Crunch Hype

The personal details belonging to more than 202 million job seekers in China, including information like phone numbers, email addresses, driver licenses and salary expectations, were freely available to anyone who knew where to look for as long as three years due to an insecure database. That’s according to findings published by security researcher Bob Diachenko […]

The world’s highest-valued artificial intelligence startup SenseTime has set foot in Japan. The Beijing-based firm announced on Friday that it just opened a self-driving facility in Joso, a historic city 50 kilometers away from Tokyo where it plans to conduct R&D and road test driverless vehicles. The initiative follows its agreement with Japanese auto giant Honda in […]

Improbable is taking a daring step after announcing earlier today that Unity had revoked its license to operate on the popular game development engine. The UK-based cloud gaming startup has inked a late-night press release with Unity rival Epic Games, which operates the Unreal Engine and is the creator of Fortnite, establishing a $25 million […]

That’s not the kind of headline one expects to write going into the week. But here we are. Universal Space’s analog Pong table is a mindblower in a whole unexpected way. The tabletop machine goes more retro than retro by bring pong into the real world through the magic of magnets (some day, perhaps, we’ll […]

Samsung’s look but don’t touch policy left many wondering precisely how committed the company is to its new robots. On the other hand, the company was more than happy to let me take the GEMS (Gait Enhancing and Motivation System) spin. The line includes a trio of wearable exoskeletons, the A (ankle), H (hip) and […]

A pair of highly-funded gaming unicorns are publicly skirmishing and the deal could have major repercussions for game developers. Today, UK-based cloud gaming startup Improbable, announced that Unity, a hugely popular game development engine, had terminated their license, effectively shutting them out from one of their top customer sources. If permanent, the license termination would […]

Amazon -owned smart doorbell maker Ring is facing claims that might give some smart home enthusiasts pause. Recent reports from The Intercept and The Information have accused the company of mishandling videos collected by its line of smart home devices, failing to inform users that their videos would be reviewed by humans and failing to […]

Having established itself as a top streaming service with now over 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily, and broker […]

A funny thing happened at Samsung’s CES press conference. After the PC news, 8K TVs and Bixby-sporting washing machines, the company announced “one more thing,” handing over a few brief moments to announce a robotics division, three new consumer and retail robots and a wearable exoskeleton. It was a pretty massive reveal in an extremely […]

Postmates has landed a $100M investment to compete with SoftBank-backed competitor DooDash ahead of an IPO expected later this year.

Californians have a lot to enjoy — great weather, big waves, solid microbreweries, and of course extremely high taxes on prepaid mobile service. But this controversial last feature is being adjusted after a judge found at least part of the state's Mobile Telephony Surcharge to be unconstitutional. As a result, bills could shrink by a couple bucks starting this month.

Researchers at Michigan State University are exploring the idea that there’s more to “social media addiction” than casual joking about being too online might suggest. Their paper, titled “Excessive social media users demonstrate impaired decision making in the Iowa Gambling Task” (Meshi, Elizarova, Bender and Verdejo-Garcia) and published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, indicates that people […]

Sites like Amazon and eBay have made it very compelling for consumers to buy online rather than in stores, in part because prices are very competitive and in many cases cheaper than what buyers might find in traditional retailers. But in the U.K., it turns out that some of those low prices are in part […]

Bungie, creator of the popular Halo and Destiny franchises, is splitting from publisher Activision and will go its own way, the company announced today. It's almost certainly good news for gamers and the company itself, but it also won't fix the problems that plagued Destiny and its sequel since their launches.

In the first days of 2017, Osterhout Design Group arrived at CES with a two-story booth and huge promises. The startup’s founder, Ralph Osterhout, wanted to take the small San Francisco-based company even further past its military contractor roots in AR, building out major enterprise and consumer businesses with flashy new product lines. The company […]

A new lawsuit may require Andy Rubin to return his $90 million payout.

PeakSpan Capital, a four-year-old, Burlingame, Calif.-based venture firm, has closed its second fund with $265 million in capital commitments, according to a new SEC filing that shows that 68 investors were involved in the fundraise. That’s a meaningful jump in size from the firm’s $150 million debut fund, which it closed in 2016. PeakSpan was […]

Ford is shutting down Chariot, the shuttle startup that it purchased just two years ago that was supposed to be a part of the automaker’s fresh effort to move beyond the traditional business of buying and selling cars. Chariot will end service on commuter routes in the U.K. on January 25, according to a company […]

By now it’s clear that seed is the new Series A. Seed rounds have tripled in size and companies have been around for 2.4 years before they raise a seed round. A new stage has emerged to fill the gap.

