Crunch Hype

Like other financial sectors in Latin America, the retail investing space is getting a facelift by local tech startups that are cashing in on the untapped potential for democratizing asset management in the region. One of those startups is Chilean-based Fintual, which today announced a $15 million round led by Kaszek Ventures, the largest fund […]

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has given Virgin Galactic the green light to begin transporting commercial passengers to space aboard its VSS spacecraft. This is an expansion of the company’s existing license, which had granted it permission to fly professional test pilots and astronauts to space using its spaceplane. The updated license comes on […]

Cryptocurrency company Circle has announced that it plans to launch a new API for companies using Circle accounts to manage crypto assets — and in particular USDC stablecoins. The new API will let companies access decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols starting with Compound lending pools. Circle is better known as one of the founding members of […]

The UK’s competition watchdog, the CMA, has opened another investigation into Big Tech — this one targeted at Amazon and Google over how well they handle (or, well, don’t) fake reviews. The Competition and Markets Authority has taken an interest in online reviews for several years, as far back as 2015. It also went after […]

Indian online learning platform Unacademy is in advanced talks to acquire Rheo TV, a less than two-year-old startup founded by two former Unacademy employees, according to three sources familiar with the matter. The current deal values Rheo TV, a startup that has built a platform to help professional game streamers live stream their gameplays and […]

Stock in many American companies, like Amazon, Alphabet or Tesla, can host hundreds or thousands of dollars per share. Fractional trading, or buying part of a single share through a brokerage, makes them more accessible—at least to people within the United States. Investors in other countries, however, often have to pay high fees through interactive […]

Podcast downloads have boomed over the last year, and Kayak co-founder and tech entrepreneur Paul English became an avid, daily listener. But anyone who loves podcasts knows that podcast discovery can be challenging. Even the top streaming apps like Apple Podcasts and Spotify lack robust discovery tools — so last week, when Spotify acquired the […]

Archer Aviation is ramping up its defense against claims by rival Wisk Aero that it misappropriated trade secrets. Archer, which unveiled its Maker eVTOL earlier this month, alleged in a court filing late Wednesday that Wisk learned of Archer’s aircraft design weeks before it filed its patent design application – effectively reversing claims that it […]

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Regularly testing waterways and reservoirs is a never-ending responsibility for utility companies and municipal safety authorities, and generally — as you might expect — involves either a boat or at least a pair of waders. Nixie does the job with a drone instead, making the process faster, cheaper and a lot less wet. The most […]

Sneaker and streetwear empire GOAT just doubled its valuation in a massive new raise. The GOAT Group parent company shared today that it has raised $195 million in a Series F raise valuing the fashion giant at some $3.7 billion. The raise was led by a handful of hedge funds and P/E firms including Park […]

In many industries, Databricks has become synonymous with modern data warehousing and data lakes. Since it’s exactly these technologies that are at the core of what modern businesses are doing around operationalizing their data, data engineering and building machine-learning models — and since Databricks is at the forefront of startups that offer these services on […]

You can't just layer a subscription model on top of a business.

After years of solely focusing on its mobile product, Instagram is at long last thinking about letting users post from their computers. A number of Twitter uses noticed that the test feature had gone live Thursday, and Instagram confirmed the test to TechCrunch. “We know that many people access Instagram from their computer,” an Instagram […]

As an increasing number of startups sell investors on mobile apps that help consumers prioritize well-being and mindfulness, other startups are looking for a more immersive take that allows users to fully disconnect from the world around them. Tripp has been building immersive relaxation exercises that seek to blend some of the experiences users may […]

Most of the time, investors don’t even know they are acting on these biases. They don’t realize they may have already written you off, which is part of the problem.

