After a very high-profile departure and a year away from the company, Facebook’s former chief product officer Chris Cox will return to his long-held position with the company. Cox shared the news Thursday in a Facebook post with a photo of his company badge. Elaborating on his return to Facebook, Cox explained that the unique
Snap announces a bunch of new features, Moderna prepares for the final-stage trial of its coronavirus vaccine and Sony shows off the PlayStation 5. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 12, 2020. 1. Snapchat debuts Minis, bite-sized third-party apps that live inside chat Snap Minis are lightweight third-party programs that users can quickly pull up
It has been an incredibly tough period for everyone the past few months as the global COVID-19 pandemic has wiped out whole industries from the economic map. While tech has been among the most resilient industries in the face of this cataclysm, the extreme mobility of the industry’s workforce begs large questions about what the
Peppy, the U.K. employee healthcare benefits platform focusing on family support, female health and mental well-being, has raised £1.7 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Outward VC, with participation from Seedcamp, Hambro Perks, Form Ventures and various unnamed angel investors. The London-based startup says the new funding will support the next stage of
Facebook is reportedly getting into the venture capital game, but for young entrepreneurs working in social media, ignoring or deleting that particular friend request could be the right call. According to a report in Axios, the company is building up a corporate fund under the auspices of its “New Product Experimentation” team, which launched last
Volkswagen has started to sell a home-charging device as the automaker prepares to bring its new ID family of electric vehicles to market. The ID.3 is the first electric vehicle under the ID label and will only be sold in Europe. Customers who made reservations for the launch edition, known as ID.3 1st, will be
APIs provide a way to build connections to a set of disparate applications and data sources, and can help simplify a lot of the complex integration issues companies face. Postman has built an enterprise API platform and today it got rewarded with a $150 million Series C investment on a whopping $2 billion valuation —
APX is an early-stage accelerator in Berlin, but it’s not quite your average accelerator — it’s essentially a joint venture between giant European publishing house Axel Springer and Porsche, the German automaker. Earlier this month, we sat down with APX managing director Jörg Rheinboldt to discuss what makes APX different and how it’s weathering the
Light’s push into smartphones was an inevitability. Sure, the startup turned heads with its pricey L16 camera, but these days mobile photography is almost exclusively the domain of the handset. Early last year, the answer arrived in the form of the trypophobia-inducing Nokia 9 PureView. In a category where manufacturers raced to add more cameras, the
Jun.08 — Bitcoin continues to fall from its December highs and chances of it rebounding in the near future seem far from reality. Bloomberg’s Caroline Hyde sat down with Erik Voorhees, CEO of ShapeShift. He’s been an original builder and entrepreneur in Bitcoin since 2011.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. After a pretty busy week on the show we’re here with our regular Friday episode, which means lots of venture rounds and new venture capital funds to dig into. Thankfully we had our full contingent on hand: Danny
Pipo Saude, a Brazilian provider of healthcare services for businesses and their employees, has raised $4.6 million in a new round of funding to expand its footprint in Brazil. “The company’s platform offers recommendations for the healthcare products that fit the team, enabling businesses to improve the quality of life of their employees,” said chief
Extra Crunch Live, TechCrunch’s chat series for Extra Crunch members, is tacking toward founders after bringing on a host of investors: on Thursday, June 18, Plaid CEO Zach Perret will join us for a conversation. Plaid, known for APIs that connect fintech applications with users’ bank accounts, came to prominence in late 2018 when it
The unicorns are still at it, Vision Fund 2 or no Vision Fund 2. This week, Instacart announced that it has raised fresh capital at a valuation north of $13 billion. And, on the tail of that news item, DoorDash is looking to add more cash at a valuation that could stretch to a pre-money
The digitally face-swapped videos known as deepfakes aren’t going anywhere, but if platforms want to be able to keep an eye on them, they need to find them first. Doing so was the object of Facebook’s “Deepfake Detection Challenge,” launched last year. After months of competition the winners have emerged, and they’re… better than guessing.
