Crunch Hype

Long before Covid-19 precipitated “digital transformation” across the world of work, customer services and support was built to run online and virtually. Yet it too is undergoing an evolution supercharged by technology. Today, a startup called SightCall, which has built an augmented reality platform to help field service teams, the companies they work for, and […]

This year, the whole notion of how we work and where we work is going to change yet again.

CircleCI, the continuous delivery pioneer, announced a $100 million Series F today on a $1.7 billion valuation. At the same time, the company announced it has acquired Vamp, a release orchestration startup that should fit nicely in the CircleCI platform. The companies did not share the purchase price. The funding was led by Greenspring Associates […]

Snowman, the small studio behind award-winning iOS games Alto’s Adventure, Alto’s Odyssey, Skate City, and others, is spinning out a new company, Pok Pok, that will focus on educational children’s entertainment. Later this month, Pok Pok will debut its first title, Pok Pok Playroom, aimed at inspiring creative thinking through play for the preschool crowd. […]

The Hamburg data protection agency has banned Facebook from processing the additional WhatsApp user data that the tech giant is granting itself access to under a mandatory update to WhatsApp’s terms of service. The controversial WhatsApp privacy policy update has caused widespread confusion around the world since being announced — and already been delayed by […]

We'll have to wait to see how public investors value the company once it begins to float later this year. But as far as unicorn SPAC deals go, there have been worse ones that we've viewed.

A startup that has built a neobank specifically to address the needs of freelancers and sole traders has picked up a growth round to continue expanding its business after seeing its usage grow by 1500% in a year. Lili, which provides a way for freelancers to use a single account both to manage their work […]

DataRobot, the Boston-based automated machine learning startup, had a bushel of announcements this morning as it expanded its platform to give technical and non-technical users alike something new. It also announced it has acquired Zepl, giving it an advanced development environment where data scientists can bring their own code to DataRobot. The two companies did […]

Israeli security startup Cycode, which specializes in helping enterprises secure their DevOps pipelines and prevent code tampering, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners. Seed investor YL Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the total funding in the company to $24.6 million. Cycode’s […]

There has been a flurry of investments in startups focused on acquiring third-party sellers on Amazon and helping them build their businesses. The latest is Acquco, which aims to stand out from the others in that it was formed by a pair of founders — Raunak Nirmal and Wiley Zhang — who actually worked at […]

Ultium Cells LLC, a joint venture between General Motors and LG Chem, has been steadily building up its battery cell manufacturing capacity in the U.S. since the venture was first announced in December 2019. But with each battery cell they produce, they’ll also produce waste – tricky-to-handle waste that also has too much inherent value […]

The University of California has always embraced the startup ecosystem in the state, including running a few of its own incubators and accelerators. Now Berkeley will have a huge new incubator of its own, Bakar Labs, which will host as many as 80 young companies a year and provide access university facilities and networks. Hosted […]

Boston-based Apptopia, a company providing competitive intelligence in the mobile app ecosystem, has closed on $20 million in Series C funding aimed at fueling its expansion beyond the world of mobile apps. The new financing was led by ABS Capital Partners, and follows three consecutive years of 50% year-over-year growth for Apptopia’s business, which has […]

Imagine if you could settle/rekindle domestic arguments by asking your smart speaker when the room last got cleaned or whether the bins already got taken out? Or — for an altogether healthier use-case — what if you could ask your speaker to keep count of reps as you do squats and bench presses? Or switch […]

Munich-based parcelLab, which offers a final-mile fulfillment service for online retailers, has closed a $112 million (GB£80 million) Series C funding round led by the US VC/PE firm Insight Partners. Germany’s Endeit Capital participated as a co-investor, alongside existing investors Capnamic Ventures and coparion. parcelLab last raised an undisclosed Series B in October 2019. The […]

On April 16, Uganda-based two-wheel ride-hailing platform SafeBoda announced that it had completed 1 million rides in Ibadan, a southwestern city in Nigeria. This might not seem spectacular from a global perspective because it took the startup a year and two months to achieve but it’s a noteworthy feat in African markets. Ibadan is one […]

