Crunch Hype

After experiencing hardship in their home countries, refugees have unparalleled drive to make a better life for themselves, their families and their communities -- which helps lift our entire economy.

This weekend, all of your friends morphed one by one into animated, Pixar-inspired characters. This isn’t a fever dream, and you’re not alone. On Thursday, Snapchat released a Cartoon 3D Style Lens, which uses AR to make you look like a background character from “Frozen.” Naturally, even though TikTok’s own AR cartoon effects aren’t quite […]

Fraud protection startup nSure AI has raised $6.8 million in seed funding, led by DisruptiveAI, Phoenix Insurance, AXA-backed venture builder Kamet, Moneta Seeds and private investors. The round will help the company bolster the predictive AI and machine learning algorithms that power nSure AI’s “first of its kind” fraud protection platform. Prior to this round, the […]

Mac Reddin, the co-founder and CEO of Commsor, met the first professional investor for his company’s $16 million Series A on Lunch Club, a marketplace for 1:1 video introductions. Commsor, which sees itself as an operating system for community managers, then experienced firsthand the benefit of matching people within similar industries in an engaging, online […]

When Cory Siskind finished school, she was dropped into a high-stakes job helping large multinational corporations manage their operational security in Mexico City, with almost no relevant lived experience. Eventually, she realized that this was more or less par for the course in the corporate security field, which lagged behind other mission-critical enterprise services, like […]

If you’re like me, you spent the weekend longing for the mixed bag that is downtown Los Angeles during E3. I’ve got fond memories of fish tacos, The Last Bookstore, watching playoff basketball in garishly lit hotel lobbies and, of course, video game press conference after video game press conference. For a second year in […]

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 Point B. Welp, the mobility event is over and we had loads of interesting interviews — and anyone with an Extra Crunch subscription can access the videos. […]

Andrea Campos has struggled with depression since she was eight years old. Over the years, she’s tried all sorts of therapies — from behavioral to pharmacotherapy. In 2017, when Campos was in her early 20s, she learned to program and created a system to help manage her mental health. It started as a personal project, […]

Brazil is a country riven with economic contradictions. It has one of the largest and most profitable banking industries in Latin America, and is among the world’s most developed financial markets.

For most startups, the hardest early challenge is identifying a market and a product to serve it. That wasn’t the case for Nubank CEO David Velez, who knew the potential for success in Brazil.

David Velez needed to fill two key co-founding roles to begin building Nubank — he needed a CTO to lead the engineering side of the business, as Velez didn’t have an engineering background.

It’s easy to assume the name Nubank refers to “new bank,” but that’s not what the founders were going for. The word “nu” in Portuguese means “naked,” and Velez wanted the name to reflect his vision.

Nubank’s first office, on California Street in the Brooklin neighborhood of São Paulo, makes for a great beginning to the company’s story.

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 morning coffee chat with you that is all about the weekend, what to expect this week, and some funding rounds you may have missed. I’m subbing in for Alex Wilhelm today, who is […]

Beleaguered electric vehicle startup Lordstown Motors’ stock shares have taken another hit after the company said Monday that CEO Steve Burns and CFO Julio Rodriguez have resigned, just a few weeks after Burns was reassuring investors of the company’s bright future. Lordstown Motors’ Lead Independent Director Angela Strand was appointed executive chairwoman to oversee the […]

A number of startups (eg, here, here, here and here) have fashioned themselves as the “Stripe for identity verification”, providing an easy way for developers to integrate ID authentication into a platform. Today, Stripe is stepping in to fill that need itself: the company is launching a new product called Stripe Identity — a self-serve […]

In January, former Uber executive Liz Meyerdirk announced that she has taken over as chief executive of The Pill Club. The company, which offers an online birth control prescription and delivery service to hundreds of thousands of women, had hit record revenues, crossing $100 million in annual run rate for the first time in its […]

Dataiku is going downstream with a new product today called Dataiku Online. As the name suggests, Dataiku Online is a fully managed version of Dataiku. It lets you take advantage of the data science platform without going through a complicated setup process that involves a system administrator and your own infrastructure. If you’re not familiar […]

It’s easier than ever to build a product and sell it around the United States, or the world. But if you want to do so without incurring the wrath of any particular state, or nation-state, you’d best have your tax matters in order. This is why Stripe’s news last week that it has built tax-focused […]

Because of the pandemic, we’re all a lot more familiar with remote working than we used to be, whether we like it or not. But the remote tools of the pre-pandemic era – Slack, Trello, Zoom, Asana, etc, etc, etc – are, if we admit it to ourselves, barely scratching the surface of what we […]

European privacy group noyb, which recently kicked off a major campaign targeting rampant abuse of the region’s cookie consent rules, has followed up by publishing a technical proposal for an automated browser-level signal it believes could go even further to tackle the friction generated by endless ‘your data choices’ pop-ups. Its proposal is for an […]

Niantic has encouraged the world to roam the streets as Pokémon trainers and wizards… next up? Time to transform and roll out. 80’s mega toy Transformers is the latest IP to partner with Niantic to build a map-heavy, geolocation-centric game. Details are still a bit light, but here’s just about everything we know: It’ll be […]

Google today announced that it is making Workspace, the service formerly known as G Suite (and with a number of new capabilities), available to everyone, including consumers on free Google accounts. The core philosophy behind Workspace is to enable deeper collaboration between users. You can think of it as the same Google productivity apps you’re […]

