Tech News

Acorns, which helps millions of people invest their spare change in the stock market, has laid off between 50 to 70 people, TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources. The Irvine, Calif.-based company would not confirm the total number of people laid off, but did confirm that there were cuts at the company as a result

Box CEO Aaron Levie has been working to change the software world for 15 years, but the pandemic has accelerated the move to cloud services much faster than anyone imagined. As he pointed out yesterday in an Extra Crunch Live interview, who would have thought three months ago that businesses like yoga and cooking classes

Belvo, a Latin American fintech startup which launched just 12 months ago, has already snagged funding from two of the biggest names in North and South American venture capital. The company is aiming to expand the reach of its service that connects mobile applications in Mexico and Colombia to a customer’s banking information and now

How did yesterday’s launch of HBO Max go? We don’t have official numbers from WarnerMedia, but app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower says HBO Max was downloaded by nearly 87,000 new users across Apple’s App Store and Google Play. That number might seem pretty low compared to other streaming launches — like the 4 million

Vaya Africa, a ride-hail mobility venture founded by Zimbabwean mogul Strive Masiyiwa, has launched an electric taxi service and charging network in Zimbabwe with plans to expand across the continent. The South Africa headquartered company has acquired a fleet of Nissan Leaf EVs and developed its own solar powered charging stations. The program goes live

In a closely-watched decision today, the Supreme Court of British Columbia published a key decision in the extradition case of Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei Technologies, China’s largest telecommunications company and a frequent target of U.S. policymakers. In its ruling, the court said that the case met the standard for “double criminality,” and thus

Ola Electric, the EV business that spun out of the ride-hailing giant Ola last year, has acquired an Amsterdam-based electric scooter startup as the Indian firm looks to locally produce and launch its own line of two wheelers as soon as this year. The Indian firm said Wednesday it had acquired Etergo, a Dutch firm

Sony has taken aim at the suddenly enormous market of people who want to self-produce high-quality video with a minimum of setup. Its ZV-1 mutates the versatile RX100 series into a selfie video machine, and it could be the all-in-one solution many a vlogger has been searching for. The new camera is very much based

Meituan’s shares hit a record high on Tuesday, bringing its valuation to over $100 billion. The Hong Kong-listed giant, which focuses on food delivery with smaller segments in travel and transportation, is the third Chinese firm to reach the landmark valuation. Tencent and Alibaba respectively topped the number back in 2013 and 2014. Tencent-backed Meituan

This week could be the biggest week to date for private spaceflight, with landmark launch attempts coming from both Virgin Orbit and SpaceX . Virgin Orbit is looking to join the elite club of private launch companies that have actually made it to space, with a full flight test of its combined Cosmic Girl and

Thailand’s largest cell network AIS has pulled a database offline that was spilling over billions of real-time internet records on millions of Thai internet users. Security researcher Justin Paine said in a blog post that he found the database, containing DNS queries and Netflow data, on the internet without a password. With access to this database,

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. It’s been a tumultuous week for Chinese tech firms abroad: Huawei’s mounting pressure from the U.S., a big blow to U.S.-listed Chinese firms, and TikTok’s

The rationale behind the deluge of dollars flooding into billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Platforms is beginning to become more clear as his e-commerce venture JioMart starts rolling out to more people across India. An e-commerce venture between the nation’s top telecom operator Jio Platforms and top retail chain Jio Retail, JioMart just launched its

An eighth Amazon employee has died of COVID-19. The news comes as the company is under scrutiny for failing to be more transparent about the wider number of infections among its warehouse workers. A spokesperson confirmed the reports of the death, telling TechCrunch, “We are saddened by the loss of an associate who had worked

Nearly a year ago, Todd Howard, the director of Bethesda Games, said that the company’s “Fallout Shelter” game would be coming to Tesla displays. It arrived, via the 2020.20 software update, this week, which was first noted at driver’s platform Teslascope. Fallout Shelter is the latest — and one of the more modern games —

