Israel-based Pileus, which is officially launching today, aims to help businesses keep their cloud spend under control. The company also today announced that it has raised a $1 million seed round from a private angel investor. Using machine learning, the company’s platform continuously learns about how a user typically uses a given cloud and then
admin
Airbnb takes on new debt as it adapts to a world without tourism, Apple announces a new entry-level iPhone and Google lowers Nest camera quality. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 15, 2020. 1. Airbnb ups its debt by $1B amid the coronavirus travel crunch Airbnb has secured commitments of $1 billion for a syndicated
Microsoft is embarking on a new sustainability initiative as part of its overall approach to support environmental protection measures, with a project it calls the ‘Planetary Computer.’ This will actually be a computing endeavor that uses aggregated global environmental data collected from a number of sources as its input, and that will seek to employe
You don’t need your Ph.D. in economics to know the economy is in rough shape right now due to the impact of COVID-19, but ServiceNow today pledged that it would not lay off a single employee in 2020 — and in fact, it’s hiring. While Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, pledged no significant layoffs for 90 days
Amazon has decided to close its six fulfillment centers in France until Monday, according to an internal document seen by Capital and Reuters. The company also said publicly that it’ll probably appeal yesterday’s court decision that restrict orders to essential goods. Yesterday, a French court ruled that Amazon hasn’t been doing enough to protect warehouse
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized the manufacture of the Coventor ventilator, a new hardware design first developed by the University of Minnesota. The project sought to create a ventilator that could provide the same level of life-saving care as existing ventilator models, but with a much lower cost to help ramp
Google today is making it easier for families to find quality educational apps with the addition of a new “Teacher Approved” section to Google Play. All apps found in this section are vetted by a panel of reviewers, including over 200 teachers across the U.S., and meet Google’s existing requirements for its “Designed for Families”
Labster, a virtual science lab edtech company, today announced that it is partnering with California’s community college network to bring its software to 2.1 million students. California Community Colleges claims to be the largest system of higher education in the country. The Labster partnership will provide 115 schools with 130 virtual laboratory simulations in biology,
French startup Slite has raised an $11 million Series A round led by Spark Capital with existing investors also participating. Slite is a sort of multiplayer Evernote. It lets you collect and organize documentation, create shared documents and build a company handbook. Many companies struggle to keep a single source of truth when it comes
Credit Kudos, a U.K. fintech using open banking to provide more accurate credit scoring, has raised £5 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is AlbionVC, which is joined by TriplePoint, Plug & Play Ventures, Ascension Ventures’ Fair by Design fund, and Entrepreneur First (EF). In addition, a number of fintech angels participated. They
Google is reportedly on the verge of stepping up their hardware game in a way that follows the example set by Apple, with custom-designed silicon powering future smartphones. Axios reports that Google is readying its own in-house processors for use in future Pixel devices, including both phones and eventually Chromebooks, too. Google’s efforts around its
The well-funded Japanese space startup Synspective has tapped launch provider Rocket Lab to take its first Earth observation satellite to orbit. Launch is planned for late 2020, and the company’s StriX–α craft will be the sole payload. Synspective was founded in 2018 and by mid-2019 had raised about $100 million, making it one of the
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Earlier today, PwC and CB Insights dropped a sheaf of data concerning the global and domestic Q1 venture capital market, something we’ll be yanking data points from here and there for a few days. What
Adriel is a South Korean startup bringing automated ad tools to small businesses — and in recent months, it’s been expanding into the United States and the United Kingdom. This might seem like exactly the wrong time to be growing an ad-buying platform, since we’re at the beginning of what’s likely to be a tremendous
BenevolentAI, a startup which has raised $292 million to apply AI to create drugs faster, today says it has uncovered an already approved drug as a potential treatment for COVID-19, after it applied its AI platform and team to the problem. The revelation, which has now appeared in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has already entered
