Lisa Enckell Contributor Lisa Enckell is a partner at Antler, an early-stage venture capital firm and startup generator. In Asia, where I work as a partner at an early-stage VC, startups are regularly rolling out a minimum viable product (MVP) and then transacting on messaging apps. Companies like shoe brand Portblue, AI e-commerce company Sorabel
Today after the bell, Slack, a popular workplace communication product, reported its FQ4 2020 earnings, the three-month period ending January 31 2020. The company’s results came in ahead of expectations. However, its shares have rapidly lost altitude in the wake of its news. In the fourth quarter, Slack’s revenue rose to $181.9 million, a gain
On Thursday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Rick Scott (R-FL) introduced legislation to further restrict the use of the popular viral video app TikTok on government devices. The bill seeks to expand existing federal guidance prohibiting use of TikTok to encompass any U.S. government-issued device. The legislation is the most recent effort by U.S. lawmakers
The JEDI contract award process might never be done. Following legal challenges from Amazon after the Pentagon’s massive, $10 billion cloud contract was awarded to Microsoft in October, the Pentagon indicated in court documents last night that it wishes to reconsider the award. It’s just the latest plot twist in an epic government procurement saga.
Speedinvest, a seed-stage VC headquartered in Vienna with offices in London, Berlin, Munich and San Francisco, recently disclosed a new €190 million fund that brings the firm’s total assets under management to more than €400 million. Its remit remains largely the same: Speedinvest broadly targets fintech, deep tech, marketplaces, industrial tech, digital health and consumer
Users of Storz & Bickel’s vaporizers can once again connect their vapes to iPhones. The company’s solution comes several months after Apple enacted a ban on apps for tobacco and cannabis vaporizers. This time around, Storz & Bickel turned to a web app to provide iPhone users with expanded controls over their vapes. I found
Caryn Marooney Contributor Caryn Marooney is general partner at Coatue Management and sits on the boards of Zendesk and Elastic. An advisor to Airtable, in prior roles she oversaw communications for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus and co-founded The OutCast Agency, which served clients like Salesforce.com and Amazon. Pride. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Sloth.
Well, that was terrible. During the day’s wild trading session, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) dropped by just under 10% in what was the largest single-day percentage decline since the stock market crash in 1987 (when markets were sufficiently scarred to institute failsafe measures for the future, to prevent similar, shocking declines). Investors shrugged
Brizzly, the name associated with a long-gone Twitter client, and later, a goofy project highlighting our addiction to social media, is coming back. And this time, it’s focused on serving the needs of Twitter power users in search of features Twitter itself has failed to build — like an Edit button and an auto-deletion option
European on-demand food delivery startups are starting to add ‘contactless’ deliveries in response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Earlier this month U.S. startups including Postmates and Instacart added an option for customers to choose not to have their meal handed to them by the courier — and instead have it dropped off at their door without
The Trump administration is preparing an executive order to ban federal departments and agencies from buying or using foreign-made drones, citing a risk to national security, TechCrunch has learned. The draft order, which was drafted in the past few weeks and seen by TechCrunch, would effectively ban both foreign-made drones or drones made with foreign
Verizon said Thursday it will boost investment in network infrastructure, increasing its capital guidance by $500 million, to prepare for the rise in telecommuting and online learning amid the coronavirus outbreak. Verizon has not seen any measurable increases in data usage, even as some business, schools and other organizations are asking its employees to work
Fintech startup Revolut has introduced a new trading feature for premium users. Starting today, Premium and Metal users can access gold exposure from the app. Revolut works with a gold services partner (London Bullion Market Association) so that money that you spend on gold exposure is backed by real gold held by this partner. In
While you’ve probably spent a lot of today thinking about the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s worth remembering that other health issues aren’t going away — and that heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States. Heartbeat Health is a startup working to improve the way that cardiovascular care is delivered, and it
With tech companies wise to many of the tactics that Russia’s now-infamous troll farms used to seed disinformation during the 2016 election, those campaigns are getting creative. According to a pair of reports out from Facebook and Twitter, a disinformation campaign run by individuals with links to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) is back and
