Crunch Hype

It was several years ago, at a tech conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., that the venture capitalist Bill Gurley issued one of what would become repeated warnings that startups were staying private too long. Comparing companies that refuse to go public to undergrads whose college careers extend several years past the point that they should, […]

One of Tesla’s big selling points is the company’s ability to wirelessly push software updates to its electric vehicles. It’s what allows these vehicles to improve over time long after they’ve been purchased by customers. This week, one of those improvements was to deliver a few Easter eggs — as promised by CEO Elon Musk […]

WhatsApp is making group calls easier with a change to the way its mobile app works. Before, users would have to start a 1:1 video call, then add participants — there wasn’t an option to begin a group call at once, the company says. Now, the design has been updated so you can start group […]

When it comes to shift workers communicating with each other in the workplace when they are not face-to-face, gone are the days of cork announcement boards. Now, the messaging app is the medium, and today one of the startups tackling that opportunity in a unique way has raised a round of funding to get to […]

M&A activity was brisk in the enterprise market this year, with 10 high-profile deals totaling almost $88 billion. Companies were opening up their wallets and pouring money into mega acquisitions. It’s worth noting that the $88 billion figure doesn’t include Dell paying investors more than $23 billion for VMware tracking stock to take the company […]

Pinterest may follow Lyft and Uber to the public markets in the first half of 2019.

Snapchat is looking to increase user engagement with the app with the launch of a new feature called Lens Challenges. Users can opt to participate in the challenges by creating a snap with a Lens that’s themed to a particular song, dance, holiday, event and more, the company explains. For example, one of the first […]

Renewable energy is the future, but at present no one is tracking just who's got solar panels on their roof, in their back yard, or a shared neighborhood installation. Fortunately, solar panels generally work best when exposed to the light. That makes them easy to spot, and count, from orbit — which is just what the DeepSolar project is doing.

Coinbase acquired Earn.com for at least $120 million back in April. And the company now plans to transform Earn.com into Coinbase Earn, a website with educational content to learn more about cryptocurrencies. Users who complete those classes will earn tokens. Coinbase bought Earn.com partly so that it could appoint Earn.com co-founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan […]

If there was a word that dominated startup and tech news coverage this year, it was SoftBank. The Japanese telecom conglomerate’s Vision Fund pushed out a prodigious amount of capital this year — quite literally billions of dollars — into companies as diverse as a molecular manufacturer (Zymergen) and a robotic pizza delivery business (Zume Pizza). […]

Microsoft today announced a new Office app that’s now available to Windows Insiders and that will soon roll out to all Windows 10 users. The new Office app will replace the existing My Office app (yeah, those names…). While the existing app was mostly about managing Office 365 subscriptions, the new app provides significantly more […]

Say what you will about MoviePass (and there’s plenty to be said), the company doesn’t give up. The theater ticket subscription service’s production wing has dried the ink on a three picture deal with John McClane himself, Bruce Willis. Deadline, which first broke the news, notes that Willis has a long standing relationship with Randall […]

TechCrunch is working on a new project to help you build a better company. We’re looking for the great service providers in the startup world: the lawyers, accountants, recruiters, human resource managers, project managers and other experts you need to help you succeed. We’re putting together detailed lists of experts based on recommendations from our […]

Facebook users might have already moved on to the company’s next notable outrage, but the company is still answering for its privacy missteps from earlier this year. Washington D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine filed a lawsuit against Facebook on Wednesday, alleging that the company has not fulfilled its responsibility to protect user data. Racine’s office […]

Cloud Spanner, Google’s globally distributed relational database service, is getting a bit more distributed today with the launch of a new region and new ways to set up multi-region configurations. The service is also getting a new feature that gives developers deeper insights into their most resource-consuming queries. With this update, Google is adding to […]

Adtech cybersecurity company Devcon announced today that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Over the past couple of years, ad fraud has become a bigger concern in the industry, but Devcon co-founder and CEO Maggie Louie said most existing solutions focus on things like verifying ad quality and confirming that impressions aren’t coming […]

Google just released an advert for Google Assistant and its band of merry products. It’s really good. Basically, the ad is “Home Alone” reimagined, but this time Macaulay Culkin plays an adult Kevin who is home alone with a house full of devices controlled by Google Assistant. Obviously. And for the sake of objectivity, I […]