A startup that created a dedicated gadget to help ensure the safety of electrical industry workers has turned their talents to addressing the need for similar workplace protections in the face of another threat: COVID-19. Vancouver-based Proxxi is launching Halo, a wrist-worn wearable device that can provide a vibration notification to alert someone of the
As recently as a year or two ago, the idea of a $900 starting price for a OnePlus device would have seemed, at best, fanciful. The company built a name for itself with a series of flagship quality devices at a mid-tier price point. It was a smart approach that served the company well, carving
With a lot of towns instituting shelter-in-place orders to restrict how people physically interact in order to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus, fitness has come into its own. In places where people are still allowed outdoors to exercise, we’ve seen an explosion of independent exercising like walking, running and cycling — often
The student loan crisis has crescendoed to even worse heights. As universities shut down across the country due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and employment opportunities dim with the rapidly decelerating economy, today’s students and postgrads need better tools than ever to navigate their finances. Unfortunately, student loans in the United States are extraordinarily complicated,
Facebook’s internal R&D group has today launched a new app that lets you keep up with your close friends via your Apple Watch. The app is called Kit, or Keep in Touch, and works using a combination of QR codes and Facebook’s existing Messenger service. According to Kit’s App Store description, you get started with
Stackery, a 4-year old Portland startup, wants to help development teams deliver serverless resources on AWS more easily, and today it announced several enhancements to the platform. With serverless applications, the development team outlines a set of trigger events and the cloud infrastructure vendor — in this case AWS — provides the exact amount of
A court in Nanterre, France, has ruled that Amazon should greatly restrict orders in France in the coming weeks. According to the decision that AFP and a union have obtained, Amazon can only accept orders of groceries, hygiene and health-related products. The company has 24 hours to comply or it’ll have to pay a fine
Truphone, a UK-based startup that provides voice and data services for phones, tablets and IoT hardware by way of eSIM software integrated directly into the devices, has raised another round of funding to continue expanding its business. The company, which told TechCrunch today that it counts Apple as a key partner, has raised another £30
Could avatars that show what co-workers are up to save work-from-home teams from constant distraction and loneliness? That’s the idea behind Pragli, the Bitmoji for the enterprise. It’s a virtual office app that makes you actually feel like you’re in the same building. Pragli uses avatars to signal whether co-workers are at their desk, away,
Mighty Jaxx, which makes licensed collectibles, has raised 4.5 million Singapore dollars (about $3.2 million) in funding for MightyVerse, its platform for tech-enabled figures. Led by the investment arm of KB Financial Group, one of South Korea’s largest banks, the round also included participation from Greycroft Partners’ gaming fund GC VR Gaming Tracker Fund and
Kumu Holdings, a live streaming startup based in the Philippines, announced today it has raised about $5 million in Series A funding, earmarked for new features and growing its operations. The round was led by Openspace Ventures, an early investor in Go-Jek, with participation from Kickstart Ventures, media conglomerate ABS-CBN, Gobi-Core Philippine Fund, and returning
As the coronavirus crisis continues, hiring data is emerging that paints a mixed picture for U.K. tech, which, in the preceding months and years has been stuck on a growth trajectory of up and to the right. That appears to have changed almost over night. According to numbers shared exclusively with TechCrunch from job sites
Layoffs have struck the startup world swiftly, hurting hospitality and travel startups, as well as recruitment and scooter companies. New data shows that some of those layoffs, brought on by COVID-19, might be disproportionately impacting satellite campuses. By nature, satellite offices are secondary to a startup’s headquarters. Opening smaller offices is a strategic move when
Frank, a New York-based student-facing startup, has raised $5 million in what the company described as an “interim strategic round” led by Chegg, a public edtech company. According to Frank founder and CEO Charlie Javice, previous investors Aleph and Marc Rowan took part in the round alongside new investor GingerBread Capital. The education funding-focused startup
The coronavirus outbreak has forced millions of U.S. employees to work from home — many for the first time. But remote work can be lonely and isolating, as people feel disconnected from their team and co-workers due to the lack of face-to-face conversations. That’s where the new startup, Hallway, aims to help. The service re-creates