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Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

TechCrunch has been covering the demo days of the seed-stage venture firm Pear VC since 2015. (There we are in the front row in 2016, surrounded by investors, typing away.) A few things have remained true since that time. There are typically 10 or so companies that present and not many more. A lot of […]

Longtime engineer and product designer Michael Sayman has been building apps since he was a kid, landing him roles at Facebook, Google, Roblox, and most recently Twitter, where he’s often been tasked with developing products aimed at a teenage audience. Sayman was only 17 when he joined Facebook, but had already built several apps — […]

Assembled, which bills itself as a workforce management platform for customer support teams, today announced that it raised $51 million in a Series B funding round led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from Emergence Capital and Basis Set Ventures. CEO Ryan Wang says that the new capital will be put toward product development, including […]

I was recently talking to a startup that was airing its frustration over Apple’s Tracker Detect app that enables Android users to find nearby, unknown AirTags. The problem? The company, TrackerDetect had been spending two years building up its SEO and brand recognition for its cybersecurity products. Needless to say, when Apple launches a product, […]

Bear markets and high interest rates often cause investors to turn away from anything resembling a risky investment. Yet, now is a good time to take another look at the cannabis sector in the U.S.

Yubo, a social livestreaming app popular with a Gen Z audience, announced today it’s becoming one of the first major social platforms to adopt a new age verification technique that uses live image capture technology to identify minors using its app, in order to keep them separated from adult users. While other companies serving a […]

It’s been a tough few years for Berlin-based femtech hardware startup Inne which came out of stealth R&D in the fall of 2019, shortly before COVID-19 hit Europe. By January 2020, founder and CEO Eirini Rapti tells us she was busy making final inspections ahead of the launch of its debut product — a connected […]

So you want to know what’s going on with Elon Musk and Twitter, but you thought maybe it’s a little too late to ask your tech-obsessed buddies for the low-down. You’ve come to the right place. Last month, in perhaps the year’s biggest tech news story yet, Elon Musk announced his intent to buy Twitter […]

Late last year, Microsoft announced the launch of Azure OpenAI Service, a fully managed, enterprise-focused product designed to give businesses access to AI lab OpenAI’s technologies with added governance features. Initially invite-only as a part of Azure Cognitive Services, the service allows access to OpenAI’s API through the Azure platform for applications like language translation […]

In software development, observability refers to keeping watch over all of an app’s components, from mobile and web clients to backend infrastructure. Given how critical this sort of visibility into a system can be for developers, not to mention a broader organization, it’s unsurprising that tools to help achieve greater observability remain in high demand. […]

It’s crunch time in the world of instant grocery delivery, with the latest turn representing a big blow specifically in Europe. Berlin-based Gorillas, which raised nearly $1 billion dollars at around a $3 billion post-money valuation only seven months ago — today announced that it would be laying off some 300 employees and exit four […]

Monday May 23, 2022, and we’re listening to our brand-new podcast called the TechCrunch Podcast. In it, we talk to TechCrunch writers about the stories they’re most excited about. The first episode is live now, featuring Darrell and Taylor talking about … UFOs‽ — Haje and Christine The TechCrunch Top 3 Hey, you, get into […]

Andy Bromberg, CEO of a16z-backed Eco, is claiming that Pebble, another fintech startup that came out of stealth this morning, “plagiarized” Eco’s materials and business model. Bromberg posted a Twitter thread this afternoon saying Pebble engaged in “copy-and-pasting, immaturity, lying, and espionage.” In the thread, Bromberg detailed the background behind his claims, and he also […]

Timed to align with Build 2022, Microsoft today open-sourced tools and data sets designed to audit AI-powered content moderation systems and automatically write tests highlighting potential bugs in AI models. The company claims that the projects, AdaTest and (De)ToxiGen, could lead to more reliable large language models (LLMs), or models akin to OpenAI’s GPT-3 that […]

Welcome back to The Interchange, the weekly TechCrunch series that looks at the latest — and what’s ahead — in the global fintech industry. It’s an incredible time to be a financial technology journalist. Besides the fact that over 20% of all venture dollars last year went into fintech startups, I am particularly excited about […]

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the […]

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh, human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. “You can often pick up significant market share in an economic downturn by just staying alive,” top startup accelerator Y Combinator wrote in an internal e-mail to its founders this week. The […]

Founders have gotten the memo that the ground is shifting under their feet right now. What to do about it is the question. Already, teams are making plans to scale back their spending to preserve capital. They’re making painful staff cuts toward that same end — or else instituting hiring freezes. But they should also […]

Arrival, the U.K.-based commercial electric vehicle company, unveiled the first prototype of its purpose-built electric vehicle for ride-hailing on the TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility stage on Thursday. The company, which is perhaps best known for its potentially revolutionary goal of building multiple automated microfactories to produce vehicles regionally and locally rather than one big production line, […]

Benchmarks are as important a measure of progress in AI as they are for the rest of the software industry. But when the benchmark results come from corporations, secrecy very often prevents the community from verifying them. For example, OpenAI granted Microsoft, with which it has a commercial relationship, the exclusive licensing rights to its […]

If meme stocks can be a thing, what’s to stop audio meme sharing from going viral!? Hoping to storm the ear-bending arena of social audio and win friends amid the gamer/creator crowd is Voicy — a Netherlands-based startup that’s building a platform for user-generated audio snippets (typically a few seconds long), offering tools to create […]

It’s Wednesday, May 18, 2022, and we are hanging out at our Mobility event, ogling cars that fly, drive themselves and have various identity crises. Wish you were here if you’re not, and hope to run into you if you are! — Haje and Christine The TechCrunch Top 3 Fintech finds footing in fraud: Prevention, […]

Ben Bear, the CEO of shared micromobility operator Spin, is stepping down from his role just a couple of months after the company was purchased by Tier Mobility, another shared operator with a large European presence. In Bear’s place will be Philip Reinckens, a Tier veteran who, as of June 6, will be responsible for […]

How many people have stuck with the same auto insurance provider because the process of finding a new one feels overwhelming and painful? A lot. It’s no surprise then that a number of startups have emerged over the years to help consumers tackle this challenge in one way or another, including The Zebra and Jerry. […]

At enterprises of a certain size, keeping track of data including apps, employees, and projects becomes increasingly challenging. According to McKinsey, employees spend 1.8 hours every day — 9.3 hours per week, on average — searching for and gathering information. The veracity of metrics like these has been challenged over the years. But it’s reasonable […]

Zenly, the popular social app with 35 million monthly active users, released a complete redesign just last month. But it turns out that this was just the first part of a bigger change at the company owned by Snap. Zenly is going to compete with the likes of Google Maps and Apple Maps as it […]

"It is difficult to find a project manager who is willing to take the risk to implement bleeding-edge tech on their project," said Heinrich Gröller, a partner at Speedinvest.

It’s Tuesday, May 17, 2022, and we are currently in the midst of an existential crisis; aren’t we all, when we are being very honest with ourselves, a little bit spambot at heart?  Tomorrow, TC Sessions: Mobility kicks off. Last chance saloon to buy tickets for our in-person event Wednesday and Thursday, or the virtual […]

TechCrunch is excited to announce the six companies pitching in person and on stage at TC Sessions Mobility 2022. Hailing form around the States and the globe, founders will pitch on the main stage, for four minutes, followed by an intense Q&A with our expert panel of judges. The judges for this pitch-off will be […]