App Samurai, a platform to market mobile apps, has closed an investment of $2.4 million in Series A funding, led by 212 Ventures and co-invested by Collective Spark, 500 Startups and Degerhan Usluel. It’s now raised a total of $4.6 million which will be used to develop the mobile advertising group’s product portfolio and global
Sony announces a camera-centric phone, Microsoft offers more details about the next Xbox and a liquid biopsy startup raises $165 million. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 24, 2020. 1. Sony announces its first 5G flagship, the triple lens Xperia 1 II Sony has announced its first 5G smartphone: The Xperia 1 II — for
Southeast Asian on-demand transport rivals Grab and Gojek deny that they are involved in talks to merge, but today Grab announced a piece of news that — at the very least — will divert attention from that story, or more likely stoke the fires of speculation that it is indeed gearing up for a deal:
Speedinvest, the European seed-stage VC that was started from Vienna but has since added offices in London, Berlin, Munich and San Francisco, has raised a new €190 million fund. It brings the firm’s total assets under management to more than €400 million. Describing its third fund as “oversubscribed” and ahead of schedule, SpeedInvest’s remit remains
MWC may have been canceled on account of rising coronavirus concerns, but the party still went on for Huawei (albeit to what appears to have been a mostly empty room). A year after wowing crowds with the Mate X, the company is introducing the Mate Xs. Rather than a proper successor, the device appears to
‘The companies that best meet their customers’ needs always end up winning’ Steve O’Hear @sohear / 8 hours Oxx, a European venture capital firm co-founded by Richard Anton and Mikael Johnsson, this month announced the closing of its debut fund of $133 million to back “Europe’s most promising SaaS companies” at Series A and beyond.
Chattermill, the London startup that offers what it calls a “customer understanding” platform that uses machine learning to gain scalable insights into customer feedback, has raised $8 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is DN Capital, alongside Ventech and btov Partners. Silicon Valley Bank also participated, in addition to a number of angel
Facebook’s Creator Studio has added a mobile companion. The insights dashboard for creators and publishers, which debuted globally in August 2018, is now available as a mobile app for both iOS and Android. Similar to the desktop hub, the Creator Studio app allows users to track how their content is performing across Facebook Pages, as
Commercial aviation isn’t typically the place to look if you’re after carbon-light initiatives. Jet fuel isn’t generally very green, and airplanes burn a lot of it when traversing the skies. But supersonic flight startup Boom wants to change the perception of commercial aviation as an emissions-costly prospect, starting with their testing development program for the
Fintech startup Revolut is raising a large Series D round of funding. TCV is leading the $500 million round, valuing the company at $5.5 billion. Over the past few years, Revolut has raised $836 million in total. Some existing investors are also participating in today’s funding round, but Revolut isn’t sharing names. Previous investors include
The specter of constant surveillance hangs over all of us in ways we don’t even fully understand, but it is also possible to turn the tools of the watchers against them. Forensic Architecture is exhibiting several long-term projects at the Museum of Art and Design in Miami that use the omnipresence of technology as a
Allowance is going digital. Venmo has been spotted prototyping a new feature that would allow adult users to create a debit card connected to their account for their teenage children. That could potentially let parents set spending notifications and limits while giving kids more flexibility in urgent situations than a few dollars stuffed in a
So far this year, one of the most eye-popping startup exits has been Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition of fintech data services platform Plaid. It’s a major exit in the white-hot fintech space, and while that transaction is still going through regulatory reviews, already some current Plaid employees are becoming alumni and fanning out into the
Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years don’t worry — we’re not changing the main show. (Here’s last week’s episode with Danny Crichton if you want to listen; I also just
Databricks today announced that launch of its new Data Ingestion Network of partners and the launch of its Databricks Ingest service. The idea here is to make it easier for businesses to combine the best of data warehouses and data lakes into a single platform — a concept Databricks likes to call ‘lakehouse.’ At the
