Crunch Hype

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

Apple’s new AirTag item trackers are pretty small, but not quite small enough to slip into most wallets without adding an obvious bit of bulk. Fortunately, as one talented AirTag owner has found, that’s nothing you can’t fix with a heat gun, a bit of soldering and an understanding that you could totally fry your […]

Twitter today confirmed earlier reports that it’s testing a new Tip Jar feature. The new addition utilizes a number of different payment platforms, including PayPal, Venmo, Patreon, Cash App and Bandcamp (all region-dependent). “Tip Jar is an easy way to support the incredible voices that make up the conversation on Twitter,” the company wrote in […]

David Swensen, among the most highly regarded money managers in the world after growing Yale’s endowment from $1 billion when he joined as a 31-year-old former grad student of the school, to the second-largest school endowment in the country after Harvard, has passed away at age 67. The cause was cancer, which Swensen had been […]

Of the 22 million comments submitted to the FCC regarding 2017’s controversial rollback of net neutrality, some 18 million were fake, an investigation by the New York Attorney General’s office has found. The broadband industry funded the fraudulent creation of about 8.5 million of those, while a 19-year-old college student submitted 7.7 million, and the […]

Orbital launch company Virgin Orbit has scheduled its next mission to space. Virgin Orbit will be returning its LauncherOne rocket to orbit in June to deliver payloads for the U.S. Department of Defense Space Test Program, SatRevolution and the Royal Netherlands Air Force. The manifest includes three CubeSat satellites as part of the DoD’s Rapid […]

Chinese electric vehicle maker Nio has chosen Norway — an EV hotspot — for its first foray into international markets. Nio Norway will offer a European version of ES8, Nio’s flagship electric SUV, to Norwegian customers from September this year. The ET7 sedan will follow in 2022. “The decision to have Norway as our first […]

Months after Apple’s App Store introduced privacy labels for apps, Google announced its own mobile app marketplace, Google Play, will follow suit. The company today pre-announced its plans to introduce a new “safety” section in Google Play, rolling out next year, which will require app developers to share what sort of data their apps collect, […]

TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield is one of the most popular parts of our annual TechCrunch Disrupt conference which is happening on September 21-23 this year. Now we’re very excited to reveal one of the fine people who will be judging Startup Battlefield at this year’s all-virtual event in September: Shauntel Garvey, a general partner at Reach Capital, […]

Chromebooks have been having banner quarter after banner quarter for the past year. While PC and tablet sales in general have been doing well as people shifted to remote working and learning, Google’s operating system has been leading the charge, in terms of the growth. That’s due in large part to the company’s wins in […]

Shortening the diagnostic journey and reducing the associated costs was, until recently, a moonshot challenge, but is now within reach. Technology and AI advances are combining to make genetic testing accessible.

Calling all frazzled procrastinators, feet-draggers, lollygaggers and last-minute decision makers. The best price on passes to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021, which takes place on June 9, disappears in mere hours. It’s now o’clock, baby. Shift your EV into gear, hail a robotaxi or tell Mr. Scott to beam you up — whatever it takes to […]

If you ask Nik Bonaddio why he wanted to build a new mobile trivia app, his answer is simple. “In my life, I’ve got very few true passions: I love trivia and I love sports,” Bonaddio told me. “I’ve already started a sports company, so I’ve got to start a trivia company.” He isn’t kidding […]

The merits of launching a free plan should no longer need to be debated. Instead, more companies should be asking: Are we giving enough away?

This morning Metafy, a distributed startup building a marketplace to match gamers with instructors, announced that it has closed an additional $5.5 million to its $3.15 million seed round. Call it a seed-2, seed-extension or merely a baby Series A; Forerunner Ventures, DCM and Seven Seven Six led the round as a trio. Metafy’s model […]

TikTok is expanding its integrations with third-party apps. The company today announced the launch of two new tool sets for app developers, the TikTok Login Kit and Sound Kit, that will allow apps on mobile, web and consoles to authenticate users via their TikTok credentials, build experiences that leverage users’ TikTok videos and share music […]

Snap on Wednesday announced its plan to soon launch a Creator Marketplace, which will make it easier for businesses to find and partner with Snapchat creators, including Lens creators, AR creators and later, prominent Snapchat creators known as Snap Stars. At launch, the marketplace will focus on connecting brands and AR creators for AR ads. […]

Diversity has been linked with equity and inclusion because diversity is just one part of the equation when it comes to hiring Black employees. How do the companies they work for make people feel welcome and included, rather than isolated? How do Black employees find their way into management, up the corporate ladder to the […]

This morning, we'll examine the buy now, pay later (BNPL) market, mostly through the lens of PayPal's first-quarter results.

