The murder of George Floyd last May ignited many things in the United States last year — one of which that was perhaps unexpected: a rise in the number of digital banks targeting the Black community. Some members of the Black community took their belief that big banks are not meeting their needs and turned […]
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. Before we get into this week’s show, make sure to check out all the news here about how Equity is expanding, and becoming even more of […]
A little less than three years ago at the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View, California, the founders of a young company hailing from Cambridge, England addressed a crowd of celebrities, investors and entrepreneurs at Y Combinator’s August Demo Day promising a revolution in food science. Over the years, the event has become a relatively […]
Online consumer intelligence and social media listening platform Brandwatch has been acquired by Cision, best known for its media monitoring and media contact database services, for $450 million, in a combined cash and shares deal. TechCrunch understands Brandwatch’s key executive team will be staying on. The move combines two large players to offer a broad […]
AI-enabled synthetic media is being used as a tool for manipulating real emotions and capturing user data by genealogy service MyHeritage, which has just launched a new feature — called “deep nostalgia” — that lets users upload a photo of a person (or several people) to see individual faces animated by algorithm. The Black Mirror-style […]
There are big investment firms, and then there are big investment firms. Brookfield Asset Management, the Toronto-based,122-year-old outfit whose current market cap is $63 billion and that oversees $600 billion in assets, clearly falls into the latter camp. Think real estate, infrastructure, renewable power, private equity and credit. If it falls into a defined asset […]
Raena was founded in 2019 to create personal care brands with top social media influencers. After several launches, however, the Singapore-based startup noticed an interesting trend: customers were ordering batches of products from Raena every week and reselling them on social media and e-commerce platforms like Shopee and Tokopedia. Last year, the company decided to […]
Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee and doughnut giant, has raised a new round of funding for its Chinese venture. The investment is led by Sequoia China with participation from Tencent, its digital partner in China, and Eastern Bell Capital. The round comes two years after Tim Hortons made its foray into China’s booming coffee industry. […]
Another VC firm has closed on some significant funding for investments — underscoring both the long-term confidence investors continue to have for backing startups in the tech sector, and the amount of money swimming around in venture at the moment. Bessemer Venture Partners announced Thursday the close of two new funds totaling $3.3 billion, money […]
Newsela, a SaaS platform for K-12 instructional material backed by the likes of TCV, Kleiner Perkins, Reach Capital and Owl Ventures, announced today that it has raised $100 million in a Series D round. The financing was led by new investor Franklin Templeton, and brings Newsela’s valuation to $1 billion. The new round is larger […]
Twitter reveals its move into paid subscriptions, Australia passes its media bargaining law and Coinbase files its S-1. This is your Daily Crunch for February 25, 2021. The big story: Twitter announces ‘Super Follow’ subscriptions Twitter announced its first paid product at an investor event today, showing off screenshots of a feature that will allow […]
AT&T just announced an agreement with private equity firm TPG that will turn DirecTV into a standalone company, albeit one that’s still majority owned by the telecom giant. Specifically, AT&T says it will own 70% of the new company, while TPG owns 30%. This transaction values DirecTV at $16.25 billion — a dramatic decline from […]
Boating is a hobby steeped in history and tradition — and so is the industry and those that support it. With worldwide connectivity, electric boats, and other technological changes dragging the sector out of old habits, Orca aims to replace the outdated interfaces by which people navigate with a hardware-software combo as slick as any […]
This morning DigitalOcean, a provider of cloud computing services to SMBs, filed to go public. The company intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol “DOCN.” DigitalOcean’s offering comes amidst a hot streak for tech IPOs, and valuations that are stretched by historical norms. The cloud hosting company was […]
Anchorage has raised an $80 million Series C funding round led by GIC, also known as Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. Andreessen Horowitz, Blockchain Capital, Lux and Indico are also participating in today’s funding round. The thinking behind this funding round is quite simple. Some companies, such as Tesla or Square, have recently chosen to invest […]
It’s been an all-around more ambitious year for Twitter. Following activist shareholder action last year that aimed to oust CEO Jack Dorsey, the company has been making long overdue product moves, buying up companies and aiming to push the envelope on how it can tap its network and drive new revenue streams. Things seem to […]
Many launch providers think reusability is the best way to lower the cost and delay involved in getting to space. SpaceX and Rocket Lab have shown reusable first stages, which take a payload to the edge of space — and now Stoke Space Technologies says it is making a reusable second stage, which will take […]
Robotics took a small step into the wild world of SPACs this week, as Berkshire Grey announced its plan to go public by Q2. Setting aside some of the bigger issues with using the reverse merger route we’ve discussed plenty, BG is an ideal candidate for this next major step for a number of reasons. […]
Sergey Brin’s secretive airship company LTA Research and Exploration is planning to power a huge disaster relief airship with an equally record-breaking hydrogen fuel cell. A job listing from the company, which is based in Mountain View, California and Akron, Ohio, reveals that LTA wants to configure a 1.5-megawatt hydrogen propulsion system for an airship […]
Diversity, equity and inclusion. These essential elements remain woefully lacking across the tech industry despite recent strides. Join us on March 3 — just one week away — for TC Sessions: Justice 2021. Hear from and engage with the top experts and leading voices working to change the tech industry for the good of all […]
