Twitter this morning is launching its own version of Stories — aka “Fleets” — to its global user base. The product, which allows users to post ephemeral content that disappears in 24 hours, had already rolled out to select markets including Brazil, India, Italy, South Korea, and most recently, Japan. The company, in a press […]
TikTok today announced it’s expanding its parental control feature set known as Family Pairing to give parents additional tools to manage various aspects of their teen’s account as well as their privacy on the social video platform. The new tools will allow parents to set their teen’s account to private, control whether their Liked Videos […]
As Italy reinstates many COVID-19 restrictions, the country’s tech ecosystem is watching and waiting to see what the wider effects of the emergency will be. Italy’s ecosystem for tech venture capital and startups has been in development for years and has made decent strides in the last decade. Will the coronavirus stymie their efforts? Put […]
Targeting the population that’s most underserved with new treatment options has been part of the mission fro Twentyeight Health since its launch. Now a new partnership with the venture-backed startup, Healthify, means that the company will be able to expand its reach. Healthify works with managed care organizations and case workers to integrate social determinants […]
Byron Deeter’s portfolio includes Twilio, DocuSign, Box, Canva, Intercom, SendGrid and many more. He is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced SaaS and cloud investors in the biz, which is why Alex Wilhelm and I are more than thrilled to lead a live Q&A with Deeter on today’s forthcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live. […]
Communication tools are evolving quickly. We have all kinds of social media for our personal lives, Slack for chatting with our coworkers, Discord for gaming and other communities, and Zoom and FaceTime for when we want to look someone (almost) in the eyes. But the business phone has been mostly stuck in the past. OpenPhone […]
Giraffe360 has a robotic camera, combined with a subscription service, which enables real estate agents and brokers to generate high-resolution photos of properties, floor plans and virtual tours easily. It’s now raised $4.5M in a funding round led by LAUNCHub Ventures and Hoxton Ventures. Also participating is HCVC (Hardware Club), alongside existing investor Change Ventures. […]
A little over two years after its $753 million acquisition of the prescription medicine delivery service Pillpack, Amazon has finally launched Amazon Pharmacy, its online and mobile prescription medication ordering and fulfillment service. Using a secure pharmacy profile, customers can add their insurance information, manage prescriptions and choose payment options all through Amazon’s service. And […]
Turtlemint, an Indian startup that is helping consumers identify and purchase the most appropriate insurance policies for them, has raised $30 million in a new financing round as it looks to reach more users in small cities and towns in the world’s second largest internet market. The new round, the five-year-old Mumbai-headquartered startup’s Series D, […]
Autodesk, the U.S. publicly listed software and services company that targets engineering and design industries, has acquired Norway’s Spacemaker, a startup that has developed AI-supported software for urban development. The price of the acquisition is $240 million in a mostly all-cash deal. Spacemaker’s VC backers include European firms Atomico and Northzone, which co-led the company’s […]
Lego’s partnership with Nintendo delivered a pretty awesome debut earlier this year with the interactive Lego Super Mario Starter Course, and now it’s following that up with additional sets designed to complement the first. These include a new ‘Master Your Adventure Maker Set,’ which adds customization options by tweaking Lego Mario’s response via three new […]
Forto, a digital freight forwarder which has experienced a boom during the pandemic, has raised another $50 million in funding. This takes its total investment to $73 million after it raised $23m in debt financing from the European Investment Bank this year. It’s now raised $126 million in total, since its launch in 2016. The […]
In a period of social distancing, making new professional connections feels harder than ever. So Amsterdam-based Cooper is building a network that’s all about making and receiving introductions. “Everything that happens in the network is based on on the foundation of introductions,” CEO Robert Gaal told me. “You should never get an unwanted message, and […]
Telkomsel, Indonesia’s biggest telecom network, has invested $150 million in ride-hailing firm Gojek, the two companies said on Tuesday. As part of the “strategic partnership,” the two firms said they will explore a “broad range of collaboration opportunities” to reach millions of Indonesians. Since 2018, Gojek and Telkomsel have maintained a deal to subsidize the […]
PingCAP, the open-source software developer best known for NewSQL database TiDB, has raised a $270 million Series D. TiDB handles hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP), and is aimed at high-growth companies, including payment and e-commerce services, that need to handle increasingly large amounts of data. The round’s lead investors were GGV Capital, Access Technology […]
Tibber, a ‘digital electricity’ supplier which uses AI to switch around power for houses based on their predicted levels of consumption – has closed a $65 million Series B round led by Eight Roads Ventures and Balderton Capital, with participation from existing investors including San Francisco-based Founders Fund, which invested last year. Alongside equity, Tibber […]
AMP Robotics, the manufacturer of robotic recycling systems, has received its largest purchase order from the publicly traded North American waste handling company, Waste Connections. The order, for 24 machine learning enabled robotic recycling systems, will be used on container, fiber and residue lines across numerous materials recovery facilities, the company said. The AMP technology […]
After weeks of rumors, Huawei confirmed it is selling Honor to a consortium of companies, including government-backed firms, Honor’s distribution partners and suppliers, in a move to save its budget phone brand from U.S. pressure. The decision was announced in a joint statement released Tuesday morning in a local Shenzhen paper. Once the transaction is […]
GitHub defies a takedown order, Strava raises a big round and Moderna reports promising COVID-19 vaccine results. This is your Daily Crunch for November 16, 2020. The big story: GitHub reinstates YouTube downloading project Back in October, the Recording Industry Association of America sent a DMCA complaint to GitHub over a project called YouTube-dl, which […]
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today we have an Equity Shot for you about Airbnb’s S-1 filing, as it looks to go public before the year is out. First we get into Airbnb’s macro performance, which shows a stable-picture historical revenue growth. There […]