Electric vehicle competition is heating up and it’s pushing some of the first entrants to add range and other features in hopes of keeping up with automakers that are just bringing EVs to the market. Nissan has been in this EV game for nearly nine years now. The company has sold more than 380,000 Leaf […]

Amazon’s IMDb movie website today announced the launch of a free streaming service, called Freedive. The service offers viewers in the U.S. access to an ad-supported collection of TV shows like Fringe, Heroes, The Bachelor and Without a Trace, as well as Hollywood movies like Awakenings, Foxcatcher, Memento, Monster, Run Lola Run, The Illusionist, The Last Samurai, […]

Earlier this week, when Razer announced that it would integrate Amazon’s Alexa into its gaming platform, I wondered if this was a strong signal of how Amazon may be starting to lay the groundwork for its own strategy to do more in gaming. By coincidence, today The Information reports just that: Amazon is now developing […]

Venture firms can come and go, as anyone who lived through the boom and bust of the late ’90s internet bubble can attest. Some firms have staying power, however, and among these is Mayfield, founded 50 years ago, just ahead of Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital (both founded 47 years ago) and Menlo Ventures and […]

You will never know as much as your lawyers do about the legal services they provide to you. It is a classic asymmetry of information, where the party that knows less gets the worse deal. In this case, that is you, the startup founder. As an attorney and a co-founder of a venture-backed startup that […]

GM is sprucing up its smartphone app for owners of the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt through a collaboration with charging network companies EVgo, ChargePoint and Greenlots. The idea is to take aggregate dynamic data from each of the EV charging networks so owners can have a “more seamless charging experience.” In short: GM wants to make […]

After days of demos and announcements and miles of walking, I’m confident in declaring Holoride the best thing at this year’s CES. The designation of “The best thing at CES 2019” is my badging. This isn’t an official award handed out by a governing body. This is just me saying Holoride is the best thing […]

Illegal child exploitation imagery is easy to find on Microsoft’s Bing search engine. But even more alarming is that Bing will suggest related keywords and images that provide pedophiles with more child pornography. Following an anonymous tip, TechCrunch commissioned a report from online safety startup AntiToxin to investigate. The results were alarming. [WARNING: Do not search for […]

Thousands of people gathered Wednesday night in a southern Chinese city to hear Zhang Xiaolong, Tencent’s low-key executive who built WeChat eight years ago. It’s no longer adequate to call the app a messenger, for it now enables myriad functions that infiltrate Chinese people’s private and public lives. It wasn’t just the tech circles tuning […]

Silicon Valley loves a party, and we’re ready to help you get your swerve on. We’ve just released a fresh batch of tickets to the 2nd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party. Our fabulous midwinter fete takes place on Friday, February 8 at Galvanize in San Francisco. Here’s a hot tip: buy your ticket now, because they won’t sit […]

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. How Trump’s government shutdown is harming cyber and national security The government has been shut down for nearly three weeks, and […]

Lyft is gearing up to roll out its next generation of shared scooters in partnership with Segway Ninebot. This comes on the heels of Segway-Ninebot’s announcement of its newest scooter, the Model Max. The Model Max was designed with the realization that wear and tear is a major issue for shared electric scooter services. It’s supposed […]

The Amazon boogie-man has every retailer scrambling for ways to fight back. But the cost and effort to install cameras all over the ceiling or into every shelf could block stores from entering the autonomous shopping era. Caper wants to make eliminating checkout lines as easy as replacing their shopping carts while offering a more familiar […]

CES has never been much of a mobile show for Samsung — not with Mobile World Congress a little over a month away. But the company did use its big platform this week to announce the announcement of its next flagship smartphone. Turns out the Samsung’s not unveiling the Galaxy S10 in Barcelona, either. In […]

If you follow millennials on Twitter (and god help you), then you know that Anne Helen Petersen’s piece this past weekend “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” struck a deep chord for many. It’s longform and detailed, but Petersen’s primary thesis is that my generation has been dumped into one of the worst moments for […]

