By now we’re all familiar with text messaging groups for multi-person co-ordination. I’ve lost count of how many WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook messenger groups I’m on! Other apps like Threema have started to be used in a business context and startups like Staffbase have decided to become full-blown ‘workforce messaging’ platforms. The thinking now amongst
admin
For two years running, Samsung played the same trick and front-loaded its annual event by announcing a new foldable. Last year’s announcement of the Fold was a huge one — the first viable (relatively speaking, of course) foldable handset from a major manufacturer. Of course, some stuff has happened in the intervening months, taking a
Intuition Robotics, the company best known for its ElliQ robot, a digital home companion for the elderly, today announced that it has raised a $36 million Series B round co-led by SPARX Group and OurCrowd. Toyota AI Ventures, Sompo Holdings, iRobot, Union Tech Ventures, Happiness Capital, Samsung Next, Capital Point and Bloomberg Beta also participated
Following the departure of it CTO last month, Tandem Bank, the U.K. challenger bank co-founded by fintech veteran Ricky Knox, has lost another key member of its team, this time seeing chief product officer Matt Ford departing for a career in venture. Ford joined Santander InnoVentures, the venture capital arm of the Spanish incumbent bank,
Facebook has been left red-faced after being forced to call off the launch date of its dating service in Europe because it failed to give its lead EU data regulator enough advanced warning — including failing to demonstrate it had performed a legally required assessment of privacy risks. Late yesterday Ireland’s Independent.ie newspaper reported that
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. Samsung Galaxy Z Flip hands-on: This is more like it When the Galaxy Fold was finally released to the public after
Matteo Franceschetti, CEO of Eight Sleep, would prefer that you don’t call his startup a mattress company. Eight Sleep does sell mattresses, albeit smart ones packed with sensors and temperature regulation controls. The company has raised north of $70 million from backers including Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. A great deal of this funding surrounds
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. This morning we’re exploring Airbnb’s march to the public markets. The popular DIY hospitality startup promised last year that it would go public in 2020. That timeline means that its 2019 performance will be included
Negotiatus, a SaaS business meant to optimize and streamline the purchasing and procurement process for businesses, has today announced the close of a $10 million Series A round. The funding was led by Rally Ventures, with participation from ERA, 645 Ventures, Green Visor Capital and Stage 2 Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to
To get a better sense of what lies ahead for the European startup ecosystem, we spoke to several investors and entrepreneurs in the region about their impressions and lessons learned from 2019, along with their predictions for 2020. We asked for blunt responses — and we weren’t disappointed. These responses have been edited for clarity
Essential was supposed to disrupt the smartphone industry. And when it was done with that, it was coming for the smart home. The company came out of stealth with a $330 million funding round and grandiose plans for a new brand of handset, led by none other than Android head, Andy Rubin. But bad timing,
Greg Mitchell Contributor Funding of Latin American startups has doubled each year over the past two years. And while most of this capital has been directed toward Brazil and Mexico, this surge is starting to have an effect on startups in the region’s smaller markets. The increased availability of capital for later rounds is creating
Marketing startup Habu is emerging from stealth today and announcing that it has already raised $15 million in Series A funding. The company comes out of super{set}, the startup studio created by Krux founders Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya. In fact, Chavez is Habu’s chairman, Vaidya serves as CTO and their former Krux colleague Matt
Fifty percent of families are scared they can’t cover the cost of a funeral. They end up overpaying because no one wants to comparison shop amidst a tragedy. That’s why ex-Googler Alison Johnston’s startup Ever Loved built a free funeral crowdfunding tool. Now it’s addressing one of the most expensive parts of saying goodbye: burial.
