May.30 — Two American astronauts are cruising to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX capsule, forging a new landmark for NASA and visionary billionaire Elon Musk. The Dragon capsule carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley took off Saturday afternoon at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a brief jumpstart for your week. A big thanks to start to the whole Equity crew for doing a stellar job last week with the show while I was on vacation, especially to Danny for taking on this particular installment of the podcast. Equity Monday is still
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. This week will see two richly valued SaaS businesses share their Q1 earnings reports: CrowdStrike and Zoom. Both are 2019 IPOs, but these relatively young public companies have enjoyed a strong run in the public
Even as Facebook continues to take a hands-off approach to monitoring violent rhetoric and disinformation on its platform, the company will make a $10 million donation “to groups working on racial justice” in the U.S., according to a late Sunday night post from chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. The commitment from Facebook follows a week of
Reliance Jio Platforms secured $10.3 billion in recent weeks from Facebook and others Manish Singh 8 hours As investors’ appetites sour in the midst of a pandemic, a three-and-a-half-year-old Indian firm has secured $10.3 billion in a month from Facebook and four U.S.-headquartered private equity firms. The major deals for Reliance Jio Platforms have sparked
HenQ, an Amsterdam-based VC that invests in European B2B software startups typically at seed and Series A, recently disclosed the first close of its fourth fund at €70 million. The final close is expected to top out at between €75-€85 million later this year, and the firm has already begun backing companies out of the
At Google’s 2018 I/O developer conference, the company debuted a new suite of “digital well-being” aimed at helping Android users better manage their screen time. At its 2019 event, it expanded its tools’ capabilities and improved the related parental controls. Although Google I/O isn’t taking place this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company
More dismal numbers confirm what we already knew: Q1 2020 was real rough for an already struggling smartphone category. Gartner’s latest report puts the global market at a 20.2% slide versus the same time last year, thanks in large part to fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Every single one of the global top-five manufactures saw
Apple CEO Tim Cook discusses the company’s new HomePod voice-controlled speaker for the home. He speaks with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology” from the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California.
As tech companies like Twitter and Facebook gear up for longer-term remote work solutions, the future of work is becoming one of the more exciting opportunities in venture capital, Charles River Ventures general partner Saar Gur told TechCrunch. And as loneliness mounts with shelter-in-place orders implemented in various forms across the world, investors are looking
Instagram today is launching new tools that enable video creators to make money, including badges that viewers can purchase during Instagram Live videos and the introduction of IGTV ads. Both launches are considered a test, as the company is limiting the features’ availability during its experimentation phase, it says. Badges will give viewers a way
Feb.09 — Pepper, the humanoid robot from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp., has just scored one of its first jobs in the U.S.: hawking beer.
Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here. Most tech companies base compensation on an employee’s local cost of living, in addition to their skills and responsibilities. The pandemic-era push to remote work seems to be reinforcing that — if
Stringr, a video-focused startup that says it can help news organizations adapt to the challenges of COVID-19, is announcing that it’s raised $5.75 million in new funding. When I wrote about the the company at the end of 2015, it was creating a marketplace that connected news organizations with videographers who could provide them with news
Accusing Twitter of censorship for adding a contextual label to false claims he made about the 2020 election process, President Trump has again declared war on social media companies. After the White House told reporters that the president would soon announce an executive order “pertaining to social media,” the draft of that order is out
Connexity, a lead-gen platform for online retailers, has acquired Skimlinks, a UK platform for publishers to make money through affiliate links. Terms of the deal were undisclosed. According to Crunchbase, Skimlinks had raised a total of $25.5M and reached a late a Series C stage of funding, the final round coming from Frog Capital which
Caraway, a direct-to-consumer startup selling ceramic pots and pans, is announcing that it has raised $5.3 million in seed funding. Founder and CEO Jordan Nathan (previously a brand manager at e-commerce holding company Mohawk Group) told me that he became interested in cookware after burning a Teflon pan and learned more about the dangers of
President Trump follows through on his threat to challenge the legal protections enjoyed by social media and internet companies, Magic Leap’s CEO is stepping down and China sees its biggest autonomous driving round yet. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 29, 2020. 1. Trump signs an executive order taking direct aim at social media companies
In spite of a positive quarter with record revenue that beat analyst estimates, Salesforce stock was taking a hit today because of lighter guidance. Wall Street is a tough audience. The stock was down $8.29/share or 4.58% as of 2:15 pm ET. The guidance, which was a projection for next quarter’s earnings, was lighter than
Freepik, a Malaga-Spain based website which offers a curated freemium marketplace of vector graphics and stock photos fed by a community of contributing designers and photographers, is being acquired by investment and private equity firm EQT. The EQT Mid Market Europe fund has entered into an agreement to acquire a majority stake of Freepik from
When this editor first met Jeremy Conrad, it was in 2014, at the 8,000-square-foot former fish factory that was home to Lemnos, a hardware-focused venture firm that Conrad had cofounded three years earlier. Conrad — who as a mechanical engineering undergrad at MIT worked on self driving cars, drones and satellites — was still excited
The global spread of COVID-19 and resulting orders to shelter in place have hit retailers hard. As the pandemic drags on, temporary halts are becoming permanent closures, whether it’s the coffee shop next door, an historic bar, or a well-known lifestyle brand. But while the present is largely bleak, preparing for the future has retailers
The U.S. has suffered from devastating wildfires over the last few years as global temperatures rise and weather patterns change, making the otherwise natural phenomenon especially unpredictable and severe. To help out, Stanford researchers have found a way to track and predict dry, at-risk areas using machine learning and satellite imagery. Currently the way forests
Box CEO Aaron Levie has been working to change the software world for 15 years, but the pandemic has accelerated the move to cloud services much faster than anyone imagined. As he pointed out yesterday in an Extra Crunch Live interview, who would have thought three months ago that businesses like yoga and cooking classes
Uber UK has launched a Work Hub for drivers to view a selection of temporary work opportunities with other companies as a way to supplement pandemic-hit ride-hailing earnings during the coronavirus crisis. The Work Hub sits within the Uber driver app and displays offers of work from third party providers — including jobs that involve
In this instalment of our ongoing series around making the most of your at-home video setup, we’re going to focus on one of the most important, but least well understood or implemented parts of the equation: Lighting. While it isn’t actually something that requires a lot of training, expertise or even equipment to get right,
May.26 — Nearly nine years after astronauts last launched into space from U.S. soil, NASA and SpaceX are teaming up for a historic launch. Two astronauts will take off for the International Space Station on Wednesday, marking the first time SpaceX will send actual humans into space. Bloomberg’s Emily Chang looks at the just how
Steve Tan Contributor Steve Tan is a Singapore-based serial entrepreneur and full-stack digital marketer with over 14 years of hands-on experience who is also the CEO and founder of Super Tan Brothers Pte. Ltd, which operates e-commerce, software, logistics, marketing, educational and investment companies around the globe. Intuitively, stores that sell online should be making
When Cisco bought AppDynamics in 2017 for $3.7 billion just before the IPO, the company sent a clear signal it wanted to move beyond its pure network hardware roots into the software monitoring side of the equation. Yesterday afternoon the company announced it intends to buy another monitoring company, this time snagging internet monitoring solution
Facebook’s R&D group, NPE Team, is launching a new app for engaging fellow fans around live events, Venue. This is the third new app to launch just this week from Facebook’s internal team focused on experimenting with new concepts in social networking. With Venue, the company aims to offer a digital companion for live events,