Crunch Hype

Calling all savvy shoppers across the startup stratosphere. We’re about to roll into a long holiday weekend here in the States, and we’re in the mood to celebrate. In true American style, we’re offering a Fourth of July sale on tickets to not one, not two, not three but all FOUR TechCrunch events. Our four-event […]

TikTok is embracing longer videos. The company announced this morning it will roll out the option to create videos of up to 3 minutes in length after first testing the change with a larger number of creators over the past several months. Previously, TikTok videos could be up to 60 seconds in length, after initially […]

Most companies don’t announce their first venture investment after almost 20 years in the business, nor do they announce that round is the equivalent of a good startup’s entire private fundraising history. But Articulate, a SaaS training and development platform, is not your typical company and today it announced a whopping $1.5 billion investment on […]

Germany’s federal information commissioner has run out of patience with Facebook. Last month, Ulrich Kelber wrote to government agencies “strongly recommend[ing]” they to close down their official Facebook Pages because of ongoing data protection compliance problems and the tech giant’s failure to fix the issue. In the letter, Kelber warns the government bodies that he […]

Primary care company One Medical has apologized after it sent out an email that exposed hundreds of customers’ email addresses. The email sent out by One Medical on Wednesday asked to “verify your email,” but one email seen by TechCrunch had more than 980 email addresses copied on the email. The cause: One Medical did […]

Starting today, Pinterest will prohibit all advertisers from sharing ads that promote weight loss. This includes any language and imagery that encourages weight loss, promotes weight loss products, idealizes certain body types, or references the BMI (which is often a poor indicator of overall health). This makes Pinterest the first major social media platform to […]

This morning Codat, a startup that provides APIs to link small-business fintech data to external services, announced that it has closed a $40 million round led by Tiger Global. The company raised $10 million in a Series A around a year ago that Index led; Codat also raised some strategic capital in the interim, but […]

Karin Tsai joined Duolingo in 2012 and is now the director of engineering. Yesterday, at TechCrunch’s City Spotlight: Pittsburgh, she spoke on the company’s extensive development process and unique culture. This interview was pre-recorded and aired a day after the company filed its SEC Form S-1 ahead of its initial public offering. As per SEC […]

Mercado Bitcoin, a Latin American digital assets exchange, has raised $200 million in Series B funding from the SoftBank Latin America Fund. The round values 2TM Group, Mercado Bitcoin’s non-operating parent company, at $2.1 billion, ranking it among the top 10 unicorns in Latin America. The funding comes just months after São Paulo-based Mercado Bitcoin’s […]

Tiger Global is in advanced stages of talks to back Indian embedded finance startup Yap, according to more than half a dozen people familiar with the matter. The New York-headquartered firm is in talks to lead a $35 million financing round in Yap — also known as YapPay and M2P — that values the Bangalore-headquartered […]

Getir, the startup based out of Turkey that has built a $7.5 billion business out a mobile app that lets consumers buy groceries and get them delivered in minutes, has grown its business up to now organically: targeting urban markets across Europe (and soon the U.S.) where it is disrupting the well-stocked cornershop with a […]

As companies scrambled to re-orient themselves last year during the pandemic, one thing was clear: the shift to remote working had come sooner than anyone expected. With this came a fundamental shift in how businesses would have to hire new talent. And the question was, were managers going to laboriously sift through CVs in a […]

Icon group is a new $30M VC fund being launched out of Germany’s iconmobile group, a WPP network agency. This means a reorganization of the company from a full-service innovation agency into also offering VC backing. iconmobile has garnered a reputation as an innovative technology, design, and sustainability agency, but the turnaround means it will […]

“Instant” grocery delivery has been a big theme among food startups in Europe, where customers can order from a limited assortment of items and get their purchases packed from “dark stores” and delivered in sometimes as little as 10 or 15 minutes. But today a startup that’s built a much bigger proposition — a virtual […]

Kevin Novak joined Uber as its 21st employee its seventh engineer in 2011, and by 2014, he was the company’s head of data science. He talks proudly of that time, but like all good things, it ran its course and by the end of 2017, having accomplished what he wanted at the company, he left. […]

