Crunch Hype

Google sometimes experiments with new features in beta versions of its various Android applications on Google Play. However, the recently spotted YouTube beta program will not, unfortunately, be a testbed for upcoming additions to the video-sharing service. Instead, Google says it only plans to test the stability of the YouTube app at this time, not […]

Repairing a phone is harder than it needs to be. With phone manufacturers spending the last decade chasing device slimness and building devices meant to last however long a phone contract lasts, user repairability just doesn’t seem to be something they care much about. Need a repair part? Good luck on eBay, friendo! In what […]

If Facebook Messenger’s redesign succeeds, you won’t really notice it even happened. I hardly did over the past week of testing. There’s just a subtle sense that the claustrophobia has lifted. Perhaps that’s why Facebook decided to throw a big breakfast press event with 30 reporters today at its new downtown San Francisco office, complete […]

Last month, the internet was a buzz with reports that Apple was sweetening up selfies on the iPhone XS and XS Max. The shots appeared to have an effect applied, in a manner similar to “beauty” filters offered on competing handsets. Apple denied it was intentionally touching photos, but not before it earned the predictable […]

The office might not seem like an area in desperate need of disruption, but Envoy — a Silicon Valley company used to sign in over 100,000 visitors at offices across the world each day; and a TechCrunch SF office neighbor! — has raised $43 million to do just that. The company started life five years […]

Industry vets and students alike crammed into UCLA's historic Royce Hall last week for TC Sessions AR/VR, our one day event on the fast-moving (and hype-plagued) industry and the people in it. Disney, Snap, Oculus and more stopped by to chat and show off their latest; if you didn't happen to be in LA that day, read on and find out what we learned — and follow the links to watch the interviews and panels yourself.

Following news of Hulu’s plans to move towards skinnier bundles, including those consisting of premium add-ons, the streaming service this morning announced the addition of Starz to its service. The Starz premium add-on will be available across all tiers of Hulu’s service, including its Limited Commercials and No Commercials plans, as well as its Live […]

Online dating is trash. Seriously, try to find anyone who disagrees with me. Vibes, operated by an all-women team, aims to be different. Sure, the swipe mechanics are still there, but that’s about the only similarity you’ll find between Vibes and the likes of Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and others. “Because of how crowded the space […]

Y Combinator, the wildly successful San Francisco-based startup accelerator, is issuing a request for startups that will focus on different kinds of geo-engineering technologies in a bid to mitigate the effects of climate change. With the acknowledgement earlier this month from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that drastic measures are going to be required […]

Futrli, a cloud-based business decision-making platform aimed at small businesses, has raised a £4m Series A from e.ventures, Notion Capital and firstminute Capital. Bootstrapped to date, Futrli claims to have over 40,000 businesses and 1,100 accountants in 130 countries using it. The four-year-old business led by CEO and founder Hannah Dawson says it uses AI/ML […]

Berlin-based startup GoEuro just raised a new $150 million funding round from Kinnevik and Temasek, with Hillhouse Capital also participating. According to Crunchbase, the company has raised nearly $300 million to date. Chances are you’ve used some sort of flight aggregator before to compare prices and find the best deal. But if you live in […]

Thrive Capital has announced the close of its largest fund to date.

There’s a war brewing to become the cloud pharmacy for men’s health. Roman, which launched last year offering erectile dysfunctional medication and recently added a ‘quit smoking’ kit, is taking on $97 million-funded Hims for the hair loss market. Today, Roman launched four new products it hopes to cross-sell to users through a unified telemedicine […]

Streaming service SoundCloud is making it easier for its users to share music from its service directly to Instagram . The company announced this morning a new feature that allows users to share tracks to Instagram Stories. However, there’s a big caveat here – the tracks are shared as a link that appears within Stories […]

Artificial intelligence touches just about every aspect of the tech world these days, aiming to provide new ways of making old processes work better. Now, a startup that has built an AI platform that tackles the ever-present, but never-perfect, business of customer service has quietly raised a large round of funding as it gears up […]

Oracle is a traditional tech company that has been struggling to gain traction in the cloud, but it could see blockchain as a way to differentiate itself. At Oracle OpenWorld today it announced the Oracle Blockchain Applications Cloud, a series of four applications designed for transactions-based processing scenarios using Internet of Things as a data […]

