Crunch Hype

Atomico, the London-based venture capital firm co-founded by Skype founder Niklas Zennström, has launched a new program to find, mentor and back the next generation of angel investors across various hubs in the European tech startup ecosystem. Dubbed the Atomico Angel Programme, and unveiled on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, the new initiative is headed […]

There’s considerable interest in the way blockchain technology could be used to manage personal data — so-called “self-sovereign ID” — but, to date, there are precious few examples of exactly how it might work. At TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin on the Startup Battlefield stage, Gravity Earth gave insight into how blockchain can be used to help […]

Germany’s competition regulator (Bundeskartellamt) is opening an investigation against Amazon . In particular, the regulator is going to look at the relationship between Amazon and third-party sellers on the platform. “Its double role as the largest retailer and largest marketplace has the potential to hinder other sellers on its platform,” Bundeskartellamt president Andreas Mundt wrote […]

Scooter startup Lime has confirmed it hired Definers but claimed it didn’t know the controversial PR firm would try to smear its rivals. The company was speaking during an on stage interview here at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. Definers was recently revealed to have carried out so-called ‘opposition research’ on entities critical of Facebook . Including […]

Asana, a service that teams and individuals use to plan and track the progress of work projects, is doubling down on its own project: to shape “the future of work,” in the words of co-founder and CEO Dustin Moskovitz. The startup, whose products are used by millions of free and paying users, today is announcing […]

While Brexit’s effects are dominating headlines in the UK and around the globe, the nation’s startup industry should emerge from the chaos relatively unscathed, according to longtime European venture investor Saul Klein . A former partner at Index Ventures (and an employee at Skype back in the day), Klein is on to his next act […]

Jeffrey Martin takes massive panoramic photographs of the world and his photos let you go from from the panoramic to the intimate in a single mouse swipe. Now he’s truly outdone himself with a 900,000 pixel wide photo of Prague’s Old Town that took six months to build. The photo, viewable here, has a total […]

Local governments collect a lot of data, but they aren’t always great at organizing and using it efficiently. Instead of letting useful municipal insights sit around in disparate databases, some not even digital, Berlin-based Polyteia proposes a platform that would allow city leaders to unify and analyze the data that represents the constituents that they […]

Meet Spin Analytics, a startup that wants to leverage artificial intelligence to automatically write credit risk modeling regulation reports. The company is participating in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. If you work for a big bank, you know how painful it can be to launch a new product. Every time you start selling a […]

Data is king. But if there isn’t a way to capture, sort and use it, then there it sits — an untapped resource. V2X Network, a German-based startup presenting onstage Thursday during Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, sees opportunity in all the data produced in the modern car. And it’s a hefty sum. A […]

Startup entrepreneurs have a crucial role to play in building a more agile response to the global refugee crisis and also helping to change the narrative around displaced people, TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin has heard. Speaking during a panel discussing how technology can support refugees to integrate and rebuild their lives, Aline Sara, CEO of NaTakallam […]

Dan Genduso spent nearly a decade working in consulting before landing on the Disrupt Berlin stage to launch his first startup, Apoll01 — a small company with a big idea about how to solve America’s expanding education crisis. First at Accenture and then at Slalom Consulting in San Francisco, Genduso focused on building out customer […]

Databases might be the least sexy thing in tech. Second to that might be encryption. That isn’t stopping Kalepso, a Montreal, Canada-based encrypted database startup that’s trying to fill in the gaps in an already crowded security space. (No pressure, then.) Kalepso says it can do better than other database offerings out there by melding […]

Augmented reality has been a buzzword for years, but for the most part, it has remained a novelty. WiARframe, which is competing in our Startup Battlefield competition today at Disrupt Berlin, believes that we are still very early on in the AR game and that part of what is holding the market back is that […]

Easyship, a Hong Kong-based startup that aims to make international shipping for e-commerce as easy as payments, has closed a $4 million Series A round. The company was founded in 2015 by former Lazada duo Tommaso Tamburnotti and Augustin Ceyrac, and ex-banker Paul Lugagne Delpon. From their time with Lazada, the then-Rocket Internet -owned e-commerce site […]

