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Improving discovery for NFTs will amplify digital creators and marketplaces | Alexandre Robicquet | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | , my team set an ambitious goal: build the smartest recommendation platform on the market. Since then, our algorithms have empowered companies of all kinds to provide tailored product and content recommendations, all without using cookies or invasive strategies. Our algorithms are so precise, they can leverage only a few on-site actions from a consumer to predict what else they’ll like. Ostensibly, that would seem to be the happy ending. But NFTs are different. The past two years have shown us that NFTs’ , and fast. NFTs hold a tremendous amount of potential not only for buyers, but for artists as well. Yet, that potential isn’t being fully tapped. The inability to predict what NFT buyers want represents one of the main issues preventing NFTs from going mainstream and digital artists from being amplified. The challenge lies in solving the “cold start” problem for NFTs, where it’s nearly impossible for brands to provide accurate recommendations for new and anonymous users. First and foremost, shopping for NFTs isn’t like shopping for anything else we usually buy online. of new NFTs are bought and sold every week, buyers use multiple wallets, and they tend to be completely anonymous. Each of these attributes contradicts what we expect with online shopping. We expect a finite number of pairs of jeans, for instance, not a never-ending supply of choices. We tend to link one credit or debit card, and while most online consumers today are, in fact, , there’s still usually the option to let a site remember your preferences. |
As Instacart looks to cut its valuation, will it kick off a trend? | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | done making news. Earlier this week, the well-known grocery delivery unicorn . Today, Bloomberg reported that Instacart its valuation from around $39 billion to $24 billion, representing a roughly 38.5% reduction in the company’s worth. Commentary indicates that , not a decrease in the value of preferred shares sold in its last round. The nuance at play here is that are set by third parties – Carta does this work for customers, as an example – and not startups or their venture investors, resulting in a more objective price by some measures. That said, what we presume to be a newly set 409a valuation for Instacart does matter. The valuation change fits into the larger trend of the . From late-2021 highs, the public markets have slashed the value of tech companies large and small, SaaS and otherwise. Instacart, which has a number of public comps thanks to IPOs from DoorDash and Uber, lives in a world where it can directly compare its worth to floating concerns. The Exchange dug into the Instacart valuation change and has a few notes on the company’s current trajectory. The changing public market issue is only one theme at play in Instacart’s smaller valuation. The other is human talent. Let’s explore. Instacart said that it set a number of records in 2021, including order volume, gross transaction volume, revenue and gross profit. The company also has more than $1 billion in cash and equivalents in the bank, so it’s far from low on capital. Bloomberg also reported that the company saw $1.8 billion in 2021 revenues, up from prior reporting that the company was on target for $1.65 billion in top-line last year. At the higher figure, and Instacart’s new valuation, the company sports a 13.3x trailing revenue multiple. (Note that this is a more conservative metric than an ARR multiple that we calculate for pure software companies.) At the company’s prior $39 billion price tag, its 2021 revenues would have given it a far greater 21.7x multiple. Instacart is not the only grocery-delivery company that has seen its revenue multiple decline in recent months. |
HubSpot is the latest SaaS company to woo creators | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | It’s getting harder these days to get your buyer’s attention. It used to be that you paid for some ads and threw up some blog posts and you were pretty much good to go, but as these channels become less effective, SaaS companies are looking to more to reach their intended audiences. This week, to give creators some money and a platform to produce podcasts and deliver them on . The company hopes to take advantage of having access to a wider variety of content while giving the creators a way to reach a broader audience. “Breaking through in the saturated podcast market can be incredibly difficult, especially for creators who are starting from scratch,” Kieran Flanagan, SVP of Marketing at HubSpot, said announcing the news. “Through HubSpot Creators, we’re able to leverage our position as a leader in the content space to raise the profiles of emerging creators who share in our mission of helping millions of organizations grow better.” In addition to getting access to the company’s platform and potential wider reach, creators get a monthly payment that increases as the audience grows. HubSpot has created four growth stages that correspond to venture funding notions: seed and Series A, B and C. They can also get access to other resources like editors and producers as they move through this system. Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, believes the approach is a really smart move. “Embracing creators and helping them to tell their stories allows HubSpot to extend their content ecosystem but also be a part of the broader creator ecosystem. That approach can allow HubSpot to build important relationships with individuals and communities as they evolve their own content strategy into other formats and channels,” Leary told TechCrunch. HubSpot was born as an inbound marketing platform in 2006, using blogs to drive interest in a company’s products and services. While the content marketing idea has evolved, Flanagan wrote announcing the new program that the original inbound marketing idea still resonates and has increased in importance with the development of product-led growth. Another big element here is building communities — people who matter to you as a brand — around these content pieces. Flanagan said that communities create a way to drive even more interest either directly (a percentage of these people become customers) or indirectly (they at least share your content with a broader world). The company is launching the program with eight podcasts with names like “ and “ .” These podcast themes relate in some way to HubSpot’s mission as a sales and marketing platform, offering content that HubSpot hopes will drive interest in its products and services. It’s worth noting that HubSpot isn’t alone in creating programs like this. LinkedIn for creators, . But is piggybacking on these platforms the best way for creators to build an audience? What are the trade-offs? Per a non-public creator terms sheet provided to TechCrunch by a source, HubSpot will pay creators a minimum of $1,000 per month for creating their weekly podcast, regardless of how many downloads it gets. This seems like a good deal for new podcasters, since it can take a while to get an independent show to the point where it is generating that much income. Podcasters in this lowest “seed” tier are also given a one-time marketing investment of $5,000. But podcasters must give up some rights for access to this fast infusion of cash. Per HubSpot’s , participation in the program grants HubSpot a perpetual license to their show, including altering it and creating derivative works from it. If HubSpot deems a host unable to fulfill their obligations, HubSpot reserves the right to replace them. Though creators remain the owners of their show, HubSpot’s perpetual license makes it clear that this financial support comes with strings attached. “HubSpot respects the rights of creators, and they believe this strikes a fair balance between creators and HubSpot,” a HubSpot spokesperson told TechCrunch. “HubSpot will also consider waiving exclusivity for creators who leave the program in good standing.” LinkedIn also recently launched a similar podcast network but declined to share specifics about its creator agreement. A LinkedIn representative told TechCrunch that its podcast partners “retain complete ownership over their content,” but did not elaborate on its licensing agreement. But as more SaaS companies launch their own podcast networks, podcasters will face difficult decisions regarding the value of their creative control versus the access to funding that these programs provide. |
It’s a fintech world, and we’re just living in it | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | Hello and welcome back to , a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It was a live recording this week, which was good fun. Our co-host was off, so and teamed up with to hammer our way through the news of the week live, with friends on Hopin, Twitter Spaces, and other locations on deck to hang out and ask questions. Down a co-host or not, we tackled a whole slew of topics, including: |
Netflix buys independent game developer Boss Fight in latest gaming acquisition | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | Netflix has acquired Texas-based independent game developer Boss Fight Entertainment, the company announced in a The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The deal, which marks Netflix’s third acquisition of a gaming company, is part of the streaming service’s ongoing push toward gaming. Boss Fight was founded in 2013 by former Zynga Dallas and Ensemble Studios employees. Netflix says the studio’s experience with building games across genres will help accelerate its ability to provide Netflix users with more titles. The Boss Fight team will continue to operate out of their current studios in Dallas, Austin and Seattle. “Boss Fight’s mission is to bring simple, beautiful, and fun game experiences to our players wherever they want to play,” said Boss Fight Entertainment founders David Rippy, Bill Jackson and Scott Winsett, in a statement. “Netflix’s commitment to offer ad-free games as part of members’ subscriptions enables game developers like us to focus on creating delightful game play without worrying about monetization. We couldn’t be more excited to join Netflix at this early stage as we continue doing what we love to do while helping to shape the future of games on Netflix together.” Earlier this month, Netflix that it was acquiring Finland’s Next Games, a developer of mobile games, for a total value of €65 million ($72 million). The free-to-play mobile games publisher already has developed titles related to some of Netflix’s biggest draws, such as “Stranger Things” and “The Walking Dead.” The deal is expected to close in Q2 2022. Last September, Netflix Night School Studio, the independent game developer known for narrative-driven titles like “Oxenfree.” The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Night School executives had said that the studio would continue to work on Oxenfree II and other Night School titles. The acquisitions are part of Netflix’s bigger strategy to build out its gaming content to complement its video catalog. “We’re still in the early days of building great game experiences as part of your Netflix membership,” Amir Rahimi, the vice president of game studios at Netflix, said in a statement. “Through partnerships with developers around the world, hiring top talent, and acquisitions like this, we hope to build a world-class games studio capable of bringing a wide variety of delightful and deeply engaging original games – with no ads and no in-app purchases – to our hundreds of millions of members around the world.” Netflix has been building out its gaming service since , when the company debuted its initial lineup that included a couple of “Stranger Things”-themed titles and other casual games. Since then, Netflix has rolled out several other titles, including “Arcanium: Rise of Akhan,” “Asphalt Xtreme,” “Bowling Ballers,” “Card Blast,” “Dominoes Café, “Dungeon Dwarves,” “Hextech Mayhem: A League of Legends Story,” “Knittens,” “Krispee Street,” “Shooting Hoops,” “Teeter (Up)” and “Wonderputt Forever.” Earlier this week, the company with two games called “Shatter Remastered” and “This Is A True Story.” Netflix also its first upcoming first-person shooter title called “Into the Dead 2: Unleashed.” The company explained to investors during its Q4 earnings call that these initial gaming launches are more about setting up Netflix to better understand what consumers want from the new service. Netflix has yet to detail how well its games are performing, only saying that it has a “growing number” of both daily active and monthly active users on its gaming titles. Netflix has also hinted that it’s open to licensing larger game IP that people will recognize in the future. |
Remote-work boom powers Firstbase to $50M Series B | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | B round of funding today, led by Kleiner Perkins. TechCrunch covered , when the world’s remote work shift was fully underway. Now in a more hybrid world, with corporations large and small trying to figure out how they will balance in-office employees and staff working from home, we were curious about how Firstbase is planning for the future. The startup helps customers onboard remote staff, ensuring that new hires receive required hardware when they need it. If you changed jobs during the pandemic, you are likely aware that getting technology products out to new recruits is not always a simple process, a fact that compounds as the physical distance between corporate offices and individual workers grows. The company has widened its feature set since we last spoke. Firstbase still helps customers’ new workers pick hardware, handling shipment and retrieval and management. It added financing to its offering mix. Now, for a regular fee, Firstbase will allow customers to pay for new employee hardware and other remote-friendly office peripherals like furniture on a ratable basis. The key question for Firstbase is how it fits into a world that is partially returning to in-office work. After posting startup-grade metrics in recent quarters — including 16x revenue growth since April 2021, from a 7x customer bump over a similar time frame — will the market prove less welcoming to Firstbase’s remote-employee servicing product than before? Founder and CEO told TechCrunch that companies with hybrid workforces are using Firstbase to get hardware to in-office workers as well as those who work from their own digs. TechCrunch asked the company about its customer split between remote-first and hybrid-style companies, hoping to get a better handle on where the average company is heading. Herd said that Firstbase’s customer mix is a fairly even split, but that some putatively hybrid companies are still majority-remote. The future of work remains in flux, I’d hazard. But what Firstbase is building could fit neatly into the office world. The startup is either developing or planning warehouse capacity in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. That physical footprint allows the startup to manage its flow of devices to and from workers, limiting lag from need to delivery. During a global chip shortage, offloading critical supply chain work to a third party could prove attractive even for companies looking toward more IRL labor. TechCrunch was curious whether Firstbase has plans of becoming a mobile device management (MDM) business, in addition to its current activities. MDMs like Jamf — now — do more work on-device than around devices’ physical delivery and care. Herd said that two years ago, building MDM capabilities was a consideration. However, he said, in the interim, Firstbase learned that customers wanted it to plug into existing MDM products and HRIS (human resource information system) software systems, rather than replace those tools. If Firstbase sells enough into SMBs that lack MDM tooling, perhaps in time it could build something simple for smaller customers. Regardless, Herd said that after expecting his company to work with Series A and B-stage startups, it’s scaling up the maturity ladder to customers hiring hundreds and thousands of workers. That means six-figure deals instead of five-figure deals, he said. Private companies typically don’t share more than these generalized metrics, but in this case, they help explain the company’s recent growth rate. Firstbase is a neat combination of software, hardware and financial tech. That makes it hard to guesstimate its gross margins or other economic details. Here’s to someone leaking the deck — or the company going public as quickly as possible so that we can get a peek at the data. |
Bigblue raises $15 million for its D2C order fulfillment service | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | French startup has raised a $15 million Series A funding round. The company operates an order fulfillment platform for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. In other words, a D2C brand can outsource all things related to logistics to Bigblue so that they can focus on product and marketing. Runa Capital is leading the round, with LPV acting as the “secondary lead investor.” Existing investor Samaipata is also participating once again. The startup currently operates in three countries — France, Spain and the U.K. It has signed partnerships with five different warehouses representing over 60,000 square meters of storage space. Bigblue customers can ship their products directly to these warehouses so that they are stored and managed by Bigblue. After that, every time a customer orders something from a Bigblue client, the product is shipped to the end customer using Bigblue’s carrier network. The startup has integrations with more than 20 different carriers and can ship all across Europe — and even globally, but finding different D2C fulfillment partners in other markets might be a smarter move. Bigblue lets you customize your packaging and add flyers in the package to personalize the experience for end customers. And if there’s something wrong, customers are invited to file a return request on a branded return portal. It supports store credit as well as refunds. “With this new round we will support scaling service offerings for Bigblue’s growing base of online merchants, fuel hiring efforts, and continue to position the company as the leader in the D2C fulfillment space,” co-founder and CEO Tim Dumain said in a statement. The result is quite simple. Bigblue wants to offer an Amazon-like experience, but with a third-party logistics stack. Bigblue integrates with many different sales channels, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Wix and Magento, as well as various marketplaces on Cdiscount, Fnac and, yes, Amazon. It means that you can promise free one-day or two-day deliveries across various marketplaces. And this is key when it comes to getting picked as the main seller on a product page on an online marketplace. Customers also get branded tracking emails. The startup competes with other D2C e-commerce logistics companies, such as , and . Overall, Bigblue has managed to attract 300 customers, such as , and . The company plans to ship 4 million parcels this year. Over the next 12 months, the startup plans to hire another 100 employees and expand across Western Europe. |
Crypto giant FTX in talks to invest in Indian gaming startup MPL | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 4 | 3 | India’s Mobile Premier League, or MPL, is in talks to raise capital from a number of investors including the crypto exchange FTX as the mobile gaming startup prepares to make a web3 push, three sources familiar with the matter told me. An investment will mark a significant shift in the Bengaluru-headquartered startup’s future outlook as it gears up to expand its offerings in a new, buzzy category. MPL operates more than 60 mobile games, including some that are sports-based, card-based and fantasy. In recent weeks, it has informed some existing and new potential investors that it plans to launch play-to-earn and NFT-based games later this year, the sources said, requesting anonymity, as the deliberations are ongoing and they are not authorized to speak to the press. MPL, which counts Sequoia Capital India and RTP Global , has been looking to raise the new investment as an extension to its Series E round at a $2.5 billion valuation, one of the sources said. The terms of the investment could change, the sources cautioned. FTX did not respond to a request for comment by press time. In a statement, an MPL spokesperson said: “as a company policy, we do not comment on speculations.” MPL has amassed over 5 million monthly active “cash playing” users, it disclosed in a December investor presentation, reviewed by me. Its monthly average revenue per user stood at about $5, the presentation said. In the presentation, MPL said it was building “the game distribution platform of tomorrow,” where over 500 million tournaments are already being played each month. A handful of established startups in India are beginning to explore opportunities in the web3 space. Dream11, MPL’s chief rival in India, is looking to lead a $100 million investment in NFT startup Rario, TechCrunch reported earlier. Cricket NFT startup FanCraze, which was recently valued at $500 million in a round led by Insight Partners, plans to expand into gaming, it has said. Glance, an InMobi Group subsidiary that is backed by Google and Jio Platforms, to introduce live game shows and NFT-based incentivization to its users. The forthcoming investment in MPL would officially mark the arrival of FTX, , into the Indian startup ecosystem, where it has so far largely been involved via the means of partnerships and sponsorships. Coinbase, FTX’s rival, in contrast has invested about $150 million in Indian companies so far, including the top two local crypto exchanges, CoinSwitch Kuber and CoinDCX. The two Indian crypto exchanges compete with WazirX, which is owned by Binance. The publicly listed firm Coinbase said on Monday that it plans to expand its local team in India to 1,000 people (from 300 currently). “We are excited to tap into the dynamic Indian software talent to build out our products and will continue to invest heavily in our India hub,” wrote Coinbase co-founder and chief executive Brian Armstrong in a blog post. |
Sweep helps corporations live up to their lofty carbon promises | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | There’s coming hard out of the gates with a new company, and then there’s . The company was founded in 2020, then raised round a few months ago, following by a $73 million Series B round announced today. The company swept in with a platform for carbon emissions management. It found a sweet spot in the world of large corporates, which were foaming at the mouth to announce that they were ready to save the planet, but then were left scratching their heads, unclear on how to actually implement, track and report on their progress. The company’s co-founder and CEO Rachel Delacour , and was left with a big enough chunk of change that she didn’t need to work again. “After the acquisition, I could just stay with my kids and enjoy life and just hang out,” Delacour told me, adding that that wasn’t her style, especially after having access to a talented team and a network of potential customers and funding. “How do you look at yourself in the mirror? “Let’s use our energy and access to the right people on a global scale to try to do our part to reduce carbon emissions and just preserve what remains of climate stability.” Rachel Delacour, CEO and co-founder at Sweep. Sweep Sweep found initial success offering a carbon management platform for large enterprises, helping them build science-based and data-driven climate programs. “[Our customers] Sweep generates reports that are compliant with the various reporting protocols to make it easier for the corporations to keep an eye on the goings-on in the climate space and bring issues and challenges to the forefront. The company’s CEO is particularly excited about collective action, ensuring that everybody shares in their part of the responsibility to avert climate disaster. The platform’s network approach to carbon management helps corporations decarbonize across global supply chains, including for multinational giants like Saint Gobain and JCDecaux. In addition to Coatue, which led the round, existing investors Balderton Capital, New Wave, La Famiglia and 2050 also participated in the round. “As a growing number of companies embark on their climate commitments, they need data and science-based solutions to power them forward,” said Coatue’s founder Philippe Laffont. “We believe Sweep is the leading technology in this competitive landscape, effectively supporting sustainability efforts from measuring and target-setting to reducing and reporting. European founders have long been at the forefront of climate innovation, and Coatue is thrilled to be on this journey with Sweep.” |
