Myneral.me wins the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech

It’s been a long night at VivaTech. The building hosted a very special competition — the TechCrunch Hackathon in Paris. Hundreds of engineers and designers got together to come up with something cool, something neat, something awesome. The only condition was that they only had 36 hours to work on their projects. Some of them were participating in our event for the first time, while others were regulars. Some of them slept on the floor in a corner, while others drank too much Red Bull. We could all feel the excitement in the air when the 64 teams...

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Startups Weekly: There’s an alternative to raising VC and it’s called revenue-based financing

Revenue-based financing is on the rise, at least according to Lighter Capital, a firm that doles out entrepreneur-friendly debt capital. What exactly is RBF you ask? It’s a relatively new form of funding for tech companies that are posting monthly recurring revenue. Here’s how Lighter Capital, which completed 500 RBF deals in 2018, explains it: “It’s an alternative funding model that mixes some aspects of debt and equity. Most RBF is technically structured as a loan. However, RBF investors’ returns are tied directly to the startup’s performance,...

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Starbucks’ Chinese nemesis surges 20% in public debut

Shares of Luckin Coffee jumped 20% in its first day of trading on the Nasdaq stock market. After opening at $17.00, shares of the Chinese Starbucks competitor climbed as high as $25.96, or more than 50%, before settling back down to $20.38 at the market’s close. The company has a market cap north of $5 billion after its first day of trading. The brick-and-mortar coffee chain has achieved major success in China by offering speedy delivery services to Chinese consumers. The company has nearly 2,400 stores compared to Starbucks’ 3,500, but it has...

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DNA Script picks up $38.5 million to make DNA production faster and simpler

DNA Script has raised $38.5 million in new financing to commercialize a process that it claims is the first big leap forward in manufacturing genetic material. The revolution in synthetic biology that’s reshaping industries from medicine to agriculture rests on three, equally important pillars. They include: analytics — the ability to map the genome and understand the function of different genes; synthesis — the ability to manufacture DNA to achieve certain functions; and gene editing — the CRISPR-based technologies that allow for the addition...

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Credder offers Rotten Tomatoes-style ratings for the news

In an age of online misinformation and clickbait, how do you know whether a publication is trustworthy? Startup Credder is trying to solve this problem with reviews from both journalists and regular readers. These reviews are then aggregated into an overall credibility score (or rather, scores, since the journalist and reader ratings are calculated separately). So when you encounter an article from a new publication, you can check their scores on Credder to get a sense of how credible they are. Co-founder and CEO Chase Palmieri compared the...

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Under the hood on Zoom’s IPO, with founder and CEO Eric Yuan

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, TechCrunch’s Kate Clark sat down with Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of video communications startup Zoom, to go behind the curtain on the company’s recent IPO process and its path to the public markets. Since hitting the trading desks just a few weeks ago, Zoom stock is up over 30%. But the Zoom’s path to becoming a Silicon Valley and Wall Street darling was anything but easy. Eric tells Kate how...

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Fastly pops in public offering showing that there’s still money for tech IPOs

Shares of Fastly, the service that’s used by websites to ensure that they can load faster, have popped in its first hours of trading. The company, which priced its public offering at around $16 — the top of the estimated range for its public offering — have risen more than 50% since their debut on public markets to trade at $25.01. It’s a sharp contrast to the public offering last week from Uber, which is only just now scratching back to its initial offering price after a week of trading underwater, and an indicator that there’s still some open...

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Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann is coming to Disrupt SF

It’s a busy time for Postmates — the logistics and delivery company is prepping for its IPO on the back of a fresh $100 million raise in February. However, founder and CEO Bastian Lehmann is still carving some time out of his schedule to join us at Disrupt SF in October. Before Postmates, Lehmann cofounded Curated.by, a real-time tweet curation platform based out of London. The German native founded Postmates in March 2011 and turned the brand into a household name. The logistics and food delivery market is clearly growing, particularly when you...

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At this point, SoftBank Group is really just its Vision Fund

{rss:content:encoded} At this point, SoftBank Group is really just its Vision Fund https://tcrn.ch/2LSuHZ9 http://bit.ly/2VvER1B May 17, 2019 at 06:19PM Last week, SoftBank Group Corp. — Masayoshi Son’s holding company for his rapidly expanding collection of businesses — reported its fiscal year financials. There were some major headlines that came out of the news, including that the company’s Vision Fund appears to be doing quite well and that SoftBank intends to increase its stake in Yahoo Japan. Now that the dust has settled a bit, I wanted...

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China’s Luckin Coffee raises up to $651M in upsized US IPO

Another week, another cash-burning tech IPO in the U.S. Following on from Uber’s high-profile listing, ambitious Chinese startup Luckin Coffee has raised up to $650.8 million on the Nasdaq after it priced its shares at $17. Despite concern at its high losses and little chance of near-term profitability, Luckin seems to have been greeted positively by investors. The company priced its shares at the top of its $15-$17 range and it upsized the share offering to 33 million, three million more than previously planned. That gives Luckin an initial net...

