Ingrid Lunden
Managing Editor, Global
The Latest from Ingrid Lunden
LinkedIn rolls out focused inbox and messaging safety tools as it gets to grip with spam and scams
LinkedIn, the social platform for the working world for networking and recruitment, hasn’t been the biggest name in headlines when it comes to how social media is leveraged for spam, scams, toxi
Zoe, which went viral with its COVID-reporting app, raises $30M to track nutrition and health
Zoe, a startup founded by doctors and researchers out of London and Boston, made its name during the pandemic with a popular — dare we say viral? — self-reporting COVID-19 app. Embraced bo
CommonGround raises $25M for immersive video avatar technology that doesn’t rely on VR gear
The trials and tribulations that a giant company like Meta (née Facebook) has been facing in overcoming skepticism, creating user interest (let alone revenue) and building quality experiences for its
Cyber Monday online sales hit a record $11.3B, driven by demand, not just inflation, says Adobe
Expectations for this year’s holiday spend online were lukewarm, but initial activity — driven by deep discounts — has bucked predictions. Cyber Monday pulled in $11.3 billion in sal
Lyst, the UK fashion marketplace, is laying off 25% of staff
Lyst, the U.K. fashion e-commerce site that last year raised funding at a $700 million valuation, is the latest tech startup to rein in spending by cutting staff. TechCrunch has learned that the compa
V7 snaps up $33M to automate training data for computer vision AI models
Artificial intelligence promises to help humans carry out everyday tasks faster and quickly solve problems that they have been too big for humans to tackle. But ironically, the building that AI can ta
Black Friday 2022 e-commerce reaches record $9.12B, Thanksgiving $5.3B; BNPL and mobile are big hits
Analysts and e-commerce leaders have been predicting a muted online holiday shopping season this year, with sales in the first three weeks of November essentially flat over a year ago due to a weaker
KaiOS, the feature phone platform startup, raises a modest $3.4M to train its sights on growth in Africa
Smartphone shipments have been declining in what has been a rough year for mobile handsets, and that’s meant even more pressure on an already-precarious sliver of the mobile market: feature phon
Aura, the frame and photo startup, raises $26M as it nears 3M app users with 1M frames sold
Aura, a startup founded by early Twitter employees that makes digital frames and photo sharing apps that can also be used to update those frames, has pulled in some funding to expand its business as i
Spain’s Cobee raises $41M for an employee benefits ‘superapp’
Benefits are one of the great oxymorons of full-time employment: the name implies help and advantages, but in a lot of cases, it’s hard to know what perks and rewards you might have available to
Spot AI raises $40M to build smarter CCTV security camera tech
CCTV and other kinds of security cameras have a strong Big Brother vibe, but for many of us that may be because we don’t really understand or know how the footage they pick up ever gets used. To
Sources: Palo Alto Networks is buying Cider Security for up to $300M
Update: Palo Alto confirmed the acquisition earlier today and will merge Cider into its Prisma stack, both as we predicted in the original article. The deal is “approximately $195 million in cas
PR software giant Cision acquires Factmata, the fake news startup that pivoted to monitoring all kinds of online narratives
Fake news, and the identification and eradication of it, has long been thought of as the purview of social media platforms, where a lot of that tends to be shared. Today, one of the more ambitious tec
Linktree intros Payment Lock, paywalls creators can put around individual pieces of media
Looking for more ways to grow its revenue, Linktree knows the way to creators’ hearts and wallets: by building more tools to help them make money. Today the “link in bio” startup, wh
Yahaha raises $40M more for its user-generated, low-code immersive gaming platform
Yahaha, a Helsinki- and Shanghai-based immersive, user-generated, low-code gaming platform founded by a group of Chinese gaming vets, made a splash in January when it announced a cumulative $50 millio
After mothballing Amazon Care, Amazon reenters tele-health with Amazon Clinic, a marketplace for third-party virtual consultants
The ink is not yet dry on Amazon’s $4 billion acquisition of OneMedical, but in the meantime, the online services giant is making one more move into telehealth, and into medical services overall
Musk says orgs will soon verify affiliated accounts; Blue sign-ups and name changes will be reinstated end of this week
Twitter Blue, Twitter’s paid tier, appears to be on ice at the moment as the company tries to navigate how to control it from being abused by impersonators while still promoting it as a mass-mar
Twitter chief information security officer Lea Kissner departs
Twitter’s most senior cybersecurity staffer Lea Kissner has departed the social media giant. Kissner announced the move in a tweet on Thursday, saying they made the “hard decision” t
Ordergroove picks up $100M to grow e-commerce subscriptions as a service
Amazon has mastered the concept of subscriptions in e-commerce. Prime-based memberships, and the ability to set up recurring purchases for everyday items, have been central to how it drums up repeat b
Google and Twitter veteran maps out a Twitter alternative
Twitter’s new CEO and owner Elon Musk is rattling the cage at his social network and ruffling a lot of feathers both inside and outside of the company. But while some in the tech world describe