As schools move more widely into reopening their doors for in-person learning, many educational institutions have also learned a critical lesson in the last year. Having better tools to teach remotely are critical for situations when the physical experience has to be shut down, but even when things are “back to normal”, better tech can […]

Google Pay users in the U.S. can now send money to GPay users in India and Singapore, Google said on Tuesday, making its first push into the remittances market. The company has partnered with Western Union and Wise, both of which have integrated their services into Google Pay. This is the first time either of […]

Lisbon-based food delivery startup Kitch hopes to hands back control to restaurants dogged by the mess of food delivery apps today, by aggregating the apps onto one tablet and platform. Restaurants then get one place to manage all their delivery orders, track couriers, and update their menus across all the delivery apps. It’s now raised […]

Say what you will, Nothing has been doing a fine job milking its upcoming launch for all it’s worth. The company has spent the last several month’s teasing the arrival of its first product. The launch will find the company entering the already extremely crowded earbuds category in June, with the arrival of the simply […]

Sweden’s Exeger, which for over a decade has been developing flexible solar cell technology (called Powerfoyle) that it touts as efficient enough to power gadgets solely with light, has taken in another tranche of funding to expand its manufacturing capabilities by opening a second factory in the country. The $38 million raise is comprised of […]

Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart has hit the market to raise about $1 billion at up to $30 billion valuation in a pre-IPO financing round, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The Bangalore-based startup, which sold majority stake to Walmart for $16 billion in 2018, initiated fundraise possibilities with some investors earlier this year […]

Even the most sanguine industry observer has to be stunned at times by the pace of dealmaking right now. Not quite halfway through 2021, startups are routinely closing new rounds just months apart and sometimes seeing their valuations triple and even quadruple with every new round. Maybe they will all become trillion-dollar companies. It’s more […]

Serialized fiction app Radish will be acquired by Kakao Entertainment in a transaction valued at $440 million. Kakao Entertainment is owned by Kakao, the South Korean internet giant whose services include its eponymous messaging platform. Radish founder Seungyoon Lee will hold onto his role as its chief executive officer, while also becoming Kakao Entertainment’s global […]

Toyota has tapped Japanese company ENEOS to help develop the hydrogen fuel cell system that will power its futuristic prototype city Woven City. The vision for the 175-acre city, where people will live and work amongst all of Toyota’s projects, including its autonomous e-Palette shuttles and robots, is to build a fully connected ecosystem powered […]

More investors are joining the wave to bet on lidar, the remote sensing method that uses laser light to measure distances and has garnered ample interest from automakers in recent times. But it’s also a technology that has long been scorned by Elon Musk partly due to its once exorbitant costs. Innovusion, a five-year-old lidar […]

Singapore-based Aspire, which wants to become the financial services “one-stop shop” for SMEs, announced that its business accounts have reached $1 billion in annualized transaction volume one year after launching. The company also unveiled Bill Pay, its latest feature that lets businesses manage and pay invoices by emailing them to Aspire’s AI-based digital assistant. Launched […]

While consumers and businesses continue to use their purchasing power to spin the wheels of the globalized economy, one of the companies that’s built a technology platform to help that economy operate more smoothly is announcing an investment to double down on growth. Zencargo, which has built a digital platform to enable freight forwarding — […]

Toronto-based Wattpad is officially part of South Korean internet giant Naver as of today, with the official close of the $600 million cash and stock acquisition deal. Under the terms of the acquisition, Wattpad will continue to be headquartered in, and operate from Canada, with co-founder Allen Lau remaining CEO of the social storytelling company […]

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Micromobility startups are following the lead of EV companies going public via mergers with special purpose acquisition companies, a financial instrument that came back en vogue in 2020. Bird Rides, the California-born micromobility company that now operates in more than 100 cities across the United States, Europe and the Middle East, plans to merge with […]

LiveWire, Harley-Davidson’s electric motorcycle, is being spun out as a standalone brand, complete with a new logo and brand identity. Harley-Davidson first unveiled the LiveWire electric motorcycle in 2018 with a listing price of $29,799, placing it on the higher end for motorcycles. It went into production the following year, with some bumps, including a […]

This morning ServiceNow announced that it was acquiring Lightstep, an applications performance monitoring startup that has raised more than $70 million, according to Crunchbase data. The companies did not share the acquisition price. ServiceNow wants to take advantage of Lightstep’s capabilities to enhance its IT operations offerings. With Lightstep, the company should be able to […]

I’m the founder of an early-stage fintech startup. We really want to move to San Francisco to be near our lead investor. Can we use International Entrepreneur Parole? How does it work?