Over the past few years, Snapchat has been building up an increasingly complex weave of partnerships. They have their advertising partners that power the vast majority of their monetization efforts. They have app developers on Snap Kit that they are also selling new features like CameraKit and Minis too. They’re bringing game developers on board
As companies struggle to find ways to control costs in today’s economy, understanding what you are spending on SaaS tools is paramount. That’s precisely what early-stage startup Quolum is attempting to do, and today it announced a $2.75 million seed round. Surge (a division of Sequoia Capital India) and Nexus Venture Partners led the round,
The OpenStack Foundation today announced that StarlingX, a container-based system for running edge deployments, is now a top-level project. With this, it joins the main OpenStack private and public cloud infrastructure project, the Airship lifecycle management system, Kata Containers and the Zuul CI/CD platform. What makes StarlingX a bit different from some of these other
Byta, the music sharing service for pre-releases and other use cases where there is a need to share sound files privately, has picked up around $1.4 million in seed funding. The round was led by the Canada Media Fund, with participation from of private investors. They include musician Scott Kannberg, one of the original members
Facebook wants to be the go-to platform for all of your social needs, but a big move it made last month to take ownership in the world of GIFs — the short, looping videos that people use to convey sentiments in online conversations — may not go as it hopes. The UK Competition and Markets
Snap is going full speed ahead with its original content strategy. The company announced that it has expanded previous partnerships with ESPN, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, the NBA and the NFL for new Shows and Snap Originals. The new slate of Snap Originals includes unscripted series, docuseries as well as scripted dramas and comedies. Here are some
Snap is unveiling some important changes for Snapchat at its Snap Partner Summit. The navigation has been rethought with a new action bar at the bottom that lets you access Snap Map and Snap Originals in just a tap. Snap Map is also getting some brand new features to compete head-to-head with Google Maps. A
Jun.11 — Henrique Dubugras, Brex Inc. founder and chief executive officer, discusses the company’s credit card that helps e-commerce businesses grow and its latest funding round with Bloomberg’s Romaine Bostick, Caroline Hyde and Joe Weisenthal on “Bloomberg Markets: What’d You Miss?”
A lot of U.S.companies have had near-death experiences in recent months. Among them is Branch, a 1.5-year-old, venture-backed New York-based startup that sells what it calls “exceptional office furniture, at half the price” — and which nearly went kaput because of the pandemic. After generating roughly $800,000 in revenue in the first weeks of March,
Food delivery takes a big step toward consolidation, Amazon announces a moratorium on providing facial recognition tech to law enforcement (but there are loopholes) and Twitter tests a way to scold users for tweeting an article they haven’t read. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 11, 2020. 1. Just Eat Takeaway confirms it’s gobbling up
Platform operators should treat personal media and mass media differently John Funge 8 hours John Funge Contributor John Funge is the Chief Product Officer at DataTribe, a cybersecurity startup foundry. He’s founded, built and sold three technology companies. Social media in its current form is broken. In 20 years, we’ll look back at the social
Michael Whitmire, CPA Contributor Michael Whitmire, CPA, is co-founder and chief executive officer at Los Angeles-based FloQast, Inc., a developer of accounting close management software. Traditionally, measuring business success requires a greater understanding of your company’s go-to-market lifecycle, how customers engage with your product and the macro-dynamics of your market. But in the most challenging
As schools stay closed and summer camp seems more like a germscape than an escape, students are staying at home for the foreseeable future and have shifted learning to their living rooms. Now, Norwegian educational gaming company Kahoot — the popular platform with 1.3 billion active users and over 100 million games (most created by
Snap is announcing at its Snap Partner Summit that the first games that will take advantage of Bitmoji will roll out soon. The feature has already been announced last year, and it looks like developers can finally take advantage of that SDK. You’ll be able to play a game with you as the hero —
As Uber and Lyft reached their public-market nadir in mid-March, you would have been forgiven for thinking they were heading under. If the markets are somewhat efficient, why else would America’s top two ride-hailing companies shed two-thirds and three-quarters of their value, respectively, in just over a month? As we know now, both companies quickly