Suiteness, a YC company that makes it easy to book hotel suites for groups, has raised $5M in Series A funding. The round was led by Bullpen Capital & Global Founders Capital, with participation from HVF (Max Levchin’s personal fund), YC’s Continuity Fund, Kima Ventures and Altair Capital. The company will use this capital to continue its expansion, and has announced 10 new… Read More
Vera, the company that secures documents in motion, regardless of the type, announced automated protection for Office 365 documents stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint today. Today’s announcement means that instead of having to define a set of security rules for each document created and stored in Microsoft’s repositories, Vera customers can define a set of rules at… Read More
Bumble, the dating app that puts women in the driver’s seat, has today announced that it is leading a seed round investment in gay dating app Chappy. The company is not disclosing the details of the investment, but they did say that Bumble is the sole investor in the round and will take an equity stake. In exchange, Bumble will be offering product development and marketing support. Chappy… Read More
After a potential customer has first contact with a business, sales gets in gear, often responding with an introductory email. Conversica has developed an artificial intelligence system designed to automate these early contact emails, and pass it off to a human salesperson when the time is right. Today, it announced a $30 million investment.
The round was led by Providence Strategic Growth. Read More
What are chatbots for? I asked Zo, Microsoft’s officially launched chatbot, currently available on the Kik Messenger app, what she does — and she was remarkably coy in answering this question, initially complaining that our conversation felt like a job interview and then qualifying this hugely with the intimate confession that “our convos give my life purpose tbh”. Read More
Splash, the event marketing platform based out of New York, has just announced the close of a $7 million Series B funding round led by Ascent Venture Partners, with participation from Spark Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, ScaleUP Ventures, Tumblr founder David Karp, and Vine cofounder Rus Yusupov.
Alongside the investment comes a new business plan for Splash in the enterprise.
Up until now… Read More
Knowmail, an Israeli startup building what it calls personalized Artificial Intelligence help employees manage email and other messages better, has closed $3.5 million in new funding. Read More
The autonomous cars won’t operate completely driverless, for the time being – as in Pittsburgh, where Uber launched self-driving Ford Focus vehicles this fall, each SUV will have a safety driver and Uber test engineer onboard to handle manual driving when needed and monitor progress with the tests. But the cars will still be picking up ordinary passengers – any customers… Read More
Symphony, a secure messaging service backed and used by 14 of the biggest banks on Wall Street, is raising up to $200 million in a new round of funding with a pre-money valuation over $1 billion, TechCrunch has learned. The funding will come from existing investors, along with a new backer, the government of Singapore via its investment arm (which includes Temasek and GIC). Symphony has… Read More
Last year, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing service announced that it would launch a data center in the UK by the end of 2016. It’s now the end of 2016 and, true to its word, AWS has now launched its “Europe (London)” region to supplement its existing European regions in Ireland and Frankfurt which opened in 2007 and 2014. In total, AWS now offers its uses a choice between… Read More
A month after it dropped major hints, Amazon has made its Prime Video service available in more than 200 countries worldwide bringing some serious competition to Netflix’s global empire. Read More
There was no fanfare and pizzazz, but Snapchat yesterday quietly shipped a new feature that could kill off other messaging apps and obstruct upcoming social startups. Read More
Google spins out Waymo, its self-driving car company, Group chat is now available in Snapchat, Oculus CEO steps down, Slack gets integrated video calling and Apple AirPods are now up for sale. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Apple’s recently launched standalone support application is now hitting the U.S. App Store. The app, which had quietly debuted last month outside the U.S., lets you access product documentation, schedule appointments, as well as chat, email or schedule calls with an Apple Support technician, among other things. While the ability to look for nearby stores and schedule appointments at… Read More
Some downsizing and refocusing is underway at Disqus, the startup incubated at Y-Combinator that became an early mover in the business of offering a plug-in to help online publishers manage comments on stories. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that the company has laid of 11 people, about 20 percent of its small staff, as it prepares to shift its business deeper into data services… Read More
During the supreme madness of the Pokémon GO season this summer, it wasn’t uncommon to hear people talk about how the insanely popular game was boosting activity levels and making people walk miles more than they did before. That effect appears to have been significantly overstated, according to research published in the British Medical Journal. Read More
Medical startup Scanadu informed customers today it will no longer support its Scout device starting May 15, 2017. The reason? Though Scanadu has been working with the Food and Drug Administration to get full approval for this and other devices, it seems Scout didn’t make the cut. Scanadu used Scout, which could detect vitals such as temperature and upload that information to… Read More
The doors to TechCrunch Disrupt London 2016 opened December 5 at the Copper Box Arena in London. The two-day conference hosted more than 2,300 attendees, with hundreds of thousands more tuning in online. You can also watch the full panels from Disrupt London on YouTube, and catch select segments on Facebook. Read More
UK startup Electron is hoping to convince the energy sector to buy into the transformative potential of blockchain technology — and, down the line, unlock commercialization opportunities for over the top services running on a decentralized infrastructure platform. Read More
Food delivery startup Munchery is trying its hand at brick-and-mortar sales, opening a pop-up shop in San Francisco that we spotted this week. In the competitive and cluttered market for online food delivery, Munchery is distinct in that it sells chef-prepared meals that just need to be heated, or meal kits with recipes and pre-measured ingredients to its members and other customers.… Read More