Mastermind Jordan Peele is a very busy man these days, working on new projects including the movie Us, an upcoming Twilight Zone reboot, a Netflix stop-motion animated movie called Wendell and Wild, as well as two Amazon shows. But the Academy Award winner is also making time for YouTube. The first trailer for Weird City, […]

The London fintech industry is pretty close-knit, full of strong personalities, and at times fiercely competitive. Within this context it is quite common for employees — and sometimes even founders — to swap sides. The latest such move sees André Mohamed, previously CTO and a co-founder of Freetrade, join rival Revolut as its new Head […]

If you thought the on-demand laundry space had run out of startup steam here’s a bit of a conditioner: Spanish startup, Mr Jeff, has bagged a $12M Series A, led by All Iron Ventures. The 2016-founded firm currently offers home laundry and dry cleaning services, including on-demand and monthly subscription options, in seven countries, with […]

Ola, India’s local rival to Uber, has seen its valuation jump to nearly $6 billion as it prepares to take in a large round of financing. The ride-hailing firm, which was founded in 2010, has raised around $3.3 billion from investors to date, and it topped that up a little this week. Ola pulled in […]

OneLogin is not a young startup by any means. The identity access management company was founded in 2009 and has watched while companies like Ping Identity, Duo Security and Okta had tidy exits. But as CEOs are fond of pointing out, the total addressable market is large and where investors see a chance, they take […]

Should you let AI help you pick your roommates? Barcelona-based urban room rental startup Badi thinks so, and it’s just closed a $30M Series B funding round less than a year after a $10M Series A — suggesting algorithm-aided matchmaking is resonating with its target Millennial(ish) ‘Generation Rent’ demographic, as they hunt for their next flatmate. […]

The funding streak for educational startups in Asia continues into 2019 after Emeritus, a U.S-Indian company that partners with universities to offer digital courses, landed a $40 million Series C round led by Sequoia India. The deal includes participation from existing investor Bertelsmann India Investments, and it takes Emeritus — founded in 2010 as offline management program company Eruditus — to […]

Google will be cheered by the view of an influential advisor to Europe’s top court vis-a-vis the territorial scope of the so-called ‘Right to be Forgotten’. Since a 2014 Court of Justice decision, search engines operating in Europe have been required to accept and review requests from private citizens to delist outdated or irrelevant search […]

Released in 2014, the year before Snapchat put face filters on the road to ubiquity, Perfect Corp’s YouCam Makeup app gave many smartphone users their first taste of augmented selfies. At the beginning, it let users experiment with different makeup looks and portrait-editing tools. Since then, YouCam Makeup has expanded beyond selfies into e-commerce and […]

TransferWise, the London-headquartered international money transfer company, is applying for a new licence in Brussels, in a bid to navigate a possible “no deal” Brexit as the U.K. prepares to leave membership of the European Union on March 29 this year. One of the definite plusses of EU membership, and something that has undoubtedly benefited […]

Bitmain, the Chinese crypto miner maker, looks like it has reached an interesting point in its pathway to going public. There’s been little heard since the company filed to go public in Hong Kong in September, but now it appears that a new CEO has been hired and its two founders are leaving. That’s according […]

Fintech startup N26 is raising a Series D round of $300 million. Following this new funding round, the company is now valued at $2.7 billion. Insight Venture Partners is leading the round with Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and a few existing investors also participating. N26 is building a retail bank from scratch. The company […]

Hulu is preparing to update its streaming app in order to make its simpler to navigate to and discover content you want to watch. Some of the changes coming in the weeks ahead are smaller, but worthwhile tweaks – like adding buttons or re-arranging where menus sit. But the more notable change is that Hulu […]

Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company developing technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and process it for use in enhanced oil recovery or in the creation of new synthetic fuels, has locked in financing from two big industry backers — Chevron and Occidental Petroleum — to bring its products to market. The undisclosed amount […]

Chamberlain Group, which owns several security and access brands including the myQ smart garage hub, has added two new companies to its portfolio: connected door lock maker Lockitron and wi-fi home security camera startup Tend. In a press statement, Chamberlain Group CEO JoAnna Sohovich said Tend and Lockitron’s produts will be integrated into myQ. “We […]

Whenever some new “cosmic puzzle” crops up, you always have to be ready for the other shoe to drop. But just because something isn’t an alien message or Ringworld doesn’t mean it can’t be interesting science. Today’s shoe drop concerns “fast radio bursts” coming from a distant galaxy — but don’t expect a secret message […]