Crunch Hype

Imagine if Google Docs was end-to-end encrypted so that not even Google could access your documents. That’s Skiff, in a nutshell. Skiff is a document editor with a similar look and feel to Google Docs, allowing you to write, edit and collaborate in real-time with colleagues with privacy baked in. Because the document editor is […]

Obie, which has developed an insurtech platform for landlords, has raised $10.7 million in a Series A funding round led by Battery Ventures. Thomvest Ventures, Funders Club, MetaProp and Second Century Ventures also participated in the financing. If this sounds like a niche offering, that’s because it is. Obie’s software specifically targets small-to-medium size apartment […]

Uptycs, a Boston-area startup that uses data to help understand and prevent security attacks, announced a $50 million Series C today, 11 months after announcing a $30 million Series B. Norwest Venture Partners led the round with participation from Sapphire Ventures and ServiceNow Ventures. Company co-founder and CEO Ganesh Pai says that he was still […]

India said on Wednesday that WhatsApp’s lawsuit challenging the new local IT rules is an “unfortunate last moment” attempt to prevent new regulations from going into effect in “a clear act of defiance,” and said the Facebook-owned service didn’t raise any specific objection about the traceability requirement in writing after October 2018. Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s Electronics […]

Axle recently announced it raised $10m in Series A financing after a stellar year of growth. The round was led by Crosslink Capital with participation from FJ Labs, Flexport, Tribeca Early Stage Partners, and others including existing investors Anthemis Group, Techstars, and Plug and Play Ventures. In a press release, the company points to the […]

APIs make the world go round in tech, but that also makes them a very key target for bad actors: as doorways into huge data troves and services, malicious hackers spent a lot of time looking for ways to pick their locks or just force them open when they’re closed, in order to access that […]

This morning Clara announced that it closed a new, $30 million funding round and secured a $50 million revolving debt facility. The startup, which provides corporate cards to Mexican companies, raised funds earlier this year when it was busy launching its product. Since then, growth has proven rapid for the Mexico City-based company. TechCrunch learned […]

A decade before investing outside of San Francisco and New York became trendy, entrepreneurs Jewel Burks, Justin Dawkins and Barry Givens were betting on Atlanta. Each experienced first-hand the biases that disproportionately hurts Black founders – while also being living proof of the wave of Black innovation and opportunity in their city. Last year, the […]

The high stakes game of chess (or, well, consolidation chicken) that is on-demand food delivery rolls on today with a little more territorial swapping in Europe: Barcelona-based Glovo has agreed to buy three of Berlin-based Delivery Hero’s food delivery brands in Central and Eastern Europe — with deals that it said are worth a total […]

Facebook has long been working on raising WhatsApp’s profile as a channel for businesses to interact with (and sell to) their customers. Today, a startup that has built a suite of tools for retailers and others to build and run those services over WhatsApp and other messaging platforms is announcing growth funding to address that […]

The relationships between banks and fintechs are multi-faceted. In some cases, they partner. In many cases, they compete. In other cases, one acquires or invests in the other. Well, today, an announcement by global payments giant Visa is aimed at helping facilitate banks and fintechs’ ability to work together. Specifically, Visa said today it has expanded […]

India has asked social media firms to provide an update on whether they have complied with its new IT rules “as soon as possible” and “preferably today” even as the new regulations are being legally challenged by WhatsApp. In a letter to “significant social media intermediaries” — which New Delhi defines as social media firms with […]

Along with the stock market, cryptocurrency is also seeing an uptick among retail investors in Indonesia. Pintu, a platform focused on first-time cryptocurrency buyers, announced today it has raised a $6 million Series A, led by Pantera Capital, Intudo Ventures and Coinbase Ventures. Other participants in the round included Blockchain.com Ventures, Castle Island Ventures and […]

The handling of user data in China has become a delicate matter for foreign tech companies operating in the country. Apple’s move to store the data of its Chinese customers in servers managed by a Chinese state-owned cloud service has stoked controversy in the West over the years. A recent New York Times investigation found […]

With more people than ever before going online to pay for things and pay each other, startups that are building the infrastructure that enables these actions continue to get a lot of attention. In the latest development, Paysend, a fintech that has built a mobile-based payments platform — which currently offers international money transfers, global […]