PetaGene, the Cambridge, U.K.-based genomics data compression startup, has raised $2.1 million in further funding. Leading the round is U.S. venture firm Romulus Capital, with participation from other unnamed investors Silicon Valley and London. It brings total funding to $3.2 million. Previous investor Entrepreneur First, the company builder backed by Greylock Partners, also followed on. […]

Candid, a teeth aligner startup that aims to make straight teeth more accessible and more affordable than Invisalign, is evolving its direct-to-consumer business. In addition to its at-home impression process, Candid recently started enabling people to come into a physical office to get their teeth scans completed. Today, Candid is opening physical storefronts in San […]

A coalition of 22 consumer and public health advocacy groups, led by Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), have today filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking them to investigate and sanction Google for how its Google Play Store markets apps to children. The complaint states that […]

Sprout Social, a social media monitoring, marketing and analytics service with 25,000 business customers that helps these organizations manage their public profiles and interact with customers across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+ (soon to RIP), has raised $40.5 million in funding in order expand its business internationally and add more functionality to its […]

Uber has lost another appeal against a landmark 2016 UK employment tribunal ruling that found a group of drivers to be workers, rather than self-employed, meaning they’re entitled to benefits such as holiday pay and the National Minimum Wage. The court of appeal today upheld previous decisions classifying the drivers as workers. Although the ruling […]

The European Commission has finally given the U.S. a deadline related to the much criticized data transfer mechanism known as the EU-US Privacy Shield . But it’s only asking for the U.S. to nominate a permanent ombudsperson — to handle any EU citizens’ complaints — by February 28, 2019. If a permanent ombudsperson is not […]

Google announced today it’s now using mobile-first indexing for over half the web pages shown in its search results globally – a significant milestone in Google’s move to favor mobile sites over desktop sites in its search results. The plans for the project have been in the works for years. The company had first detailed […]

Dataiku wants to turn buzzwords into an actual service. The company has been focused on data tools for many years, before everybody started talking about big data, data science and machine learning. And the company just raised $101 million in a round led by Iconiq Capital with Alven Capital, Battery Ventures, Dawn Capital and FirstMark […]

The latest revelations about Facebook’s handling of user data — an investigation by the New York Times found that Facebook had been providing special data access to large companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Spotify and others — has landed the social network once more in hot water in Europe, and specifically the United Kingdom. Today, Damian Collins MP, […]

Justin Kosslyn Contributor Justin Kosslyn is the chief product manager at Jigsaw, a unit within Alphabet that uses technology to address global security issues. Amid all the discussion today about online threats, from censorship to surveillance to cyberwar, we often spend more time on the symptoms than on the underlying chronic conditions. If we want […]

Elementary Robotics has raised $3.6 million in seed funding to begin building a manufacturing facility and expand its presence in Los Angeles as the city continues to grow as a hub for robotics and automation. Earlier this year, Embodied announced a $22 million round for its personal robotics platform focused on healthcare and wellness, while InVia Robotics […]

On the back of Disney increasing its shareholding in Oslo-based Kahoot to four percent last week, Kahoot today announced a new initiative that helps to position the popular startup — which already has 60 million games and has seen over 1 billion players engage on its platform over the last year — as the “Netflix for […]

By the time you hear about a research project online or in the news it’s probably already gone through countless iterations and changes. Until Morressier, however, that early stage research was done separately by researchers who barely interacted with each other. Morressier is a service for early stage research. This means it allows researchers to […]

Price f(x), a startup that offers cloud-based pricing software, has raised €25 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is European B2B technology growth investor Digital + Partners, and consulting firm Bain & Company. Prague-based Credo Ventures and London-based Talis Capital, which both backed Price f(x) at Series A, have also participated in this […]

The G-Shock is so nerdy that it’s become cool and this latest model, the GMWB5000GD-9, is no exception. Based on the original G-Shock models, this decidedly unsmart (but not dumb) watch features solar charging, atomic timekeeping, and a simple Bluetooth connection to your phone. Plus now it comes in gold or silver toned metal, a […]

The female-focused co-working space has raised $117 million to date.

