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This week we look at the sad, strange death of HQ Trivia, spying app ToTok getting booted from Google Play, an enticing Apple rumor and much more.

Financial services startups raised less money in 2019 than they did in 2018 as VC firms looked to back late stage firms and focused on developing markets, a new report has revealed.

At times, it can be hard to tell exactly who “Locke & Key” was made for.

As Samsung (re)unveiled its clamshell folding phone last week, I kept seeing the same question pop up amongst my social circles: why? I was wondering the same thing myself, to be honest.

Some of Latin America’s leading venture capital investors are now backing hotel chains.

SpaceX is looking to raise around $250 million in new funding according to a new report from CNBC’s Michael Sheetz.

According to a report from Bloomberg, the Trump campaign called dibs on some of the most prized ad space online in the days leading up to the 2020 U.

The U. S.. government has shared much more information about changes to the H-1B visa program in recent weeks.

Tyler Haney, the founder and chief executive of activewear label Outdoor Voices, has stepped down, according to the Business of Fashion.

Hot Wheels will ship you a Cybertruck long before Tesla is likely to make any deliveries on their electric retro-future wheels trapezoid: The toy maker just unveiled two different RC Cybertruck models, including a 1:64 scale model at just $20 – and a much larger 1:10 scale version for $400.

A few days ago, Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein published an interesting piece digging into the world of artificial intelligence (AI) startups, and, more specifically, how those companies perform as businesses.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has been sharing a number of updates about his company’s progress on Starship this week.

The coronavirus outbreak continues to impact the tech industry, Facebook’s Libra Association signs up a new partner and short-form video service Quibi is available for pre-order.

Mangrove Capital Partners’ co-founder and CEO Mark Tluszcz is brimming with enthusiasm for what’s coming down the pipe from health tech startups.

TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics+AI brings together a wide group of the ecosystem’s leading minds on March 3 at UC Berkeley.

DSP Concepts — a startup whose Audio Weaver software is used by companies as varied as Tesla, Porsche, GoPro and Braun Audio — is announcing that it’s raised $14.

After eBay, Visa, Stripe, and other high-profile departures, the Libra Association scored a win today with the addition of Shopify.

Julian Shapiro Contributor Share on Twitter Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.

While the broader SaaS category has seen huge valuation gains in recent quarters, Dropbox has not.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Robotics and automation tools are now foundational parts of warehouses and manufacturing facilities around the world.

Autonomous air mobility company Volocopter has added to the Series C funding round it announced in September 2019.

A new industry alliance led by Alphabet’s Loon high-altitude balloon technology company and SoftBank’s HAPSMobile stratospheric glider subsidiary aims to work together on standards and tech related to deploying network connectivity using high-altitude delivery mechanisms.

The coronavirus outbreak could result in at least a 3. 3% drop — and as high as a 9% dip — in the volume of PCs that will ship globally this year, research firm Canalys reported Thursday evening in its revised projections to clients.

Tier, the European e-scooter rentals startup that operates in 55 cities across 11 countries, has topped up its funding for the second time in four months.

Electriphi, a provider of charging management and fleet monitoring software for electric vehicles, has joined the scrum of startups looking to provide services to the growing number of electric vehicle fleets in the U.

Tock, a nine-year-old, Chicago-based culinary reservation service, has never had the kind of brand-recognition that other companies in the space have enjoyed, from publicly traded OpenTable to Resy, the New York-based company that was founded in 2014 and acquired last year for undisclosed terms by American Express.

We’ve been dropping into the Australian startup scene increasingly over the years as the ecosystem has been building at an increasingly faster pace, most notably at our own TechCrunch Battlefield Australia in 2017.

Esports, video games and the innovations that enable them now occupy a central space in the cultural and commercial fabric of the tech world.

One of the questions I frequently ask startup founders is how much they’re spending on security.

Several companies rolled out electric pickups in 2019. Tesla’s Cybertruck got most of the attention, but don’t sleep on General Motors and Ford — bringing electric pickups to market is critical for the viability of electric vehicles.

Got your sights set on attending TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 on May 14 in San Jose? Spend the day with 1,000 or more like-minded founders, makers and leaders across the startup ecosystem.

Yesterday, Samsung announced that the Galaxy Flip Z sold out online.

