Floodgate, a Palo Alto, Ca.-based early stage venture capital firm, has raised $131 million for its sixth fund, according to an SEC filing that shows the 11-year-old firm turned to just eight investors for the capital commitments. Though small by today’s fundraising standards, the fund reflects a bit of a departure for the firm, whose fifth fund closed with $76 million in 2014. (Its… Read More
With the dawning of the digital age, low-income students face a new, unprecedented challenge: access to high-speed internet. Startups and nonprofits across the country are stepping up to help low-income families connect to the internet. They deliver programs that aim to facilitate the personal, academic and professional growth of their local communities. Read More
Your Android phone is about to get an upgrade. Google today is making good on its promise to bring its Siri alternative known as Google Assistant to more Android devices, starting today. The company announced at Mobile World Congress over the weekend that its Assistant would soon launch in the U.S., followed by English-language launches in Australia, Canada and the U.K., as well… Read More
AWS took a lot of heat when its S3 storage component went down for several hours on Tuesday, and rightly so, but today they published a post-mortem explaining exactly what happened complete with technical details and how they plan to prevent a similar event from occurring again in the future. At the core of the problem was unsurprisingly human error. Some poor engineer, we’ll call him… Read More
NASA has just published its 2017-2018 software catalog, which lists the many apps, code libraries and tools that pretty much anyone can download and use. Of course, most of it is pretty closely tied to… you know, launching spacecraft and stuff, which most people don’t do. But here are a few items that might prove useful to tinkers and curious lay people alike. Read More
Building on its promise to give the entrenched a run for their money, conversational AI startup Ozlo is making its meticulously crafted knowledge layer available for purchase today. Ozlo’s new suite of APIs that includes tools for both expressing knowledge and understanding language will help to democratize the creation of conversational AI assistants. In the spirit of the expert systems… Read More
If you’re looking to roll up your sleeves to help put on the best startup show in the Big Apple, you should definitely sign up to be a TechCrunch Work Exchange Volunteer at Disrupt NY 2017. TechCrunch is thrilled to announce that we are now accepting applications to the Work Exchange at this year’s show in New York City, and we hope you’ll consider joining us.… Read More
Publishing platform Medium recently laid off dozens of people. So if you don’t want to hand away your precious writing to a startup that is still looking for its business model, you can move your content to WordPress.com in just a few clicks.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, just launched a new importing tool that makes it easier to copy all your Medium content to a… Read More
Co-founder Ernestine Fu hopes that Blackstorm Labs, the makers of a bullet hell-ish fantasy shooter called EverWing, has figured out how to tap into that real-time co-operative experience that you might find in a massive online game like World of Warcraft within Facebook Messenger.
The company is calling the experience Boss Raids. EverWing runs on HTML5 within Facebook Messenger, where… Read More
There is an inherent problem that plagues all dating apps. The world is getting smaller — instead of choosing a mate from the pool of our college classmates or neighborhood friends, we’re now connected to everyone on the planet with a few taps of the thumb.
This means that dating apps rarely run short of people to serve up, which means that we’re playing a game of optimization. Read More
Update 11:25 AM PT: An Uber spokesperson provided the following statement regarding the separate firm it retained aside from Holder’s: The law firm Perkins Coie is looking into the specific allegations raised by Susan. They will report into Eric Holder, who is responsible for the overall investigation into Uber’s workplace practices. To be clear: they are investigating… Read More
A new startup called unGlue wants to help kids better manage their time on connected devices. Just don’t call it parental control software, says co-founder and CEO Alon Shwartz. The idea, he explains, is to offer families a simpler solution for setting limits on screen time across devices, whether inside the home or away. Shwartz, a serial entrepreneur, came up with the idea for… Read More
News outlets are having the time of their lives as people are flocking in to subscribe, but what if you want to read more than one news outlet? You could keep a giant stack of subscriptions, or you could reach for Discors. The startup recently announced it’s adding The New York Times and the Financial Times to its $4.99 per month subscription model. Read More
Most of Snap’s top products came from acquisitions, and now it will have the war chest to make more. Yet it didn’t have to blow its momentum to collect this cash. After pricing its IPO at $17, above its original $14 to $16 range, today its shares popped over 40 percent to start trading at $24. That means it pocketed $3.4 billion while still looking cool and confident on the… Read More
The wearable industry actually posted some pretty solid numbers over the last quarter, according to a new study released this week by IDC. Carrying the headline “Wearables Aren’t Dead, They’re Just Shifting Focus,” the release notes that, in spite of some stark evidence to the contrary, companies are still shipping product in record numbers.
IDC notes a 16.9 percent… Read More
Millennial consumers care about the sustainability of what they buy more than any other generation that came before them. This point is illustrated in studies from Pew Research, Clemson University and Nielsen, to name a few. Now, a New York-based consumer data company called HowGood has raised $4.2 million in a Series A round of venture funding to help retailers answer every question these… Read More
TechCrunch invites you to our annual SXSW Party. RSVP to come meet our writers while enjoying free drinks and musical performances by violin looping wizard Kishi Bashi and inspirational dance drummer Madame Gandhi. It’s all going down from 1:30pm to 4:30pm, Saturday March 11th. We’re teaming up with Splash to take over one of South By’s top venues, The Mohawk, located just… Read More
After months of hand-wringing, Snap’s IPO has now set the stage for what people will be expecting for the future of its business. Snap’s performance this morning is also setting the stage for what investors and Wall Street will be looking for at tech IPOs moving forward this year. Read More
Campbell, Calif.-based ChargePoint secured a new $82 million funding round, led by automaker Daimler. The new funding will help ChargePoint expand its network of electric vehicle charging stations in Europe, as the company pursues its goal of making charging stations for EVs as readily available and convenient as gas stations. The funding round also includes existing investors BMW i… Read More