Flux, the London fintech that has built a technology platform for banks and merchants to power itemised digital receipts and a lot more, has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by VC firm e.ventures (which has previously backed the likes of Farfetch, Sonos and Groupon), with participation from existing investors […]

Fitness and gaming have been two of the most popular categories of apps for years, and now a startup founded out of London that has combined the two in a unique way has picked up a big round of funding to capitalise on that. Zwift, an interactive platform for people to turn indoor cycling workouts […]

As Facebook colonized the rest of the web with its functionality in hopes of fueling user growth, it built aggressive integrations with partners that are coming under newfound scrutiny through a deeply reported New York Times investigation. Some of what Facebook did was sloppy or unsettling, including forgetting to shut down APIs when it cancelled its […]

Meet PixelMe, a new software-as-a-service startup that wants to help marketers retarget customers using an URL shortener. The company just raised a $1.3 million at a $4 million pre-money valuation — investors now own 22 percent of the company. PixelMe is taking a Buffer approach by sharing many behind-the-scene details of the company’s journey. You […]

SoftBank Corp’s initial public offering today started with a bang before trailing off into a whimper, with the stock falling 14.5 percent during its first day of trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The company is the mobile unit of conglomerate SoftBank Group, whose holdings also include Sprint and the $100 billion Vision Fund. Shares […]

As Facebook continues to grasp the severity of the situation in Myanmar, where the UN has concluded that its social network plays “determining role” in inciting genocide, the U.S. tech giant has completed a third sweep in recent months to remove bad actors from its platform. Facebook said late Tuesday U.S. time that it has […]

Update: Twitter’s response has been added to the end of this post. A new study by Amnesty International and Element AI attempts to put numbers to a problem many women already know about: that Twitter is a cesspool of harassment and abuse. Conducted with the help of 6,500 volunteers, the study, billed by Amnesty International […]

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s vision of an “entirely new system of transport,” which he unveiled Wednesday night at a splashy event in Hawthorne, California, wasn’t a reusable rocket like the ones he’s building at his nearby SpaceX headquarters. Nor is it an electric vehicle, like the Teslas he is producing at a factory in Fremont, California. […]

By any measure Facebook hasn’t had the best of years in 2018. But while toxic problems keep piling up and, well, raining acidly down on the social networking giant — from election interference, to fake accounts, faulty metrics, security flaws, ethics failures, privacy outrages and much more besides — the silver lining of having a core […]

Uber has regained approval to test its self-driving cars on Pennsylvania roads.

Smart security camera maker Lighthouse AI is calling it a day. The news, first reported by The Information, has since been confirmed by CEO Alex Teichman. “I am incredibly proud of the groundbreaking work the Lighthouse team accomplished – delivering useful and accessible intelligence for our homes via advanced AI and 3D sensing,” the executive […]

Tinder has fired its vice president of marketing and communications Rosette Pambakian, as well as other employees who sued Tinder’s parent company Match Group and its controlling shareholder IAC earlier this year. The Verge first broke the news of the firings. A Match Group spokesperson confirmed that a number of Tinder employees have been terminated, […]

A year and a half after giving birth to Oath, Verizon’s officially rebranding its media group as… wait for it… Verizon Media Group. It’s simple, it’s straightforward, it says what it does on the package — and most importantly, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than “Oath.” Division head Guru Gowrappan confirmed that […]

A growing cluster of actors, musicians and viral internet stars have Fortnite in their crosshairs. The smash hit third-person shooter is free to play but generates mountains of revenue through in-game microtransactions. Those purchases lure avid Fortnite players to spend real-life cash on virtual cosmetic items, like special character skins (today: a winter skiing set!) […]

While proponents swore 2018 would be the year AR moved mainstream, by year’s end it seems the biggest trend has been the movement of early startups to financial collapse. Blippar, an early augmented reality app that raised more than $130 million in venture funding from investors like Qualcomm and Candy Ventures, announced today that it […]

Tesla made its ambition for world domination known when it announced its intention to build a factory in China. The move makes sense — but it might be shortsighted.

2018 has been a big year for big games, and with new titles from the Assassin’s Creed, Red Dead Redemption, Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises all competing… it’s enough to make a gamer want to just quit and play something a little more low-key. Here are some of the smaller, independent games we liked […]