Short, snappy, entertaining videos have become an increasingly common way for young people to receive information. Why not learn English through TikTok-like videos too? That was what prompted Angelo Huang to launch Blabla. Originally from Taiwan, Huang relocated to Shanghai in 2019 to start Blabla after working in Silicon Valley for over a decade. A […]
Poshmark, the nine-year-old, Redwood City Ca.-based online marketplace for second-hand clothing, beauty, and home decor products, is set to start trading as a public company on the Nasdaq tomorrow after tonight pricing 6.6 million shares higher than originally planned, according to Bloomberg. Per its report, the company, which earlier expected to sell shares at between […]
Grab Financial Group said today it has raised more than $300 million in Series A funding, led by South Korean firm Hanhwa Asset Management, with participation from K3 Ventures, GGV Capital, Arbor Ventures and Flourish Ventures. The Financial Times reports that the funding values Grab Financial, a subsidiary of ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab, at […]
Sennder, a large digital road freight forwarder based out of Germany, has raised $160m in Series D financing. The round was led by an unnamed party, but round participants included Accel, Lakestar, HV Capital, Project A and Scania. Sources say Hedosophia may be the unnamed growth investor, although Sennder declined to comment. To date, Sennder […]
Fresh off the announcement of more than $500 million in new capital across two new funds, Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group has announced that they’re adding Anu Sharma and Daniel Li to the team’s list of Partners. The firm, which in recent years has paid particularly close attention to enterprise software bets, invests heavily in the […]
Quite a bit has happened since Snap announced last week that it was indefinitely locking President Trump’s Snapchat account. But after temporary bans from his Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts as well as a permanent ban from Twitter, Snap has decided that it will also be making its ban of the President’s Snapchat account permanent. […]
Following a comprehensive ban from Twitter and a number of other online services following last week’s assault on the Capitol by his followers, President Trump managed to put out a tweet in the form of a video address touching on the “calamity at the Capitol”… and, of course, his deplatforming. In the video, Trump instructs […]
U.S. safety regulators have asked Tesla to recall 158,000 vehicles over media control unit failures that cause the touchscreen displays to stop working, following a months-long investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The Office of Defects Investigation unit of the agency determined that the failure of the media control unit is a safety […]
Tokyo-based SODA, which runs sneaker reselling platform SNKRDUNK, has raised a $22 million Series B led by SoftBank Ventures Asia. Investors also included basepartners, Colopl Next, THE GUILD and other strategic partners. Part of the funding will be used to expand into other Asian countries. Most of SNKRDUNK’s transactions are within Japan now, but it […]
One in five people have a mental health illness. Pace, a new startup founded by Pinterest and Affirm executives, wants to pay attention to the other four in that statistic. “Nobody is perfectly mentally healthy all the time,” said Jack Chou, Pace co-founder. “It’s a non-existent idea, everyone is sort of swimming in between being […]
The last several years have seen a substantial increase of ability for robotic exoskeleton technology. Completely understandable. For one thing, it’s that rare technology you encounter that really feels like it’s going to change lives for the better the first time you see it. I’ve had a number of demos with companies that frankly took […]
Airbnb takes a big step to avoid violence at the inauguration, Intel gets a new CEO and Affirm goes public. This is your Daily Crunch for January 13, 2021. The big story: Airbnb cancels all DC bookings during inauguration week Airbnb said today that “in response to various local, state and federal officials asking people […]
Weezy — an on-demand supermarket that delivers groceries in as fast as 15 minutes — has raised $20 million in a Series A funding led by New York-based venture capital fund Left Lane Capital. Also participating were U.K.-based fund DN Capital, earlier investors Heartcore Capital and angel investors, notably Chris Muhr, the Groupon founder. Although […]
Every year, around 10 million pets go missing in the U.S., and millions of those end up in shelters where they aren’t always reunited with their owners, due to their lack of identification or a microchip. A new mobile app, Shadow, aims to tackle this problem by leveraging a combination of a volunteer network and […]
With many social networks suddenly reevaluating their policies in light of recent political violence in the U.S., the popular messaging app Telegram has begun chipping away at an organized network of neo-Nazi and white supremacist accounts flourishing on the platform. Telegram confirmed to TechCrunch that it has removed dozens of channels over the course of […]
The electric, autonomous vehicles of the future might be manufactured by Apple’s main supplier Foxconn and Chinese automaker Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. The two companies have agreed to form a joint venture focused on contract manufacturing for automakers, with a specific focus on electrification, connectivity and autonomous driving technology as well as vehicles designed for […]
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Researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created a set of fish-shaped underwater robots that can autonomously navigate and find each other, cooperating to perform tasks or just placidly school together. Just as aerial drones are proving themselves useful in industry after industry, underwater drones could revolutionize ecology, shipping and other areas […]
