Budget-lodging startup Oyo reported a loss of $335 million on $951 million revenue globally for the financial year ending March 31, 2019, and pledged to cut down on its spending as the India-headquartered firm grows cautious about its aggressive expansion. The six-year-old startup’s growing revenue, up from $211 million in financial year ending March 31,
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A new project called GameSnacks is launching today from Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, with the goal of bringing fast-loading, casual online games to users in developing markets. Billions of people are coming online through mobile devices. But they’re often on low memory devices with expensive data plans and struggle with unreliable network connections. That
Too often, people are asked to give away their insights and time for free. Jen Horonjeff, founder and CEO of healthcare startup Savvy, knows this first hand and is trying to change that by applying a cooperative model to her business. As an infant, Horonjeff was diagnosed with juvenile idiopathic arthritis. Since then, she has
“Not gonna lie. This f*cking sucks. This is the last HQ ever!” yelled host Matt Richards . And it just got crazier from there.The farewell game of HQ Trivia before it shut down last night was a beautiful disaster. The hosts cursed, sprayed champagne, threatened to defecate on the homes of trolls in the chat
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App
With so many new investors, the old seed fundraise playbook needs a rewrite Danny Crichton 8 hours Seed fundraising is rarely easy, but it certainly used to be a lot less complicated than it is today. In a simpler world, a seed investor (or maybe two) would lead a round, which meant that they would
As the streaming battles heat up, Netflix is hoping a new partnership with Samsung will help it fend off rivals. At Samsung’s Unpacked event this week, the mobile device maker announced a deal with Netflix that will bring to its Galaxy smartphones exclusive bonus content associated with several Netflix original shows. The partnership also allows
In case you haven’t heard, VCs are loving on workplace software as of late, and productivity tools that help teams collaborate seem to be a particular frothy area of investment. A smattering of top VC firms and angels, including General Catalyst, First Round Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Biz Stone and Ellen Pao, are throwing their confidence
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. After having a good time with NEA’s Rick Yang last week, we thought we’d bring on another venture capitalist. So this week Danny and I had Elliott Robinson from Bessemer swing over for the show. As it turned
HQ Trivia is dead. Today the company laid off its full staff of 25 and will cease operation of its trivia, sports, and word guessing games, a source close to the company confirmed. HQ Trivia had a deal in the works to be acquired, but they buyer pulled out yesterday and investors aren’t willing to
‘The life of an entrepreneur is often very isolated and comes with a lot of pressure’ Mike Butcher @mikebutcher / 20 hours Entrepreneurs — particularly tech entrepreneurs — face the uphill struggle of building something new in the world. Sometimes that struggle can exact a heavy mental toll. As much as everyone knows they should
The Galaxy Z Flip ships with the same “Care Instructions” as the Fold. It’s a five-item list with the following basic points: Don’t scratch the screen with a pen or fingernail Don’t stick stuff between the screens when folding Don’t get it dusty, wet or feed it after midnight Don’t stick stickers to the screen
“If I was running Clearbanc by myself, it probably would have gone off the cliff eight times at this point,” says Clearbanc co-founder Andrew D’Souza. “If I were running the company by myself, it would be half its size,” adds Michele Romanow, Clearbanc’s other co-founder. In addition to starting the $420 million-backed fintech company together, D’Souza
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. As I write to you, SaaS and cloud stocks are busy setting fresh all-time highs and as we’ve seen, venture interest in modern software companies is pushing more money into the sector. But despite it appearing
Instagram is changing its advertising rules to require political campaigns’ sponsored posts from influencers to use its Branded Content Ads tool that adds a disclosure label of “Paid Partnership With”. The change comes after the Bloomberg presidential campaign paid meme makers to post screenshots that showed him asking them to make him look cool. Instagram
Alibaba issued its latest earnings report yesterday, and the Chinese eCommerce giant reported that cloud revenue grew 62 percent to $1.5 billion U.S., crossing the RMB10 billion revenue threshold for the first time. Alibaba also announced that it had completed its migration to its own public cloud in the most recent quarter, a significant milestone
Last month, Tradeshift, a platform for supply chain payments that has achieved unicorn status in recent years, had some good news and some bad news. It announced a Series F funding round of $240 million in equity and debt, raised from a combination of existing and new investors. It’s now raised a total of $661
Want to spice up the bedroom without paying for pills or awkward visits to a sex therapist? A new app called Lover lets you take a sexual personality quiz, explore carnal knowledge tutorials, and discretely figure out which turn-ons you share with your partner. Built by board certified sexual medicine clinical psychologist Dr. Britney Blair,
Tamatem, the leading mobile games publisher in the Arabic speaking market, has raised $3.5 million in additional funding — essentially an extension of the startup’s earlier Series A. The round was led by existing investor Wamda Capital, with participation from Modern Electronics Company (a subsidiary of AlFaisaliah Group) and North Base Media. Tamatem says the
Venture capital has been flooding the various subverticals under the robotics umbrella in recent years, and the construction space is one of the largest beneficiaries. Last November, we surveyed 13 of the top robotics-focused VCs to find out which areas of robotics are exciting them most going into 2020. One of the most common areas
Tinder is testing a series of new social features designed to boost conversations between users on its service. One of the new features is a conversational prompt, first teased during parent company Match Group’s recent earnings. The prompt encourages users to respond to questions or finish a sentence in order to better showcase their personality
Tozny, a Portland, Oregon startup that wants to help companies more easily incorporate encryption into their programs and processes, introduced TozID today. It is an identity and access control tool that can work independently or in conjunction with the company’s other encryption tools. “Basically we have a Security as a Service platform, and it’s designed
Instagram users who miss the reverse chronological feed might get a new way to see the most recent pics and videos from who they follow. Instagram has been spotted internally prototyping a “Latest Posts” feature that appears as a pop-up over the main feed and brings users to a special area showing the newest content
Simsim, a social commerce startup in India, said on Friday it has raised $16 million in seven months of its existence as it attempts to replicate the offline retail experience in the digital world with help from influencers. The Gurgaon-based startup said it raised $16 million across seed, Series A and Series B financing rounds
GumGum is announcing that it’s raised $22 million from existing investors, including Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, NEA spinout NewView Capital and Upfront Ventures — money that CEO Phil Schraeder said he’ll use to pursue a more aggressive acquisition strategy. This Series D comes nearly five years after GumGum raised a $26 million Series C. Schraeder
Facebook is adding another app to its group of experimental projects from the NPE Team, an initiative it announced last year focused on rapidly trying out new ideas in social to see how users react. This week, the team released its fourth app experiment with the launch of Hobbi, a photo and video sharing app
Moving data to the cloud from an on-prem data warehouse like Teradata is a hard problem to solve, especially if you’ve built custom applications that are based on that data. Datometry, a San Francisco startup, has developed a solution to solve that issue, and today it announced a $17 million Series B investment. WRVI Capital
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. GSMA cancels Mobile World Congress due to coronavirus concerns “The GSMA has cancelled MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding
When Google announced that it was acquiring data analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion, it was a big deal on a couple of levels. It was a lot of money and it represented the first large deal under the leadership of Thomas Kurian. Today, the company announced that deal has officially closed and Looker is
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re adding five names to the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) club and listing all preceding members in a single post. This series, which was a bit of an accident, if I’m being honest,