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The state of the smartphone

{rss:content:encoded} The state of the smartphone https://tcrn.ch/2M0JxwC https://tcrn.ch/30qlgU5 May 17, 2019 at 04:01PM Earlier this month, Canalys used the word “freefall” to describe its latest reporting. Global shipments fell 6.8% year over year. At 313.9 million, they were at their lowest level in nearly half a decade. Of the major players, Apple was easily the hardest hit, falling 23.2% year over year. The firm says that’s the “largest single-quarter decline in the history of the iPhone.” And it’s not an anomaly, either. It’s part of a continued...

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Minecraft Earth makes the whole real world your very own blocky realm

{rss:content:encoded} Minecraft Earth makes the whole real world your very own blocky realm https://tcrn.ch/2VP2LKx https://tcrn.ch/2YzAAfu May 17, 2019 at 03:01PM When your game tops a hundred million players, your thoughts naturally turn to doubling that number. That’s the case with the creators, or rather stewards, of Minecraft at Microsoft, where the game has become a product category unto itself. And now it is making its biggest leap yet — to a real-world augmented reality game in the vein of Pokemon GO, called Minecraft Earth. Announced today...

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Health[at]Scale lands $16M Series A to bring machine learning to healthcare

Health[at]Scale, a startup with founders who have both medical and engineering expertise, wants to bring machine learning to bear on healthcare treatment options to produce outcomes with better results and less aftercare. Today the company announced a $16 million Series A. Optum, which is part of the UnitedHealth Group, was the sole investor . Today, when people looks at treatment options, they may look at a particular surgeon or hospital, or simply what the insurance company will cover, but they typically lack the data to make truly informed decisions....

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Tutor House, the UK-based tutoring platform, scores £2M from Fuel Ventures

Tutor House, a U.K.-based startup that operates a marketplace to let parents find an online or in-person tutor for their children, has raises £2 million in funding. Backing the round, the first for the young company, is Fuel Ventures, the London-based VC and startup builder set up by Mark Pearson of MyVoucherCodes fame. Fuel Ventures recently closed its third fund of £20 million to continue investing in early-stage B2B and B2C marketplaces, platforms and SaaS. Founded by Ex-teacher Alex Dyer in 2012 — and self-funded until now — Tutor House connects...

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Macron defends his startup-friendly policies

For the third year as president, France’s president Emmanuel Macron talked to the French tech ecosystem at VivaTech in Paris. This time, he used this opportunity to defend his policies so far and say that tech startups have nearly everything they need to succeed Frichti’s Julia Bijaoui, TransferWise’s Flora Coleman, OpenClassrooms’ Pierre Dubuc, Vinted’s Thomas Plantenga and UiPath’s Daniel Dines shared the stage with Macron and each asked one question about funding, European regulation, talent, the digital single market, etc. Just like last year,...

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Asus’ $499 ZenFone 6 has a flip-up camera and a giant battery

{rss:content:encoded} Asus’ $499 ZenFone 6 has a flip-up camera and a giant battery https://tcrn.ch/2WNRExN http://bit.ly/2HnHoa6 May 17, 2019 at 12:33AM Premium smartphone manufacturers have moved the needle on pricing, but 2019 may well go down as a kind of golden age for budget flagships. Apple, Google and Samsung are all in that business now, and OnePlus has once again shown the world how to offer more for less. And then there’s the new Zenfone. It’s a bit of an understatement to suggest that Asus has had trouble breaking into the smartphone...

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Retail Zipline raises $9.6M from Emergence and Serena Williams

Retail Zipline, a startup aiming to improve communication between retail stores and corporate decision makers , announced today that it has raised $9.6 million in Series A funding. CEO Melissa Wong previously worked in corporate communications for Old Navy, where she said she saw “such a disconnect between what was decided in headquarters and what was decided in stores.” For example, management might decide on a big marketing push to sell any remaining Mother’s Day-related items after the holiday has passed, but then “the stores wouldn’t do it.” “The...

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A year after outcry, carriers are finally stopping sale of location data, letters to FCC show

{rss:content:encoded} A year after outcry, carriers are finally stopping sale of location data, letters to FCC show https://tcrn.ch/2Yxgkec http://bit.ly/2VxM8Ot May 16, 2019 at 10:40PM Reports emerged a year ago that all the major cellular carriers in the U.S. were selling location data to third party companies, which in turn sold them to pretty much anyone willing to pay. New letters published by the FCC show that despite a year of scrutiny and anger, the carriers have only recently put to end this practice. We already knew that the carriers,...

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