Crunch Hype

Twitter says the number of government demands for data on its users has shot up in the past year. In its latest transparency report out Thursday, the social media giant said it received 10 percent more requests between January and June than on its previous reporting period — the largest percentage increase in three years. […]

As companies shift to CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery), they face a problem around monitoring and fixing problems in builds that have been deployed. How do you deal with an issue after moving onto the next delivery milestone? Harness, the startup launched last year by AppDynamics founder Jyoti Bansal, wants to fix that with a new […]

Ever wonder how much of your personal information is accessible to marketers? Well, there’s a new service called My Number Lookup that makes it easy (and free) for you to check the data that’s publicly available and tied to your mobile phone number. The service was created by Keepsafe, maker of privacy-centric products. While there […]

Amazon will again enable procrastinators to hold off on completing their Christmas shopping until the last minute. The company today announced it will offer free, two-hour delivery up until midnight on Christmas Eve, powered by Prime Now, in select markets. Prime Now is currently available across 30 U.S. cities, Amazon says. In addition, Prime members […]

Sovrn recently raised a $25 million in new funding with the goal of expanding beyond the adtech business through acquisitions. Now it’s announcing the first of those deals: It’s acquiring affiliate marketing company VigLink. Sovrn first launched in 2014 — made up, as CEO Walter Knapp put it, from “bits and pieces of different companies.” […]

Robinhood is undercutting the big banks by forgoing brick-and-mortar branches with its new zero-fee checking and savings account features. With no overdraft or monthly fees, a juicy 3 percent interest rate, and a claim of more US ATMs than the five biggest banks combined, Robinhood is using the scalability of software to pass impressive perks […]

Soon after Google unveiled the top trends in what people searched for in 2018, Baidu published what captivated the Chinese in a parallel online universe, where most of the West’s mainstream tech services including Google and Facebook are inaccessible. Google’s year in search 2018: the World Cup, Fortnite GIFs and Bitcoin China’s top search engine […]

Getaround, the peer-to-peer car-sharing service that first launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in 2011, is expanding a partnership with Uber that gives users access to rideshare-ready vehicles. The program, which launched as a pilot in May 2017 in San Francisco, is now available to Getaround customers in Los Angeles and San Diego. Two more cities, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. will soon […]

Welcome, friends, to the consumer electronics dead zone. It’s that increasingly brief window between the last of the pre-holiday releases and the CES deluge. It’s rarely home to genuinely exciting announcements, but when you’re a company like Samsung, you’ve got to find somewhere on the roadmap to portion out all of those gadgets. Say hello […]

Months after a big round, African fintech startup Jumo has pulled in a fresh $12.5 million to add more fuel for its expansion into Asia Pacific. The new investment comes from London-based investment fund Odey Asset Management, and it is an extension to a $52 million round that closed back in September. The deal takes Jumo, […]

Work-Bench, an early stage enterprise startup venture capital firm based in New York City announced its $47 million Fund II today. It follows their initial $10 million fund. Work-Bench is itself like a venture capital investment startup. A scrappy operation run by just five enterprise industry veterans, it defies convention in a number of ways […]

Minted, known for its selection of printed goods, says it's profitable on an EBITDA basis.

San Francisco banned delivery robots because they obstructed pedestrians, so Postmates built one with eyes, turn signals, and a mandate to yield. Serve is Postmates’ new cooler-meet-autonomous-stroller that it hopes can cut costs and speed up deliveries. The semi-autonomous rover uses cameras and LIDAR to navigate sidewalks, but always has a human pilot remotely monitoring […]

Prisma Labs, the startup behind the style transfer craze of a couple of years ago, has a new AI-powered iOS app for retouching selfies. An Android version of the app — which is called Lensa — is slated as coming in January. It bills Lensa as a “one-button Photoshop”, offering a curated suite of photo-editing features intended […]

Stride Health, the consumer healthcare consulting and optimization service, has inked a new partnership with the U.S. government’s healthcare departments to provide “enhanced direct enrollment” to verify tax credit eligibility and process enrollments on its platform. The service is akin to e-filing taxes, according to Stride founder and chief executive, Noah Lang. “Except in this […]

Chorus.ai, a service that listens to sales calls in real time, and then transcribes and analyses them to give helpful tips to the salesperson, has raised $33 million to double down on the current demand for more AI-based tools in the enterprise. The Series B is being led by Georgian Partners, with participation also from […]

