]

Tech and political leaders sounded the alarm bell today about the potential for artificial intelligence to exacerbate huge inequalities across the world. The mood music coming out of the World Economic Forum is that AI is seen as having great potential to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues (such as climate change), but […]

Since launch, Brandless has looked to make shopping for everyday items simple by pricing everything at $3. Today, for the first time since the company came on the scene, Brandless will be adding new items that exceed its own $3 limit. The e-commerce brand is adding baby and pet products to its portfolio. Baby products […]

Two years ago this week, AppDynamics was about to IPO. Then Cisco swooped in with a big fat check for $3.7 billion and plans changed quickly. Today, as part of Cisco, the company announced it was expanding its monitoring vision across the business with a number of enhancements to its product suite. AppDynamics CEO David […]

Steemit, an early blockchain startup that’s developing an alternative to Reddit, has a new chief less than two months after laying off most of its staff as part of cost-cutting measures. Celebrated as an early success story in the crypto world, the company shed 70 percent of its employees back in November on account of […]

One in every three dogs gets cancer, according to the National Canine Cancer Foundation. OneHealth, a startup that just raised a $5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Bio fund with participation from Lerer Hippeau and Y Combinator, aims to make it easier for humans to treat canine cancer, which is the number one disease killer […]

LG has put out a gesture-heavy hint ahead of the annual unveiling of new smartphone hardware at the world’s biggest mobile confab, Mobile World Congress, which kicks off in a month’s time. The brief video teaser for its forthcoming MWC press event in Barcelona, which was shared today via LG’s social media channels, shows a […]

Amazon launched an Echo Wall Clock before the end of the last year but, less than a month later, things aren’t running to schedule. The e-commerce giant has paused the sale of the $30 Alexa-powered smart clock after a number of customers reported connectivity issues, according to The Verge. The clock is still listed on Amazon but, […]

China’s Xiaomi has become the latest smartphone maker to tease a folding smartphone, dropping the below video clip of its president and co-founder, Bin Lin, fondling the device on social media today. The twist is the tablet does not have a single center parting but rather two folds that divide it into three panels, with […]

Groww, a startup hoping to make saving and investment opportunities more widely available to young people in India, has closed a $6.2 million Series A to grow its business. Founded in 2017, the Bengaluru-based company was part of Y Combinator in the U.S. last year and it went on to raise a $1.6 million “pre-Series A” […]

The new year is well underway and, before January is out, we polled VCs in Southeast Asia to get their thoughts on what to expect in 2019. The number of VCs in the region has increased massively in recent years, in no small part due to forecasts of growth in the tech space as internet […]

Google has launched its first clean energy project in Asia. The company announced today that it struck a long-term agreement to buy the output of a 10-megawatt solar array in Tainan City, Taiwan, about 100 km south of its data center in the country. Google already has solar and wind projects across North and South […]

Did you blow enough money on Uber to get Diamond status? A lot of users are finding out tonight as Uber rolls out its rider loyalty Rewards program to San Francisco and a slew of other cities. The feature calculates how much you’ve spent on Uber and Uber Eats in the last six months awards […]

Alchemist, which began as an experiment to better promote enterprise entrepreneurs, has morphed into a well-established Silicon Valley accelerator. To prove it, San Francisco-based Alchemist is announcing a fresh $2.5 million investment ahead of its 20th demo day on Wednesday. Juniper Networks, a networking and cybersecurity solutions business, has led the round, with participation from […]

Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, is about to undertake the 10th launch of its New Shepard launch vehicle, with its capsule chock full of experiments. The launch, which was originally scheduled for a month ago but delayed for various reasons, will be take place at 6:50 AM Pacific time.

Tesla owners may soon have a way to see (and record) damage that happens to their vehicles when they’re unattended. Tesla will roll out “Tesla Sentry Mode” for all cars with Enhanced Autopilot, CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet Tuesday. Musk didn’t provide any more information about when this feature might be available and […]

Viacom is bucking the trend of launching new premium subscription-based entertainment offerings with its bid to acquire Pluto TV for $340 million in cash. It’s a way to distribute the company’s once mighty-with-millennial properties like Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, MTV and BET to an audience that doesn’t pay for cable and boost the audience and reach for […]

Launch startup Rocket Lab is following the success of its first couple commercial launches by adding a prestigious (and deep-pocketed) new client: DARPA. The New Zealand-based company will send an experimental satellite called R3D2 into low Earth orbit sometime in late February if all goes well. DARPA is of course the Defense Department’s research wing, […]

Smile! You’re on camera. At least, your license plate is. You might have heard of automatic license plate recognition — known as ALPR (or ANPR in the U.K. for number plates). These cameras are dotted across the U.S., and are controlled mostly by police departments and government agencies to track license plates — and people — […]

Hollywood’s highest-profile lobbying group, the Motion Picture Association of America, has announced the addition of a new member: Netflix. The trade group’s membership includes the major Hollywood studios, including Disney, Paramount, Sony, Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. Netflix is the first internet streaming service to join. To regular moviegoers, the MPAA is probably best-known (to the […]

Video game revenue in 2018 reached a new peak of $43.8 billion, up 18 percent from the previous years, surpassing the projected total global box office for the film industry, according to new data released by the Entertainment Software Association and The NPD Group. Preliminary indicators for global box office revenues published at the end […]

Oracle has allegedly withheld $400 million in wages from racially underrepresented workers (black, Latinx and Asian) as well as women, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs said in a filing today. The OFCCP is the office within the DOL that enforces equal pay and ensures government contractors comply with anti-discrimination regulation. In […]

Former Charles Schwab chief marketing officer Becky Saeger becomes Okta's third female board member.

In case you missed it, space is being democratized -- and quickly. But it’s not just students and hobbyists in their garages toying with model rockets anymore.

Communications satellites are multiplying year by year as more companies vie to create an orbital network that brings high-speed internet to the globe. Ubiquitilink, a new company headed by Nanoracks co-founder Charles Miller, is taking a different tack: reinventing the Earthbound side of the technology stack.

Google, as well as many other companies, has long relied on Wikipedia for its content. Now, Google and Google.org are giving back. Google.org President Jacquelline Fuller today announced a $2 million contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment. An additional $1.1 million donation went to the Wikimedia Foundation, courtesy of a campaign where Google employees decided where […]

As we get ready for TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI on April 18 at UC Berkeley, we can’t help but look back at last year’s robotics event. With more than 1,000 attendees, thought-provoking panels and cutting-edge demos, 2018’s TC Sessions: Robotics was pretty great. We’ve compiled some highlights of some of our favorite moments from last […]