Microsoft is holding its annual Build developer conference in Seattle this week and the company is hosting its second and final keynote of the event today. You can watch the live stream right here. Today’s keynote is scheduled to start at 8:30am on the West Coast, 11:30am on the East Coast, 4:30pm in London and 5:30pm in Paris. Yesterday’s keynote mostly focused on topics… Read More
A meal kit startup with a focus on healthful recipes and organic ingredients, Sun Basket, has just raised $9 million in series C-2 round of venture funding led by Unilever Ventures, with Baseline Ventures and Founders Circle Capital joining the round. The investment brings the startup’s total capital raised to-date to $52 million. Sun Basket delivers recipes and pre-measured ingredients… Read More
Researchers at CMU’s Future Interfaces Group reckon they’ve come up with a quicker, less expensive and less cumbersome way to create a smart home. And one that might have some privacy benefits too. Just plug in their single ‘super sensor’ and play… Read More
Last week, to commemorate World Password Day — yes, there really is such a thing — we ran my 2015 article called Kill the password, my treatise on the myriad problems associated with passwords. Trusona, a company trying to transform identity, announced today that it is releasing support for passwordless entry on Salesforce.com. Hey, it’s a start. The trouble with the password… Read More
This morning Cisco announced that it is buying MindMeld for $125 million. Founded in 2011, MindMeld helps businesses to build conversational interfaces with cloud-based services. MindMeld, originally called Expect Labs, was launched on the stage of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012. At that time the startup wanted to build an iPad app that could listen in on your conversations and provide… Read More
TechCrunch is excited to partner with General Catalyst in New York for Include Office Hours. Spencer Lazar, Partner at General Catalyst, will be meeting with founders to provide key advice and guidance. Submit your application here. In 2014, TechCrunch launched the Include Program in an effort to facilitate opportunities for underserved and underrepresented founders. Noting the significant gaps… Read More
We want to see you in New York for Disrupt NY 2017, our annual celebration of all things startup. It’s a great time. You get to meet great founders and VCs and I’d love to meet you personally when I run through the alley with our video team. Hardware is my favorite thing in the world and you’re some of my favorite people. Disrupt runs from May 15-17 and will be held on Pier 36… Read More
Twiggle, a Tel Aviv-headquartered startup focused on making searching for products online as simple as talking to a store clerk, announced today that it has raised $15 million led by MizMaa Ventures and Korea Investment Partners. Read More
A thief, your kids skipping school or paranormal activity? That’s the question that Lighthouse aims to answer with its new interactive assistant. By combining sophisticated sensors with computer vision technology, the Lighthouse team hopes to deliver an experience that brings more day-to-day value than a mere home security solution. Coming out of Stealth today, the company is… Read More
Europe’s top court appears to be leaning towards calling a spade a spade by judging Uber’s business a transportation company, rather than just an enabling tech platform as the company prefers to think of itself, ie. as a way for the on-demand ride hailing app to work around the (stricter) licensing regulations that can be applied to traditional taxi firms. Read More
Ontruck, a Madrid-based startup that has built an “on-demand logistics platform” to connect businesses directly with road freight carriers, has raised $10 million in Series A funding. Read More
Verizon appears to have won its bidding war with AT&T for Straight Path Communications after offering $3.1 billion. AT&T announced last month that it had agreed to buy Straight Path for $1.6 billion, but after Verizon placed a bid for nearly double that amount on Monday, AT&T declined to match it, reports the Wall Street Journal. Read More
Soon enough, self-driving car companies will have the opportunity to see how their cars deal with sitting in the occasionally snowy bumper-to-bumper New York traffic. Today, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state will begin accepting applications from companies interested in testing out their self-driving car vehicles on public roads. “With this action, we are taking a… Read More
Snap has a pretty rough day with its first earnings report, Didi Chuxing gets a big $5 billion investment from SoftBank and the author of “Cracking the Coding Interview” comes into the studio to challege John Mannes at Connect 4. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Lightspeed Venture Partners is having quite a year. But to learn a little more about the firm’s earliest days, how exactly it helps startups and whether it thinks the pace of innovation right now can keep up with the amount of capital flooding the market, investor Semil Shah of the seed-stage firm Haystack sat down with Lightspeed co-founders Ravi Mhatre and Barry Eggers. Read More
As competition among them heats up, meal kit startups are expanding their repertoire, including by selling their dinner kits at groceries and adding new products to their catalogs. Today, early meal kit player HelloFresh announced the availability of wines on their site beginning May 17th. Read More
With an eye on providing banking services later this year, online lending startup SoFi is planning to apply for an industrial bank charter in the next month, according to CEO Mike Cagney. If approved, it would become the first company to receive a new industrial loan company (ILC) charter in a decade. Read More
Snapchat won’t say exactly how many Spectacles its sold, but it did admit today that the “Other revenue” category that’s mostly from Spectacles brought in around $4.5 million in revenue in Q4 2016, and over $8.3 million in revenue in Q1 2017. Read More
