Crunch Hype

The popular image of a Chapter 7 bankruptcy might be a large company like Enron failing, or maybe some lazy drifter trying to shirk their financial responsibilities. The reality is anything but those sorts of images. Today in America, the most common reason for bankruptcy is to discharge egregious sums of medical debt [1], which […]

Tyto Care, a telehealth company that enables physicians to conduct on-demand remote exams, announced today that it has added $9 million to its Series C, bringing the round’s total to $33.5 million. The new funding comes from strategic investors Sanford Health, Itochu, and Shenzhen Capital Group. First announced last year, the oversubscribed Series C was […]

Facebook is launching some of its self-styled ‘election security’ initiatives into more markets in the coming months ahead of several major votes in countries around the world. In an interview with Reuters the social networking giant confirmed it’s launching checks on political adverts on its platform in Nigeria, Ukraine and the European Union, reiterating too that […]

While we will continue to see a lot of consolidation among smaller startups in the area of financial technology, or fintech, there are also some much bigger combinations at play to help tap into economies of scale against current and future competition. Today, Fiserv announced that it would acquire First Data — respectively giants in […]

Verizon Wireless is now offering free access to Apple Music. The music streaming service is available on select Verizon Wireless plans starting on January 17, 2019. Previously, Verizon and Apple offered a free 6-month trial to the streaming service. The partnership comes as Apple is clearly looking for partners to help extend the reach of […]

A slew of banks are coming together to back a new roll-up strategy for the Los Angeles-based mobile gaming studio, Jam City and giving the company $145 million in new funding to carry that out. There’s no word on whether the new money is in equity or debt, but what is certain is that JPMorgan Chase […]

Tesla today is launching a new home charging station designed for the modern home. The new Wall Connector is the auto maker’s first home charging solution that can be plugged into a wall outlet rather than being hardwired into the home’s electrical system. This charger can plug directly into a NEMA 14-50 plug — the […]

With one click, any semi-skilled hacker could have silently taken over a Fortnite account, according to a cybersecurity firm who says the bug is now fixed. Researchers at Check Point say the three vulnerabilities chained together could have affected any of its 200 million players. The flaws, if exploited, would have stolen the account access token […]

What do you get when you put one Internet connected device on top of another? A little more control than you otherwise would in the case of Alias the “teachable ‘parasite'” — an IoT project smart speaker topper made by two designers, Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen. The Raspberry Pi-powered, fungus-inspired blob’s mission is to […]

Why is one of the most popular Android apps running a hidden web server in the background? ES File Explorer claims it has over 500 million downloads under its belt since 2014, making it one of the most used apps to date. It’s simplicity makes it what it is: a simple file explorer that lets […]

London-headquartered BeMyEye has made another acquisition, its third in a little over three years. This time the retail execution monitoring service is purchasing Russian crowdsourcing and image recognition provider Streetbee. The acquisition will see BeMyEye launch “Perfect Shelf,” which will use image recognition technology to lower the cost for consumer goods companies wanting to get […]

French startup Doctolib announced back in September that it would open up telemedicine appointments on its platform in 2019. The company is taking advantage of recent legal changes that finally make telemedicine legal in France. Doctolib is a marketplace matching patients with health practitioners — 70,000 practitioners and 1,400 medical institutions use it in France […]

Grab is Southeast Asia’s top ride-hailing firm, thanks in no small part to its acquisition of Uber’s local business last year, but the company also houses an ambitious fintech arm, too. That just added another vertical to its business after Grab announced it is teaming up with China’s ZhongAn to introduce insurance. Grab and ZhongAn International, […]

YouTube announced several policy updates today, including more stringent enforcement of its ban on videos of dangerous challenges and pranks. In a FAQ posted to its support site, YouTube wrote “we’ve updated our external guidelines to make it clear that challenges like the Tide Pod challenge or the Fire challenge, that can cause death and/or […]

Roku is deleting the Infowars channel from its platform, a couple days after adding it as a supported channel. In a tweet, Roku said after the channel became available, “we heard from concerned parties and have determined that the channel should be removed from our platform. Deletion from the channel store and platform has begun and […]

The Large Hadron Collider has produced a great deal of incredible science, most famously the Higgs Boson — but physicists at CERN, the international organization behind the LHC, are already looking forward to the next model. And the proposed Future Circular Collider, at 100 kilometers or 62 miles around, would be quite an upgrade.