EU, US agree on data transfer deal to replace defunct Privacy Shield | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 3 | 25 | The European Union has just announced reaching an agreement in principle with the U.S. on a revived trans-Atlantic data flows deal — potentially signaling an end to the that has dogged cloud services after a landmark court ruling in that struck down the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield. “We have found an agreement in principle on a new framework for trans-Atlantic data flows,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at a joint press conference with U.S. President Joe Biden today. “This will enable predictable, trustworthy data flows between the EU and the U.S., safeguarding privacy and civil liberties.” Pleased that we found an agreement in principle on a new framework for transatlantic data flows. It will enable predictable and trustworthy 🇪🇺🇺🇸 data flows, balancing security, the right to privacy and data protection. This is another step in strengthening our partnership. — Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) The legal uncertainty hanging over EU-U.S. data flows has led, in recent months, to European data protection agencies issuing orders against flows of personal data passing via products such as , Google Fonts and , among others. Facebook’s lead EU regulator also finally sent a , in a multiyear complaint related to its EU-U.S. data flows, after the company exhausted legal challenges against an . Although the social networking giant still hasn’t been ordered to suspend its EU-U.S. data flows — and may now dodge that bullet entirely if EU regulators agree to suspend data transfer enforcements now that there’s a political agreement in place with the U.S., as they did when Privacy Shield was agreed in principle, allowing a grace period of suspended enforcements during however many months are needed to secure final agreement and adopt the new EU-U.S. data flows deal. That will surely be what Meta has been hoping would happen as it sought to delay earlier enforcement. The detail of what has been agreed by the EU and U.S. in principle — and how exactly the two sides have managed to close the gap between what remain two very differently oriented legal systems — is not clear. And since the sustainability of the deal will hinge on exactly that fine detail, there is little that can be taken away from today’s announcement beyond the political gesture. The uncertainty over EU-U.S. data transfers actually extends back further than 2020. A much longer-standing predecessor agreement, called Safe Harbor, was invalidated by Europe’s top court in 2015 over the same core clash between EU privacy rights and U.S. surveillance laws. This dynamic means that any replacement deal faces the daunting prospect of fresh legal challenges to test how robust it is when it comes to ensuring that EU citizens’ rights are adequately protected when their data flows to the U.S. “We managed to balance security and the right to privacy and data protection,” von der Leyen suggested in further brief remarks during a wide-ranging press conference. She also couched the agreement reached as “balanced and effective” but provided no specifics on what has actually been decided. The White House has now released this “ ” on the transatlantic data framework agreement which sheds a little light on where the two sides have focused — noting for example that EU peoples will be able to seek redress from “a new multi-layer redress mechanism that includes an independent Data Protection Review Court” that the U.S. administration says would consist of individuals “chosen from outside the U.S. Government who would have full authority to adjudicate claims and direct remedial measures as needed”. The Commission had very similar things to say about Privacy Shield (and Safe Harbor) — until the court took a very different view, of course. So it’s important to understand that a full and final assessment does not and cannot rest with EU commissioners or their U.S. counterparts. Only the European Court of Justice can weigh in. Max Schrems, the privacy lawyer and campaigner whose name has become synonymous with striking down trans-Atlantic data transfer deals (aka Schrems I and Schrems II) was quick to sound a note of skepticism. Responding to von der Leyen’s announcement in a , he wrote: “Seems we do another Privacy Shield especially in one respect: Politics over law and fundamental rights. “This failed twice before. What we heard is another ‘patchwork’ approach but no substantial reform on the U.S. side. Let’s wait for a text but my [first] bet is it will fail again.” Seems we do another especially in one respect: Poltics over law and fundamental rights. This failed twice before. What we hear is another "patchwork" approach but no substantial reform on the US side. Let's wait for a text, but my frist bet is it will fail again. — Max Schrems 🇪🇺 (@maxschrems) Schrems famously — and correctly — . So his assessment of the text, when it emerges, will arguably have more weight than the Commission’s. Via his privacy advocacy not-for-profit, , Schrems also said he expects to be able to get any new agreement that does not meet the requirements of EU law back to the CJEU “within a matter of months” via civil litigation and preliminary injunction. “[O]nce [the final text] arrives we will analyze it in depth, together with our U.S. legal experts. If it is not in line with EU law, we or another group will likely challenge it. In the end, the Court of Justice will decide a third time. We expect this to be back at the Court within months from a final decision,” he noted in a statement, “It is regrettable that the EU and U.S. have not used this situation to come to a ‘no spy’ agreement, with baseline guarantees among like-minded democracies. Customers and businesses face more years of legal uncertainty.” Unless there is a significant change to US Surveillance law underpinning this, it is hard to see how it could survive a challenge. In that scenario, the role of the Commission lawyer before the CJEU is not an enviable one! — Gerard Rudden (@GerardARudden) The response from the tech industry to the news of another revived data transfer deal was predictably positive. Google, which along with Meta has been for the two sides to come up with a viable compromise, was quick to welcome the announcement. In a statement, a company spokesperson told us: “People want to be able to use digital services from anywhere in the world and know that their information is safe and protected when they communicate across borders. We commend the work done by the European Commission and U.S. government to agree on a new EU-U.S. framework and safeguard transatlantic data transfers.” The CCIA tech industry association, which has also lobbied hard for a replacement to Privacy Shield, welcomed today’s announcement as “good news.” Although its director, Alexandre Roure, found a little space in his response statement to express needling displeasure with — which he suggested will introduce fresh “data restrictions.” |
Crowdcube brings its equity crowdfunding platform to France | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | If you live in the U.K. or the U.S., you may already be quite familiar with equity crowdfunding. And yet, few French startups turn to their community of users to raise some new funding. Thanks to recent regulatory changes, British investment platform plans to shake things up as it is officially launching on the French market. And you may have noticed a recent crowdfunding campaign in the French tech ecosystem already. I recently covered ’s . The company wants to reimagine private banking with a comprehensive financial aggregator combined with financial recommendations. Finary also planned to raise part of its Series A from its community via Crowdcube. It makes sense, as Finary is a wealth management platform and crowdfunding rounds also represent alternative investment opportunities. And it’s been quite successful, as the startup managed to raise €2.17 million ($2.4 million at today’s exchange rate) from 983 Finary users in 21 minutes. People had the opportunity to invest anything from €10 to €5,000. On average, they invested €2,200 each to become Finary shareholders. The next French crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube will be . This is quite significant, as Qonto is one of the highest-valued French startups. The company offers business bank accounts to small and medium companies based in Europe. Earlier this year, the startup announced a $552 million Series D round (€486 million) at a $5 billion (€4.4 billion) valuation. As there might be a lot of interest for such a well-known company, Qonto is focusing on its user base in France, Italy, Spain and Germany. Qonto customers will be able to pre-register until April 19th before the official launch of the campaign. “Companies enjoy the community aspect of equity crowdfunding more than the fundraising element,” Crowdcube Country Manager France Pauline Pham told me a few weeks ago. And you can see it in Crowdcube’s track record in other countries. Some of the better-known startups that have raised money through Crowdcube include Revolut, Monzo, Citymapper, Cowboy and Freetrade. These are consumer startups with thousands or sometimes millions of users. While Crowdcube seems like the perfect match for fintech companies, the company doesn’t want to restrict its platform to trendy tech companies. “We are not just thinking about tech companies but all sorts of unlisted companies,” Pham said. |
Fintech Roundup: Goldman Sachs buys another startup, Fast hits a speed bump and BaaS gets hotter | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 4 | 3 | Add to this equation a CEO — — who is known for his “brash style” and had his share of controversy in Australia prior to starting Fast. Holland’s former startup Tow.com.au, which aimed to be “the Uber of towing,” failed in what at least one person described as a “disaster.” In February, NPR published noting that Holland’s previous venture was embroiled “in a multimillion-dollar billing dispute with the Australian state government over towing and impounding fees that led to the startup’s liquidation in 2018.” It added that “the way Holland has rewritten and polished his past raises questions about how far the envelope can be pushed before crossing ethical lines.” Also, according to NPR, as Ilya Strebulaev, a professor of finance who studies the venture capital industry at Stanford University told NPR: “Failure is not a curse. But what’s important is how the failure happened.” Notably, David George, general partner of the Growth Fund at Andreessen Horowitz, told TechCrunch: When Coinbase was first starting out and looking for a partner bank, many traditional financial institutions had blanket policies that prevented them from participating in crypto. Cross River, on the other hand, had the foresight to lean into this new frontier and support Coinbase, and many other leading crypto companies, who are still happy partners to this day. And here’s more that either my awesome colleagues wrote or that I thought were interesting but just couldn’t get to: £20 million Meanwhile, fellow fintech enthusiast Ron Shevlin in February summed it up nicely in a recent , writing that “the rise of interest in banking as a service is the result of the growing embedded finance trend.” s CTO detailed to Ron Miller . A few more compelling news items seen on TechCrunch: |
The biggest VC firms are managing a lot more moolah than you thought | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | . That’s been the collective reaction around these parts after reading a new post by business journalist Eric Newcomer, who smartly took the time to review filings for his newsletter, Newcomer, that reveal how much money some of biggest brands in venture capital are currently managing. The numbers are frankly staggering. Note that these are all firms that are structured as registered investment advisors and thus required to disclose their assets under Securities and Exchange Commission rules. The biggest surprise, , is that the four-year-old crypto investment firm disclosed that its assets under management have ballooned to $13.2 billion. Would you have guessed at that amount? We would not, though in fairness, we hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about it, either. (We do have lives to lead.) What we did know: Paradigm was formed four years ago by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and former Sequoia Capital investor Matt Huang. (Four is pretty young as these things go.) The pair, who already oversee around 50 people, recently closed their biggest fund yet with $2.5 billion late last year . . . which seemed like a lot of money when they announced this back in November — and now seems like less money. What we didn’t quite consider are the bets Paradigm has made in companies whose values have soared over the last couple of years in particular, including, naturally, Coinbase. Its market cap is currently $43 billion, but its market cap hit a whopping $85 billion when it began trading publicly in April of last year, and because it was a direct listing, investors were free to sell immediately. Paradigm happened to be the outfit’s second-biggest outside investor, with an 11.4% stake in the company, which explains a lot. It’s also an early investor in the Bahamas-based exchange FTX, which was valued at by its private investors when it last raised funding in January. But wait, there’s more. If you had to guess how much in assets Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) was managing, how much would you guess? Maybe $25 billion? You would be wrong by roughly half, as it turns out. Indeed, per the disclosures surfaced by Newcomer, the 12-year-old firm was managing $54.6 billion in assets as of disclosures made last week. That’s more than a 50% increase over the $35.8 billion it was managing when it last made a disclosure. (Newcomer doesn’t mention when this was made — we’re still looking for this one — but we’re guessing it wasn’t more than a year ago.) How did it happen? As with Paradigm, raising sizable funds has played a role, but in a16z’s case, fundraising has played a bigger role. The firm has raised a stunning $25.5 billion in capital from investors since its 2012, including via its crypto and bio practices (and that’s not including that $4.5 billion the company is for its crypto arm right now). Add into the mix its bet on Coinbase — the firm owned roughly a quarter of the exchange when it began trading publicly — and a on GitHub that turned out (especially if the firm held on to that Microsoft stock), and you start to appreciate how the firm ended up in its position. As for Sequoia Capital, this is a firm that has a long history — it’s now 50 years old — but good God does it manage a lot of money. Per the filings Newcomer uncovered, its most recent tally is $85.5 billion. Were we the last to know this? The amount puts Sequoia somewhat narrowly ahead of 23-year-old Coatue (it disclosed $72.1 billion in assets last week) but behind 19-year-old Tiger Global, which apparently has a truly jaw-dropping $124.7 billion, though these numbers appear to be Consider our hair blown back. . |
Better.com teaches us how not to downsize a company | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 4 | 3 | four months, digital mortgage lender Better.com has conducted a mass layoff not once, but twice. The company also badly botched a mass layoff not once, but twice. |
The venerable mainframe rolls on at IBM with the release of the z16 | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | When you think of mainframes, you probably have a mental picture from an old movie, with punch cards and a computer that takes up an entire large room. But the mainframe still lives, and is a viable product at . Today, it’s much sleeker and more powerful, and helps run data-intensive workloads for the world’s biggest industries, with use cases that might not be quite ready for the cloud. Today IBM unveiled the latest mainframe in its storied history, . It runs on the , which the company released last summer. The chip has been optimized to run massive workloads, processing 300 billion high-value financial transactions per day with just one millisecond of latency, according to the company. That’s for customers who have a serious need for speed with heavy volume. The primary use case the company is selling for this monster machine is real-time fraud prevention. Financial institutions in particular are the target customers, but Ric Lewis, SVP for IBM systems, says it’s for just about any company processing a lot of business-critical transactions. “It’s still banking, insurance, public sector, government, healthcare, retail — anywhere where you really have high transaction throughput, where you need security, reliability and the world’s best transaction processing,” Lewis said. That comes down to the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of the Fortune 100, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers and eight out of the top 10 telcos, which are using mainframes, according to data provided by IBM. Most of those machines come from IBM. Circa 1955, a female office worker sorts punch cards as two men talk near the console of an IBM 705 III mainframe computer, owned by the US Army, 1950s. (Photo by Getty Images/Getty Images) “What’s cool about this latest announcement is we’ve now integrated AI inferencing particularly optimized for fraud detection in real time inside the chip,” he said. The difference here is that there is usually a lag between the fraud being detected and the consumer learning about it. IBM wants to change that with the z16. “Now, that set of customers can access data [that fraud could be occurring] in real time inside the chip. It’s all enabled by our own VLSI chip called Telum that we announced last [year], but this will be the first system shipping with that chip.” Lewis says that while the cloud has been great for the industry, he believes there is a whole class of companies and applications where the cloud just isn’t a viable option, and for some percentage of those, a powerful mainframe like the z16 could be the answer. “There was a time when people would say that everything is going to end up in the cloud, and I think what you’re seeing more recently is people believing data is everywhere. It’s not all going to be in the cloud. And really the evolution of the whole compute landscape is more towards specialized infrastructure,” he said. And of course, in Lewis’ view that involves specialized hardware like his company’s z16. The company’s mainframe sales were down 6% as of its most recent earnings report, but customers might have been waiting for the technology recycle that comes with this announcement before buying any additional units. The company said that the z16 will be available for all customers on May 31st, and it could be a test of Lewis’ view that some workloads will remain in a private data center running on mainframes for some time to come. |
Gotrade, the app that lets international users buy fractions of US stocks, raises $15.5M Series A | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | , an app that lets international users buy fractional shares of U.S. stocks and ETFs, announced today it has raised $15.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Velocity Capital Fintech Ventures, with participation from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, BeeNext, Kibo Ventures, Picus Capital and returning investors LocalGlobe, Social Leverage and Raptor. The company’s last round of funding was announced in June 2021. Gotrade’s app was launched a year ago, after receiving clearance from the Labuan Financial Service Authority of Malaysia, and says it now has 500,000 users from more than 140 countries, acquired through word of mouth and customer referrals with no marketing. It has transacted about $400 million so far, across 5 million trades. The startup was founded in 2019 by Rohit Mulani, Norman Wanto and David Grant. Its app lets users buy fractional shares in NYSE and Nasdaq-traded stocks starting from $1 USD. Gotrade does not charge a commission on its trades. Instead, it monetizes by charging a 0.5% to 1.2% foreign exchange fees if users deposit funds in local currency that is converted into U.S. dollars for trading. The fee includes instant deposits, which means Gotrade users can start trading without needing to pre-fund their accounts. Gotrade is also testing a new membership tier called Gotrade Black, with premium features like candlestick charts, analyst ratings, target prices and risk measurement for $2 USD per month. Part of the capital will be used to create localized versions of the app for more markets. Co-founder and CEO Rohit Mulani told TechCrunch that the startup is currently exploring all markets in Southeast Asia. That means launching Gotrade’s app in local languages with whatever deposit methods for cash are most commonly used, including local bank transfers and e-wallets. One of Gotrade’s key markets is Indonesia, where Gotrade has launched Gotrade Indonesia. Gotrade is among several investment apps in Indonesia that have raised funding over the past year or so. These include , , and . When asked how Gotrade Indonesia differentiates from investment apps that have a fractional trading feature, like Pluang, or plan to add one, Mulani said Gotrade Indonesia’s specific focus on fractional trading enables it to power notional value trading of stocks with high share prices, like Tesla, due to its nine-decimal-place fractional share features. “At the moment, other investment apps (like Pluang) have one decimal place in terms of fractional. This means it still costs a minimum of $333 and $285 to invest in Amazon or Google respectively on those platforms. It costs a minimum of $1 on Gotrade Indonesia,” Mulani said. He added that another difference is that “unlike other investment apps offering CFDs (contract for differences), our products are fully backed by listed equities.” Since Indonesian brokers are not allowed to offer foreign securities within Indonesia, but instead have to offer derivatives of foreign securities, Gotrade partnered with Valbury Asia Futures, the Jakarta Futures Exchange and the Futures Clearing House of Indonesia, which are all overseen by Bappebti, the country’s derivatives regulator, to launch Gotrade Indonesia. This allows Gotrade Indonesia to offer a fully backed derivative to give its users market access to U.S. stocks. Funds are sent to the Futures Clearing House, and trades are made through Indonesian financial conglomerate Valbury Group and registered on the Jakarta Futures Exchange. Then trades are sent to the Alpaca Securities LLC, a FINRA licensed broker-dealer in the U.S. and executed at the National Best Bid and Offer to adhere to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s regulations. This means that when a user trades on Gotrade Indonesia, it results in a contract between them and Valbury. Valbury’s corresponding trade with Alpaca Securities creates a fully hedged position. Gotrade Indonesia says it is the first platform in Indonesia to offer this kind of market access for U.S. stocks, meaning that its users don’t have to go through a foreign stockbroker or trade CFDs locally while accumulating substantial fees. Along with the launch of Gotrade Indonesia, the company announced it has added Andrew Haryono as a co-founder. Haryono is the owner of the Valbury Group. |