We’re thrilled to announce Caryn Marooney is speaking at our upcoming TechCrunch Early Stage virtual event in July. She spoke with us last year and we had to have her back. Just look at her resume. She was the co-founder and CEO of The Outcast Agency, one of Silicon Valley’s best-regarded public relations firms. She […]

Inspired by his own problems with skin ailments, tech founder Daniel Jensen decided there had to be a better way. So, using an in-house tech platform, his Copenhagen-based startup Nøie developed its own database of skin profiles, to better care for sensitive skin. Nøie has now raised $12m in a Series A funding round led […]

AI is fundamental to many products and services today, but its hunger for data and computing cycles is bottomless. Lightmatter plans to leapfrog Moore’s law with its ultra-fast photonic chips specialized for AI work, and with a new $80M round the company is poised to take its light-powered computing to market. We first covered Lightmatter […]

I’m going to be honest with you: It was kind of a slow week for robotics news. Honestly, that’s the first time I can say that since I started doing this thing weekly (happy 10 weeks to us, by the way). Of course, this stuff always ebbs and flows to a certain extent — even […]

Ace Games, a Turkish mobile gaming company founded by a former Peak Games co-founder, has raised a $7 million Seed funding round led by Actera Group. Co-investment has come from San Francisco’s NFX. Former gaming entrepreneurs Kristian Segerstrale, Alexis Bonte, and Kaan Gunay also participated. Firat Ileri is previous investors from the pre-seed round. The […]

For every crypto-skeptic that see NFTs as yet another hype bubble, there’s an acolyte who sees NFTs as the key to unlocking the future of the creative web. Bitski, an SF-based startup that builds custom NFT storefronts for brands and creators, is banking on the latter and they have new investors betting the same. The […]

The topic of compensation has historically been a delicate one that has left many people — especially startup employees — wondering just what drives what can feel like random decisions around pay and equity. Last June, software engineers (and housemates) Miles Hobby and Geoffrey Tisserand set about trying to solve the problem for companies by […]

As ESG reporting goes up the agenda for large companies, it’s also increasingly doing so for smaller companies as well. But right now, tracking things like your company’s CO2 emissions is mainly the preserve of large corporations. Now a startup hopes to address this. Diginex Solutions has a self-guided tool which claims to generate ESG […]

Autonomous vehicles rely on many sensors to perceive the world around them, and while cameras and lidar get a lot of the attention, good old radar is an important piece of the puzzle — though it has some fundamental limitations. Oculii, which just raised a $55M round, aims to minimize those limitations and make radar […]

ReCharge, a provider of subscription management software for e-commerce, announced today that it has raised $227 million in a Series B growth round at a $2.1 billion valuation. Summit Partners, ICONIQ Growth and Bain Capital Ventures provided the capital. Notably, Santa Monica, California-based ReCharge was bootstrapped for several years before raising $50 million in a […]

Desktop Metal today announced the launch of wood 3D printing tool, Forust. Founded in 2019, the company specializes in 3D printing for interior design. The company’s “non-destructive” printing methods have managed to largely fly under the radar, with minimal press coverage until now — making them a pretty ideal acquisition candidate. In fact, the gross […]

Speaking isn’t simple for at least 40 million Americans, so a new Austin-based startup is scaling a solution. Expressable is a digital speech therapy company that connects patients to speech language pathologists (SLP) via telehealth services and asynchronous support, and it has raised a new $4.5 million seed round. The early-stage startup is launching with […]

It’s widely known that video streaming boomed during the pandemic, as millions of people were faced by boredom during lockdowns. But an unintended consequence of this was the growing environmental impact of millions of video streams which meant server farms needing to draw increasing amounts of power from the grid. Indeed, there were even calls […]

Tech investments in emerging markets have been in full swing over the past couple of years and their ecosystems have thrived as a result. Some of these markets like Africa, Latin America, and India, have comprehensive reports by publications and firms on trends and investments in their individual regions. But there’s hardly a report to […]

