Crunch Hype

Boston-based Filtered.ai has raised a $7 million round to accelerate its hiring cadence, and built out the go-to-market model for its its engineering and developer-focused hiring service, it recently announced. TechCrunch caught up with the company to discuss not only why it decided to leave bootstrapping behind, but also to dig into how its service […]

Rivian said that deliveries of the R1T Launch Edition, the limited edition release of its first series of “electric adventure vehicles,” will be delayed by a month, according to an update on its website. Customers who preordered can now expect to start receiving their pickup trucks in July instead of June, with Launch Edition deliveries […]

mmhmm, the communications platform developed by Phil Libin and the All Turtles team, is getting a variety of new features. According to Libin, there are parts of communication today that can not only match what we get in the real world, but exceed it. That’s how this next iteration of mmhmm is meant to deliver. […]

Most marketers today know how to send targeted communications to customers, and there are many tools to help, but when it comes to sending personalized in-house messages, there aren’t nearly as many options. Pyn, an early stage startup based in Australia wants to change that, and today it announced an $8 million seed round. Andreesen […]

Acorns feels like a company going public a year or two early, which is a bit of the point of SPACs, frankly.

Europe’s lead data protection regulator has opened two investigations into EU institutions’ use of cloud services from U.S. cloud giants, Amazon and Microsoft, under so called Cloud II contracts inked earlier between European bodies, institutions and agencies and AWS and Microsoft. A separate investigation has also been opened into the European Commission’s use of Microsoft […]

Before the pandemic rendered us homebound, the houseplant industry was already in bloom. One year sequestered in our homes later, and our living spaces have flourished into our personal indoor gardens. An app that uses machine learning to help people care for their plants, Greg announced today that it has received $5.4 million in seed […]

Airspace Link is today announcing it raised a $10 million Series A from Altos Ventures, Thales, and others. The Detroit, Michigan-based startup anticipates using the additional funds to expand its domestic offering and expand overseas. CEO Michael Healander explains to TechCrunch that the company sees airspaces as digital infrastructure lacking critical regulations. “Today you have […]

Bird is rolling out a next-generation scooter with a bigger, longer-range battery and a diagnostic monitoring system to New York and Berlin this summer, as the micromobility startup seeks out ways to improve its margins and ultimately become profitable. The Bird Three, which is already available in Tel Aviv, is designed to last longer and […]

Trying to buy a house in a competitive market is perhaps one of the most stressful things an adult can go through. Competing with a bunch of people all putting offers on a house that fly off the market in a matter of days is not fun. One startup that is trying to give home […]

The digital health space continues cooking on gas: Berlin-based Ada Health has closed a $90M Series B round of funding led by Leaps by Bayer, the impact investment arm of the German multinational pharma giant, Bayer AG. Other investors in the round include Samsung Catalyst Fund, Vitruvian Partners, Inteligo Bank, F4 and Mutschler Ventures. The […]

Wayflyer, a revenue-based financing platform for e-commerce merchants, has raised $76 million in a Series A funding round led by Left Lane Capital. “Partners” of DST Global, QED Investors, Speedinvest and Zinal Growth — the family office of Guillaume Pousaz (founder of Checkout.com) — also put money in the round. The raise comes just after […]

Twitter called the recent visit by police to its Indian offices a form of intimidation and said it was concerned by some of the requirements in New Delhi’s new IT rules. Speaking for the first time since a special squad of Delhi police made a surprise visit to two of its offices on Monday, Twitter […]

Vidya Madhavan always wanted to be in business. Growing up in India, she thought she might be in the business of running a factory, given the power and influence of outfits like Tata Group, the Indian multinational conglomerate. She certainly had an affinity for school, graduating at the top of her high school class, nabbing […]

Can an app improve your romantic relationships? The founders behind Paired, a “relationship care” app for couples, believe it can. And since launching in October, with $1M to kick things off, they’ve convinced 5,000+ coupled-up others to try their custom blend of partner quizzes, “relationship satisfaction” tracking, and audio tips from experts — to try […]

French startup Agicap has raised a new $100 million funding round led by Greenoaks. With today’s funding round, the company has reached a valuation of more than $500 million (€415 million). Agicap is building a service that lets you track your cash flow in real time, build reports and get forecasts. In addition to Greenoaks, […]

