Crunch Hype

Meet Upflow a French startup that wants to help you deal with your outstanding invoices — the company first started at eFounders. If you’re running a small business, chances are you’re either wasting a ton of time or a ton of money on accounts receivable. Most companies currently manage invoices using Excel spreadsheets, outdated banking […]

Half of my family (and half of the Internet, it seems) all has eyes and phones locked on the same Black Friday sales page right now — and, likely to the disappointment of the big retailers, it’s not any of theirs. In the latest in a streak of wild Black Friday stunts, Cards Against Humanity […]

A new report from the U.S. government on the impacts of climate change on society indicates that unless action is taken, climatological events could cost the country nearly half a trillion dollars annually by 2090. The National Climate Assessment is a Congressionally mandated report on the impacts of climate change and was culled from the work […]

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. (This one’s a little shorter than usual — it’s a holiday weekend in the United States.) If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Black Friday predicted to hit […]

An unprecedented international grand committee comprising 22 representatives from seven parliaments will meet in London next week to put questions to Facebook about the online fake news crisis and the social network’s own string of data misuse scandals. But Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg won’t be providing any answers. The company has repeatedly refused requests for […]

Meet BlueCargo, a logistics startup focused on seaport terminals. The company was part of Y Combinator’s latest batch and recently raised a $3 million funding round from 1984 Ventures, Green Bay Ventures, Sound Ventures, Kima Ventures and others. If you picture a terminal, chances are you see huge piles of containers. But current sorting methods […]

Amazon warehouse workers in several countries in Europe are protesting over what they claim are inhuman working conditions which treat people like robots. It’s the latest in a series of worker actions this year. They’ve timed the latest protest for Black Friday, one of the busiest annual shopping days online as retailers slash prices and heavily […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. It’s the day after Thanksgiving, so if you are reading this in America I hope there is a pet leaned up against your legs and that you are sitting next to a fire while staring down one more […]

After a record-breaking Thanksgiving with $3.7 billion in digital sales across desktop and mobile devices, it looks like Black Friday will also pull in a bumper year for e-commerce. Adobe — which tracks trillions of transactions across a range of retail sites — says that as of 5pm Pacific time, $4.1 billion was already spent […]

A major player in the race to transport Chinese people around is losing steam. Meituan Dianping, the Tencent-backed all-encompassing platform for local services, continues to put the brakes on bike-sharing and ride-hailing, the company said on its earnings call on Thursday. The eight-year-old firm is best known for competing with Alibaba-owned Ele.me in food deliveries […]

I barely slept, the second night in Chunking Mansions. The loud neighbors, the hot Hong Kong air, the landlord banging on the door after midnight. None of these things are particularly conducive to a peaceful rest, and for once in my life I actually looked forward to attempts at shut eye on the 15+ hour […]

We love a great deal almost as much as we love early-stage startups. So, we decided to combine both into an awesome Black Friday mashup for Disrupt Berlin 2018. Europe’s premier tech startup conference takes place next week on 29-30 November, and this is your chance to save some serious euros. For the next 24 […]

It took all of 14 minutes for the Soundbrenner Core to hit full funding. Not too shabby. Last week, the wearable maker closed out its campaign with more than 10x its $50,000 goal. A few days later, we sat down with the startup at the headquarters of Hong Kong-based accelerator, Brinc. Soundbrenner has already made […]

Thanksgiving, a day when brick-and-mortar stores tend to be closed, has become a big one for online spending, and this year did not disappoint, with a surge of consumers rushing to digital platforms to grab sale items while physical stores were closed. This year, US consumers spent a record $3.7 billion on Thanksgiving, according to […]

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re: Pretty good at tech stuff Spending time with your family for Thanksgiving Bored because you’re reading this article right now You may not celebrate Thanksgiving where you live, but most of our readers are American. So let’s use this opportunity to review the tech setup of your family. […]

Berlin-based Zizoo — a startup which self describes as booking.com for boats — has nabbed a €6.5 million (~$7.4M) Series A to help more millennials find holiday yachts to mess about taking selfies in. Zizoo says its Series A — which was led by Revo Capital, with participation from new investors including Coparion, Check24 Ventures and PUSH […]

Ah, wonderful to see you again, sir. The usual? Kool-Aid Grain Alcohol Martini with a twisty straw. Of course. And I see you’re wearing a new watch. The MQT Essential Mirror. Quite striking. I see the watch has a quartz ETA movement – an acceptable movement by any standard – and a very elegant face […]

Google has announced its plan for combating election interference in the European Union, ahead of elections next May when up to 350 million voters across the region will vote to elect 705 Members of the European Parliament. In a blog post laying out a narrow approach to democracy-denting disinformation, Google says it will introduce a […]