Zymergen, a five-year-old company that manufacturers molecules for a wide array of uses and industries, has closed on $400 million in Series C funding led by one of its earlier investors, the SoftBank Vision Fund. Even in a world where triple-digit million-dollar rounds have become de rigueur, the amount stands out, as does the company, […]

Crypto markets may be down down down, but that isn’t stopping Opera’s crypto features — first released in beta in July — from rolling out to all users of its core mobile browser today as the company bids to capture the ‘decentralized internet’ flag early on. Opera — the world’s fifth most-used browser, according to Statcounter […]

Grab, the Southeast Asia ride-hailing firm that bought out Uber’s local business, has added another investor to its rolling cast of backers after it added $150 million from Yamaha Motor to its ongoing Series H round. That round is targeted at $3 billion, and Yamaha Motor joins an investor group in the round that includes […]

Apple has announced a major expansion that will see it open a new campus in North Austin and open new offices in Seattle, San Diego and Los Angeles as it bids to increase its workforce in the U.S. The firm said it intends also to significantly expand its presence in Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado […]

Finalcad, a mobile platform that enables the construction industry to digitize much of its processes, has closed $40 million in Series C funding. The round was led by publicly listed London venture capital firm Draper Esprit, and Cathay Innovation, with the support of Salesforce Ventures. Existing existing French investors Serena, Aster and CapHorn Invest also […]

Industrial robotics is on track to be worth around $20 billion by 2020, but while it may have something in common with other categories of cutting-edge tech — innovative use of artificial intelligence, pushing the boundaries of autonomous machines that are disrupting pre-existing technology — there is one key area where it differs: each robotics […]

Volvo Trucks released teaser images Wednesday of the electric trucks it plans to bring to California next year as part of a demonstration project, the latest truck manufacturer to publicize its electric plans in the state. The attraction to California is no accident. The state has set aggressive targets to improve air quality and reduce […]

Alibaba has reshuffled the leadership at Lazada, its e-commerce firm in Southeast Asia, after CEO Lucy Peng — an original Alibaba co-founder — stepped down to be replaced by Lazada executive president Pierre Poignant after just nine months in the role. Alibaba owns more than 90 percent of Lazada but it has been involved in the business […]

Last week we did a deep dive on how Pokémon GO’s new (and long overdue) player-versus-player battle system would work. The only thing we didn’t know at the time was when, exactly, it would actually start rolling out. The answer: tonight. Just a few days ago, Niantic started shipping an update to the app that […]

Thibault Schrepel Contributor Share on Twitter Thibault Schrepel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Economic Law at Utrecht University and a reviewer at the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law & Policy. While statements and position papers from most central banks were generally skeptical of cryptocurrencies, the times may be changing. Earlier this […]

TNB Aura, a recent arrival to Southeast Asia’s VC scene, announced today that it has closed a maiden fund at SG$31.1million, or around US$22.65 million, to bring a more private equity-like approach to investing in startups in the region. The fund was launched in 2016 and it is a joint effort between Australia-based venture fund Aura […]

Fintech startup Revolut is now officially a bank. While the startup initially expected to get its European banking license during the first half of 2018, the company has finally come out of the regulatory tunnel with a license in hand. As expected, Revolut applied for a license through the Bank of Lithuania and is leveraging […]

It's been just over a month since Rocket Lab's inaugural (and long-delayed) commercial launch, "It's Business Time," and it's about to take another customer to space: NASA. Tonight's 8PM scheduled launch will take 10 small satellites to orbit as part of NASA's Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) XIX mission.

Stratim, the mobility services company formerly known as Zirx, is suing its co-founder and now-former COO Shmulik Fishman for breach of fiduciary duties, civil conversion, criminal conversion, theft, criminal mischief, deception, unjust enrichment and fraud. The lawsuit’s co-plaintiff is Adesa, a subsidiary of KAR Auction Services, which acquired Stratim earlier this year. Stratim powers fleet management […]

Lucasfilm has released an initial cast list for “The Mandalorian,” the live-action Star Wars series that Jon Favreau is creating for the upcoming streaming service Disney+. Pedro Pascal, who had a brief-but-glorious run on “Game of Thrones” as Oberyn Martell, will star in the title role — Lucasfilm describes his character as “a lone Mandalorian […]

During the first two weeks of Scoot’s operations of shared, electric scooters in San Francisco, more than 200 scooters were either stolen or damaged beyond repair, Scoot CEO Michael Keating wrote in a blog post. As a temporary fix, Scoot attached cable locks to some of its scooters in San Francisco. Now, the company is […]