Using asynchronous video interviews to improve startup recruiting | Sunny Saurabh | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | process more efficient so you can filter the best candidates from the top of the funnel is one of the biggest challenges facing hiring managers. Traditional interviews aren’t cutting it any longer, but asynchronous video interviews (AVI) are one alternative some companies are using to shortlist candidates while saving on cost and time. Instead of a real-time conversation, applicants in front of a webcam watch or listen to a video with a series of interview questions and receive a fixed amount of time to review and respond. Afterwards, their answers are reviewed by an AI, a hiring manager, or some combination of the two. Here’s how startups and small businesses are using AVIs to make the most of the hiring process and shortlist the best candidates. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is an admirable principle, but first impressions determine how an interview will play out. Even before applying for a job, first evaluate the employer’s brand, according to LinkedIn. Companies can leverage AVIs to take control of the narrative and portray themselves in the best light. To begin with, introduce your company as transparently and authentically as possible. Share your organizational culture and corporate philosophy with potential candidates — from the start, you need to know whether the candidate fits into your work environment. When you’re a startup, building credibility in the talent market is critical. Talk about your vision and the impact you have had so far, using examples and case studies wherever possible. Use the interview process to stand out out as an employer. Creating a recruitment strategy is a long, complicated process. Every detail should be examined closely before you execute, especially when incorporating new tools. Before connecting with candidates, make sure your hiring process is well structured and clear by r |
Max Q: Space goes SPAC | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | Hello and welcome back to Max Q. Welcome to all our new subscribers. For those who are new here, my inbox is always open for feedback, comments and tips at In this issue: It’s the end of a (short) era. SpaceX will no longer be making new Crew Dragons, the spacecraft that ferries humans to and from space, and will instead focus on reusing the fleet of four already in existence, . Crew Dragon is SpaceX’s , borrowing its design from the Dragon cargo capsule that’s used for resupply services to the ISS. Crew Dragon capsules have taken humans to space in five separate missions since its debut in 2020, including Inspiration4, financed by billionaire Jared Isaacman. While the company concludes production of Crew Dragon, it remains hard at work on development of the ultra-super-heavy next-generation launch system Starship. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that the company is targeting May for the first orbital flight test of the new spaceship, but the company is still awaiting key regulatory approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration before that can take place. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon on the launch pad for the Crew-3 mission. SpaceX Pixxel, a startup with offices in the United States and India, has raised $25 million in funding to launch a constellation of satellites that will provide hyperspectral coverage on demand. It aims to send up a six-satellite constellation that will be able to provide five-meter resolution over much of the Earth’s surface about every 48 hours. The money will go toward constructing and launching the satellites, as well as a software platform for customers. Founder and CEO Awais Ahmed said it would be “a generalized platform with built-in models and analysis.” The $25 million Series A was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Jordan Noone, Seraphim Space Investment Trust Plc, Lightspeed Partners, Blume Ventures and Sparta LLC. Pixxel Chad Anderson: On the heels of successfully closing $32 million for Space Capital II last month, we are continuing to actively invest. We have more amazing companies in the pipeline than I’ve ever seen — we’ve already made eight investments out of the new fund, have another investment closing this week and have a term sheet out for our next investment. And the Space Capital I portfolio is starting to show some significant gains as our portfolio hits key milestones and our seed investments graduate to Series B. With three active funds under management, we’re now supporting companies at all stages of the venture cycle, so a lot going on, and we’re having a lot of fun. Alongside a slew of mostly underwhelming earnings calls from deSPAC’d space companies last week, the SEC proposed rules to overhaul SPACs by enhancing disclosure and investor protections. The proposal would tighten rules around forward-looking projections and often unrealistic growth forecasts that SPACs have become notorious for. And companies acquired by SPACs, as well as their officers and directors, would become liable for misrepresentations or omissions in the merger documents that SPACs file. I think this is a very healthy development and I’ve been thinking about all the ways it will improve the long-term health of the category. While an orbital launch from South Texas likely won’t actually happen this week, something I’m watching closely is the progress at Starbase. I visited the production facility/test site/spaceport last week and the scale of what’s happening there is awe-inspiring. The Super Heavy first stage that SpaceX will likely use for its first Starship orbital test flight was just moved to the Orbital Launch Site, so I’m excited to see what happens next. Like many others, I’m looking forward to seeing them get their launch license and testing this thing on orbit. “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” theme song: “Now, this is a story all about how my life got flipped-turned upside down…” Check out this by Kevin Bell, a lawyer at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. He details how a whistleblower informed him of a new spacecraft thruster system that used mercury, a powerful neurotoxin that, once emitted, would eventually fall back to the Earth’s surface. It’s an illustrative case of how legal and regulatory frameworks often don’t keep up with the speed of technological development. |
Latch parts ways with CFO after difficult SPAC debut | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | Latch CFO Garth Mitchell is leaving the company less than a year after he assumed the role and led the through a special purpose acquisition vehicle, or SPAC, an accidental e-mail obtained by TechCrunch shows. The executive shakeup is still not showcased on the news portion of Latch’s website, but t Latch said that, “effective immediately,” Mitchell will be succeeded by Barry Schaeffer, senior vice president of finance at Latch. The executive shakeup continues with COO Ali Hussain, who will maintain his title but step down as “executive officer and principal operating officer.” Junji Nakamura, a senior VP at the company, will also assume a new role as chief accounting officer. “These changes are an important part of this next phase of our growth,” Luke Schoenfelder, Latch’s CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to deliver amazing experiences for our customers and increasing value for our shareholders through these changes.” Latch did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Latch’s changes come at a crucial moment for many tech companies in the public markets, after share prices fell amid a broader recovery from pandemic-induced valuation highs. TechCrunch has covered this trend since at least December of 2021. The selloff persisted into 2022, leading to a sentiment shift amongst investors regarding the value of technology companies. |
Everly Health founder discusses leading a startup through two acquisitions | Maggie Stamets | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of Found. The podcast in which we get into the stories behind the startups. This week, founder and CEO Julia Cheek is talking about taking steps to revolutionize healthcare by helping patients gain access to all kinds of medical testing and in doing so allowing providers to have the data they need to give the best care possible. and first met Julia at when she was a self-proclaimed “fish out of water.” In this episode, she talks about how she went from being a fresh first-time founder to a CEO and competent leader who has strategically acquired companies to create a holistic and vertically integrated home-testing company. Tune in to hear them chat bout: Everly Health is an Austin-based company. Don’t miss this week’s on Austin, Texas. . and let us know a bit about yourself and what you think of FOUND. Connect with us: |
Daily Crunch: Twitter stock price soars after Elon Musk acquires 9.2% stake | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | Why hello, we didn’t see you there. Welcome back to another week and an artisan, small-batch, limited-edition, locally crafted, handmade Daily Crunch for Monday, April 4, 2022! Today, we’re pretty psyched about Kirsten’s transportation newsletter, where she covers and much more. On Wednesday, we’re tuning in to Austin, Texas for our . It’s not too late to register, so, er, maybe go and do that. Finally, a reminder that everyone has their own things going on, so let’s meet this week with kindness, shall we? — and Well stir me a poke-bowl and call me Susan, it’s all happening in the land of food delivery. , and over on the Equity podcast, Alex and Mary Ann are digging into . Also, if you’re keen to rethink how you’re eating, think along with Foraged — it is making it easier for people foraging for food to sell their wares online, on what I’m fondly thinking of as a . Looking back at last week’s demo-day extravaganza; , the accelerator’s companies are trying to once and for all. In the Startups Weekly newsletter ( ), . 📰 Occupy your ocular orbs with our omnibus of observant orations: If you want to launch in the middle of a downturn, don’t be spooked. Not only is it easier to hire during a market correction, there’s less pressure to deploy blitzscaling tactics that can mask underlying problems with product and marketing. According to Andy Stines, general partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners, the current “valuation reset” isn’t a crisis — it’s an opportunity for early-stage founders. For companies in the $4 million-$5 million ARR range, a $15 million Series A might still make sense, he writes. “Conversely, if you raise a $4 million-$6 million Series A at a more modest valuation, it gets much easier to reach the goal for a 2x-2.5x valuation step up to the Series B.” |
At last, a gnat-sized affordable wireless mic set for vloggers and podcasters | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | The usually high-flying company brings its tech closer to Earth with a super-nifty pair of microphones. DJI Mic packs five hours of recording mojo into a minuscule package using a form factor we typically see for wireless earbuds. Two microphones and a receiver vanish into a nifty charging case when you’re not using them for a great on-the-go recording solution. DJI Mic claims to deliver “crystal-clear audio at long distances”, with an impressive 5.5 hours of battery life, which extends to 15 hours if you can find time for charging breaks where the units live in the charging case between takes in your shooting schedule. I’ve done oodles of on-location shoots and impromptu video conference things over the years, and I can’t tell you how long I’ve been longing for a solution exactly like this. I haven’t had a chance to test it out myself yet, but if it lives up to the hype, I can see DJI selling these kits by the boatload. The full system consists of two microphone transmitters, a receiver and a pocket-size charging case that fits easily into your bag or pocket. It works with smartphones, cameras and action cams that support a line input. The system is paired at the factory, so all you need to do is fish the various components out of the charger case, and it all pairs and is ready to go. The microphones have a clip and a magnetic plate, and the receiver has a little touch screen to give you info about volume settings, channel selection and the other settings you’d expect. The transmitters themselves weigh in at 30 grams — heavy for a lav mic, but light for a transmitter. It may be a little too chunky to stick on a lapel in practice, but if you’re wearing a reasonably sturdy jacket or sweater, it should stay in place beautifully. The real magic DJI adds here is not relying on crappy radio tech — through its drone tech, the company has learned a thing or two about long-range real-time transmission tech, and DJI claims 800-foot (250 meter) range for its microphones. That’s more than most wireless microphones, and — given that most cases that you’ll use a lav mic is less than 30 feet, it gives you plenty of wiggle room. Not gonna lie, the video nerd in me gets silly excited about this. The form factor has wireless earbuds chic written all over it. DJI Another neat feature is that each of the microphones has 8 GB of storage built in, and a USB-C socket to copy locally recorded audio off the transmitters. Boom, separate audio files to make your audio editing easier. The files are 48kHz 24-bit WAV files for maximum audio quality goodness. The receiver supports Lightning, USB-C and 3.5mm sockets, so you can plug and, er, record to your heart’s desire. The kit went on sale today with a $329 price tag. It isn’t pocket-change, but based on specs alone, I’d expect the company to see these flying off the shelves. If the reviews match the promise, they may just have a serious winner on their hands. |
Shein said to be raising $1 billion at $100 billion valuation | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | Yes, you read it correctly. The fast fashion e-commerce company that few in the tech industry had even heard of two years ago is aiming to raise $1 billion at a valuation of $100 billion. Shein’s fundraising plan was first reported by and we’ve reached out to the firm and its investors for comment. Given its growth, it should surprise no one though that investors are piling in to get a slice of this rising challenger of Zara and Amazon despite its skyrocketing valuation. Last June, the company told us that its valuation was at the “billion-dollar level” as of its last funding round in 2020. Shein is in talks with General Atlantic for this new funding round, according to Bloomberg. The company counts Tiger Global, IDG and Sequoia among its existing investors. We suggested last June that , and the numbers from 2021 are telling. According to app analytics firm , Shein was the second most downloaded shopping app in the U.S. last year after Amazon. But while Shein still enjoyed great momentum, with its installs growing 68% year over year, Amazon saw a 2.4% decline. Worldwide, Amazon was the fourth most downloaded shopping app, overtaken by Singapore’s Shopee, Shein and India’s Meesho. From its 14 years of existence (and hence it’s not really a “startup”), Shein has come up with a data-driven, supplier-supported formula to success. Its designers closely track social media influencers and runway shows to devise new pieces, a method that’s not too different from other fast fashion brands. What separates Shein is the responsiveness of its supply chain, a vast network of loyal and agile dingy workshops around Guangzhou, a major metropolitan in south China where most of its operations are. The company tests a great variety of cheap clothing in small batches, and if data shows that something is selling well, it quickly places more orders with these suppliers to sell even more. This demand-driven approach allows Shein to maintain low inventory costs. Shein also manages to reduce costs by taking advantage of customs rules. In 2016, the U.S. which allows individuals to buy import goods tax-free, from $200 to $800. The law was supposed to help small American businesses lower import tax but ended up benefiting global business-to-consumer e-commerce platforms like Shein, as a higher amount of their shipments can enter the U.S. with no duty and faster border clearance. Shein is not without challenges. The company is in the process of setting up a holding company in Singapore, and its founder Sky Xu is reportedly seeking Singapore citizenship, , to bypass China’s tightening grip over offshore listings. Xu is certainly not the only Chinese tech CEO changing citizenship to pursue foreign IPOs. At the end of last year, Beijing proposed a on overseas-listed Chinese firms, including one stipulating that a company whose main management mostly consists of Chinese nationals or executives who live in China, and its main business operating location is in China, must go through a filing process with China’s securities authority. Anecdotally, we’ve heard that some venture capital firms in China have begun offering citizenship applications as part of their post-investment service. Lastly, Shein has been under fire for its lack of supply chain transparency and potential damage to the environment. Good On You, a site that tracks brands’ sustainability practices, gives Shein a “ ” environmental rating. |
DeLorean teases its EV concept car | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | DeLorean, the automaker behind the pop culture icon gull-winged car, provided a and a debut date of an all-electric vehicle concept that aims to breathe new life into the brand. The upcoming EV concept is the latest effort of Stephen Wynne, who owns the DeLorean name and supplies parts for the 6,000 or so remaining vehicles, to revive the brand. Wynne partnered with several Texas executives who more recently were connected to Karma Automotive. DeLorean Motors Company CEO Joost de Vries formerly worked at Karma. The shows a Let’s clear things up a bit. The next generation of DeLorean is coming into focus August 18, 2022. For more information read the press release here: — DeLorean Motor Company (@deloreanmotorco) In a Linkedin Post, de Vries wrote “Yes, a teaser as it doesn’t show the whole vehicle yet, but a great shot of the rear quarter ! Looking forward to share more soon….” The new EV concept, which was first announced in a social media campaign before Super Bowl LVI, will debut during Monterey Car Week in August, the company said Monday. Along with the reveal, DeLorean will also announce the official name of the vehicle. The DeLorean EV concept will be displayed August 21 on the concept lawn at Pebble Beach during Monterey Car Week. The company said in its announcement that the “past, present, and future of DeLorean will unfold over the duration of Monterey Car Week through a series of activations and events showcasing the vehicle.” Concept is the important word here, which means its future as a vehicle that consumers can buy and drive is not clear. It could, as so many concept cars before it, end up in the figurative trash bin. Bringing the vehicle to production will take capital — and lots of it. Just ask Fisker, Rivian, Lucid and the half dozen other EV startups that have tried to develop and produce an EV. |
Activision Blizzard flip-flops on vaccination policies as employees walk out | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | It’s been a rocky time for employees at Activision Blizzard as they weather , a by Microsoft and textbook examples of . Then, last week, the gaming giant’s chief administrative officer, Brian Bulatao, sent an email to all U.S. employees mandating a June return to the office after over two years of working from home during the pandemic. “Effective immediately, we are lifting our vaccine mandate for all U.S. employees,” Bulatao wrote in the message, which was leaked by Jessica Gonzalez, a former Activision Blizzard engineer and current labor organizer for the . “This means that employees no longer need to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to return to office.” LEAKED: Brian Bulatao emailed all of ABK to talk returning to office in June. They will not be enforcing proof of vaccination. I’m sure the ‘benefits’ of in person collaboration is actually so employees organizing can be followed and monitored closely. Do not die for this company — Jessica Gonzalez 💙 is a chair 🪑 (@_TechJess) Employees voiced concern about the plan, which would make returning to work especially unsafe for immunocompromised staff. Activision Blizzard has almost 10,000 employees, though they are spread across a variety of global offices. But eliminating vaccine mandates and other tactics to reduce the spread of COVID-19 struck some workers as short-sighted and brazen. So on April 1, the ABK Workers Alliance their intent to stage a virtual walkout. Bulatao walked back his message soon after, declaring that individual studios could choose whether or not to enforce a vaccine mandate, but members of the ABK Workers Alliance felt the response was unsatisfactory. “As soon as we went live with our demands and our intention to walk out, leadership responded immediately and announced they would let individual locations enforce their own vaccination policies,” said Kate Anderson, a quality assurance tester at Activision. “This shows us the power of collective action.” At least 117 employees, including Anderson, proceeded with that planned virtual walkout today and are demanding that the company make work from home an option for all employees and reinstate the vaccine mandate for all studios that haven’t already taken this action themselves. According to a Blizzard engineer, have reinstated vaccine requirements, including . Covid is far from over. It's clear that leadership across the gaming industry does not have health and safety in mind with hasty RTO plans and reduced safety precautions. Join me in sharing photos of your home workspace if you're ! — Ada-Claire 'Malingerer' Cripps 💙🏳️⚧️ (@adaclairecripps) As Activision Blizzard navigates a tumultuous period, quality assurance testers at Raven Software — the department of Activision Blizzard that mostly works on “Call of Duty” — formed the first union at a major U.S. gaming company, the . Predictably, the company did not voluntarily the 34-member unit, meaning that they will have to hold an election through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). “We are proud to file with the NLRB as we enjoy supermajority support for our union and know that together, we will gain the formal legal recognition we have earned,” the union, working with the (CWA), said in a at the time. Anderson thinks that unionizing would help in situations like developing a return-to-office plan. “I think it’s incredibly important to consult employees when making big decisions like this, especially when it affects the health and safety of employees,” Anderson told TechCrunch. “With a union, we would be able to have a seat at the table.” Other like Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon have instituted flexible work policies, allowing employees to work from home at least a few days a week. “Many of us have been working from home effectively since 2020,” Anderson said. “We have seen other companies put in place hybrid models for remote work and in-office work and largely let their employees choose what is best for them. There is no reason ABK can’t do the same.” |
