TechCrunch

It’s time to be honest about what the tech industry can do to truly invest in racial equity — and to hold companies accountable when they don’t.

Snapchat’s augmented reality dreams might be starting to look a bit more realistic. The company has been subtly improving its AR-powered Lenses every year, improving the technical odds-and-ends and strengthening its dev platform. The result is that today, more than 170 million people — over three-quarters of Snap’s daily active users — access the app’s […]

As Facebook continues to shrink from responsibilities that would see the company moderating political speech, Joe Biden has apparently had enough. The presumptive Democratic nominee launched a campaign of sorts against Facebook leadership Thursday, with an open letter slamming Facebook’s decisions and a catchy hashtag, #movefastfixit—a play on the company’s much-maligned early slogan, “Move fast and […]

Facing unprecedented growth, Instacart has secured new funding to keep up with demand. The San Francisco company announced today that it has raised $225 million in a round led by DST Global and General Catalyst. Existing investor D1 Capital Partners participated in the round, which brings Instacart’s valuation to $13.7 billion. Instacart will use the […]

A newly released draft intelligence bill, passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, would require the government to detail the threats posed by commercial spyware and surveillance technology. The annual intelligence authorization bill, published Thursday, would take aim at private sector spyware makers, like NSO Group and Hacking Team, who build spyware and hacking […]

Facebook is testing a new feature that aims to keep users inside its platform when they’re looking for factual information they would otherwise turn to Google or Wikipedia to find. The company confirmed to TechCrunch it’s now piloting an updated version of Facebook Search that displays factual information when users search for topics like public […]

SaaS businesses uniquely benefited from falling infrastructure costs, superior business models, low interest rates and a shift from on-premise IT systems, but these tailwinds won't last forever.

Food delivery takes a big step toward consolidation, Amazon announces a moratorium on providing facial recognition tech to law enforcement (but there are loopholes) and Twitter tests a way to scold users for tweeting an article they haven’t read. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 11, 2020. 1. Just Eat Takeaway confirms it’s gobbling up […]

As companies struggle to find ways to control costs in today’s economy, understanding what you are spending on SaaS tools is paramount. That’s precisely what early stage startup Quolum is attempting to do, and today it announced a $2.75 million seed round. Surge (a division of Sequoia Capital India) and Nexus Venture Partners led the […]

Early this week, Zencastr sent out an email to a select number of users, outlining plans to test a new video podcasting tool. The service has grown significantly in popularity over the last year or so, as more burgeoning podcasters have sought out a service that can streamline the remote recording process. The new feature […]

Pharmaceutical company Moderna told Bloomberg on Thursday that it’s on pace to begin the final-stage clinical trial of its vaccine for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 by July. Moderna was the first company to begin human clinical trials of its vaccine candidate in the U.S., and the last stage of its study will include […]

No business is immune to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve seen Airbnb — a company particularly susceptible to this Black Swan event — go through an insane design sprint. Even enterprise collaboration tools have felt it, with Box readjusting its product road map to focus on how the tool worked for remote employees. […]

NASA has selected a company to fly its VIPER Moon rover to the Moon, for a mission which will be a crucial step in its Artemis program as it will help the agency determine where and how it can establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface. NASA announced on Thursday that Astrobotic will be […]

The “Stories” format popularized by Snapchat is now commonly used across social platforms. Today, there are Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, and YouTube Stories. for example. Even Twitter and Spotify are testing the concept. Last year, Pinterest also joined in by experimenting with a feature called “Story Pins” which allowed creators to share their ideas in […]

After teasing the series’ arrival for some months, Quibi is finally ready to launch its take on 60 Minutes for the social media generation. What that mainly means is content tailored to the shortened attention spans of viewers on top which the service has hung all of its hopes, dreams and $1.8 billion. The new […]

When it comes to Twitter tweaks, the focus in the last several months seems to have been more on working on ways to make its platform less prone to being abused by people who use it to spread false and misleading information and harassment, and generally weaponise it for aims that are ultimately harmful. But […]

As Uber and Lyft reached their public-market nadir in mid-March, you would have been forgiven for thinking they were heading under. If the markets are somewhat efficient, why else would America’s top two ride-hailing companies shed two-thirds and three-quarters of their value, respectively, in just over a month? As we know now, both companies quickly […]

Enterprise automation startup JIFFY.ai announced today it has raised $18 million in Series A funding for product development and expansion into new markets around the world. The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Rebright Partners and W250 Venture Fund. A roster of executives from tech companies also invested, including AssetMarket chief […]

Online abuse in its many forms on social media is in the spotlight these days as it has never been before: not only can strong and hateful words be directly harmful to individuals, but their use fans the flames around hate groups and other extremists, fomenting even stronger (and often tragic) responses offline, too. Today, […]

It’s no surprise that the coronavirus pandemic is accelerating the digital health space and so it’s also no surprise that a lot of the startups in this area are currently getting funded. Conversa Health, a Portland, Oregon-based startup that provides a virtual care and communication platform for personalized healthcare, is among these startups. The company […]