IBM confirmed reports from over night that it is conducting layoffs, but wouldn’t provide details related to location, departments or number of employees involved. The company framed it in terms of replacing people with more needed skills as it tries to regroup under new CEO Arvind Krishna. “IBM’s work in a highly competitive marketplace requires

Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Platforms has agreed to sell 2.32% stake to U.S. equity firm KKR in what is the fifth major investment the top Indian telecom operator has secured in just as many weeks. On Friday, KKR announced it will invest $1.5 billion in the top Indian telecom operator, a subsidiary of India’s most

As segments of the country begin the process of reopening, many antsy Americans are no doubt itching to travel during the Memorial Day weekend. With the holiday fast approaching the TSA is outlining new security measures for those flying during the pandemic. Some have already been in place amid limited flight schedules and for the

Founder Collective, a seed-stage fund formed 11 years ago in Cambridge, Ma., has closed its newest fund with $85 million. Earlier today, we talked with the firm’s general partners — Eric Paley, David Frankel, Micah Rosenbloom — to learn more about it. Among our first questions: whether the three are themselves the largest investors in

Brainbase, the rights management platform that’s helping Hollywood studios manage the licensing rights to their cultural icons, has picked up another $8 million in financing. Behind every popular story is an attempt to make money off of it, and Brainbase helps Hollywood find new ways to make money off of consumer tastes. The money came

Khatabook, a startup that is helping small businesses in India record financial transactions digitally and accept payments online with an app, has raised $60 million in a new financing round as it looks to gain more ground in the world’s second most populous nation. The new financing round, Series B, was led by Facebook co-founder

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Yesterday afternoon, Vroom, an online car buying service, filed to go public. Based on its SEC filing, Vroom is a highly-successful private company in fundraising terms that has attracted over $700 million during its life

Last week, U.S. unemployment claims hit 36 million over a two-month period. The results of pandemic-led closures have been devastating to innumerable industries, as the timeline to reopen remains uncertain in many areas. Indeed noted in a recent report that hirings have slowed significantly versus this time last year. No surprise, really, for those who

Julian Shapiro Contributor Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing team that trains startups in advanced growth, helps hire senior growth marketers and finds vetted growth agencies. He also writes at Julian.com. More posts by this contributor Use accelerated retargeting to increase conversions Break-even ads can generate free brand awareness We’ve aggregated

In mid-March, Apple closed all of its stores outside of China “until further notice.” It was a sweeping — but necessary — move for a world facing down a growing pandemic. In a statement issued today until the title, “To our Customers,” Retail SVP Deirdre O’Brien offered insight into the company’s plans to reopen locations.

COVID-19 knocked the wheels off the economy, but one nascent tech job not only kept rolling, it picked up speed. Teleoperations — or more specifically, teleops for autonomous delivery robots — is still a niche job within an industry that has yet to dive into the deep end of the commercialization pool. However, the job,

Everlywell was one of the first startups to announce that it was working on a self-administered, at-home COVID-19 diagnostic kit, but it initially sought out to ship kits before regulators made clear that this was not in line with its guidelines. Everlywell then became intent on working with the FDA to secure a proper Emergency

[embedded content] On Saturday, the United Launch Alliance (ULA) is targeting a liftoff time of 8:24 AM EDT (5:24 AM PDT) for one of its Atlas V rockets carrying the U.S. Space Force’s X-37B orbital test vehicle, which is a fully autonomous winged spaceplane that looks a little like a scaled down version of the

Kevin Rose has been in the spotlight since co-founding the early social news aggregation site Digg in late 2004. A genial whiz kid turned serial entrepreneur, he has since become as well-known for launching a whole lot of slickly designed products, some of them out of his startup incubator Milk (later acquired by Google), and

New numbers from NPD confirm what we’ve known for a while: the first quarter of 2020 was a very good one for gaming companies. The new report notes that sales hit a record $10.86 billion in the States between January and March of this year, marking a 9% increase over a year prior. $9.58 billion