TikTok owner ByteDance accused of scraping content from Instagram and Snapchat for its older app Flipagram | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | TikTok’s parent company ByteDance made fake accounts with content taken from Instagram, Snapchat and other social media platforms and posted them on Flipagram in 2017, according to a new report today from . The report says the company took videos, usernames, pictures and more from the social media platforms and uploaded them to the app without users’ consent or knowledge. BuzzFeed News spoke with four former ByteDance employees who say the scraping began shortly after the company in January 2017. Internal documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News indicate that the scraping was seen as a “growth hack” for the company. One employee said that ByteDance’s goal was to scrape more than 10,000 videos a day. Two of the employees said that the scraping was used to train and inform ByteDance’s “For You” algorithm, which is currently used today by TikTok and its Chinese equivalent, Douyin. The employees say ByteDance was looking to train the algorithm on U.S.-based content. The report also indicates that ByteDance was scraping and uploading content from Musical.ly, which would later become TikTok once in 2017. BuzzFeed News sent ByteDance a list of the allegations along with questions, to which ByteDance responded: “ByteDance acquired Flipagram in 2017 and operated it, and subsequently Vigo, for a short time. Flipagram and Vigo ceased operations years ago and aren’t connected to any current ByteDance products.” The internal documents include references to the scraped data and reasons explaining why the company was doing so. In one document, an employee explained that the scraped content could be used to test which types of videos performed the best on the platform. The employee had also noted that current users could mimic the content to enhance their own videos and gain popularity. The former employees said that some people had noticed their social media content was being posted on Flipagram and had reached out to the company. Employees were told to either delete the fake accounts or give control of the account to the person who filed the complaint, the report claims. Flipagram was founded in 2013 and allowed users to create and share short videos as something of a TikTok pre-cursor. The practice of scraping content as a growth hack, as this report claims took place, was not unusual for services operating at the time. But it does lead to questions as to whether TikTok’s algorithms were trained using video content from competitor apps. (BuzzFeed was able to get a comment from former Flipagram CTO Brian Dilley, who denied any scraping took place.) Flipagram’s app garnered popularity among young users and at one point was considered a major threat to Instagram. But while ByteDance took many learnings from Flipagram, it ultimately chose to merge Musical.ly with TikTok and laid off the Flipagram team in February 2018. |
EV auto sales shine in first quarter of 2022 | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | Automakers’ U.S. sales for the first three months of the year may portend the arrival of the battery-electric age sooner than expected. The only brands to post sales gains were all-electric. Sales of electric vehicles soared during the first quarter of 2022, mostly due to the debut of new nameplates. Meanwhile, the overall industry reported a 15.3% decline in new vehicle sales, to 2,516,236 units, according to figures from the Autodata Corp. Tesla and Polestar reported especially sharp rises in first-quarter sales in the U.S., compared with the same period a year ago. Even Karma, an EV company that has struggled to gain traction in recent years, sold 60 vehicles for the quarter just ended, versus 14 a year ago. BMW, the single outlier, reported modest growth on increased demand for its large utility vehicles and recently redesigned 4 Series sports car. The industry-wide sales figures released on Friday show that sales plunged by double-digits for every other brand except Hyundai and Kia, which suffered only single-digit declines. Headwinds facing the industry include rising gas prices and an inventory shortage due to supply chain and production disruptions resulting from COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began February 24. Mainstream automakers’ electrified portfolios marked a bright spot in a struggling market. Ford, which said in March that it will separate operations for its EVs and gas-engine vehicles, reported a record 37.9% jump in EV sales in the first quarter compared to the same period last year. Hyundai posted a particularly solid result, selling 6,244 Ioniq 5 EVs in the first quarter compared with 153 in the fourth quarter of 2021. Kia, which started selling the EV6 in the first quarter, reported 5,281 of the electric vehicles were sold in the U.S. in the first quarter, according to Autodata. GM sold 99 of its new Hummer EV compared to one in the fourth quarter of 2021. Tesla, the 800-pound gorilla of EV companies, saw its U.S. sales rise 87.2% to 129,743 units, compared with the same quarter last year. Tesla’s global sales for the quarter broke a new record, despite idling its Gigafactory Shanghai twice in March to comply with government mandates to stop the recent COVID-19 outbreak. Consumer interest in EVs boosted all of Tesla’s models, but the Model Y compact crossover led the increase. Polestar’s sales climbed 1,179.7% to 1,510 units, compared with the 118 units the company sold during the first quarter last year, due to the arrival of the Polestar 2 luxury sedan. Even though the EV volumes are small and due to EV brands ramping up production at their factories, the overall trend indicates a sea change in consumer demand. Newcomer Lucid delivered 460 during the first quarter of 2022, according to Autodata. Rivian reported Tuesday it in the first quarter, putting it on course to meet its production goal of 25,000 EVs this year. Rivian also said it delivered 1,227 vehicles in the first quarter. The production figures include a mix of the Rivian R1T pickup truck, R1S SUV and the commercial vans it is making for Amazon, a Rivian shareholder. |
Q1 crypto losses spike 695% on year following massive hacks | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | over three months deep into 2022, and with each month it seems the scale of crypto exploits grows as the sector continues to expand. Just last week, play-to-earn ’s Ronin Network announced it was exploited for about , making it the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) hack to date. While that was the biggest hack in history, a number of massive multimillion-dollar exploits also transpired in 2022. As people and capital flood into crypto, losses are becoming larger, Adrian Hetman, a DeFi expert at web3 bug bounty and security services platform , told TechCrunch. Wormhole, one of the biggest cryptocurrency platforms that offers bridges to Solana and other blockchains, was hacked for about , or 120,000 ether, on February 2. A week prior to the Wormhole hack, DeFi protocol was hit by hackers who stole 206,809 from Qubit’s QBridge protocol, worth about $80 million at the time. “The Wormhole and Ronin hack, both massive in nature, represent serious vulnerabilities or failures in the crypto ecosystem,” Anthony Georgiades, co-founder of NFT and web3 blockchain provider and general partner at , told TechCrunch. There has been a “loss” of about $1.23 billion across the web3 ecosystem in the first quarter of 2022, according to a report by Immunefi. That number accounts for any funds lost due to hacks and fraudulent events, Hetman said. That total is up 695% from the year-ago quarter’s losses of $154.6 million, the data showed. As of April 4, there is about $230 billion in (TVL) across a number of DeFi protocols. That TVL is 170% higher than the year-ago date of $84.91 billion, according to from DefiLlama. “So given this number, and the fact that a single mistake in code could mean hackers get immediate access to hundreds of millions of dollars, it makes sense that blackhats are interested in getting a slice of that pie,” Hetman said. Aside from the rise of adoption, DeFi is still relatively new and developers are still learning how to write safe and secure codes, Hetman noted. “Many users are still not well educated on how to safely interact with different projects — or even which projects they should interact with,” Hetman said. Additionally, many developers are still “copying and pasting code from other projects,” so a vulnerability present in one project’s code can oftentimes be spread to many other projects. Although hacks and exploits lead to financial and asset losses, they also cause unease in the overall ecosystem, Georgiades said. Hacks and exploits can result in the loss of user, consumer and institutional confidence and trust, which in turn can hamper user growth and discourage new entrants into the market, Georgiades added. |
VCs scale their bets on Solana’s expanding NFT ecosystem | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | The voracious rise of NFTs as an asset class has been a bubble that seemingly refuses to pop — at least for the time being — but NFT marketplaces are continuing to court investor attention, especially around opportunities that appear untapped by market leaders. In recent weeks, increased attention has been centering on the Solana ecosystem’s NFT opportunity. On Friday, Justin Kan’s crypto gaming marketplace , which hosts Solana-based NFTs, raised $35 million in a round co-led by Paradigm and Multicoin, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Animoca, Coinbase and Solana Labs. The round came just two weeks after Solana’s most popular native NFT storefront raised a $27 million round led by Paradigm, with additional funding coming from Sequoia, among others. Solana, which offers consumers low-cost transaction fees and increased speeds, has been one of the bolder success stories of the blockchain ecosystem in recent years as the network has courted developers and investors. Many players see the layer 1 (L1) alternative as a better hub for NFT efforts which have often been a substantial drag on the Ethereum network, leading to hefty fees and wait times across the entire network. “We started with Solana because we thought that was the best user experience for users, gamers and game companies,” Kan told TechCrunch in an interview. All of the attention has attracted new investment in Solana NFT startups, but also new efforts from existing heavyweights. Last week, OpenSea in a tweet that it will be adding support for the Solana blockchain in the coming weeks. OpenSea remains the hub for the lion’s share of overall NFT sales. Its total transaction volumes have reached stratospheric heights, pushing the company to a $13.3 billion valuation — but the startup still has plenty of work ahead building out broad enthusiasm for the technology among mainstream consumers. While the platform eclipsed $2.5 billion in transactions over the last 30 days, those funds were spread across around 450,000 unique wallets — a major year-over-year increase for the platform but also a signal of how insular the NFT market remains at this point. Meanwhile, Magic Eden’s total volumes are a small fraction of OpenSea’s — $41 million versus $2.5 billion over the past month, but Magic Eden’s 95,000 active traders during that time signal a platform with rising user interest despite much lower average transactions. One of the largest open questions will be how curation factors into the continued challenges of NFT marketplaces in dealing with spam. For the past several years, OpenSea has relied heavily on the expenses tied to minting NFTs on Ethereum as a means of curating its marketplace. Over the past year, they’ve tried to reduce fees by offering a more streamlined process called “lazy minting,” but in January they had to rein in the feature upon noting that 80% of the NFTs created using the technique were either spam, fakes or plagiarized works. Solana, with its reduced fees, will likely accelerate some of these issues for large marketplaces and force them to build out more robust content filters, perhaps leaving room for upstarts with better defined niches or more aggressive curation tactics. |
Paramount+ releases new trailer for ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,’ its ‘Discovery’ spinoff | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | A month before its premiere on May 5, has now released its new for the highly anticipated “Star Trek: Discovery” spinoff titled “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.” Set about 10 years before “The Original Series,” the series stars Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck reprising their respective roles as Christopher Pike, Number One and Spock from the second season of “Star Trek: Discovery.” The 10-episode series is based on the years when Captain Christopher Pike manned the helm of the U.S.S. Enterprise. The show will center around Pike and his crew and follow them as they explore new worlds around the galaxy. Meanwhile, Celia Rose Gooding will fill Nichelle Nichols shoes as a young Nyota Uhura, Babs Olusanmokun plays Dr. M’Benga, Jess Bush plays Nurse Christine Chapel, Melissa Navai plays Lt. Erica Ortegas, Bruce Orak plays an Aenar (albino subspecies of Andorians) named Hemmer who is blind in one eye and Christina Chong plays La’An Noonien-Singh (a relation of the “Star Trek” villain Khan). The series premiere was written and directed by Akiva Goldsman, with a story by Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet. The co-show-runners are Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers. Goldsman would also remain an executive producer on “Star Trek: Picard.” Moreover, according to ’ digital originals U.S. rankings, the Paramount+ original series “Star Trek: Picard” dropped to fifth place after a , giving it 32.3 times average demand, during the week of March 28 through April 1. had the series in second place on the digital originals chart, up nine spots from eleventh place a week prior. The drop could be due to the newest season of “Bridgerton,” which bumped the Netflix show up to first place, along with the new HBO Max series “Our Flag Means Death” in second. Netflix recently reported that “Bridgerton” as having the best opening weekend among all English-language series on its service. According to Goldsman, when speaking to about the new show in 2020: We’re going to try to harken back to some classical ‘Trek’ values, to be optimistic, and to be more episodic. Obviously, we will take advantage of the serialized nature of character and story building. But I think our plots will be more closed-ended than you’ve seen in either ‘Discovery’ or ‘Picard.’ His comments were meant to address some of the criticism that has emerged around the other Paramount+ “Star Trek” series, which had forgotten Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic philosophy about the future. Paramount+ has already green-lighted a second season of “Strange New Worlds,” with Paul Wesley joining the cast as future Enterprise Capt. James T. Kirk. Hopefully, this new series will be a hit in the digital charts and continue the legacy of being one of the most culturally influential works of science fiction. “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” will stream exclusively in the United States on Paramount+. |
Just like IRL, the metaverse requires infrastructure. We don’t have it yet | Avi Hadad | 2,022 | 4 | 4 | way through a crowd, thousands of people donning anything from casual wear to the most over-the-top dresses. Even though the place is absolutely packed, you don’t have to use your elbows to shrug past. Like a ghost, you pass through anyone you encounter, and they go through one another as well, turning the regular Brownian dynamics of the crowd into something truly phantasmagorical. That’s how crowds worked in “Snow Crash,” the 1992 novel by Neal Stephenson that introduced the world to the metaverse. But how will Meta’s version handle them? This question is not nearly as trivial as early impressions might suggest. Even though we are yet to witness this all-encompassing digital reality, pundits are already breaking spears over just how amazing or dystopian it can be. Ironically, the answer in both cases greatly depends on the code and the data infrastructure that will power every interaction in the realm. When you make your way through the proverbial crowd in a metaverse, your VR headset has to render every other avatar next to you according to your perspective and spatial location. When you bump into someone, the back-end servers have to calculate the physics of your interaction, ideally with a full account of the vector and momentum of your movement. Then, optionally, they must send the appropriate signal to your haptic gloves, suit or any other device you’re wearing, which would translate into the actual impact you feel. Our example here requires a lot of computation, even when it involves just two avatars running into one another. The task of processing a multitude of such interactions in a crowd of even a few hundred avatars is probably enough to send a weak back-end server into a meltdown. And let’s not forget that inputs guiding the motion of every avatar are beamed in through optic cables, with different latencies, with lags, which makes running the entire thing without shattering the suspension of disbelief that much more challenging. From a stage dive at a virtual rave to a digital beach volleyball game, this holds true for any other interaction involving many digital personas operating through precise motion controls. The idea of bringing thousands of people together in a virtual space is not exactly new: Online multiplayer games have been doing that for a long time already. In fact, Fortnite has already hosted metaverse-style concerts with . So surely it should be a piece of cake for Meta to do as much? Well, not really. As always, the devil lurks in the details. While the gaming industry can indeed teach Meta a thing or two about online interactions, even the vastest and most ambitious multiplayer realms rely on clever tricks to avoid back-end overload. The general rule of thumb here is to actually avoid cluttering too many users together in one digital location at the same time. In other words, they avoid the very thing the metaverse, with its live event ambitions, . |
Google, Databricks, Fivetran, Redis and others launch the Data Cloud Alliance | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | There’s a new alliance in town: the . Founded by The idea here is to make life easier for the members’ customers by working together to provide APIs and integration support to allow for data portability and accessibility between their platforms, no matter whether those are being used on-premises, or on private or public clouds (or a mix of them). The members will also work together to create “ It’s worth noting that the partners here are mostly not competitors but offer services that complement each other. Many of these companies have also before, with Confluent, Elastic, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs working with Google to integrate their services with the Google Cloud Platform, for example. |
Google Cloud launches BigLake, a new cross-platform data storage engine | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | At its Cloud Data Summit, Google today announced the preview launch of BigLake, a new that makes it easier for enterprises to analyze the data in their data warehouses and data lakes. The idea here, at its core, is to take Google’s experience with running and managing its BigQuery data warehouse and extend it to data lakes on Google Cloud Storage, combining the best of data lakes and warehouses into a single service that abstracts away the underlying storage formats and systems. This data, it’s worth noting, could sit in BigQuery or live on AWS S3 and Azure , too. Through BigLake, developers will get access to one uniform storage engine and the ability to query the underlying data stores through a single system without the need to move or duplicate data. “ Google Using policy tags, BigLake allows admins to configure their security policies at the table, row and column level. This includes data stored in Google Cloud Storage, as well as the two supported third-party systems, where , Google’s multi-cloud analytics service, enables these security controls. Those security controls then also ensure that only the right data flows into tools like Spark, Presto, Trino and TensorFlow. The service also integrates with Google’s tool to provide additional data management capabilities. Google notes that BigLake will provide fine-grained access controls and that its API will span Google Cloud, as well as file formats like the open column-oriented Apache and open-source processing engines like Apache Spark. Google “The volume of valuable data that organizations have to manage and analyze is growing at an incredible rate,” Google Cloud software engineer Justin Levandoski and product manager Gaurav Saxena explain in today’s announcement. “This data is increasingly distributed across many locations, including data warehouses, data lakes, and NoSQL stores. As an organization’s data gets more complex and proliferates across disparate data environments, silos emerge, creating increased risk and cost, especially when that data needs to be moved. Our customers have made it clear; they need help.” In addition to BigLake, Google also today announced that , its globally distributed SQL database, will soon get a new feature called “change streams.” With these, users can easily track any changes to a database in real time, be those inserts, updates or deletes. “This ensures customers always have access to the freshest data as they can easily replicate changes from Spanner to BigQuery for real-time analytics, trigger downstream application behavior using Pub/Sub, or store changes in Google Cloud Storage (GCS) for compliance,” explains Kazmaier. Google Cloud also today brought , a tool for managing the entire lifecycle of a data science project, out of beta and into general availability, and launched Connected Sheets for Looker, as well as the ability to access Looker data models in its Data Studio BI tool. |
Two new ways to attend TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 — in person or online | Alexandra Ames | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | |
Intel suspends operations in Russia | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | A month after stopping shipments to customers in Russia and Belarus, Intel has now suspended all business operations in Russia. In a , the company said, “Intel continues to join the global community in condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine and calling for a swift return to peace,” adding that it will support its 1,200 employees in Russia and “[implement] business continuity measures to minimize disruption to our global operations.” Other tech companies that have taken action in Russia include Apple, which after the Ukraine invasion, AMD, Adobe and General Electric. Meanwhile, Spotify, along with news outlets like CNN, ABC and the BBC, has suspended services in Russia in response to a new law that dramatically restricts free speech. In a , reporter Vadim Smyslov covered the impact the war is having on Russia’s tech workers, with many choosing to leave the country after war was declared, and others unable to receive payments after Russia was disconnected by SWIFT in early March. Others crossing the Russian border described being detained and interrogated.
