Apr.09 — Daniel Schreiber, chief executive officer and co-founder of Lemonade, discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence on the insurance industry and trust issues in data privacy. He speaks with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.”
After what felt like winter, investors say startup deals are back on — although the numbers suggest they never stopped. As Semil Shah of Haystack VC phrased it in a blog post, “It’s game on, pandemic or bust.” This is good news for founders and big funds, but the investment landscape becomes more complicated when
When we announced the formation of The TechCrunch List last week, we had no idea what response we would get to our proposal for founders to recommend their “first check” investors. While plenty of founders over the years had told us that they wanted such a database to rely on or to refer to other
Instagram is expanding its TikTok competitor known as “Reels” to new markets, following its launch last year in Brazil. Starting today, Instagram is rolling out further access to Reels in France and Germany, allowing users to record short, 15-second video clips set to music or other audio, then share them on the platform where they
When Dell bought EMC in 2016 for $67 billion it was one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history, and it brought with it a boatload of debt. Since then Dell has been working on ways to mitigate that debt by selling off various pieces of the corporate empire and going public again, but one
More than a year after Amazon announced that it would be lead a $575 million investment into UK food delivery startup Deliveroo, the country’s competition regulator, the CMA, has finally announced that it has provisionally cleared the deal, without any additional remedies (that is, requests to alter the terms), saying that it does not pose
For decades, the United States has had a monopoly on positioning, navigation, and timing technology with its Global Positioning System (GPS), a constellation of satellites operated by the military that today provides the backbone for location on billion of devices worldwide. As those technologies have become not just key to military maneuvers but the very
Qupital, a trade financing platform, announced today that it will partner with eBay as one of its officially recommended Hong Kong financing service providers. In today’s announcement, Qupital said it will provide offshore financing services, including working capital, to eBay sellers in China through QiaoYiDai, its main product. The agreement with eBay means Qupital will
Memo Bank wasn’t always called Memo Bank. It originally started as Margo Bank and it has been flying under the radar for a few years. The French startup is now about to launch publicly and shared more details about what it is building. As the name suggests, Memo Bank is a bank. It plans to
Snap’s latest developer offering is a tool called Verify that’s aiming to save its mobile-first developers cash on verifying user phone numbers en masse. The new tool is being integrated into its Login Kit framework, allowing devs with a “Log In with Snapchat” button to move away from tapping services like Twilio for SMS verification,
With more companies moving workers home, making sure your systems are up and running has become more important than ever. ServiceNow, which includes an IT Help Desk component in its product catalogue recognizes that help desks have been bombarded during the pandemic. To help stop configuration problems before they start, the company acquired Sweagle today,
Curve, the London fintech that is re-bundling various financial products by letting you consolidate all your bank cards into a single card and app, is partnering with Samsung in the U.K. to power its forthcoming debit card, which is scheduled to launch later this year. Dubbed “Samsung Pay Card” — and obviously a bid by
As movie theaters reopen across the United States and the world, there are lingering questions about what kinds of measures those theaters will be taking to keep staff and moviegoers safe in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. These concerns were illustrated last week, when AMC CEO Adam Aron said in an interview that
AngelList, a platform that helps startup founders discover and connect to angel investors and job seekers, on Wednesday branched out to a new category in India to further serve the ecosystem. The startup platform said its new product, called EquityList, allows founders to easily manage their cap table, which as the name suggests, is a
The fintech revolution is just getting started. At least that’s the impression we got after a conversation with Plaid co-founder Zach Perret. He appeared on Extra Crunch Live last week to talk about his company’s announced exit to Visa and the larger fintech landscape. Perret and Plaid announced a deal to sell the company to Visa
Twitter took its latest action on content from President Trump Tuesday, again hiding a threat of state violence behind a warning label and appending it with a notice. Trump’s latest offending tweet declared “There will never be an ‘Autonomous Zone’ in Washington, D.C., as long as I’m your President. If they try they will be
Salesforce has a bunch of announcements coming out of the virtual Trailheadx conference taking place later this week, starting today with some new developer tools. The goal of these tools is to give developers a more modern way of creating applications on top of the Salesforce platform. Perhaps the most interesting of the three being
Zopa, the 15-year-old peer-to-peer lending company, is announcing that it has been awarded its full U.K. bank licence, as it gears up to launch a fixed-term savings account, followed by a credit card. Dubbed “Zopa Bank,” the new challenger bank will sit alongside its existing peer-to-peer lending business, under Zopa Group, creating what the veteran fintech
The App Store ecosystem today is home to nearly 2 million apps. That means finding new apps to download is now more challenging than ever. This, in turn, leads app developers to funnel more money into App Store Search ads, traditional SEO and digital advertising in an effort to acquire new users. A new feature
Feb.05 — Tasha Keeney, Ark Investment analyst, discusses her bullish case for Tesla Inc. with Bloomberg’s Paul Allen and Taylor Riggs on “Bloomberg Markets.”
Get ready for five days of education, action and opportunity at Disrupt 2020 on Sept. 14 -18. This year the programing and networking may be virtual, but the connections you make and the benefits you derive are very real. If the idea of virtual networking feels somehow less potent, we have great news for you.
French startup Swile, the startup formerly known as Lunchr, raised a $78.7 million (€70 million) Series C round a few months ago. The startup wants to manage all your corporate benefits and improve team building in general. Index Ventures is leading the round, Bpifrance and Idinvest are also participating. Index Ventures already led the company’s
A landmark regulatory intervention that seeks to apply structural antitrust remedies to cut big (ad)tech’s rights-hostile surveillance business models down to size has been revived after Germany’s federal court overturned an earlier ruling that had suspended enforcement of a ban on Facebook combining user data. The upshot is the tech giant could be forced to
In the chip game, more is usually better and to that end, Ampere announced the next chip on its product roadmap today, the Altra Max, a 128 core processor, the company says is designed specifically to handle cloud native, containerized workloads. What’s more, the company has designed the chip, so that it will fit in
The future of Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV), the U.K. early-stage investment firm now majority owned by Legal & General, is in flux after three of its founders have lost their seat on the board, TechCrunch has learned. ADV’s investments include Push Doctor, WeFarm and Perlego, amongst many others. Rumours began circulating earlier this month within the
In recent years, Seattle-based Wyze made a name for itself thanks to making a lot of smart home gadgets affordable. These days, the company sells everything from smart plugs and locks to scales and fitness bands, but what started it all was the $20 Wyze indoor security camera. Today, the company is following that up
Two months after Quibi’s high-profile launch as a short-form mobile-native TV app led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, it is evident the startup is greatly underperforming relative to the hundreds of millions of dollars already spent on content and marketing. According to a Wall Street Journal report, “daily downloads peaked at 379,000 on its
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: How can I bring
Sparrow Exchange, a Bitcoin and Ethereum options trading platform based in Singapore, announced today it has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by HDR Group, the owner of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, with participation from Signum Capital, Du Capital and FinLab EOS VC. The funding will be used to develop Sparrow’s
It’s more than four years since major tech platforms signed up to a voluntary pan-EU Code of Conduct on illegal hate speech removals. Yesterday the European Commission’s latest assessment of the non-legally binding agreement lauds “overall positive” results — with 90% of flagged content assessed within 24 hours and 71% of the content deemed to