Crunch Hype

Some more comments from readers on the changing culture around startups filing their Form Ds with the SEC, and then a short update on SoftBank and a bunch more article reviews. We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the […]

Elon Musk’s tweets piss me off for two reasons. When he’s not accusing actual heroes of sex crimes or trolling the federal government, it’s what comes after that drives me batshit. The top reply to most of his tweets is some asshat impersonating him to try to trick his followers into falling for a bitcoin […]

French startup BlaBlaCar is announcing plans to acquire Ouibus, the bus division of France’s national railway company SNCF. For the first time, BlaBlaCar is moving beyond carpooling and plans to offer both long-distance carpooling rides and bus rides. BlaBlaCar already ran a test with Ouibus for the past six months on popular corridors. It looks […]

Chappy, the dating app for gay men, has today announced a partnership with GLAAD. As part of the partnership, Chappy will make a donation to GLAAD for each conversation initiated on the dating app, from now throughout 2019. The company won’t disclose the amount of the donation, but said that it hopes to raise “hundreds […]

French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech at the Internet Governance Forum at UNESCO in Paris. While the IGF has been around for a while, it hasn’t been as active as some would have hoped. That’s why the French government is issuing the Paris Call, a short three-page document on cybersecurity. President Macron hopes to […]

Black Friday may still be 10 days away, but shopping season started early in the enterprise this year. We have seen acquisitions totaling almost $50 billion in the last couple of months alone, topped by the mega $34 billion IBM-Red Hat deal two weeks ago. What exactly is going on here? While not every deal has […]

Tel Aviv-based Audioburst has been developing a search engine for audio news, which allows users to locate audio content within podcasts and other talk radio programs. Today, the company is capitalizing on its technology to launch personalized playlists that deliver custom news briefs that get better over time the more you use the product. The […]

Ridesharing service Lyft is today announcing its new plan to encourage repeat use: the launch of a loyalty program for riders, Lyft Rewards. The program, which will begin rolling out next month to select riders across the U.S., will let riders earn points for each dollar spent, which can then be used for upgrades to […]

Tiger Global has returned to backing early-stage Indian startups after it wrote a $3 million check for CheckMate, a U.S.-Indian startup that helps restaurants deal with the pain of multiple food ordering platforms. The deal is a Series A and it represents the first time that CheckMate has raised outside funding for its business. It […]

Test Pilot is Mozilla’s program for experimenting with some of its more outlandish ideas for Firefox and beyond. Some of those experiments make it into the browser itself, some become standalone extensions and others get unceremoniously canned. Today, the organization is announcing two new Test Pilot projects: Price Wise, which lets you track the price […]

Facebook and the French government are going to cooperate to look at Facebook’s efforts when it comes to moderation. At the start of 2019, French regulators will launch an informal investigation on algorithm-powered and human moderation. Facebook is willing to cooperate and give unprecedented access to its internal processes. This announcement is the result of […]

Some consolidation and subsequent divestment are in play in the worlds of imaging and voice recognition. Today, Kofax and Nuance announced that Kofax would be acquiring Nuance’s imaging division, for $400 million in cash. The deal, which had been rumoured in recent days, is expected to close in Q1 2019. The acquisition is a notable move […]

eBay shoppers will now be able to buy installation services along with their purchases. The company this morning announced new partnerships with Handy, Porch and InstallerNet which will allow online shoppers the option of booking installation and assembly services when buying items that require a bit of extra work – like TVs, bikes, furniture, and more. The option will be […]

According to a patent application continuation filed in 2017 and published recently, Sony may have tentative plans to build out a touchscreen-equipped PlayStation controller. Whether the value added from having a touchscreen right on the controller will be worth the added cost is not yet clear. Right now, PlayStation controllers have a touch-enabled center button […]

It seems that Sunday has become a popular day to announce large deals involving enterprise companies. IBM announced the $34 billion Red Hat deal two weeks ago. SAP announced its intent to buy Qualtrics for $8 billion last night, and Vista Equity Partners got into the act too, announcing a deal to buy Apptio for […]

Are you ready to experience Disrupt Berlin 2018? Our premier tech startup conference takes place on 29-30 November and draws international participants from more than 50 countries across Europe, Asia and beyond. No matter what role you play in the startup universe, you’ll enjoy two days packed with action, insight, inspiration and opportunity. Still need convincing? […]

