Author: pekandesigns

Weights & Biases, a startup building development tools for machine learning, has raised $15 million in its second round of funding. The company was started by CrowdFlower founders Lukas Biewald and Chris van Pelt, along with former Google engineer Shawn Lewis. (Under its new name Figure Eight, CrowdFlower was acquired by Appen for up to […]

A new startup aims to help you get your student loans under control. Today, an app called Pillar, backed by $5.5 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins, is launching a simpler way for consumers to better understand their student loan debt — and even pay it off early. To do so, the app […]

This morning’s Moto Z4 news was good cause to go back and reassess the state of the modular phone. Three years after the line launched, the concept hasn’t exactly ignited the market — in fact there are really just a handful of scattered competitors to show for it. Essential is among the most prominent with […]

Maveron, a venture capital fund co-founded by Starbucks mastermind Howard Schultz, has closed on another $180 million to invest in early-stage consumer startups. The capital represents the firm’s seventh fundraise and largest to date. To keep the fund from reaching mammoth proportions, the firm’s general partners said they turned away more than $70 million amid […]

The FCC has officially issued this year’s Broadband Deployment Report, summarizing the extent to which the agency and industry have closed the digital divide in this country. But not everyone agrees with it: “The rosy picture the report paints about the status of broadband deployment is fundamentally at odds with reality,” said Geoffrey Starks in […]

We are very pleased to announce that the new and improved Crunchbase Unicorn Leaderboard re-launched today after nearly a year’s absence from TechCrunch. Venture investors did a lot of handwringing in the past year over rising valuations, but that did not slow the unicorn juggernaut, as 2018 outstripped all previous years in terms of the number […]

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 will start deactivating riders with low ratings Uber drivers have been able to rate their passengers before this, but those […]

Last year, Salesforce chairman Marc Benioff mentioned, perhaps for the first time, his interest in the the blockchain. It was not known at the time if he was seriously interested, or if Salesforce would indeed offer a way to use the blockchain on the Salesforce platform. Today, a little over a year later, the company […]

Most of the buzz about esports focuses on high-profile professional teams and audiences watching live streams of those professionals. What gets ignored is the entire base of amateurs wanting to compete in esports below the professional tier. This is like talking about the NBA and the value of its sponsorships and broadcast rights as if […]

Just ahead of WWDC, Apple has launched a new App Store website in the hopes of better defending itself against recent antitrust and anti-competitive accusations. The website details how Apple runs its App Store, including how apps are curated and reviewed, and what business models are available to developers. It also features a section entitled […]