Applications for Startup Battlefield are now open! Founders, this past year has been challenging in ways words can’t encompass. But you are persevering and now is the time to show the world what you have been working on. TechCrunch is on the hunt for game-changing and ground-breaking startups from around the globe to feature in […]
The NFT ecosystem is having an explosive moment and the startups that were ready to run with it are getting lots of cash to continue capturing that momentum. SuperRare, an NFT art platform that has garnered tens of millions in new sales in recent weeks, has just raised millions from investors. The $9 million Series […]
YouTube announced today it will begin testing what could end up being a significant change to its video platform: It’s going to try hiding the dislike count on videos from public view. The company says it will run a “small experiment” where it will try out a few different designs where dislike counts are no […]
This afternoon Substack, a paid-newsletter startup, confirmed that it has raised $65 million, as initially reported by Axios. TechCrunch dug into the math behind the financing here. As anticipated, a16z led the new financing. What’s in store from the now Series B-backed company? Product work. The company wrote that it intends to “rapidly” expand its […]
Autonomous, electric mobility service provider Optimus Ride announced a partnership with powersports vehicle manufacturer Polaris to bring fully autonomous GEM electric vehicles to market. The two will introduce a new line of Polaris GEM low-speed vehicles that will be engineered to fully integrate Optimus Ride’s autonomous software and hardware suite. The microtransit vehicles are expected […]
Arm today announced Armv9, the next generation of its chip architecture. Its predecessor, Armv8, launched a decade ago and while it has seen its fair share of changes and updates, the new architecture brings a number of major updates to the platform that warrant a shift in version numbers. Unsurprisingly, Armv9 builds on v8 and […]
Google today announced that it is rolling out Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a crucial part of its Privacy Sandbox project for Chrome, as a developer origin trial. FLoC is meant to be an alternative to the kind of cookies that advertising technology companies use today to track you across the web. Instead of a […]
Vote counting begins today in the historic effort to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama fulfillment center. The warehouse — which opened exactly a year ago to meet ramping up demand as COVID-19 bore down on the U.S. — has become ground zero for one of the most important labor efforts in modern American history. Voting began […]
The NFT craze has been an intriguing moment for digital artists who have seen great leaps in how tech has allowed them to create their work, but not as much progress in shifting how they profit off of it. Though crypto’s early adopter artists have seemed to gain the most attention thus far, more institutionally […]
Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, is today releasing its latest project called Stack, an app that will help you digitize your documents, receipts and other papers you have lying around the house, and then automatically save them to Google Drive. The app will also helpfully suggest a name for your scans and the right category […]
UPDATE: Per the Wall Street Journal, this is actually not happening and was instead an April Fool’s joke gone wrong. VW USA still has not responded to requests for comment, but VW Europe told the publication that it was in fact a joke. The release announcing the news remains live on VW’s official U.S. media […]
HighRadius, which has developed AI-powered fintech software, announced Tuesday it has raised $300 million in a Series C funding round led by D1 Capital and Tiger Global. The round values Houston-based HighRadius at $3.1 billion, triple its valuation of “more than $1 billion” at the time of its $125 million Series B in January of […]
Duo, the authentication service Cisco acquired for $2.35 billion in 2018, today announced its plans to launch a passwordless authentication service that will allow users to log in to their Duo-protected services through security keys or platform biometrics like Apple’s Face ID or Microsoft’s Windows Hello. The infrastructure-agnostic service will go into public preview in […]
Back in the halcyon days of 2019, we piloted a new format for Extra Crunch we dubbed the EC-1. Modeled after the Form S-1 filing that late-stage startups submit to the SEC as part of the IPO process, EC-1s are authoritative, deep analyses into growth-stage startups. We profiled and analyzed a number of companies like […]
The company that would become Tonal had to fight through multiple VC rounds of skeptical investors ready to say that two-letter word that stops all progress.
Company building, brand building, launch strategy and marketing tactics are key to the success of most startups — and that’s what this second part of the Tonal EC-1 is all about.
Why should any customer spend upward of $3,000 on a Tonal device? The answer will determine Tonal’s eventual success, and that’s the theme we will explore in this fourth and final part of the EC-1.
Cameo, the celebrity video site you’re probably familiar with if you’ve celebrated a birthday in the last three years, announced this morning that it’s raised a $100M Series C. The round, which was led by Jonathan Turner with e.ventures, puts the site’s value at just north of $1 billion. Cameo has been building a good […]
SpaceX is set to make a change to its Crew Dragon spacecraft for its forthcoming history-making all-civilian launch, currently set for September 15. That Dragon will replace its International Space Station docking mechanism with a transparent dome, through which passengers will be able to take in an awe-inspiring surround panorama of space and the Earth […]