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Demand Curve: How I’d grow Skio | Joey Noble | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | on Shopify sell subscriptions without ripping their hair out,” explained Skio’s founder, Kennan Davison, when we sat down with him to understand how the product works, how it’s been growing to date and the challenges the company faces. Skio launched in April 2021 with the goal of eliminating the hacky workarounds that other subscription apps have been using for Shopify. The company lets its clients employ native Shopify checkout along with a passwordless login to provide a seamless experience to their customers. In the beginning, like many startups, Skio had to do things that don’t scale to acquire its first customers. Kennan would frequent direct-to-consumer communities on Twitter to find upset users of his competitor, ReCharge. After acquiring the first few customers, Skio created case studies to showcase how it improves the subscription process. As the company began acquiring more customers, word-of-mouth helped the company show how much of an improvement Skio is over ReCharge (and other competitors). Considering the amount of inbound requests the company received to demo Skio, it’s clear it has product-market fit. Now, Skio has over 100 recurring customers, including brands like Bev, Muddy Bites, Doe Lashes, Krave Beauty and more. The company has nearly zero churn, and it wants to keep it that way. To do that, the team’s goal is to continue acquiring users who are upset with their current subscription solution. How can Skio continue growing this customer base while maintaining a low churn rate? That’s what we’ll explore in this article. This post will share why some growth strategies are better than others, introduce growth concepts and explain our approach. The aim is to give you the insights necessary to pattern match a growth strategy to your own startup and begin applying the content right away. Before we begin, here’s a quick look at Skio: As previously mentioned, Skio’s target customers include current users of ReCharge, particularly those who aren’t happy with it. Skio charges a monthly subscription fee as well as a transaction fee. To grow Skio’s revenue, we need to increase the total number of paying customers subscribed to its app. These customers must be low-churn risk, which means the most frustrated ReCharge customers are acquired before we target Shopify owners more broadly. There are three ways startups can acquire customers: inbound, outbound and viral. Viral growth happens when awareness of a product is spread by customers using that product. Slack and TikTok are great examples of viral products, because users send invites to others to join, and the more users on the platform, the more valuable it is. Product-led growth and referrals are the most common viral-based acquisition strategies. There are three key factors to consider when assessing if viral growth will work for your startup. We’ll assess whether a viral growth strategy will work for Skio using a simple scoring method. Each factor will be given a rating of low, mid or high based on the likelihood of success. For an invite to be relevant, Shopify store owners that use subscriptions will have to invite other Shopify store owners that use subscriptions. While founders tend to be well connected, it’s unlikely they will know enough people who fit that subscription for the number of invites sent to reach the critical mass required for viral growth. Score: Low. |
Twitter is working on an edit button for real | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | Apparently it wasn’t just an or an . As any true blue Twitter user knows, the divide over the social network adding an edit button is the deepest ideological ravine of our time — and Twitter is poised to switch sides. The company confirmed Tuesday that it is indeed working on a way to edit tweets. Twitter started tinkering around with a tweet-editing option last year and will test it out in , a corner of the platform’s premium subscription product where it tries out new features. Twitter Blue subscribers can expect to see an edit tweet button “in the coming months,” according to the company. On Monday, the news broke that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was buying a and taking a board seat. In characteristic Musk fashion, the iconoclastic mega-billionaire spilled the beans about an edit button in a tweet a day before the company opted to make an announcement through official channels. Do you want an edit button? — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Twitter has shown a somewhat novel willingness to shape the platform based on user feedback, so it will be interesting to see what happens as the test begins. It’s easy to find strong opinions in favor of or vehemently against editing tweets, but much harder to know at scale what most people really want. Some Twitter power users have clamored for an edit tweet button for years, while others have serious misgivings about making misinformation and harassment even harder to manage on a social network still rife with serious problems. 👀 — Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) In the past, the company has downplayed its interest in giving users the ability to edit tweets, saying that the feature on its list of priorities. But 2022 Twitter is a very different beast, one that bears little resemblance to the stagnant social platform of yore — and one that’s no longer led by CEO Jack Dorsey, who faced to pick up the company’s pace. Though Dorsey’s out, pick up the pace it did. Twitter has accelerated into all kinds of new products over the last two years, rapidly developing and sometimes discarding new features as quickly as they came. Fleets, Twitter’s experimental disappearing tweet product, after officially debuting in November 2020. The company first launched its perk-packed premium monthly subscription service Twitter Blue a little less than a year ago and has generally been willing to see what sticks in recent months. That includes everything from and to that reframe the platform’s rules as a living document that responds to global events. |
Daily Crunch: Peloton Guide with body-tracking camera now on sale for $295 | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | Welcome to the Daily Crunch for Tuesday, April 5, 2022. Today was one of those days reporters love — frenzied writing, source-gathering — all the trappings of a good newsletter! Join us as our fingers dance joyous Lindy Hop routines across our keyboards. While we have you here: Do you love robots? We sure do! to nerd out about arms, assembly, articulation, actuators and . Come to think of it, we are 12% sure we’ll cover the rest of the robotics alphabet, too. — and Hellooooo startup nerds. We’re back with another round of news from the world of startups, starting with an op-ed from Marc Schröder, managing partner at MGV, about . A propos of VC — , as Connie explores in her article. News I choose for you to peruse: / Getty Images The total value of cryptocurrencies reached nearly $2.3 trillion last year, but as that number soared, so did interest from malign actors looking to exploit bugs, poor code and social engineering hacks. The web3 ecosystem “lost” $1.23 billion to exploits in just the first quarter of 2022, a nearly eight-fold increase compared to a year earlier, and that number is likely to continue increasing as the space expands, reports Jacquelyn Melinek. |
Base10 Partners closes fund three with $460M to invest globally: ‘The cat is out of the bag’ | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | , a venture firm founded only four years ago, just closed its third fund with $460 million in capital commitments. Because co-founder Ade Ajao — originally from Spain — is half Nigerian, the new fund makes Base10 — which now has $1.3 billion in assets under management — the world’s largest Black-led venture capital fund, it says. While that’s notable, far more interesting to us is how Ajao and firm co-founder TJ Nahigian are using that distinction to their advantage without making diversity an express part of their own investing mandate. Indeed, the firm says it is — and has always been — solely concerned with backing startups that help automate “real economy” sectors, like food, retail, logistics and fintech. More, it says by simply focusing on good companies and not approaching teams with a kind of “ideal” founder profile in mind, it naturally finds its way into strong startups with very diverse teams. Maybe so. Something about its approach appears to be working. Some of the bets Base10 has made include the Brazilian fintech company Nubank, which went public late last year. (Ajao wrote it an early personal check but says Base10 was formed too late to invest in the outfit until it was already a growth-stage business.) Base10 is also an investor in such buzzy startups as Notion (now valued at $10 billion), Figma (valued at $10 billion), FTX (valued at $32 billion) and Handshake (valued at $3.5 billion) to name just a handful of its 79 portfolio companies to date. We talked yesterday with Ajao, who helped co-found the Madrid-based rideshare company Cabify before jumping into VC via Workday Ventures. We wanted to better understand how he and Nahigian — also an investor and former entrepreneur — built what they have in such a short period, and how market turmoil right now is impacting their outlook. AA: That remains true. One thing that is quite important for us is showing that if you just try to invest in the best businesses out there, and you try to do it with an open mind — meaning you try to remove biases about backgrounds, demographics and geography — you will end up with better financial performance and a portfolio that will likely be more diverse. Other minority-led funds with the same approach are seeing the same. To me, that says more about the industry’s blind spots than anything else. We mean demographics and geography, and that is gender, ethnicity and where you’re from. At a more high level, more than half of the portfolio has a founder or co-founder that would be considered “underrepresented” in venture. The majority of the portfolio is outside of Silicon Valley or San Francisco. We are investing in Africa, we’re investing in Latin America, we are investing in the Midwest. But the single geography with the most investments is the Bay Area, where we all live, and even within the Bay Area, we have a higher percentage of companies that are founded by people with non-traditional backgrounds. I don’t know why — I don’t have all the data — but one thing we began noticing more as we had to substitute in-person meetings [with Zoom calls] was that when we had a founder pitch the entire group, they often said, “Oh, wow, you guys look different.” I think it has an impact. I started Cabify in Latin America in 2011. And then my next three investments were [the Brazilian] e-hailing app 99Taxis, [the Colombia-based on-demand delivery company] Rappi and Nubank, and I passed those deals to several VCs in Silicon Valley who would not touch them. Back then, partnerships did not want to invest in businesses outside the Bay Area — it was seen as a disadvantage. It was, ‘We’ll write a term sheet if you agree to move to the Bay Area.’ Now, in the last 18 months, I’ve gotten emails and calls from a number of those partnerships that are like, ‘Hey, we’re going to Mexico,’ ‘We’re going to Colombia — who should we meet there?’ I never thought the story was only about SoftBank. I think what [former SoftBank exec] Marcelo [Claure] and his team did was quite commendable. They really put a spotlight in the ecosystem and on what other people were missing. But I do think enough people are seeing the light. [In the meantime] what I like is that you actually don’t see a lot of general partners at venture capital firms in the Valley who have had experience in Latin America, and the reason I like that is because it gives us an advantage. [Laughs.] If you look at the amount of money raised by venture capital and recorded in the last eight quarters — I think it hit a record amount every quarter — that money has to go somewhere. The other thing I will say is that for the last two years, basically every LP has seen record amounts of cash distributions from venture capital funds. I’m no macro economist. I don’t know if we’re about to enter into a recession. I just think back 10 or 11 years ago when I was fundraising [for Cabify] on Sand Hill Road, and it is day and night [compared with today]. I mean, like 10 years ago, if you were doing a company in Spain or doing a company in Colombia, like, good luck. And Nigeria? I mean, that was crazy talk. Now, I think that cat is out of the bag. |
Rivian picks up EV production in Q1, on track to hit annual target | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | Rivian produced 2,553 vehicles in the first quarter, putting it on course to meet its production goal of 25,000 EVs this year, the company said Tuesday. Rivian also reported that it delivered 1,227 vehicles in the first quarter. The production figures include a mix of the Rivian R1T pickup truck, R1S SUV and the commercial vans it is making for Amazon, a Rivian shareholder. “These figures are in line with the company’s expectations, and it believes it is well positioned to deliver on the 25,000 annual production guidance provided during its fourth quarter earnings call on March 10, 2022,” the company . In March, Rivian to 25,000 vehicles in 2022 due to supply constraints. Analysts had expected Rivian to produce closer to 40,000 EVs in 2022, but supply constraints augmented by Russia’s war in Ukraine and the lingering effects of the pandemic caused the company to adjust its target. “The biggest constraints we now face really lie with the supply chain,” CEO RJ Scaringe told investors during its first-quarter earnings call in March. “It’s really a small number of parts for which the supplier isn’t ramping at the same rate as our production lines are ramping up. Were it not for supplier constraints,” he added, “we’re confident we could achieve in excess of 50,000 vehicles this year.” The Q1 production results suggest Rivian has successfully navigated some of the production bottlenecks that often plague automakers attempting to scale operations — and notably during one of the more constrained supply chains in recent history. Production grew 150% from the 1,015 vehicles in the fourth quarter when Rivian first began making and delivering its R1T electric pickup truck. Deliveries also improved, but not as significantly, growing just 22.5% from the 920 vehicles sold in the fourth quarter. |
The US government has just 1% of the EV chargers it needs | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | The U.S. government owns about 1,100 charging stations. It may need more than 100,000 charging stations to support widespread EV use in the next decade, according to on Tuesday. The testimony, which was , mainly delved into the U.S. Postal Service’s efforts to transition its fleet to EVs and federal fleet transition issues. GAO found that federal agencies like USPS held certain incorrect assumptions about the cost and benefits of using gas versus electric vehicles, namely that USPS used gas prices that are about $2 per gallon less than the current national average in its estimates, and assumed maintenance and acquisition costs that are higher than the reality. GAO has identified charging infrastructure costs and installation as a key challenge to acquiring EVs for federal fleets. Last month, President Joe Biden’s administration unveiled a plan to award over the next five years to build thousands of EV charging stations. The plan, which falls under Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill, is the first tranche of a total $7.5 billion approved by Congress in November to be used for funding 500,000 EV charging stations. Biden also signed an executive order in December that would see the government ending purchases of gas-powered vehicles by 2035. The order said light-duty vehicles purchased by the government will be emission-free by 2027. It’s important to note, though, that the White House’s definition of emission-free includes plug-in hybrids, so maybe someone should tell them that hybrid cars are still gas powered? Despite these lofty goals, few moves have been made yet toward electrifying America’s government fleets. The General Services Administration (GSA) said that as of March 10, federal agencies have only ordered an additional 1,854 zero-emission vehicles since its prior report. The U.S. government usually purchases about 50,000 vehicles annually. The federal fleet currently has about 657,000 cars, SUVs and trucks, out of which less than 1% are currently electric, . The Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Management Program offers technical support to federal agencies looking to buy EVs and install EV supply equipment (EVSE), which can be purchased at a discount through the GSA EVSE blanket purchase agreement. GSA negotiates discounted prices for many EV models. Last year, GSA was able to secure Chevy Bolts for almost $10,000 below market price. That said, the only other pure electric vehicle available last year , the Nissan Leaf, is offered at a discount of around $1,000. |
Meta adds the ability to share video from third-party apps directly to Facebook Reels | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | Facebook is adding the ability to post Reels from third-party apps, its parent company Meta on Tuesday. The company is introducing a “ ” integration, which will allow developers to make it easy for people to share video from their apps directly to Facebook. “Once integrated, third-party apps will have a Reels button so people can share short videos, then customize with Reels editing tools like audio, text, effects, captions and stickers,” said John McCarthy, Meta’s director of product management, in a blog post. “Instead of downloading their video content and uploading it later, they can now create and share video seamlessly with one tap of a button.” Meta highlighted that as part of the launch, several of its partners, including Smule, Vita and VivaVideo have already integrated the “Sharing to Reels” button in their apps. Developers who are interested in integrating the button in their apps can learn more about doing so on Meta’s The company says the new feature will help people reach new audiences on Facebook and builds on its “Sharing to Stories” feature, which allows developers to enable their users to share content to Facebook Stories directly from third-party apps. Meta Today’s announcement comes as Facebook out Reels worldwide after in the U.S. last September. Alongside the global rollout, Facebook also introduced more creative tools and new ways for creators to make money from their Reels through advertising, and soon, Stars. While Reels first began as a way to directly combat TikTok with Meta also brought them to Facebook shortly after. The company touted during its Q4 2021 that Reels is now its “fastest-growing content format by far.” The company also said Reels was the biggest contributor to growth on Instagram and “growing very quickly” on Facebook, too. Reels is one of the largest product investments at Meta, which has publicly discussed the threat posed by TikTok. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has TikTok a big competitor that’s growing at “quite a fast rate off of a very large base.” It’s clear that Meta sees its new integration with third-party apps as a way to increase the popularity and reach of Facebook Reels, as it continues to compete with TikTok. |
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Substack wants to join the podcast monetization fray | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | Uploading paywalled audio on Substack isn’t new, but the newsletter platform is re-upping its attempt to woo podcasters into using its service. Substack posted today to make podcasts on Substack. Like a newsletter, they can charge subscribers for access, so long as they are willing to part with a 10% cut. This works for podcasters whose entire show is paywalled, as well as for podcasters who only paywall certain episodes. Posting on Substack doesn’t prohibit you from also sharing public episodes on various podcatchers — listeners can access paywalled episodes on either the Substack app or via RSS feed. Apple and Spotify have been dueling to make themselves the go-to platform for podcast monetization, but Substack is competing just as much with other subscription platforms like Patreon. Coincidentally, the podcasts “ ” and “ ” both announced this week that they will shut down their existing Patreon accounts to join Substack, per . Substack has previously wooed big creators over to its platform by , but the platform doesn’t disclose who it does or does not pay an advance — the company’s policy is to let the creators decide for themselves if they want to disclose that they’re part of what it calls the “ ” program. So, we can only speculate whether these Patreon-to-Substack movements are anything more than coincidental timing. It’s hard to say what benefit Substack provides podcasters that Patreon doesn’t offer as well. Substack has also been working on in beta, helping creators better control who sees their paywalled videos — right now, on Patreon, a paywalled video is usually a link to an unlisted YouTube video, which can be easily shared. But Patreon has also stated that it’s working on native uploads. Besides that, Patreon takes either a 5%, 8% or 12% cut depending on what you choose, while Substack takes 10% — unless you’re on Patreon’s premium plan; you’ll keep more of your earnings over there. Podcasters of a certain ilk might be swayed by Substack’s “ ” content moderation policy. Both Substack and Patreon prohibit spam, porn, illegal activities, doxxing, plagiarism and impersonation, but Patreon has more detailed guidelines about misinformation related to and . Substack’s lax rules have made it a comfortable home for some prominent banned from mainstream social networks . A small subset of five prominent anti-vaccine newsletters alone pulls in on the platform. |
Affirm is giving job offers to the ‘vast majority’ of Fast engineers | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | Fast, a one-click speedy checkout platform, . In conjunction with that decision, Fast is giving a “vast majority” of its engineers the chance to join Affirm, a public fintech company in the buy now, pay later space, according to Affirm. Per an email seen by TechCrunch and Fast CEO Domm Holland said that his company’s shut down was a result of a lack of financial resources to continue operating the business. He also noted that the current environment has been “extremely challenging for high-growth tech companies.” “With Fast winding down, our agreement will enable the vast majority of our engineers to transition to roles at Affirm. I’m grateful to Affirm for their work to place many of our engineers in great roles quickly,” Holland continued in the e-mail, noting that Affirm has roughly $3 billion in cash on its balance sheet. Holland didn’t make clear how many engineers would be given the chance to join Affirm, and if it was decided by seniority, team or geographic location. While acqu-hiring is a common way for a startup in need of a soft landing to get an exit, this move appears to be different. A person familiar with the manner alleges that Fast was in talks with Affirm leadership on this agreement separate from its shut down, which will include the removal of all services and the brand’s existence. In other words, Affirm seems to want Fast’s talent, but not a whiff of its product. Affirm, which went public in 2020, its third-quarter financial outlook with slimmer operating expenses and higher revenue expectations. In an email sent to TechCrunch, an Affirm spokesperson noted that the company has long invested in engineering talent, and over the last year has completed three strategic talent acquisitions. “With Fast winding down its operations and discontinuing its brand and products, we saw another opportunity to invite a great technology team to join us,” the statement read. “While we do not have plans to get into the one-click checkout business, we look forward to welcoming many of Fast’s talented engineers to Affirm as we continue to advance our existing product roadmap in support of our mission to build honest financial products that improve lives.” Fast declined to answer how long the talks have been going on, and how many Fast employees will be receiving a job offer. When it comes to vision, the overlap between Fast and Affirm isn’t too hard to garner. Fast launched with a vision to make it easier for consumers to check out on e-commerce websites, while Affirm launched to help consumers afford those online purchases in the first place. Both companies built platform-agnostic services that support the optimization of consumers’ purchasing journeys; although clearly, one’s fate was better established than the others. Affirm’s active merchants have grown to 168,000, up 2,030% from the prior year, and its partners cover more than 60% of U.S. e-commerce, including Walmart, Amazon, Target, Peloton and tons from Shopify. It also boasts more than 11 million active consumers, up 150% year over year. |
