To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 29, 2021. Between the IPO cycle and earnings it has been quite the day. And Nikola’s founder was indicted on three counts of fraud. […]

Last quarter, Chromebooks saw 275% year-over-year growth up to 12 million units. The figure isn’t quite as unwieldy for Q2, but a 75% year-over-year growth is still extremely respectable, with the category hitting 11.9 million shipments, per the latest figures from research firm, Canalys. Chromebooks joined the rest of the PC market in getting an […]

Varda Space Industries has raised a $42 million Series A to bring to manufacturing a key capability that can only be found off-world: microgravity. The eight-month-old startup is looking to establish its first manufacturing facility in space as early as 2023, and by doing so, bring back to Earth advanced products that can only be […]

Prashant Pandey Contributor Prashant Pandey is the head of engineering at Asana, a leading work management platform for teams. Prior to Asana, Prashant started and led the Bay Area team building Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service. Startups and SMBs are usually the first to adopt many SaaS products. But as these customers […]

Pinterest’s shares had popped last week when Snap posted its best quarter in four years, as investors were betting Pinterest’s image-based social app would also see a return in advertiser spending. Those expectations now appear to be correct, as Pinterest beat on earnings with second-quarter revenue of $613.2 million and earnings per share of 25 […]

Robinhood priced its public offering at $38 per share last night, the low end of its IPO range. The company was worth around $32 billion at that price. But once the U.S. consumer investing and trading app began to allow investors to trade its shares, they went down sharply, off more than 10% in the […]

Horizon Blockchain Games is — as the name implies — a company building games on the blockchain, along with tools to help others do the same. The company announced today that it has raised another $4.5M, bringing its total raised to a little over $13M. Horizon’s first game is Skyweaver, a competitive digital trading card […]

Kuldeep Singh Rajput, the founder of Boston-based Biofourmis, is imagining a future where heart failure patients go home with a prescription, a wearable sensor and an app. Today, a new FDA designation gets the company one step closer to that goal.  Founded in 2015, Biofourmis is a digital therapeutics company that develops software to “augment” […]

The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) has awarded Zūm, a startup that wants to upgrade student transportation, a five-year $150 million contract to modernize its transport service throughout the district. Zūm, which already operates its rideshare-meets-bus service in Oakland, much of Southern California, Seattle, Chicago and Dallas, will be responsible for handling day-to-day operations, […]

Indian budget hotel chain Oyo may have lost a significant portion of its business amid the pandemic, but it is inching closer to finding a new investor: Microsoft. Microsoft is in advanced stages of talks to invest in Oyo, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The size of the investment and the valuation are […]