Crunch Hype

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley has announced that he is stepping back from his full-time role at the company. During the first seven years of the company, he was the startup’s Chief Executive Officer. In 2016, Crowley moved to an executive chairman position. He’s also been running the Foursquare Labs R&D group since then. Going forward, […]

Brian Armstrong, the founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, is coming to Disrupt this September 21-23, and given how much there is to discuss, we couldn’t be more excited to host him. As some industry observers will know, Armstrong, a native of San Jose, Calif., whose parents were both engineers, nabbed two degrees from […]

The cybersecurity unicorn raised its IPO price range today. As a heat check on the larger IPO market, it's a thermometer about to explode.

Shopify changed the e-commerce landscape by making it easier for merchants to set up their websites both quickly and affordably. A startup called Tapcart is now doing the same for mobile commerce. The company, which has referred to itself as the “Shopify for mobile apps,” today powers the shopping apps for top brands, including Fashion […]

This week, TechCrunch is turning its spotlight on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with interviews, profiles, and an event featuring the outgoing mayor, CMU’s President, and local startups. The Rust Belt city has spent much of the past decade working to shed the image that arrived in the wake of the deindustrialization of the 1970s and 80s. Courtesy of […]

SpaceX is hoping to attempt to fly its in-development spacecraft Starship to orbit for the first time in July, according to company president Gwynne Shotwell. Shotwell shared the timeline at the International Space Development conference during a virtual speaking engagement. Starship has been in development for the past several years, and it has been making […]

From now until July 5th, we are offering 10% off annual Extra Crunch membership. This offer is valid for readers in the U.S., Canada, Europe, UK, and Israel. Claim the deal by navigating here. Extra Crunch is a membership program from TechCrunch that helps startup teams get ahead. Benefits include: Discover how successful startups operate […]

The saying goes that, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” That may or may not be true, but at least one “old dog” is working hard to disprove that saying. Western Union has been operating in the cross-border payments space for nearly 150 years (yes, you read that right – 150 years) and […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You […]

Honda said Monday it will sell its first electric SUV in North America in early 2024, part of the automaker’s push to shift away from gas-powered vehicles before the middle of the decade. The new car’s name, Prologue, is meant to signify the beginning of what the company called its “new electrified era.” Prologue is […]

UK-based robotics company CMR Surgical this morning announced a $600 million Series D. This latest round, led by Softbank’s Vision Fund 2 and co-led by Ally Bridge Group, joins an existing $384.8 million already raised by the Cambridge firm. It values the company at $3 billion. CMR’s flagship product is Versius. The robotic system is […]

The U.S. Department of Transportation launched a Smart City Challenge in 2015, which asked mid-sized cities across the country to come up with ideas for novel smart transportation systems that would use data and tech to improve mobility. Out of 78 applicants, Columbus, Ohio emerged as the winner. In 2016, the city of just under […]

On the heels of Etsy’s huge deal to acquire Depop to open the door to more social selling, targeting younger users, and deeply expand in Europe, the crafty marketplace has announced another significant deal to build out its reach, this time in Latin America. Etsy has announced that it will acquire Elo7 — commonly referred […]

The UK’s digital businesses can breathe a sign of relief today as the European Commission has officially signed off on data adequacy for the (now) third country, post-Brexit. It’s a big deal for UK businesses as it means the country will be treated by Brussels as having essentially equivalent data protection rules as markets within […]

Ran Korber and his asthmatic and pregnant wife were looking to buy a house in Israel. As an environmental engineer, he knows that air pollution is the leading environmental cause of premature death, can cause premature birth, and can account for other respiratory diseases. Korber started looking for the city with the least amount of […]

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hello and welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and packages move (today and in the future) from Point A to […]

Drink making probably isn’t at the top of your list of jobs most likely to be fully automated. The past year-and-a-half have, however, brought into stark relief how large a role robotics could play in the food service industry. I’ve said it time and again on these pages, but the appeal is clear: Robots don’t […]

Thursday, a dating app that wants to solve problems created by, well, too much time spent using dating apps, had raised a £2.5 million (~$3.5M) seed investment — a few months after launching (in May) its single-matching service in London and New York (and racking up over 52k downloads). Last Thursday (June 17) it says […]

Once heralded as disruptive marketplaces, classifieds are giving way to transactional marketplaces. Yet, some classifieds in the West like eBay have evolved with time, acquiring competition operating both models. In Africa, this occurrence is happening in part, at least for the classifieds businesses that haven’t fizzled out. Jiji, one of the largest marketplaces for classifieds […]

Voyager Innovations, the Manila-based owner of PayMaya, one of the Philippines’ most popular payment and financial services apps, announced today it has raised $167 million in new funding to launch more financial services, including a digital bank. The raise includes $121 million in new funding, and $46 million from previously committed funds. Voyager announced in […]

The pandemic has spurred interest in saving and investment apps around the world, especially ones geared toward newer investors. In Southeast Asia, startups in this space that have raised funding over the past few months include Ajaib, Bibit and Stashaway—and that’s just a (very) partial list. Now Infina, which calls itself the “Robinhood of Vietnam,” […]

Slice, an Indian fintech startup that has built a “super card” for millennials in India, said on Monday it has raised $20 million in a new financing round and is adding new features to change how people engage with their credit cards. Existing investors Gunosy, Blume Ventures and others financed the new round in the […]

In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a growing trend of creators adopting digital and social media, not just as a supplement to their media presence but also as a cornerstone of their personal brand. The pandemic has surely accelerated creator economy trends. Many popular artists and figures have had to postpone concerts and […]

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices […]

Rumor has it, if you whisper mafia to a venture capitalist or tech reporter, a seed investment and headline appears within minutes. That process quickly turns into seconds if the mafia reference includes the letters S, T, R, I, P and E before it. Tech mafias, otherwise known as a group of early employees within […]

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment.