WarnerMedia CEO exits as Discovery merger nears close | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | On Monday, April 11, the highly anticipated of WarnerMedia and Discovery was set to officially close. We already have somewhat of an idea of what will happen with the companies’ two streaming services, Discovery+ and HBO Max. Back in March, Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels would at first bundle Discovery+ and HBO Max together until they could figure out the best way to consolidate the two services into a single direct-to-consumer platform. WarnerMedia not only owns HBO Max, but also linear network HBO, CNN (as well as new service CNN+), Warner Bros., DC Films, New Line Cinema, TBS, TNT, TruTV, Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, Turner Sports and Rooster Teeth, among others. It is also part owner of The CW. Meanwhile, Discovery is the parent of Discovery+, Discovery Channel, Investigation Discovery, Travel Channel, Turbo/Velocity, HGTV, Food Network, TLC, Animal Planet, Science Channel and OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network). Streamers of both Discovery+ and HBO Max can expect a lot of changes to come, as the two companies will be combining huge content libraries that are equally unique in their own way, giving people a vastly complex offering. Also announced today, proclaimed his resignation in a memo ahead of the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger. , Kilar was hired as CEO of WarnerMedia prior to the launch of the streaming service HBO Max. However, Kilar was up for the challenge as he was previously brought on as CEO of Hulu shortly after its 2007 launch. Discovery Inc. CEO David Zaslav will take the reins, and the former WarnerMedia CEO has cultivated a streaming giant that Zaslav can bank on. And boy, will he make bank. In May 2021, Zaslav signed a new employment contract that ends in 2027, which was designed to keep him at the company through its merger with WarnerMedia. , the value of Zaslav’s 2021 compensation package jumped to $246 million, a huge difference compared with $45.8 million in 2019. In 2020, it was $37.7 million. Like Kilar, the Discovery Inc. CEO has lengthy experience in the industry and has led the company since 2007. Following the publication of this report, other executive exits from WarnerMedia were confirmed, including and WarnerMedia studios and networks group chairman and CEO |
After months of delay, GM restarts Chevy Bolt EV production | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | General Motors has finally resumed production of the Chevrolet Bolt EV and EUV after months of delay, . The automaker had halted production of the vehicles at its Orion assembly plant in Michigan after issuing a recall last August of more than 141,000 Bolts due to battery fire risk. GM has confirmed 18 Bolt fires globally, which the automaker and its battery supplier, LG Chem, attributed to two manufacturing defects: a torn anobe tab and a folded separator. As a mea culpa, . Supply chain issues caused the reopening of the plant to be repeatedly pushed back over the last seven months, stretching far beyond . In October, , where owners with recalled Chevy Bolts could swap out old modules with new ones, something the automaker is still doing to mitigate the lack of supply until vehicles make it off the assembly line. While the Chevy Bolt has been GM’s most popular EV brand, the automaker said last July it would invest $35 billion through 2025 in the development of EVs and automated technology. It’s pouring money into its Ultium platform, the underlying EV architecture and batteries for its next-gen EVs, including the , Chevrolet Silverado, Buick crossovers and the Cadillac Celestiq and Lyriq ( ). In addition, on Tuesday, to make millions of affordable EVs on the Ultium platform. |
Niantic makes another acquisition, absorbing AR studio NZXR | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | Just a month after its last acquisition of the WebAR development platform , Niantic its purchase of New Zealand-based augmented reality studio today. These strategic acquisitions are part of Niantic’s overarching plan to build what it calls a “ ,” which is dependent on AR rather than VR. NZXR formed , when its Wellington-based team was laid off from working on , an . Rather than going their separate ways, the team built their own business, working on projects like the AR skateboarding game and the interactive theater experience . “When John Hanke, Niantic’s CEO, wrote ‘ it resonated with us far more than any of the metaverse hype pieces published before or since,” NZXR . “A better world is not given. It’s going to take a lot of work and Niantic has demonstrated to us that they’re willing to put in the effort.” |
Twitter limits reach for Russian government accounts and bans most POW imagery | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Twitter will place new limits on government accounts that belong to countries at war when those governments also restrict the free flow of information within their own borders. In a , Twitter explained that the new policy is designed to reconcile the “severe information imbalance” that happens when an authoritarian government blocks access to online platforms while still leveraging those same platforms for propaganda. “Particularly in moments of active, armed interstate conflict, the harms created by this imbalance are acute; access to information, and to the ability to share information, are of paramount importance,” Twitter VP of Global Public Policy Sinéad McSweeney wrote. Starting with Russia, accounts that fall under the new rules will be excluded from amplification across Twitter’s explore, search and home features. To meet Twitter’s threshold for the new account limitations, a country’s censorship of online information must impact either the majority of its population or severely limit a smaller group of people within its borders. To determine which conflicts qualify under the ruleset, Twitter is using a definition of interstate armed conflict from the . The new rules will apply even in situations when Twitter isn’t banned within the country in question. Hundreds of accounts affiliated with the Russian government have been actively promoting a very misleading portrait of the invasion since its early days. A cadre of Russian embassy accounts in particular have served as a “ ” for some strains of Russian disinformation, according to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Twitter of Russian state-linked media accounts in late February, but the new policy will broadly hide accounts affiliated with the Russian government from the site’s recommendation and discovery features. Twitter also announced a new policy that will require governments and state-linked accounts to remove any imagery depicting prisoners of war, a change now added to Twitter’s . Twitter will still allow accounts to share some images of prisoners of war if they serve a “compelling public interest,” including journalism, but now explicitly bans any PoW media shared with abusive intent. While Twitter’s policy changes mostly have Russia in mind given its bloody aggressions into neighboring Ukraine, the Ukrainian government could also run afoul of the new rules. In early March, Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs began sharing , including images of Russian prisoners being interrogated. While Ukraine was likely trying to counter Russia’s misinformation campaign and stoke anti-government sentiment in the country, the strategy could arguably break Geneva Conventions laws that govern the treatment of prisoners of war. Unfortunately, Twitter’s new rules are timely. In recent days, the have come into focus. As Russian troops withdraw from some besieged cities, the aftermath paints a grisly portrait of civilian massacre, torture and mass kidnapping — and those revelations have only just begun. |
Dailyhunt and Josh apps parent firm raises $805 million at $5 billion valuation | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | At a time when a number of startups are finding it difficult to raise capital, VerSe Innovation, the , said on Wednesday it has raised $805 million. The startup, which has built one of the largest adtech businesses in the country and is also driving commerce through its apps, is valued at nearly $5 billion in the new round, up from about $3 billion just eight months ago, its co-founders told TechCrunch in an interview. The round — a Series J — was led by Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), its largest investment to date in the region. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’), Luxor Capital and Sumeru Ventures as well as existing backers Sofina Group and Baillie Gifford also participated in the round. The new round — the largest in the Indian startup ecosystem this year ( ) — brings VerSe Innovation’s all-time raise to about $2 billion (some through secondary transactions). The startup says it raised capital after receiving a plethora of inbound offers and that the new capital, along with its existing reserves, gives it runway for “several years.” VerSe Innovation, which counts Google and Microsoft among its backers, currently operates three popular apps that have made deep inroads in smaller Indian cities and towns, long considered to be nonmonetizable, with their snackable and informative content and have reimagined the way one can entertain those customers while finding a business model to support such endeavour. Its short video app, Josh, has amassed over 150 million users, 50 million of whom create and publish content. The app, which has partnered with 15 music labels, clocks over 80 billion plays on its app each month, the startup said. Thanks to these stats, Josh has emerged as what the startup claims to be a clear market leader. It competes with a handful of apps including YouTube, , InMobi Group unit Glance, and the . India’s prompted several Indian startups to launch their own short video apps. But most of them have either shut down or pivoted. VerSe Innovation co-founders Umang Bedi and Virendra Gupta. Bedi was the head of Facebook India prior to joining Dailyhunt. VerSe Innovation News aggregator app Dailyhunt, which operates in 15 languages and has a creator ecosystem of over 100,000 content partners, has over 350 million users, whereas the startup’s recently launched app PublicVibe now serves over 5 million monthly active users. Catering to users outside of urban Indian cities is a feat of its own. Umang Bedi, co-founder of VerSe Innovation, told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup had to build its own adtech business to make more economic sense for all its stakeholders including the company’s growing universe of creators. “A data point that I can share with you is that there are 400 advertisers in India with whom we have full-funnel integration with their third-party mobile measurement platforms,” he said. “That’s how we reconcile first-party billing and third-party billing data to really drive performance campaigns. We are not dependent on certain advertisers. 50% of our advertisers are enterprises and rest are small businesses across tier 2, 3, and 4 India,” said Bedi, who previously served as the India head of Facebook. Another monetization bet that is working for Josh is influencers-led commerce. Scores of creators on its platform are selling items from popular brands — and sometimes their own private labels — on the platform. “We have an influencer who is a homemaker who is selling a variety of spices on the app. She is really popular in Mumbai,” he said. “We are doing curated lives, which are targeted shopping feeds, and also making existing videos contextually shoppable. Having the ability to use tech to prove the e-commerce piece, it just shows that we can play a meaningful role in the social-commerce and India’s broader e-commerce outlook because we already have engaged consumers,” he added. The startup is now also exploring ways to embrace web3 to widen its monetization capabilities, he said. Bedi declined to reveal specifics about how VerSe plans to tackle the world of tokens and NFTs, or identity the blockchain it will be using, but said the startup’s efforts will be apparent in a few months. VerSe plans to continue to focus on serving users in the home market of India, saying there’s an ample opportunity left in the country, and deploy the new capital to broaden its AI and ML capabilities to make its apps more engaging to users, Virendra Gupta, co-founder of VerSe, said. It’s also working on a number of new apps, he added. “Our family of apps will certainly grow, but I can’t give you a number just yet,” Bedi quipped. “India’s digital content is experiencing phenomenal growth, and VerSe Innovation is well positioned to be one of the leaders in the fast-growing short video and local language content space,” said Frank Su, managing director and head of Private Equity Asia at CPP Investments, in a statement. “This investment aligns with our approach of providing strategic capital to industry leaders in India’s technology sector. We look forward to supporting the next phase of VerSe Innovation’s growth journey, which we believe will deliver strong risk-adjusted returns for the CPP Fund.” |
Instacart is coming after users who tricked shoppers out of tips | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | In the height of the pandemic, grocery delivery behemoth Instacart dealt with “tip-baiting” or a gross tactic in which customers baited shoppers with a big tip, and then reduced said tip to zero after they received groceries. Instacart then alleged that less than 0.5% of orders have tips removed post-delivery, but then introduced a series of new policies, including required feedback if a tip is removed, deactivation of customers who consistently remove tips and reduction in the tip-adjustment window from three days to 24 hours. Today, weeks after announcing a amid a slashed valuation, the delivery unicorn is introducing another protection for shoppers. , Instacart is rolling out a tip protection service to give its shoppers more reliable access to their tips. The protection will see Instacart protect shoppers from customers who remove a tip without reporting an issue with an order. Instacart says it will cover the amount of the zeroed-out tip up to $10. “While having a tip zeroed out after delivery is exceedingly rare, Instacart wants to ensure that shoppers are supported in the event that this happens,” the company It’s unclear how the company landed on $10 as the ideal tip; when a percentage may be more effective if shoppers with massive orders lose out on their tips post-delivery. For what it’s worth, Instacart said that the number of orders that have tips removed post-delivery has steadily declined. Instacart’s update may be its latest attempt at , which have been on strike against the company’s low pay and lack of communication. Tips have been a particularly tense topic, with some workers demanding to make the default tip at least 10% of a customer’s total bill — up from the current 5% default. The tipping protection scratches at this worry by affording more reliability to tips that may be taken away, but doesn’t get into the heart of making higher earnings a more automatic feature within the app. When asked if there are any future plans to increase the tipping default, Instacart pointed to its efforts to prompt customers to consider increasing their tips: “We’re also prompting customers to consider increasing their tip anytime they rate a shopper 5 stars, as another way of recognizing great service from shoppers who go above and beyond. Shoppers have seen a 6% average increase in their earnings from tips on eligible orders as we’ve piloted this feature over the past few months,” the company wrote in an e-mail to TechCrunch. “At checkout, if the customer opts not to leave a tip, we’ll encourage them to consider adding one to recognize their shopper’s hard work. In testing, this feature has resulted in a 12% average reduction in customers choosing not to leave a tip.” Along with new tipping protections, the launch of multistore batches, which lets shoppers select batches that include multiple store locations. A spokesperson explained that a shopper can accept a batch that includes orders from two customers at two different stores, and then only take one trip across town to maximize time spent earning money. The company is certainly on a journey toward reinventing itself, so getting in good graces with shoppers may prove smart. Co-founder Apoorva Mehta left his post as chief executive of Instacart in July, to be replaced by Her rise to chief executive came as the pandemic winds down and parts of the world begin to reopen, a crucial moment for the company to rethink how it conducts business. Under Simo, a few executives have left including and the The company announced recently that it’s creating a service that includes e-commerce support for online grocery stores, fulfillment help for deliveries, advertising tech for digital retail, analytics and some in-store tech support. |
Tesla delivers record number of EVs in ‘exceptionally’ difficult quarter | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 4 | 2 | Tesla reported Saturday that it delivered more than 305,000 electric vehicles in the first quarter, a record-breaking figure that was inline with analyst expectations even as production suffered due to supply chain constraints and COVID-related factory shutdowns. “This was an difficult quarter due to supply chain interruptions & China zero Covid policy,” . “Outstanding work by Tesla team & key suppliers saved the day.” Tesla reported that it and delivered 310,048 vehicles in the first quarter. The vast majority of vehicles produced and delivered were Model Y and Model 3 vehicles. Tesla delivered 295,324 Model Y and Model 3 vehicles. It delivered 14,724 Model S and Model X vehicles. The delivery figures were in line or beat analysts expectation depending on the polled group. Analysts surveyed by Refinitiv showed expectations of 308,836 vehicle deliveries while those polled by FactSet anticipated 317,000. However, production was down slightly from 305,840 in the previous quarter due to factory shutdowns and supply chain issues. Tesla’s first-quarter delivery and production report comes amid increasing pressure in China where a surge in COVID-19 cases has prompted the government to issue lockdowns. Tesla Shanghai twice in March. Tesla’s Gigafactory Shanghai Tesla has scaled its production compared to the same quarter last year as new factories come online. In the first quarter of 2021, Tesla produced just over 180,000 vehicles and delivered nearly 185,000 vehicles. Production should continue to ramp up now that Tesla’s new factory in Berlin has opened. Tesla also said Saturday that it will report first-quarter earnings April 20 after the market closes. A live Q&A with Tesla management will follow at 5:30 pm ET. |
From a whirlwind, clarity | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 4 | 2 | What a . If you were plugged in to the startup news cycle recently, you’ve been busy. Y Combinator , Instacart’s repricing continued to reverberate, and it feels like we’re discovering that . That’s starting to feel like a summary of the first quarter: A and a . We’ll better understand the full Q1 picture when we get all the incoming venture capital data, but early marks do match that summary. What’s ahead is going to prove utterly fascinating. Q2 will see a host of startups need to raise new capital, and many will find the investing landscape utterly foreign compared to when they last looked for capital. What will that force? Will unicorns tap venture debt? Will we see a parade of down-rounds? Smaller inside deals to bolster runway? I don’t know. Listening between the cracks, the public conversation about a startup pullback may actually be somewhat late. If it was happening internally earlier in the year then we might have picked up on it. But what we can say is that the news hurricane of the last few weeks has been clarifying. From falling tech stocks to retreating unicorns and infinite early-stage hype, we are in a strange period, but one that I think we can now put a bow atop and move on from. Here’s to Q2. This little newsletter launched out of , TechCrunch’s reporting that sits behind our paywall. Launched a few years ago under the Extra Crunch brand, our experiment into the subscription media space has been a fascinating journey. Last week that I would take over as Editor in Chief of TechCrunch+, something that I am very excited about. And frankly more than a little humbled, but saying so is past cliche at this point so we can move on. A few notes on what’s ahead seem fair at this juncture, as The Exchange’s regular entries have been a staple of the TechCrunch+ posting flow since late 2019, which means that you all are veterans of the project. Thank you, by the way. TechCrunch+ has reached material scale, which means we have a strong cohort of subscribers, hard evidence that we’re doing something worthwhile and that the larger TechCrunch community is willing to endorse that work. The even better news is that we’re investing in TechCrunch+ this year, with more staff and lots of neat ideas ahead. Our goal is to not only do more reporting and writing, but also to widen our lens somewhat to ensure a broader content mix. That’s why to write about the fascinating, infuriating, and quickly evolving world of crypto. We’ll have more names to announce shortly in other areas, including the areas where I have traditionally written for you. That TechCrunch+ is not only alive, but growing is great news if you care about startups. One very nice thing about having a subscription service as part of a publication is that you can afford — literally — to go a bit more niche than you otherwise might be able to. This means that The Exchange has been able to, at times, focus down to a single startup topic and spend endless time gutting through its mechanics. Our work covering , , and 2022’s startup slowdown that we mentioned above are a few examples. TechCrunch is building this year. And part of that work is accelerating TechCrunch+. I think I am supposed to end this with some sort of pitch, right? I’ll try: Give a try this year when it makes sense. When the right article makes you curse the paywall, I hope that we earn your attention, and, well, money, this year. Hugs, be kind to one another, and I’ll talk to you Monday. — Alex |
What 411 YC Demo Day pitches will teach you about startups | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 4 | 2 | It’s YC week, and while I love to question how the accelerator’s impact is evolving in today’s climate, there’s always a lot to learn about hundreds of founders coming together and debuting their businesses to the world. I, alongside some of my favorites on the TechCrunch and TechCrunch+ team, covered Y Combinator Winter 2022 Demo Day with a series of posts: Now that we’re done, though, I want to leave you with a few takeaways I had after listening to hundreds of pitches. Here’s what 411 Demo Day pitches will teach you about startups: I did an earlier version of this column in September, titled Months later, the accelerator has grown its expanse, with nearly half of its companies based outside the United States and new representation from New Zealand, Sudan, Uganda and Costa Rica. I’ll remind you all, as I always do, that YC — similar to any singular institution — isn’t entirely illustrative of the next wave of decision-makers and leaders within startups. Its growing check size, for example, knocked out a whole slew of funders who once poached deal flow from demo day. And when it comes to diversity, the accelerator dipped in support for some underrepresented groups. In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll look at an edtech round in India, getting rid of pro rata and Cross River Bank’s atypical raise. As always, you can support me by forwarding this newsletter to a friend, or Classplus! As our own Manish Singh points out, “at a time when so many edtech firms in India are attempting to cut their reliance on teachers, a Noida-based startup that is helping teachers and creators operate, manage and sell courses to students The startup, now valued at $570 million, is just four years old. Offline coaching — in which tutors go in-person to teach students on a variety of subjects — is still very popular in India, however it’s limited by geography. The pandemic, and a broader digitization across the globe, has made some teachers pursue online opportunities to grow their larger businesses. Classplus’ ability to raise money means that urban India has enough demand to be a venture-backable market. Investors Vijay Chattha and Jay Kapoor, spin out from a PR company, arguing that VC should abolish pro rata. The duo drew from a portfolio survey and found that investors rarely provide value-add beyond 90 days from the signed term sheet. “At that point, the investor’s engagement is limited to their attendance at the quarterly board meeting — and that’s the lead investor,” The investors thus think that their peers shouldn’t invoke contractually negotiated pro-rata rights if they aren’t involved in the business, since “their mere presence on the cap table disincentivizes other VCs from working harder for their founders.” Chattha and Kapoor’s argument is contrarian, because it bets on investors changing their habits at the cost of their own returns. However, I like that it’s asking investors to raise their bar on involvement and influence once they land that coveted cap table spot. It’s easy to give up pro rata in a startup that is struggling, but what about needing to constantly prove yourself to your highest valued company? Incentive alignment for days, if you ask me. Lawrence Anareta / Getty Images Cross River Bank has raised $620 million in funding at a valuation north of $3 billion. The company provides technology infrastructure to venture-backed lending and payments, making the raise somewhat of a double bet on fintech’s boom. Fintech startups raised $121.6 billion last year — up 153% year-over-year in terms of global VC deal value, however, as Mary Ann pointed out, it’s atypical to pour millions of dollars into a traditional bank. Andreessen Horowitz general partner David George explained why he is so interested in the company: “When Coinbase was first starting out and looking for a partner bank, many traditional financial institutions had blanket policies that prevented them from participating in crypto,” George told TechCrunch. “Cross River, on the other hand, had the foresight to lean into this new frontier and support Coinbase, and many other leading crypto companies, who are still happy partners to this day.” / Getty Images TechCrunch Early Stage 2022 is April 14, aka right around the corner, and it’s in San Francisco. Join us for a one-day founder summit featuring GV’s Terri Burns, Greylock’s Glen Evans and Felicis’ Aydin Sekut. The TC team has been fiending to get back in person, so don’t be surprised if panels are a little spicier than usual. , and Follow our new senior crypto reporter, and our new senior enterprise reporter, , read it here: Until next time, |