Ford is increasing its investment in its electric vehicle future to $30 billion by 2025, up from a previous spend of $22 billion by 2023. The company announced the fresh cashflow into its EV and battery development strategy, dubbed Ford+, during an investor day on Tuesday. The company said it expects 40% of its global […]

Eight months after Lucid Motors showed off the final version of its all-electric Air sedan, the company has finally revealed the in-cabin tech — from the curved 34-inch display and second touchscreen to the underlying software, integrated apps and Amazon Alexa voice assistant — that drivers and passengers will use once the automaker begins deliveries […]

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Would you pay for an upgraded Twitter? That’s a question Twitter will soon answer when it rolls out a new subscription service that will present users with an expanded feature set available only to paid subscribers. This is a different offering than Twitter’s previously announced Super Follow subscription plans, which will allow users to subscribe […]

Drug discovery is a large and growing field, encompassing both ambitious startups and billion-dollar Big Pharma incumbents. Engine Biosciences is one of the former, a Singaporean outfit with an expert founding crew and a different approach to the business of finding new therapeutics, and it just raised $43 million to keep growing. Digital drug discovery […]

Tesla has installed its 200,000th Powerwall, the company’s home battery storage product, the company said in a tweet on Wednesday. Tesla’s CFO Zachary Kirkhorn told investors during a first-quarter earnings call in April that Tesla is continuing to work through a “multi-quarter backlog on Powerwall,” suggesting that the volume of installations will continue to soar […]

"The deck has to show that you're solving an important problem, that you've got the path to an important solution, that there is a big market opportunity, and that your team is positioned to execute."

OpenAI is launching a $100 million startup fund, which it calls the OpenAI Startup Fund, though which it and its partners will invest in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems (and productivity). Among those partners and investors in the fund is Microsoft, at whose Build conference OpenAI founder Sam Altman announced the news. In a […]

I do recruitment for tech startups. With a surge of VC investing, many startups are urgently hiring. Which visas offer the quickest options for international talent?

TechCrunch Disrupt has always been opportunity central, but that’s never been truer than this year at Disrupt 2021 (September 21-23) — especially for early-stage founders who exhibit in Startup Alley. Here’s why. Using Hopin — our virtual platform — Startup Alley exhibitors can schedule and host interactive product demos via livestream. Every exhibiting startup receives […]

The European Union plans to beef up its response to online disinformation, with the Commission saying today it will step up efforts to combat harmful but not illegal content — including by pushing for smaller digital services and adtech companies to sign up to voluntary rules aimed at tackling the spread of this type of manipulative […]

Chinese-backed and Africa-focused fintech platform OPay is in talks to raise up to $400 million, The Information reported today. The fundraising is coming two years after OPay announced two funding rounds in 2019 — $50 million in June and $120 million Series B in November. The $170 million raised so far came from mainly Chinese […]

“Headless” commerce — a set of tools that companies can use with their own customized front ends to build apps for selling goods and services — have become a huge business, not just because companies are seeing a bigger demand than ever before for people buying online, but because those companies are generally more focused […]

The last time humans visited the moon in 1972, they got around on a relatively simple battery-powered vehicle. As NASA prepares for the next crewed mission to the moon, it’s looking to give the lunar rover an upgrade. Lockheed Martin and General Motors said Wednesday they’re working together to develop a next-generation lunar vehicle designed […]

Prismic, a company building a content management system, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round. While the startup has been profitable since 2016, it wants to unlock the full potential of its headless CMS by iterating more quickly on its product. Aglaé Ventures and Eurazeo are co-leading today’s funding round. Headless content management […]

When Merlin Labs founder Matt George was learning to fly in Vermont, he had a close call with a Jet Blue aircraft that was coming into Burlington airport. It was “an unsettling experience,” he told TechCrunch, but one that stuck with him. A few years later, after the transportation company he founded Bridgj was acquired […]

Security researchers say at-home exercise giant Peloton and its closest rival Echelon were not stripping user-uploaded profile photos of their metadata, in some cases exposing users’ real-world location data. Almost every file, photo or document contains metadata, which is data about the file itself, such as how big it is, when it was created, and […]

This morning Datacy, a startup with its headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, announced that it has closed $2.4 million in new funding to continue building its consumer-friendly data collection and monetization service. The company is effectively an argument that the preceding sentence is possible. Datacy is a tool that allows individuals to collect their browsing data, […]