The federal government produces one hell of a lot of data, but despite desultory lurches towards usability there's little guarantee that it's available in a way that makes it useful to anyone. That may change for the better with the OPEN Government Data Act, which the President signed into law last night.

CES crowds can be tough — especially toward the end of the week. You’re physically and emotionally drained, and you’re pretty sure you’ve seen everything the consumer electronics world has to offer. And then something comes along to knock your socks off. Square Off was one such product, impressing the crowd at our meetup and […]

The director and star of “Lost in Translation” are working together again, with Bill Murray starring alongside Rashida Jones in “On the Rocks,” a new film directed by Sofia Coppola. The movie will tell the story of a young mother who reconnects with her playboy father in New York City. Production is supposed to begin […]

The only way to get more information from a smartphone screen is to bring the pixels closer to our eyes, with the device somehow mounted on our heads rather than holding it in our hands.

Snap CFO Tim Stone is leaving the company, according to documents Snap filed with the SEC today. “Tim has made a big impact in his short time on our team and we are very grateful for all of his hard work,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in a memo, obtained by TechCrunch, to employees. “I […]

There’s nothing like The Sims to log off from reality for a bit. Getting away from the increasingly ubiquitous world of smart assistants, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely. EA announced this week that the perennial favorite life simulation series is getting its very own smart assistant. Lin-Z is a lot like […]

Box announced today that it has hired Lakshmi Hanspal to be the company’s new chief information security officer (CISO). She boasts 20 years of security experience, including holding executive security roles at SAP Ariba and Bank of America. She also spent time in a senior role at PayPal. In a blog post announcing the hire, […]

There’s no shortage of iPhone cases out there, of course. But for those who absolutely must have Apple’s stamp on their accessories, the company just dropped a couple of official charging cases for its latest round of handsets — the XS, XS Max and XR. The cases, first spotted by MacRumors, maintain a similar design […]

After launching on iOS, Twitter is giving Android users the ability to easily switch between seeing the reverse-chronological “latest tweets” and the algorithmic “top tweets” feeds on their home page. The company announced the rollout at a media event in New York. The “sparkle button” is a way for Twitter to appease long-time power tweeters while […]

Google today announced that it has started the long-expected rollout of its Material Design update for Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Sites, after first testing this update to the G Suite apps with its new design for Google Drive last year. It’s worth noting that there are no new features or other changes here. Everything […]

Outdoorsy is building for the road ahead. The three-year-old company, which connects customers with underused RVs and other trucks big enough to camp in overnight, just raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Greenspring Associates, with participation from earlier backers Aviva Ventures, Altos Ventures, AutoTech Ventures and Tandem Capital. That puts its total funding, […]

Mozilla today announced that it is closing the Firefox Test Pilot program. For the last three years, Test Pilot was Mozilla’s project to trial some of its more experimental Firefox features with a group of users that opted into this program. It was Test Pilot that first trialed features like Containers, which became the Firefox […]

A YC startup called GBatteries has come out of stealth with a bold claim: they can recharge an electric car as quickly as it takes to full up a tank of gas. Created by aerospace engineer Kostya Khomutov, electrical engineers Alex Tkachenko and Nick Sherstyuk, and CCO Tim Sherstyuk, the company is funded by the […]

While the DoD is in the process of reviewing the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract RFPs (assuming the work continues during the government shutdown), Microsoft continues to build up its federal government security bona fides, regardless. Today the company announced it has achieved the highest level of federal government clearance for the Outlook mobile app, […]

The investment in Knock comes amid consistent year-over-year growth in venture capital deals for real estate tech companies.

Roku has just made a bad decision with regard to its growing advertising business by associating its brand with the toxic conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones. As Digiday first reported this morning, Roku has chosen to add the Infowars live show hosted by Jones to the Roku platform as a supported channel, much to the disgust […]

Getaround is getting around the courthouse. One of the car-sharing startup’s early investors, Geoffrey Shmigelsky, is suing the company, alleging fraud and unfair conduct. “Our client supported Getaround and Mr. Zaid from the very start, only to be swindled out of $1.785 million that went straight into the pockets of Mr. Zaid’s family and friends, […]