Fast shuts doors after slow growth, high burn precluded fundraising options | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | that provided online checkout products, this afternoon that it will shut down. The company’s future has been in doubt for days now, after reporting indicated that its 2021 revenue growth was modest, its cash burn high and its fundraising options limited. had his share of controversy in Australia prior to starting Fast. Holland’s former startup, Tow.com.au, which aimed to be “the Uber of towing,” failed in what at least one person described as a “disaster.” NPR’s noted that Holland’s previous venture was embroiled “in a multimillion-dollar billing dispute with the Australian state government over towing and impounding fees that led to the startup’s liquidation in 2018.” Meanwhile, in the wake of Fast’s demise, community resources are already cropping up — including a list of former workers that is circulating. A quick scan of social media indicates that a number of companies are looking to snap up Fast staff. The talent market for startup workers is still hot, so perhaps the impact on those laid off today will prove short-lived. Fast’s conclusion comes after some other richly valued startups have begun to pull back. Layoffs are more broadly in startup land, and one very to better incentivize its workers. Earlier today, TechCrunch reported that Workrise — which was valued at $2.9 billion last year after a $300 million raise — what is believed to be “hundreds” of employees. This year is shaping up to look a lot different than 2021. |
This Week in Apps: TikTok partners with Giphy, new rules for reader apps, Roblox sides with Apple | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 4 | 2 | Welcome back to This Week in Apps, that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the year-end . Global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5%, reaching 230 billion in 2021, and mobile ad spend grew 23% year over year to reach $295 billion. Today’s consumers now spend more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users surpassed five hours per day in mobile apps in 2021. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours, either. They can grow to become huge businesses. In 2021, 233 apps and games in consumer spend, and 13 topped $1 billion in revenue. This was up 20% from 2020, when 193 apps and games topped $100 million in annual consumer spend, and just eight apps topped $1 billion. This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place, with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and suggestions about new apps to try, too. TechCrunch Apple this week it will begin to allow a subset of applications sold on its App Store to link to an external website where users can create or manage their accounts with the app developer. The change to Apple’s App Store Review guidelines only applies to what Apple calls “reader” apps — meaning, apps designed primarily to provide access to some sort of digital content, like magazines, books, audio, music or video. Apple’s plans were first announced last September in the context of the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), and had been set to arrive sometime in early 2022. The company had earlier said the changes would apply globally to all reader apps on the App Store when they went live, but had not provided an exact launch date. Specifically, Apple instructs developers to apply for something it calls the in order to provide this functionality in their own apps. Developers must apply for the entitlement and then be approved in order to make the change. Apple has been leveraging the use of entitlements whenever it’s been pushed by lawmakers or regulators to update its App Store rules in an area. By doing so, it’s still in compliance with the letter of the law, but it places an additional burden on those developers who want to take advantage of the new options — like , which are now permitted by law to use third-party billing, for example. Apple could easily update its App Store rules to document that this sort of new functionality is now permitted in select use cases, but it still wants to exert control over the whole process and ensure developers who don’t meet the requirements slip through the cracks. It’s disappointing to see Apple continuing to fight so hard against this larger turning of the tide for its app marketplace — even getting itself entangled in expensive lawsuits like the one with Epic Games — instead of having earlier simplified commissions across the board with a sizable — but still manageable — price cut. One has to wonder if Apple could have headed off developers’ and regulators’ concerns by taking a different path from the complicated carve-outs it has proceeded to embrace. The can afford to make less money from users’ App Store purchases. And it could find a variety of ways to monetize its app developer ecosystem differently in the future. It seems Apple is already payment processing technology in-house in a bid to generate more revenue and reduce reliance on fintech partners. While this effort would impact all parts of Apple’s larger business, it could also help Apple handle the App Store losses that arose from lowered commissions. Roblox March 31, 2022 was the deadline for the submission of amicus briefs supporting Apple in the Epic appeal. Among the new signers were those from former national security officials, including Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, former DNI and NSA director, and two former CIA directors, Gen. Hayden and John Brennan. The officials agree with Apple’s positioning that its commission structure is fair and allows it to create a “safe and secure ecosystem.” What’s interesting, however, is that Roblox also filed a brief to support Apple’s cause. A platform maker itself, albeit one that hosts online games not mobile apps, it’s likely aware of the impact of app market regulations on its own business. In particular, Roblox pointed to the need for platforms to set the standards for, review and approve software, user-generated content and apps that appear on platforms. It stressed how Apple’s App Review system benefits all apps in the Apple ecosystem, including its own mobile Roblox app, by providing a level of safety and security. While the company didn’t say Apple should be protected from all antitrust scrutiny, it made a solid argument against removing the platform model entirely. None of this is to say that Apple necessarily has it right whereas other platform models have it wrong, or that all decisions Apple might make regarding its App Store platform and related policies are sacrosanct or should be de facto protected from antitrust scrutiny. But the key point is that Apple’s model does provide real benefits to security and privacy. No platform is going to be perfect in its efforts to rid an ecosystem of bad actors, but it is core to Roblox’s beliefs that real, tangible results can be obtained where there is an enhanced focus on safety and security. The evidence at trial did not show that all of these benefits necessarily can be retained while eliminating the platform model that has allowed for them. Roblox’s experience, consistent with the evidence presented here, is that these particular procompetitive aspects of the App Store are real and intertwined with the way Apple structures its platform. The district court was right not to cast them aside as mere “pretext,” and neither should this Court. Fiesta Russia in mid-March officially in order to its grip on the country’s citizens’ ability to access uncensored information about the Russia-Ukraine war. But the ban has only resulted in sending another app just like Instagram to No. 1 on the Russian App Store. On March 29 and 30, a Russian app called became the top free iPhone app in the country after having first launched on November 25, 2021. The first time it ever charted in the top free apps in the country was on March 26. There’s not a lot of information about Fiesta, though it appears to be Russian-made. Its website doesn’t offer much information beyond what the app looks like and a form to join the beta. The site also displays photos of the app and links out to Fiesta’s social accounts, including and — the latter where it’s never posted. The app greatly resembles Instagram, but it also offers features for finding and joining local events, which differentiates it. According to preliminary estimates, Fiesta has now seen nearly 200,000 installs to date — most of which occurred this past week. From March 27 to March 30, the app saw around 184,000 installs — or more than 30 times the 6,000 installs it saw in the prior period from March 23 to March 26. Apple TikTok Instagram Apple 1. Update Spotify on iOS 2. Open Safari on iOS 3. Paste this into the URL bar: spotify:internal:podcastclips 4. Paste and Go 5. Open in Spotify You're welcome. 😉 — Chris Messina 🪬 (@chrismessina) in both debt and equity, led by Quona Capital. The app offers a range of services, including cash advances, BNPL, bill pay, a prepaid debit card and more. led by Insight Partners, bringing its total raise to date to $195 million. The company claims to have increased revenues by 300% over the past year. led by Microsoft’s M12, TPY Capital and Playtika to build a mobile games development platform. The company aims to soft launch later this year. in a new round led by Malabar Investment. The company, popular for rummy game RummyCircle, claims to have more than 100 million users. with @partyshirt I am way too late to this party 😅 |
International startups shrug off US insurtech meltdown | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 4 | 2 | run of concerned headlines that insurtech companies have generated, you’d be forgiven for anticipating that the startup category would find itself in dire straits. Not a bit of it. As The Exchange explored recently, despite some notable public-market misfires from the sector in the year. After a , a number of U.S.-based insurtech startups went public in 2020 and 2021. After some initially strong trading, the cohort has since been decimated by valuation declines. In the wake of the mess, that startups building insurance products would dry up somewhat, while upstart tech companies targeting the back end of the global insurance market would prove more active. And yet. The latest Y Combinator cohort featured a number of insurance-focused technology companies, and some of them want to actually write policies. Not all, of course. Our hunch about where insurtech startups are working on the mechanics of the existing insurance industry is coming good. We were just too pessimistic about the rest of the insurtech category. That the insurtech startup category is not dead should not be a surprise at this point. In the wake of 2021’s surprisingly strong data, there’s reason to believe that 2022 could bring more of the same. Using a , updated to constrain it to just Q1 2021 and Q1 2022 data, here’s the lay of the land for insurtech startups in capital terms: If you are looking at the two numbers and wondering why we’re not shouting about a roughly $400 million decline on a year-over-year basis, let us help. Venture capital data collected by groups like Crunchbase, PitchBook, and CB Insights has to deal with the pace and depth of private-market disclosures, which are different from what public companies drop. They are laggier and less complete. So we expect the Q1 2022 number to “fill in” some as time passes, bringing it closer to its year-ago comp. What matters more than any wiggle in the dollar amount is the simple fact that insurtech fundraising has fallen apart. Indeed, it’s still chugging along. Good news, we reckon, for the startups building in the space today. Let’s talk about what they are focused on. |
Here’s Y Combinator’s answer to cultivated meat’s scaling problem | Emma Betuel | 2,022 | 4 | 2 | The positive impact alternative meat products — like plant-based meat or cultivated meat — can have on the environment is striking. In optimistic scenarios where we transition to from meat-laden to plant-based diets over the next 15 years, between – % of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions can be avoided. Except for the fact that alternative meat has a big scaling problem. The Good Food Institute (GFI) that alternative meat producers will need to create 800 production facilities and spend about $27 billion within the decade To do this, cultured and plant-based meat companies need to solve scientific problems ranging from bioreactor size and efficiency to the high costs of growth factors used in cell-cultured meat. Some startups see these scaling problems as a foothold in the alternative meat space. Rather than launching brands, these are B2B alternative protein companies developing scalable industrial production platforms. There are two companies in embracing this model. Mooji Meats was incorporated just six months ago and is in the midst of raising a $2.5 million seed round. The company has developed a 3D printer capable of producing whole cuts of meat using plant protein or cultured meat cells. They’re developing a 3D-printed cut of Wagyu beef, and expect a prototype to be viable for taste tests within six months, co-founder Insa Mohr told TechCrunch. “There’s always this trade-off between scale and texture,” Mohr told TechCrunch. “3D printing always creates great textures without being scalable. Then there’s other technologies being scalable but not creating good textures. Especially not for steaks. And we overcome this trade-off.” Mooji Meats founders Insa Mohr and Jochen Mueller. Mooji Meats Mohr claims that Mooji can print these cuts of meat by layering fat, connective tissue and muscle cells in a marbling pattern, but she didn’t provide many details on how that happens. Mooji’s key advantage, she says, is speed. Mohr said that one printing head is “250 times faster” than existing 3D printers. At this early stage, it’s not a crime to be secretive. But proof of this enhanced operating speed needs to be visible soon. Mohr claims that the $2.5 million Mooji is currently raising should be enough runway to get the company to their first customer, and, one would hope, proof of concept in the real world. If you think plant-based meats will have issues meeting demand, that’s nothing compared to the cost challenges cultivated meats face. Some companies at least claim to break that cost barrier. In December 2021, Future Meat, an Israeli cultured meat company raised a round led by ADM Ventures (an astronomical jump from its $14 million Series A), and claimed to be capable of churning out a pound of chicken for , less than half of the $18 it cost six months prior. But that’s still higher than the roughly per pound of regular chicken. Anne-Sophie Mertgen, the founder of startup Micro Meat, told TechCrunch that most new cultured meat companies still struggle to get their businesses up and running at scale. Early Micro Meat experiments showing cultured meat in dishes. Micro Meat “No other industry exists where the big players are completely vertical,” she told TechCrunch. “So we really believe that to build this industry at the large scale that is needed to feed the world. We need more B2B players.” Micro Meat was founded in 2021 while Mertgen’s postdoc work at Tec de Monterrey in Mexico was paused due to the pandemic. Micro Meat’s focus is creating cell tissue scaffolds. Scaffolds are structures that facilitate the flow of nutrients and give cells the cues they need to form mature muscle tissues. Unstructured ground products don’t need hugely complex scaffolds, but cuts like steaks do. “We can cultivate them [tissue scaffolds] using similar processes that the cultivated meat industry is using, like biopharma reactors, for example,” she said. “We can scale this indefinitely, like right now we can produce, easily, with our first prototype, 100 grams in a minute.” The tech is currently in a prototype phase, but Micro Meat has successfully created a cultured pork product, she said. The company has raised $375,000 to date in pre-seed funding, and is in the process of raising a $2 million seed round. That round should provide up to two years of runway needed to establish an R&D line, perfect more devices and consumable products, and reel in some co-development contracts, said Mertgen. The Micro Meat team. Co-founders Anne-Sophie Mertgen and Vincent Pribble are third and fourth from the left. Micro Meat Both Micro Meat and Mooji Meats share a larger thesis: There’s untapped opportunity for B2B players in the alternative meat space. “The first B2B players entered the market in 2017, while the first cultivated meat companies were established in 2013-14,” Mertgen said. So this is generally a super young industry, but I think it’s really going to be needed.” Mohr says that she’s seeing some of these companies emerge now: “There’s more and more platform solutions evolving, which basically shows us that the industry as a whole is evolving,” she said. But there are yet more holes in the alternative industry that need to be plugged, industry analysts . Two that stick out right now are more diverse protein sourcing options for plant-based meat and cheaper growth factor sources for cultured meat products. The good news is that there’s money for companies looking to dig into these problems. The amount of private funding into the alternative protein space has heated up since 2020. That year $3.1 billion was poured into alternative proteins, a in funding from the previous year. , we’ve continued to see close. That’s a nice setup for an industrial alternative meat platform company with the ability to scale this nascent science. Each supply chain problem is a big enough scientific challenge to make or break a company, if not a career. |
Indian giant Tata Group to debut super app on April 7 | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 4 | 2 | Indian conglomerate Tata Group plans to debut its long-anticipated “super app,” called TataNeu, to the public on April 7, the company has disclosed on its app and Play Store page. Years in the making and riddled with multiple delays and buggy performance, TataNeu is the salt-to-software giant’s attempt to go head-to-head with rivals including American e-commerce group Amazon and local billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms that have scaled to new heights in the past decade while Tata focused on more legacy businesses. The app including some such as and that the firm has purchased in recent years. TataNeu will also offer users the ability to send people money and pay broadband, electricity, water and satellite TV bills and secure loans, TechCrunch reported earlier. Tata is hoping that customers will find its one-stop shop offering and rewards lofty enough to make the bold switch. Tata plans to offer them “NeuCoins” as reward, where one NeuCoin is equivalent to one Indian rupee. The firm, which has been testing TataNeu with tens of thousands of its employees for several quarters, plans to eventually phase out different group unit loyalty offerings by BigBasket, 1mg and other services and replace them with NeuCoins, TechCrunch reported earlier. The rewards are one of the major focuses for Tata Group as it attempts to build a “connective layer” for its services that operate in a wide range of categories. If successful, the 155-year-old giant is positioned to conjure up the largest loyalty program in the country. The company has also engaged with several investors — including SoftBank, the firm — to raise capital for its newfound tech ambitions. Screenshots of TataNeu app. (Credit: TechCrunch) TechCrunch reported in February that Tata was inching closer to launching the app. We also got hold of a recent build of the app and access to the service. From : Despite the delays, TataNeu looks anything but modern and executives at the firm are still scrambling to figure out how they can draw customers to the super app, according to two people familiar with the matter and materials provided to TechCrunch. […] But the app is comically buggy, horribly slow and the integrations merely point to different Tata services via an in-app browser — sometimes with the desktop view on a phone. |
Singapore-based healthcare startup Ordinary Folk gets $5M to fight stigma | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | , a Singapore-based telehealth startup dedicated to men and women’s health issues, has raised $5 million in pre-Series A funding from Monk’s Hill Ventures. The funding will be used for hiring and expand into Hong Kong while scaling in Singapore. Founded in 2020 by Sean Low, the startup has two main platforms: Noah is for men’s sexual health, mental wellness, hair care and weight management, while Zoey focuses on sexual wellness, fertility, mental health and wellbeing. Low says he started Ordinary Folk to ease the pain points of an in-person clinical visit, while also making it easier to seek care for stigmatized conditions like erectile dysfunction. “Men’s and women’s health conditions are intimate problems that affect all of us at some point of our lives, whether directly or through your partner,” he told TechCrunch. “And before we started Noah and Zoey, there weren’t any good solutions in Singapore and Hong Kong.” The company chose Hong Kong as its next market to expand into because there are many similarities between Singapore and Hong Kong, Low added. For example, both are densely-populated and fast-paced, with healthcare systems that have the same issues, he said. “While there are nuances, Singaporeans and Hong Kongers also identify similarly on issues such as high healthcare costs, fear of illegitimate medication, inconvenience of visiting a doctor and the stigma attached to men’s and women’s health conditions,” he explained. Ordinary Folk says that since its launch, its revenue has grown by over 130% and it has had over a million unique visitors. It differentiates from other telemedicine startups by building a full healthcare stack, Low said, including healthcare and logistics for medication in non-description packaging. This also means Ordinary Folk was able to create a health assessment patients take before scheduling an appointment, allowing doctors to make more detailed diagnoses. “In the case of sexual health, having to answer intimate questions can be tough and what more to a stranger whom you’ve never met,” said Low. The health assessment was developed in partnerships with doctors and health experts. Ordinary Folk’s network of providers include physicians, psychologists, therapists and other specialists. In a prepared statement, Peng T. Ong, the co-founder and managing partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures, said, “Millions of people across Asia find it difficult to access proper treatment and care for health conditions that have tremendous taboo attached. Through Noah and Zoey, Ordinary Folk is uniquely positioned to bring in value through the consumer journey of healthcare services, creating an ecosystem where patients have access to medical experts and products, and a wide range of treatment options. |
