Crunch Hype

Innovusion, a two-year-old startup developing LiDAR sensor technology for autonomous vehicles, has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Chinese firms Nio Capital and Eight Roads Ventures along with U.S.-based F-Prime Capital. Other seed round and strategic investors joined the round, the startup said. Nio Capital is the venture arm of […]

The promise of Tether, the digital currency pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, was that it could provide the benefits of a cryptocurrency while providing a fiat -backed peg against price fluctuations. But the currency has fallen below the $1 in recent weeks, right as a range of competing currencies are becoming available to meet […]

Following a $20 million round earlier this year, Quizlet is seeing solid growth in revenue and MAUs.

Two hackers who stole millions of users’ data from ride-hailing firm Uber have been indicted on separate hacking charges related to a data breach at online learning portal Lynda, two people familiar with the case have told TechCrunch. Vasile Mereacre, a Canadian citizen living in Toronto, and Brandon Glover, a Florida resident, were indicted earlier […]

If we want drones to do our dirty work for us, they're going to need to get pretty good at hauling stuff around. But due to the pesky yet unavoidable restraints of physics, it's hard for them to muster the forces necessary to do so while airborne — so these drones brace themselves against the ground to get the requisite torque.

Vishal Makhijani, the longtime chief executive of online education company Udacity, is stepping down as its chief executive officer, TechCrunch has learned. Makhijani first joined the company in 2013 as chief operating officer under Sebastian Thrun, the company’s founder and chief executive at the time. In 2016, Thrun, the original architect of Alphabet’s self-driving car […]

Amazon is still raking in the cash, but its slower than expected customer growth in its web services offerings and a weaker than expected sales outlook for the holiday season shook investor confidence and caused the stock to slide around 5 percent in after-hours trading. Profits for the company continued to soar, reaching $2.9 billion, […]

Master of all things gadget accessory, Anker announced a handful of new products at an event tonight in Manhattan. The biggest/smallest of the bunch is the PowerPort Atom, a compact wall charger designed to free up spaces around an outlet. The $30 device sports a USB-C port and is smaller than most standard smartphone chargers. […]

Earlier today, The New York Times published a bombshell story about Google’s payout to Andy Rubin following reports of sexual misconduct by the Android creator. In the wake of the piece, CEO Sundar Pichai and VP People Operations Eileen Naughton co-signed a memo sent to Google staff detailing what it deems “an increasingly hard line […]

NBA legend Michael Jordan is playing the esports game now, leading a $26 million round of funding for the ownership group aXiomatic. For Jordan and new co-investor Declaration Capital — the family office investing the personal wealth of David Rubenstein, who co-founded and serves as co-executive chairman of the multi-billion-dollar private equity firm, The Carlyle Group — investing in […]

Snapchat continued to shrink in Q3 2018 but its business is steadily improving. Snapchat’s daily active user count dropped again, this time by 1 percent to 186 million, down from 188M and a negative 1.5 percent growth rate in Q2. User count is still up 5 percent year-over-year, though. Snapchat earned $298 million in revenue with […]

The podcast market will discover the answer to a foundational question about its future in the next few years. Will it continue along the path of music streaming, where all podcasts are available everywhere on free, ad-supported tiers? Or, will it follow the path of streaming TV into paid subscription services with exclusive content? Today, effectively […]

Ahead of Airbnb’s expected initial public offering sometime within the next two years, the accommodation rental business has brought on a new chief technology officer. Aristotle Balogh, formerly Google’s VP of engineering, application storage, indexing and serving, is starting at Airbnb in mid-November. Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk previously served as the company’s CTO up until January […]

It’s been painful, the silence of Silicon Valley with regards to Saudi Arabia, whose shifting accounts about the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi have nearly veered into slapstick. He freely walked out the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Actually, rogue killers got to him. No, he was in a fist-fight and was subdued to death by Saudi […]

The White House has issued a memorandum outlining the need for a new national wireless connectivity strategy; the document doesn't really establish anything new, but does request lots of reports on how things are going. Strangely, what it proposes sounds a lot like what the FCC already does.

A little-known but highly influential group of attorneys from across the country will soon meet in Detroit and could change our skies forever. They claim their draft model legislation concerning drones will help protect privacy. However, their actions could have far-reaching effects on innovation, safety and future drone operations.

