The German pension and insurance industry was a laggard in the world of online a few years ago, but in recent times it has quickly caught up. There’s further evidence of this trend with the news that Xpension (trading as xbAV), an online platform for pensions and life insurance, has raised €25 million in its

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. This morning brought fresh economic bad news for the U.S. economy, with over 700,000 jobs lost in the latest report, despite the window of time measured not including some of March’s worst days, and the

Hardware engineering is mostly document-based. A typical satellite might be described in several hundred thousand PDF documents, spreadsheets, simulation files and more; all potentially inconsistent between each other. This can lead to costly mistakes. NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because one engineering team used metric units while another used English units, for instance.

Most of the world — despite the canaries in the coal mine — was unprepared to cope with the coronavirus outbreak that’s now besieging us. Now, work is starting to get underway both to help manage what is going on now and better prepare us in the future. In the latest development, the UK government today

Lunar, the Nordic challenger bank that started out life as a personal finance manager app (PFM) but since acquired a full banking license last year, has extended it Series B round with an additional €20 million in funding. It brings the Series B total to €46 million, having disclosed €26 million in August last year.

As the global economy grinds to a halt, every business sector has been impacted, including the linked worlds of startups and venture capital. But how much has really changed? If you read VC Twitter, you might think that nothing has changed at all. It’s not hard to find investors who say they are still cutting

GDPR and other data protection and privacy regulations — as well as a significant (and growing) number of data breaches and exposées of companies’ privacy policies — have put a spotlight on not just on the vast troves of data that businesses and other organizations hold on us, but also how they handle it. Today,

SoftBank Group has pulled a $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares citing closing conditions not being met. The investment behemoth had been rumored to be getting cold feet when the WSJ reported last month that it was using regulatory investigations as a way to back out of its commitment to buy $3 billion in shares

When three former employees of Revolut founded Flux in 2016, the mission was clear: build a platform to bridge the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up in your bank statement or mobile banking app. Off the back of this, the young

Addionics, an Israeli/U.K. startup that is developed next-generation rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles and other applications, has raised $6 million in funding. The round is led by Next Gear Ventures, and includes a $2.5 million grant as part of the European Union’s Horizon2020 innovation competition. Founded by former Imperial College London academics, Addionics has created

Just three months after capping what was the best year for Indian startups, having raised a record $14.5 billion in 2019, they are beginning to struggle to raise new capital as prominent investors urge them to “prepare for the worst”, cut spending and warn that it could be challenging to secure additional money for the

Update: Unfortunately, we’re going to have to postpone this call. We’ll be in touch soon with the new dates. In the meantime, we have plenty of exciting calls slated and can’t wait to share them with you. Stay tuned! Stuck at home? JK! I know you are! You’re not alone. FirstMark Capital partners Rick Heitzmann,

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. This morning we’re looking at what venture capitalists got up to in the first quarter of the year and how they are really responding to the current global crisis. It’s easy to find mixed signals

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank with over 4 million account holders, is taking a number of precautionary steps to help see it through the current coronavirus downturn, including voluntary furloughs and its CEO forgoing a salary, TechCrunch understands. In an internal company-wide memo issued by co-founder and CEO Tom Blomfield, he tells the bank’s over

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. If you missed Friday’s main episode, it was a fun one so take the time if you have the minutes; we’re settling into a new hosting lineup that is shaping up to be our best ever, so we’re

The coronavirus pandemic has all but halted a lot of business activity, but today comes news of a deal that underscores how M&A is still happening in some sectors despite (not because of) everything else going on. One.com — the big hosting provider in Europe with around 1.5 million customers, itself acquired just over a

Online learning looks likely to be a key beneficiary of the social distancing and quarantine measures that are being applied around the world as countries grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic. In turn, this looks set to buoy some relative veterans of the space. To wit: Preply, a 2013-founded tutoring marketplace, is today announcing a $10

French startup Zyl has released a major update of its mobile app for iOS and Android. The app is all about finding long-forgotten memories of important life events in your photo library. Zyl scans your photo library and magically finds photos that matter. Every day, the app sends you a notification to tell you that

As part of its response to the public health emergency triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Commission has been leaning on Europe’s telcos to share aggregate location data on their users. “The Commission kick-started a discussion with mobile phone operators about the provision of aggregated and anonymised mobile phone location data,” it said today.

A coalition of grassroots UK tech initiatives has come together to co-ordinate the key groups of tech industry people supporting the UK’s response to the Coronavirus.COVID19 Tech Response (CTR) aims to co-ordinate the supply of available tech talent; work on the problems that need solving and the matching of the two. So far, they have