Startups Weekly: How will we build the city of the future?

Editor’s note: Get this weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT), just subscribe here. Commercial real estate, the traditional heart of most cities, may have lost its reason to exist in the last few months. The world is about to find out what the situation is as more locations start to reopen. First up in our ongoing coverage of the topic, Connie Loizos caught up with a couple proptech investors this week for TechCrunch, who saw existing trends accelerating — with many medically focused additions. Brendan...

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The real threat of fake voices in a time of crisis

Jinyan Zang Contributor Share on Twitter Jinyan Zang is a researcher at Data Privacy Lab and a Ph.D. candidate in Government at Harvard University. Latanya Sweeney Contributor Share on Twitter Latanya Sweeney is a professor of government and technology in residence at Harvard University's Department of Government, editor-in-chief of Technology Science and the founding director of the Technology Science Initiative and the Data Privacy Lab at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. Max Weiss Contributor Max Weiss...

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This Week in Apps: Houseparty battles Messenger, Telegram drops crypto plans, Instagram Lite is gone

{rss:content:encoded} This Week in Apps: Houseparty battles Messenger, Telegram drops crypto plans, Instagram Lite is gone https://ift.tt/2ybymLG https://ift.tt/2TcLvLM May 16, 2020 at 05:06PM Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per...

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This Week in Apps: Houseparty battles Messenger, Telegram drops crypto plans, Instagram Lite is gone

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than...

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(Formerly Augean) Burro is giving a helping hand to field workers

Rather than focusing on robots that will replace human workers outright, the company has created a semi-autonomous robotic cart that saves pickers a long trip. https://ift.tt/eA8V8J (Formerly Augean) Burro is giving a helping hand to field workers https://ift.tt/2WzXv...

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Facebook to acquire Giphy in a deal reportedly worth $400 million

Facebook will acquire Giphy, the web-based animated gif search engine and platform provider, Facebook confirmed today, in a deal worth around $400 million, according to a report by Axios. Facebook said it isn’t disclosing terms of the deal. Giphy has grown to be a central source for shareable, high-engagement content, and its animated response gifs are available across Facebook’s platforms, as well as through other social apps and services on the web. Most notably, Giphy provides built-in search and sticker functions for Facebook’s Instagram,...

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Daily Crunch: Facebook is acquiring Giphy

Facebook acquires a popular GIF search engine, video game sales see major growth and Sorrentino reports promising results for a COVID-19 treatment. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 15, 2020. 1. Facebook to acquire Giphy in a deal reportedly worth $400 million Facebook will acquire Giphy, the web-based animated GIF search engine and platform provider. The company confirmed the deal but isn’t disclosing the terms; Axios reports that it’s worth around $400 million. Giphy has grown to be a central source for shareable, high-engagement content, and...

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Some investors turn to cutting fully remote checks while sheltering in place

By March 16, founder Janine Yancey was tired of playing the waiting game. After watching the stock market take yet another unprecedented nosedive due to coronavirus, she called up a potential investor. “If this isn’t going to happen, let’s call it now,” Yancey said, referring to the close of her Series A round, the first capital her culture tech company, Emtrain, would have accepted in 14 years. “At that point, I put my nose to the grindstone; I didn’t have a lot of bandwidth in engaging in conversation that wasn’t going anywhere.” She had the...

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Hypnosis for health? Investors have placed a $1.1 million bet on Mindset Health that it can work

Chris and Alex Naoumidis came to hypnotherapy through dresses. As The New York Times reported last year, the two brothers initially started their careers as startup entrepreneurs with a peer-to-peer dress-sharing app for women. The Australian natives were overcome with doubt about their ability to succeed in startupland; when apps didn’t work, their father suggested they try hypnotherapy. Those sessions led the brothers to launch Mindset Health and raise $1.1 million in funding from investors including Fifty Years, YC, Gelt VC, Giant Leap VC and...

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Building and investing in the ‘human needs economy’

Heather Hartnett Contributor Share on Twitter Heather Hartnett is general partner and CEO of Human Ventures, an early-stage venture fund and startup studio in New York City. The entrepreneurial and investor focus of the last decade has largely been centered on increased convenience and consumerism, and has encouraged companies to prioritize scaling, with little care for how it affects stakeholders, employees, consumers and even the environment. We have been talking about a shift for some time, but now more than ever, it has become obvious...

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Big VCs stacked billions in Q1 while smaller firms saw their haul shrink

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. After spending perhaps more time than we should have recently trying to figure out what’s going on with the public markets, let’s return to the private markets this morning, focusing in on venture capital itself. New data out today details how U.S.-based VCs fared in Q1 2020, giving us a window into how flush the financial class of startup land was heading into the COVID-19 era. The short answer is that big funds raised lots of...

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Alternative assets are becoming mainstream

Anthony Zhang Contributor Share on Twitter Anthony is co-founder and CEO of Vinovest, a platform for investing in fine wine. He has previously founded and sold two companies (EnvoyNow & Know Your VC), and is also a Thiel Fellow. The way we invest is changing. Technology makes investing easy and more accessible than ever. Meanwhile, Millennials and Gen Z are gravitating away from public equity investments. These changes have led to the rise of alternative assets. People are increasingly looking for new and innovative ways to approach...

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Building and investing in the ‘human needs economy’

Heather Hartnett Contributor Share on Twitter Heather Hartnett is general partner and CEO of Human Ventures, an early-stage venture fund and startup studio in New York City. The entrepreneurial and investor focus of the last decade has largely been centered on increased convenience and consumerism, and has encouraged companies to prioritize scaling, with little care for how it affects stakeholders, employees, consumers and even the environment. We have been talking about a shift for some time, but now more than ever, it has become obvious...

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What’s up with tiny checks at giant valuations?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Are you a regular Equity listener? Take our survey here! We talk about it on the show, and it’s embedded below in case you don’t want to click a link. From home once again this week, Danny, Natasha, Alex, and Chris got together to pull the show together. But unlike last week’s episode (catch up here if you are behind), this week’s show features a game that actually worked. It’s at the end, as you’ll see. But before...

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Singapore-based Intellect wants to lower barriers to mental health support in Asia

Taking care of your emotional wellbeing is as important as physical health, but in Asia, the topic is often stigmatized. Intellect, a Singapore-based startup, wants to make the idea of mental health more approachable with an app that offers self-guided exercises based on cognitive behavorial therapy techniques. The company develops consumer and enterprise versions of the app (for employers to offer as a benefit) and now has users in countries including Singapore, Indonesia, India and China. Since its beta launch earlier this year, co-founder and...

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Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green demystifies the COVID-19 consumer

“In general, the consumer has proven to be more resilient than I would have thought,” said Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, which has investments in breakout D2C stars like Glossier, Hims and Bonobos. She joined us for an Extra Crunch Live conversation to help us better understand buying habits in the COVID-19 era. With tens of millions out of work and uncertainty all around, people are spending less, but Green showed up with a healthy dose of optimism — while acknowledging that her worst-case scenario planning was wrong. Her top-line...

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Forget sourdough, these sisters are launching a starter to create authentic Asian food

For immigrants in the United States, representation can feel complex, celebrated and oftentimes a mix of the two. And that’s exactly why sister duo Vanessa and Kim Pham launched Omsom, a seed-stage food startup that sells packaged “starters” to recreate authentic Asian dishes at home. The starter contains sauce, spices and aromatics, and the co-founders say consumers can make a dish in 30 minutes or less. “As we were seeing Asian Americans claim their voices in media and in culture more broadly, we then would juxtapose it with walking down this...

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