Crunch Hype

Aussie startup founder Domm Holland came to the U.S. as a Silicon Valley outsider. He shares how he built a network and raised $124 million in just two years.

Among the many, many tasks required of grade school teachers is that of gauging each student’s reading level, usually by a time-consuming and high-pressure one-on-one examination. Microsoft’s new Reading Progress application takes some of the load off the teacher’s shoulders, allowing kids to do their reading at home and using natural language understanding to help […]

Four years ago, Argo AI made its first acquisition as a young, newly backed self-driving vehicle startup. Now, Argo says its acquisition of lidar company Princeton Lightwave is paying off and is poised to help it deliver autonomous vehicles that can operate commercially on highways and in dense urban areas starting next year. Argo AI […]

In April, we brought you over a dozen breakout sessions on fundraising and operations at the TC Early Stage event. Calendly’s Tope Awotona explained how to bootstrap effectively, Marlon Nichols shared how to get an investor’s attention, Zoom CRO Ryan Azus talked about how to build and lead a sales team, and Fuel Capital’s Leah […]

Of the many frustrations of having a severe motor impairment, the difficulty of communicating must surely be among the worst. The tech world has not offered much succor to those affected by things like locked-in syndrome, ALS, and severe strokes, but startup Cognixion aims to with a novel form of brain monitoring that, combined with […]

"I think every founder I know thinks that their decks are shared a lot more. I don’t feel like that, but I know that comes from experience."

Crypto startups couldn’t be hotter as currencies push past all-time-highs and investor appetite reaches mania for new projects. Crypto investment firms that have been investing in blockchain startups for years are not only beginning to see major movement from their portfolio, but are gaining renewed appetite from LPs after a lengthy crypto winter to make […]

It’s been a wild couple of years for Oura. Last year, in particular, proved to be a major driver for the wearable fitness manufacturer. With the pandemic bringing professional sports to a screeching halt in 2020, a number of major leagues have adopted the ring, including the NBA, WNBA, UFC and NASCAR. The company has […]

In March 2020, Tame had a digital event suite for offline corporate events. But with the pandemic hitting, it did a hard pivot into providing a highly customizable virtual events platform, primarily used by companies for their sales events. The result is that it has now raised a seed round of $5.5m, a large round […]

NurseFly, the healthcare jobs marketplace owned by IAC, has rebranded to Vivian Health as it expands its range of services. Originally launched for traveling nurses (or nurses willing to travel for short-term positions), Vivian Health now includes listings for permanent positions, per diem shifts and local openings. It also added employer reviews and a pay […]

So much can happen in 72 hours, and it’s easy to get distracted — especially when you’re building a startup in the fast lane that is mobility tech. But listen up: you have just 72 hours left to save $100 on your pass to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 on June 9. Don’t let “busy” distract […]

Stride VC, a London-based seed investment fund, has raised its second fund, which will be £100M ($138.6M) – identical to its first fund. The fund will invest primarily in London startups but also look at select European opportunities. The breakup of the LPs in the fund is 10% fund of funds, 60% other institutional, 28% […]

Let’s discuss IPOs this morning to fully understand where we stand today in the realm of unicorn liquidity.

We tend to think of venture capital in tens or hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, so it’s refreshing to find Evening Fund, a new $2 million micro fund that focuses on small investments between $50,000 and $100,000 as it seeks to help young startups with early funding. The new fund was launched by […]

What if you could Zoom with your favorite creator and ask them questions? That’s the promise of Bright, the new live video platform launching today from co-founders Guy Oseary and early YouTube product manager Michael Powers. The service, built on top of Zoom, allows fans to engage in live, face-to-face video sessions with creators, ask […]

Instagram is making its video Stories and Reels more accessible with the launch of a new “captions sticker” that will allow users to watch without having the sound on. The addition will not only make it easier for users who are hard of hearing or deaf to engage with video content, it also offers a […]

New numbers from research firm Canalys point to continued growth for PCs in 2020/21, as the pandemic has forced many to rethink how — and where — they work. PC shipments have grown for four straight quarters. All told, the numbers (within which the firm lumps tablets, incidentally) grew 53% year over year. Chromebooks were […]