Model9, an Israeli startup launched by mainframe vets, has come up with a way to transfer data between mainframe computers and the cloud, and today the company announced a $9 million Series A. Intel Capital led the round with help from existing investors including StageOne, North First Ventures and Glenrock Israel. The company reports it
The GSMA, the organization behind MWC, the world’s largest mobile trade show, has announced that it is officially canceling the show. MWC usually attracts over 100,000 attendees from 200 countries to Barcelona. This year’s show was supposed to take place on February 24-27. Several publications received a statement about the cancellation. “The GSMA has cancelled
Undisclosed influencer marketing posts on social media should trigger financial penalties, according to a statement released today by the Federal Trade Commission’s Rohit Chopra. The FTC has just voted 5-0 to approve a Federal Register notice calling for public comments on questions related to whether The Endorsement Guides for advertising need to be updated. “When
Europe has emerged as a key region for hatching and scaling fintech companies, and today one of the bigger hopefuls is announcing a large round of funding, from a mix of strategic investors, to keep growing its business. Fenergo, a startup from Dublin that builds solutions for banks and other financial management companies to help
A/O PropTech is a European VC that officially launched last week after raising €250 million in what it describes as “permanent capital” to invest in companies disrupting the €230 trillion real estate industry. This approach sees the firm structured more like a corporation with various shareholders, rather than a traditional venture capital fund with a
Eye-witness photos and videos distributed by news wire Reuters already go through an exhaustive media verification process. Now the publisher will bring that expertise to the fight against misinformation on Facebook. Today it launches the new Reuters Fact Check business unit and blog, announcing that it will become one of the third-party partners tasked with
There have been plenty of stories written about the so-called “Slack-lash” and the growing unrest among workers dealing with DM interruptions that take their attention away from the task at hand. Slack is a poster boy for the problem, but VCs have invested heavily in a number of collaboration tools over the past several years
The UK government has taken the next step in its grand policymaking challenge to tame the worst excesses of social media by regulating a broad range of online harms — naming the existing communications watchdog, Ofcom, as its preferred pick for enforcing rules around ‘harmful speech’ on platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok in
More big names are stepping away from the biggest phone and telecom trade show event this year. Nokia, one of the omnipresent firms at major tech trade conferences, won’t be attending this year’s Mobile World Congress, it said Wednesday citing health and safety concerns over coronavirus outbreak. Electronics giant HMD, which sells smartphones under Nokia
The world will likely never see the Galaxy S11. Or the Galaxies S12-S19, for that matter. At an event this morning in San Francisco, Samsung announced that it was skipping a decade’s worth of handsets and going straight to the Galaxy S20. The new flagship debuted onstage today, in three flavors: the S20, S20+ and
Spaceflight Industries, owner of both Spaceflight, Inc. and BlackSky, is selling the Spaceflight, Inc. portion of its business to Japanese industrial megacorporation Mitsui & Co, and Yamasa both of which will co-own the company in a 50/50 joint venture after its closing. The deal will see Spaceflight continue to operate as an independent business based
Following TechCrunch’s coverage of 500 Startups’ 25th batch (and numbers 24, 23, 22, and 21, in case you wanted to go back in time), today we’re saying hello to the accelerator’s 26th cohort. 500 Startups, in case you weren’t aware, is a seed-stage accelerator and a collection of venture funds. The group, now with a
As the number of IoT devices proliferate, and machines conduct transactions with machines without humans involved, it becomes increasingly necessary to have a permissionless system that facilitates this kind of communication in a secure way. Enter the IOTA Foundation, a Berlin-based open source distributed ledger technology (DLT) project, which has hooked up with the Eclipse
Vezeeta, a healthcare platform operating in the Middle East and Africa, has raised a $40 Million Series D funding round led by UAE-based Gulf Capital, alongside further investment from existing Riyadh-based investor Saudi Technology Ventures (STV), which previously led Vezeeta’s Series C round in September 2018. Vezeeta’s other investors include BECO Capital, Silicon Badia, Vostok
The buyer beware adage is never more true than among early adopters. It was price, however, that made the Galaxy Fold such a difficult pill to swallow. When it was finally released to the public after numerous delays, the device came swaddled in warnings. It was a long list, and not exactly a vote of
There was a lot of moving and shaking in the cybersecurity unicorn world in 2019. It was a year that saw two of the biggest exits in cybersecurity history: CrowdStrike went public valued at $3.35 billion and Cloudflare rocketed 20% in its first day on the stock market. Clearly, the cybersecurity market is booming. Recent