A code repository used by the New York state government’s IT department was left exposed on the internet, allowing anyone to access the projects inside, some of which contained secret keys and passwords associated with state government systems. The exposed GitLab server was discovered on Saturday by Dubai-based SpiderSilk, a cybersecurity company credited with discovering […]

Snap today announced a multi-year deal with Universal Music Group, one of the largest music companies in the world. From Queen to Justin Bieber, users can clip songs from the expansive UMG catalog to use in their Snaps and on Spotlight, the app’s TikTok competitor. This announcement comes after Snapchat added its Sounds feature in […]

BuzzFeed had a hard time with growth in 2020, but its deck showcases big optimism about the future of its leading business (advertising) and growth business (commerce).

SmartAsset, a marketplace that connects consumers to financial advisors, announced today that it has raised $110 million in a Series D round of funding. The financing values New York-based SmartAsset at over $1 billion, and brings its total raised since its 2012 inception to just over $161 million, according to Crunchbase. TTV Capital led SmartAsset’s […]

In the U.S, after you get vaccinated against COVID-19 you are given a small paper card issued by the CDC that is essentially the only evidence that you’ve received your shots. It might seem like a flimsy level of proof, one that you could easily lose, but replacing that paper copy with a digital one […]

As we become more and more aware of the kind of impact we are having on this planet we call our home, just about everything is having its CO2 impact measured. Who knew, until recently, that streaming Netflix might have a measurable impact on the environment, for instance. But given vast swathes of the internet […]

Every time a recurring meeting is added to a calendar, a kitten dies.

What are the most important factors when you’re pitching your startup for fundraising? What questions come to the minds of the VCs you’re pitching? How do you get the deal across the finish line? Or choose the right investors for your company to begin with? Extra Crunch Live looks to answer all these questions and […]

Having read more SPAC investor decks in the last twelve months than I’d like to admit to, I thought I was over being irked by their bullishness. Call me conservative, but public companies shouldn’t be full of shit, and companies going public should probably aim for a similar target. That’s why S-1 filings for traditional […]

Ecosystems make strange bedfellows. Here’s one of the stranger in recent memory – and one of the most unexpected bits of news from today’s Windows 11 event. Microsoft announced today that it will be making Android apps available on the next major version of its operating system. Chief Product Officer Panos Panay called the addition, […]

The other week at TC Sessions: Mobility, I spoke to a trio of executives at top automotive companies about why they’re all so bullish about robotics. There are the obvious implications, of course. Automakers have long employed robotics for manufacturing – they were really ahead of the curve on those concerns about automating job loss. […]

Happy Windows 11 day. Microsoft is giving us our best look yet at its upcoming operating system, which is due out over the holidays. Following a year when the vast majority of our interpersonal communications arrived through computer and phone screens, the company is putting its communication software front and center. Windows 11 will have […]

After weeks of leaks and hype, Microsoft today officially announced Windows 11, the next version of its desktop operating system. While the company may have once said that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows, forgoing major point launches for a regular cadence of bi-annual upgrades, but it clearly believes that the changes — […]

Few spaces have grown hotter in the past year than the creator economy has, but for all of the new tools available to those starting a podcast, newsletter or storefront, most players have been more focused on building out their own platform opportunity rather than selling full independence to creators. Spore wants to transform the […]

Content is king, as the saying goes. But in actual fact, a lot of what companies do today with content, and thus the power of that content, is relatively limited by the tools that exist to present it. That is slowly changing, and now a startup called Sanity, which has built a system to make […]

News that the firm is making $2.2 billion in capital available for crypto projects is driving this morning's headlines, but the dollar figure should not be a surprise.

As companies deliver code ever faster, they need tooling to provide some semblance of control and governance over the cloud resources being used to deliver it. Env0, a startup that is helping companies do just that, announced a $17 million Series A today. M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, led the round with participation from previous investors […]

The business operation automation startup's CEO says the new capital will give it the space it needs to hire and build faster than if it continued to operate from a smaller capital case.

