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Theranos closes its last remaining blood-testing lab after it reportedly failed an inspection
Theranos is closing down its last remaining blood-testing facility after the lab reportedly failed a regulatory inspection, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Read More
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A new lawsuit alleges anti-aging startup Elysium Health hasn’t paid its sole supplier
Chromadex, the sole supplier of anti-aging startup Elysium Health‘s two main product ingredients pterostilbene and Nicotinamide Riboside (NR), is suing the startup for failure to make payments on those ingredients and for breach of a trademark and royalties agreement. According to a document on Chromadex’s website, dated December 29, 2016, Elysium “made… Read More
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Arizona plans to sue Theranos over faulty blood tests
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is soliciting outside legal counsel to pursue a consumer fraud lawsuit against the beleaguered blood testing startup Theranos, according to a document posted on the state’s procurement website. Brnovich has so far declined to comment on any action, but the document contends Theranos may have defrauded customers in the state and the office is… Read More
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Strange new lawsuit against longtime investor Michael Goguen gets dropped
Early last month, we told you about a bizarre new lawsuit involving longtime venture capitalist Michael Goguen, whose career at Sequoia Capital ended early last year after he was sued in a salacious breach of contract suit that accused him of sexually mistreating a woman named Amber Baptiste, then refusing to honor an elaborate financial arrangement they’d made. Baptiste and Goguen… Read More
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Theranos slashes another 41 percent of its workforce
Not a week goes by and it seems like we hear more bad news about Silicon Valley’s darling turned cautionary tale Theranos. The latest bit is a whopping 155 layoffs at the company today. The one drop blood test company once worth $9 billion took a quite the tumble from grace after an intense series of investigations from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the U.S. Food… Read More
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Lawsuit claims Snap Inc. hasn’t been honest about its pre-IPO performance metrics
Against the backdrop of an imminent public offering, one former Snap Inc. employee is claiming in a lawsuit that the company inflated its performance metrics to lure investors. Anthony Pompliano, the one-time head of Snap’s growth and user engagement team, is seeking an injunction and monetary relief after being fired just three weeks into his tenure. Mr. Pompliano, now a… Read More
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Eaze CEO steps down
Keith McCarty, founder of the well-funded pot delivery startup Eaze, is stepping down from his position as CEO. Instead, the startup’s chief product and technology officer Jim Patterson will take on the role and McCarty will remain on the board of directors “as a strategic advisor on company growth,” says a blog post on the site announcing the change of roles. McCarty… Read More
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Fading anonymous social network Yik Yak is laying off most of its employees
Yik Yak, the once universally recognized anonymous social network that virally took over college campuses back in 2014, is planning to lay off a “significant” number of employees, first noted by The Verge. The company is said to be retaining mostly engineers as it notified its team of about 50 employees earlier this morning. In a statement to TechCrunch, Tyler Droll, CEO of Yik… Read More
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What’s next for tech companies in the Brexit debate
Crowdpac’s Steve Hilton, a passionate advocate of Brexit, has few points of agreement with Daniel Korski, a former advisor to David Cameron and an organizer of the Remain campaign. But the two could agree on at least one thing — the U.K. is headed for a so-called hard Brexit that will have negative ramifications for the technology and business sectors. “My sense is that they… Read More
Latest Crunch Report
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Red carpet roundup: Silicon Valley goes Hollywood for 2017 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony
Covering a red carpet isn’t usually a skill in the repertoire of tech journalists, but it’s also not every day that you get to see Vin Diesel and Kevin Durant on the same stage as Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan and Sergey Brin. If the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is nerd prom, the Breakthrough Prize Ceremony is nerds taking over Ibiza. During the event, $24… Read More
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Snowden discusses Facebook’s fake news controversy
Facebook is facing post-election criticism that it did not do enough to weed out fake news on the platform, allowing viral false stories to spread and influencing the election result. The social network experimented with AI and human reports to cut back on fake stories during the campaign season, and announced yesterday that it will ban fake news sites from its ad network. At Fusion’s… Read More
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Contrary to reports, Grubhub CEO never called for Trump voters to resign
Emotions remain high as the country closes out its second day with a President-elect Donald Trump. Startup founders are struggling to instill confidence among employees that the culture of openness at their companies will not be affected by a President Trump. Unfortunately, some media outlets aren’t helping. Earlier this evening, Fox news published that Grubhub CEO Matt Maloney had… Read More
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Walgreens is suing Theranos for $140 million in Delaware
Walgreens has filed a lawsuit against blood analysis company Theranos. Walgreens was once Theranos’ biggest partner and the startup used several of the drugstore chain’s Arizona store locations as testing sites. However, Walgreens formally severed ties with the startup in June, citing the myriad bad test results and a federal investigation as the reason for ending the… Read More
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Oral arguments for who owns CRISPR-Cas9 start next month
The date has been set for oral arguments to begin over who owns the patent rights to the gene-editing wonder CRISPR-Cas9. Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and her colleague from the Max Planck Institute Emmanuelle Charpentier head to court on December 6th to face off against MIT’s Feng Zhang and present their argument before three US Patent and Trademark Office judges on why… Read More
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How peer-to-peer payment app Cookies imploded
Only a couple of months after the official launch, German startup Cookies announced on its blog that it is filing for bankruptcy. According to the blog post and discussions I had with multiple sources, it’s filing for bankruptcy due to an argument between the co-founders and a lack of funding. Based on what I’ve heard, there are clearly two sides to the story here. Read More
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Sheriff’s department denies surveilling Standing Rock protesters via Facebook check-ins
Like wildfire, the latest viral protest spreading across the internet involves Facebook users checking in at Standing Rock, ND en masse to “confuse” and “overwhelm” law enforcement authorities seeking to disrupt ongoing protests against the proposed path of an oil pipeline. The viral Facebook post claims that the local sheriff’s department in Morton County is… Read More
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Etsy adds Adyen as a new payment processor in wake of Worldpay outage
And they say wild west justice is no more. Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade goods, has just reached a deal with Adyen, a global payments processor, to help run its payments backend for the over 1.7 million sellers on the site. You may remember a few months ago that Worldpay, Etsy’s long-time payments processor, was party to a month long calamity that disrupted millions… Read More
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Peter Thiel will donate $1.25M to the Trump campaign, despite the latest controversies
Peter Thiel surprised Silicon Valley enough when he endorsed controversial Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump at the Republican National Convention earlier this year. Valley investors and entrepreneurs — the vast majority of whom do not support Trump — are likely to be even more taken aback by the news that Thiel has chosen this point to donate $1.25 million to his… Read More
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CRISPR loses Nobel to tiny machines
CRISPR, the gene-editing technology revolutionizing the biotech industry, has failed to take home the Nobel prize in chemistry for the second year in a row. Instead, the award went to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard L. Feringa – three men who developed the world’s smallest machines using molecular physics. Each will share equally in the 8 million Swedish kronor… Read More
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