As of now, one fo the UK’s biggest and most active tech VCs has a new partner. Principal Colin Hanna has spearheaded several of Balderton’s deals in the past couple of years, and has now been appointed a Partner. But there’s a twist to this plot. He will be officially based in Berlin (where he’s […]

French startup Matera has announced that is has raised a new $43 million (€35 million) Series B funding round led by Mubadala Capital. Bpifrance, Burda Principal Investments as well as existing investors Index Ventures and Samaipata are also participating. The company is building a vertical SaaS for residential property management. In France, co-owners of the […]

WhatsApp has sued the Indian government challenging the second largest internet market’s new regulations that could allow authorities to make people’s private messages “traceable,” and conduct mass surveillance. The Facebook-owned instant messaging service, which identifies India as its biggest market by users, said it filed the lawsuit in the High Court of Delhi on Wednesday. […]

Xiaomi, one of China’s high-profile tech firms that fell in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, has been removed from a U.S. government blacklist that designated it as a Communist Chinese Military Company. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has vacated the Department of Defence’s designation of Xiaomi as a CCMC in […]

Investors are backing Koo, an Indian alternative to Twitter, with large size checks at a time when tension is brewing between the American social network and New Delhi. The Indian startup said on Wednesday it has raised $30 million in a financing round led by Tiger Global Management. Mirae Asset, IIFL’s venture capital fund and […]

Smart Eye, the publicly traded Swedish company that supplies driver monitoring systems for a dozen automakers, has acquired emotion-detection software startup Affectiva for $73.5 million in a cash-and-stock deal. Affectiva, which spun out of the MIT Media Lab in 2009, has developed software that can detect and understand human emotion, which Smart Eye is keen […]

The social video tool Promo.com just raised $16 million in a Series B round led by Getty Images, the company synonymous with stock imagery. Brands, creators or whoever else might need some quick and dirty video content can search Promo.com for what they need, just like they would use a stock photography service. Getty offers […]

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Tesla Model Y and Model 3 vehicles bound for North American customers are being built without radar, fulfilling a desire by CEO Elon Musk to only use cameras combined with machine learning to support its advanced driver assistance system and other active safety features. Like many of Tesla’s moves, the decision to stop using the […]

Lordstown Motors released its Q1 earnings yesterday, and the electric vehicle manufacturer is facing a few challenges.

We can introduce rules and regulations to ensure the wise use of powerful technologies. We’ve done it before, with cars, radiography and nuclear energy. What’s different about social media?

In all likelihood, you do not currently associate Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, essayist and cultural critic, with entrepreneurship. Serial entrepreneurs Brad Feld and Dave Jilk — whose friendship dates back to their college days at MIT — think that you should. Indeed, in the foreword of their new book, “The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A […]

Despite the company's putative performance not being very good thus far today, I can't really find much bad about the company's valuation and implied multiples.

Earlier this year, Turntable.fm’s founder Billy Chasen dusted off the old site and resurrected it for the pandemic age. I know I wasn’t the only one feeling a wistful pang of nostalgia for the service during the long, dull days of sheltering in place. And while March 2020 would have been the best time for […]

What’s it like raising a round in 2021? How has it changed over the last few months, as some glimmer of normalcy seems, at least, within reach? What do early-stage founders (and investors!) need to know about the current state of the industry? Few are in a better place to outline this than Avlok Kohli, […]

Washington, DC Attorney General Karl Racine announced a new antitrust suit against Amazon Tuesday, accusing the company of stifling competition by exerting control over third-party sellers. The lawsuit, filed in DC Superior Court, alleges that Amazon fixed prices on its massive online retail platform by blocking third-party sellers from selling their products for less elsewhere. […]

Whatnot exists with one primary goal in mind: to give people a place to buy and sell collectibles (like Pokémon cards, sports cards, pins, etc.) in a safe, authenticated way. The company started out with intentions of being a GOAT/StockX-style resale marketplace, where the products up for sale lived on neat little pages with row […]

Salesforce dominates the world of CRM today, but while it’s a popular and well-used tool for organizing contacts and information, it doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to helping salespeople and marketers sell better, especially when meetings are not in person. Today, one of the startups that has emerged to help fill the […]

Struum, the new streaming service from former Disney and Discovery execs, is today officially launching to the public. Unlike traditional on-demand streamers, such as Netflix, the Struum model is more akin to a “ClassPass for streaming,” as its plan is to aggregate content from smaller video services then provide access under its own subscription. Today, […]

One of the major issues facing companies these days isn’t finding relevant data, so much as moving it to where it’s needed. Enter Airbyte, an early stage startup that is building an open source data integration platform to help solve that problem. Today the company announced a $26 million Series A, just a couple of […]

Expensify may be the most ambitious software company ever to mostly abandon the Bay Area as the center of its operations. The startup’s history is tied to places representative of San Francisco: The founding team worked out of Peet’s Coffee on Mission Street for a few months, then crashed at a penthouse lounge near the […]

TechCrunch sat down with Brian Chesky, Airbnb co-founder and CEO, to discuss the future of travel and what it was like leading the world's biggest travel startup during a global pandemic.

