Crunch Hype

Tapping the tiny screen of the Apple Watch with precision has a certain level of fundamental difficulty, but for some people with disabilities it’s genuinely impossible. Apple has remedied this with a new mode called “Assistive Touch” that detects hand gestures to control a cursor and navigate that way. The feature was announced as part […]

You may not be familiar with the term “dark patterns” but the manipulative design phenomenon is ubiquitous in the apps and services we use every day. Dark patterns nudge consumers to make choices that enrich companies, usually at their own expense. That can look like misleading wording that leads someone to sign their personal data […]

Part of learning to be an engineer is understanding the tools you’ll have to work with — voltmeters, spectrum analyzers, things like that. But why use two, or eight for that matter, where one will do? The Moku:Go combines several commonly used tools into one compact package, saving room on your workbench or classroom while […]

Google has announced a series of updates soon coming to Google Maps, as part of the company’s larger goal of delivering over 100 A.I.-powered improvements to the platform by year-end. Among the new improvements, detailed during Google I/O’s developer conference this week, are new routing updates, Live View enhancements, an expansion of detailed street maps, […]

Emeritus plans to acquire iD Tech, a STEM education service for children, which brings a whole different set of customers to its umbrella.

The TC Disrupt 2021 super early bird deal took our best deal in its beak and flew the coop. But you can still buy a Startup Alley Pass and exhibit in our virtual expo area at a great price. Take advantage of our early bird deal, cross an item off your to-do list and keep […]

Google is resuming work on reducing the granularity of information presented in user-agent strings on its Chrome browser, it said today — picking up an effort it put on pause last year, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it said it wanted to avoid piling extra migration burden on the web ecosystem […]

Tess Hatch, vice president and partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 as a judge for our Startup Battlefield competition. By the way startups, you can still apply now until May 27 to take part in the competition here! At Bessemer, Tess spearheads frontier tech investments, including the scaling and […]

Acquisitions are an important element of the startup ecosystem, and current proposed legislation would have a significant negative effect on the U.S. entrepreneurial environment.

Bitcoin, Ethereum and a host of Altcoins suffered massive drops Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, erasing months of gains and hundreds of billions in market cap. The overall crypto market shrunk more than 20% over the past 24 hours according to crypto tracker CoinMarketCap. What’s behind the drop? Well, some may say the market was […]

Chrome, at least in its experimental Canary version on Android (and only for users in the U.S.), is getting an interesting update in the coming weeks that brings back RSS, the once-popular format for getting updates from all the sites you love in Google Reader and similar services. In Chrome, users will soon see a […]

Netlify, the startup that’s bringing a micro services approach to building websites, announced today that it has acquired YC alum FeaturePeek. The two companies did not share the purchase price. With FeaturePeek, the company gets a major upgrade in its design review capability. While Netlify has had a previewing capability called Deploy Previews in the […]

This morning, we're going over Squarespace's recently disclosed Q2 and full-2021 guidance. Then we'll ask how its expectations compare to its reference price-defined pre-trading valuation.

The three co-founders of The GIST are all themselves sports fans, but realized in 2018 that sports media in general left a lot to be desired when it comes to catering to audiences outside of the traditional, male-dominated stereoptyical sports audience. So they started a new kind of sports media enterprise, taking a risk on […]

Ro, a digital elective care and telemedicine provider last valued at $5 billion, announced today that it has acquired Modern Fertility, a reproductive health company founded in 2017. Axios estimates it sold for $225 million in a majority-stock deal. TechCrunch has learned that the deal was “north” of $225 milliion. Ro, also founded in 2017, has […]

Construction technology may not be the sexiest of industries, but it is one where tremendous opportunity lies — considering it has historically lagged in productivity. And, lags in productivity means project delays, which typically costs everyone involved more time and more money. There are a number of larger players in the space (think Procore, PlanGrid […]

Ampere, the server startup that is betting on bringing Arm-based chips to the data center and edge, is hosting its annual media day today. With the 80-core Altara and 128-core Altra Max, the company already offers a platform that can rival and outperform those of competitors like Intel and AMD in many common scenarios — […]