Yext says that in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s making its Yext Answers site search product free for 90 days. You might not see an obvious connection between site search and a worldwide pandemic. You might even think this sounds like a marketing gimmick. But Yext CEO Howard Lerman said that for the past
The European Commission is switching all staff in “non-critical functions” to remote working from next Monday in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In an email sent to staff today the Commission writes that president Ursula von der Leyen has activated a business continuity plan that requires all but those in “critical functions” to telework from
According to a new report from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple could unveil new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models with scissor-switch keyboards. MacRumors first noticed the report; TechCrunch obtained the research note as well. Apple updated the big MacBook Pro in November. The company slightly increased the size of the display from 15” to 16”
No surprise, really, that 5G smartphone sales are on the way up. Frankly, there’s really no other way to go, according to the latest numbers from NPD’s Mobile Phone Tracking. The firm noted that 5G handsets accounted for less than 1% of total sales in the U.S. The hurdles are also what you’d expect: namely,
YC-backed Giveaway lets folks give away their unused or unnecessary items in a marketplace. Unlike other buy/sell or donation platforms, Giveaway uses a virtual currency on the platform to reward people for listing their products for free on the app. Users earn Karma coins each time they list an item on the website. Folks can
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. A few weeks ago, Uber and Lyft, kicking bags of the 2019 stock market and regularly cited as examples of venture-backed excess, were back to fighting form. After encouraging Q3 2019 reports from both ride-hailing
Before leaving SoftBank-backed Zume Pizza in November 2018, co-founder Julia Collins knew what her next move would be: climate-friendly food. Today, Collins is announcing Planet FWD’s $2.7 million seed round led by BBG Ventures with participation from Cleo Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Kapor Capital and others. What’s unique about this round, Collins told TechCrunch,
BackboneAI, an early-stage startup that wants to help companies dealing with lots of data, particularly coming from a variety of external sources, announced a $4.7 million seed investment today. The round was led by Fika Ventures with participation from Boldstart Ventures, Dynamo Ventures, GGV Capital, MetaProp, Spider VC and several other unnamed investors. Company founder
Far from replacing humans, Artificial Intelligence is actually coming to the aid of a very old profession that has fallen out of fashion to such an extent that people are increasingly not joining it. I speak of the rarified world of the Actuary. Actuaries deal with the measurement and management of risk and uncertainty using
Blade, the French startup behind Shadow, announced plans to overhaul its subscription tiers back in October. The company is now bringing the new plans to the U.S. with a new entry tier at $11.99 per month as well as more powerful options in the coming months. Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. For
PandaDoc, a sales-focused document automation startup, announced a new web-based document production editor today that allows sales teams to quickly generate proposals and contracts from design templates. The templates give a consistent and professional look to these documents, which might otherwise be produced in a word processor like Word or Google Docs. While customers are
With the markets in turmoil and fear running rampant through the global economy, you might not think it’s the right moment to start a company. According to at least one well-known venture capitalist, however, it’s a great time to start up. TechCrunch recently caught up with former founder and active venture capitalist Jason Lemkin to
AWS has launched its own open-source operating system for running containers on both virtual machines and bare metal hosts. Bottlerocket, as the new OS is called, is basically a stripped-down Linux distribution that’s akin to projects like CoreOS’s now-defunct Container Linux and Google’s container-optimized OS. The OS is currently in its developer preview phase, but
Mike Hudack, the former CTO of Deliveroo and most recently a founding partner at London venture capital firm Blossom Capital, has quietly joined Monzo as the challenger bank’s new Chief Product Officer. TechCrunch understands that Hudack had previously been advising Monzo on a part-time basis for the past 11 months, while simultaneously working part-time at
Augmented reality headset maker Magic Leap has struggled with the laws of physics and failed to get to market. Now it’s seeking an acquirer, but talks with Facebook and medical goods giant Johnson & Johnson led nowhere according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Ed Hammond. After raising over $2 billion and being valued between