Microsoft today announced PyTorch Enterprise, a new Azure service that provides developers with additional support when using PyTorch on Azure. It’s basically Microsoft’s commercial support offering for PyTorch. PyTorch is a Python-centric open-source machine learning framework with a focus on computer vision and natural language processing. It was originally developed by Facebook and is, at […]

Unlike in other years, this year’s Microsoft Build developer conference is not packed with huge surprises — but there’s one announcement that will surely make developers’ ears perk up: The company is now using OpenAI’s massive GPT-3 natural language model in its no-code/low-code Power Apps service to translate spoken text into code in its recently […]

At its annual Build conference today, Microsoft announced a couple of new features for version 91 of its Edge browser that, like so much at Build this year, aren’t earth-shattering (developer velocity!) but nice quality-of-life upgrades for its users. Since Microsoft develops Edge in the open, these may also feel familiar to those who keep […]

At its (virtual) Build conference today, Microsoft launched a number of new features, tools and services for developers who want to integrate their services with Teams, the company’s Slack competitor. It’s no secret that Microsoft basically looks at Teams, which now has about 145 million daily active users, as the new hub for employees to […]

At its Build developer conference today, Microsoft announced a new set of Azure services (in preview) that businesses can now run on virtually any CNCF-conformant Kubernetes cluster with the help of its Azure Arc multi-cloud service. Azure Arc, similar to tools like Google’s Anthos or AWS’s upcoming EKS Anywhere, provides businesses with a single tool […]

The highest chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has delivered a blow to anti-surveillance campaigners in Europe by failing to find that bulk interception of digital comms is inherently incompatible with human rights law — which enshrines individual rights to privacy and freedom of expression. However today’s Grand Chamber judgement underscores the […]

Even as 2021 shapes up to see a record number of launches, demand is growing fast. Companies like Phantom Space Corporation aim to fill it with mass manufacturing techniques never yet seen in the space industry. Now the company has acquired StratSpace, a satellite program designer and manager, Phantom Space announced Tuesday. It’s a critical […]

eYs3D Microelectronics, a fabless design house that focuses on end-to-end software and hardware systems for computer vision technology, has raised a $7 million Series A. Participants included ARM IoT Capital, WI Harper and Marubun Corporation, who will each serve as strategic investors. Based in Taipei, Taiwan, eYs3D was spun out of Etron, a fabless IC […]

Hyro, formerly Airbud, is today announcing the close of a $10.5 million Series A financing round led by Spero Ventures, with participation from Twilio, and Mindset Ventures. Existing investors Hanaco Ventures, Spider Capital and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator also participated in the round. Hyro is an enterprise application, currently aimed at the healthcare sector but with […]

We previously wrote about Propy using blockchain technology to smooth real-world real estate sales by introducing the concept of smart contracts. Propy was the first blockchain startup to make that work. Now the company is pushing the boundaries again, by auctioning a real apartment as an NFT. Although one might want to brush this aside […]

Flexibits, the company behind productivity apps Fantastical and Cardhop, is releasing a new version of Cardhop for both macOS and iOS. This is the second major version of the app and it adds new features, such as business card scanning, widgets, organizational charts and a deeper integration with Fantastical. Cardhop is a clever take on […]

In the latest chunky funding round out of Europe, UK-based email security startup, Tessian, has closed $65 million in Series C funding. The startup applies machine learning to build individual behavior models for enterprise email use that aims to combat human error by flagging problematic patterns which could signify risky stuff is happening — such […]

In a world defined by tons of noise and little signal, startups that make it easier for consumers to make a choice just make sense. Career Karma helps students pick a tech bootcamp, Stackin’ helps millennials navigate the world of neobank and savings apps, and a new Boston-based company is helping doctors keep track of […]