The podcasting world remains one of the most vibrant formats in media (and I am not just saying that since the Equity crew won a Webby yesterday for our not-that-humble podcast). Its openness, diversity, freedom, and ease-of-authoring has broadened the medium to all sorts of hosts on every subject imaginable. We experience that dynamism and […]

All batteries degrade over time. For automakers, fleet managers and other companies, the crux — and key to profitability — is knowing when they will. But it’s surprisingly difficult to understand the health and status of a battery without extensive and expensive testing, which isn’t always possible once a battery is in a vehicle. German […]

Britive, an early-stage startup that is trying to bring privileged access control to a multi-cloud world, announced a $10 million Series A this morning. Crosslink Capital led the investment, with participation from previous investors Upfront Ventures and One Way Ventures. The company helps automate permissioning across multiple cloud vendors and software services, whether that involves […]

If you’ve lived in a few places in your life then you probably have experienced the feeling of moving into a nice new apartment or house — a blank canvas of rooms and spaces filled with possibility. Most times, unless you’ve got that money money, you then fill it up with all of your same, […]

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic and go deep. This time Natasha and Alex corralled TechCrunch transportation editor Kirsten Korosec to talk to us about the endless parade of EV SPACs, […]

As energy prices continue to rise and more home owners look to the viability of things like solar, consumers will no doubt be searching for more ways to control their usage. Founded by ex-Tesla engineer Arch Rao, Span looks to address these questions, while asking, in a world of smart home devices, why the end-user […]

Blue Origin is taking a novel approach to selling the first available private spaceflight seat on its New Shepard rocket, with an auction that will award the spot to the highest bidder. The company used a sealed bidding process for the first part of the contest, but it is now revealing the amount of the […]

A massive raise for the 3D printing industry this morning, as Massachusetts-based Formlabs has announced a $150 million Series E. The round, led by Softbank’s Vision Fund 2, effectively doubles the value of the unicorn to $2 billion dollars. The news comes during a kind of resurgence as the once-beleaguered industry is seeing a massive […]

The real estate sales market has been in an upswing this year, and today a startup that’s addressing one of homeowners’ biggest needs — repair and maintenance services, and specifically the stress of sorting these out when things break down — is announcing some funding on the heels of strong growth. Super — which has […]

In the past few weeks, we’ve heard Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace and Hippo’s Assaf Wand discuss the biggest opportunities in prop tech, heard why Scale AI’s Alex Wang and Accel’s Dan Levine think that unconventional VC deals can be the best option and taken a stroll through the Poshmark Series A deck with CEO Manish […]

Unbounce, a Vancouver startup best known for helping marketers create automated landing pages, added a new wrinkle this morning when it announced it has acquired Snazzy.ai, an early stage automated copywriting startup. The two companies did not share the terms. Unbounce Chief Strategy Officer Tamara Grominsky says that her company focuses on helping customers convert […]

At the end of March, TechCrunch reported that buzzy startup Pipe — which aims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue” — had raised $150 million in a round of funding that values the fintech at $2 billion. Well, that deal has closed and in the end, Miami-based Pipe confirms that it has actually raised $250 […]

European startup studio eFounders has now been around for 10 years. And because a birthday sounds like a good opportunity to share some metrics, the portfolio companies have reached a valuation of $2 billion together — only 18 months after reaching $1 billion. eFounders says it is focused on building the future of work. In practical […]

End-to-end encrypted email provider ProtonMail has officially confirmed it’s passed 50 million users globally as it turns seven years old. It’s a notable milestone for a services provider that intentionally does not have a data business — opting instead for a privacy pledge based on zero access architecture that means it has no way to […]

After IFA became one of an extremely small number of in-person trade shows in 2020, the gfu Consumer & Home Electronics GmbH is pulling the plug on this year’s event. Initially planned for September 3-7 at the Messe in Berlin, the large-scale consumer electronics trade show is going on hiatus. Among other concerns, organizer are […]

The past year has been utterly devastating to the music industry generally, and live music in particular. Artists who make a living touring have been forced to find alternative ways to make ends meet, while those among us who once frequented live events have been looking for ways to plug the hole created by wide-scale […]