Databricks launched its fifth open source project today, a new tool called Delta Sharing designed to be a vendor neutral way to share data with any cloud infrastructure or SaaS product, so long as you have the appropriate connector. It’s part of the broader Databricks open source Delta Lake project. As CEO Ali Ghodsi points […]

Another day, another mobility SPAC deal. This time, it’s Tritium, a Brisbane-based developer and producer of direct current fast EV chargers that is taking the SPAC path to the public market in a deal valuing the company at $1.2 billion. Tritium said Wednesday it will be heading to the Nasdaq via a merger with special […]

Rock picking is probably not the first thing you think about when you think agricultural robotics. Understandably so. There are a number of companies out there looking to automate aspects like fruit and vegetable picking, weeding and field tending, but rocks are still a major issue for many farmers. They’re big, they’re heavy and they […]

Certain industries were hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic than others, especially in its early days. Small businesses, including retailers and restaurants, were negatively impacted by lockdowns and the resulting closures. They had to adapt quickly to survive. If they didn’t use much technology before, they were suddenly being forced to, as so many things […]

Edtech has realized it needs to build for the TikTok generation. It’s part of the reason we’re seeing a rise in supplemental, aspirational companies such as Outschool and Masterclass, which both lean on snappy editing, engaging content, and most of all, on demand learning. But a nut that is yet to be cracked is how […]

Kodiak Robotics, the U.S.-based self-driving truck startup, is partnering with South Korean conglomerate SK to explore the possibility of deploying its autonomous vehicle technology in Asia. The ultimate aim of the partnership is to sell and distribute Kodiak’s self-driving technology in the region. Kodiak will examine how it can use SK’s products, components and technology […]

Instagram today announced it’s adding a new feature to help connect online shoppers to product drops through its app. Drops, which are a newer e-commerce trend, help sellers create buzz for forthcoming products in the days and weeks leading up to their availability. The products themselves are often only available in limited supplies or for […]

The Flywire IPO is neat from a financial perspective and notable in that it's a Boston exit as opposed to yet another New York or San Francisco-based flotation.

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, Alex and Natasha dug into Danny’s latest mega-project: A long, fascinating, and deeply-reported series into the world of disaster tech. It’s all about the market, startups, and their backers, so it was perfect fare for […]

Treet, a company rethinking the resale retail market, announced the close of a $2.8 million seed round today. The financing comes from Bling Capital, Matchstick Ventures, Techstars, BABM Ventures, BBG Ventures, Green Meadow, Interlace Ventures, V1.VC, and Alante Capital. Despite the fact that selling old clothes is the most sustainable, and most financially beneficial way […]

Insurtech is picking up steam in a big way, but startup Parametrix thinks there is still plenty of room left to innovate. The company, which today announced the close of a $17.5 million funding round, offers insurance policies for companies who rely on third-party cloud providers, ecommerce services, payment gateways and CRM systems. In essence, […]

We don’t hear as much these days about “Zoom fatigue” as we did in the first months after the Covid-19 pandemic kicked off last year, but what’s less clear is whether people became more tolerant to the medium, or if they’d found ways of coping with it better, or if they were hopeful that tools […]

The big media consolidation continues — day after rumors swirled around Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, the online massive retailer confirmed today that it will be acquiring the nearly 100-year-old studio for a cool $8.45 billion. The deal is another big step toward bolster Amazon’s fight in the streaming wars, with some 4,000 films. The list […]

Facebook this week will begin to publicly roll out the option to hide Likes on posts across both Facebook and Instagram, following earlier tests beginning in 2019. The project, which puts the decision about Likes in the hands of the company’s global user base, had been in development for years, but was deprioritized due to […]

Lightrun, a startup that helps developers debug their live production code, today announced that it has raised a $23 million Series A round led by Insight Partners. Glilot Capital Partners, which led the company’s $4 million seed round, also participated in this round. What makes Lightrun stand out in a sea of monitoring startups is […]

Another sizable raise for a pet (cats and dogs) tracking company this morning. Austria-based Tractive has announced a $35 million Series A, led by Guidepost Growth Equity. The round is the company’s first since 2013, when its GPS-based tracker first hit the market. Along with the funding round, the company is also announcing its official […]