Mark your calendars and dust off your public-speaking skills. This year, there’s an exciting new opportunity at TC Sessions: Robotics & AI, which returns to UC Berkeley on March 3, 2020. We’ve added a pitch-off specifically for early-stage startups focused on AI or robotics. You heard right. In addition to a full day packed with
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Childcare is one of the biggest expenses for American parents and it’s not just families who are taking a hit. Childcare issues cost the United States’ economy an estimated $4.4 billion in lost productivity each year and also impacts employee retention rates. Kinside wants to help with a platform that not only enables families to
By Miles, the U.K. pay-by-mile car insurance provider, is launching a “connected car” insurance policy specifically for Tesla drivers. The new insurance product pulls real-time mileage information directly from a car owner’s Tesla account and uses the distance they have driven to price their insurance each month. It claims to be the first car insurance
If you thought the saga of the $7,000 Apple Pro Display XDR couldn’t get any more ridiculous, prepare yourself for the proverbial cherry on top: The company insists that you only use the single special cleaning cloth that comes with the monitor. If you lose it, you’re advised to order another. Apple, already under fire
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. The iPhone’s new parental controls can limit who kids can call, text and FaceTime and when With the release of iOS
The team at Wotch has created a new social video platform — but wait, don’t roll your eyes quite yet. “Obviously, we’re very used to someone creating a new internet video-sharing platform,” said co-CEO Scott Willson. “It must be very irritating for everyone to hear that.” And yet Willson and his co-founder/co-CEO James Sadler have
Acquia announced it has acquired customer data platform (CDP) startup AgilOne today. The companies did not disclose the purchase price. CDPs are all the rage among customer experience vendors, as they provide a way to pull data from a variety of channels to build a more complete picture of the customer. The goal here is
Electric vehicle startup Nio is laying off 141 people at its North American headquarters. According to a filing from Employment Development Department of California, the employees at its San Jose office received notice on December 6. Nio, whose global headquarters are in Shanghai, announced last month that it is partnering with Intel’s Mobileye to develop
Wefox Group, the Berlin-based insurtech startup behind the consumer-facing insurance app and carrier One and the insurance platform Wefox, is disclosing $110 million in a second tranche of Series B funding. Sources tell TechCrunch that this gives the company a pre-money valuation of $1.65 billion. WeFox Group declined to comment on the financials. The Series
It was just a couple of months ago that Tines, the cybersecurity automation startup, raised $4.1 million in Series A funding led by Blossom Capital, and now the Dublin-based company is disclosing an $11 million extension to the round. This additional Series A funding is led by venture capital firm Accel, with participation from Index
Alarm clocks were one of the most obvious implementations since the introduction of the smart screen. Devices like Lenovo’s Smart Clock and the Amazon Echo Show 5 have demonstrated some interesting features in the bedside display form factor, and Google has worked with the former to refine the experience. This morning, the company introduced a
Facebook is making its line of Portal-branded smart video calling devices more relevant to consumers, including those who don’t even have a Facebook account. The company today says its Portal family of products will now work with just a WhatsApp account, allowing users to make video calls to friends and family, as well as access
Today, Microsoft announced a public preview of Microsoft Teams for Linux, the first Office 365 tool that’s available for the open source operating system. The hope is that by making it available for preview, the company can get feedback from the community and improve it before it becomes generally available. “Starting today, Microsoft Teams is
Zetwerk, an Indian business-to-business marketplace for manufacturing items, has closed a significantly large financing round as it scales its operations in the nation and also helps local businesses find customers overseas. The 18-month-old startup said on Wednesday it has raised $32 million in a Series B financing round led by Lightspeed and Greenoaks Capital. Zetwerk
According to Atomico’s recent “State of European Tech, 2019” – widely considered by the European tech industry to be a reliable annual study – at present, 92 in every 100 dollars invested in Europe goes to all-male teams, 83% founders are white, 82% are university educated, in the UK, a quarter of investment committees saw
