 |  | | Wednesday, February 05, 2020 • By Anthony Ha | |
Happy Wednesday Spotify makes another podcast acquisition, Andreessen Horowitz raises a $750 million fund for life sciences investments and Disney+ has gotten really big, really quickly. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 5, 2020. | | | |
| Spotify is doubling down on its podcast strategy with a big acquisition to grow its sports coverage: It announced that it’s buying The Ringer, the popular network of podcasts created and run by broadcaster Bill Simmons, with around 30 podcasts in its mix and approximately 100 million downloads per month. "The trend that we are investing in here is that radio is moving online," CEO Daniel Ek said in the earnings call today. "We have bought the next ESPN." Read more | |  | | |
| So far, the firm has only had one exit from its life science portfolio: the $65 million acquisition of Jungla by the genetics testing firm Invitae back in 2019. Read more | | | |
| On yesterday’s earnings call, Disney CEO Bob Iger said the streaming service — which launched in November — has grown to 28.6 million paying subscribers as of February 3. The company also says it plans to launch Hulu internationally next year. Read more | |  Image Credits: Patrick T. Fallon / Bloomberg / Getty Images | | |
| The Zebra joins competing startups, including Insurify ($23 million), Gabi ($27 million) and Policygenius in raising new capital this year. Alex Wilhelm looks at why venture capitalists are putting so much money into this market. Read more | | | |
| Apple’s long-running policy of not preloading third-party software onto its devices is coming up against a new piece of Russian legislation requiring every smart device to be sold with certain applications already installed. Inside the country, the policy has even been called the zakon protiv Apple, or the "law against Apple.” (Extra Crunch membership required.) Read more | |  | | |
| Following Tier Mobility's $60 million Series B late last year, the e-scooter rentals startup has been busy bolstering its C-suite. Read more | | | |
| Deliverr doesn't own a warehouse or a delivery truck, but the startup is helping e-commerce companies not named Amazon achieve Amazon-like two-day shipping. Based on its understanding of markets, the company moves goods to different parts of the country, stores them in available warehouse space and uses the warehouse's own picking systems to grab the goods. Read more | | | |
| |
Newest Jobs from Crunchboard | | | | |
| |
| |
