The President of the United States of America kicked off the morning with a series of tweets criticizing one of the country’s largest corporations for alleged ties to election tampering and China’s military. In a thread that would have been regarded as a remarkable occurrence under any other administration, Donald J. Trump called out Google

Carro, an automotive marketplace and car financing startup based in Singapore, said it has raised $30 million to extend and close its $90 million Series B financing round and acquired Indonesia-based marketplace Jualo as it looks to further scale its business in Southeast Asia. The Series B round, for which Carro raised $60 million last

Wear OS’s struggles have not been the result of a lack of trying from all parties. Google’s been trying in earnest to break into the wearables game for several years, and in spite of some high profile hardware partners, the company has failed to make a dent. At this point it’s honestly tough to get

A $28 million financing has made SmartNews, an AI-powered news aggregation app, a unicorn. Japan Post Capital has led the Series E round, which brings the company’s total investment to $116 million and pushes its valuation to $1.1 billion. Existing investors in SmartNews include Development Bank of Japan, SMBC Venture Capital and Japan Co-Invest L.P.

Roblox is big. Bigger than Minecraft big. The massively multiple online title has been around since 2006, but the game has been achieving a crazy amount of momentum of late. On Friday, it announced via blog post that it’s grown past 100 million monthly active users, pushing past Minecraft, which is currently in the (still

“Years and Years” is an unusual show. It’s a co-production of HBO and the BBC, and in the course of six hourlong episodes, it covers a span of more than 10 years in our near future. During that time, we see the rise of a terrifying Trump-style politician in the United Kingdom named Vivian Rook

Amazon has tweaked the settings for its Alexa voice AI to allow users to opt out of their voice recordings being manually reviewed by the company’s human workers. The policy shift took effect Friday, according to Bloomberg, which reports that Alexa users will now find an option in the settings menu of the Alexa smartphone

MaC Ventures, the new Los Angeles-based investment firm formed from the merger of Cross Culture Ventures and M Ventures, has quietly started deploying capital from its fund. One of the firm’s first disclosed investments is Edge Delta, which announced a $3 million seed round earlier this week. The Seattle-based company, which has a tool to

Late last week, the DOJ green lit T-Mobile and Sprint’s $26 billion deal to become nation’s number three carrier. The deal isn’t officially official just yet, with some prominent opposition facing the merger. A growing list of attorneys general have sued to block the merger, and other big name just came on board. With the

While you’d be hard pressed to find any startup not brimming with confidence over the disruptive idea they’re chasing, it’s not often you come across a young company as calmly convinced it’s engineering the future as Dasha AI. The team is building a platform for designing human-like voice interactions to automate business processes. Put simply,

In an amazingly quick turn-around for a deal of this scope, Salesforce announced today that it has closed the $15.7 billion Tableau deal announced in June. The deal is by far the biggest acquisition in Salesforce history, a company known for being highly acquisitive. A deal of this size usually faces a high level of

Fitbit continued solid device growth for Q2, up 31%, year over year, representing a 5% bump in revenue. From that angle, the company’s long-term turnaround appears to be on track — but things weren’t all cheery this time out. Notably, the company’s stock is down in after-hours trading after it lowered guidance for annual revenue.

An exposed database at automotive giant Honda allowed anyone to see which systems on its network were vulnerable to unpatched security flaws, potentially giving hackers insider knowledge of the company’s weak points. The server contained 134 million rows of employee systems data from the company’s endpoint security service, containing technical details of each computer and

A serious crash by a delivery drone in Switzerland have grounded the fleet and put a partnership on ice. Within a stone’s throw of a school, the incident raised grim possibilities for the possibilities of catastrophic failure of payload-bearing autonomous aerial vehicles. The drones were operated by Matternet as part of a partnership with the

NakedPoppy co-founders Jaleh Bisharat and Kimberly Shenk are an impressive duo. Bisharat, the startup’s chief executive officer, is a commanding presence and a bona fide marketing savant. The perfect compliment to Shenk, a reticent and data-focused chief product officer. Together they’re building a cosmetics startup, NakedPoppy, where people can purchase high-quality “clean” makeup, or sustainable,

Capital One was hacked, the company has disclosed. The breach was first discovered on July 19th. A notice about the data breach is currently being broadcast from the company’s home page. Here’s what we know so far: Capital One believes the breach exposed credit card application data for those who’d applied between 2005 and 2019.

Europe’s top court has made a ruling that could affect scores of websites that embed the Facebook ‘Like’ button and receive visitors from the region. The ruling by the Court of Justice of the EU states such sites are jointly responsible for the initial data processing — and must either obtain informed consent from site

Ryan Craig Contributor More posts by this contributor Existential education error: Failing to train students on software Facebook is going back to college The future of work is so uncertain that perhaps the only possible job security exists for the person who can credibly claim to be an expert on the future of work. Nevertheless,

Hello, weekenders. This is Week-in-Review, where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure. Last week, I talked about how services like Instagram had moved beyond letting

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is looking for pitches on how to enhance and augment traditional creative arts through immersive technologies. Through a partnership with Microsoft the foundation is offering a share of a $750,00 pool of cash and the option of technical support from Microsoft, including mentoring in mixed-reality technologies and

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I noted some challenges plaguing mental health tech startups. Before that, I wrote about Zoom and Superhuman’s PR disasters. Remember, you

Earlier this month, TechCrunch held its annual Mobility Sessions event, where leading mobility-focused auto companies, startups, executives and thought leaders joined us to discuss all things autonomous vehicle technology, micromobility and electric vehicles. Extra Crunch is offering members access to full transcripts of key panels and conversations from the event, such as Megan Rose Dickey‘s

A new chapter is opening up for Monotype, the font and imaging technology specialist that is associated with some of the more iconic evolutions in typefaces in the digital age (if you know Times New Roman or Arial, you know Monotype) . Today, the company announced that private equity house HGGC is acquiring it for

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today released the first volume of its bipartisan investigation into Russia’s attempts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections. Helmed by Select Committee Chairman Richard Burr, the Republican from North Carolina, and Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner, who serves as vice chairman, the committee’s report, “Russian Efforts Against Election

Months of tit-for-tat trade negotiations between China and the United States have damaged cross-border investment interest between the superpowers, especially in areas that involve deep technology and intellectual property. But one sector has so far stayed relatively intact: lifestyle. That’s what got Per Welinder, the legendary skateboarder-turned-entrepreneur who recently moved into venture investing, to look

The FTC just announced the details of its settlement agreement with Facebook over years of privacy practices in violation of a previous order. To say the settlement is favorable to Facebook, even with the record $5 billion penalty, is an understatement; the company’s lawyers are probably popping champagne right about now. Here’s why. 1. $5

Tile — the company that makes popular small square-shaped tags and other technology to help people keep track of physical belongings like keys and bags — has made more recent moves to link up with chipmakers, helping it expand to wireless headsets and other electronic and other connected items as part of a wider smart home strategy.

WeWork chief executive officer Adam Neumann is already rich, but soon all of the early employees and investors of the co-working giant will be too. The business, now known as The We Company, has accelerated its plans to go public, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. WeWork is expected to unveil

Since co-founding Heap, CEO Matin Movassate has been saying that he wants to take on the analytics incumbents. Today, he’s got more money to fund that challenge, with the announcement that Heap has raised $55 million in Series C funding. Movassate (pictured above) previously worked as a product manager at Facebook, and I interviewed him after

Weed may be legal in California, but the black market is still the top spot for buyers looking for bud on a budget. Flower Co. graduated from Y Combinator’s latest class on the promise that they could cut customers better deals by focusing on partnering with growers directly to create their own house brands while