Tech News

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. This morning we’re dialing into some late-stage venture activity in Utah. Why? Because Utah has become a hotbed of startup activity, yielding both IPOs and huge acquisitions. And as Utah isn’t a media hub in

Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that operates Wikipedia and a number of other projects, has urged the Indian government to rethink the proposed changes to the nation’s intermediary liability rules that would affect swathes of companies and the way more than half a billion people access information online. The organization has also urged the Indian

Since roughly 2012, billionaire Bill Gates has been participating in Reddit’s annual Secret Santa gift exchange, which matches Reddit users with internet strangers who give them presents. He seems to relish the role. For example, in 2017, he was matched with a cat lover, sending off a giant load of feline-themed gifts, including a large

Modern agriculture involves fields of mind-boggling size, and spraying them efficiently is a serious operational challenge. Pyka is taking on the largely human-powered spray business with an autonomous winged craft and, crucially, regulatory approval. Just as we’ve seen with DroneSeed, this type of flying is risky for pilots, who must fly very close to the

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. Uber founder Travis Kalanick is leaving the company’s board of directors Uber founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick will officially resign

Apps from Chinese developers have been gaining popularity on Indian app stores for sometime. Last year, as many as 44 of the top 100 Android apps in India were developed by Chinese firms. But things have changed this year as local developers put on a fight. According to app analytics and marketing firm AppsFlyer, Indian

A security researcher said he has matched 17 million phone numbers to Twitter user accounts by exploiting a flaw in Twitter’s Android app. Ibrahim Balic found that it was possible to upload entire lists of generated phone numbers through Twitter’s contacts upload feature. “If you upload your phone number, it fetches user data in return,”

DJI is easily the leading brand when it comes to camera drones, but few companies have even attempted a ground-based mobile camera platform. The company may be moving in that direction, though, if this patent for a small off-road vehicle with a stabilized camera is any indication. The Chinese patent, first noted by DroneDJ, shows

A year from now, this is likely to have all blown over. A year from now, the Samsung Galaxy Fold’s turbulent takeoff may well be a footnote in the largest story of foldables. For now, however, it’s an important caveat that will come up in every conversation about the nascent product category. How history remembers

The birth and growth of financial technology developed mostly over the last ten years. So as we look ahead, what does the next decade have in store? I believe we’re starting to see early signs: in the next ten years, fintech will become portable and ubiquitous as it moves to the background and centralizes into

Nik Milanovic Contributor Nik Milanovic is a fintech and financial inclusion enthusiast, with a decade of work across mobile payments, online lending, credit and microfinance. More posts by this contributor Fintech’s next decade will look radically different Libra’s critics are missing the forest for the trees So what happens when fintech ‘brings it all together’?

Boeing launched its Starliner CST-100 commercial crew spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time on Friday morning in an uncrewed test, and while an error with the onboard mission clock meant that the Starliner didn’t reach its target orbit as intended and subsequently didn’t have enough fuel on board to actually

Every once in a while on VC Twitter, a comment or statement seems so outlandish, so completely outrageous, that it must be — certainly has to be — false. Such as it was for Primary Ventures investor Jason Shuman, who commented on the recent prices for pitch deck advice in the Valley today: Founder friend

I’m not a venture capitalist. I don’t play one on TV, either (though I might if anyone asked!). Still, after many years of covering startups, including as an editor with TechCrunch, in a daily newsletter I publish called StrictlyVC, and at numerous media outlets before that (anyone remember the early years of Red Herring magazine?),

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the grey space in between. Today, we’re weighing a standard bit of startup wisdom that recently reemerged against some surprising, contrasting evidence. Does too much money hurt a startup more than it helps, or is that standard view actually mistaken?

When in April of last year, the photo hosting service SmugMug acquired the photo-hosting service Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary, SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill said he was committed to breathing new life into the service, calling it “core to the entire fabric of the Internet.” MacAskill didn’t reveal at the time how much SmugMug

Scott Wolfe, chief executive officer of the New Orleans-based money management and payment startup for contractors in the construction industry, always thought he’d be in the grocery business. His family owned a number of grocery stores around New Orleans and he was readying himself to go into the family business when Hurricane Katrina hit. As

As the number of privately held companies continues to grow — and privately held companies stay private longer than ever — public market shareholders who’d earlier benefited from the growth of companies like Google and Amazon are missing out, fears the Securities & Exchange Commission. Toward that end, the agency today proposed amendments to the

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the grey space in between. Today we’re exploring the 2019 IPO cohort from a capital-in perspective. How much did tech companies going public in 2019 raise before they went public, and what impact that did that have on their valuation

The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut

TrialJectory, which is developing a new technology service to match cancer patients with clinical trials, has raised $2.7 million to finance its continued growth. Led by Contour Venture Partners, the new financing will be used to accelerate TrialJectory’s operations by adding more clinical trials for different cancer types and expanding the company’s outreach to caregivers,

Singapore’s fashion startup Zilingo has acquired Sri Lanka’s SaaS startup nCinga in a $15.5 cash and stock deal, the two said today. nCinga, founded in 2013, offers an IoT platform to enable real-time production monitoring on factory floors and data analytics tools. Its acquisition is one of Sri Lanka’s largest tech exits in recent times,

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the grey space in between. Today we’re digging into unicorns: how many will find an exit through an acquisition (selling themselves to a larger company) or an IPO (starting to trade as a public company) before the market turns? When

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. This week, we are looking at how WeWork’s largest rival in China — UCommune — is pulling ahead with its initial public offering and GitHub’s

Listen. Spotify’s tired of screwing around here. The company spent a lot of money on podcasts. Like, a lot, a lot. And it really needs you to start listening to things, because it’s almost certainly going to spend even more in the coming years. I mean, music is good, too, don’t get it wrong, but

Volkswagen Group and Qatar have agreed to develop a public transit system of autonomous shuttles and buses by 2022 for the capital city of Doha. The agreement signed Saturday by VW Group and the Qatar Investment Authority is an expansive project that will involve four brands under VW Group, including Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Scania, its

Recently released documents revealed the FBI has for years secretly demanded vast amounts of Americans’ consumer and financial information from the largest U.S. credit agencies. The FBI regularly uses these legal powers — known as national security letters — to compel credit giants to turn over non-content information, such as records of purchases and locations,

Amazon Alexa can now play podcasts from Apple, making Amazon’s line of Echo devices the first third-party clients to support the Apple Podcasts service without using AirPlay. Before, this level of support was limited to Apple’s HomePod. According to Amazon, the addition brings to Alexa devices Apple’s library of more than 800,000 podcasts. It also

Andy Dunn, the founder of menswear site Bonobos which sold to Walmart in 2017 for $310 million, is now parting ways with the retail giant. The executive, who joined Walmart as SVP of digital consumer brands at the time of the acquisition, officially announced his departure in a LinkedIn post titled “A Love Letter to

Reliance Industries, one of India’s largest industrial houses, has acquired a majority stake in NowFloats, an Indian startup that helps businesses and individuals build online presence without any web developing skills. In a regulatory filing on Thursday, Reliance Strategic Business Ventures Limited said (PDF) it has acquired an 85% stake in NowFloats for 1.4 billion Indian