It’s been a tough year for business. From ransomware attacks and power outages to cloud downtime and supply-chain disruptions, it’s never been more important to communicate to customers and stakeholders about what’s going wrong and why. Yet, with partial data and misinformation often spreading faster than official word, it’s also never been harder to deliver […]

Hey Equity fam, we have a small clip of extra goodness for you today. After our live show — listen to the recording here, it was good fun — we got to take a few questions from the audience, audio that was not included in the main episode, as we didn’t have the time. But […]

Bristol proved especially popular among tech investors last year — local businesses raked in an impressive $414 million in 2020, making it the third-largest U.K. city for tech investment.

Earlier this week, we caught up with Steve Sarracino the founder of the growth-equity firm Activant Capital in Greenwich, Conn., We’d last talked with Sarracino back in early April of last year, as people around the world were being forced into their homes by the pandemic, and his firm was just closing its third fund […]

There’s a new Megan Thee Stallion music video out in time for triple digit temperatures. But instead of launching a fresh viral TikTok dance for summer, the single inspired an informal protest among Black creators tired of thanklessly launching trends into the social media stratosphere. With the release of the video for “Thot Shit,” some […]

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

There's a kernel of truth in every joke, so whenever someone quips, "This meeting could have been an email!" you can bet that some small part of them meant it sincerely.

Researchers at MIT and Caltech have created a nanoengineered material that could be tougher than the likes of kevlar or steel. Made of interconnected carbon “tetrakaidecahedrons,” the material absorbed the impact of microscopic bullets in spectacular fashion. The study, led by MIT’s Carlos Portela, aimed to find out whether nanoarchitected materials — that is, designed […]

The Chinese ride-hailing giant appears set to be valued at a discount to its U.S. counterpart. By several tens of billions of dollars, it turns out. And we can’t quite figure out why.

The reality is that while companies can get smarter about cyber defenses and users can get more vigilant in their cyber hygiene practices, only the government has the power to end this behavior.

This week, we'll explore a number of projects aimed at identifying or confirming bias or cheating behaviors in machine learning systems, or failures in the data that support them.

Mega-rounds are no longer an exception in Latin America; in fact, they have become a trend, with ever-larger rounds being announced over the last few months.

Mercuryo, a startup that has built a cross-border payments network, has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round of funding. The London-based company describes itself as “a crypto infrastructure company” that aims to make blockchain useful for businesses via its “digital asset payment gateway.” Specifically, it aggregates various payment solutions and provides fiat and […]

Several personalized health tech startups hope to reinvent care for patients suffering from musculoskeletal (MSK) medical conditions and chronic pain.

The EU for all its lethargy, faults and fetishization of bureaucracy, is, ultimately, a good idea. It might be 64 years from the formation of the European Common Market, but it is 29 years since the EU’s formation in the Maastricht Treaty, and this international entity is definitely still acting like an indecisive millennial, happy […]

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has committed to doing more to quickly purge illegal hate speech from its platform in the European Union by formally signing up to a self-regulatory initiative that seeks to tackle the issue through a voluntary Code of Conduct. In statement today, the European Commission announced that the professional social network has joined the […]

Erica Chidi, the co-founder of Loom and a first-generation Nigerian-American, learned how to wrap the language of self-care around her body from an early age. She spent the early part of her life in South Africa, then the epicenter of the HIV and AIDS epidemic, watching her father work as an endocrinologist and infectious disease […]

Forward-thinking entrepreneurs and growth marketers simply must make time to study their competition, learn best practices and apply them to their own business growth.

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising kicks off in just two weeks and we “see you shiver with antici…pation” (two points for the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” reference). And who can blame you? We sure don’t. On July 8-9, this two-day virtual bootcamp will deliver leading startup gurus, mavens and masters serving up choice, […]

Seattle-based Edge Delta, a startup that is building a modern distributed monitoring stack that is competing directly with industry heavyweights like Splunk, New Relic and Datadog, today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Menlo Ventures and Tim Tully, the former CTO of Splunk. Previous investors MaC Venture […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we did something fun and different and good: a live show! A good number of people came, and asked questions, and altogether, it was a blast. Danny, Natasha, and Alex had a lovely time with the […]

Amazon’s cloud services giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) is getting into the encrypted messaging business. The company has just announced that it has acquired secure communications service Wickr — a messaging app that has geared itself towards providing services to government and military groups and enterprises. It claims to be the only “collaboration service” that […]

API Holdings, which operates the giant healthcare startup PharmEasy, said on Friday it has reached an agreement to acquire a 66.1% stake in Thyrocare, which runs a diagnostic lab chain, for about $613 million in what is the first ever acquisition of a publicly listed firm by an unicorn startup in the world’s second most […]

"I think because of the VC money and also the hype in the industry, a lot of people just forget how easy and simple the business should be."