If the pandemic has been good for anything it’s been good for the therapy business and for startups targeting mental health, with VCs kept very busy signing checks. To wit, here’s another one: Madrid-based ifeel has bagged €5.5 million (~$6.6M) in Series A funding, led by Nauta Capital. The startup was founded back in 2017 […]

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals. Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words. This is your chance to put Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen on the Techcrunch […]

Kahoot, the popular Oslo-based edtech company that has built a big business out of gamifiying education and creating a platform for users to build their own learning games, is making an acquisition to double down on K-12 education and its opportunities to grow in the U.S. It is acquiring Clever, a startup that has built […]

Nigerian fintech startup Paystack has been relatively quiet since it was bought by fintech giant Stripe last October. The deal, worth more than $200 million, caused shockwaves to the African tech ecosystem and offered some form of validation to work done by founders, startups and investors alike. Today, the payments company, which powers businesses with […]

During the pandemic, we’ve seen the rise of ‘Zoom investing’ – where VCs literally use remote video conference tools like Zoom and Google Meet to take pitches from entrepreneurs. Now a new European Seed fund plans to leverage that emerging behavior and bake it into their model. Mattias Ljungman, the former co-founder of Atomico formed […]

NFTs were arguably already taking off when Beeple sold his NFT artwork for $69m. But another crypto project attracted attention when it bought an original Banksy artwork for $95,000. The group literally burnt the artwork and sold its NFT on the OpenSea platform for $400,000. Although the stunt was covered by CBS News, BBC News, […]

Einride, the Swedish startup known for its unusual-looking electric and autonomous pods that are designed to carry freight, has raised $110 million to help fund its expansion in Europe and into the United States. The Series B round, which far exceeds its previous raises of $10 million in 2020 and $25 million in 2019, included […]

While incumbent insurance providers continue to get disrupted by startups like Lemonade, Alan, Clearcover, Pie and many others applying tech to rethink how to build a business around helping people and companies mitigate against risks with some financial security, one issue that has not disappeared is fraud. Today, a startup out of France is announcing […]

Krafton, the South Korean developer of PUBG Mobile, said on Thursday that it is bringing back the popular gaming title to India under the brand name ‘Battlegrounds Mobile India.’ The new title, which uses the color scheme of the Indian flag and is largely a replica of PUBG Mobile, will offer “a world class AAA […]

Despite a persistent semiconductor shortage that is disrupting the global automotive industry, investors remain bullish on the chips used to power next-generation vehicles. Kneron, a startup that develops semiconductors to give devices artificial intelligence capabilities by using edge computing, just got funded by Delta Electronics, a Taiwanese supplier of power components for Apple and Tesla. […]

Twitter just made a change to the way it displays images that has visual artists on the social network celebrating. In March, Twitter rolled out a limited test of uncropped, larger images in users’ feeds. Now, it’s declared those tests a success and improved the image sharing experience for everybody. no bird too tall, no […]

Singapore-based Rainforest is one of the newest entrants in the wave of startups that “roll-up” small e-commerce brands. Launched in January by alumni from some of Southeast Asia’s top startups, including Carousell, OVO and Fave, Rainforest acquires Amazon marketplace sellers. This is similar to the Amazon-centric approach taken by Thrasio, Branded Group and Berlin Brands […]

One of the biggest funding trends of the past year is companies that consolidate small e-commerce brands. Many of the most notable startups in the space, like Thrasio, Berlin Brands Group and Branded Group, focus on consolidating Amazon Marketplace sellers. But the e-commerce landscape is more fragmented in the Asia-Pacific region, where sellers use platforms […]

China expressed concern on Wednesday over India’s move to not grant any Chinese firm permission to participate in 5G trials in the world’s second-largest internet market as the two neighboring nations struggle to navigate business ties amid their geo-political tensions. India’s Department of Telecommunications earlier this week approved over a dozen firms’ applications to conduct […]

Surprised by the revenue miss? Shocked by the profit beat? Startled by the sharp drop in the value of Uber's stock? Let's unpack the numbers.

SpaceX flew the 15th prototype of its Starship fully reusable next-generation rocket today, with a test flight that included a successful climb to around 30,000 feet, as well as a controlled flip, descent and soft landing upright as planned. A very small fire appeared to break out at the base of the rocket shortly after […]

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.