Give the gift of organization this year. Bags are often ignored but are a critical part of anyone’s mobile gear. They’re the outward representations of our techie styles, and we put far too little thought into where we keep our most prized possessions. Here’s a collection of bags TechCrunch reviewed over the last year. You’ll find waxed canvas […]

Amazon has reversed a decision it made six months ago to shut off its US ecommerce site to Australian shoppers. Reuters reports that the U-turn comes after a customer backlash. Since July shoppers in Australia trying to browse stuff to buy on Amazon.com have been redirected to the local site, Amazon.com.au. Shipping to Australia from Amazon.com was also […]

One of the most immediate — and already live — applications for robotics and artificial intelligence in general has been in using unmanned robots in warehouses and other environments, where they replace humans in repetitive jobs such as sorting and moving objects from A to B. Now, Beijing-based robotics startup Geek Plus (aka Geek+) says […]

Wluper, the London-based tech startup building a conversational AI to power domain specific voice assistants, has raised $1.3 million in seed funding. Leading the round is “deep tech” VC IQ Capital, with participation from Seedcamp, Aster, and Magic Pony co-founder Dr Zehan Wang. Founded in 2016 and originally backed by Jaguar Land Rover’s InMotion Ventures, […]

French crowd-lending platform October (formerly known as Lendix), wants to educate more people about new ways to borrow money. That’s why the company is launching a project called Grandir Ensemble (grow together). 11 big companies are borrowing €100,000 each on October at a 2.5 percent interest rate. October users will be able to lend as […]

Heiliger Strohsack! Holy smokes — Disrupt Berlin 2018 kicks off in exactly one week! We’re beyond excited to welcome thousands of startup movers, shakers and makers to Europe’s premier tech startup conference. We’ve packed a ton of top-notch programming into 29-30 November, and we can’t wait for you to arrive in Berlin and get the […]

This Saturday, several issues related to LGBTQ equality, including marriage, are up for referendum in Taiwan’s mid-term elections. A little more than a year after the country’s top court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, the LGBTQ community is once again fighting for their rights due to efforts by anti-gay groups. The battle has reached […]

Movinga, the European house removals and relocation platform, has closed €15 million in further funding. The round was led by London-based growth investor ETF Partners, with participation from existing backers Santo Venture Capital, Earlybird, and Rocket Internet. The company says the new capital will support “further process automation”, the launch of new services, and international […]

Instarem, a Singapore-based startup that helps banks transfer money overseas cheaply, has raised a Series C round of over $20 million for global expansion. The round is led by MDI Ventures — the VC arm of Indonesian telecom operator Telkom — and Beacon — the fund belonging to Thai bank Kasikorn — as well as […]

China’s payments giants have taken their battle to Hong Kong. Less than a week after Ant Financial announced adding QR codes to the city’s MTR public transport network of rail, Tencent’s WeChat Pay unveiled a similar scheme on Wednesday. Starting mid-2021, commuters in Hong Kong can scan a barcode to enter the subway turnstile through […]

There’s hardly enough room to turn around in Livin Farms’ office. Pretty standard, really, in Central, Hong Kong, where space is at a perpetual premium. It’s a small operation for the HAX-backed startup — there’s space for a few desks and not much more. The startup’s last product, the Hive, stands next to the door. […]

Since planes were invented, they've flown using moving parts to push air around. Sure, there are gliders and dirigibles, which float more than fly, but powered flight is all about propellers (that's why they call them that). Today that changes, with the first-ever 'solid state' aircraft, flying with no moving parts at all by generating "ionic wind."

Don't panic! Life imitates art, to be sure, but hopefully the researchers in charge of the Cognitive Architecture for Space Exploration, or CASE, have taken the right lessons from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and their AI won't kill us all and/or expose us to alien artifacts so we enter a state of cosmic nirvana.

A win for privacy on LinkedIn could be a big loss for businesses, recruiters and anyone else expecting to be able to export the email addresses of their connections. LinkedIn just quietly introduced a new privacy setting that defaults to blocking other users from exporting your email address. That could prevent some spam, and protect […]

One day after experiencing a massive outage across its ad network, Facebook, one of the most important online advertising platforms, is still seeing “intermittent” issues for its ad products at one of the most critical times of the year for advertisers. According to a spokesperson for the company, while most systems are restored there are […]

Apple’s HomePod is a distant third behind Amazon and Google when it comes to market share for smart speakers that double up as home hubs, with less than 5 percent share of the market for these devices in the U.S., according to one recent survey. And its flagship personal assistant, Siri, has also been determined […]

We need to create industry and regulatory environment in which autonomous vehicle companies compete based upon the quality of their technology -- not just upon their ability to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to collect and silo as much data as possible.

