Soft Space, a payment provider in Southeast Asia, has closed its $5 million Series A as it looks to expand across the region, and potentially into Japan.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia-based Soft Space works with large enterprise customers, typically banks, to offer customized solutions for mobile payment, both at point-of-sale and other parts of the process. Typically these solutions are white-labeled. Read More
Spruce, a new startup looking to speed up the mortgage closing process, has raised $4.5 million in its series A financing from Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, and Third Prime Capital along with a slew of private angel investors. Founded by two former employees of the robo-advisory wealth management company Betterment, the new startup is notable for a few reasons. First, it’s… Read More
For those operating a bitcoin exchange — where people can buy cryptocoins — you’d imagine that the current surge in value for bitcoin and others like Ethereum’s ether coin is a dream come true. The answer is yes and no. Coinbase, the world’s most funded bitcoin exchange, was dragged offline by the massive increase in interest in the space. Users have… Read More
Mark Zuckerberg gives this year’s Harvard commencement speech, Uber and Lyft are returning to Austin, Ford has some leadership shake-ups and TC Battlefield company Beam (acquired by Microsoft) is now called Mixer. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
There are few verticals filled with more utopian dreams than the studios and startups building VR and AR experiences. While some are looking to craft 3D experiences that integrate into the real world, others are aiming to create massive worlds we can escape to. The one thing many of them have in common, however, is that they are built on a game engine from a company called Unity. Read More
I have to say, I really like e-paper. And it’s come a long way since the crude early Kindles — nowadays you have e-readers that are as high-resolution as the best phones and iPads. And they’re set to get even better if E-Ink’s latest screens make it into a few products, as I hope they do. Read More
The threat of minefields is an ongoing and horrifying one, and the duty of clearing them is as difficult as it is dangerous. All the more reason, then, that it should be done by robots! A new type of inexpensive, versatile bot modeled after turtles could be a great tool for this and other jobs. Read More
New data out of Stanford is lending credence to common wisdom that fitness trackers suck at counting calories. Heart-rate monitoring, on the other hand, fared surprisingly well in the school’s Medical Center studies. Read More
Another one of the co-founders of online lending startup SoFi is leaving the company, TechCrunch has learned. Dan Macklin, who served as VP of Community and Member Success at SoFi, has announced internally that he’ll be stepping down from his position on June 6th. Read More
HBO confirmed today that Silicon Valley will indeed be returning for a fifth season, but one of its stars, T.J. Miller, who plays the ever moronic Erlich Bachman, will not be rejoining the cast. Read More
It was off to the races for Appian, which debuted on the Nasdaq on Thursday, soaring 25 percent on its first day on the stock market. After pricing shares at $12, the company closed the day above $15, valuing the company at about $900 million. Read More
Binded aims to make it easier for photographers to protect their intellectual property by creating a permanent record of their copyright in a public database, namely the blockchain. The startup was previously known as Blockai, but it’s rebranding today — the new name is meant to focus less on technology and instead emphasize the idea of creating a legally binding record. Read More
Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard commencement speech centered around how we can improve life through big projects, equal opportunity and building both local and global community. He outlined a plan “to create a world where every single person has a sense of purpose.” Read More
Target has reportedly rolled $75 million into Casper, the direct-to-consumer mattress startup you may have heard about in all those podcasts. The funding is a good chunk of what should end up being a more than $100 million round. Read More
Ahead of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s commencement speech at Harvard today, the school’s much-lauded student newspaper had some… interesting headlines to share. Read More
While some in Silicon Valley indulge in free meals, laundry service and egg freezing, an estimated 50 percent of the workforce won’t even have basic benefits by 2020 — and Virginia Senator Mark Warner wants to do something about that. Read More
Customer experience chatbot developer Rulai has launched a new “low-code” chatbot development tool and raised $6.5 million to roll it out. Yi Zhang, the company’s chief technologist, and her team are launching a product that customer service managers can use to develop chatbots that will perform tasks based on customer conversations, and that can be created without a single… Read More
College dropout-turned-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally got his degree today, and now he’s about to give Harvard’s 366th commencement speech.
You can watch him speak here now, where we’ll embed the Facebook Live broadcast on TechCrunch, and provide frequent updates on any news or insights he mentions.
For a deeper look at the substance of his talk, read our follow-up… Read More
The Pokémon company has come out with another true masterpiece. It’s called Magikarp Jump, which came out for iOS and Android earlier today. It’s about training Magikarp, the most beloved Pokémon in the universe, to jump as hard as it can and squash the hopes and dreams of its opponents. Here are some tips to get started. Read More
Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley ordered Thursday that Uber needs to hand over to Waymo the full, unredacted term sheet between Uber and Otto. By the end of the day. Corley ultimately decided there was no basis for Uber to redact the information because there was no privileged information shared with Otto prior to the acquisition. Read More