Founded in 1990 by CEO Bahram Akradi, Minnesota-based Life Time used to be known as a premier health club that operated large gyms mainly in affluent suburbs in Midwestern and Southern states. Its success was memorialized in 2015 when two leading private equity firms, Leonard Green & Partners and TPG Capital, led a $4-billion deal […]

When in July of last year, SoftBank’s Vision Fund led a whopping $200 million round in the Silicon Valley startup Plenty, investors behind a competing indoor farming startup across the country, New York-based Bowery, were left reeling. Just one month earlier, they’d closed on a round that brought Bowery’s total funding to $31 million. As […]

Revolutionary products succeed when they deliver value to their users. The fact that a product creates a behavior shift is not enough. It must create value to overcome the initial skepticism.

Epic Games unveiled plans for a new developer framework for online services. This framework will let other game developers add cross-platform support into their games. The SDK will be free and roll out in multiple parts over 2019. Fortnite has been one of the best examples of cross-platform gameplay. A single player can install Fortnite […]

Consumers are increasingly entrusting online services with all kinds of personal data — but that trust has been repeatedly abused or taken for granted. If a doctor or a lawyer did that, they’d be kicked to the curb, because they have a legally defined duty to protect privileged data. Why don’t Facebook and Google? They […]

Luxury fashion marketplace Farfetch will tap into the sneaker resale economy with its latest transaction.

Oracle filed suit in federal court last week alleging yet again that the decade-long $10 billion Pentagon JEDI contract with its single-vendor award is unfair and illegal. The complaint, which has been sealed at Oracle’s request, is available in the public record with redactions. If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same argument the […]

The VPN industry sucks. Dozens of companies promise you the impossible dream of perfect privacy. But it’s simply a big lie. A company called Confirmed VPN wants to change that by holding VPN companies accountable. WTF is a VPN? VPN companies let you establish an encrypted tunnel between your device and a server in a […]

The Google Play Store is receiving an update today that will allow customers to make charitable donations to nonprofits from their Android device. While it may seem odd to to be rallying for support for charities within the same marketplace where users download apps and games, it’s not uncommon. Apple for years has collected donations […]

Nearly five years after announcing its acquisition of Oculus VR, Facebook is finally ready to put behind it the drama surrounding its founding. Gaming giant ZeniMax Media’s lawsuit against Facebook over the misuse of intellectual property related to the founding of Oculus VR has finally been settled. In a statement, ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman confirmed […]

Bloomberg today updated its earlier reporting on Apple’s plans for a news and magazine subscription service. Earlier this year, the outlet said Apple would relaunch the digital newsstand business Texture, which it acquired this spring, as part of the Apple News app. Now, Bloomberg confirms the launch time frame could be “as soon as this […]

Uber, which is gearing up to go public early next year, is really doubling down on this whole multi-modal transportation provider effort. Earlier this month, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced the launch of Uber Bus, a minibus service in Cairo, Egypt. “I’m excited to be in Cairo to launch Uber Bus, a product that will improve […]

Fintech startup YayPay just raised another $8.4 million for its software-as-a-service solution focused on collecting money from outstanding invoices. The company participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield several years ago. Information Venture Partners led today’s funding round with existing investors Birchmere, QED, Fifth Third Capital, Gaingels and 500 Fintech Fund also participating. YayPay targets large companies […]

Accenture announced today that it’s reached an agreement to acquire Adaptly. The digital advertising company launched in 2010 with self-serve tools for running ads across different social networks. In a blog post about the acquisition, co-founder and CEO Nikhil Sethi wrote that the company’s mission hasn’t changed, but it has expanded to support Google and […]

Tigera, a startup that offers security and compliance solutions for Kubernetes container deployments, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors Madrona, NEA and Wing also participated in this round. Like everybody in the Kubernetes ecosystem, Tigera is exhibiting at KubeCon this week, so I […]

Non-tracking search engine, DuckDuckGo, is now a little easier to find online after the company acquired the premium generic domain name duck.com — thereby shaving a few letters off its usual URL. This means browsing to duck.com now automatically redirects to DuckDuckGo .com. The twist in this tale is that duck.com’s prior owner was Google. […]

Future Family is a startup (and a Disrupt Startup Battlefield alum!) that helps families more easily afford fertility services like IVF and egg freezing. They work with fertility clinics to get the often unpredictable costs set in stone, then cover said costs and convert them into a more approachable monthly payment plan. But covering those […]