Framer, the Amsterdam-based startup behind interactive design platform Framer X, has raised $24 million in Series B investment. The round is led by European VC firm Atomico, with participation from Accel, and AngelList. The startup says it will use the new capital to continue building out its platform for designers and product teams. It brings […]

London’s transport regulator, TfL has announced a partnership with Bosch for its forthcoming co-working space in Shoreditch. The civic tech project is intended to run for 18 months as a pilot — though Bosch’s ‘Connectory’ co-working facility won’t open until the end of January. A company spokeswoman confirmed the partnership is nonetheless up and running […]

Jake Bright Contributor Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa. More posts by this contributor Nigerian data analytics company Terragon acquires Asian mobile ad firm Bizense Africa Roundup: Local VC funds surge, Naspers ramps up and fintech diversifies Nigerian consumer data analytics firm Terragon Group has acquired […]

Selling equity to buy Facebook and Google ads is a bad deal for startups. Clearbanc offers a fundraising alternative. For fast-growing businesses reliably earning sales from their marketing spend, Clearbanc offers funding from $5,000 to $10 million in exchange for a steady revenue share of their earnings until it’s paid back plus a 6 percent […]

Alibaba may have pioneered the concept of Singles’ Day, the world’s largest shopping day based on sales, but it very much not the only e-commerce giant involved. JD.com, Alibaba’s biggest rival in China, just announced that it sold RMB 159.8 billion ($23 billion) in goods for its Singles’ Day campaign. Unlike Alibaba, which racked up $31 billion […]

Ceph is an open source technology for distributed storage that gets very little public attention but that provides the underlying storage services for many of the world’s largest container and OpenStack deployments. It’s used by financial institutions like Bloomberg and Fidelity, cloud service providers like Rackspace and Linode, telcos like Deutsche Telekom, car manufacturers like […]

Enterprise software giant SAP announced today that it has agreed to acquire Qualtrics for $8 billion in cash, just before the survey and research software company was set to go public. The deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2019. Qualtrics last round of venture capital funding in 2016 raised $180 […]

Just a few years ago, Li Mengqi could not have imagined shopping on her own. Someone needed to always keep her company to say aloud what was in front of her, who’s been blind since birth. When smartphones with text-to-speech machines for the visually impaired arrived, she immediately bought an iPhone. “Though it was expensive,” […]

The second wave of Internet-era travel companies has captured the attention of venture capitalists.

Howie Xu Contributor Share on Twitter Howie Xu is the vice president of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Zscaler. He previously co-founded TrustPath and served as an entrepreneur in residence at Greylock. This month marks the 5-year anniversary of Aileen Lee’s landmark article, “Welcome To The Unicorn Club”. At the time, the piece defined […]

The kids in Madrid’s El Retiro Park are loving their new on-demand joyriding toys. Lime launched its scooters in the Spanish capital this summer. Spending a weekend in the city center last month the craze was impossible to miss. Scooters parked in clusters vying for pay-to-play time. Sometimes lined up tidily. All too often not. […]

Microsoft is continuing to invest in a broad spectrum of developers for its Xbox gaming ecosystem with the acquisition of Obsidian and InXile, makers of complex RPGs primarily aimed at PC users. The two studios will join four others snatched up in June, significantly bolstering Xbox's first-party development resources.

To offset the creepiness of having Facebook’s camera and microphone in your house, its new Portal video chat gadget needs best-in-class software. Its hardware is remarkably well done, plus Messenger and the photo frame feature work great. But its third-party app platform was pretty skimpy when the device launched this week. Facebook is increasingly relying […]

When you're launching a new social media product, like an image-sharing app or niche network, common wisdom is to make it available to everyone as soon as it's ready. But simulations carried out by Facebook — and let's be honest, a few actual launches — suggest that may be a good way to kneecap your product from the start.

Alibaba scored another blockbuster Singles’ Day after customers around the world shopped in stores and online on the tenth edition of its November 11 shopping festival. That puts this year’s gross merchandise volume – a measure for the dollar value of total transactions – at a staggering $30.8 billion, although the company recorded its lowest-ever […]

Earlier this week in a new experimental newsletter I’ve been helping Danny Crichton on, we briefly discussed transit pundit Jarrett Walker’s article in The Atlantic arguing against the view that ridesharing and microtransit will be the future of mass transit. Instead, his thesis is that a properly operated and well-resourced bus system is much more […]

Meet Bubble a bootstrapped startup that has been building a powerful service that lets you create a web application even if you don’t know how to code. Many small and big companies rely on Bubble for their website. I have to say I was quite skeptical when I first heard about Bubble. Many startups have […]