CBS’ streaming plans have become even more Trek-centric with the announcement of a two-season order for a half-hour animated series called “Star Trek: Lower Decks.” Many Star Trek fans will probably recognize “Lower Decks” as the title of a popular “Next Generation” episode about four junior officers on the Enterprise, and it sounds like the […]

The dev team that’s now engineering the Fleksy keyboard app has raised more than $800,000 via an equity crowdfunding route. As we reported a year ago, the development of Fleksy’s keyboard has been taken over by the Barcelona-based startup behind an earlier keyboard app called ThingThing. The team says their new funding raise — described […]

Another VC firm has raised its largest fund ever.

Dropbox has been building out Paper, its document-driven collaboration tool since it was first announced in 2015, slowly but surely layering on more functionality. Today, it added a timeline feature, pushing beyond collaboration into a light-weight project planning tool. Dropbox has been hearing that customers really need a way to plan with Paper that was lacking. […]

Short of an actual apocalypse (which should be coming any day now), this Nerf-branded gun from Hasbro is (thankfully) probably the closest you’re going to come to any real life Fortnite action in the near future. The dart-firing gun was announced recently, alongside a Fortnite version of Monopoly (which launched earlier this month), and now […]

Teikametrics is a Boston-based startup that helps retailers tackle the challenges of advertising on Amazon. Today, the company is announcing that it has raised $10 million in Series A funding. CEO Alasdair McLean-Foreman said third-party sellers represent 60 percent of the transactions on Amazon. But they don’t have any real data science capabilities, so they […]

A growing number of states has legalized retail marijuana sales, but ensuring that everything works as advertised is no easy task. Among the many things that regulators have to concern themselves with are granting licenses to dispensaries, retail sales, delivery, distribution, and ensuring marijuana has been tested for pesticides and other materials before it hits […]

Twitch continues to dominate the live streaming market, with approximately 2.5 billion hours watched by viewers in the third quarter of 2018, according to a new industry report out this morning. While YouTube still trails, it’s begun to close the gap with Twitch, it appears. YouTube’s live streaming platform, YouTube Live, started the year with […]

ShopRunner has raised $40 million and confirmed its acquisition of ecommerce marketplace Spring.

Google Maps has been steadily rolling out new features to make its app more than just a way to find places and navigate to them. In recent months, it’s added things like group trip planning, music controls, commuter tools, ETA sharing, personalized recommendations, and more. Now, it’s introducing a new way for users to follow their […]

Can’t wait to get your giant hand on Palm’s tiny “ultra-mobile?” Turns out it will be arriving sooner than later — next Friday, in fact. Verizon (you know, the giant telecom that owns the media conglomerate that owns TechCrunch) announced today that it will be launching the strange new thing on November 2. The 3.3-inch […]

Streaming news company Cheddar announced this morning it’s acquiring Rate My Professors, the Viacom-owned site where students go online to rate and review their professors and schools across the U.S. The site, founded in 1999, has become something of a staple on the web, and by its nature it attracts the young demographic that Cheddar […]

About 800 kilometers of unused fiber optic cable running down the U.S. eastern seaboard is set to become the first stateside quantum network. The aim is to get the quantum network up and running and accepting customers by the end of the year, making it the first time that quantum keys will be exchanged commercially […]

Big problems require big war chests. Ribbon wants the biggest chest of them all. The startup, which was founded just about a year ago by ex-LendingClub head of strategic development Shaival Shah and ex-Twitter/TellApart engineer Jian Wei Gan (who, full disclosure, is married to TechCrunch columnist Joyce Yang), wants to replace the incredible stress of […]

A China foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying dismissed yesterday’s damning report about spying on Trump’s unsecured iPhone, calling it, “fake news,” according to The South China Morning Post. She had a few other choice words for the president, suggesting he switch to a Huawei handset, or, failing that, just stop communicating. The shade amounts to […]

Google this morning announced it’s bringing its A.I.-powered Lens technology to Google Image Search. The idea, explains the company, is to allow web searchers to learn more about what’s in a photo – including, in particular, items they may want to shop for and buy. For example, a photo of a well-decorated living room might […]

Founders Fund has led the $6 million Series A for the startup, which plans to use the investment to launch a line of travel apparel.

