TechCrunch Startup News

Step aside, Allbirds. Atoms come in quarter sizes you can mix-and-match. Emerging from stealth today in a TechCrunch exclusive, this shoe startup’s obsession with satisfaction allowed it to replace my Nikes. I’ve spent the last 2 months wearing Atoms every day. They’re the first sneaker classy looking enough for semi-formal occasions, but that I can comfortably walk or even hike in for hours. Lear...

Indiecade always offers a nice respite from the wall of undulating human flesh and heat that is the rest of the E3 show floor. The loose confederation of independent developers often produces compelling and bizarre gaming experiences outside of the big studio system. TendAR is the most compelling example of this out of this year’s batch. It is, simply put, a pet fish that feeds on human emotions t...

Fintech startup N26 is updating its N26 Metal product and launching it tomorrow. You might remember that the company first announced its premium card at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin in December 2017. Shortly after the conference, the card was available in early access for existing N26 Black customers. But the company had to go back to the drawing board and update the card design. N26 Metal customers...

In 2014, it seemed like pretty much anyone with a pulse and pitch deck was capable of raising huge amounts of capital from prestigious venture capital firms at sky-high valuations. Here we arefour years later and times have changed. VCs inked a little more than 3,100 deals in the last quarter of 2017, according to Crunchbase— about 500 fewer than the previous quarter. Learn more about your ad choi...

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has created a system that can see your body through walls, recreating your poses when you walk, sit, or simply stand still. It uses RF waves to sense where you are and then recreates your body as a simple stick figure. It’s called RF-Pose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For many architects, the hardest part of their job starts after they finish designing a building, when the onerous process of code compliance begins. Written to ensure the safety and accessibility of buildings, codes dictate everything from the height and depth of stairs and where railings end, to the amount of floor space in front of toilets and the height of windows. Learn more about your ad cho...

Sometimes you acquire a company for the assets and sometimes you do it for the talent. Today Workday announced it was buying Rallyteam, a San Francisco startup that helps companies keep talented employees by matching them with more challenging opportunities in-house. The companies did not share the purchase price or the number of Rallyteam employees who would be joining Workday . In this case, Wor...

The robots are here and one company, Starship Technologies, has raised $25 million to bring even more to the mainstream. This latest round of funding includes a follow-on investment from Matrix Partners and Morpheus Ventures. New investors include Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn and others. These autonomous robots can carry items, like groceries or packag...

Logtrust is now known as Devo in one of the cooler name changes I’ve seen in a long time. Whether they intended to pay homage to the late 70s band is not clear, but investors probably didn’t care, as they gave the data operations startup a bushel of money today. The company now known as Devo announced a $25 million Series C round led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from Kibo Venture...

Panda has built the next silly social feature Snapchat and Instagram will want to steal. Today the startup launches its video messaging app that fills the screen with augmented reality effects based on the words you speak. Say “Want to get pizza?” and a 3D pizza slice hovers by your mouth. Say “I wear my sunglasses at night” and suddenly you’re wearing AR shades with a moon hung above your head. L...

For the past decade, telecommunications companies around the globe have been grappling with falling average revenues per user equaling stagnant growth rates. While particularly mobile operators have enabled increasing prosperity in third-world countries, new ways of working and fueled entirely new markets, much of the wealth created has landed on the books of companies that we look upon with incre...

After a week of rumors, Microsoft today confirmed that it has acquired GitHub, the popular Git-based code sharing and collaboration service. The price of the acquisition was $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. GitHub raised $350 millionand we know that the company was valued at about $2 billionin 2015. Former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman (and now Microsoft corporate vice president) will become GitHub’s C...

America’s mayors have spent the past nine months tripping over each other to curry favor with Amazon.com in its high-profile search for a second headquarters. More quietly, however, a similar story has been playing out in startup-land. Many of the most valuable venture-backed companies are venturing outside their high-cost headquarters and setting up secondary hubs in smaller cities. Where are the...

In a delightful bit of irony BitBay, a Central European exchange, has shut down operations in Poland even as it received an invitation by the Polish government to participate in a national blockchain working group. The news, which appeared in a Tweet, states that the group will assess regulations for cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and ICOs. “Our exchange has received an invitation from the PFSA to...

Machine learning is one of those buzzwords that nearly every tech company likes to throw around nowadays — but according to Lukas Biewald, it represents a genuinely new approach to programming. “Software has eaten alot of the world, and machine learning is eating software,” Biewald said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After their long post-financial-crisis slump, European tech IPOs are starting to rebound. Tech companies raised more money on European public markets between 2015-17 (€5.3 billion) than in the previous seven years combined. With venture capital having boomed in that time, that trend is set to continue: There is a generation of well-funded, fast-growing technology companies now eyeing the public ma...

They first launched nearly a decade ago with names like Diamond Foundry, Brilliant Earth, Mia Donnaand Pure Grown Diamonds, with millions of dollars in financing and a mission to reshape the diamond industry. They were startups that were going to popularize man-made diamonds for the masses in a way that would make the industry more sustainable and wring billions of dollars from the roughly $100 bi...

Here’s where it’s cheaper to take an Uber than to own a car Ride-sharing companies have long touted the cost benefits of their platforms. Well, depending on the city, it can be cheaper on a weekly basis to take an UberX or UberPOOL than it is to own a personal car, according to Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers partner Mary Meeker’s 2018 annual internet trends report. In four of the five largest citi...

Snapchat is secretly planning the launch of its first full-fledged developer platform, currently called Snapkit. The platform’s prototypes indicate it will let other apps offer a ‘login with Snapchat’ options, use the Bitmoji avatars it acquired, and host a version of Snap’s full-featured camera software that can share back to Snapchat. Multiple sources confirm Snap Inc is currently in talks with...

At some point in the future, while riding along in a car, a kid may ask their parent about a distant time in the past when people used steering wheels and pedals to control an automobile. Of course, the full realization of the “auto” part of the word — in the form of fully autonomous automobiles — is a long way off, but there are nonetheless companies trying to build that future today. Learn more...

TechCrunch scoured all of Europe to find the most innovative and disruptive early-stage startups to launch at TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Europe 2018 at VivaTech. And today starting at 9:05 am CET on the TechCrunch homepage you can watch the pitches from the latest 15 Startup Battlefield companies. Each company will pitch for six minutes on the Pitch B stage at VivaTech, followed by a rigorous...

Fifteen companies just got off the stage at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield Europe at VivaTech in Paris. The TechCrunch team has taken feedback from our expert judges and narrowed the group down to five companies that will be competing in the finals on the VivaTech Main Stage at 6:15pm CET. (If you’re not at VivatTech, you can watch the finals live here on TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad cho...

And the winner of Startup Battlefield Europe at VivaTech is… Wingly With IOV as runner-up At the very beginning, there were 15 startups. After a morning of incredibly fierce competition, we now have a winner. Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech at VivaTech in Paris, alternating between French and English. He defended a third way to regulate tech companies, which is different from the U.S. and from China. Macron thinks Europe should have a say when it comes to regulation — and it shouldn’t be just about privacy. Of course, he defended GDPR and online privacy, but he also talked about taxes, c...

Disrupt SF is set to be the biggest tech conference that TechCrunch has ever hosted. So it only makes sense that we plan an agenda fit for the occasion. That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to announce that Ring’s Jamie Siminoff will join us on stage for a fireside chat and Jason Mars from Clinc will be demo-ing first-of-its-kind technology on the Disrupt SF stage. Learn more about your ad choices...