Crunch Hype

Enterprise-focused Alchemist Accelerator is back with another one. Today marks its 27th Demo Day, with more than two dozen companies expected to take the (virtual) stage. Coming in at 25 companies, this is Alchemist’s largest cohort so far. Meanwhile, Alchemist Director Ravi Belani tells me that applications to the accelerator have grown by more than […]

They say for every door that opens another closes, and the executive shuffle at VMware is certainly proving that old chestnut true. Four months after Pat Gelsinger stepped down as CEO to return to run Intel, the virtual machine pioneer announced yesterday that long-time exec Raghu Raghuram was taking over that role. That set in […]

Cloud Run, Google Cloud’s serverless platform for containerized applications, is getting committed use discounts. Users who commit to spending a given amount on using Cloud Run for a year will get a 17% discount on the money they commit. The company offers a similar pre-commitment discount scheme for VM-based Compute Engine instances, as well as […]

A year and a half’s worth of global pandemic has had a profound impact on virtually every sector of the workforce. When it comes to future automation, food prep isn’t quite at the top of the list (that distinction likely goes to warehouse fulfillment, for the time being), but it’s certainly up there. And it’s […]

Legionfarm, the gaming platform that lets gamers play with pro players in their favorite games, has today announced the close of a $6 million Series A round. Investors in the round include SVB, Y Combinator, Scrum VC, Kevin Lin, Altair Capital, Ankur Nagpal and more. Legionfarm launched out of Y Combinator at the beginning of […]

An activist short seller has written a letter to the chief executive of insurance giant Lemonade with details of an “accidentally discovered” security flaw that exposes customers’ account data. Carson Block, founder of investment research firm Muddy Waters Research, sent the letter to Lemonade co-founder and chief executive Daniel Schreiber on Thursday, describing the bug […]

UK-based startup Sylvera is using satellite, radar and lidar data-fuelled machine learning to bolster transparency around carbon offsetting projects in a bid to boost accountability and credibility — applying independent ratings to carbon offsetting projects. The ratings are based on proprietary data sets it’s developed in conjunction with scientists from research organisations including UCLA, the […]

With the pandemic finish line in sight — at least for some — now is a good time to start assessing which segments have been most impacted by the events of the past year and a half. In terms of robotics, investments have been all over the place — and for good reasons. COVID-19 seems […]

Repairability has been a big sticking point for consumer electronics over the past several years. As devices have gotten thinner — and companies have pushed to maintain control over proprietary systems — many devices have become near impossible for an every-day person to repair. It’s an issue for a number of reasons — not the […]

Risk defense startup SpecTrust is emerging from stealth today with a $4.3 million seed raise and a public launch. Cyber Mentor Fund led the round, which also included participation from Rally Ventures, SignalFire, Dreamit Ventures and Legion Capital. SpecTrust aims to “fix the economics of fighting fraud” with a no-code platform that it says cuts […]

If you’re new to Discord, you might be thrown off by the lack of an endless feed peppered with ads. On Discord, all of the action happens in interest-specific servers, and the company wants to make it easier for anyone to stumble across and plunge into those communities. The company launched Stage Channels, its own […]

Assembling the perfect burger, or perfect sales model, is more complicated than it sounds, though. Here are some of the biggest do's and don'ts:

Retail giant Walmart announced this morning it’s acquiring the Tel Aviv-based startup Zeekit, which allows consumers to virtually “try on” clothing when shopping online. The company leverages a combination of real-time image processing, computer vision, deep learning and other A.I. technology to show shoppers how they would look in an item by way of a […]

BluBracket, an early stage startup that focuses on keeping source code repositories secure, even in distributed environments, announced a $12 million Series A today. Evolution Equity Partners led the round with help from existing investors Unusual Ventures, Point72 Ventures, SignalFire and Firebolt Ventures. When combined with the $6.5 million seed round we reported on last […]

Don't wait for laws preventing the use of NDAs. Companies should shape these policies on their own, rather than waiting for legislation to drag an ethical NDA policy out of them.

