Month: June 2020

Zopa, the 15-year-old peer-to-peer lending company, is announcing that it has been awarded its full U.K. bank licence, as it gears up to launch a fixed-term savings account, followed by a credit card. Dubbed “Zopa Bank,” the new challenger bank will sit alongside its existing peer-to-peer lending business, under Zopa Group, creating what the veteran fintech
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A landmark regulatory intervention that seeks to apply structural antitrust remedies to cut big (ad)tech’s rights-hostile surveillance business models down to size has been revived after Germany’s federal court overturned an earlier ruling that had suspended enforcement of a ban on Facebook combining user data. The upshot is the tech giant could be forced to
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In recent years, Seattle-based Wyze made a name for itself thanks to making a lot of smart home gadgets affordable. These days, the company sells everything from smart plugs and locks to scales and fitness bands, but what started it all was the $20 Wyze indoor security camera. Today, the company is following that up
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Two months after Quibi’s high-profile launch as a short-form mobile-native TV app led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, it is evident the startup is greatly underperforming relative to the hundreds of millions of dollars already spent on content and marketing.  According to a Wall Street Journal report, “daily downloads peaked at 379,000 on its
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Sydney-based Canva, the design platform for non-designers, has today announced the close of a $60 million funding round, bringing its valuation to $6 billion, according to the company. The startup has raised a total of more than $300 million, including this latest round of financing, from investors like Bond, General Catalyst, Sequoia, Felicis Ventures, and
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During the virtual keynote of WWDC, Apple shared the first details about iOS 14, the next major version of iOS that is going to be released later this year. The most visual change is that the home screen is getting widgets. “This year, we spent time rethinking the iconic experience of the iPhone,” SVP of
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Microsoft acquires a security startup, Canva raises $60 million and Apple kicks off a virtual WWDC. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 22, 2020. 1. Microsoft confirms acquisition of CyberX to boost security in its Azure IoT business Microsoft announced today that it’s acquiring CyberX, a security startup that focuses on detecting, stopping and predicting
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Ethan Batraski Contributor Ethan Batraski is a partner at Venrock, where he invests across sectors with a particular focus on hard engineering problems such as developer infrastructure, advanced computing and space. Technology has dramatically changed over the last decade, and so has how we build and deliver enterprise software. Ten years ago, “modern computing” was
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While we await a fresh IPO filing from heavily backed insurtech startup Lemonade, let’s talk a little more about its public offering. Since our first dig into its S-1 filing, TechCrunch has spoken to a number of investors and operators in Lemonade’s space to find out if our initial read was off — were we
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