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Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

A look back at the week's top posts, plus recommendations for growth marketers who know how to drive results.

We'll be off on Monday, July 5 in observance of Independence Day. Thanks very much for reading, and I hope you have an excellent weekend.

To truly lower costs and reduce inefficiencies, we have to abandon the existing structure and put the customer first.

Get your spool-of-yarn emojis ready — threads might be coming to Facebook soon. Facebook has been spotted testing a new feature that gives public figures on Facebook the ability to create a new post that’s connected to a previous one on a related subject. This feature ties the posts together more visually so fans can […]

Posting the wrong things at the wrong time is embarrassing, but it can also be a breach of fiduciary duties and may even run afoul of securities laws.

Yesterday, enterprise computing corporation Zebra Technologies announced its plan to acquire Fetch Robotics. The San Jose-based startup has been a mainstay in warehouse and fulfillment robotics for a number of years, offering a modular system designed to automate companies behind the scenes. The full deal is valued at $305 million, with Zebra acquiring the remaining […]

In this case study, we'll show how we used research-driven CRO (conversion rate optimization) techniques to increase lead conversion rate by 79% for China Expat Health, a lead generation company.

Lordstown Motors continues to stumble. The beleaguered electric vehicle startup is now being investigated by the Department of Justice, in addition to an ongoing investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The investigation, first broke by the Wall Street Journal on Friday, is still in its early stages, according to unnamed sources. It is being […]

For a brief moment, earlier this week, it seemed as though Pittsburgh might be the center of the tech universe. Just as Carnegie Mellon alum Duolingo was announcing its IPO. Senators Bob Casey and Pat Toomey were in town, as Vice President Kamala Harris paid a visit to the City of Bridges to talk infrastructure. […]

Therapy is rapidly becoming a standard part of many people’s lives, but 2020 interrupted that trend by nixing in-person sessions and forcing therapists to migrate their entire practice online — and it turns out that’s not so easy. Frame simplifies it with an all-in-one portal for clients and therapists, unifying the listings, tools and management […]

Privacy litigation that’s being brought against Facebook by two not-for-profits in the Netherlands can go ahead, an Amsterdam court has ruled. The case will be heard in October. Since 2019, the Amsterdam-based Data Privacy Foundation (DPS) has been seeking to bring a case against Facebook over its rampant collection of Internet users’ data — arguing […]

More investors are embracing video pitches, and in the age of the Zoom-based pitch meeting, it’s quickly becoming the standard.

In a surprise announcement today, IBM announced that Jim Whitehurst, who came over in the Red Hat deal, would be stepping down as company president just 14 months after taking over in that role. IBM didn’t give a lot of details as to why he was stepping away, but acknowledged his key role in helping […]

To see Didi get taken to task mere days after its U.S. debut puts a bad taste in our mouths.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Danny, Natasha, and Alex were on deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit. But, if you want to hear more about Robinhood, this is not the episode for you. If you want to learn more about the consumer fintech […]

General Motors is investing in domestically sourced lithium. The company said Friday it became the first investor in an Australian company’s project to extract the mineral, a critical component of electric vehicle batteries, from the Salton Sea Geothermal Field near Los Angeles. The automaker will have first rights on lithium produced by Controlled Thermal Resources’ […]

Licious, a Bangalore-based startup that sells fresh meat and seafood online, has raised $192 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint beyond the South Asian market. The new round — a Series F — was led by Singapore’s investment firm Temasek and Multiples Private Equity. The round, which brings […]

Swedish gaming giant Modern Times Group (MTG) has acquired Indian startup PlaySimple for at least $360 million, the two firms said Friday. MTG said it will pay 77% of the acquisition sum to Indian game developer and publisher in cash and the rest in company shares. There’s also another $150 million reward put aside if […]

A great deal has changed since we last covered Nigerian fintech startup TeamApt two years ago. At the time, the company had just closed a $5.5 million Series A round from a single VC — Quantum Capital Partners, a firm owned by Zenith Bank billionaire Jim Ovia. TeamApt has quite the story. CEO Tosin Eniolorunda […]

Neobanks have led the charge as regards venture capital funding for consumer fintech startups. But while they have collectively dominated the fintech space, they don’t operate a monolithic model. There are five distinct models, and the one adopted by Nubank, the $30 billion behemoth, is the credit-led model. Neobanks operating this model start by offering […]

Two billionaires are neck and neck in the final sprint to the Kármán line, but Richard Branson may clinch it with a July 11 flight on a Virgin Galactic spacecraft, narrowly beating out Jeff Bezos’s planned July 20 trip aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard capsule. Whoever wins, the real lesson here is that with […]

Twitter is considering changes to the way it contextualizes misleading tweets that the company doesn’t believe are dangerous enough to be removed from the platform outright. The company announced the test in a tweet Thursday with an image of the new misinformation labels. Within the limited test, those labels will appear with color-coded backgrounds now, […]

Edtech startup Microverse has tapped new venture funding in its quest to help train students across the globe to code through its online school that requires zero upfront cost, instead relying on an income-share agreement that kicks in when students find a job. The startup tells TechCrunch it has closed a $12.5 million Series A […]

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

We are seeing a wave of private companies sweeping across parts of education and training that were previously overseen or funded centrally by governments. This is happening all across the world.

Where does all that revenue come from?