We’re here at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2018, with the newest batch of Startup Battlefield companies. Each year, TechCrunch chooses a select number of innovative startups to compete in Startup Battlefield — TechCrunch’s premier global startup launch competition. The startups are vying for the famed Disrupt Cup and a $50,000USD equity-free grand prize. The teams have been training […]

Disrupt Berlin Day 1 starts now, and we have quite a show in store for you. We’ll kick the day off with an interview with Roborace’s Lucas di Grassi, and follow it up with conversations with speakers, including Localglobe’s Saul Klein, Lime’s Caen Contee, Taxify’s Markus Villig and Via’s Daniel Ramot. Then we’ll head into […]

Microsoft is readying its HoloLens augmented reality tech for combat. The company just won a $480 million military contract with the U.S. government to bring AR headset tech into the weapon repertoires of American soldiers. The two-year contract may result in follow-on orders of more than 100,000 headsets according to documentation describing the bidding process. […]

Fintech startup Revolut has been teasing Asian market expansions for more than a year, but it sounds like it might finally happen. The company has secured licenses to operate in Singapore and Japan. It now expects to launch its service in Q1 2019. In Singapore, the company was granted a Remittance License by the Monetary […]

Startup Battlefield Africa is right around the corner. This year it’s in Lagos, Nigeria on December 11. As usual, we have a stellar lineup of panels that will include investors and founders discussing issues such as blockchain, raising venture capital on the continent and beyond and much more. And of course companies will compete in […]

Chinese video streaming service iQiyi is raising new cash as it feels the squeeze from surging content costs. The video business, which is owned by China’s online search giant Baidu, said on Wednesday that it will issue $500 million in convertible senior notes. Proceeds from the offering will go towards content and technology investments as […]

Following a flopped IPO in 2012, Facebook desperately brainstormed new ways to earn money. An employee of unknown rank sent an internal email suggesting Facebook charge developers $250,000 per year for access to its platform APIs for making apps that can ask users for access to their data. Employees also discussed offering Tinder extended access […]

Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney "will tell a Silicon Valley tale that [is] too good to be true," in one of two films in the works documenting the Theranos saga.

The Nintendo Switch continues to prove itself as quite the formidable little console. Today, Nintendo shared a press release of victory lap brags from its Thanksgiving weekend sales. The company detailed that $250 million in Nintendo products were purchased over the four-day period with the company’s Nintendo Switch console leading the way. The company also […]

I’ll admit that I’ve warmed up pretty quickly to the Osmo Pocket. The original post from earlier today is pretty skeptical, owing in no small part to the price point. And while I stand by the earlier assessment that $349 is prohibitively expensive for the consumer market the company appears to be going after, I’ve […]

Qualcomm is betting big on on-device artificial intelligence.

In the wake of a report from the WSJ last week that detailed how low demand for Apple’s latest iPhones was prompting the company to cut orders for the devices, particularly the iPhone XR, an Apple VP is detailing that the XR is the company’s best-selling model available right now. The disclosure comes from Apple […]

The Los Angeles game development studio Jam City is setting up a shop in Toronto with the acquisition of Bingo Pop from Uken Games. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. The deal is part of a broader effort to expand the Jam City portfolio of games and geographic footprint. In recent months the company has inked agreements […]

It’s been a year for on-demand services in India. Drivezy today became the latest to refuel after it raised a $20 million Series B. The round was led by existing investor Das Capital, with participation from automotive giant Yamaha, Axan Partners and IT-Farm. The deal takes Drivezy, which was formerly known as JustRide, to $31 million raised to date. In addition, […]

Instagram is a visual service; it’s a feed of photos and videos and memes that users take in, but the company is rethinking how to optimize a visual service for users with visual impairments via a couple of new features. The accessibility-focused update rolling out today offers two options to give visually impaired users alternative […]

Audi is making room in its electric future for more than SUVs or crossovers. After a string of teasers, the German automaker finally unveiled the Audi e-tron GT concept, a four-door all-electric coupe that has some Porsche DNA sprinkled in and that looks a lot like the A7. Audi introduced the concept Wednesday during the […]

