Remote work may have changed the way we spend our days, but there’s quite a sneaky disruptor among us: burnout. As the pandemic drags on, employees are either soul-searching for a bigger purpose or simply exhausted by the uncertainty and stale culture of their current jobs. It’s not a small subset of the working population,
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A screenshot from Night School Studio game “Oxenfree” Night School Studio, the independent game developer known for narrative-driven titles like “Oxenfree,” announced today it has been acquired by Netflix. This makes it the first games studio the streaming giant has purchased. In Netflix’s announcement, Mike Verdu, vice president of game development, wrote Night School’s “commitment
Peter Relan is not exactly a household name, but he has seen a lot over the course of his career and enjoyed a fair amount of success. A Stanford grad who logged time at Hewlett Packard and Oracle before becoming the CTO of the ill-fated, bubble-era company Webvan, Relan has, in more recent years, become
Extra Crunch is now TechCrunch+. In addition to updating our name and logo, we’re offering military, student and government membership discounts and have expanded access to new regions. Also, Extra Crunch Live, our weekly video series with investors and founders, is now TechCrunch Live — and you don’t need to be a member to join
Not every country has a Multiple Listing Service to aid in buying and selling a home. This often makes the process complicated as buyers weed through fake and duplicate listings and little pricing data, unlike in the United States. Property technology startup Nomad Homes is working to change that by creating a personalized real estate
Millennial consumers are emerging as a key demographic in the insurance market, and today a Swedish startup that’s building a business catering specifically to their needs and priorities is announcing a round of funding to fuel its growth. Hedvig, a neo-insurer that provides property, travel, contents, and accident insurance geared to the lifestyles of younger
Amazon today announced a new subscription service called “Alexa Together,” designed for families with aging family members who are still living independently, but who may need extra support. The $19.99 per month subscription expands on Amazon’s existing product, Alexa Care Hub, an earlier investment in elder care, by taking many of Care Hub’s features and
Andy Weyer Contributor Given the surplus of liquidity in the markets, entrepreneurs have access to more funding options than ever before. Venture banks, venture debt funds and venture capitalists are each jockeying to prove how their money is greener. Nonetheless, each has constraints that dictate their behavior. While a venture capitalist may swing for the
Sisu Data, which aims to help businesses make better decisions, announced today it has raised $62 million in a Series C round of funding led by Green Bay Ventures. Existing backers Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and NEA also put money in the round, along with new investor Geodesic Ventures. The financing brings San Francisco-based Sisu’s total
Arize AI is applying machine learning to some of technology’s toughest problems. To continue with its mission, the company announced $19 million in Series A funding. Battery Ventures led the round with participation from existing investors Foundation Capital, Trinity Ventures, The House Fund and Swift Ventures. The new round comes over a year after the
Heydoc, a system for managing the medical data and admin tasks in medical practitioners, has closed a $8.3m Series A round led by Smedvig Capital with existing investors Hambro Perks, Triple Point Ventures and InHealth Ventures also participating. This brings the total amount raised to date by Heydoc to $12m. Heydoc mainly operates in the UK but plans to expand internationally. It competes mostly with
Amazon is introducing two new services tied to user health and fitness, and its Halo personal health devices. They include Halo Fitness, a new service for interactive home video workouts that looks a lot like Apple Fitness+, and Halo Nutrition, a personalized, guided meal planner. Both of these services will be included as part of
Netflix is expanding its mobile gaming push with the launch of three more gaming titles which will become exclusively available to Netflix members in select European markets. The company today is introducing a trio of casual games — “Shooting Hoops,” “Teeter Up,” and “Card Blast” — to Netflix members in Spain and Italy, as well
Burro first crossed our path during our 2020 robotics event, when the agtech company competed in our pitch off. The company (which used to go by the decidedly less fun name Augean) appears to be moving up in the world, announcing a $10.9 million Series A raise this week. S2G Ventures and Toyota Ventures led
French startup Qovery has raised a $4 million seed funding round. The company integrates directly with your git repository and lets you deploy your code to a public cloud without having to manage the infrastructure yourself. Qovery isn’t a hosting platform. It’s a service that deploys your application to Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean or Scaleway.
