Forecast, a Denmark-based startup that has developed “AI-powered” project management software, has raised $5.5 million in new funding. The round is led by Crave Venture Partners, with participation from existing backers SEED Capital and Heartcore. Forecast has raised $10 million in total funding to date. Founded in late 2016, Forecast describes itself as an AI-powered
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One of the world’s most static technologies may be the humble mug, but startup Ember decided it was time for a change when they introduced their temperature-controlled smart mug to the market in 2016. Now, the company has launched its Ember Mug 2 – a follow-up that keeps the concept and design intact, but that
It’s not quite an “Apple Prime” subscription, but it’s compelling. Apple on Wednesday introduced a new program that will allow Apple Card users to finance their iPhone purchases for 24 months, without paying interest. The program aims to appeal to consumers who frequently upgrade their iPhone to the latest model, but often turn to their
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. Jack Dorsey says Twitter will ban all political ads Arguing that “internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse,”
Kepler Communications, the Toronto-based startup that’s focused on developing and deploying shoebox-sized satellites to provide telecommunications services, is opening up registration for those interested in getting their first developer kits. These developer kits, designed to help potential commercial customers take advantage of its Internet of Things (IoT) narrowband connectivity deploying next year, will then be
Paidy, a Japanese financial tech startup that provides instant credit to consumers in Japan, announced today that it has raised a total of $143 million in new financing. This includes a $83 million Series C extension from investors including PayPal Ventures and debt financing of $60 million. The funding will be used to advance Paidy’s
Motorcycle racing series Supercross isn’t quite ready to add an EV class. The sport — where riders race high-performance machines on jump-filled stadium tracks — currently fields only gas-powered two-wheelers. Supercross was poised to launch an all electric class this month, by converting its junior program to a new e-moto manufactured by KTM — Supercross
Berlin rose as one of Europe’s leading startup hubs over the last decade, featuring unicorns N26, Delivery Hero, HelloFresh, and Auto1 Group. Berlin attracts developers from Eastern Europe and elsewhere into an international hub where English is the linga franca among startups and costs are noticeably lower than in London or Paris. Rocket Internet, while
Using a computer and modern software can be a chore to begin with for the visually impaired, but fundamentally visual tasks like 3D design are even harder. This Stanford team is working on a way to display 3D information, like in a CAD or modeling program, using a “2.5D” display made up of pins that
The world of phone-based AR has involved a lot of promises, but the future that’s developed has so far been more iterative and less platform shift-y. For startups exclusively focused on mobile AR, there’s been some soul-searching to find ways to bring more lightweight experiences to life that don’t require as much friction or commitment
Facebook today announced it has filed suit in California against a domain registrar OnlineNIC and its proxy service ID Shield for registering domain names that pretend to be associated with Facebook, like www-facebook-login.com or facebook-mails.com, for example. Facebook says these domains are intentionally designed to mislead and confuse end users, who believe they’re interacting with
Just around 9:45 a.m. Pacific Time on February 28, 2017, websites like Slack, Business Insider, Quora and other well-known destinations became inaccessible. For millions of people, the internet itself seemed broken. It turned out that Amazon Web Services was having a massive outage involving S3 storage in its Northern Virginia datacenter, a problem that created
The rise of the internet has given every company the chance to be a global company. But as a founder, growing from your garage to the worldwide markets can be tricky business. That’s why we’ve assembled a panel of top-tier experts to talk through the peaks and pitfalls of scaling strategies at Disrupt Berlin in
Omio (née GoEuro) has acquired multimodal travel veteran Rome2rio as it works on building out a global travel aggregator business, having taken the decision to zoom out from its home market of Europe earlier this year. Financial details of the transaction are not being disclosed. But Omio raised a $150M funding round a year ago
GoPro’s first foray into the 360-degree action was the GoPro Fusion, and while it was a strong first offering, the new GoPro MAX ($499) is a very different – and much improved – immersive action camera that has a lot to offer experienced videographers and voices alike. To be sure, the MAX has trade-offs, but
