Starling Bank, the U.K.-based challenger bank founded by banking veteran Anne Boden, has raised another £60 million from its existing investors, Merian Global Investors and Harry McPike’s JTC. The investment brings the total raised by Starling to £323 million and follows two funding rounds of £105 million in aggregate led by Merian in 2019. Boden
Facebook receives plenty of pointed criticism from numerous corners, including for refusing to police political speech on Facebook, its seemingly endless string of privacy breaches and its apparent coziness with the Trump administration. One of the platform’s most prominent critics, somewhat unexpectedly, is comic, writer and actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Indeed, his powerful speech to
Tesla appears to be ramping up installations of its solar tile roofs in the San Francisco Bay area and will eventually roll out to Europe and China, according to CEO Elon Musk who in a series of tweets provided the first substantial update since the company launched the third iteration of its product in October.
“It’s an open secret that every company is on fire,” says Kintaba co-founder John Egan. “At any given moment something is going horribly wrong in a way that it has never gone wrong before.” Code failure downtimes, server outages and hack attacks plague engineering teams. Yet the tools for waking up the right employees, assembling
Over the last few years, Facebook has been busy building out AI capabilities in areas like computer vision, natural language processing (NLP) and ‘deep learning,’ in part by acquiring promising startups in the space. Understandably, this has seen the U.S. social networking giant look to the U.K. for AI talent, including an acqui-hire of NLP
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. As top exhibitors pull out of MWC, organizers implement stringent safeguards A couple of weeks before the event, the organizers of
It was South Korea’s — rather than Netflix’s — night at the Oscars, thanks to Bong Joon-ho’s biting class satire Parasite, which won a well-deserved best picture gong. But tech giant Samsung appears to have been hoping to steal a little of the national limelight: The Korean phone maker chose a prime Oscars ad slot
A couple of weeks out, Mobile World Congress organizer, the GSMA, has issued some fairly sweeping safeguards over growing concerns around the coronavirus. After a number of high profile back outs, including ZTE, LG, NVIDIA and Ericsson, the company issued a new list, including a ban of visitors originating from the Hubei province, whose capital
Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehouse company, doesn’t tend to do small rounds. On Friday night word leaked out about its latest mega round. This one was for $479 million on a $12.4 billion valuation. That’s triple the company’s previous $3.9 billion valuation from October 2018, and CEO Frank Slootman suggested that the company’s next finance
‘It’s a category that’s been underserved for a long time,’ says principal Hannah Seal Natasha Lomas @riptari / 10 hours U.K. startup Daye is rethinking female intimate care from a woman’s perspective, starting with a tampon infused with cannabidiol that tackles period pain. It’s also quietly demolishing the retrograde approach to product design that women
An interview with Julie Samuels, founding executive director of Tech:NYC Scott Bade 10 hours Scott Bade Contributor Scott Bade is a former speechwriter for Mike Bloomberg and co-author of “More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First.” More posts by this contributor The tech of giving back: an interview with Salesforce’s Chief Philanthropy Officer
An algorithmic risk scoring system deployed by the Dutch state to try to predict the likelihood that social security claimants will commit benefits or tax fraud breaches human rights law, a court in the Netherlands has ruled. The Dutch government’s System Risk Indication (SyRI) legislation uses a non-disclosed algorithmic risk model to profile citizens and
TVs this year will ship with a new feature called “filmmaker mode,” but unlike the last dozen things the display industry has tried to foist on consumers, this one actually matters. It doesn’t magically turn your living room into a movie theater, but it’s an important step in that direction. This new setting arose out
Qualcomm is facing fresh antitrust scrutiny from the European Commission, with the regulator raising questions about radio frequency front-end (RFFE) chips which can be used in 5G devices. The chipmaker has been expanding into selling RFFE chips for 5G devices, per Reuters, encouraging buyers of its 5G modems to also buy its radio frequency front-end
This morning Carta, a startup that helps private companies manage equity, announced it has created an investing vehicle called Carta Ventures. The well-funded unicorn wants to invest in young startups that it sees building off of its data-driven perspective into the world of private companies, helping to foster an ecosystem around its core products and
Scape Technologies, the London-based computer vision startup working on location accuracy beyond the capabilities of GPS, has been acquired by Facebook, according to a regulatory filing. Full terms of the deal remain as yet unknown, although a Companies House update reveals that Facebook Inc. now has majority control of the company (more than 75%). However
Google is updating Google Maps on Android and iOS with a revamped tab bar at the bottom, a new icon and a couple of new features. In particular, the company is putting more emphasis on user-generated content and recommendations. At the bottom of the app, you now get five icons — Explore, Commute, Saved, Contribute
In a little less than three months, TechCrunch will bring its Early Stage event to SF for the very first time. Early Stage is meant to bring together more than 50 experts across startup core competencies, from funding to marketing to operation. Today, I’m pleased to announce another four experts being added to the agenda.
