Point Nine, the pan-European early-stage VC focused on SaaS and digital marketplaces, has raised its fifth fund, totalling just short of €100 million (in fact, “P9 V” is a €99,999,999 fund — get it?). Despite its Berlin, Germany roots, the VC has always operated fairly remotely and invests globally. In total, it has invested in […]
Chinese electric vehicle startup WM Motor just pocketed an outsize investment to fuel growth in a competitive landscape increasingly coveted by foreign rival Tesla. The five-year-old company raised 10 billion yuan ($1.47 billion) in a Series D round, it announced on Tuesday, which will pay for research and development, branding, marketing and expansion of sales […]
After rolling out in some of Canada’s most high-falutin burger bistros, Impossible Foods is hitting Canada’s fast casual market with new menu items at national chains like White Spot and Triple O’s, Cactus Club Cafe and Burger Priest. While none of those names mean anything to yours truly, they may mean something to our friendly […]
Companies send out conflicting messages about the TikTok deal, Microsoft acquires a gaming giant and the WeChat ban is temporarily blocked. This is your Daily Crunch for September 21, 2020. The big story: This TikTok deal is pretty confusing This keeps getting more confusing. Apparently TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has reached a deal with Walmart […]
Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, I got the chance to speak to Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist who is a Senior Fellow of the Federation of American Scientists. Dr. Feigl-Ding has been a frequent and vocal critic of some of the most profound missteps of regulators, public health organizations and the […]
Well, that was fast. This morning, I analyzed Palantir’s newly published fifth amendment of its S-1 filing with the SEC as it pursues a public direct listing on the NYSE. I called the company “not a democracy” after it added new provisions to create a special mechanism called “Stockholder Party Excluded Shares” that would, in […]
The spotlight on edtech grows brighter and harsher: On one end, remote-learning startups are attracting millions in venture capital. On the other, many educators and parents are unimpressed with the technology that enables virtual learning and gaps remain in and out of the classroom. It’s clear that edtech’s nebulous pain points — screen time, childcare […]
Both Zoom and Twitter found themselves under fire this weekend for their respective issues with algorithmic bias. On Zoom, it’s an issue with the video conferencing service’s virtual backgrounds and on Twitter, it’s an issue with the site’s photo cropping tool. It started when Ph.D. student Colin Madland tweeted about a Black faculty member’s issues […]
Imagine yourself unable to see well enough to drive, and how that would change your life. I witness that scenario every day at home with my wife, who is legally blind, and a very busy person. She reveres Uber and Lyft because they provided her with the still remarkable option to get up and go […]
You’ve probably seen the screenshots going around that show iOS home screens that differ considerably from the stock options that Apple provides. Yes, if you’re an Android user you’re probably laughing at iPhone owners for finally (nearly) catching up to the customization features they’ve had for years, but if you’re an iOS fan, you probably […]
Launcher is bringing its customizable widgets to iOS 14 with new functionality, including the ability to rotate a widget’s icons by date, time or even location. It also supports customizable widget backgrounds, icons of different sizes or those with no labels for a cleaner look. The app, which first debuted in 2014, had been well-known […]
The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t hit every factory in China at once. The initial impact to China’s electronics industry arrived around the time the nation was celebrating its new year. Two weeks after announcing 59 known cases of a new form of coronavirus, the national government put Wuhan — a city of 11 million — under […]
The pandemic has accelerated adoption of a number of technologies, from online grocery to multiplatform gaming to streaming services and more. But one industry that has not benefited is traditional pay TV. According to new research from eMarketer, the cable, satellite and telecom TV industry is on track to lose the most subscribers ever. This […]
One good trend in 2020 has been large technology companies almost falling over one another to make ever-bolder commitments regarding their ecological impact. A cynic might argue that just doing without most of the things they make could have a much greater impact, but Microsoft is the latest to make a commitment that not only […]
There’s a lot of virtual ground for one person to cover — and real opportunities to uncover — during the two days of TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 (October 6-7). Take advantage of our group discounts, bring the whole team and multiply your results and your ROI. Buy four or more passes, and you’ll trim $25 […]
Marco Financial, a new Miami-based startup, is looking to take a piece of the roughly $350 billion trade finance market for Latin American exporters with its novel factoring services business. Small and medium-sized businesses in Latin America can have trouble getting the financing they need to launch export operations to the U.S. and Marco said […]
During the most recent quarter, only a few earnings reports stood out from the rest. Zoom’s set of results were one of them, with the video-communications company showing enormous acceleration as the world replaced in-person contact with remote chat. Another was Peloton’s earnings from the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2020, which it reported September […]
Biotech has become one of the hottest areas of venture investment in recent years, as progress in machine learning, genetics, medical devices and biology fuse together into new products for the gargantuan health industry. Case in point: Grail, which began in 2016 as a spinoff from genetic sequencing giant Illumina and co-founded by longtime Google […]
NBCUniversal and Roku announced late last week that they’d resolved the dispute that was keeping NBCU’s streaming Peacock app off Roku’s smart TV platform. And as of this morning, Peacock has launched on Roku . When Peacock launched in July, it was not available on either Roku or Amazon Fire TV — in Roku’s case, […]
One of the more salient trends in the tech world — arguably the engine that propels it — has been the recurring theme of people who hone talents at bigger companies and then strike out on their own to found their own startups. (Some, like Max Levchin, even hire entrepreneurial types intentionally to help perpetuate […]