Mental health, and how it is getting addressed, has been one of the major leitmotifs of the past year of pandemic living. Covid-19 not only has led to a lot of people getting ill or worse; it has increased isolation, economic uncertainty, and led to a lot of other kinds of disappointments, and that all […]

Personalized nutrition startup Zoe — named not for a person but after the Greek word for ‘life’ — has topped up its Series B round with $20M, bringing the total raised to $53M. The latest close of the B round was led by Ahren Innovation Capital, which the startup notes counts two Nobel laureates as […]

Their investors call them disruptive innovators and detractors. Some call them “dirty scammers.” But the Leda Health co-founders think of themselves as advocates for sexual assault survivors.

HoneyBook, which has built out a client experience and financial management platform for service-based small businesses and freelancers, announced today that it has raised $155 million in a Series D round led by Durable Capital Partners LP. Tiger Global Management, Battery Ventures, Zeev Ventures, 01 Advisors as well as existing backers Norwest Venture Partners and […]

As he looked back on the one-year mark, Klein sat down to discuss the unique set of challenges he faced.

Firefly Aerospace has raised a total of $175 million, across a $75 million Series A round that valued the company north of $1 billion, and a $100 million secondary transaction which consisted of the sale of holdings held by primary Firefly investor Noosphere Ventures. The launch startup also announced that it intends to raise another […]

When Elon Musk stood on stage at Tesla’s Battery Day in September and promised to cut lithium-ion battery prices in half, he claimed some of the savings would come from reinventing the dirty and complex process of making their nickel metal cathodes. “It’s insanely complicated, like digging a ditch, filling it in and digging the […]

Twitter this morning announced it’s acquiring Scroll, a subscription service that offers readers a better way to read through long-form content on the web, by removing ads and other website clutter that can slow down the experience. The service will become a part of Twitter’s larger plans to invest in subscriptions, the company says, and […]

An Indian startup that began its life after the global pandemic broke last year said on Tuesday it has concluded its third financing round as it enables hundreds of thousands of teachers in the world’s second largest internet market run classes online and serve their students. Bangalore-based Teachmint said today it has raised $16.5 million […]

The identity verification space has been heating up for a while and the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated demand with more people transacting online. Persona, a startup focused on creating a personalized identity verification experience “for any use case,” aims to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded space. And investors are banking on the San […]

Activist investor Starboard Value is clearly fed up with Box and it let the cloud content management know it in no uncertain terms in a letter published yesterday. The firm, which bought a 7.7% stake in Box two years ago claims the company is underperforming, executing poorly and making bad business decisions — and it […]

As cybersecurity continues to grow in profile amid an increasingly complex and dangerous landscape of malicious activity, a cyber security vendor that specializes in “all-in-one” services covering the many aspects of security IT has closed a big round of funding to grow. Acronis has raised $250 million in equity, and co-founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov […]

Indian telecom ministry on Tuesday said it has granted several telecom service providers permission to conduct a six-month trial for the use and application of 5G technology in the country. New Delhi has granted approval to over a dozen firm spanning multiple nationalities — excluding China. Among the telecom operators that have received the grant include […]

It looks like everyone and their mother is trying to reinvent the Brazilian banking system. Earlier this year we wrote about Nubank’s $400 million Series G, last month there was the PicPay IPO filing and today, alt.bank, a Brazilian neobank, announced a $5.5 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures (USV). It’s no secret that […]

Africa is the last frontier for basically anything. Mobile gaming is no exception. For a continent that is home to more than 1 billion millennials and Gen Zers, mobile gaming has never really picked up, despite the continent witnessing rapid economic growth and smartphone adoption. Two issues have proved detrimental to this growth: distribution and […]

This morning WorkBoard, a software startup that sells software designed to help other companies plan, announced that it has raised a $75 million Series D. Softbank Group led the investment, which saw participation from prior investors including Microsoft’s M12 venture capital arm, a16z, GGV and Workday Ventures. Per the company, three new investors also took […]

