We take an in-depth look at TikTok usage in Russia, Facebook’s Oversight Board looks beyond Facebook and Sesame Workshop backs an edtech fund. This is your Daily Crunch for February 11, 2021. The big story: TikTok becomes a political battleground in Russia Russia has a small but fast-growing and vocal group of TikTok users. And […]
TikTok is expanding its integrations with third-party services, with the launch of a test that allows creators in the food space to link directly to recipes found on the Whisk app. This is being made possible by way of a new “recipe” button overlaid on related TikTok food videos. The feature makes a TikTok cooking […]
The Facebook Oversight Board has only been operational for a short time, but the nascent project is already looking ahead. In a conversation hosted by the Carnegie Endowment Thursday, Oversight Board co-chair and former Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt painted a more expansive vision for the group that could go beyond making policy decisions […]
Knife Capital, a South African venture capital firm, is raising a $50 million fund for startups looking to raise Series B financing. With Knife Fund III called the African Series B Expansion Fund, the firm seeks to directly invest in the aggressive expansion of South African breakout companies. It also plans to co-invest in companies […]
“For All Mankind: Time Capsule” is a new augmented reality app created by Apple to promote the upcoming second season of “For All Mankind,” which premieres on February 19 on Apple TV+. Even for those of you who aren’t fans of the the show — which tells the story of an alternate history in which […]
Public.com, a social-focused free stock trading service, is nearing the close of a Series D just two months after raising a $65 million Series C, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. According to Business Insider, the San Francisco-based fintech is raising $200 million at a $1.2 billion valuation in a round led by Tiger […]
Demetrius Curry has spent the last couple years chasing a dream. His startup, College Cash, allows brands to petition users to create photo and video marketing content highlighting their product or service, with the wrinkle being that content creators are paid by the brands in the form of credits that go directly toward paying down […]
Video collaboration startup Frame.io unveiled a new technology today that it calls Frame.io Camera to Cloud. Michael Cioni, the startup’s global senior vice president of innovation, explained that while consumers expect to instantly upload video footage to the cloud, professional film and TV productions still rely on hard drives. There’s a good reason for that: […]
Analysis of a trove of data extracted from the Chicago Police Department has revealed major differences between how Black and white officers, as well as male and female ones, actually enforce the law. This rare apples-to-apples comparison supports the idea that improving diversity in law enforcement may also improve the quality of policing. Historically hard […]
When Sam Lurye looks at a loading dock he sees both a bottleneck in the world’s supply chain and an opportunity. The opportunity — driven by a tension between the digital and physical infrastructure at warehouse distribution centers and factories today and the push toward autonomy — prompted Lurye to found Kargo, a smart loading […]
A webcam app installed by thousands of users left an exposed database packed with user data on the internet without a password. The Elasticsearch database belonged to Adorcam, an app for viewing and controlling several webcam models including Zeeporte and Umino cameras. Security researcher Justin Paine discovered the data exposure and contacted Adorcam, which secured […]
Typically when we talk about tech and security, the mind naturally jumps to cybersecurity. But equally important, especially for global companies with large, multinational organizations, is physical security — a key function at most medium-to-large enterprises, and yet one that to date, hasn’t really done much to take advantage of recent advances in technology. Enter […]
Just three years after its founding, biotech startup Immunai has raised $60 million in Series A funding, bringing its total raised to over $80 million. Despite its youth, Immunai has already established the largest database in the world for single cell immunity characteristics, and it has already used its machine learning-powered immunity analysts platform to […]
Apps saw record downloads and consumer spending in 2020, globally reaching somewhere around $111 billion to $112 billion, according to various estimates. But a growing part of that spend was subscription payments, a new report from Sensor Tower indicates. Last year, global subscription app revenue from the top 100 subscription apps (excluding games), climbed 34% […]
Shell’s plan to roll out 500,000 electric charging stations in just four years is the latest sign of an EV charging infrastructure boom that has prompted investors to pour cash into the industry and inspired a few companies to become public companies in search of the capital needed to meet demand. Since the beginning of […]
Maisonette, a four-year-old, New York-based company, has aimed from the outset to become a one-stop curated shop for everything a family might need for their young children. That plan appears to be working. Today, the company — which launched with preppy young children’s apparel and has steadily built out categories that include home décor, home […]
The team at Reduct.Video is hoping to dramatically increase the amount of videos created by businesses. The startup’s technology is already used by customers including Intuit, Autodesk, Facebook, Dell, Spotify, Indeed, Superhuman and IDEO. And today, Reduct is announcing that it has raised a $4 million round led by Greylock and South Park Commons, with […]
Treinta, a startup that is part of the Winter 2021 Y Combinator cohort, announced this morning that it has raised north of half a million dollars for its bookkeeping and inventory management software aimed at Latin American small businesses. The capital was raised between a small friends-and-family round, Y Combinator’s investment in Treinta and another […]
