Short-form video apps have seen major successes, like TikTok, as well as dramatic failures, like Quibi. Now, a new app called Snax wants to offer a twist on the popular vertical video format by giving users a way to not just watch mini-movies on their mobile devices, but also interact with them. The subscription streaming
Kandji, the startup building an Apple device management business, has been doing pretty well for itself with rapdily growing revenue, a fat valuation and lots of investment capital rolling in. Today, the company announced a $100 million Series C on an $800 million valuation, up 10x in the last year when the company did its
Brands are always looking for new ways to get in front of potential customers, but though influencer marketing has grown, it’s still not so easy for brands to find the right person. That’s where Carro comes in. David Perry and Jason Goldberg co-founded the company in 2015 and built a cross-store selling and influencer commerce
One of the most popular streaming software makers is in hot water after being called out by top Twitch personalities and the open source project that served as a backbone for the company’s success. Streamlabs, formerly Streamlabs OBS, changed its name Wednesday after backlash spread on Twitter against the company over alleged sketchy business practices.
Noissue, a New Zealand-based global packaging platform, wants to make sustainable packaging accessible to businesses of all sizes. Everything the company offers, from custom tissue paper and cards to totes, stickers and tape, is 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable, and with low order minimums, it’s not just the big players who can afford to buy
Mom-and-pop corner store owners in Latin America manage relationships with over 100 different suppliers, on average, often traveling long distances to pick up inventory, so they aren’t able to regularly restock. Most of these relationships are largely managed manually and on paper, but Chiper developed an e-commerce ecosystem for corner stores that is shifting that
The UK government has named five projects that have scored public funding under a ‘tech safety’ challenged announced in September — when the Home Office said it wanted to encourage the tech industry and academia to develop novel AI/scanning technologies that could be implemented on end-to-end encrypted (e2ee) services to detect child sexual abuse material
After years of ignoring consumer demand for in-app lyrics, particularly in the U.S., Spotify announced today it will make a new Lyrics feature available to all global users, both Free and Premium, across platforms. The feature is powered by lyrics provider Musixmatch, and expands on a prior deal Spotify had with the company to offer
Sapphire Partners’ Cathy Gao talks to Emily Chang about how the Great Resignation is affecting the tech industry, and how can companies use technology to have a recruiting edge in this tight market and to retain talent.
A team of Google executives, many of whom worked with one another for years, left the company earlier this year to launch a startup. The fintech firm, Arbo Works, has raised a financing round led by Sequoia Capital India, the two said Thursday. Arbo Works, spearheaded by Caesar Sengupta, said on Thursday 120 angel investors,
A decade ago, Vijay Shekhar Sharma flew to Hong Kong to attend an All Things D conference. At the event, he watched Silicon Valley executives Jack Dorsey and Brian Chesky talk about the firms they were building. But the conversation that would change the trajectory of his firm, One97 Communications, was an interview of Alibaba
Snapchat announced earlier this year that it would add Layers to Snap Map, making the social product more interactive. Today, the app is launching its first two layers: Memories and Explore. The Snap Map has been used to show people where their friends are currently located (if they opt-in to location sharing), interesting places to
Plastics are bad, m’kay, and a lot of the world is pretty god-awful at reducing, re-using and recycling. Single-use plastics are among the worst environmental evils out there, and Zume is leaping to the rescue. The company is working to create a sustainable, viable and economic alternative to a lot of the plastics we currently
E-commerce and other online businesses are becoming increasingly global in their operations and customer bases, and a startup called Airwallex — which has built a banking solution that addresses the opportunity to provide cross-border financial services — has been seeing a massive surge of activity. To capitalize further on that opportunity, today the company is
The UK’s data protection watchdog has written to Apple and Google seeking details of how they assess apps to determine the age ratings they apply following concerns raised by an online child safety charity. The move follows the coming into force of the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code this September — which puts requirements on
Following a Covid-driven boost, the popular AllTrails resource for hikers, bikers, climbers, and anyone else who enjoys the outdoors, announced today it’s raised $150 million from the growth fund of global private equity firm Permira to further accelerate its business. Prior investor Spectrum Equity will continue to be the company’s largest shareholder, following this transaction.
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: Can our employee travel
Few companies had as good a pandemic run as Instacart. The company’s service saw huge demand gains, leading to waves of venture capital interest. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. From a late 2018 funding cycle that valued the U.S. grocery
Instagram’s standalone messaging app Threads is shutting down. The app will no longer be supported by the end of December 2021, the company confirmed to TechCrunch after reports began circulating via social media of its impending closure. Instagram is planning to alert its existing Threads users with an in-app notice beginning on November 23, which
Hydrogen is at the center of many industrial processes and potentially part of major future energy ecosystems, but the process of isolating and storing it is wasteful and expensive. DiviGas, armed with a $3.6M seed round, hopes to clean up the hydrogen production industry with a new tech that leapfrogs existing methods, potentially supercharging this
Google Cloud announced a multiyear partnership with Cohere, an early-stage startup that is building a natural language processing platform to make it easier for developers to build natural language processing models into applications. The solution requires a fair amount of infrastructure resources to pull off, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is going to provide them
Overwolf, a platform that enables creators to build, share, and monetize items inside games, has raised a $75 million Series D funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Previous investors including Griffin Gaming Partners, Insight Partners, Intel Capital, Liberty Technology Venture Capital, and Marker also participated. The funding will be pumped into Overwolf’s CurseForge Core,
Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’ve got lots of them. We’re just starting to roll out this year’s gift guides, so check back from now until the end of December for more! For this year’s STEM toy gift guide we’ve split out our recommendations by age for easier
Waldo, a photo-sharing platform that has historically targeted businesses, schools, camps, sports leagues, and other organizations, is capitalizing on the growing anti-Facebook sentiment to promote its newly launched consumer product. The company today is introducing a service aimed at private photo-sharing among family and friends which it’s promoting as an “ad-free, non-toxic” and private alternative
This morning Plug Pagamentos (Plug) announced a $2.7 million seed round, led by Costanoa Ventures‘ latest partner, Amy Cheetham. Other investors in the round included Verve Capital and Norte Ventures, among others. Plug, based in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, wants to make its home-market more amenable to online commerce. In an interview,
Many real estate technology companies are developing technology that is in competition with, or could potentially replace, real estate agents. One startup that aims to help agents succeed and flourish with its technology and “bundled business services,” Place, has raised $100 million in a Series A round at a valuation north of $1 billion. Goldman
TikTok has developed a bad reputation for hosting dangerous viral “challenges” on its app, which at their worst, have led to serious injury or death — as in the case of the blackout challenge that prompted Italian regulators to take action against the social network this year to remove underage users. More recently, the app
Slack has always differentiated itself as a communications tool by its ability to run applications inside of Slack and avoid dreaded context switching. At the Frontiers Conference today, the company is announcing a twist on app integrations with new building blocks — components that developers can build and string together into pre-packaged kinds of workflows.
The cloud may be the direction that much of enterprise IT is moving today, but it still remains a major source of security issues, with some 98% of all enterprises in a recent survey reporting that they have contended with a cloud-related security breach in the last 18 months. Today, a startup called Laminar is
Sky Mavis Co-Founder Jef Zirlin joins Emily Chang to discuss the rise of their Axie Infinity game and the play-to-earn model, a growing trend that’s helped the tech-focused game studio reach a $3 billion dollar valuation. Also: the future of crypto in gaming and work, and what’s next for Sky Mavis. ——– Like this video?