Hello everyone; it’s a busy week with TechCrunch Early Stage underway and a slew of tech earnings to parse through. But that didn’t stop the Equity crew from sitting down to chat about the recent wave of SPAC commentary. Danny and I wanted to talk about what a SPAC is — the acronym stands for special […]
WhatsApp plans to offer credit, insurance and pension products to lower-income individuals and those in rural areas in India and help digitize local small and medium-sized businesses as the Facebook service looks to make a digital payments push in its biggest market by users. The instant messaging app maker has been working with banks — […]
Back in 2016, Mobalytics wowed the judges at Disrupt SF with its data-based coach for the exploding competitive gaming world, winning the Startup Battlefield. The company is building on the success of the past few years with a new funding round and a compelling new collaboration with Tobii that uses eye-tracking to provide powerful insights […]
Apple today is again taking to the press to fight back against claims of anti-competitive practices on its App Store. Last month, the company detailed the results of a commissioned study that showed how Apple wasn’t receiving a cut of revenue on the majority of App Store transactions — $519 billion in commerce. This time, […]
GEDmatch, the DNA analysis site that police used to catch the so-called Golden State Killer, was pulled briefly offline on Sunday while its parent company investigated how its users’ DNA profile data apparently became available to law enforcement searches. The company confirmed Wednesday that the permissions change was caused by a breach. The site, which […]
For the past decade Apple has tried to make the iPhone one of the most secure devices on the market. By locking down its software, Apple keeps its two billion iPhone owners safe. But security researchers say that makes it impossible to look under the hood to figure out what happened when things go wrong. […]
SaaS is hot in 2020. Tooling that helps facilitate remote work is hot in 2020. And we all know that anything related to video chatting in particular is on fire this year. In the midst of all three trends is Kudo, which just raised $6 million in a round led by Felicis. But Kudo’s video […]
Ready to do everything in your power to keep your startup on track for success — and keep more of your hard-earned currency in your wallet? Listen up. Early-bird pricing on passes to Disrupt 2020 ends in less than two weeks. Buy your pass before the bird expires on July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PDT, […]
Reflect, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2020 class, is building a tool to automate website and web application testing, making it faster to get your site up and running without waiting for engineers to write testing code, or for human testers to run the site through its paces. Company CEO and co-founder Fitz […]
A few days ago, Ilan Abehassera and Carlos Diaz announced Diaspora Ventures, their new VC fund. The duo plan to invest in French founders who have a global mindset: They might be based in France and willing to relocate to the U.S., in the U.S. already or they might be starting a remote company from […]
Amazon today announced a slew of new features for developers who want to write Alexa skills. In total, the team released 31 new features at its Alexa Live event. Unsurprisingly, some of these are relatively minor, but a few significantly change the Alexa experience for the more than 700,000 developers who have built skills for […]
Dexterity emerged from stealth this week to announce its full-stack solution aimed at creating collaborative robotics systems. The hardware-software system is designed for a variety of different tasks, including bin picking and box packing, targeted at warehouse fulfillment and logistics needs. The Bay Area-based startup has already built up significant support from the investment world, […]
Facebook’s messaging app is adding new privacy controls, the company announced this morning. Initially, this will include today’s launch of App Lock for iOS, which allows users to lock access to their private chats by way of the device’s built-in security mechanisms, including Touch ID and Face ID. A second privacy feature, which involves new […]
There are few better ways to bridge that gap than a thoughtful implementation of messenger tools, those chat bubbles many big brands use to offer real-time customer support.
Spotify this morning announced a global, multi-year licensing agreement with Universal Music Group, which secures the label’s catalog for streaming rights but also signs it on to be an early adopter of Spotify’s future products and provide feedback to Spotify’s development team as those products are being built. Deal terms were not disclosed, but “multi-year” […]
After the bell yesterday, Apple-device management company Jamf announced its final IPO pricing. We’ve been tracking the Jamf IPO for some time, as it is yet another example of a technology company worth $1 billion or more going public during the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in March, we’d have guessed that today’s IPO market would be […]
Workplace instant messaging platform Slack has filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft in the European Union, accusing the tech giant of unfairly bundling its rival Teams product with its cloud-based productivity suite. A spokeswoman for the Commission’s competition division confirmed receipt of a complaint, telling us via email: “We confirm that we received a complaint […]
Cooks Venture has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by SJF Ventures and Cultivian Sandbox, with participation from Larry Schwartz and John Roulac. At its most basic level, Cooks Venture provides a proprietary breed of chicken to grocery stores for consumption. The company also lists Fresh Direct and direct online sales to its […]
Apple recently announced that they would be transition their Mac line from Intel processors to their own, ARM-based Apple Silicon. That process is meant to begin with hardware to be announced later this year, and last two years according to Apple’s stated expectations, and while new Intel-powered Macs will be released and sold leading up […]