With Casper’s public offering earlier this week, we’ve closed the book on the first two venture-backed IPOs of note in 2020. Casper, joined by One Medical, carried over $870 million of private capital, venture and otherwise, across the finish line. Even though each IPO featured an unprofitable tech-enabled business that had posted sub-30% growth and
Four senators, including Ted Cruz (R-TX), have asserted that, as a consequence of sanctions placed on Iran, Twitter must cease providing its services to Ayatollah Khamenei and other leaders in the country. “The Ayatollah enjoys zero protection from the United States Bill of Rights,” he wrote in a letter to the company. Although the move
Russ Heddleston Contributor Russ is the cofounder and CEO of DocSend. He was previously a product manager at Facebook, where he arrived via the acquisition of his startup Pursuit.com, and has held roles at Dropbox, Greystripe, and Trulia. Follow him here: @rheddleston and @docsend More posts by this contributor First mover advantage: Does it matter
Controlling your smart home gadgets from your phone or by voice isn’t exactly a chore, but after setting up a bunch of smart lights, a Wi-Fi lock, thermostat and a few more smart devices, I came to miss the ability to control at least some of them with a physical switch. Add to that the
Motorola’s long been a kind of quiet workhorse on the mobile scene. Aside from the occasional razzle-dazzle of a Moto Z or Razr, the Lenovo subsidiary mostly trades in budget handsets. The G line is probably the best example of the bunch. The devices aren’t flashy and the specs are often a year or two
A startup called Our.News is working to make its users smarter consumers of the news. In other words, it’s confronting some big, seemingly intractable problems. For one thing, there’s a tremendous amount of disinformation online — as Our.News founder and CEO Richard Zack put it, “Unfortunately, you have thousands of people all over the world
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was something fun. First, we were back as a group in the San Francisco studio, which is always fun. Even better, we had NEA’s Rick Yang on hand to chat with Danny and Alex about
Clear is an early stage startup with a big ambition. It wants to build a blockchain for high-volume transaction systems like payments between telcos. Today it announced a $13 million Series A investment. The round was led by Eight Roads with participation from Telefónica Innovation Ventures, Telekom Innovation Pool of Deutsche Telekom, HKT and Singtel
Meet AssoConnect, a French startup that is building a software-as-a-service application to give you all the tools you need to manage your nonprofit organization (association in French). The company just raised a $7.7 million (€7 million) funding round with XAnge and ISAI leading the round. Various business angels, such as Nicolas Macquin, Rodolphe Carle, Michaël
France’s competition watchdog DGCCRF announced earlier today that Apple will pay a $27.4 million (€25 million) fine due to an iOS update that capped performance of aging devices. The company will also have to display a statement on its website for a month. A couple of years ago, Apple released an iOS update (10.2.1 and
The Galaxy Fold felt like an omen for a burgeoning category. The fascinating and promising product was plagued by broken review units that forced Samsung to go back to the drawing board with a reinforced model. But even that version ultimately ran into issues, as I can personally attest. No doubt other companies readying their
It’s no secret that it’s hard to make the economics work at drive-share companies. That may explain the success to date of HopSkipDrive, a six-year-old, L.A.-based company that pairs drivers with both families but also, crucially, school districts. Specifically, the now 100-plus person company has deals in place with school districts in 13 markets across