More money for the now very buzzy business of reshaping how people work: Worksome is announcing it recently closed a $13 million Series A funding round for its “freelance talent platform” — after racking up 10x growth in revenue since January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a remote working boom. The 2017 founded […]

SpaceX’s bourgeoning Starlink satellite-based broadband internet service just got a big boost from a significant new partner: Google Cloud. Thanks to a new partnership between the two, SpaceX will now be locating Starlink ground stations right within Google’s existing data centers, providing the Starlink network with direct access to ground-based network infrastructure to help facilitate […]

Liquid Death, a four-year-old, L.A.-based canned mountain water startup that has steadily garnered market share and press coverage by promising, amusingly, to “murder your thirst,” just raised $15 million in Series C funding. The round brings the company’s total backing to date to $50 million. The new financing — it follows a $23 million Series […]

While a unicorn named Hopin tends to dominate the virtual conferencing space, a new startup just raised millions of dollars by focusing on what it believes is an untapped niche in the same universe: academic conferences. Morressier, a virtual conference and publishing platform specifically for the scientific community, announced today that it has raised $18 […]

Roku today announced the launch of its own original programming, which will initially become available to viewers in the U.S., U.K., and Canada through the media platform’s free streaming hub, The Roku Channel, starting on May 20th. The debut lineup will include 30 titles, including both the scripted and reality programming Roku had acquired from […]

Blockset, the blockchain infrastructure platform for enterprises by BRD, announced early access to its Wallet-as-a-Service today. The white-label solution gives clients, like financial institutions, the ability to launch wallets that have the same features as BRD’s own mobile cryptocurrency wallet, which now has about 7 million users with over $20 billion assets under protection. Blockset’s […]

It’s hard to recall a consumer electronics category that matured quite as quickly as the fully wireless earbuds. Things went from a handful of plucky startups to virtually every hardware manufacturer over the course of a year or two. When Amazon entered the category, it did so in an already arguably overcrowded field. The first […]

Upsie, a consumer warranty startup, has raised $18.2 million in a Series A round led by True Ventures. The financing brings the total raised for the St. Paul, Minnesota-based startup to $25 million since its 2015 inception. A large group of investors participated in the round, including Concrete Rose VC, Avanta Ventures, Kapor Capital, Samsung […]

The Internet of Things just got bigger. Four years after Ford Motor Company introduced an integration with Amazon’s suite of smart home devices, the automaker is beefing up its in-vehicle software offerings with built-in Alexa voice assistant and a wireless software update ecosystem. Ford’s over-the-air software updates, which it has branded Power-Up, will have the […]

TiMi Studios, one of the world’s most lucrative game makers and is part of Tencent’s gargantuan digital entertainment empire, said Thursday that it has struck a strategic partnership with Xbox. The succinct announcement did not mention whether the tie-up is for content development or Xbox’s console distribution in China but said more details will be […]

SpaceX private spaceflight ambitions got a big boost in 2018 when Japanese entrepreneur and billionaire Yusaku Maezawa announced he’d be taking a trip aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon on a round-trip flight passing the Moon. Maezawa is still on track to make that trip by 2023 according to current schedules, but he’s so eager to […]

Google has been fined just over €100 million (~$123M) by Italy’s antitrust watchdog for abuse of a dominant market position. The case relates to Android Auto, a modified version of Google’s mobile OS intended for in-car use, and specifically to how Google restricted access to the platform to an electric car charging app, called JuicePass, […]

Nano Technologies, a startup that lets workers in Vietnam access their earned wages immediately through an app called VUI, has raised $3 million in seed funding. The oversubscribed round was led by returning investors Golden Gate Ventures and Venturra Discovery, and included participation from FEBE Ventures, Openspace Ventures and Goodwater Capital. Nano recently took part […]

Only four months after securing Series B fundraising of $310 million, Chinese autonomous driving company WeRide says it has achieved its Series C funding round that brings its post-money valuation to $3 billion. This is first time the company has disclosed its value. The company did not share how much it has raised this round, […]

Tesla CEO and self-dubbed Technoking is back-peddling on the company’s stance about bitcoin and has suspended purchases of its electric vehicles with the cryptocurrency. The change of stance, which was delivered via tweet, comes just weeks after Tesla CFO and dubbed “Master of Coin” Zach Kirkhorn said the company believes in the longevity of bitcoin, […]

Vitalik Buterin donated cryptocurrencies worth $1.5 billion to several non-profit organizations, including $1 billion to a COVID-19 relief fund in India, on Wednesday in one of the largest-ever individual philanthropy efforts. Or at least that was the worth of the cryptocurrencies — many of which are dog-themed — when he made the donation. Buterin, the […]

