Crunch Hype

US/Israeli startup, Sorbet – which helps companies de-risk themselves against accrued paid time off (PTO) by employees — has raised another $15M, in a round led By Dovi Frances’ Group 11, not long after a $6 million seed round only last April. Sorbet says it removes the burden of PTO from employers, allowing employees to […]

Following Wise’s announcement earlier this month that it planned to go public by way of a direct listing on the LSE, today the company made the news formal with a regulatory filing. The London-based company — formerly known as TransferWise and primarily in the business of transferring money across different currencies — with 10 million […]

After launching five years ago in the United States, Apple’s search advertising service finally arrived in mainland China this week. The feature, called Apple Search Ads, lets developers bid on an advertising slot based on users’ keyword search in the App Store, similar to how Google search ads work. JPMorgan previously estimated the giant’s annual […]

Industries like real estate, automotive, and financial services have long and offline sales cycles and digital advertising tends not to perform well in these areas. The conversion rates are low and because the real-world assets are offline the temptation of advertisers is to buy leads and clicks, which can inflate customer acquisition costs. People are […]

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

It’s a little thing, but one worth savoring. If you’re tired of your Instagram feed mostly being a chaotic mashup of screencapped tweets and reshared TikToks, well, those things probably aren’t going away but one is about to look a lot better. Twitter just added the capability to share a tweet directly to Instagram Stories, […]

Bird has announced the launch of shared e-bikes to its fleet of e-scooters, which it says can be found in over 250 cities around the world. The shared micromobility provider is also launching a so-called ‘Smart Bikeshare’ platform that allows local shared bike and e-moped providers and transit apps to integrate with Bird’s app. “Shared […]

AI has been filling in the gaps for illustrators and photographers for years now — literally, it intelligently fills gaps with visual content. But the latest tools are aimed at letting an AI give artists a hand from the earliest, blank-canvas stages of a piece. Nvidia’s new Canvas tool lets the creator rough in a […]

You’ve likely seen the headlines surrounding the pretty major decline in NFT sales from the market’s recent peak, with some reports indicating as much as a 90 percent decline in recent weeks. And while plenty of crypto speculators are on the losing end of that rapid decline, others see a future where digital collectible and […]

A company, however its incorporation papers may define it, is really just a set of people. If your principles don’t reflect those people’s values, do those principles really represent the company?

Amazon revolutionized one-click shopping, and it has a nearly $2 trillion market cap to show for the effort. Now, a 10-person startup founded by JD Maresco, who previously cofounded the public safety app Citizen, says it plans to make it a lot easier for retailers who sell directly to their customers to make re-ordering their […]

While many entrepreneurs see board meetings as a chore, they can be a powerful tool if used well.

There are massive opportunities for business value creation in cybersecurity. Many unicorns will be built in these spaces, and there are a few specific areas worth betting on.

While every food delivery company is trying to get an edge on its rivals with discount codes, faster service, and a turn into the realm of spooky with ghost kitchens and dark stores, a startup built on a lighter, social concept — letting people see what their friends are chomping on, making it possible to […]

It’s hard to understand just how steeply the cost of launching and operating satellites has dropped, particularly since the introduction of lower cost launch services from a number of commercial players, and the maturation of the smartphone supply chain. Swarm co-founder and CEO realized just how much the cost curve had changed when she and […]

Successfully selling a business has much to do with timing. For many entrepreneurs, it’s the high-stakes end game where they cash out and reap the rewards of their efforts.

Cleerly Coronary, a company that uses A.I powered imaging to analyze heart scans, announced a $43 million Series B funding this week. The funding comes at a moment when it seems that a new way of screening for heart disease is on its way. Cleerly was started in 2017 by James K. Min a cardiologist, […]

This year we’re taking exhibiting in Startup Alley, the epicenter of opportunity at every Disrupt, to a whole new level at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 (September 21-23). Team TechCrunch will tap up to 50 exhibiting founders to take part in Startup Alley+, an exclusive, VIP experience designed to grow your business and increase your opportunities two […]

