Social Capital co-founder Chamath Palihapitiya is spinning out a company from his venture capital fund-turned-family-office, TechCrunch has learned. The new entity, temporarily dubbed CaaS (short for capital-as-a-service) Technologies, will focus on providing data-driven insights to VC firms. Data informs investment decisions at VC funds more than ever, as new technologies make way for increasingly quantitative…
Last year Shopify announced Shopify Ping, a free unified messaging platform for merchants to communicate directly with customers in a chat context. Today, it announced it’s adding support for Apple Business Chat to Shopify Ping. The real benefit to this is that users can not only use Apple’s business chat product to communicate with customers,…
WeWork announced today that it will acquire Waltz, a building access and security management startup, for an undisclosed amount. Waltz’s smartphone app and reader allows users to enter different properties with a single credential and will make it easier for WeWork’s enterprise clients, such as GE Healthcare and Microsoft, to manage their employees’ on-demand memberships…
Jonathan Keidan, the founder of Torch Capital, had already built a portfolio that included Acorns, Compass, Digital Ocean and Sweetgreen, before he raised single dollar for his inaugural venture capital fund, which just closed with $60 million. Keidan, a consummate networker who began his professional career as a manager working with acts like The Nappy…
Sick of those anxiety-inducing red dots constantly appearing on the Groups, Watch, or other tabs in your Facebook app? Well the social network may be easing up a little in its unending war for your attention. Facebook is now testing a toggle to turn off the red in-app notification dots on its homescreen. Until now…
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. iPadOS preview Brian Heater checks out the new, forked version of iOS with tablet-specific features like a richer Home Screen, support…
At its NEXTGen event in Munich, BMW today announced that it is running ahead of schedule in its efforts to offer at least 25 electrified vehicles. Previously, the German luxury car manufacturer was shooting for 2025, but it now says that it will offer these 25 vehicles by 2023. As BMW’s Klaus Fröhlich stressed at…
And we’re back! TechCrunch is returning to NYC for a Meet and Greet tomorrow at The Yard in Herald Square. It’s been a couple years since we’ve held an event in NYC and we’ve missed it. Join Managing Editor Jordan Crook, Battlefield Host and Senior Writer Anthony Ha, Head of Startup Battlefield Neesha Tambe, and…
WordPress now accounts for 34 percent of all websites globally, and today one of the key companies that helps handle the creation and management of some of those WP-hosted sites is getting a little bigger through some consolidation in the wider ecosystem. WP Engine, which works with businesses to build and manage their WordPress-hosted sites,…
Google bought Kaggle in 2017 to provide a data science community for its big data processing tools on Google Cloud. Today, the company announced a new direct integration between Kaggle and BigQuery, Google’s cloud data warehouse. More specifically, data scientists can build a model in a Kaggle Jupyter Notebook, known as Kaggle Kernels in the…
