Businesses today feel, more than ever before, the imperative to have flexible e-commerce strategies in place, able to connect with would-be customers wherever they might be. That market driver has now led to a significant growth round for a startup that is helping the larger of these businesses, including those targeting the B2B market, build […]
If you’ve ever used a Snapchat or Instagram filter, you know that one of the popular use cases for AR (augmented reality) is to change up your appearance with virtual makeup — like a different shade of lipstick or eyeshadow, for example. Today, Google is moving into this space, as well, with the launch of […]
Europe has greenlit Google’s $2.1BN acquisition of fitness wearable maker Fitbit, applying a number of conditions intended to shrink competition concerns over letting it gobble a major cache of health and wellness data following months of regulatory scrutiny of the deal. While Google announced its plan to buy Fitbit over a year ago, it only […]
While 2020 won’t be remembered fondly by many of us for much of anything, it was a blockbuster year for enterprise M&A with the top 10 deals totaling an astounding $165.2 billion. This is the third straight year I’ve done this compilation. Last year the number was $40 billion. The year prior it was $87 […]
It’s been an eventful fall for Perigee CEO and founder Mollie Breen. The former NSA employee participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield in September, and she just closed her first seed round on Thanksgiving, giving her a $1.5 million runway to begin building the company. Outsiders Fund led the round with participation from Westport, […]
Royalties aside, songwriters are often unsung heroes of music making. Sure, some — like Carole King and Jimmy Webb — become well-known in their own right, but more often than not, names are relegated to the liner notes. A new feature in Spotify seeks to correct that — or at least offers listeners a way […]
Adobe is launching an update to its Spark social media design tool today that will bring more than 10,000 new design assets to the service. This update, which follows the launch of animations in Spark in September, also brings a small UI change with it to accommodate this new feature, but for the most part, […]
Oscar, the New York-based health insurance upstart at the vanguard of a wave of venture capital healthcare investment made in the wake of the Affordable Care Act, has raised another $140 million in financing. The new capital means that Oscar has raised what would be the equivalent of $1 million a day for the entirety […]
Today, American securities watchdog the SEC announced that Robinhood, a free-to-trade broker that has grown rapidly in recent years, has paid a $65 million fine to settle charges relating to some of its historical business practices. The actions at issue occured between 2015 and 2018, with the SEC alleging that the company “made misleading statements and […]
Canoo, the Los Angeles-based electric vehicle startup that will make its debut later this month on the Nasdaq as a publicly traded company, revealed Thursday an all-electric multi-purpose delivery vehicle. The electric delivery vehicle, which includes a high roof height, storage lockers and a software as a service platform to manage fleets, is targeted at […]
A new startup called Gawq wants to tackle the problem of fake news and the “echo chamber” problem created by social media, where our view of the world is shaped by manipulative algorithms and personalized feeds. Through Gawq’s newly launched mobile news app, it aims to present news from a range of sources, while allowing […]
Walmart and TikTok announced this morning they will be partnering on the first pilot test of a new shoppable product experience on TikTok’s social video app. Walmart, as you may recall, had planned to invest in TikTok when the app was being threatened with a ban from the U.S. market unless it sold its U.S. […]
The idea sounds almost too simple. Create a version of Linkedin that’s specifically for the healthcare industry, where professionals can find out not just who has what credentials, but also learn about the research those professionals are conducting and the specialties they have. In the middle of a global pandemic, when industry insiders are all […]
Cloudflare is launching a new product today called Cloudflare Pages. It competes directly with Netlify or Vercel, two cloud hosting companies that let you build and deploy sites using JAMstack frameworks. Popular JAMstack frameworks include Gatsby, Jekyll, Hugo, Vue.js, Next.js, etc. If that announcement sounds familiar, that’s because reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, leaked details […]
Launch startup Astra had a monumental week, achieving their first spaceflight with a rocket test on Tuesday. Astra CEO Chris Kemp joined Relativity CEO Tim Ellis, and VOX Space President Mandy Vaughn at our TC Sessions: Space event on Wednesday, and with Relativity’s huge $500 million round earlier this year, and Virgin Orbit’s milestone test […]
Corporate spend management startup Ramp has raised $30 million more in a new round, it announced today. TechCrunch covered Ramp’s launch earlier this year, when it also detailed that it had raised around $23 million up to that point. The startup raised its latest round in August of 2020, with conversations about the deal kicking […]
SpaceX is launching a Falcon 9 today from Kennedy Space Center, with a launch window that spans three hours and opens at 9 AM EST (6 AM PST). The mission will carry a spy satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and will include a recovery attempt for the first-stage booster used on the […]
A startup with a new type of spacecraft propulsion system could make the interplanetary travel seen in Star Trek a reality. Magdrive has just closed a £1.4M seed round led by Founders Fund, an early investor in SpaceX, backed by Luminous Ventures, 7percent Ventures, and Entrepreneur First. Magdrive is developing a next generation of spacecraft […]