Making the choice to adopt, or to find an adopting family, is a legally complex, emotionally taxing, expensive and time-consuming process. PairTree aims to make one part at least considerably easier and faster with its online matching platform where expectant mothers and hopeful adopters can find each other without the facilitation of an agency or […]

Outschool founder Amir Nathoo has a message to the edtech sector, which recently found itself under a spotlight thanks to the pandemic: Add your voice, and don’t try to always appear neutral. The founder of the unicorn business penned a statement, co-signed by other edtech leaders, promoting the continuance of teachers being allowed to teach […]

The days of a scrolling to the end of your Instagram feed look to be coming to an end. After adding algorithmic suggestions to the bottom of the app last year, Instagram is running a test that would splice more recommended posts from accounts you don’t follow into the feed with those you do. In […]

Five-year old self-driving truck startup Embark Trucks Inc. said Wednesday it would merge with special purpose acquisition company Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp. II in a deal valued at $5.2 billion. Embark takes a different approach to autonomous trucking: As opposed to manufacturing and operating a fleet of trucks themselves, which is the route rival TuSimple […]

Inspired by this Hunter Walk tweet and the ensuing chatter. TechCrunch recently sat down with Leading Investor from Well Known Firm to chat about their investing theses, the state of today’s venture capital market, and why prices are so high for early-stage startups. We’ve been hunting down Leading Investor for some time, so it’s great […]

The notorious Clop ransomware operation appears to be back in business, just days after Ukrainian police arrested six alleged members of the gang. Last week, a law enforcement operation conducted by the National Police of Ukraine, along with officials from South Korea and the U.S., saw the arrest of multiple suspects believed to be linked […]

Video game giant Electronic Arts is continuing to make M&A moves as it looks to bulk up its presence in the mobile gaming world. Fresh off the $2.4 billion acquisition of Glu Mobile this past April, their biggest purchase to date, Electronic Arts announced Wednesday that they are buying Warner Bros. Games’ mobile gaming studio […]

It’s become increasingly obvious over the last few years, as Vladimir Putin has tightened his grip on his country, that Russian entrepreneurs who want to engage properly with the rest of the world have had to leave their mother country. Gone are the days when a startup in Russia might attract attention from many Western […]

SentinelOne's IPO is a fascinating debut because the company sports a combination of rapid growth and expanding losses that make it a good heat check for the IPO market.

In 2019, LinkedIn’s engineering team announced DataHub, a metadata tool it had built to help it organise, search and discover insights from its vast data trove. In 2020, LinkedIn open sourced it. Now, a startup co-founded by one of the creators of DataHub and by a former senior engineer from Airbnb who helped build the […]

Spin, Ford’s micromobility subsidiary, has launched its first custom designed and built electric scooter. The company says the S-100T scooters are its safest and longest lasting, two qualities that it hopes will attract the attention of cities as it aims its strategy at exclusive partnerships. When the company launches its service in Sacramento in July, […]

Thoughtful and high-quality product design is no longer optional. Gone are the days that a startup could launch with a bare-bones app or website. The demand side of the design equation has only grown — consumers are used to beautiful, intuitive products — while the supply side is struggling to keep up. How are startups […]

For all that’s said about fundraising and working alongside investors, rarely do we get to see founders and their investors in candid conversation with one another. Extra Crunch Live is changing that. On the weekly live show, we sit down with founders and the VCs who funded them to talk about how they came together […]

I’ve been working on an H-1B in the U.S. for nearly two years, but I’m unhappy with my job. I want to start something of my own in the U.S. Are there any immigration options that would let me do that?

Security compliance is precisely three things: incredibly boring, time consuming, and entirely necessary to run a business in the modern age. Compliance isn’t going away, but startups like Drata are making it slightly easier to bear. Drata helps companies get their SOC 2 compliance quicker by using automation. SOC 2 is a certification used to […]

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 Danny, Alex, and a bunch of the TechCrunch crew took on the recent happenings in the world of bitcoin. In a break from our regular format, we recorded live from a Twitter […]

Salesforce and AWS represent the two most successful cloud companies in their respective categories. Over the last few years the two cloud giants have had an evolving partnership. Today they announced plans for a new set of integration capabilities to make it easier to share data and build applications that cross the two platforms. Patrick […]

