TechCrunch

Overview

TechCrunch is an American technology-news publication launched on 11 June 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare to cover the emerging Web 2.0 trend — the wave of new internet companies that venture capitalists kept asking Arrington to explain (ReadWrite). It grew from a personal blog obsessively profiling startups into the trade press of Silicon Valley’s startup economy, changing owners four times in twenty years — AOL in 2010, Verizon’s media division, Apollo’s Yahoo, and finally Regent LP in March 2025 — while keeping its name, its San Francisco base and its Disrupt conference (MediaPost). Its influence has always rested on a simple mechanism: a TechCrunch story could make an unknown startup legible to investors overnight, and its Startup Battlefield turned product launches into a judged public contest (ReadWrite).

From a blog to AOL — and through four owners

Arrington started TechCrunch in June 2005 because, in his own explanation from that first week, his venture-capital friends kept asking what this or that company was about and how it fitted the bigger Web 2.0 picture — and since he was trying everything out anyway, he decided to write about it (ReadWrite). Within eighteen months it had become, in contemporary coverage, the blog where startups got “pimped” and big news sometimes broke first, and Arrington a polarising figure in tech circles (Associated Press). The Associated Press reported that more than 10 million people visited its sites each month by 2010, while eWeek put its traffic at 33 million page views per month and 10 million unique visitors (Associated Press, eWeek).

On 28 September 2010, AOL announced it would buy TechCrunch and its sister sites for an undisclosed amount, with chief executive Tim Armstrong and founder Michael Arrington announcing the deal onstage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in San Francisco and signing the agreement in front of the audience (Associated Press). The deal included the flagship blog Arrington had begun in 2005, plus MobileCrunch, CrunchGear and CrunchBase, and TechCrunch remained in San Francisco, with Arrington expecting to stay for at least three years (Associated Press). A key term, eWeek reported, was that Arrington would maintain his websites’ editorial independence without interference from Armstrong or his executives, and TechCrunch became a wholly owned AOL unit (eWeek). The price was never officially disclosed; reports pegged it between $25 million and $40 million, so the frequently repeated “$25 million” is the bottom of the reported range, not a confirmed figure (eWeek).

Owner	Period	How it changed hands
Independent (Arrington/Teare)	2005–2010	Founded as a blog covering Web 2.0 startups (ReadWrite)
AOL	2010–2017	Acquired September 2010, terms undisclosed, reported $25–40m (Associated Press, eWeek)
Verizon Media (Oath)	2015–2021	Verizon acquired AOL and Yahoo and reorganised the outlets into Oath, then Verizon Media (MediaPost)
Yahoo (Apollo)	2021–2025	Verizon sold its media division to Apollo for $5 billion, renamed Yahoo (MediaPost)
Regent LP	2025–present	Yahoo sold TechCrunch to the California private-equity firm in March 2025 (MediaPost)

Between 2015 and 2017, Verizon acquired AOL and Yahoo and reorganised TechCrunch, Engadget and other outlets into a new division called Oath, and then Verizon Media (MediaPost). Verizon sold its media division in 2021 to Apollo Global Management for $5 billion, which was renamed as Yahoo (MediaPost). In March 2025, Yahoo sold TechCrunch to Regent, a California-based private-equity firm that owns dozens of companies in media, retail and manufacturing, shortly after Regent’s acquisition of Foundry, the firm behind PCWorld, Macworld and TechAdvisor (MediaPost). Editor-in-chief Connie Loizos said Yahoo decided to sell because “our DNA is simply different from the rest of its portfolio,” and TechCrunch said it had steadily regrown its readership over the past year (MediaPost).

Disrupt, Crunchbase — and the Altair interview

TechCrunch’s second business, alongside journalism, was convening the industry it covered. Its Disrupt conference, whose first edition kicked off in New York in May 2010 with a Startup Battlefield competition won by Soluto, combined keynote interviews with a judged startup launch contest (TechCrunch). CrunchBase, the database of startups, companies and people originally developed alongside TechCrunch, spun out from AOL/Verizon in September 2015, with Emergence Capital leading an investment in the newly independent company while AOL/Verizon retained a significant stake (TechCrunch). The spinout was announced onstage at Disrupt in San Francisco, when the database held about 860,000 companies and people and drew around 2 million unique visitors a month (TechCrunch).

The publication’s reach into engineering-software news is visible in its coverage of Altair Engineering’s 2017 initial public offering: Altair chief executive James Scapa told TechCrunch in an interview that “almost everybody in the tech world actually is a customer,” as Altair rounded off an offering that raised around $180 million on prior-year revenues of $313 million, up from $294 million the year before (Microwaves & RF). That single sentence is a useful measure of TechCrunch’s position by 2017: a Troy, Michigan, simulation-software firm going public chose it as the outlet to explain its customer base to the tech world (Microwaves & RF).

What this profile does not claim

• It does not state $25 million as the AOL price; the price was undisclosed, with reports giving a $25–40 million range.
• It does not assert a single launch-day history beyond ReadWrite’s 11 June 2005 date; tertiary listings giving other days were not relied on.
• It does not reproduce the original TechCrunch–Scapa interview, which was not retrieved; it cites the independent report that attests the interview took place.
• It does not state TechCrunch’s current staffing, traffic or editorial leadership after the March 2025 Regent sale, beyond MediaPost’s report of regrown readership, because those were not verified from fully-read sources.
• It does not claim Crunchbase is still part of TechCrunch; Crunchbase has been independent since its September 2015 spinout.