Founders, it’s time to launch your company on the most famous stage in tech media. Startup Battlefield applications are now open. TechCrunch is scouring the globe to find the most innovative and game-changing startups to compete for the famous Disrupt Cup and a $100,000 equity-free prize at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2020. Startups will gain
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. We’re still in IPO-land this morning, working our way through the Accolade S-1 filing. Yesterday we dug through the Procore filing, a vertical software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. That was a former startup that we could get
Facebook -owned WhatsApp is finally giving users’ eyes a break by rolling out a dark mode setting to the messaging app — years after some other tech giants figured out how to offer a ‘dimmer pixels’ switch. The messaging giant says the feature is rolling out globally in the “coming days” to the latest version
Most developers think of Stack Overflow as a question and answer site for their programming questions. But over the last few years, the company has also built a successful business in its Stack Overflow for Teams product, which essentially offers companies a private version of its Q&A product. Indeed, the Teams product now brings in
Popular music app publisher MWM has raised a $55.9 million (€50 million) funding round. Blisce/ is leading the round with Idinvest Partners, Bpifrance (Large Venture fund), Aglaé Ventures and Xavier Niel also participating. Some of MWM’s apps include edjing Mix, Beat Maker Pro, Drum Machine, Beat Snap 2, TaoMix 2, Guitar and Drums. The company
I was honestly a surprised to find out from Sensel that the company is only just recently raising its Series A. The Sunnyvale-based hardware startup has been around since 2013, bringing its first product, the modular music and computing Morph peripheral, to market a few years back. Over the past few years, however, the company’s
French startup Le Wagon has raised its first round of funding after many years of bootstrapping. The company closed a $19 million funding round (€17 million) a few months ago. Cathay Capital is leading the round with AfricInvest also participating. “We’ve always bootstrapped since 2013 and we’ve always been profitable since day one,” Le Wagon
iPrice Group, which helps comparison shoppers in Southeast Asia by pulling together prices from different e-commerce platforms, has closed a $10 million Series B. Led by ACA Investments, the round also included participation from Daiwa PI Partners and returning investors Line Ventures, Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund. The company’s last funding announcement, from Line’s venture
Another major figure could soon join the list of a growing number of people who are done with social media: The leader of the world’s largest democracy. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted Monday evening that he was thinking about giving up on his Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts. Modi, whose 53 million followers
RTP Global, the VC firm founded by Russian entrepreneur and investor Leonid Boguslavsky, is announcing a new $650 million fund to continue backing early-stage tech startups, primarily at Series A but also some late seed deals and Series B. Of note, the VC’s last fund was launched in December 2017 and totalled $200 million, so
Nokia announces a big leadership change, an AT&T streaming service expands and we look at how our jobs may have to evolve during to the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 2, 2020. 1. Rajeev Suri to step down as Nokia CEO; Pekka Lundmark to take over The company, like its rivals Sweden-based
Robinhood, the startup with a stock trading app valued upwards of at least $7.6 billion, suffered one of its worst outages on one of the busiest trading days of the year. As the Dow Jones Industrial Average enjoyed the single biggest point-gain in the history of the index, Robinhood’s application fell prey to an error
So much for that correction! After a desolate week, the United States saw its major indices rally on Monday, pushing the value of domestic and domestically listed securities higher. The gains came despite a rising number of infections in the country of the novel coronavirus, now known as COVID-19. Last week, rising concern about an
Throughout this series on the rise of multiverse virtual worlds, I have outlined the collision of gaming and social media into a new multiverse era of social media within virtual worlds due to technological and cultural changes. The result will be a healthier ecosystem of social media than what currently exists and the economic development
Google today announced that it is canceling the physical part of Cloud Next, its cloud-focused event and its largest annual conference by far with around 30,000 attendees, over concerns around the current spread of COVID-19. Given all of the recent conference cancellations, this announcement doesn’t come as a huge surprise, especially after Facebook canceled its
Sonantic, a U.K. startup that has developed “human-quality” artificial voice technology for the games and entertainment industry, has raised €2.3 million in funding. Leading the round is EQT Ventures, with participation from existing backers, including Entrepreneur First (EF), AME Cloud Ventures and Bart Swanson of Horizons Ventures. I also understand one of the company’s earlier
Apple Inc. has agreed to pay a settlement of up to $500 million, following a lawsuit accusing the company of intentionally slowing down the performance of older phones to encourage customers to buy newer models or fresh batteries. The preliminary proposed class action lawsuit was disclosed Friday night and would see Apple pay consumers $25
One of the big, on-going debates in VC and founder circles concerns whether to accept money from top-tier, later-stage venture capitalists during a seed round. Even as their funds reach monstrous sizes, more and more top funds are investing in the earliest stages of a startup’s life, intensifying the question for founders of so-called “signaling
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re in for a treat, as we get to dig into Procore’s S-1 filing. In case you aren’t familiar, Procore sells software that helps manage construction projects, but it offers more than a single
When Elliott Management, a New York investment firm with an activist approach, sets its sights on a company, it usually means it has been under-performing, and it sees a ton of unmet potential. News broke on Friday that the company had bought a substantial stake in Twitter and was seeking board seats. Sources have confirmed
Thoma Bravo announced today that it had closed its hefty $3.9 billion acquisition of security firm, Sophos, marking yet another private equity deal in the books. The deal was originally announced in October. Stockholders voted to approve the deal in December. They were paid $7.40 USD per share for their trouble, according to the company,
Now that the world is swimming in data we may be able to address the climate and environmental risks to the planet. But while there is plenty of capital to invest in things like ClimateTech, a lot of the data that’s needed to tackle this big issue is badly applied, leading to a big misallocation
One of the benefits of owning a Pixel smartphone is that it improves over time as Pixels are first to receive updates that deliver the latest fixes and improvements. The first round of new features arrived in December, including a filter for robocalls, more photo controls, improved Duo calls, and more. Today Google says Pixel
Spinny, an online platform for selling used cars, has secured $43.7 million from a cohort of influential investors in a new financing round as it looks to expand to more Indian cities. The Series B financing round for the Gurgaon-based startup was led by the Fundamentum Partnership, the growth-capital fund backed by tech veterans Nandan
The world of consumer banking has seen a massive shift in the last ten years. Gone are the days where you could open an account, take out a loan, or discuss changing the terms of your banking only by visiting a physical branch. Now, you can do all this and more with a few quick
AudioTelligence, a startup that spun out of University of Cambridge-funded CEDAR Audio, has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding for its “autofocus for sound”. Leading the round is Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, Cambridge Enterprise, and CEDAR Audio. Founded in 2017 and based in Cambridge, U.K., the company has
Fictional portrayals of virtual worlds such as “Ready Player One” and “The Matrix” typically portray the physical and virtual worlds as distinct realms siloed from each other. Characters escape a dystopian, impoverished physical realm and enter a separate, utopian virtual realm in which they are wealthy and important. Our non-fictional future won’t have that dichotomy.
In part 5 of our virtual worlds series: why this new future will heal fractures caused by today’s social media Eric Peckham @epeckham / 9 hours The basis of the classic James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies” is an evil media mogul who instigates war between the U.K. and China because it will be great
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently
Stem, a startup that helps independent musicians get paid, is expanding with a new financing program called Scale. Co-founder and CEO Milana Rabkin Lewis described the company’s core offering as a way for collaborators to “memorialize the split” of the proceeds from a song — once they’ve uploaded a track, Scale can automatically handle splitting