New platforms are all about the content, and Resolution Games is one of the rare game studios going all in on AR/VR gaming. The Stockholm-based startup has swept up $7.5 million in Series B funding at an $87.5 million valuation. The round was led by MizMaa Ventures with participation from GV, GP Bullhound, Fly Forever, […]

Maybe it was her lipstick applying robot. Or her terrifying vegetable-chopping death machine. Or the robot that tried its best (and failed wonderfully) to feed her breakfast. Chances are good you’ve seen one of Simone Giertz’s ridiculous creations, be it on the Colbert show or GIF’d into your newsfeed. As the “Queen of Shitty Robots” […]

Lyft, the transportation on demand company that is heading to a $15 billion IPO in 2019, is racing ahead with its autonomous vehicle plans. TechCrunch has learned that it is acquiring the London-based augmented reality startup Blue Vision Labs and unveiling its first test vehicle with Ford to advance its vision for self-driving cars. The first […]

Nintendo’s Labo Kits are surprisingly fun — and complex. I say this as someone who spent the better part of a workday piecing together a small piano. Now the gaming giant is looking to bring its cardboard building sets into the classroom, as part of a broader STEAM curriculum. The company says it plans to […]

Private jet subscription service Surf Air is announcing a new membership package called Surf Air Express alongside Indiegogo, which allows for members to pay a smaller subscription for individual bookings on the company’s semi-private scheduled planes. For a mere $2500 subscribers can get access to seats on the Surf Air planes or small jets for roughly […]

Apple CEO Tim Cook is expected to endorse the idea of a “comprehensive federal privacy law” for the U.S. in a keynote speech tomorrow. He will also back Europe’s approach to data protection and privacy — recently cemented in place via the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — essentially saying technology does not have to […]

Crypto-anarchists may not like it, but money doesn’t buy everything. Sometimes, you just need the help of a traditional venture capitalist. Binance is the fastest growing company in crypto — having risen to become the world’s largest crypto exchange based on trading volumes in under one year — but even it needs help from the old […]

More than half a year after splitting from a long time role at Microsoft, former Windows and Device EVP Terry Myerson is finally ready to talk about his future. In a blog post this morning, the executive discussed what he’s been up to for the past several months (running, learning the piano, strengthening personal relationships, […]

Uber is continuing to expand its on-demand food delivery service, Eats. By the end of this year, Uber plans to cover more than 70 percent of the U.S. Today, Uber covers more than 50 percent of the U.S. population. Uber Eats competitor Postmates, on the other hand, recently said it covers 60 percent of U.S. […]

Robotics has had a role in manufacturing since the 1970s, but even today they are aren’t often driven by the latest software. Bright Machines, a San Francisco startup wants to change that and it got a whopping $179 million Series A today to get this thing going. While it was at it, it also officially […]

A Washington state internet provider left an unprotected server online without a password, exposing network schematics, passwords and other sensitive files for at least six months. Worse, it took the company a week to shut off the leak, despite several phone calls and emails warning of the exposure. The little-known internet provider, PocketiNet, may not […]

Amazon’s version of Prime aimed at business users is gaining a handful of new perks, the retailer announced this morning. Unlike the consumer version of Prime, the new benefits aren’t focused around entertainment – like access to streaming music or movies, for example – but are instead meant to help business customers gain better insight […]

Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY) will spin off MoviePass and all movie-related activities into a separate public company. HMNY is an analytics company after all, and MoviePass has been a pretty bad investment for the company’s bottom line. When HMNY acquired MoviePass last year, the company didn’t really care about creating a subscription service for […]

Dirty data means bad business. Yet sales operations are still largely based on incomplete, manually entered activity logging done by sales reps. Anyone who’s worked in a sales role can attest to the wasted hours of task logging that managers require as part of their oversight. But what if a company could automatically track the […]

Gamers, worldwide! A new seasons is upon us. New games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2 have either arrived or are on the way, which means we’re wading into a holiday season of fresh gaming. But with new games also come new esports to watch. The competitive season for […]

While the blockchain world has seemingly blazed along in the last 18 months, much of the action has been in the currency world. The underlying technologies building this world are growing at an equally blistering rate, but until now few have threatened to ‘game the game’. Today at the Web3 Summit in Berlin, Parity Technologies […]

Paul Dabrowski, the chief executive officer of Synthego, which provides genetically engineered cells to scientists and researchers, worries about a future where access to the genetic technologies that will reshape the world are only available to the few who can afford them. To hear him tell it, that’s why Dabrowski began working on Synthego in […]