All is not lost for smartphone manufacturers. On the heels of two years’ of global stagnation, the category is finally showing some signs of life. Much of the bounce back comes as manufacturers are working to correct for dulled consumer interest. I wouldn’t put too much weight in the numbers right now, as they’re little
CEO Jack Dorsey just announced, via tweet, that Twitter will be banning all political advertising — with a few exceptions like voter registration. “We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” Dorsey said. He also said the company will share the final policy by November 15, and that it will start enforcing the
Sophia Wood Contributor Sophia Wood is a principal at Magma Partners, a Latin America-focused seed-stage VC firm with offices in Latin America, Asia and the U.S. Sophia is also the co-founder of LatAm List, an English-language Latin American tech news source. Brazil continued to churn out unicorns this month, with Curitiba-based Ebanx becoming the first
Freetrade, the U.K. challenger stockbroker that offers commission-free investing, has closed $15 million in Series A funding. The round includes a $7.5 million investment from Draper Esprit, the U.K. publicly-listed venture capital firm, along with previously announced equity crowdfunding via Crowdcube. The funding will be used by Freetrade for further growth and product development, including
Namogoo, the Herzliya, Israel-based company that has developed a solution for e-commerce and other online enterprises to prevent “customer journey hijacking,” has raised $40 million in Series C funding. The round is led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from existing backers GreatPoint Ventures, Blumberg Capital, and Hanaco Ventures. It brings total raised by Namogoo to
Berlin-based femtech startup Inne is coming out of stealth to announce an €8 million (~$8.8M) Series A and give the first glimpse of a hormone-tracking subscription product for fertility-tracking and natural contraception that’s slated for launch in Q1 next year. The Series A is led by led by Blossom Capital, with early Inne backer Monkfish
As Jack Dorsey announced his company Twitter would drop all political ads, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg doubled-down on his policy of refusing to fact check politicians’ ads. “At times of social tension there has often been an urge to pull back on free expression . . . We will be best served over the long term
Google open-sourced its TensorFlow machine learning framework back in 2015 and it quickly became one of the most popular platforms of its kind. Enterprises that wanted to use it, however, had to either work with third parties or do it themselves. To help these companies — and capture some of this lucrative market itself —
Writers Laura Wagner, Kelsey McKinney, Tom Ley, Lauren Theisen, Patrick Redford, Albert Burneko and Chris Thompson all tweeted today that they have resigned from Deadspin, the sports-focused site owned by G/O Media. A quick refresher: G/O Media was formerly known as Gizmodo Media Group, and before that as Gawker Media. It took on its current
Workiz, a startup whose software helps field service professionals manage their work, said today it has raised $5 million in Series A funding. The funding was led by Magenta Venture Partners, with participation from returning investor Aleph. The company announced the launch of Workiz Voice, an Amazon Alexa-powered feature that allows the app to be
Microsoft-owned Github has removed the APK of an app for organizing political protests in the autonomous community of Catalonia — acting on a takedown request from Spain’s military police (aka the Guardia Civil). As we reported earlier this month supporters of independence for Catalonia have regrouped under a new banner — calling itself Tsunami Democràtic
As much as we’d like to think that we’re entering an era of autonomous robots, they’re actually still pretty helpless. To keep them from falling down all the time, a human’s fast reflexes could be the solution. But the human has to feel what the robot is feeling — and that’s just what these researchers
Despite ongoing public relations crises, Facebook kept growing in Q3 2019, demonstrating that media backlash does not necessarily equate to poor business performance. Facebook reached 2.45 billion monthly users, up 1.65 percent from 2.41 billion in Q2 2019 when it grew 1.6 percent, and it now has 1.62 billion daily active users, up 2 percent
Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey announced abruptly — though the timing was certainly not accidental — that the platform would soon disallow any and all political advertising. This is the right thing to do, but it’s also going to be hard as hell for a lot of reasons. As usual in tech and politics,
Chances are you mostly think of Samsung as a consumer-focused electronics company, but it actually has a very sizable B2B business as well, which serves over 50,000 large enterprises and hundreds of thousands of SMB entrepreneurs via its partners. At its developer conference this week, it’s putting the spotlight squarely on this side of its