The European Parliament has called for a full audit of Facebook following a string of data breach scandals — including the Cambridge Analytica affair. MEPs are urging the company to allow European Union bodies to carry out a full audit to assess data protection and security of users’ personal data, following the scandal in which […]

Xiaomi has announced the newest version of its bezel-less Mi Mix family, and it doesn’t sport a notch like its Mi 8 flagship. Indeed, unlike the Mi 8 — which I called one of Xiaomi’s most brazen Apple clones — there’s a lot more to get excited about. The Mi Mix 3 was unveiled at an […]

After raising $400 million in September in a round that valued it at $4.4 billion, the real estate startup Compass is making an acquisition to help it double down on growth: it is acquiring a portion of Spring, the mobile-first fashion shopping app that has raised more than $100 million since 2014, to work on […]

Twitter came in ahead of analysts’ financial estimates in its third quarter, reporting $758 million in revenue (a 29 percent year-over-year increase) and earnings per share of 21 cents. Analysts had predicted revenue of $703 million and EPS of 14 cents per share. Ad revenue was also up 29 percent, to $650 million, and Twitter […]

Apple continues to increase its efforts in Southeast Asia’s fast-growing market after it picked Thailand as the location for its second Apple Store in the region. A post on Apple’s website reveals that it will operate a retail store at the soon-to-open Iconsiam which is set to become Bangkok’s largest mall when it opens next […]

It’s been nearly a decade since Rockstar Games introduced Red Dead Redemption, a massive open world game with a story about as reflective of American culture as the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Tomorrow, Red Dead Redemption II goes live after months of breathless speculation. And yes, it’s as good as you dreamed it. That’s not […]

Despite share price struggles, Xiaomi has revealed that it is on track for a record sales year which will see it easily surpass its goal of selling 100 million smartphones in 2018. Wang Xiang, the executive in charge of the Chinese firm’s international business, said on Twitter that he expects to hit its 2018 100 million […]

The U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has confirmed that it has hit Facebook with a maximum £500,000 ($645,000) fine around the way it mishandled user data following the Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier this year. The ICO announced its intention to hand Facebook the fine back in July and it said today that it had not changed […]

Armed with new capital (following a recent £8 million Series C round) and now doing £1 million per month in revenue, job meta-search engine Adzuna has acquired the U.K. tech startup job board Work In Startups. Terms of deal aren’t being disclosed. However, it will see Adzuna take over operation of the Work In Startups […]

Tado, the smart thermostat and AC control maker, has raised a further $50 million in funding from an array of noteworthy and strategic investors. Backing the Munich-headquartered company this time around is Amazon, E.ON, Total Energy Ventures, Energy Innovation Capital, Inven Capital, and the European Investment Bank. It brings total funding to $102 million since being […]

LG remains confident that it can turn the corner for its serially unprofitable mobile business despite the division racking up a loss of over $400 million this year so far. The Korean company as a whole is having a good year. Following a record six months of profit and revenue in the first half of 2018, the […]

Tesla, which reported its first quarterly profits in two years Wednesday, is looking to extend its earnings streak by bringing its new Model 3 to customers beyond North America. And part of that plan involves accelerating its manufacturing plans in China. Tesla saw its revenue skyrocket to $6.8 billion in the third quarter (and a $312 […]

Facebook announced today that it has removed 8.7 million pieces of content last quarter that violated its rules against child exploitation, thanks to new technology. The new AI and machine learning tech, which was developed and implemented over the past year by the company, removed 99 percent of those posts before anyone reported them, said […]

Facebook is working on a new app that it hopes could win back the attention of teens while capitalizing on its recently-attained major label music licenses. Facebook is building a standalone product where users can record and share videos of themselves lip syncing or dancing to popular songs, according to information from current and former […]

President Trump has three iPhones — two of them are “secure” and his third is a regular personal device. But whenever the commander-in-chief takes a call, his adversaries are said to be listening. That’s according to a new report by The New York Times, which put a spotlight on the president’s array of devices — […]

“Hold the Dark” tells the story of Russell Core (played by Jeffrey Wright), a wolf expert who arrives in the Alaskan village of Keelut to investigate the disappearance of a young boy. At least, that’s how the Netflix Original movie begins. On this week’s episode of the Original Content podcast, your regular hosts are joined […]