Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Fintech is what you hear about constantly, but probably aren’t as read up on as you’d like to be. Neither am I. Luckily we have a new report concerning fintech investing to unpack and explore.
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Microsoft announced a major update to its Dynamics 365 product line today, which correlates to the growing amount of data in the enterprise, and how to collect and understand that data to produce better customer experiences. This is, in fact, the goal of all vendors in this space including Salesforce and Adobe, who are also
European Union lawmakers have set out a first bundle of proposals for a new digital strategy for the bloc, one that’s intended to drive digitalization across all industries and sectors — and enable what Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has described as ‘A Europe fit for the Digital Age‘. It could also be summed
Apple says the coronavirus outbreak will hurt its manufacturing and sales, Jeff Bezos makes a big commitment to fighting climate change and SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 18, 2020. 1. Apple will miss revenue forecast as coronavirus impacts its manufacturing and sales In a letter to investors, Apple said
Robotic process automation — the ability to automate certain repetitive software-based tasks to free up people to focus on work that computers cannot do — has become a major growth area in the world of IT. Today, a startup called Aisera that is coming out of stealth has taken this idea and supercharged it by
In the wake of the $5.3 billion sale of banking API provider Plaid to Visa — a deal generally lauded as intelligent for the larger company — fintech became an even hotter part of the venture capital and startup landscape. While companies in the broad fintech and finservices spaces were already attractive bets for private
Facebook may make it easier to escape its ranking algorithm and explore the News Feed in different formats. Facebook has internally prototyped a tabbed version of the News Feed for mobile that includes that the standard Most Relevant feed, the existing Most Recent feed of reverse chronological posts that was previously buried as a sidebar
We all know the cloud infrastructure market is extremely lucrative; analyst firm Canalys reports that the sector reached $30.2 billion in revenue for Q4 2019. Cloud numbers are hard to parse because companies often lump cloud revenue into a single bucket regardless of whether it’s generated by infrastructure or software. What’s interesting about Canalys’s numbers
Is “Twitter Stories” on the way? Or will we just get tools to send prettier tweets? Well now Twitter has the talent for both as it’s just acquired Chroma Labs. Co-founded by Instagram Boomerang inventor John Barnett, Chroma Labs’ Chroma Stories app let you fill in stylish layout templates and frames for posting collages and
Video editing startup InVideo has new funding and a new product. The San Francisco-headquartered company bills itself as the easiest way for anyone to create professional-quality videos, using a drag-and-drop interface, along with a library of templates and stock photos and videos. The resulting videos can then be optimized for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other
A new startup called Arize AI is building what it calls a real-time analytics platform for artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company is led by CEO Jason Lopatecki, who has also served as chief strategy officer and chief innovation officer at TubeMogul, the video ad company acquired by Adobe. TubeMogul’s co-founder and former CEO
“I don’t feel good about that. That sucks” Chrys Bader-Wechseler reflects when asked about the bullying that went down on the anonymous app Secret he co-founded in 2013. After $35 million raised, 15 million users, and a spectacular flame out two years later, the startup was dead. “Since I left secret I feel alive and
Dell Technologies announced today that it was selling legacy security firm RSA for $2.075 billion to a consortium of investors led by Symphony Technology Group. Other investors include Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board and AlpInvest Partners. RSA came to Dell when it bought EMC for $67 billion in 2015. EMC bought the company in 2006
Back in 2018, OurPath emerged as a startup in the U.K. tackling the problem of diabetes. The company helped customers tackle the disease, and raised a $3 million round of funding by combining advice from health experts with tracking technology via a smartphone app to help people build healthy habits and lose weight. Now rebranded
Security camera maker Ring is updating its service to improve account security and give more control when it comes to privacy. Once again, this is yet another update that makes the overall experience slightly better but the Amazon-owned company is still not doing enough to protect its users. First, Ring is reversing its stance when
The death of Mobile World Congress 2020 started as a trickle. First, it was an understandably nervous ZTE. As a Chinese company, it was undoubtedly going to receive extra scrutiny — never mind that ZTE’s Shenzhen headquarters are a two-hour flight from Wuhan. Soon enough, South Korea’s LG backed out, followed by Nvidia and Ericsson.
Despite the rapid growth of e-commerce in India, Southeast Asia and other emerging markets, the vast majority of retail transactions there still happen offline in small stores that also serve as neighborhood hubs. The central role these stores play in their communities led GGV Capital to develop what the firm refers to as its mom-and-pop
Gojek has paid $30 million to take a minority stake in Blue Bird, one of the largest taxi operators in Indonesia, according to Bloomberg, which first reported that the deal was in progress last month. Gojek’s stake in Blue Bird is worth $30 million. The taxi operator’s holding company disclosed in a regulatory filing earlier
Egnyte announced today it was combining its two main products — Egnyte Protect and Egnyte Connect — into a single platform to help customers manage, govern and secure the data from a single set of tools. Egynte co-founder and CEO Vineet Jain says that this new single platform approach is being driven chiefly by the
SumUp, the London-based fintech company that enables small businesses to take card payments via its device and online, is launching its own pre-paid card in partnership with Mastercard. Dubbed “SumUp Card,” the new offering will enable merchants to gain quicker to access funds collected via SumUp as it will no longer require money to be
Will Robbins Contributor Voodoo Games is one of the most interesting startups alive today. In mid-2018, it had 150 million MAUs and raised $200 million from Goldman Sachs, yet I’ve never heard anyone mention the company. That might be normal for an obscure enterprise SaaS play, but Voodoo is consumer-facing through and through. Quantitative success
PullRequest, a startup that provides code review as a service, announced today that it was buying Moonlight, an early stage startup that has built an online platform for hiring remote developers. The companies did not share the terms. Lyal Avery, founder and CEO at PullRequest, says that he bought this company to expand his range
It’s suspiciously convenient that Facebook already fulfills most of the regulatory requirements it’s asking governments to lay on the rest of the tech industry. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in Brussels lobbying the European Union’s regulators as they form new laws to govern artificial intelligence, content moderation, and more. But if they follow Facebook’s suggestions,
Atomico, the European venture capital firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, has announced that it has closed its fifth fund — “Atomico V” — giving it another $820 million to invest in European startups. The London-headquartered VC firm’s previous fund closed at $765 million, so this is an increase over three years ago. However, the
This morning brought a look at some of what we’re missing at this year’s Mobile World Congress. The show may have been called off on account of coronavirus concerns, but the news goes on. We knew that TCL was planning to show off a number of “alternative” smartphone form factors, and one just showed up
Americans are saddled with $1.2 trillion in auto loans, according to data collected by the Federal Reserve. And while that debt can be refinanced, even U.S. car owners who know it’s an option face a complicated task. MotoRefi, a new fintech startup that was born out of QED Investors in 2017, says it has developed
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Late last week two Boston-based companies raised big rounds. The size of the two investments — each over the $100 million mark — and their rapid succession made them stand out. The pair of investments
Remember when Zenefits imploded, and kicked out CEO Parker Conrad. Well, Conrad launched a new employee onboarding startup called Rippling, and now he’s going after another HR company called Gusto with a new billboard, “Outgrowing Gusto? Presto change-o.” The problem is, Gusto got it taken down by issuing a cease & desist order to Rippling
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is in Europe this week — attending a security conference in Germany over the weekend where he spoke about the kind of regulation he’d like applied to his platform ahead of a slate of planned meetings with digital heavyweights at the European Commission. “I do think that there should be regulation
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through HQ Trivia is dead. On Valentine’s Day, the company laid off its full