AWS has been on a mini shopping spree since the first of the year. First it picked off Israeli disaster recovery startup CloudEndure last week. This week, it was TSO Logic, a Vancouver startup that helps companies make the most efficient use of cloud resources. The companies did not share the purchase price. Amazon confirmed […]

Instagram has been earning money from businesses flooding its social network with spam notifications. Instagram hypocritically continues to sell ad space to services that charge clients for fake followers or that automatically follow/unfollow other people to get them to follow the client back. This is despite Instagram reiterating a ban on these businesses in November […]

An unprotected server storing millions of call logs and text messages was left open for months before they were found by a security researcher. If you thought you’d heard this story before, you’re not wrong. Back in November, another telecoms company, Voxox, exposed a database containing millions of text messages — including password resets and two-factor […]

CM Group, the organization behind email-centric services like Campaign Monitor and Emma, today announced that it has acquired marketing automation firm Sailthru and the email personalization service Liveclicker. The group did not disclose the acquisition price but noted that the acquisition would bring in about $60 million in additional revenue and 540 new customers, including […]

When the government seized classified-ads site Backpage, forcing it to shut down in April, it became a lot harder to find and locate potential victims of sex trafficking. While it was symbolically good that the site, whose CEO later pled guilty to charges of sex trafficking, shut down, it created a significant technical challenge for law enforcement and […]

Everyone has to have a podcast, apparently. Even Facebook . The social network this week launched its second-ever original podcast series, and its first one in the U.S. An arm of Facebook’s business operation, the new show “Three and a Half Degrees” will focus on entrepreneurship – specifically the lessons learned, challenges faced, and other […]

Airbnb, which is expected to go public this year, announced today a number of milestones. For starters, Airbnb says it was profitable on an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) basis for the second year in a row in 2018. In Q3 2018, Airbnb said it had its strongest quarter ever, where it […]

The week following CES is probably as good a time as any to launch a Kickstarter campaign for your strange new smartphone. After all, a company like Doogee’s going to have difficulty rising above the din during a CES or MWC, even with an idea as interesting as the rugged, modular S90. The Chinese manufacturer […]

Meal kit company Blue Apron expects to achieve profitability this quarter, the company said ahead of its Q4 2018 and fiscal year 2018 financial results. Blue Apron will release its earnings January 31, but said today that, “based on its current view of the business, Blue Apron plans to reaffirm confidence in achieving profitability” on […]

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. Netflix will raise prices for US subscribers, with its most popular plan going up to $13 per month For the most […]

We’re looking for the best lawyers who are working with startups today, and we’d like your recommendations. Right now, it’s hard to find the sort of attorney who can help you see around corners as a young company, negotiate tricky situations, and connect you to other legal experts when you need to go deep on […]

Madrona Venture Group has long been one of the premier early-stage venture firms in the Pacific Northwest and in recent years, it has done a good job of recruiting former industry executives. In recent years, those included the former Microsoft developer tools chief S. Somasegar, now a managing director, and former Windows and Xbox exec […]

DuckDuckGo has a new, unlikely partner in search: Apple. The privacy-focused search engine that promises to never track its users said Tuesday it’s now using data provided by Apple Maps to power its map-based search results. Although DuckDuckGo had provided limited mapping results for a while using data from open-source service OpenStreetMap, it never scaled its […]

If you haven’t snagged a ticket to the 2nd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party on February 8, listen up and listen good. We just released the third round of our first-come-first-serve tickets, and the first two batches sold like proverbial hotcakes. Buy your ticket while you still can, because you don’t want to miss out on a […]

Amazon is giving its Fire TV Stick an upgrade. The company announced today it will now ship the Fire TV Stick with the new version of the Alexa Voice Remote launched last fall. The remote allows users to control other devices besides their Fire TV, thanks to its support for both Bluetooth and multi-directional infrared. […]

23andMe, co-founded by CEO Anne Wojcicki, has deployed its latest update, featuring interactive ancestry details, cultural insights about food, art, language, and the option to order a physical ancestry book. Starting today, customers will be able to see more granular ancestry results from more than 1,000 regions, as well as 33 population-specific pages about cultural information. […]

To compete in a world of on-demand everything right to your door led by the likes of Amazon and Uber, traditional physical retailers and those working with them have been looking for an edge by providing efficient, tech-fuelled delivery services of their own. Now, a startup that has built a platform to enable last-mile logistics […]