The latest data from Inrix paints a dismal picture for folks traveling Wednesday (that’s today!) ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. Drivers in Boston, New York City and San Francisco will see the largest delays with drive times nearly quadruple the norm, according to AAA and Inrix, which aggregates and analyzes traffic data collected from vehicles and highway […]

Facebook has recruited Kate Patchen, a veteran of the U.S. Department of Justice who led its antitrust office in Silicon Valley, to be a director and associate general counsel of litigation. Patchen takes up her post amid ongoing scandals and reputation crises for her new employer, joining Facebook this month, according to her LinkedIn profile. The […]

Apple probably didn’t intend to let competitors take advantage of Siri Shortcuts this way, but you can now launch Google Assistant on your iPhone by saying “Hey Siri, OK Google .” But don’t expect a flawless experience — it takes multiple steps. After updating the Google Assistant app on iOS, you need to open the […]

Drone.io, makers of the open-source Drone continuous integration/continuous delivery tool (CI/CD), announced Drone Cloud today, a new CI/CD cloud service that it’s making available for free to open-source projects. The company is teaming with Packet, which is offering to run the service for free on its servers. Drone.io co-founder Brad Rydzewski says his company is […]

Facebook has said it will appeal a £500,000 penalty issued by the U.K.’s data watchdog this summer following a lengthy investigation into the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal. Facebook told the regulator an estimated one million U.K. users were among the 87 million of its users whose private data was harvested by Dr. Aleksandr Kogan and his company […]

Affetto is a robot that can smile at you while it pierces your soul with its endless, dead state. Created by researchers at Osaka University, this crazy baby-head robot can mimic human emotions by scrunching up its nose, smiling and even closing its eyes and frowning. Put it all together and you get a nightmare […]

Amazon’s renowned secrecy encompasses its response to a new security issue, withholding info that could help victims protect themselves. Amazon emailed users Tuesday, warning them that it exposed an unknown number of customer email addresses after a “technical error” on its website. When reached for comment, an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch that the issue exposed […]

Machine learning is everywhere now, including recruiting. Take CV Compiler, a new product by Andrew Stetsenko and Alexandra Dosii. This web app uses machine learning to analyze and repair your technical resume, allowing you to shine to recruiters at Google, Yahoo and Facebook. The founders are marketing and HR experts who have a combined 15 […]

Quantum Machines, an Israeli startup launched by three Ph.D. physicists, wants to build the operational and control layer for quantum computing. Today, it announced a $5.5 million seed investment led by TLV Partners with participation from Battery Ventures. The three principals have been studying quantum computing for a decade and they understand that to commercialize […]

Facebook failed to prevent its platform being used to auction a 16-year-old girl off for marriage in South Sudan. Child early and forced marriage (CEFM) is the most commonly reported form of gender-based violence in South Sudan, according to a recent Plan International report on the myriad risks for adolescent girls living in the war-torn region. Now […]

Google is expanding its efforts to support media to Asia-Pacific after the search giant brought its Google News Initiative to the region. Known as GNI, the program is designed to “help quality journalism thrive in the digital age” by providing grants (i.e. cash without equity) to media organizations that are judged to have potential. The initiative […]

Since its entry into China in 2016, WeWork has extended from four to around 60 locations across the country’s megacities like Shanghai, Beijing and, most recently, Shenzhen. That’s one-sixth of WeWork’s 360 locations worldwide. It’s also equivalent to what WeWork has achieved in its early five to six years globally, Sern Hong Yu, regional head of project […]

TechCrunch will soon be returning to Africa to hold its Startup Battlefield competition dedicated to the African continent, in Lagos, Nigeria, on December 11th. The event will showcase the launch of 15 of the hottest startups in Africa on stage for the first time. We’ll also be joined by some of the leading investment firms […]

Wind Mobility, a Berlin-based mobility startup that offers “dockless” e-scooter (and electric bicycle) rentals, has raised $22 million in seed funding, throwing its hat into the European competitor to Bird and Lime ring. It follows recent raises by Sweden’s VOI ($50 million Series A led by Balderton) and Germany’s Tier (€25 million Series A led […]

Love Juul or hate it, you can probably appreciate why the e-cigarette company is frustrated. It has grown like gangbusters since the first Juul vaporizer was introduced in 2015, leaving competitors — including traditional tobacco companies with their own e-cigarettes — gagging on its smoke. Yet now, a meaningful percentage of that business is being threatened […]