Group video calls will be coming to Telegram’s messaging platform next month with what’s being touted as a fully featured implementation, including support for web-based videoconferencing. Founder Pavel Durov made the announcement via a (text) message posted to his official Telegram channel today where he wrote “we will be adding a video dimension to our
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Georges Archibald Contributor Georges Archibald is head of Americas at the Apex Group. Almost two centuries ago, gold prospectors in California set off one of the greatest rushes for wealth in history. Proponents of socially conscious investing claim fund managers will start a similar stampede when they discover that environmental, social and governance (ESG) insights
Data intelligence company Near is announcing the acquisition of another company in the data business — UM. In some ways, this echoes Near’s acquisition of Teemo last fall. Just as that deal helped Singapore-headquartered Near expand into Europe (with Teemo founder and CEO Benoit Grouchko becoming Near’s chief privacy officer), CEO Anil Mathews said that this new
French startup OpenClassrooms has raised an $80 million Series C funding round led by Lumos Capital Group. The company operates an online education platform in French and English. Users can choose among 54 training programs and get a diploma at the end of the program — some of those program lead to French-state-recognized bachelor and
DoorDash is announcing new pricing plans for the restaurants who use the platform for pickups and deliveries. Before this, the company did not offer standardized pricing across restaurants. However, the question of how high delivery app fees might go (and how parsimonious the payments might be for restaurants as a result) prompted DoorDash to publish
TechCrunch’s Early Stage 2021 is back for part two of our bootcamp-for-entrepreneurs event, with a focus on marketing and fundraising. Building on the first half of the event in April, this two-day virtual sprint will take place July 8 & 9, and we’re thrilled to welcome Rebecca Reeve Henderson as one of our all-star slate
Toucan, a startup that helps users learn a new language while they browse the web, is announcing that it has raised an additional $4.5 million in seed funding. As I wrote last fall, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup has built a Chrome extension that scans the text of whatever website you’re reading and translates select
In the never-ending stream of venture capital funding rounds, from time to time, a group of startups working on the same problem will raise money nearly in unison. So it was with OKR-focused startups toward the start of 2020. How were so many OKR-focused tech upstarts able to raise capital at the same time? And
The director of a new unit set up this month inside the UK’s competition watchdog — with a dedicated focus on tech giants’ impacts on digital markets — has been giving a hint of how it could operate, once it’s on a statutory footing and imbued with powers to sanction problem platforms and potentially even
U.S.-based challenger bank Current, which has now grown to nearly 3 million users, announced this morning it has raised a $220 million round of Series D funding, led by new investor Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The funding swiftly follows Current’s $131 million Series C at the end of last year, at which point the company had
Maryam Haque Contributor Bobby Franklin Contributor More posts by this contributor The startup community must defend merit-based immigration Ensuring foreign-born founders can grow their startups in the U.S. Let’s be clear: The venture capital industry has lacked diversity. The good news is the industry is working to improve itself. To begin with, as an industry,
Stripe, the privately-held payments company now valued at $95 billion, has made an acquisition to expand the range of tools (and services) that it provides to online businesses. It has acquired TaxJar, a popular provider of a cloud-based suite of tax services, which can be used to automatically calculate, report and file sales taxes. One
Mobile social networking app for women, Peanut, is today becoming the latest tech company to integrate audio into its product following the success of Clubhouse. Peanut, which began with a focus on motherhood, has expanded over the years to support women through all life stages, including pregnancy, marriage and even menopause. It sees its voice
Ford Motor Company will open a $185 million R&D battery lab to develop and manufacture battery cells and batteries, a first step toward the automaker possibly making battery cells in-house. The facility comes as yet another signal to consumers and other automakers that the auto giant is no longer hedging its bets on the transition
Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier runs the centerpiece of IBM’s transformation hopes. When Big Blue paid $34 billion for his company in 2018, it was because it believed it could be the linchpin of the organization’s shift to a focus on hybrid computing. In its most recent earnings report, IBM posted positive revenue growth for