Following these rules won't guarantee success for your health tech startup, but if you can't pin down these basics, you don't have a shot.

Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system known as Autopilot could not have been engaged on the stretch of road where a Model S crashed last month in Texas, killing the two occupants, according to a preliminary report released Monday by the National Transportation Safety Board. The results help clear up some of the mysteries around the […]

Years after popping open a Pandora’s box of bad behavior, social media companies are trying to figure out subtle ways to reshape how people use their platforms. Following Twitter’s lead, Facebook is trying out a new feature designed to encourage users to read a link before sharing it. The test will reach 6% of Facebook’s […]

Voyager Space Holdings has added X.O. Markets, the parent of commercial space service venture Nanoracks, to its growing catalogue of space companies. The agreement was first announced last December. This is Voyager’s fourth majority stake acquisition of a space company since its founding in October 2019, and it won’t be its last. Voyager CEO Dylan […]

In a new letter, attorneys general representing 44 U.S. states and territories are pressuring Facebook to walk away from new plans to open Instagram to children. The company is working on an age-gated version of Instagram for kids under the age of 13 that would lure in young users who are currently not permitted to […]

Last week activist investor Starboard delivered a public letter rebuking Box for what it perceives as underperformance. Today the firm, which owns 8% of Box stock, making it the company’s largest stock holder, took it a step further with an official slate of four candidates it will be putting up at the next stockholder’s meeting. […]

Houston-based startup Axiom Space and NASA unveiled more details Monday about the forthcoming Axiom Mission 1 (AX-1), the first fully private human mission to the International Space Station. The Axiom Mission 1 spaceflight mission will ferry four private astronauts to the International Space Station in January 2022. The eight-day mission will be launched from NASA’s […]

With Procore's range feeling bullish thus far and Kaltura back in the mix, it's hard to not be at least modestly bullish on today's IPO market.

Startup Battlefield, the world’s preeminent pitch competition, has launched hundreds of startups over the years — 922 if you want to be a stickler about it. The next Battlefield takes place at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23. Yup, that sound you hear is opportunity knocking. If you want a shot to compete against some […]

Ford confirmed Monday that its all-electric pickup truck will be named the F-150 Lightning, resurrecting a name that once donned the SVT F-150 in the 1990s. The company hasn’t said much about the powertrain, range or other specs. However, Ford President and CEO Jim Farley provided new details about the electric pickup that is coming […]

On the heels of its expanded partnership with Facebook, Spotify this morning announced new sharing features that broaden the way Spotify content, including both music and podcasts, can be shared across social media. As part of this, Spotify’s Canvas feature, which adds a looping, visual art experience to songs, is being improved. Spotify will also […]

Kara Penn is the mother of four daughters and owner of Mission Spark, a management and strategy consulting company. And now, thanks to Hustle Fund, she is also an angel investor. Hustle Fund is coming out of stealth today with Angel Squad, a new initiative aimed at making angel investing more accessible to more people, […]

From now until May 16, TechCrunch readers can save 10% on an annual or two-year membership. That’s $89 per year in the U.S., with similar discounts for readers outside The States. Grab a 10% discount on Extra Crunch here. Extra Crunch is a members-only community from TechCrunch. We help founders and startup teams get […]

We believe in rewarding early action with super savings. That’s exactly what you’ll get if you hit the brakes just long enough to buy a pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 before our super early-bird deal expires on Friday May 14, 11:59 pm (PST). Seriously, hit that easy target, and you’ll attend our three-day startup-palooza for […]

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 weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You […]

It is clear that Black, women, Latinx and LGBTQ+ startup founders face an uphill battle when it comes to getting a share of the VC investment pie in Silicon Valley. Perhaps that’s why Sixty8 Capital, a firm based in Indianapolis, Indiana, smack dab in the middle of the country, has chosen to launch a new […]