Twitter has a history of sharing feature and design ideas it’s considering at very early stages of development. Earlier this month, for example, it showed off concepts around a potential “unmention” feature that would let users untag themselves from others’ tweets. Today, the company is sharing a few more of its design explorations that would […]

It’s a sweltering day here in New York City, and that means Wall Street is on fire, and so is Robinhood, apparently. The popular stock trading app officially filed its Form S-1 with the SEC a few hours ago to go public, where it will trade under the ticker “HOOD.” Robinhood files to go public […]

People — not applications, networks or endpoints — have become the primary security perimeter in today’s cloud-first, choose-the-handiest-device, collaboration-obsessed world.

India’s central bank has identified Big Tech’s push into financial services as a challenge for banks in the South Asian market, saying the growing presence of these firms have prompted concerns about creation of an uneven playing field. In a report published on Thursday, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said Big Tech offers a wide […]

We spoke to EY’s Franck Sebag, Osborne Clarke Spain partner David Miranda and Dealroom’s Yoram Wijngaarde to better understand the current IPO market as it relates to European public offerings.

A court in Paris has fined Airbnb, the popular marketplace for vacation rentals. According to the court, the tech company has failed to comply with local regulation when it comes to listing your apartment on the platform. Airbnb should pay $9.6 million (€8.08 million) to the city of Paris. This decision has been years in […]

This afternoon Robinhood, the popular investing app for consumers filed to go public. The company intends to list on the NASDAQ under the symbol “HOOD.” That Robinhood released an S-1 filing today is not a surprise. The company privately filed to go public back in March, leaving the startup-watching world waiting for the eventual filing […]

It’s only one week left until we get our bootcamp on at TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising. It’s your chance to learn everything you need to know about fundraising, growth marketing, brand building, pitch deck development and more. And we’ve tapped the brightest minds in startup to share their hard-earned wisdom. It’s not […]

LA-based game studio Singularity 6 has banked more funding as it scales itself up and readies for the launch of its debut title. The startup tells TechCrunch, they’ve raised $30 million in a Series B bout of funding led by FunPlus Ventures with additional participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), LVP, Transcend, Anthos Capital and Mitch […]

Yesterday Apple unleashed a whole bunch of new public betas on the world: iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and watchOS 8. Today the company is back with another big software puzzle piece announced at WWDC in June. Following three weeks of developer beta, the public beta version of macOS 12.0 Monterey is now live for download […]

The United States is a welcoming market full of opportunities. However, relocating presents significant challenges.

Barracuda Networks has purchased Skout Cybersecurity, a New York-based channel-only provider of extended detection and response (XDR) services. The deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, will see the California-based cybersecurity vendor enter the fast-growing XDR market. As a result of the ever-increasing attack surface as businesses shift to the cloud and embrace hybrid working, […]

The creator economy is changing the way that people earn a living, whether you’re an Instagram influencer or a freelance graphic designer. But traditional banks haven’t caught up. Take Alexandra Botez for example. The Stanford graduate earns six figures playing chess on Twitch, where she has 877,000 followers. But when she tried to apply for […]

Given APIs' ubiquity and importance, it’s understandable that all eyes were on the U.S. Supreme Court’s April 5 ruling in Google LLC v. Oracle America Inc., which addressed two core questions.

We’re fresh off of our big Pittsburgh event, and I’ll have more thoughts on that for you next week, once we’ve crawled through all of the interviews, published profiles and all of that fun stuff. t I admit that I’m also partly putting that off because there’s just a ton of investment news to get […]

Google is making it possible to store digital versions of either Covid-19 test results or vaccination cards on users’ Android devices. The company on Wednesday announced it’s updating its Passes API, which will give developers at healthcare organizations, government agencies, and other organizations authorized by public health authorities the ability to create digital versions of […]

Nowports, an automated digital freight forwarder in Latin America, has raised $16 million in Series A funding. Mouro Capital — a venture capital fund focused on fintechs and adjacent businesses that is backed by Banco Santander — led the round for the Monterrey, Mexico-based startup. Foundation Capital also participated in the financing, which included participation […]

A regulation underpinning a digital certification system for individuals in the European Union to verify their COVID-19 status via a common credential has gone into application today — on schedule. From today, almost all EU Member States are now able to issue and verify digital certificates, per the Commission — with only a handful of […]

We first covered Traptic back in 2019, when it appeared as a Battlefield finalist on stage at Disrupt SF. Today, the South Bay robotics startup is announcing some major progress. For starters, it began commercial deployment of its strawberry-picking mobile robot early this month. Traptic tells TechCrunch that Blazer-Wilkinson, a top-five U.S. strawberry producer, began […]

Zebra Technologies this morning announced its intention to purchased Bay Area-based warehouse robotics firm, Fetch. The $290 million deal finds the enterprise corporation snapping up 95% of the company, in addition to the 5% it already owns. The deal comes as interesting in warehouse and fulfillment robotics is continuing to heat up, both in the […]

For edtech startups, it’s always been easier to go direct-to-consumer than it is to sell into school districts. The latter has stodgy and strict sales cycles, while the former has a bit more flexibility when it comes to opening up that wallet. The pandemic added validation to this dynamic by supercharging consumer companies like Quizlet and […]

Autonomous driving system developer Ghost Locomotion has raised a $100 million Series D funding round, led by Sutter Hill Ventures. Returning investor Founders Fund also participated in the round, along with Coatue. The money will be used toward R&D as the company continues to develop its highway self-driving and crash prevention technology. Ghost has been […]