Interactive voice advertising startup Instreamatic, which can insert interactive voice ads into an audio stream, has raised $6.1 million in a Series A funding led by Progress Ventures led the round, joined by Accomplice, and Google Assistant Investments. SF-HQ’d Instreamatic lets brands that advertise through streaming music apps and podcasts (for instance) have interactive voice-based
ZenGo, a mobile app to manage your cryptocurrencies, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners. ZenGo is a non-custodial wallet, which means that the company doesn’t manage your crypto assets for you — you remain in control. Other investors include Distributed Global and Austin Rief Ventures. Existing investors Benson Oak,
It’s been a very tough year for Placer.ai’s core customer segments of retail and commercial real estate, to put it mildly. But the foot traffic and location analytics startup saw growth in new categories, including consumer packaged goods (CPG) and hedge funds that use its tech to perform due diligence. The Los Altos, California-based company
Popular family tracking app Life360 is investing in hardware. The company this morning announced the $37 million acquisition of Chicago-based Jiobit, the maker of a wearable location device designed for use by families with younger children, pets, or seniors. The $37 million is primarily in stock and debt, Life360 notes, but if certain performance metrics
The two founders of Crusoe Energy think they may have a solution to two of the largest problems facing the planet today — the increasing energy footprint of the tech industry and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the natural gas industry. Crusoe, which uses excess natural gas from energy operations to power data centers
Adobe today announced the launch of a new asset management tool, Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials. That’s a mouthful, but while the company didn’t necessarily simplify the name, the idea here is to give teams that work with lots of digital assets an easier-to-use management experience in the Adobe Experience Cloud than Adobe’s current enterprise-centric
TikTok will open a center in Europe where outside experts will be shown information on how it approaches content moderation and recommendation, as well as platform security and user privacy, it announced today. The European Transparency and Accountability Centre (TAC) follows the opening of a U.S. center last year — and is similarly being billed
Step, the digital banking service aimed at teens and endorsed by TikTok star Charli D’Amelio, announced this morning the close of a $100 million round of Series C funding after growing to over 1.5 million users just six months after launch. The new round, led by General Catalyst, comes shortly after Step’s $50 million Series
Sign language is used by millions of people around the world, but unlike Spanish, Mandarin or even Latin, there’s no automatic translation available for those who can’t use it. SLAIT claims the first such tool available for general use, which can translate around 200 words and simple sentences to start — using nothing but an
Weav, which is building a universal API for commerce platforms, is emerging from stealth today with $4.3 million in funding from a bevy of investors, and a partnership with Brex. Founded last year by engineers Ambika Acharya, Avikam Agur and Nadav Lidor after participating in the W20 YC batch, Weav joins the wave of fintech
Another week, another big tech hearing in Congress. With a flurry of antitrust reform bills on the way, Democratic lawmakers are again bringing in some of the world’s most powerful tech companies for questioning. In the next hearing, scheduled for Tuesday, April 27 at 10 AM ET, the Senate Judiciary’s subcommittee on privacy and technology
Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to turn every home into a distributed power plant that would generate, store and even deliver energy back into the electricity grid, all using the company’s products. While the company has been selling solar and energy storage products for years, a new company policy to only sell solar coupled with
Faculty, a VC-backed artificial intelligence start-up, has won a tender to work with the NHS to make better predictions about its future requirements for patients, based on data drawn from how it handled the COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2019, Faculty raised a $10.5M Series A funding round from UK-based VCs Local Globe, GMG Ventures, and,
Apple’s latest software upgrade brings a big change, Roku accuses Google of anti-competitive behavior and Brex raises a big funding round. This is your Daily Crunch for April 26, 2021. The big story: iOS 14.5 brings privacy changes and more Apple released the latest version of its mobile operating system today, which includes the much-discussed
Andrés Dancausa Contributor Andrés Dancausa is fund partner, EMEA for operator-led international investors TheVentureCity. Before entering the world of VC, he was the CEO of a Spanish fintech company and launched his own startup in the edtech space. There’s a disconnect between reality and the added value investors are promising entrepreneurs. Three in five founders