At TechCrunch Disrupt today, SmartNews announced the release of major new features for the American version of its news discovery app, designed to make it easier for users to get updates about the elections, COVID-19 and the weather. Several features focus on the presidential race, and other candidates up for vote this year. SmartNews, which […]
Snowflake went public this week, and in a mark of the wider ecosystem that is evolving around data warehousing, a startup that has built a completely new concept for modelling warehoused data is announcing funding. Narrator — which uses an 11-column ordering model rather than standard star schema to organise data for modelling and analysis — […]
Melisa Irene‘s path to becoming a partner at one of Southeast Asia’s most esteemed venture capital firms is an unconventional one. “I always consider myself to be quite lucky,” said Irene, who was promoted to be a partner at East Ventures in January 2019. At 25 years old, she was the Jakarta-based investment firm’s first […]
Pan-African fintech company Interswitch plans to fire up its corporate venture arm again—according to CEO Mitchell Elegbe—who spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday. The Nigerian founder didn’t offer much new on the Lagos-based firm’s expected IPO, but he did reveal Interswitch will revive investments in African startups. Founded by Elegbe in 2002, Interswitch pioneered the […]
Infarm, the vertical farming company that has built a network of urban farms to grow fresh food closer to consumers, has raised $170 million in new investment in a “first close” of a Series C. Leading the round — which is expected to reach $200 million and is a mixture of equity and debt — […]
There have been a couple of articles published in the last two days reporting on an impromptu sweep that took place outside of a venue we are using for our TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco this week. We wanted to detail what we know about what happened and the steps that are being taken […]
In a Wednesday filing in federal court, the United States government said that users who use or download WeChat “to convey personal or business information” will not be subject to penalties under President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transactions with the Tencent-owned messaging app. Trump issued the executive order against WeChat on August 6, the […]
This may be counterintuitive. I hope so. I remember the day I first started using Twitter. My friend Gabe Rivera suggested it would be a good idea to sign on to the fledgling network. Basically it was a land grab — claim the real estate of my name. I most likely was aware of the […]
Building and growing a startup is hard, but pivoting said startup into something new and then achieving that same growth is even harder. But it’s not impossible. Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, founder and CEO of PromisePay, and Jessica Matthews, founder and CEO of Uncharted Power, both have experiences doing this. At TechCrunch Disrupt, they shed some light […]
Lightspeed Venture Partners announced the launch of its Southeast Asia operations today. Based out of the firm’s new regional headquarters in Singapore, Lightspeed’s team there will invest in startups throughout Southeast Asia from the three global funds it closed earlier this year, which total about $4 billion. The Southeast Asia team consists of partner Akshay […]
Millions of high school kids play online multiplayer games, but they seldom have crosstown rivals in Fortnite or Valorant. PlayVS wants to make that happen with its platform for school-sponsored esports, and it’s growing like crazy, doubling its staff in the last year and putting thousands of schools on its platform. PlayVS connects online games […]
Facebook makes its next steps in VR, Apple releases iOS 14 and the PlayStation 5 gets a launch date. This is your Daily Crunch for September 16, 2020. The big story: Facebook unveils the Oculus Quest 2 Facebook announced the smaller, more affordable follow-up to the Oculus Quest VR headset launching on October 13 at […]
For people who are blind or visually impaired, JAWS is synonymous with freedom to operate Windows PCs with a remarkable degree of control and precision with output in speech and Braille. The keyboard-driven application makes it possible to navigate GUI-based interfaces of web sites and Windows programs. Anyone who has ever listened to someone proficient in […]
If you’ve got a large online following, as well as knowledge that might be valuable to that audience, Prox is a startup currently in beta testing that’s building tools to help you make money. Michael Mathieu, formerly the CEO of YuMe, joined Prox as CEO in January. The goal, he told me, is to create […]
Working at the intersection of biology and computing may be the most exciting new spot for technologists at the moment. That’s the word from Daphne Koller, the founder and chief executive officer of Insitro — the biotech company that’s raised more than $243 million in the two short years since it launched. Speaking at our […]
If in-person events were still a thing in 2020, there’s a pretty good chance we’d know a lot more about the PlayStation 5 by now. With tech companies setting their own event schedules, however, Sony and Microsoft have offered themselves a more leisurely schedule with which to portion out news. Microsoft struck first, with aggressive […]
“Scandal” and “Little Fires Everywhere” star Kerry Washington won her first Emmy Award yesterday, but when she joined us at TechCrunch Disrupt today, she was much more focused on her work as an investor. Washington traced much of her interest in technology to the premiere of “Scandal” in 2012. It had, she said, been “almost […]
Despite the surprise release of iOS 14 that left app developers unprepared, an ambitious few have managed to push their way through — or even pull an all-nighter — in order to make their apps available with iOS 14 support on launch day. For the first time in years, the new version of iOS offers […]
Asset management might not be the most exciting talking topic, but it’s often an overlooked area of cyber-defenses. By knowing exactly what assets your company has makes it easier to know where the security weak spots are. That’s the problem JupiterOne is trying to fix. “We built JupiterOne because we saw a gap in how […]
My husband started his own company here on his J-2 visa work permit, and our daughter was born here, but we’re supposed to return to Italy for two years. How can we get a 212(e) waiver?