Fears over the potential impact of the coronavirus spreading in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East have sent stocks plummeting in Monday’s open — with tech stocks among the hardest hit. The reason for the declines is clear: The global response to the coronavirus (also known as Covid-19). Over the weekend, cases outside of China
Petnet, the smart pet feeder backed by investors including Petco, recently experienced a week-long system outage affecting its second-generation SmartFeeders. While the startup’s customer service recently tweeted that its SmartFeeders and app’s functionality have been restored, Petnet’s lack of responsiveness continues to leave many customers frustrated and confused. Petnet first announced on Feb. 14 that
Sony has announced its first 5G smartphone: The Xperia 1 II — which, for the curious and/or confused, is pronounced ‘Xperia One, Mark Two’. Which isn’t at all confusing, er. “No one understands the entertainment experience better than Sony,” said president of mobile communications, Mitsuya Kishida, claiming the company is “uniquely positioned” in the era
HealthJoy, a platform designed to make it easier for employees to use their healthcare benefits, has raised $30 million in Series C funding led by Health Velocity Capital. Returning investors also participated, including U.S. Venture Partners, Chicago Ventures, Epic Ventures, Brandon Cruz and Clint Jones. This brings HealthJoy’s total funding so far to $53 million.
Target Global, the pan-European venture capital firm headquartered in Berlin, has raised a new €120 million early-stage fund, following what it claims was only 3 months of fundraising. Dubbed “Early Stage Fund II”, the new vehicle will see the firm continue to back early-stage tech companies across Europe and Israel, leading and co-leading seed and
Laiye, a Chinese startup that offers robotic process automation services to several major tech firms in the nation and government agencies, has raised $42 million in a new funding round as it looks to scale its business. The new financing round, Series C, was co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lightspeed China Partners. Cathay Innovation,
Cobee, a Spanish fintech startup that has developed an employee benefit management app and accompanying card, has closed €2.1 million in “pre-Series A” funding. The round was co-led by Speedinvest, and Target Global. Other backers include Chris Bouwer (co-founder of Adyen) and existing investors Encomenda Smart Capital, BStartup (Banco Sabadell), Lanai Partners and Abac Nest.
Rallyhood says it’s “private and secure.” But for some time, it wasn’t. The social network designed to help groups communicate and coordinate left one of its cloud storage buckets containing user data open and exposed. The bucket, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), was not protected with a password, allowing anyone who knew the easily-guessable
Financial services startups raised less money in 2019 than they did in 2018 as VC firms looked to back late stage firms and focused on developing markets, a new report has revealed. According to research firm CB Insights’ annual report published this week, fintech startups across the world raised $33.9 billion* in total last year
[Editor’s note: Want to get this weekly review of news that startups can use by email? Just subscribe here.] How well do Robinhood’s financials stack up against incumbent online brokerages? While we wait for the seven-year-old company’s long-planned IPO, Alex Wilhelm examined Morgan Stanley’s big $13 billion purchase of E-Trade for fresh data comparison points. Robinhood
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
A few days ago, Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein published an interesting piece digging into the world of artificial intelligence (AI) startups, and, more specifically, how those companies perform as businesses. Core to the argument presented is that while founders and investors are wagering “that AI businesses will resemble traditional software companies,” the
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re living up to the introduction of this daily column by digging into the recently announced E-Trade sale and what its new price and recent financial performance can tell us about Robinhood, a startup
As Samsung (re)unveiled its clamshell folding phone last week, I kept seeing the same question pop up amongst my social circles: why? I was wondering the same thing myself, to be honest. I’m not sure even Samsung knows; they’d win me over by the end, but only somewhat. The halfway-folded, laptop-style “Flex Mode” allows you
Tyler Haney, the founder and chief executive of activewear label Outdoor Voices, has stepped down, according to the Business of Fashion. We’ve reached out to Haney directly, as well as board members from the venture firms that have backed the company, including General Catalyst and Forerunner Ventures, and we hope to update this story accordingly.