Frumtak Ventures, one of the few VCs in Iceland, has raised its third fund, Frumtak III. The $57 million (ISK 7b, €48m) fund will focus on post-seed and Series A startups. The firm says its typical ticket size will range from $1-5 million (€850k-4.2m). Frumtak was a somewhat lesser-known European VC until it popped up […]

Freight technology startup, Forto, which we most recently covered when it raised $50 million late last year, is upping the stakes. It’s now raised $240 million in a round led by Softbank Vision Fund 2 to expand its trade shipments between China and Europe. Forto manages shipping containers from origin to destination. Softbank is also […]

PlanetScale, the company behind the open-source Vitess database clustering system for MySQL that was first developed at YouTube, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B funding round led by Insight Partners, with participation from a16z and SignalFire. With this, the company has now raised a total of $55 million, according to […]

Lower, an Ohio-based home finance platform, announced today it has raised $100 million in a Series A funding round led by Accel. This round is notable for a number of reasons. First off, it’s a large Series A even by today’s standards. The financing also marks the previously bootstrapped Lower’s first external round of funding […]

Diversity and inclusion have become central topics in the world of work. In the best considerations, improving them is a holistic effort, involving not just conceiving of products with this in mind, but hiring and managing talent in a diverse and inclusive way, too. A new startup called Pequity that has built a product to […]

Vercel, the company behind the popular open-source Next.js React framework, today announced that it has raised a $102 million Series C funding round led by Bedrock Capital. Existing investors Accel, CRV, Geodesic Capital, Greenoaks Capital and GV also participated in this round, together with new investors 8VC, Flex Capital, GGV, Latacora, Salesforce Ventures and Tiger […]

It’s a big day for Kuaishou, TikTok’s largest rival in China. The Chinese short video company, known overseas for one of its video apps Kwai, announced it has sailed past the one billion monthly active user (MAU) mark. How big is that? Facebook’s MAUs stood at 2.85 billion as of March. TikTok was forecasted to […]

Israeli cloud security startup Mitiga has raised $25 million in a Series A round of funding as it moves to “completely change” the traditional incident response market. Mitiga, unlike other companies in the cybersecurity space, isn’t looking to prevent cyberattacks, which the startup claims are inevitable no matter how much protection is in place. Rather, […]

An international coalition of consumer protection, digital and civil rights organizations and data protection experts has added its voice to growing calls for a ban on what’s been billed as “surveillance-based advertising”. The objection is to a form of digital advertising that relies upon a massive apparatus of background data processing which sucks in information […]

Canadian early stage venture firm Golden Ventures has raised its fourth fund, a $100 million pool of capital that it will use to invest in between 20 to 25 companies, as well as a $20 million ‘Opportunities Fund’ that it will use to make follow-on investments in standout performers among its portfolio. This is also […]

Aircall has raised a $120 million Series D round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Following today’s funding round, the company has reached unicorn status, which means it has a valuation above $1 billion — this is the 16th French unicorn. The startup has been building a cloud-based phone system for call centers, support lines […]

It’s hard to keep up with the fundraising spree in China’s autonomous driving industry these days. Guangzhou- and California-based robotaxi company WeRide, which counts Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance as one of its strategic investors, has raised over $600 million in just under five months from its Series B and C financing rounds. The four-year-old upstart said in […]

Joyride, a Toronto-based company that provides white label apps, back-end analytics and multi-modal fleet management for shared micromobility startups, has raised $3.7 million — seed money that it says will help it reach a greater number of small, local operators. The company, which operates in more than 160 markets in every continent besides Antarctica, has […]

Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam are cofounders who met during Y Combinator’s 2012 summer batch and went on to cofound Forge, which helps accredited investors and institutions buy and sell private company shares and which most recently raised $150 million in new funding in May. Forge — originally known as Equidate — has taken off […]

The founders of Holy Grail, a two-year-old startup based in Mountain View, California, are taking a micro approach to solving the outsized problem of capturing carbon. The startup is prototyping a direct air carbon capture device that is modular and small — a departure from the dozens of projects in the U.S. and abroad that […]