The Israeli cybersecurity venture studio Team8 has raised $85 million in new financing from a clutch of new and returning strategic investors including Walmart, Airbus, SoftBank, and Microsoft’s investment arm, M-12. The studio’s plans to raise a larger fund were first reported by PEHub in May. Team8 has long believed that by combining the strengths and security […]

This iPhone is great. It is most like the last iPhone — but not the last “best” iPhone — more like the last not as good iPhone. It’s better than that one though, just not as good as the newest best iPhone or the older best iPhone. If you’re upgrading from an iPhone 7 or […]

Spot, the chatbot that enables individuals to document and report harassment and discrimination, has launched a tool for human resources departments. This version enables HR departments to manage and track anonymous reports of harassment and discrimination, and follow up on those reports. Spot relies on memory science and artificial intelligence to address harassment and discrimination […]

SoftBank Group has become the latest high profile technology business to drop out of an investment conference in Saudi Arabia following the snowballing global outcry over the killing of journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. The Wall Street Journal reports the last minute cancelation by CEO Masayoshi Son of a speaking engagement at the Future Investment Initiative conference which opens in […]

After months of talk, HTC’s blockchain phone is finally arriving — albeit in limited quantities. The hardware maker announced today at a crypto conference in Berlin that it’s opening up access to an early version the Exodus 1 handset to “cryptographers and developers from all over the world” through its official site. Of course, “early […]

A huge shout-out to all the early-stage startup procrastinators out there. Our 24-hour clock is in play, and that means you need to act quickly if you want to save up to €500 on tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2018. And by quickly we mean by tomorrow, 24 October. That’s when the early-bird price flies the […]

Amazon is getting ready to introduce some more of its futuristic convenience stores where buyers can skip the line. San Francisco may be the center of techie desires and culture but all of Amazon’s five existing Go locations have been elsewhere. Today, the company is announcing some new locations for upcoming stores, including one that […]

Tier, one of a number of electric scooter rental startups based in Berlin, has raised a chunky €25 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is VC fund Northzone, with participation from existing investors Speedinvest, and Point Nine. The investment marks the biggest financial backing for a European company in the space, and, according […]

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 E-moto startup Alta Motors reportedly powers down African financial technology startups move beyond payment services Africa’s VC landscape is becoming more African with an increasing number of investment funds […]

Emil, a new startup from the founders of Movinga, has launched what it claims is Germany’s first pay-per-mile car insurance that measures miles in real-time. Aimed at drivers who do less than 6,200 miles per year on average (or roughly 120 miles per week) — which we’re told accounts for 49 percent of German drivers — […]

The UK government has rejected a parliamentary committee’s call for a levy on social media firms to fund digital literacy lessons to combat the impact of disinformation online. The recommendation of a levy on social media platforms was made by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee three months ago, in a preliminary report following […]

With Fulfillment by Amazon, marketplace sellers can make their products eligible for Amazon Prime’s 2-day shipping. Today, Walmart is catching up on this front. The retailer today announced it’s expanding its 2-day shipping to the millions of products offered by its own marketplace sellers. This expansion will roll out in the months ahead, alongside a […]

Oracle today announced that it has made another acquisition, this time to enhance both the kind of data that it can provide to its business customers, and its artificial intelligence capabilities: it is buying DataFox, a startup that has amassed a huge company database — currently covering 2.8 million public and private businesses, adding 1.2 […]

Twitter has cleared more Infowars related accounts off its platform. The company told CNN today that it permanently suspended 18 accounts affiliated with the far-right website, known for spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, on Monday after “numerous violations and warnings.” It added the removals were in addition to five Infowars affiliated accounts that had been […]

You may remember that back in May, the Water Abundance Xprize named the five finalists in its contest to demonstrate the sustainable and scalable collection of water from the air. Interestingly, none of those finalists were the winner — after one dropped out, an eliminated team stepped in and took the prize.

In an attempt to boost diversity and inclusion efforts and civic engagement between the growing technology industry in Los Angeles and the community that surrounds it, over 80 venture capitalists and entrepreneurs joined the city’s mayor, Eric Garcetti, and the non-profit Annenberg Foundation to announce PledgeLA. The initiative is one way in which the Los […]

As we noted six months ago, Tiger Global Management, the 17-year-old investment group, is starting to see a whole lot of its venture-related startup investments pay off. We also guessed that because of those wins, the outfit was likely lining up commitments for a new mega fund. It was a safe bet. According to a […]