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Usually we wait a few days until a show has settled. While we stall, our producer and director Tina Chase Gillmor scours the recording for short clips that give a sense of the flavor and tenor of the conversation. This show, recorded a little more than 2 weeks ago, went deep on politics, government, anything […]

AWS announced today that it’s releasing a tool called AWS SaaS Boost as open source distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. The tool, which was first announced at the AWS re:Invent conference last year, is designed to help companies transform their on-prem software into cloud-based software as a service. In the charter for the software, […]

The GasBuddy mobile app, which typically helps consumers find the cheapest gas nearby, has now become the No. 1 app on the U.S. App Store for the first time ever, due to the fuel shortages in the U.S. that followed the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline. Americans, fearful that gas would become unavailable, began panic-buying […]

Waymo’s chief financial officer Ger Dwyer and its head of automotive partnerships and corporate development Adam Frost — two longtime executives at the autonomous vehicle company — are leaving this month, departures that comes amid some executive shuffling following CEO John Krafcik’s exit earlier this year. Dwyer and Frost’s departure was shared internally this week, […]

Video sharing social network TikTok has removed more than 500,000 accounts in Italy following an intervention by the country’s data protection watchdog earlier this year ordering it to recheck the age of all Italian users and block access to any under the age of 13. Between February 9 and April 21 more than 12.5M Italian […]

Do you and your early-stage startup have what it takes to be a modern-day gladiator and compete in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021? You won’t know unless you apply, and time is running out. You have only 48 hours left to throw your helmet into the ring. If you want to compete for glory, […]

My startup is considering individuals who live outside the U.S. for a few positions we are looking to fill. Does it make sense to sponsor them for a visa to work remotely from somewhere in the U.S.?

As the famous phrase goes, ‘software is eating the world’ and now software is eating dentistry. Or, perhaps more accurately, the arena of orthodontics — the specialty of dentistry that deals with things like braces — is slowly but surely being digitalized. To whit, Impress, a Southern European player in direct-to-consumer orthodontics, has raised a […]

What drove the company's hugely unprofitable revenues and resulting net losses? Unit economics that were nearly comically destructive.

As competition with tech giants heats up, TikTok is rolling out a series of new features to help keep its short-form video app ahead of rivals. The company today announced the launch of a new Green Screen Duet feature, which combines two of TikTok’s most popular editing tools to allow creators to use another video […]

Planck, the AI-based data platform for commercial insurance underwriting, announced today it has raised a $20 million growth round. The funding came from 3L Capital and Greenfield Partners, along with returning investors Team8, Viola Fintech, Arbor Ventures and Eight Roads. This brings the New York-based startup’s total raised to $48 million, including a $16 million […]

You can't dismiss no- and low-code services as a fountain of technical debt and lukewarm dev projects. If you do, the market is kinda saying that you're just elitist and obstinate.

India’s cabinet on Wednesday approved Department of Heavy Industry’s proposal to provide incentives to boost domestic production of batteries with advanced energy storage, the latest in a series of efforts by New Delhi to make the world’s second-largest internet market less reliant on other nations for various electronics goods and shrink its trade deficit. The […]

Five months after it was announced that Pal Gelsinger would be stepping down as CEO of VMware to take the top job at Intel, the virtualization giant has finally appointed a permanent successor. Raghu Raghuram — a longtime employee of the company — has been appointed the new CEO. He will be taking on the […]

Cisco announced this morning that it intends to acquire Indianapolis-based startup Socio, which helps plan hybrid in-person and virtual events. The two companies did not share the purchase price. Socio provides a missing hybrid event management component for the company to add to its Webex platform. The goal appears to be to combine this with […]

Fiveable, an online learning community for high school students, made its first-ever acquisition earlier this week: Hours, a virtual study platform built by a 16-year old. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Fiveable is a free, online learning community for high school students with the focus of helping them pass Advanced Placement (AP) […]

Another major name in mobile has confirmed that it won’t be exhibiting at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Chip giant Qualcomm is joining a list that already includes Google, IBM, Nokia, Sony, Oracle, Ericsson and, most recently, Samsung and Lenovo. In a statement offered to TechCrunch, a spokesperson for the company confirmed that it will […]

As the app ecosystem rapidly expands beyond the borders of mobile, app developers and publishers would benefit immensely from identifying economical and secure ways of adopting more SDKs.