Twyla, a year-and-a-half-year-old startup that collaborates with artists to create exclusive prints for sale at its site, at prices that range from $1,000 to $5,000, has raised $14 million in new funding led by GV, with participation from earlier investors IVP and Redpoint Ventures. The company has now raised $19 million altogether. Twyla was cofounded by HomeAway cofounder Brian Sharples… Read More
It’s not like there’s a shortage of lunch options for corporate employees, but that’s not stopping on-demand food startup Munchery from testing its luck with corporate lunch delivery. Today, Munchery will start delivering lunch to office employees in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and New York. This is an extension of Munchery’s @Work initiative, which already… Read More
The Internet of Things — the area of technology where previously dumb objects are getting equipped with radio signals and microprocessors to be connected, monitored, controlled and supercharged through networks — is still in its early days, but one of the more interesting startups in the field is raising some significant money as it gears up to take a leading role in its… Read More
This morning, Faraday Future Dragon Racing unveiled its livery for the third season of the Formula E all-electric open-wheel racing series in Hong Kong. The car’s black-and-white fade pattern echoes the Faraday Future logo, though the company says the design takes its cues from an electromagnetic wave. In the video below, Pontus Fontaeus, chief designer of interiors at Faraday, says… Read More
With Cruise and Waze and Uber and Comma and Otto and Tesla and all the rest, it’s clear that the automotive world is on the edge of a dramatic cliff. Things are about to change and fast. It’s why we heavily featured mobility companies a few weeks back at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. And it’s why Aol’s Autoblog is holding their first conference around the topic, too. The event… Read More
A 2015 data breach at UK ISP TalkTalk has landed the company with a £400,000 fine from the national data protection agency — a record penalty for the ICO to hand out, although £100k shy of the current maximum it can impose. Read More
Story Terrace today announced it has raised £500,000 ($640,000) to continue its mission to tell the stories of those you love. The customers are typically kids who want to buy a highly personal gift for their parents around an anniversary, or startup founders who have recently exited a business and want to set the record straight — or at least firmly crooked. Read More
Polar’s been doing heart rate monitoring before it was cool. Way, way before. In fact, the company’s been making the things since 1982, giving it a three-decade head-start on most of the competition. The Finnish company’s latest device has that functionality built in, naturally, utilizing an optical sensor on the back and the company’s proprietary algorithm to… Read More
The notion of a kitchen with a built in robot chef capable of whipping up a lobster bisque at the push of a button sounds like something out of Futurama. But it technically exists — at least as a demo prototype. UK startup Moley Robotics has been working on the concept for several years now, starting off in 2014 and showing off a demo unit last year. Read More
The deadline to apply for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt London has been extended! Startups from across the world now have until 12pm PT on October 13th to get their application in front of the selection team (TechCrunch journalists and editors). Apply now!
Why compete in the Startup Battlefield? For starters, you’ll get to present your company to the best and brightest… Read More
One of the hallmarks of any social network is how it pushes people to share their experiences with others, but increasingly we’ve seen a lot of moves by social platforms to give people the option to remain very private, if they choose.
One of the latest moves on this front comes from LinkedIn, the social network for the working world with some 450 million members and currently getting… Read More
If you’ve been out of touch with the FinTech market recently you may have missed how popular prepaid cards have become. This is especially true when it comes to “open-loop” cards, which are prepaid cards powered by a processor like Visa or MasterCard that can be used anywhere a credit or debit card is accepted. These accounts now look and feel increasingly similar to an… Read More
Blue Origin succesfully launches a rocket to test a capsule-malfunction scenario, VC firm Metamorphic Ventures raises $50 million and gets a new name, VC firm Fenox pauses its India fund after Venktesh Shukla leaves the company, Clearpath raises a $30 million Series B and Google’s autonomous cars cross 2 million miles driven. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Theranos is closing its labs and wellness centers, CEO Elizabeth Holmes announced today in blog post. And this isn’t a temporary closure: the “approximately” 340 employees running them are out of a job. Read More
On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last month, Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun announced that the online education company would be building its own autonomous car as part of its self-driving car nanodegree program. To get there, Udacity has created a series of challenges to leverage the power of community to build the safest car possible — meaning anyone and everyone is welcome to become… Read More
At Google’s hardware event this week, the new version of the Android operating system, Android 7.1 (Nougat 7.1), was barely mentioned. As it turns out, there was a reason for that: some of the new Pixel smartphones‘ best features won’t be arriving in the new OS. This includes features like Google Assistant, the built-in customer support service, unlimited and free backup… Read More
The internet has come a long way since the first domain name was registered in 1985. Even longer when you consider it was only 1994 when a WIRED writer contacted McDonald’s to see if they were interested in registering mcdonalds.com, and, well, got nowhere. Indeed, the state of the domain-name industry has vastly changed. Read More
The 2016 presidential transitions teams have the opportunity to build upon the innovation agenda of previous administrations to advance a culture of innovation that is supported and enabled by cutting-edge tech throughout government. Read More
Samsung has agreed to acquire Viv, an AI and assistant system co-founded by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham — who created Siri, which was acquired by Apple in 2010. The three left Apple in the years after the acquisition and founded Viv in 2012. Pricing information was not available, but we’ll check around. Viv has been billed as a more extensible, powerful version… Read More
eBay — the soup to nuts marketplace for new and used goods — has made another acquisition to build out its search and discovery technology for customers to find what they need among the 1 billion or so items that are listed on the site. The company today announced that it has acquired Corrigon, an Israel-based startup that has is a specialist in computer vision and visual… Read More