In the summer of 2019, Timilehin Ajiboye became intrigued with the idea of building a travel app after conversations with a circle of friends. One friend reached out to Ajiboye asking if he knew of any platform where she could find new, aesthetically pleasing places to dine in, visit and take pictures. And then, during a
After rebranding from White Hat and raising $44 million earlier this year, tech apprenticeship startup Multiverse has raised another round of funding. The company today announced that it has closed $130 million in a Series C round. The funding had been rumored in recent weeks while the round was being closed. D1 Capital Partners and
Mobile spyware is one of the most invasive and targeted kinds of unregulated surveillance, since it can be used to track where you go, who you see and what you talk about. And because of its stealthy nature, mobile spyware can be nearly impossible to detect. But now one Y Combinator-backed startup is building an
For many financial institutions in Southeast Asia, verifying new customers takes a week or two, said the founders of Verihubs. The startup cuts that time down to as little as five seconds, using AI-based identity authentication technology and APIs that let companies continue verifying returning customers through SMS, WhatsApp or flash calls. Verihubs announced it
Madison Schill Contributor Madison Schill is the director of marketing and communications at Livescale and is a former fashion editor and producer. Live shopping — the seamless and simultaneous combination of online shopping, livestreaming and social media — has been taking North America by storm since October 2019. Though booming to take up over 13%
The decarbonization of the planet will be the next major disruption of the 21st century, according to SOSV managing general partner Sean O’Sullivan and Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures. A disruption of such magnitude will bring about changes that will touch every industry and corner of daily life, and as a result, a complex
Brett Lovelady Contributor Brett Lovelady is the founder of Astro Studios, now a part of PA Consulting, a design-driven company that empowers designers and strives to capture the value of design in the product, brand, experience and company creation process. Around 90% of startups ultimately fail, and the reasons leading to failure are well known:
Investor and entrepreneur Anshu Sharma — formerly Storm Ventures, now CEO of privacy-focused SkyFlow — asked on Twitter today about the connection between interest rates and technology valuations: Ignore the compliments; Sharma was merely trying to bait Jeff and me into engaging with his question. Which worked, as you can tell. Sharma is someone with
The head of Instagram has just announced that it’s “pausing” a planned version of the social media software aimed at under 13 year olds. The development comes hard of the heels of critical reporting in the Wall Street Journal which unearthed internal documents that suggest the Facebook-owned company was aware the social media service caused
As more enterprises migrate to cloud-based architectures, they are also taking on more applications (because they can) and, as a result of that, more complex workloads and storage needs. Machine learning and other artificial intelligence applications add even more complexity. Now a startup that has built technology to make that process move faster and more
The UK’s competition watchdog has cleared Facebook’s acquisition of Kustomer, a maker of CRM tools. The purchase was announced last November — with a price-tag we reported as $1BN — but is pending closing after facing regulatory scrutiny. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened an inquiry on the proposed merger this summer, at
Cryptocurrency company Coinbase is announcing a handful of new features. While the company is better known for its exchange that lets you convert USD into various cryptocurrencies, Coinbase wants to expand its consumer services so that you use the platform for different use cases with more financial services. First, the company will soon launch direct
Customer service is one of the most important relationships between a business and its customer, and that was made even more clear during the global pandemic. Though Thankful AI CEO Ted Mico and his co-founder Evan Tann didn’t start out with experience from the business side, they started the Venice, California-based company in 2018 out
Regional seed and early-stage venture capital firm, Flat6Labs, has finished raising $10 million for its seed fund targeted at Tunisian startups, according to a statement released by the company. The seed fund, called Anava Seed Fund (ASF), at first sought a close of $3 million but instead closed 3.3x of the initial figure. The fund
When businesses can connect more personally with their customers, those customers in turn are more loyal. However, as consumer behavior changes, especially as it did over the past 18 months, it is more difficult to establish that connection amid all of the messages put in front of them. Optimove, specializing in customer relationship management marketing,