If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance you have a LinkedIn profile with your digital resume and hundreds — if not thousands — of professional connections. But how many of those people do you actually know well, and, more importantly, do you ever connect with them and meet others from their networks? “You […]

With security top of mind in many companies these days, especially given how many staff work at home, there is one area that remains chronically ignored: that of the world of APIs which power all of the platforms we all use every day. Now, a significant player in the cybersecurity of APIs is super-charging its […]

The Indian government is not pleased with WhatsApp’s new privacy policy. The nation’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has once again directed the Facebook-owned company to withdraw the planned update. In a letter to WhatsApp on Tuesday — which was read to TechCrunch — MeitY has given the popular instant messaging provider seven […]

Walmart-backed Indian payments services firm PhonePe is in advanced stages of talks to acquire Samsung-backed Indus OS, a startup that operates an eponymous third-party Android app store, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The deal values Noida-headquartered Indus OS at $60 million, the source said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. The […]

Project management has long been a people-led aspect of the workplace, but that has slowly been changing. Trends in automation, big data, and AI have not only ushered in a new wave of project management applications, but they have led to a stronger culture of people willing to use them. Today, one of the startups […]

Payroll automation is not exactly the sexiest of startup areas but it’s a pretty decent business. The larger startup in the space is Payfit which has raised upwards of $208.4M to do something that lots of companies find quite painful. But Payfit does a lot of other things as well, potentially leaving it exposed. Now […]

A.I.-powered voice transcription service Otter.ai wants to make it even easier for its business users to record their meetings. The company is today introducing a new feature, Otter Assistant, which can automatically join the Zoom meetings on your calendar, transcribe the conversations, and share the notes with other participants. Though Otter.ai is already integrated with […]

In the early days of social media, all things seemed possible. Twitter was this weird reboot of blogs, with a social layer atop an RSS feed that gave authority to last in/first out musings by providing data not just about read or unread but shared by who. You could take that authority data and rank […]

The Kia EV6, an all-electric crossover that kicks off the automaker’s Plan S strategy to shift away from internal combustion engines and toward EVs, will come to the U.S. early next year, the company said Tuesday evening during a live streamed event in New York. The EV6 is the first dedicated battery-electric vehicle to built […]

The University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC), a deep-tech investment firm, announced the first close of its fifth fund, which is expected to total 30 billion JPY (or about $275 million USD) by June 2021. UTEC currently has about $780 million in total assets under management, and says this makes it one of the […]

Fintech startup StudentFinance — which allows educational institutions to offer success-based financing for students — has raised a $5.3 million (€4.5 million) seed round co-led by Giant Ventures and Armilar Venture Partners. It’s now raised $6.6 million total, to date. StudentFinance launched in Spain first, followed by Germany and Finland, with the U.K. planned this […]

By the end of the year, more than 10 car models from Volvo, GM, Renault and Polestar will be powered by the Android Automotive operating system — and all of the built-in Google apps and services that come with it. Now, the company is making it easier for third-party developers to bring their navigation, EV […]

Roofer Pro. Roof Snap. Acculynx. There’s suddenly no shortage of companies offering software to make easier the lives of roofers and their customers. Among these is Roofr, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based, 31-person sales platform for roofing contractors that just raised $4.25 million in post-seed funding led by Bullpen Capital, with participation from Avidbank and previous […]

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This year’s I/O event from Google was heavy on the “we’re building something cool” and light on the “here’s something you can use or buy tomorrow.” But there were also some interesting surprises from the semi-live event held in and around the company’s Mountain View campus. Read on for all the interesting bits. Android 12 […]

Google offered an update on its TV platform, Android OS, at its Google I/O developer event on Tuesday. The company said its Android TV OS now reaches over 80 million monthly active devices, including through its new experience Google TV for Chromecast, as well as other platforms like smart TVs. The company also previewed a […]

Düsseldorf-based proptech startup Dabbel is using AI to drive energy efficiency savings in commercial buildings. It’s developed cloud-based self-learning building management software that plugs into the existing building management systems (BMS) — taking over control of heating and cooling systems in a way that’s more dynamic than legacy systems based on fixed set-point resets. Dabbel […]