Munchery’s vendors claim the food delivery startup took advantage of them in its final hours, knowingly allowing them to continue making deliveries it couldn’t pay for. Earlier this week, Munchery surprised customers with an email announcing it would cease operations, effective immediately. It did not, however, notify any of its vendors of the news, according to…
Jigsaw, the cybersecurity-focused division owned by Google parent Alphabet, is now allowing political organizations in Europe to sign up for its anti-web flooding technology for free. Until now, the free-to-use technology designed to protect political campaigns and websites against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks — dubbed Project Shield — was only available to news sites and journalists,…
Microsoft’s Bing is down in China, according to users who took to social media beginning Wednesday afternoon to complain and express concerns. The Seattle-based behemoth has confirmed that its search engine is currently inaccessible in China and is “engaged to determine next steps,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch Thursday morning. Citing…
In 2019, we still don’t really know what to do about fake news. With nothing to disincentivize viral hyperpartisan headlines and other exercises in confirmation bias, online misinformation seems to run as rampant as ever. It’s a tricky problem, particularly because it’s one that requires the readers most drawn to too outrageous to be true…
Confluent, the commercial company built on top of the open source Apache Kafka project, announced a $125 million Series D round this morning on an enormous $2.5 billion valuation. The round was led by existing investor Sequoia Capital with participation from Index Ventures and Benchmark, who also participated in previous rounds. Today’s investment brings the…
China’s Xiaomi has become the latest smartphone maker to tease a folding smartphone, dropping the below video clip of its president and co-founder, Bin Lin, fondling the device on social media today. The twist is the tablet does not have a single center parting but rather two folds that divide it into three panels, with…
Did you blow enough money on Uber to get Diamond status? A lot of users are finding out tonight as Uber rolls out its rider loyalty Rewards program to San Francisco and a slew of other cities. The feature calculates how much you’ve spent on Uber and Uber Eats in the last six months awards…
Okta, the Nasdaq-listed cloud identity management company, has recruited former Charles Schwab chief marketing officer Becky Saeger to its board of directors. The latest appointment comes one month after the company named Shellye Archambeau, former chief executive officer of MetricStream, to its board. Saeger becomes Okta’s third female board member. Michelle Wilson, a former senior…
We’ve got a double dose of exciting news for you, startup fans. First, we’re thrilled to announce that investment firms August Capital, SV Angel and Uncork Capital have partnered with us for the 2nd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party at Galvanize on February 8. And second, today we released into the wild another fresh, though limited,…
Axa Venture Partners, the venture capital arm of insurance company Axa, is raising an early-stage fund. Today’s new $150 million fund (€130 million) is called AVP Early Stage II. Previously, Axa Venture Partners had raised a $110 million early-stage fund back in 2015. So far, it has invested in 40 companies, such as Hackajob, K4Connect,…