March 2 is the planned launch date for SpaceX’s 20th ISS resupply mission, which is bringing the usual supplies and goodies, plus a payload of interesting experiments from partners and paying customers.

During the days when Snapchat’s popularity was booming, investors thought the company would become the anchor for a new Los Angeles technology scene.

Quibi, the mobile-only streaming service from Jeffrey Katzenberg, is now open for pre-orders.

Amazon may have a market cap of more than $1 trillion, but Finbarr Taylor, CEO of Y Combinator-backed startup Shogun, said the e-commerce giant is “kind of dropping the ball.

“The Mandalorian” was a pretty good show. On that most people seem to agree.

If you’ve been following cryptocurrency news for the past few months, there’s one word that keeps coming back — DeFi, also known as decentralized finance.

French cloud-hosting company Scaleway is updating its lineup of dedicated servers and giving it a new name.

A bold mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to Mars’ two moons, including a lander component for one of them, is all set to enter the development phase after the plan was submitted to the Japanese government’s science ministry this week.

Female-founded and female co-founded companies are over-indexing for unicorn status despite a lack of investment dollars.

Tesla’s Model 3 is among the top 10 choices for car buyers in 2020, according to Consumer Reports.

WarnerMedia and YouTube TV today announced a distribution deal that will bring HBO and Cinemax to the Google-owned live TV streaming service for the first time as well as, notably, WarnerMedia’s new service HBO Max, set to launch this spring.

We reported today on KidsGuard, a powerful mobile spyware. Not only is the app secretly installed on thousands of Android phones without the owners’ consent, it also left a server open and unprotected, exposing the data it siphoned off from victims’ infected devices to the internet.

A spyware app designed to “monitor everything” on a victim’s phone has been secretly installed on thousands of phones.

DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure provider targeting smaller business and younger companies, announced today that it has secured $100 million in new debt from a group of investors, bringing its 2016-era debt raise to a total of around $300 million.

Twitter is rolling out a “continue thread” button, ViacomCBS has big plans for its streaming service and Morgan Stanley acquires E-Trade.

Customer engagement platform Leanplum today announced that it has raised a $27 million extension to its 2017 $47 million Series D round.

Twitch, the Amazon-owned streaming service for gamers, is poised to surpass 40 million monthly active viewers in the U.

Google has buried a major change in legal jurisdiction for its U.

A U. S.. defense agency charged with providing information technology and communications support to the U.

Before it was worth $7. 6 billion, the original idea for Robinhood was a stock-trading social network.

Here's what the recently announced E-Trade sale and its recent financial performance can tell us about Robinhood's valuation.

CBS All Access, the streaming service now owned by ViacomCBS following the merger, is expanding.

Like practically everyone else in the mobile world, the cancellation of MWC on extremely short notice left HTC in the lurch.

ChartHop, a startup that aims to modernize and automate the organizational chart, announced a $5 million seed investment today led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has intervened to raise concerns about Google’s plan to scoop up the health and activity data of millions of Fitbit users — at a time when the company is under intense scrutiny over how extensively it tracks people online and for antitrust concerns.

Six months ago or thereabouts, a group of engineers and developers with backgrounds from the National Security Agency, Google and Amazon Web Services had an idea.

HungryPanda, a food delivery service for Chinese communities in cities around the world, announced today it has raised $20 million in funding.

It sounds like Liquid Death has won over investors with its promise to “murder your thirst” — the startup is announcing that it’s raised $9 million in Series A funding.

Hold that tweet — and add another one. Twitter is adding a new feature for mobile users to make it easier to link dispersed ‘shower thoughts’ together — and another thing styleee.

LinkedIn has cornered the market when it comes to putting your own professional profile online and using it to network for jobs, industry connections and professional development.

For global venture capitalists still on the fence about entering Africa, a first move could be co-investing with a proven fund that’s already working in the region.

After settling a patent infringement lawsuit filed against it by Peloton, fitness startup Flywheel will stop offering its At Home online classes on March 27.

Codeacademy, the New York-based online interactive platform that offers coding classes in a wide variety of programming languages, is a little like background noise; it’s been operating reliably since founder Zach Sims created the company while still a Columbia University student in 2011.