Nodes & Links is a scheduling platform for large-scale infrastructure projects which works out when the nuts and bolts for the bridge (for example) should be delivered, and in what order. Unsurprisingly, complex infrastructure projects often get this wrong. The company has now raised an $11 million Series A funding round led by urban sustainability-focused […]

VividQ, a UK-based deeptech startup with technology for rendering holograms on legacy screens, has raised $15 million to develop its technology for next-generation digital displays and devices. And it’s already lining up manufacturing partners in the US, China and Japan to do it. The funding round, a Seed extension round, was led by UTokyo IPC, […]

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Lego has worked extremely closely with Apple over the years, experimenting with unreleased iOS tech and demoing it onstage at launch events like WWDC; this has included some pretty heavy tinkering on the augmented reality ARKit platform that they’ve integrated several of their play sets with, adding digital experiences to the physical toys. But one […]

Pragmatic customers are being forced to adopt because they are under duress. It is not that they buy into the vision of software eating the world. It is because their very own lunches are being eaten.

SpaceX launched 85 satellites for external customers, as well as three Starlink satellites, to orbit on Tuesday, marking the second successful launch of the company’s dedicated rideshare missions. While the Transporter-2 mission will deliver fewer objects to space than the first rideshare mission (the Transporter-1 sent up 143 satellites, a new record), it launched more […]

BMW i Ventures, the venture capital arm of BMW Group, has announced a new $300 million fund to further its investment in technologies that make transportation, manufacturing and supply chains more sustainable. The firm doesn’t operate as a traditional corporate venture capital fund, but rather acts independently from BMW while being fully backed by the […]

Peanut, the maker of a social networking app for women, is entering into the investing space with today’s launch of a microfund called StartHER. As the name implies, the new fund will focus on investing in women, as well as other historically excluded founders “of all ages, life stages, ethnicities and sexual orientations,” the company says. […]

Volvo Cars wants to completely electrify its lineup by 2030 and on Wednesday offered a glimpse into how it plans to get there and what its next generation of vehicles might look like. But it’s not going to do it alone. Although the automaker plans on developing its own in-car operating system and other parts […]

Most buildings are beginning their digital transformation and are looking for ways to bring people back, keep people healthy and create environments where people want to spend time.

Hour One, a startup that allows businesses to create ‘photoreal’ presenters which can speak pre-set any text or any language in a highly realistic manner, has signed a deal with Berlitz. The language learning giant will use the platform to augment its instructor-led services and grow its online language training programs in a way that […]

It’s easy to forget, but Salesforce bought Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, a deal that has yet to close. We don’t know exactly when that will happen, but Slack continues to develop its product roadmap adding new functionality, even while waiting to become part of Salesforce eventually. Just this […]

This is your opportunity to get a glimpse of the future of iOS, iPadOS and watchOS. Apple just released the first public beta of iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and watchOS 8. Those releases are the next major versions of the operating systems for the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Unlike developer betas, everyone can download […]

Common Sense Media has made a name for itself among parents as a useful resource for vetting entertainment and technology in terms of its age-appropriateness. Now, the organization’s for-profit affiliate, Common Sense Networks, is taking inspiration from those kid-friendly recommendations with the launch of new streaming service called Sensical. The service offers age-appropriate, entertaining, and […]

Here are seven ad types that have proven to increase click-through rates (CTR), with examples of each. Clone them to test in your own social ad campaigns.

In the white-hot creator economy space, startups are increasingly looking to build paint-by-numbers platforms to help budding creators more easily execute on what were once seemingly insurmountable business challenges. The ex-Uber team at Pietra is cashing in on this vision with a plan to build a backend for launching and scaling creator product lines. The […]

Amazon has petitioned that the newly minted Chair of the FTC and implacable critic of the company, Lina Khan, be recused from decisions relating to the company. The company argues that she has been too outspoken about the failure to regulate Amazon to handle matters impartially. It will be for the FTC to decide, and […]

SWORD Health, a virtual musculoskeletal care platform founded in 2015, announced today that it has raised an $85 million Series C funding round led by General Catalyst. Other participating investors included BOND, Highmark Ventures, BPEA, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Transformation Capital and Green Innovations. The funding comes months after the company raised a $25 million […]

