Alright, startup fans, you’ve procrastinated long enough. If you somehow haven’t yet gotten your tickets to the hottest startup show in Europe, today is the day to do it. Today is the final day to get Disrupt London 2016 tickets at our early-bird price of £950 apiece, a full £250 cheaper than those same tickets will be tomorrow. You can get those tickets here. What… Read More
Arex, a startup that is taking a marketplace approach to invoice financing for SMBs, thus helping creating another asset class for investors, has picked up €3 million in backing. Leading the round is Finland’s Lifeline Ventures, alongside London-based LocalGlobe, and various unnamed angel investors. Read More
Indus OS, the startup developing a localized version of Android for India, is now going after international OEMs after it clinched a deal that will local giant Intex sell smartphones powered by its operating system. Read More
Are smartwatch sales tanking? Analysts are divided. A recent IDC report suggested the total shipment of smartwatches had plummeted by 50 percent in the last year, but this week rival analyst firm Canalys claimed that sales have actually increased. Read More
Europe gets another new VC today with the official outing of London and Amsterdam-based Keen Venture Partners, which plans to invest in European companies with “breakaway momentum,” ranging from €5-10 million per company. Read More
Remember that silly app, Yo, where you could ping someone with just a tap? Well, Kevin Jonas does. At the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York, the Jonas brothers talked about why they are creating apps. After seeing the Yo app raise over $1 million in funding, Kevin said it made launching startups look easy. “If they could do that, look what I can do,” said Kevin, about… Read More
GoPro’s earnings report is pretty bad, Yelp to lay off 4% of workforce, YouTube upgrades its comments system, Ford has ideas for last-mile tech and the Obama administration looks to create 48 national charging corridors for electric vehicles. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Update 9:21PM PT: An HTC spokesperson has reached out to TechCrunch specifying that “any Vive hardware upgrades at arcades are related to the current business edition Vive hardware or innovations on peripherals that could create unique experiences for arcade installations.” Though the HTC Vive has only been on sale for a few months, the company may be gearing up to show off… Read More
Engineers become engineers because they like to figure out how things fit together, literally and figuratively. This is not always entirely true, but usually. The lines are blurring between traditional engineers who make designs real and the designers who can now “engineer.” Technology is now allowing anyone with a design mindset to engineer a solution. Read More
Silicon Valley is like no other place in the world right now. The Bay Area has been booming with ideas and innovation for the past decade. But in 2016, the IPO market wilted and unicorns suddenly had to prove their worth. Startups that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars began shuttering and investors are nervous. In “The Down Round” series, we talked to entrepreneurs and… Read More
The renewable energy services company Arcadia Power has just launched a new product that allows renters across the U.S. to buy renewable energy. It’s a significant step forward for the renewable energy project developer and operator, which had previously integrated with utilities as an offset provider and load management company. And it’s potentially a game changer for the… Read More
Out of the pill? Nurx is a web platform delivering birth control in less than a couple of hours, and it just raised $3.5 million in Series A financing from Union Square Ventures.
The startup launched in 2014 to bridge the gap between running out of birth control and waiting to get a new prescription. It added delivery of PrEP, an anti-HIV medication, to its services earlier this year and… Read More
The aspiring asteroid miners at Planetary Resources have struck pay dirt in Luxembourg, the tiny (but wealthy) European country positioning itself as an ally to commercial space. The country is directly investing €12 million, with another €13 million coming from public investment bank SNCI. Read More
Adobe today showed off a new experimental tool, Project VoCo, at its annual MAX conference in San Diego. Project VoCo lets you edit speech as easily as text — and you can’t just edit existing text, you can even use the same voice model to create completely new recordings, too. Here is how this works: Project VoCo needs about 20 minutes of voice samples from a given speaker. It… Read More
The 2016 Mercedes-Benz C350e plug-in hybrid sedan is not a Tesla fighter. It’s not even much of a Chevy Volt fighter. It is a very comfortable, very refined plug-in-hybrid mid-range Mercedes. So if that’s your jam, this is your car.
The C350e has a 2-liter gasoline engine and a 60-kW electric motor, for a combined 275 hp and 443 lb-ft of torque, which means quick merging on the… Read More
There’s no shortage of competition in the housing space, but Apartment List is making a dent in rentals.
With more than 5 percent of America’s listings already on the site, the startup is raising $30 million in a round led by Canaan Partners to take the business to the next level.
“Our goal was to bring as much inventory to consumers as possible,” CEO John Kobs told… Read More
Expectations were already incredibly low for GoPro this go around and yet somehow the company managed to eclipse even the worst fears of analysts. The company’s stock trading was halted prior to the release of results that missed revenue expectations by 23 percent and nearly $75 million. When trading began again, shares were down 22 percent. This means that, in a matter of minutes,… Read More
Zarget announced yesterday that it has raised $6 million in Series A funding. Co-founder and CEO Arvind Parthiban said Zarget’s goal is to build a full suite of products for small businesses to track and optimize websites — one that could be used by “a tech-savvy marketer like me, without any coding skills.” The product’s capabilities include A/B testing,… Read More
More than 90 percent of all phishing emails are now ransomware. The average amount paid via ransomware has grown from $40 in 2009 to $1,000 in 2016. This amount will grow even faster as ransomware moves to enterprise. Read More
TechCrunch Include Office Hours are happening in SF on November 15th! Vanessa Larco, Pete Sonsini and Rick Yang of NEA will join TechCrunch to provide advice and feedback to startups. Launched in 2014, Include is TechCrunch’s diversity program, aimed at facilitating opportunities for underrepresented groups in tech to take their startups to the next level. The Office Hours program is… Read More
