Meet Silverfin, a startup focused on accounting software. This isn’t about helping small startups handle accounting tasks themselves. Silverfin wants to build the cloud service for small and big accounting firms — Salesforce, but for accounting. The startup just raised a Series B funding round led by Hg — Index Ventures led the previous Series […]
Whether Wall Street agrees with the company’s last valuation (roughly $3.5 billion) or not, as a success story for founders to minimize dilution, it’s a really strong contender outside of pure bootstrapping.
Like many working parents, Vlada Lotkina, the founder and CEO of ClassTag, wanted to be more involved in her daughter’s preschool education. A paper notice about an upcoming field trip, squeezed between messy folders in a backpack, begged for smart technology around parent-teacher communication, she recalls. Lotkina turned to other parents in the preschool class […]
Homeland Security’s cybersecurity advisory unit is warning Windows 10 users to make sure that their systems are fully patched, after exploit code for a “wormable” bug was published online last week. The code takes advantage of a security vulnerability patched by Microsoft back in March. The bug caused confusion and concern after details of the […]
The killing of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that resulted have been a major wake-up call for many with regards to the role of policing in the United States. Yesterday, Floyd’s hometown of Minneapolis announced plans to dismantle the city’s police department via a veto-proof majority in the city council. Among the factors that […]
New York-based fintech startup Wahed (meaning “One” in Arabic) describes itself as a digital Islamic investment platform and as the world’s first “halal robo adviser.” It has now closed a $25 million investment round led by Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Ventures (also known as Wa’ed Ventures), a venture capital investment arm of oil giant Saudi Aramco. […]
After an indefinite postponement last week, Sony’s PlayStation 5 event is officially back on. The event has been rescheduled for a live stream on June 11 at 1:00 pm Pacific Time according to a tweet from PlayStation’s official account. It will live stream on Twitch and YouTube. See you Thursday, June 11 at 1:00pm Pacific […]
Lemonade, a heavily-backed startup that sells renters and homeowners insurance to consumers, filed to go public today. The company (backed by SoftBank, part of the Sequoia empire, General Catalyst and Tusk Venture Partners, among others) releasing its financial results helps shed light on the burgeoning insurtech market, which has attracted an ocean of capital in […]
Twitter is developing a new in-app system for requesting verification, according to a recent finding from reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, which Twitter has since confirmed. The discovery involves an added “Request Verification” option that appears in a redesigned account settings screen. This feature is not launched to the public, Twitter says. Wong typically digs […]
Researchers at MIT have published a new paper that describes a new type of artificial brain synapse that offers performance improvements versus other existing versions, and which can be combined in volumes of tens of thousands on a chip that’s smaller physically than a single piece of confetti. The results could help create devices that […]
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what those events mean to people in the rest of the world. This week, we are seeing the backlash Chinese tech companies face around the world as anti-China sentiment escalates. In China, one of the world’s […]
The 2020 Ford Escape plug-in hybrid — a first for the SUV — comes with an EPA-estimated 37 miles of all-electric driving range and 100 miles per gallon equivalent, stats that will put the redesigned model into competition with the new Toyota RAV4 Prime. The Toyota RAV4 Prime has an estimated 42-mile EV range and […]
To help you prepare for what’s next, I’ve talked with software developers who’ve been through previous recessions to get their advice on what moves to make now to put yourself in the best position possible in a recession.
eMarketer tries to quantify the rise of e-commerce, Reddit’s co-founder steps down from the board and SpaceX focuses on its next-generation spacecraft. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 8, 2020. 1. US e-commerce sales to jump 18% in 2020, but not enough to offset retail’s decline U.S. e-commerce sales will jump 18% this year due […]
Google Maps is today introducing a series of new features to better inform travelers and commuters about how their trip may be impacted by COVID-19 — including travel restrictions, COVID-19 checkpoints or even just the crowdedness of public transport. It’s also adding features that will help those traveling to COVID-19 testing centers better understand the […]
What we have here, then, is not merely another unprofitable unicorn. We have a very low-margin, unprofitable unicorn, that is still drawing enough investor interest to raise its IPO range.
While we’re preparing to launch a six-wheeled robotic rover roughly the size of a car to explore Mars, future planetary exploration and science missions could employ much smaller hardware — including, potentially, swarms of robots the size of insects designed to act in concert with one another autonomously. Swarming insect-like robots are being developed by […]
A few days ago, the French government detailed different measures as part of its support plan for startups. France already announced a $4.3 billion (€4 billion) plan back in March. The new announcements are more about refining and adding some additional measures. The French government wanted to act quickly when it made its initial announcement […]
U.S. e-commerce sales will jump 18% this year due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic that forced more shoppers online, according to a new forecast released today by eMarketer. However, the surge in new online orders won’t make up for the overall hit that the U.S. retail sector will take this year, the firm […]
Among countless other unexpected effects, COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of all manner of new technologies, as people look for ways to reduce transmission of the virus. Yokohama, Japan-based WHILL has already seen a bit of traction for its autonomous mobility device in the forms of global trials in recent years, and now that the […]