Codeacademy, the New York-based online interactive platform that offers coding classes in a wide variety of programming languages, is a little like background noise; it’s been operating reliably since founder Zach Sims created the company while still a Columbia University student in 2011.

PocketPills, which bills itself as the sole online pharmacy operating in Canada, has raised $7.

Teikametrics, a startup that helps retailers optimize their online ad spending, has raised $15 million in additional funding.

Apple banned vaping apps in November 2019. Since then, the company has said very little about its decision, leaving many companies upset and confused about its blanket prohibition.

After expressing interest in processing campus security camera footage with facial recognition software, UCLA is backing down.

The lead European Union privacy regulator for most of big tech has put out its annual report which shows another major bump in complaints filed under the bloc’s updated data protection framework, underlining the ongoing appetite EU citizens have for applying their rights.

Amid skyrocketing operating expenses, remote work has become an obsession for Bay Area founders looking to have it both ways, accessing Silicon Valley’s networks of capital and opportunity without paying steep premiums for talent.

Yellow, the accelerator program launched by Snap in 2018, has selected ten companies to join its latest cohort.

Gmail’s search is getting a significant update that will allow users to more easily narrow results to help them find a specific email.

Netflix announced today that it has acquired “Don’t Look Up,” a comedy written and directed by Adam McKay, with Jennifer Lawrence attached to star.

“Yes. ” That was Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s simple answer when I asked if he thought he’d achieved what he set out to do in his first year.

Last week at Stanford, antitrust officials from the U. S.. Department of Justice organized a day-long conference that engaged numerous venture capitalists in conversations about big tech.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Over the past twelve months, Mayven, the benefits provider focused on women’s health and family planning, has expanded its customer base to include over 100 companies and grownits telehealth services to include 1,700 providers across 20 specialties — for services like shipping breast milk, finding a doula and egg freezing, fertility treatments, surrogacy and adoption.

California-based mobility startup Zero Motorcycles has a new e-moto in its lineup — the fully-faired SR/S, unveiled today in New York.

Increased competition from competitors like Hulu and YouTube TV and even Netflix has finally taken its toll on Dish’s live TV streaming service, Sling TV.

We’re not in immediate danger of any asteroids colliding with Earth – at least not as far as anyone’s aware.

TechCrunch is returning to U. C.. Berkeley on March 3 to bring together some of the most influential minds in robotics and artificial intelligence.

With the days of desert-themed releases officially behind it, Google today announced the first developer preview of Android 11, which is now available as system images for Google’s own Pixel devices, starting with the Pixel 2.

Founders Fund, the investment firm led by its controversial co-founder Peter Thiel and partners Keith Rabois and Brian Singerman, has closed on $3 billion in new capital across two investment funds, TechCrunch confirmed.

Google Cloud today announced that its new Seoul region, its first in Korea, is now open for business.

Blue Apron considers “strategic alternatives,” Facebook experiments with different News Feed formats and Twitter buys a startup focused on the Stories format.

In the murky world of crypto and blockchain, taking disputes to a traditional court would either land both the plaintiff and the defendant in jail or confuse the court to the point of total befuddlement.

TechCrunch Sessions Mobility is gearing up to be a lit event. The one-day event, taking place May 14 in San Jose, has just added Dmitry Shevelenko, co-founder and president of an automatic repositioning startup for micromobility vehicles.

TikTok announced today the introduction of a new set of parental controls, called “Family Safety Mode,” designed to let parents set limits on their teenage children’s use of the TikTok mobile app.

The 400,000 distribution yards located in the U. S.. are critical hubs for the supply chain.

As cybercrime continues to evolve and expand, a startup that is building a business focused on endpoint security has raised a big round of funding.

Earlier today TechCrunch covered the launch of a new, $450 million cybersecurity-focused fund, the second from venture group ForgePoint Capital.

Weeks after Zomato acquired Uber’s Eats business in India, its chief local rival is bulking up some ammunition of its own.

A number of startups are taking on big banks with new apps that offer modern, mobile banking experiences, innovative features, and reduced or even zero fees.

Google today announced that it has acquired Cornerstone, a Dutch company that specializes in helping enterprise migrate their legacy workloads from mainframes to public clouds.

Microsoft announced a major update to its Dynamics 365 product line today, which correlates to the growing amount of data in the enterprise, and how to collect and understand that data to produce better customer experiences.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.