AWS has always been the pure cloud vendor, and even though it has given a nod to hybrid, it is now fully embracing it. Today in conjunction with VMware, it announced a pair of options to bring AWS into the data center. Yes, you read it correctly. You can now put AWS into your data […]

Hand-held gimbals have largely been the realm of pro videographers. But DJI is looking to change things up with an ultra-portable take on its popular Osmo line. The Osmo Pocket is a four-inch-tall version of the drone maker’s camera stabilizer that can either be plugged into an iPhone or utilized as a standalone. At $349 […]

Earlier this year, the U.S. government tried to force Facebook to secretly recode its Messenger app to allow the feds to listen into an encrypted, real-time voice call on suspected members associated with the notorious MS-13 gang. It was only when reporters revealed that when Facebook declined, the feds pushed the court to hold the […]

Amazon’s AWS today launched Amazon Forecast, a new pre-built machine learning tool that will make it easier for developers to generate predictions based on time-series data. While predictions are pretty much the most standard use case for machine learning, building them still takes some skill. Amazon, of course, has already built plenty of these models […]

Amazon today announced AWS DeepRacer, a fully autonomous 1/18th scale race car that aims to help developers learn machine learning. Priced at $399 but currently offered for $249, the race car lets developers to get hands-on – literally – with a machine learning technique called reinforcement learning (RL). RL takes a different approach to training […]

AWS announces Amazon Personalize, a new service that helps developers build personalization and recommendation models.

One of the challenges just about every business faces is converting forms to a useful digital format. This has typically involved using human data entry clerks to enter the data into the computer. State of the art involved using OCR to read forms automatically, but AWS CEO Andy Jassy explained that OCR is basically just a […]

AWS today announced Amazon Elastic Inference, a new service that lets customers attach GPU-powered inference acceleration to any Amazon EC2 instance.

You can’t build a good machine learning model without good training data. But building those training sets is hard, often manual work, that involves labeling thousand and thousands of images, for example. With SageMaker, AWS has been working on a service that makes building machine learning models a lot easier. But until today, that labeling […]

AWS is not content to cede any part of any market to any company. When it comes to machine learning chips, names like Nvidia or Google come to mind, but today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced a new dedicated machine learning chip of its own called Inferentia. “Inferentia will be a very […]

Who doesn’t love robotics? And who doesn’t love robotics and AI together for the first time? Take it all in at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on April 18, 2019. Get your tickets today at the Early Bird discount of $249 while they last. Students, we even have deeply discounted $45 […]

Amazon last year dismissed the idea of getting into the blockchain with AWS, but today that’s changed. The company announced a new service called Amazon Quantum Ledger Database or QLDB, which is a fully managed ledger database with a central trusted authority. The service, which is launching into preview today, offers an append-only, immutable journal […]

It was only a year ago that AWS CEO Andy Jassy said that he wasn’t all that interested in blockchain services. Clearly something has changed over the course of the last year because today, the company is launching two new blockchain services: Quantum Ledger Database and Amazon Managed Blockchain. As the name implies, AWS Managed […]

AWS announced a new time series database today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. The new product called DynamoDB On-Demand is a fully managed database designed to track items over time, which can be particularly useful for Internet of Things scenarios. “With time series data each data point consists of a timestamp and one or […]

AWS unveiled a new security product today at AWS re:Invent, the company's annual conference for cloud storage enthusiasts.

The concept of data lakes has been around for a long time, but being able to set up one of these systems, which store vasts amount of raw data in its native formats, was never easy. AWS wants to change this with the launch of AWS Lake Formation. At its core, this new service, which […]

A fintech whale quietly going about its business in Southeast Asia has come out from under the radar after Oriente, a Hong Kong-based business headed by Skype’s first employee, announced that it has raised a whopping $105 million. It may not be well known at this point, but the company has some serious street cred. Oriente […]

Amazon has had storage options for Linux file servers for some time, but it recognizes that a number of companies still use Windows file servers, and they are not content to cede that market to Microsoft. Today the company announced Amazon FSx for Windows File Server to provide a fully compatible Windows option. “You get a […]