Throughout its four or so years of life, the Equity podcast crew has had the good fortune to record a few live shows. We sat on the small stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, for example, with Garry Tan one year, and Charles Hudson another. We’ve also ventured to other venues and events with varying levels of […]

Update: Google has now confirmed the delay, writing in a blog post that its engagement with UK regulators over the so-called “Privacy Sandbox” means support for tracking cookies won’t start being phased out in Chrome until the second half of 2023. “We plan to continue to work with the web community to create more private […]

JW Player, a very early mover in the market for online video technology — it powered YouTube’s first video player, before Google acquired it and it built its own — has long been profitable through a business model of providing one-to-many video streaming tools to publishers and others that want to bring video into their […]

Electric propulsion developer Orbion Space Technology has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round, which it says it will use to scale production capacity of its Aurora propulsion system. The Michigan-based startup manufactures Hall effect plasma thrusters for use in small and cube satellites. Thrusters are used throughout the lifespan of a satellite […]

Volvo Cars and Luminar Technologies are beefing up their partnership. The two companies said Thursday that Luminar’s autonomous driving stack – a combination of hardware and software that includes lidar sensors and a proprietary perception system – will be standard on Volvo’s forthcoming flagship electric SUV. Luminar had previously announced the production deal with Volvo […]

A lot of startups were built to help people make all-cash offers on homes with the purpose of gaining an edge against other buyers, especially in ultra-competitive markets. Accepti.inc is a Denver-based company that is attempting to create a new category in real estate technology. To help scale its digital mortgage lending platform, the company […]

It’s no surprise that the coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we shop, especially when it comes to groceries. Grocery delivery apps experienced a record number of downloads in March 2020, and by the following month, Walmart Grocery (which is now integrated into the Walmart app) surpassed Amazon as the No. 1 shopping app on […]

BMW’s Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm is investing in Kodiak Robotics, a company that develops autonomous trucking technology. Kodiak will use the funds to build out a safety case for its self-driving tech stack so it can more quickly commercialize. It will also work on hiring fresh talent and expanding its truck fleet, with a […]

Deliveroo has had another win in the UK courts, beating back an appeal by the IWGB union which has sought for years to challenge the gig platform over couriers’ rights but has continued to fail to overturn the company’s classification of riders as self-employed. The latest appeals court ruling is the fourth judgment in the […]

Visa has announced plans to acquire Tink for €1.8 billion, or $2.15 billion at today’s exchange rate. Tink has been a leading fintech startup in Europe focused on open banking application programming interface (API). Today’s move comes a few months after Visa abandoned its acquisition of Plaid, another popular open banking startup. Originally, Visa planned […]

Remittances — specifically when people in developed countries send money to family or friends in emerging markets — continues to be a huge lever to help those in more challenging economies survive and improve their lot. Today, a startup that has built a remittance platform that it believes is the most economically sympathetic and useful […]

While the cryptocurrency market’s most recent hype wave seems to be dying down after a spectacular rise, Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm is reaffirming its commitment to startups building blockchain projects with a hulking new $2.2 billion crypto fund. It’s the firm’s largest vertical-specific fund ever — by quite a bit. Andreessen Horowitz’s 2018 crypto fund […]

Snowflake changed the conversation for many companies when it comes to the potentials of data warehousing. Now one of the startups that’s hoping to disrupt the disruptor is announcing a big round of funding to expand its own business. Firebolt, which has built a new kind of cloud data warehouse that promises much more efficient, […]

Illumio, a self-styled zero trust unicorn, has closed a $225 million Series F funding round at a $2.75 billion valuation. The round was led by Thoma Bravo, which recently bought cybersecurity vendor Proofpoint by $12.3 billion, and supported by Franklin Templeton, Hamilton Lane, and Blue Owl Capital. The round lands more than two years after […]

Jio Platforms, run by India’s richest man (Mukesh Ambani), and Google on Thursday unveiled the JioPhone Next, an affordable Android smartphone, as the top Indian telecom operator and the American giant make further push to expand their reach in the world’s second largest internet market. The Indian firm, which secured $4.5 billion investment from Google (and […]