Microsoft tries to improve corporate intranet, Google will offer new smartphone health measurements and 23andMe is going public via SPAC. This is your Daily Crunch for February 4, 2021. The big story: Microsoft rethinks corporate intranet Microsoft launched what it’s calling a new “employee experience platform,” designed to reinvent those corporate intranet sites that large […]
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. The good news is that we managed to fit it all into a single episode this week. The bad news is that that means the show […]
Huawei’s status in the U.S. has been one of many question marks hovering over the newly minted Biden administration. The smartphone maker was one of a number of Chinese companies added to the Department of Commerce’s “entity list” during Trump’s four years in office. Gina Raimondo, Joe Biden’s nominee for Commerce secretary, has offered what […]
As Democrats settle into control of both chambers of Congress, signs of the party’s legislative priorities are starting to manifest. So far, lawmakers’ interest in reimagining tech’s regulatory landscape appears to be alive and well. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is out with a new proposal for antitrust reform that would create more barriers for big […]
Robotic process automation (RPA) has found a strong foothold in the world of enterprise IT through its effective use of AI and other technology to help automate repetitive tasks to free up people to focus on more complicated work. Today, a startup called Infinitus is coming out of stealth to apply this concept to the […]
As startups have stayed private longer and liquidity has become harder to secure for early employees and investors, more and more shareholders have looked for ways to unload their shares to others. All the way back in 2011, companies like SecondMarket were seeing nine-figures’ worth of shares being traded on their secondary share platforms. That […]
Twitter is upping its data analytics game in the form of an expanded, multiyear partnership with Google Cloud. The social media giant first began working with Google in 2018 to move Hadoop clusters to the Google Cloud platform as a part of its Partly Cloudy strategy. With the expanded agreement, Twitter will move its offline […]
Virtual health and wellness platforms have grown increasingly popular throughout the pandemic, but a new startup wants to focus that effort exclusively on senior citizens. Bold, a digital health and wellness service, plans to prevent chronic health problems in older adults through free and personalized exercise programs. Co-founded by Amanda Rees and her partner Hari […]
The recent Databricks funding round, a $1 billion investment at a $28 billion valuation, was one of the year’s most notable private investments so far. For Databricks signaled its IPO readiness by disclosing to TechCrunch last year that it had scaled its revenue run rate from $200 million to $350 million in a year, so […]
Fundraising is challenging, especially for deep tech founders who need to get investors excited about a complex technology, a complex sales cycle and a complex risk profile.
Meet moka.care, a French startup that has built several services that should help you improve your psychological well-being. The company sells its solution to employers directly. They can then offer access to moka.care to their employees. The startup raised a $3 million (€2.5 million) funding round from Singular, the VC firm founded by former Alven […]
The Venmo mobile payments app is going to look very different in 2021 as it inches closer to neobank territory with expansions into budgeting, saving and cryptocurrency, said Venmo parent company PayPal, during its fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday. The company also plans to put its $4 billion Honey acquisition to work by integrating its suite […]
Flux, the London fintech that has built a technology platform for banks and merchants to power itemised digital receipts and more, has seen its lengthy pilot with Barclays bear fruit. Announced formally today — but actually quietly rolled out a few months ago — Flux-powered digital receipts are now available as an opt-in for all […]
Latitude, a startup building games with “infinite storylines” generated by artificial intelligence, is announcing that it has raised $3.3 million in seed funding. The idea of an AI-generated story might make you think of hilariously nonsensical experiments like “Sunspring,” but Latitude’s first title, AI Dungeon, is an impressively open-ended (and coherent) text adventure game where […]
As impressive as the cameras in our smartphones are, they’re fundamentally limited by the physical necessities of lenses and sensors. Metalenz skips over that part with a camera made of a single “metasurface” that could save precious space and battery life in phones and other devices… and they’re about to ship it. The concept is […]
The early-stage carbon offset API developer Patch could be another one of Andreessen Horowitz’s early bets on climate tech. According to several people with knowledge of the investment round, former OpenTable chief executive and current Andreessen Horowitz partner Jeff Jordan is looking at leading the young company’s latest financing. Such an investment would be a […]
Google today announced the launch of Apigee X, the next major release of the Apgiee API management platform it acquired back in 2016. “If you look at what’s happening — especially after the pandemic started in March last year — the volume of digital activities has gone up in every kind of industry, all kinds […]
Marketing software company HubSpot is acquiring The Hustle, the business and tech media startup behind the popular newsletter of the same name. Axios broke the news of the deal and reported that it values the startup at around $27 million. HubSpot declined to comment on the deal price, and while tweeting about the acquisition, The […]
Here in the U.S., we take for granted the ability to invest and trade in the stock market. So while we can get in an uproar about the various ways Robinhood may or may not be acting responsibly, it can be easy to forget that not everyone in the world has the same access to […]
Google is introducing features that will allow users to take vital health measurements using just the camera they already have on their smartphone, expanding to a whole new group of people health and fitness features typically only available on dedicated wearables. Beginning next month, and available initially on Google Pixel phones exclusively (but with plans […]
