Commercial cannabis operations often rely on software platforms to track and forecast crops from seed to sale. Trym today is announcing a large $3.1M seed round that will help the company expand its software offering. Trym’s solution offers commercial growers a robust set of features, including integration with the regulatory platform Metrc and environmental sensors. […]
After launching its first bottle in 2018, LARQ has drummed up a good deal of interest among consumers looking for ways to wean themselves off of plastic bottles. Last year alone, the Bay Area-based startup managed to sell 75,000 bottles, with help from retail partners like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s. The feat is made more impressive […]
Shipping has long been one of the more antiquated, and least technological, segments in the world of commerce, with its physical aspects — rooted in massive cargo tankers, giant fleets of aircraft and trucks, and trains of linked-up containers — underscoring some of the more obvious analogue attributes of the business. That has also made […]
Bitpanda, a crypto assets platform, has closed a $52 million Series A funding round form Valar Ventures, a venture capital firm backed by Peter Thiel. Vienna-based VC Speedinvest also participated, alongside other unnamed investors. Claiming 1.3 million users, Bitpanda has previously been trading digital assets and tokenizing precious metals. The Vienna-based company will use the cash to […]
It’s been a big year for online learning companies — and it sounds like Thinkific is no exception. The Vancouver-based startup is announcing that it has raised $22 million in new funding. Thinkific different from businesses like MasterClass (which raised $100 million this year) and Skillshare (which raised $66 million) because it doesn’t create, distribute […]
Huboo, the U.K.-headquartered startup that offers an end-to-end fulfilment service for online retailers of all sizes, has raised £14 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Stride.VC, with participation from Hearst Ventures. Existing investors, including Episode 1, Maersk Growth, Ada Ventures, and True Capital all followed on, bringing Huboo’s funding to £18 […]
With lockdowns around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the travel industry especially hard. In Asia, however, several startups are adapting by focusing on domestic activities (or “staycations”) instead of international travel. They include Taipei-based KKday, which announced today that it has closed a $75 million Series C led by Cool Japan Fund and […]
Meet Multis, a French startup that is building business bank accounts, except that it lets you store, send and receive cryptocurrencies. The startup just raised a $2.2 million seed round. Investors in today’s funding round include White Star Capital, Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, eFounders, Greenfield One and Digital Currency Group. “It’s very complicated to manage […]
NtechLab, a startup that helps analyze footage captured by Moscow’s 100,000 surveillance cameras, just closed an investment of more than 1RUB billion ($13 million) to further global expansion. The five-year-old company sells software that recognizes faces, silhouettes and actions on videos. It’s able to do so on a vast scale in real time, allowing clients […]
French startup Exotec has raised a $90 million Series C round led by 83North, with existing investors Iris Capital and Breega also participating. Other existing investors include 360 Capital. The company has been working on semi-automated warehouses for e-commerce clients. The system is based on tiny robots called Skypods. They roam the floor and go […]
XtalPi, an American-Chinese biotech firm that focuses on AI-assisted drug discovery, has raised a $319 million round C from a slate of enthusiastic investors led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund. It joins numerous others with 9-figure rounds in what is clearly a valuable and competitive space. XtalPi works with major pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer that need […]
A month after completing Y Combinator’s accelerator program, BukuWarung, an financial tech startup that serves small businesses in Indonesia, announced it has raised new funding from a roster of high-profile investors, including partners of DST Global, Soma Capital and 20VC. The amount of the funding was undisclosed, but a source told TechCrunch that it was […]
Microsoft said it’s investigating an authentication outage with Office 365, preventing users from accessing some of the company’s most widely used services, including Office.com, Outlook.com, and Teams. The company’s status dashboard said the issue started at 2:25pm PT, and has impacted mostly consumer users across the globe for the last few hours. Some government users […]
The pandemic shook up our (and virtually every other) video news production process as Zoom became the focus of our daily lives; slowly but surely we’ve altered the production process to reflect Zoom’s easy onboarding and semi-casual approach to virtualized meetings and conversations. We now use a series of interweaved services to broadcast the live […]
Americans can continue using TikTok for now, Google updates its developer policies and Uber gets approval to resume operations in London. This is your Daily Crunch for September 28, 2020. The big story: Judge delays TikTok ban The saga continues! The Trump administration’s ban on TikTok was scheduled to take effect today — but over […]
Amazon is introducing a personal shopping service for men’s fashion. The service, now available to Prime members, is an expansion of the existing Personal Shopper by Prime Wardrobe, a $4.99 per month Stitch Fix rival, originally aimed at women. With Personal Shopper by Prime Wardrobe, an Amazon stylist selects an assortment of fashion items that […]
TC Sessions: Mobility is coming up next week, and we’ve decided to sweeten the deal for what’s included with your event pass. Buy your ticket now and you’ll get a free annual membership to Extra Crunch, our membership program focused on startups, founders and investors with more than 100 exclusive articles published per month. Extra […]
Small startups and logistics giants alike are working on how to use automated vehicle technology and robotics for delivery. Some have even accelerated their efforts, with mixed results, as the COVID-19 pandemic drove up demand for delivery. But is the world — or the tech — ready for the mainstream? TechCrunch has tapped three experts […]
The global pandemic is driving interest toward cannabis, and device makers are recording record sales. From startups to major players, several leading manufacturers told TechCrunch that their companies are seeing a boom in sales since the start of the crisis. Coupled with supply constraints, consumers are now seeing limited supply on some top models as […]
Research papers come out far too rapidly for anyone to read them all, especially in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry and company. This column aims to collect the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in but not limited to artificial intelligence — and […]
