Daimler — the German car giant that owns Mercedes-Benz among other brands — has made one more acquisition to further its reach in ridesharing and what it sees as the next generation of how cars are owned and used. It has acquired Flinc, a startup also out of Germany that has built a platform and app for peer-to-peer-style carpooling. People who are driving in one direction find… Read More
When Box landed GE as a customer in 2014, it marked a turning point for the cloud content management company, giving them momentum ahead of their IPO. Three years later, Vera, a data rights management startup is getting a similar feeling, announcing GE’s 300,000 employees would be using Vera to protect the company’s intellectual property as it moved through the world. “This… Read More
Roli’s Blocks are one of the most compelling products I’ve seen out of a hardware startup in the past year. The modular system is a unique take on music making by the company that gave the world the rubbery-keyed Seaboard keyboard. The system is a lot more user friendly than the company’s original offering both in terms of price and flexibility, with modules that swap in and out. Read More
The long-running saga over the future of Toshiba’s memory chip business — the world’s second largest supplier of NAND memory used in phones and PCs — took a big step forward after the Japanese company officially agreed [PDF] to an $18 billion sale to a consortium led by Bain Capital, which includes Apple among its backers. A deal was agreed in principle earlier this… Read More
Google has rolled out changes to how it displays search results for products in Europe to try to comply with an EU antitrust ruling against its Google Shopping search comparison service. Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt brings top tech founders and investors to the stage for riveting interviews, but many attendees want more time with the experts. Introducing Off the Record (OTR), a new series of sessions inside Disrupt Berlin that delivers just that.
So, what are Off the Record sessions? Think conversations with main stage-caliber speakers — only they take place in a more intimate… Read More
The parent company of games giant Nexon has confirmed that it acquired Korea’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange, Korbit, in a deal that values it at just over $120 million. A spokesperson from NXC, the corporation which owns $11.5 billion-valued Nexon, confirmed to TechCrunch that it paid 91.3 billion KRW (approximately $79.5 million) for 65.19 percent of Korbit. South Korean… Read More
It’s time to put an end to these dumb automatic customer support calls that ask you to press 1, then press 4, then press 2, then say “yes”… CallDesk is working on a virtual agent for customer support calls. Think something like Siri for customer calls. Point Nine Capital and EQT Ventures are investing in today’s funding round of $2.5 million (€2.1 million). There… Read More
Nokia brand licensee HMD Global is doubling down on the tech nostalgia card it pulled out back in February, by announcing a 3G version of the colorful candybar Nokia 3310 — now with support for a handful of apps. Read More
Unfortunately, most funding networks are often old boys’ clubs. But more women-led investor firms like BB Ventures, Kapor Capital and Backstage Capital in the U.S. and Allbright in the U.K. are demonstrating to the VC world that you can bring real business AND be intentional about funding diverse ventures, at the same time. Who knew?
AllBright – the collective for working women… Read More
Naspers, the South African media and internet giant, has upped its stake in Delivery Hero, the Berlin based food-delivery giant that went public earlier this year and has a market cap of $6.8 billion. Naspers has acquired another 13 percent of the company, 22.4 million shares, equivalent to about €660 million ($775 million), from Rocket Internet. Naspers now owns 26.3 percent of the… Read More
The French tech scene — ‘La French tech’ as they like to call it — has been making waves recently, while France generally has been benefiting from the ‘Macron bounce’. So it’s only right that we highlight whats going on there at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, our premier European event. That means bringing over key players from their startup ecosystem.… Read More
Japanese news app Gunosy, which listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange two years ago, has put its weight and money behind ambitious ad tech startup AdAsia.
Singapore-based AdAsia, founded in April 2016 by Japanese ad execs Kosuke Sogo and Otohiko Kozutsumi, announced that it has raised a further $2.5 million in addition to the $12 million Series A it closed in April.
The additional capital… Read More
Earlier this year Thailand-based Omise held a $25 million ICO to develop a next-generation decentralized payment network, and now the company has closed an undisclosed investment from Thai bank Krungsri (Bank of Ayudhya).
Omise has raised over $20 million in VC money — the ICO was for its Omise Go (OMG) division — but this new financing is strategic in nature. The deal itself… Read More
Grab, Uber’s main rival in Southeast Asia, has made a move into dock-less bikes after the company quietly backed oBike. Singapore-based Grab invested in oBike — which was started in Singapore by Chinese founders and is present in 30 cities — as part of a $45 million Series B round that was announced in August, a source with knowledge of the deal told TechCrunch.… Read More
Facebook doesn’t just want to make it easy to sign up to be a blood donor from the News Feed. It’s also creating a special kind of post for requesting blood donations of a certain type in a certain location, and then notifying nearby donors that qualify. While many people are interested and willing to give blood, they might not know how to sign up, where to go, or have the… Read More
Cambodia is set to become the newest battlefield for Uber and Grab’s ride on-demand battle after both companies expanded into the Southeast Asian country’s capital city Phnom Penh this week. Word that Grab, which recently raised $2 billion from SoftBank and Didi, is preparing to launch in the city slipped out this week. A spokesperson confirmed that the company is conducting testing… Read More
Amazon reveals its high-end Echo, MIT’s CSAIL developed a robot that can wear different exoskeletons, Ford and Lyft tie the knot and Delta gives people free messaging on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and iMessage on flights. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Magic Leap very well could be one giant, well-funded performance art piece.
Today, the augmented reality company (which, again, has yet to launch a product or share any details of a product despite raising absurd amounts of dough) launched a new website.
The website is nice. It’s modern, pretty bare bones, it has a new red version of their logo and a sign-up page to “keep in… Read More
Digital streaming business Roku has priced its IPO at $14 per share, raising close to $220 million. This values the company at about $1.3 billion. This is good news for Roku, which had proposed a range of $12 to $14. Earlier reports suggested that the company had been targeting a $1 billion market cap. Roku is in the cord-cutting business. The company’s digital streaming players… Read More