Virgin Orbit had a successful first commercial launch, meaning there’s now officially another small satellite launch provider in operation with a track record of delivering payloads to space. Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket took off from its carrier aircraft at around 11:45 AM EDT today, and the spacecraft had a successful series of engine fires and […]

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed seven new charges against Paige Thompson, the former Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineer accused of hacking Capital One and stealing the personal data of more than 100 million Americans. The new charges, which include six counts of computer fraud and abuse and one count of access device […]

Australian rocket launch startup Gilmour Space Technologies is betting that bigger isn’t always better. The company has developed a small launch vehicle it calls Eris, a 25-meter (82 foot) rocket that can deliver a payload of up to 215 kilograms (474 pounds) to sun synchronous orbit. Now, it’s raised a $61 million AUD ($46 million […]

It’s almost go-time for all you early-stage startup founders. That’s right, on July 8-9 thousands of determined entrepreneurs around the world will gather virtually for the best little two-day bootcamp we like to call TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising. Two days focused on the bottom-line essentials to build your start up the right […]

Over the past year, there has been a surge of newly formed digital banks aimed at specific demographics. The banks in nearly all cases are trying to meet the needs of certain populations that they believe are feeling left out or underserved by traditional financial institutions. The latest such neobank to emerge is New York-based […]

Mandolin just marked its first birthday earlier this month, and yet the Indianapolis-based startup is already announcing a $12 million Series A. That’s a quick follow up to the $5 million seed it raised in early October of last year. Turns out the global pandemic is a pretty fortuitious time to launch and grow a […]

While many Chinese companies are seemingly struggling to find the demand that they expect for their shares on American exchanges, domestic companies are seeing some opposite results.

Instagram is building its own version of Twitter’s Super Follow with a feature that would allow online creators to publish “exclusive” content to their Instagram Stories that’s only available to their fans — access that would likely come with a subscription payment of some kind. Instagram confirmed the screenshots of the feature recently circulated across […]

If the pandemic achieved anything good, it was putting health front and center in the minds of the general public, elected officials, investors and innovators. Cityblock has been working on solutions for bringing together the healthcare industry and communities since long before now, but it raised a total of $372 million spanning December through March, […]

Increased diversity on boards isn’t just a great development by itself; board experience positions members well for future leadership roles, getting more women and people of color into corner offices.

Board tensions at Hinge Health, a San Francisco-based digital health unicorn, have caused Bessemer Venture Partners to switch up its board director seat, replacing the original investor at the chair with a different one. Hinge Health co-founder and CEO Daniel Perez says BVP’s original board seat went to the partner who led the his company’s […]

Microsoft’s customer security chief says as many as one-third of all government demands that the company receives for customer data are issued with secrecy clauses that prevents it from disclosing the search to the subject of the warrant. The figure was disclosed in testimony by Microsoft’s Tom Burt ahead of a House Judiciary Committee on […]

No, it’s not April Fool’s Day. But Twitter’s entire account has been taken over by NFTs. As its new header reads: “I’ve stopped moisturizing because tweeting about NFTs is keeping me young now.” If that’s true, the Twitter bird is going to look like a little baby duckling by the end of the day. This […]

To train a robot to navigate a house, you either need to give it a lot of real time in a lot of real houses, or a lot of virtual time in a lot of virtual houses. The latter is definitely the better option, and Facebook and Matterport are working together to make thousands of […]

Slack started talking about a new set of communications tools to enhance the text-based channels at the end of last year. Today the company released a new audio tool called Slack Huddles and gave more details on a couple of other new tools including the ability to leave a video message and an enhanced employee […]

This morning Gusto, a unicorn that sells payroll and benefits management software, announced that it will now offer part of its service via an API to external platforms. The new product, dubbed Gusto Embedded Payroll, will allow vertical SaaS companies to provide payroll support to their own customers. The move to provide elements of its […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha brought on Alexis Gay, a former operator at Patreon who now makes her living as comedian and podcast host, to talk about the creator economy — including our disdain for that horrid phrasing. You […]