Roy Bahat Contributor Share on Twitter Roy Bahat is the head of Bloomberg Beta. More posts by this contributor For founders and investors, it’s time for some ‘real talk’ about money Who will find the first silver unicorn? Shauntel Garvey Contributor Share on Twitter Shauntel Garvey is a co-founder and general partner at Reach Capital. […]

How’s this for eyebrow-raising? In London, for the last year and a half, a team of lawyers, cryptographers, software engineers, and/or former military consultants have been brewing a bizarre and/or brilliant plan for a bridge between the blockchain and the real world — a system whose success is directly proportional to the extent to which […]

Months after announcing its privacy-focused DNS service, Cloudflare is bringing 1.1.1.1 to mobile users. Granted, nothing ever stopped anyone from using 1.1.1.1 on their phones or tablets already. But now the app, now available for iPhones, iPads and Android devices, aims to make it easier for anyone to use its free consumer DNS service. The […]

Nested, the London-based “data-driven” estate agency that provides a cash advance to help you buy a new home before you’ve sold your old one, has raised a further £120 million in funding. The new round is a mixture of equity and debt: £20 million and £100 million, respectively. Leading the equity round is Northzone, and […]

We knew the Xbox One was set to get keyboard and mouse support eventually, but now we know exactly when.

Crunchbase News recently profiled a selection of U.S. companies’ largest VC raised in 2018, and no surprise here: the 10 largest rounds all topped out well north of $100 million.

Moogsoft has laid off 30 employees and completed two C-suite hires. Its new COO Amer Deeba recently resigned from Qualys following SEC charges of insider trading.

Virtual reality hasn’t proven itself to be the lucrative escape of the every-man, but the medium has done a fairly good job enticing the gaming community and keeping that niche (mostly) happy. While a couple of big titles have gotten some halfway-decent ports to VR, for the most part VR users are confined to whatever […]

Libertarian on lockdown? Privacy minded or paranoid? Security is more front of mind today than ever before. If it’s not a company vacuuming up your data or nation states trying to hack your email, it’s your own “opsec” that needs a refresh. For this holiday season, we have more than a dozen gift ideas — […]

Mary Meeker, who revealed in September plans to leave Kleiner Perkins after an eight-year run with the venture firm, is reportedly looking to raise up to $1.25 billion for her debut fund. So says Business Insider, citing multiple sources. We’ve reached out to Meeker for more information. As Meeker told Recode a couple of months […]

The idea that social media can be harmful to our mental and emotional well-being is not a new one, but little has been done by researchers to directly measure the effect; surveys and correlative studies are at best suggestive. A new experimental study out of Penn State, however, directly links more social media use to worse emotional states, and less use to better.

Tesla Model 3 owners who opted for the Performance variant now have a reason to go to the track. Or, if history is a guide, they’ll skip the track and try the newly released Track Mode software feature in a parking lot or winding road. Track Mode — to be clear — is designed for, […]

Done cloning Snapchat, Facebook is now chasing Chinese short-form video sensation TikTok with the launch of its knock-off Lasso. Available now for iOS and Android, Lasso is Facebook’s answer to the zany mobile lipsyncing playground that’s gained ground with young users, both in China and in the West. The release confirms TechCrunch’s scoop from last month […]

PayPal has shut down several accounts, including those for far-right group the Proud Boys and their founder, Gavin McInnes, for the promotion of "hate, violence, or other forms of intolerance." Several anti-fascist groups were also banned as part of the same wave of policy enforcement.

Another day, another exit scam. This time it comes to us from South Korea, where an exchange, Pure Bit, has completely shut down after raising $2.8 million in Ethereum from investors. The exchange, which promised to deliver something call Pure Coin, was live yesterday and today is completely shut down after posting “Sorry” and “Thanks” […]

Two researchers, Dr. Domenico Vicinanza of Anglia Ruskin University and Dr. Genevieve Williams, have “sonified” a video of the 5,000th Martian sunrise captured by the Mars rover, Opportunity. The music is a representation of the experience of seeing the sun rise over the red dunes as light pierces the planet’s atmosphere. It’s beautiful. From the […]

Upstart launch provider Rocket Lab aims to finally launch its first fully commercial payload to orbit this weekend after months of delays. The small Electron rocket will take six satellites from four companies to orbit as early as tomorrow evening Pacific time — Sunday afternoon at the company's launch site in New Zealand.