The market remains very hot for startups building e-commerce empires by consolidating independent third-party merchants that have gained traction on Amazon’s Marketplace, and in the latest development, Razor Group — a Berlin-based startup buying up promising Amazon sellers and scaling them into bigger, multi-channel businesses — has closed financing of $400 million to scale its […]

Arrival, the electric vehicle manufacturer that’s attempting to do away with the assembly line in favor of highly automated microfactories, is partnering with Uber to create an EV for ride-hail drivers. Arrival expects to reveal the final vehicle design before the end of the year and to begin production in the third quarter of 2023. […]

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. TechCrunch’s new home The original plan was to spend a minute today explaining that the Daily Crunch is now being put together by a new and expanded team. I, your friend Alex, […]

Amazon’s free, ad-supported streaming service IMDb TV is getting its own mobile app. The company announced the news today at its first-ever NewFronts presentation to advertisers, where it also shared that its over-the-top streaming businesses combined — meaning, IMDb TV, Twitch, live sports like Thursday Night Football, Amazon’s News app and others — have now […]

Solid state battery systems have long been considered the next breakthrough in battery technology, with multiple startups vying to be the first to commercialization. Automakers have been some of the top investors in the technology, each of them seeking the edge that will make their electric vehicles safer, faster and with increased range. Ford Motor […]

Sony and Discord have announced a partnership that will integrate the latter’s popular gaming-focused chat app with PlayStation’s own built-in social tools. It’s a big move and a fairly surprising one given how recently acquisition talks were in the air — Sony appears to have offered a better deal than Microsoft, taking an undisclosed minority […]

Leaders need to embrace an all-new learning curve: How to engage in digital transformation that includes ethics by design.

The creators behind CryptoPunks, one of the most popular NFT projects on the web, just revealed their latest project, called Meebits. The project boasts 20,000 procedurally generated 3D characters that are tradeable on the Ethereum blockchain. There have been hundreds of 3D avatar NFT platforms popping up over the past several months hoping to gain […]

Competitors Volvo AB and Daimler Trucks are teaming up to produce hydrogen fuel cells for long-haul trucks, which the companies say will lower development costs and boost production volumes. The joint venture, which is called cellcentric, aims to bring large-scale “gigafactory” production levels of hydrogen fuel cells to Europe by 2025. While the two companies […]

Over the past several years I’ve covered my fair share of upstart avatar companies that were all chasing the same dream — building out a customizable platform for a digital persona that gained wide adoption across games and digital spaces. Few of those startups I’ve covered in the past are still around. But by netting […]

Twitter Spaces, the company’s new live audio rooms feature, is opening up more broadly. The company announced today it’s making Twitter Spaces available to any account with 600 followers or more, including both iOS and Android users. It also officially unveiled some of the features it’s preparing to launch, like Ticketed Spaces, scheduling features, reminders, […]

When the iconic American power tools company Stanley Black & Decker began looking for ways to improve the pipeline of diverse candidates that the company was reviewing for potential roles, it turned to an Israeli-based startup called Talenya for help. The company wasn’t alone in looking to startups for support in new hiring initiatives. Last […]

What we're looking at here is a fintech unicorn IPO. A great way to kick off the week, to be honest, though I'd thought that Robinhood would be the next such debut.

One the same day as Fortnite maker Epic Games goes to trial with one of the biggest legal challenges to the App Store’s business model to date, it has simultaneously announced the acquisition of the artist portfolio community ArtStation — and immediately lowered the commissions on sales. Now standard creators on ArtStation will see the […]

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hi there, new and returning readers. This is The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and packages move (today and in the future) from […]

Education may well be the most important activity we conduct as a society — and it may also be the hardest space to build a startup in. Selling to school districts and universities is notoriously difficult, but enticing consumers is even harder. Learning takes focus, patience, tenacity and resources, and most consumers would prefer to […]

Luis von Ahn, an entrepreneur who has dedicated his career to scaling free education, has probably annoyed you more than once. In fact, you’ve likely been annoyed by his work dozens and maybe hundreds of times over the years. A decade before he co-founded the whimsical and language-learning app Duolingo, one of the most popular […]