Today’s devices have been secured against innumerable software attacks, but a new exploit called Plundervolt uses distinctly physical means to compromise a chip’s security. By fiddling with the actual amount of electricity being fed to the chip, an attacker can trick it into giving up its innermost secrets. It should be noted at the outset
An update to Apple’s iOS operating system, out today, will give parents a new set of tools to fight back against kids’ iPhone addiction. With the release of iOS 13.3, parents will for the first time be able to set limits over who kids can talk to and text with during certain hours of the
D-Wave Systems announced a partnership with Japanese industrial giant NEC today to build what they call ‘hybrid apps and services’ that work on a combination of NEC high performance computers and D-Wave’s quantum systems. The two companies also announced that NEC will be investing $10 million in D-Wave, which has raised $204 million prior to
Open source is a great source of free tools for developers, but as these projects proliferate, and some gain in popularity, the creators sometimes look for ways to monetize successful ones. The problem is that it’s hard to run a subscription-based, dual-license approach and most developers don’t even know where to start. Enter Israeli startup
Over the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of FinTech startups like N26 and Monzo to challenge the incumbents with new products like challenger banks. But what if the big banks wanted to compete in that game themselves? This is the aim of FintechOS a Romanian startup that actually aims to help incumbents compete in this brave new, competitive, world. FintechOS allows banks
Smart glasses maker North announced today that it will be ending production of its first-generation Focals glasses, which it brought to market for consumers last year. The company says it will instead shift its focus to Focals 2.0, a next-generation version of the product, which it says will ship starting in 2020. Focals are North’s
According to CEO Afif Khoury, we’re in the middle of “the third wave of social” — a shift back to local interactions. And Khoury’s startup Soci (pronounced soh-shee) has raised $12 million in Series C funding to help companies navigate that shift. Soci works with customers like Ace Hardware and Sport Clips to help them
Heiliger Strohsack — or holy smokes as we say here in the States! We’re just hours away from kicking off Disrupt Berlin 2019 (11-12 December). We have a stellar event planned with an all-star lineup that only TechCrunch can assemble, and we’re expecting our largest number of attendees yet. Seriously, have you read the star-packed
Earlier this year, Omers Ventures, the venture capital arm of Canadian pension fund Omers, outed a new €300 million fund aimed at European technology startups, having recruited local VCs Harry Briggs, Tara Reeves and Henry Gladwyn. And now the firm is adding a fourth member in Europe: Jambu Palaniappan (pictured centre), the former head of
Early-stage startups have a massive problem: there are way, way too many things to do, and never enough people to do them. Whether it’s growth marketing, or product design, or software engineering or a myriad list of other tasks, something somewhere isn’t going to get done by the founding team and early employees. And so
Berlin-headquartered streaming guide JustWatch has grown to over 10 million users across 38 countries in under 5 years. Now, it’s expanding its U.S. presence with the acquisition of New York-based rival, GoWatchIt, from Plexus Entertainment. Deal terms were not revealed but were a mixture of cash and stock for the smaller operation, which had just
Jow, the French e-grocery app — which combines recipes, recommendations and online grocery ordering — has raised $7 million in new funding. The round is led by Stride.VC, alongside Caterina Fake and Jyri Engeström from Yes VC, and Shan-Lyn Ma, the co-founder and CEO of Zola. Previous seed backers, DST global partners and eVentures, also
Google this morning announced the arrival of its first “feature drop.” The new offering will continue the company’s regular feature enhancements, now arriving every month, like clockwork. This first one brings a whole bunch of upgrades, including a few already noted by some eagle eye views. The call screen update is probably the biggest of
When Chris Williams founded entertainment platform Pocketwatch in 2017, he was certain that no one had yet found the right way to work with the generation of children’s talent finding its audience on platforms like YouTube. Convinced that packaging creators under one umbrella and leveraging the expanding reach of even more media platforms could reshape
AWS held its annual re:Invent customer conference last week in Las Vegas. Being Vegas, there was pageantry aplenty, of course, but this year’s model felt a bit different than in years past, lacking the onslaught of major announcements we are used to getting at this event. Perhaps the pace of innovation could finally be slowing,