As ubiquitous as Google Docs has become in the last year alone, a major criticism often overlooked by the countless workplaces who use it is that it isn’t end-to-end encrypted, allowing Google — or any requesting government agency — access to a company’s files. But Google is finally addressing that key complaint with a round […]

Motorway, is a UK startup that allows professional car dealers to bid in an auction for privately-owned cars for sale. The startup has had rapid success by removing a lot of friction in the process. It’s now raised £48m / $67.7m in a Series B round led by Index Ventures, along with new investors BMW i Ventures […]

Immersive Labs, a platform which teaches cyber security skills corporate employees by using real, up-to-date threat intelligence in a “gamified” way, has closed a $75 million Series C funding round led by new investors Insight Partners alongside Menlo Ventures, Citi Ventures and existing investor Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The investment will be used to scale […]

The Gang or a subset did a Clubhouse, longer than a regular show by a good third. The audio only structure lacked the visual cues that distinguish between irony and bad manners, but otherwise it felt familiar if not comfortable. I can’t remember what we talked about, only that I seemed a little more emphatic […]

Tristan Abbey Contributor Share on Twitter Tristan Abbey is President of Comarus Analytics LLC. He served as senior policy advisor at the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and as director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. No single question bedevils American energy and environmental policy more than nuclear waste. No, […]

Blue Origin has its winning bidder for its first ever human spaceflight, and the winner will pay $28 million for the privilege of flying aboard the company’s debut private astronaut mission. The winning bid came in today during a live auction, which saw 7,600 registered bidders, from 159 countries compete for the spot. This was […]

In a world of talking points and corporate jargon, opinions are refreshing — and Expensify CEO and founder David Barrett is full of them. One of his earliest lessons in life, for example, was that basically everyone is wrong about basically everything. If instilling that at a young age doesn’t force you to become an […]

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

The announcement of new iPad software at this year’s WWDC conference had an abnormally large expectation hung on it. The iPad lineup, especially the larger iPad Pro, has kept up an impressively frantic pace of hardware innovation over the past few years. In that same time frame, the software of the iPad, especially its ability […]

Apple went big on security and privacy during its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote this week, showcasing features from on-device Siri audio processing to a new privacy dashboard for iOS that makes it easier than ever to see which apps are collecting your data and when. While typically vocal about security during the Memoji-filled, two-hour-long(!) […]

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 […]

The tools and technology to move forward, from machine learning to sensors to nano materials, are more powerful and affordable than ever, allowing for higher ambition and far faster time to market.

Edtech giant Byju’s has become the most valuable startup in India after raising about $350 million in a new tranche of investment from UBS Group and Zoom founder Eric Yuan, Blackstone and others that valued the Bangalore-based firm at $16.5 billion (post-money). In a new filing, Byju’s revealed that scores of investors including Abu Dhabi […]

Sean O’Sullivan, the founder of the global venture outfit SOSV, has slowly but steadily built up a sizable operation over the years. SOSV started off as a family office, investing the capital of O’Sullivan after he cofounded two companies, including MapInfo, an outfit that went public in 1994 before Pitney Bowes acquired it years later, […]

Electric air mobility is gaining elevation. But there's going to be some turbulence ahead.

Michael Brown, a longtime general partner with Battery Ventures, was just elected to the role of chairman of the National Venture Capital Association three years after joining its board of directors. Earlier this week, we caught up with Brown to ask about his new, year-long role with the 48-year-old trade group — and what issues […]

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AutoX, Momenta and WeRide took the stage at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 to discuss the state of robotaxi startups in China and their relationships with local governments in the country.

Facebook has bought several virtual reality game studios over the past couple of years, and they added one more to their portfolio Friday with the acquisition of Seattle-based BigBox VR. The studio’s major title, “Population: One,” was one of the big post-launch releases for Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 headset and is a pretty direct Fortnite […]

This morning, Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm dug into the EU insurtech market, interviewing European VCs and collating the biggest recent rounds to take the temperature of the waters across the pond.

Your first marketer will have an outsized impact on team dynamics as well as the overall strategic direction of the brand, product and company.

Mate Rimac, the founder and CEO of Croatian electric hypercar and components developer Rimac Automobili, started a separate company nearly three years ago to work on electric robotaxis. Little is known about the company, which still operates in stealth. Rimac told TechCrunch this week at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 he hopes to keep this separate […]

NASA said Friday it was seeking proposals from commercial companies for two new private crewed missions to the International Space Station. The first mission would likely take place between fall of 2022 and mid-2023. The second one would follow sometime between mid-2023 and the end of 2023. Private astronaut missions are a relatively recent initiative […]

In Friday acquisition news, Shopify shared today that they’ve acquired the team from augmented reality startup Primer, which makes an app that lets users visualize what tile, wallpaper or paint will look like on surfaces inside their home. In a blog post, co-founders Adam Debreczeni and Russ Maschmeyer write that Primer’s app and services will […]

Didi filed to go public in the United States last night, providing a look into how the Chinese ride-hailing company's business weathered the pandemic.

French startup Lydia is better known as the dominant app for peer-to-peer payments. But the company has been adding more features, such as a debit card, account aggregation, donations, money pots and more. This week, the company is adding savings accounts thanks to a partnership with French fintech startup Cashbee. If you aren’t familiar with […]

Now that we have your attention, know this: Prices go up tonight on passes to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising. If you’re an early-stage founder (pre-seed through Series A), don’t miss this chance to save $100 on our two-day virtual event dedicated to helping you build a stronger startup. It’s one of the […]