Lincoln Star Concept: Could a sport tourer be in Lincoln’s electric future? | Abigail Bassett | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Lincoln unveiled Wednesday at an event in Hollywood : The Lincoln Star Concept, a crossover that looks a lot like a Corsair or Nautilus crossover with a longer, lower-slung body, sharper body creases highlighted with LED lighting effects and a few interesting offerings that are unlikely to make their debut on any future production vehicle. The Lincoln Star Concept vehicle is a concept that is not going to end up on the production line. This is purely a research exercise and will be used to gauge customers’ interest in potential features and design styling for Lincoln’s plans to fully electrify half of its offerings by 2050. The presentation TechCrunch attended showed the Star Concept and several other vehicles that appear to be grand tourers or low-slung sedans, which is particularly interesting, given that Lincoln currently offers only SUVs and crossovers in the United States. Lincoln “We’re soliciting feedback and getting ideas with the Star Concept. The volume of proportions is something that obviously can sit two or three rows,” John Jraiche, the global director of luxury vehicles on enterprise product line management team at Lincoln said in an interview with TechCrunch. “In the lineup that we showed you in the presentation, each vehicle will serve a very unique purpose and I honestly think they don’t have proxies that are out in the market right now.” While journalists were not permitted to take photos during the presentation preceding the embargo today, the slides clearly showed what looked to be lower, sleeker-looking sedan-style bodies under sheets alongside the Star Concept. When pressed on whether there might be a grand tourer or “sports”-style car coming from Lincoln, Jraiche demurred. “You use the word ‘sports,’ … I think there’s a space for kind of a low-riding, long, low-roof, height vehicle. I wouldn’t necessarily use the term ‘sports car.’ I think there could be an opportunity for a form language, like the one I just kind of described. Kind of lower and more low-riding to the ground, lower ride, lower roof, height.” If Lincoln does roll out a grand tourer or sedan it would represent a significant shift in Lincoln’s product plans since the company only currently sells crossovers and SUVs in the U.S. market. The company stopped selling the Continental sedan in the U.S. in 2020, just four years after announcing the return of the famed moniker, after Ford, Lincoln’s parent company, announced that it would only produce SUVs and crossovers for the U.S. market (with the exception of the Mustang). There’s a very strong possibility that U.S. consumers may get a Lincoln based on the Mach E, which also has a lower ride height and fastback grand touring styling. In reality, however, the U.S. isn’t the growth market for Lincoln; China is. If Lincoln does make a , it’s highly likely to be for the C hinese market and not for the U.S. “China is really key to our future growth.” Joy Falotico, president at Lincoln said during the presentation. “Last year we sold more than 91,000 vehicles in China and that was the year over year increase of 48%.” Lincoln currently sells more vehicles in China than it does in the U.S. In the spring of 2021, Lincoln announced the Zephyr — a sedan that is built and sold only in China. According to the company, they’ve taken more than 5,600 preorders for the vehicle since the announcement. The Lincoln Corsair (a crossover that is also available in the U.S.) is the top-selling nameplate in China for the last 23 months, according to the company. “Sedans are strong in China,” Jraiche said later, echoing Falotico’s statement during the presentation. “The data says that is where the market is headed in the future with EV is yet to be seen but we have some forecasts and we think it’s going a low-riding vehicle with a low ride height and lower roof height. A low-slung vehicle.” The Star concept certainly fits the low ride height and low-roofline styling, though it is more crossover or wagon-like than what Jraiche insinuated. Jraiche did drive home that what really matters the most when it comes to the future of Lincoln is content. “What you deliver inside the vehicle is going to be paramount,” he said. “What pain points are you solving for the customer? How do you use the compute power? What experiences are you going to deliver? We’re choosing to serve as a flexible driver environment.” Lincoln To that end, the concept included interesting touches like coach doors, front seats that swivel to create a living room-style space inside, hidden in-door storage for a laptop that can be mirrored to the vehicle’s internal screens, a drawer-style front trunk and a rear tailgate that turns into outdoor lounge seating. While we’d certainly be excited to see any of these features show up on a production car from Lincoln, we doubt that we’ll see them in the form they take on the Star Concept. Beyond the Star Concept, Lincoln says it will have a total of four new all-electric vehicles by 2026. What shape they take and where they’ll be sold will remain to be seen. |
Elon Musk’s Boring Company raises $675M to scale Loop projects | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | The Boring Company, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s project to build underground highways to alleviate traffic congestion, has raised a $675 million Series C round, bringing its valuation up to $5.7 billion. The round was led by Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, 8VC, Craft Ventures, and DFJ Growth. The company says it will use the funds to significantly increase hiring across engineering, operations and production in order to build and scale Loop projects and accelerate the research and development of Prufrock, the company’s next generation tunnelling machine. In October, to build a transportation system that would shuttle passengers in Tesla vehicles via a network of tunnels under Las Vegas beyond its current 1.7 mile footprint that currently connects the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) campus to a 29-mile route that would hit all the best tourist spots in the city of sin. Operation on the updated Vegas loop should commence this year, according to the company. While the hints at other Loop projects in the works, TBC has not yet stated whether it is pursuing other projects. However, the company does mention that with increased boring speed, this type of transportation architecture can be applied to inter-city, or what TBC refers to as Hyperloop. That’s where improvements to Prufrock come in, an automated mining machine that can tunnel continuously and without humans on the ground in the tunnels. The current iteration, Prufrock-2, can mine at 1 mile per week, according TBC. The company boasts that a tunnel the length of the Vegas Strip, which is about four miles, can be completed in a month. The next generation, Prufrock-3, is designed to tunnel at seven miles per day. “In the short term, if each Prufrock-2 mines at 1 mile/week, and TBC produces 1 new Prufrock machine per month, then TBC will be introducing 600 miles/year of capacity,” the company said in a statement. “As a point of reference, less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnel has been constructed in the United States in the last 20 years.” |
Tesla blames inflation, cost pressure from suppliers for increased car prices | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Tesla has raised prices on its vehicles as it anticipates cost pressures from suppliers and logistics over the next six to 12 months, the automaker said on Wednesday during its . “We absolutely want to make EVs as affordable as possible. It’s been very difficult with inflation at a 40 or 50-year high, and I think the official numbers actually understate the true magnitude of inflation,” said Tesla CEO Elon Musk. “In some cases we’re seeing suppliers request 20-30% cost increases for parts from last year to the end of this year. So there’s a lot of cost pressure there.” The news comes as Tesla has also said it expects a prolonged supply chain crisis to at its factories that will continue through the rest of the year. During the first quarter, roughly 5% to 10%. The automaker says the market will bear it as demand continues to outstrip supply. “It may seem like maybe we’re being unreasonable about increasing the prices of our vehicles, given that we had record profitability this quarter,” Musk said during the briefing with investors Wednesday, “but the waitlist for vehicles is quite long, and some of the vehicles that people will order, the waitlist extends into next year.” Tesla said it is not immediately affected by the rising cost of raw materials, but that cost pressures could mount once its current contracts with suppliers expire. “Our contracts do directly reflect movement and commodity or raw material prices,” said Zach Kirkhorn, Tesla’s CFO, during the briefing. “But as those contracts expire, we have to renegotiate them, so that there can be a lag in some cases.” The automaker says its prices likely won’t continue to rise over the long-term. “We hope we don’t need to increase the pricing further,” Musk said. “The current pricing is anticipating what we think is the probable growth in costs. And if it does actually materialize we estimate slightly reduced prices.” “But we don’t control the macroeconomic environments,” he added. “Governments keep printing vast amounts of money and if there are not significant increases in lithium extraction and refinement and other raw materials, such that everyone’s competing for a limited amount of raw materials, then obviously that will drive prices to high levels.” Musk said Tesla is unwilling to slow the transition to sustainable energy, even given such constraints, and that the company is working with existing suppliers to determine how to accelerate the production of raw materials as quickly as possible. |
Musk says Tesla aspires to mass produce robotaxis by 2024 | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Tesla plans to bring a dedicated robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals to market by 2024, CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday during . That’s just two years to develop, test, verify, produce at volume and commercially launch a robotaxi service that meets regulatory rules that vary from state to state. In California, Tesla’s largest market for passenger vehicle sales, it will mean navigating the permitting process of two agencies. Musk struck a bullish tone despite the numerous challenges. The dedicated robotaxi will be highly optimized for autonomy, meaning it would not have a steering wheel or pedals, Musk said, adding that there are a number of other innovations around it that he thinks are quite exciting. “I think can be very powerful product where we aspire to reach volume production in 2024,” Musk said later adding “I think [the robotaxi] really will be a massive driver of Tesla’s growth.” Earlier this month at , Musk outlined a variety of future products that are a departure from its passenger car business, which generates the bulk of its profits today. Those products included mention of a robotaxi and Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot concept. Tesla’s robotaxi pursuit puts it in competition with companies that have been developing autonomous vehicle technology for robotaxis for years, including the Alphabet unit Waymo, Argo AI, Aurora, GM’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise, Motional and Zoox. It also calls into question whether Tesla intends to scrap its current strategy to full autonomy or if this will be developed in parallel. Musk has been hinting at robotaxis for years, but not through a standalone product like the one he described Wednesday. Instead, he has repeatedly promised to turn the Tesla vehicles that people own today into their own robotaxi via an upgraded advanced driving assistance system called Full Self-Driving software that currently costs $12,000. Tesla vehicles come standard with a driver-assistance system branded as Autopilot. Owners can buy “full self-driving,” or FSD — software that Musk has repeatedly promised will one day deliver full autonomous driving capabilities. FSD is not capable of driving on its own. It is considered a Level 2 ADAS and still requires a human driver to pay attention and take control. Dozens of videos posted by owners provide a mixed picture of the software’s capability and includes numerous clips of the vehicles failing to navigate basic driving and even suddenly veering off toward pedestrians or into another lane. During the call, Tesla acknowledged that its vehicles are largely unaccessible for many people given their high cost and sees the introduction of robotaxis as a way of providing customers with “by far the lowest cost-per-mile of transport that they’ve ever experienced,” said Musk. “Look at some of our projections, it would appear that a robotaxi ride will cost less than a bus ticket, a subsidized bus ticket or a subsidized subway ticket,” Musk continued. Notably, he did not disclose what sensor suite Tesla is considering for the purpose-built vehicle and whether it would use only cameras or also employ lidar and radar, which is the industry standard. Tesla’s full self-driving and Autopilot features have doggedly relied only on cameras and a vision-based approach to reach autonomy, whereas most other AV companies rely on a combination of cameras, radar and lidar. But during the call, Musk admitted to the difficulties of reaching actual full self-driving through this method, which ends up being a constant game of two steps forward, one step back. “With respect to full self-driving, of any technology development I’ve been involved in, I’ve never really seen more false dawns or where it seems like we’re going to break through, but we don’t, as I’ve seen in full self-driving,” said Musk. “And ultimately what it comes down to is that to sell full self-driving, you actually have to solve real-world artificial intelligence, which nobody has solved. The whole road system is made for biological neural nets and eyes. And so actually, when you think about it, in order to solve driving, we have to solve neural nets and cameras to a degree of capability that is on par with, or really exceeds humans. And I think we will achieve that this year.” |
This kamikaze drone sacrifices its own rotors to take down other drones | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Drones can be dangerous, and we’ve seen consumer-grade drones used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Back in 2018, interrupted travel plans for 140,000 travelers in London, and last year, too. There are The propellors detach from the drone to widen the net, aiming to take down offending drones. : It’s one of the coolest designs we’ve seen for drone take-down technologies, and it has the additional benefit of being potentially cheap to deploy; a good racing drone operator can use the two cameras to position the drone — the front-facing camera can be used to find the drone, and the top camera can be used to position the net exactly where it is needed, before detaching the individual rotors to send the net toward the offending drone. The cool thing about designing the defensive drone this way is that by using racing drone components, the device can be extraordinarily fast — as you’ll know if you’ve ever been along to — and drones that carry a payload tend to be slower and heavier. The Interceptor Drone can easily catch up with and intercept most other consumer drones. Once it has deployed its rotor-net, a parachute deploys and the bright orange drone floats gently down to the surface while emitting a beeping sound so you can go collect the brains and body of it for re-use at a later date. The demo video is beyond cool — check it out above — and there are . |
Musk says robot, aimed for 2023, will be worth more than Tesla’s car business | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Tesla CEO says the company’s robot, named Optimus, will be “worth more than the car business, worth more than FSD.” FSD, or “full self-driving,” is that relies on cameras and computer vision technology to perform some autonomous driving tasks. An FSD subscription costs Tesla owners about $12,000, or up to $199 per month. The executive shared during the company’s that Tesla is continuing to work on its robot. Optimus was first introduced in August 2021 . The 5’8″ robot will rely on Tesla’s work in neural networks and Dojo advanced supercomputer, and Musk envisions it performing tasks that can otherwise be described as human drudgery — things like grocery shopping and other everyday tasks. So far, all we’ve seen of the bot concept has been a person in a white spandex jumpsuit. Earlier this month at , Musk said a new wave of products, like Optimus, will be introduced in 2023. “I was surprised that people did not realize the magnitude of the Optimus robot program,” said Musk on Wednesday’s earnings call. “The importance of Optimus will become apparent in the coming years. Those who are insightful or looking, listening carefully, will understand that Optimus will ultimately be worth more than the car business, worth more than FSD.” We’re not exactly calling bullshit on this, but the idea that Tesla will be able to get a robot like this to market any time soon seems rather unrealistic. Other companies have been trying to create humanoid robots to take over human work for years, and we’ve not heard a lick about why this could possibly work for Tesla, especially given the short time frame Musk is aiming for. After all, it took Boston Dynamics 25 years of dedicated learning to build Atlas, and other automakers like Honda, Toyota and General Motors have also unveiled robot concepts in recent years that have barely landed. Why is that? Well, first there’s the question of whether a humanoid robot is actually the most efficient way to automate things. Then there’s the question of cost and scale. Because who is the target audience for a robot that will take away the human drudgery? The obvious answer is those who are currently toiling in the grind, people who don’t have enough money to outsource things like doing the laundry or grocery shopping. A Roomba alone could set you back $900. Will Tesla be able to scale its robot quick enough to the point of it being less than $10,000 a pop? Probably not. |
WeChat’s newsfeed turns 10. Is it still relevant? | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Over the last few days, my WeChat has been inundated with people reminiscing about the first post they ever published on the app’s newsfeed, which marked its 10-year anniversary this week. The newsfeed feature, called Moments, is like a social network that lives within the WeChat super app. Unlike many other social networks, which either die down over time or have fallen from grace among their original users , Moments has managed to stay relevant. Indeed, 780 million users were on Moments every day, among whom 120 million were actively posting content, according to an delivered by Allen Zhang, the creator of WeChat, in January 2021. At its scale, Moments is one of China’s largest social networks despite not being an independent app. People use it to record daily musings, promote business, find out what their old colleagues are up to, watch a live concert ( ), share news, and in times of emergency, deliver useful information to those in need. It’s hard to overstate the role this seemingly simple feature plays in WeChat’s success, let alone the product philosophy and business logic behind WeChat that it encapsulates. WeChat is aptly called a “super app” because each of its major features works like a full-on app, albeit with stripped-down functions: WeChat Pay (PayPal), short videos (TikTok), messaging (WhatsApp), official accounts (Medium and Facebook Page) and Moments (Facebook News Feed). A year after its messenger went live in 2011, WeChat introduced Moments. Like Facebook’s News Feed — which is arguably its closest Western equivalent — it features a scrolling chain of text, photos, articles and videos shared by a user’s contacts. Moments’ longevity partly stems from the fact that it’s prominently featured on an app with near-ubiquity in a country with 1.4 billion people. As of last September, WeChat had more than 1.2 billion monthly users who use it to chat, read news, watch funny videos, order food, book hospital visits, pay utility bills — you name it. The other critical factor, some argue, is that Moments has remained largely in its pristine form. Allen Zhang is often applauded for keeping Moments posts in chronological order, free from the disruption of algorithms that try to predict which friend’s update a user wants to see. Moments is also relatively ad-free — scroll down 10 posts and a user might find one unintrusive ad. That in part is thanks to other money-making businesses within WeChat, such as its mobile payments solution, that take some pressure off the networking feature to monetize people’s attention. Moments isn’t without challenges. Ubiquity is also its curse. Many users now have thousands of contacts on WeChat because the app is widely used for work on top of social needs. Many users may not want to share their decade of stories with a stranger they have just politely added at a networking event. Seeing the demand for more privacy, in 2017, WeChat began allowing users to hide their Moments feeds or make them visible for only a certain period of time. The move was a hit. In a speech in early 2021, Zhang an estimated 200 million users had made their Moments feeds visible for only three days. So long as WeChat keeps on inventing and listening to users, Moments will keep on attracting loyal followers. |
Daily Crunch: ‘For a limited time,’ Coinbase’s new NFT marketplace will waive transaction fees | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Happy 20th of April, 2022, which has no particular significance and we are not making any jokes. It’s been a strange news day, but never fear, we have some great stories for you to peruse. Today’s is a good one, with and discussing startup myths and assumptions. Don’t forget that , the TechCrunch podcast where founders talk about the stories behind their startups, was nominated for a Webby for best technology podcast. We need your help with some votes, so ! Car enthusiasts and those who like to talk about all things movement-related, it’s time to secure your tickets for next month’s . Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov will join us for a fireside chat. There’s something here for everyone, even . And while you’re procuring tickets, grab one for October’s . Take care, and we’ll see you here again tomorrow! – and Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, NFTs are all the rage, and a small subset of people are raking in the cash in the process. In a TC+ analysis, wonders how the market is going to survive the volatility and the outliers-driven market dynamics. Fascinating and (and a TC+ subscription, if you haven’t given our subs team the $50 worth of annual subscription tokens yet). In , we listed a firehose of new funds. One day late (how dare they not jump on our entirely arbitrary bandwagon), . Meanwhile, in the most life-imitates-art ( , “Silicon Valley”) story I’ve written for TechCrunch to date, Social Local Mobile Commerce (SoLoMoCo) app to bring the sharing economy to your apartment building. More? You want more? I gotchu: / Getty Images Whether it’s a neighborhood gym or a SaaS decacorn, every company that relies on recurring revenue watches its churn rate closely. Churn “is complex and confusing,” says Sid Jain, a senior analyst at ChartMogul, but for early-stage companies, it’s one of a few real-time metrics that can help founders run experiments and gather feedback quickly. Jain explains the differences between customer and revenue churn, shares formulas for calculating benchmarks, and answers the question: “What is a good monthly churn rate?” If you’re starting to think about recurring revenue, or know someone who is, please read and share. |
Tumblr said 420 Blaze it (but literally) | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Yesterday, Tumblr rolled out Tumblr Blaze to all users over 18 in the United States. The feature lets users promote their content in the same way you might boost a tweet or a Facebook post on those respective platforms — you pay a set fee between $10 and $150, and you’ll get an estimated 2,500 to 50,000 impressions on your post. But when you release a feature called Blaze literally the day before 4/20, you have to make a 4/20 joke. Today only, Tumblr is letting users try out its newest attempt at monetizing the so-called “hellsite” by offering Blaze pricing at $4.20 (good), $54.20 (not that funny, clearly a money grab) and $420.00 (who would do this?). Tumblr According to Tumblr, over 48% its of users are Gen Z, and if you want to cater to a young audience, you have to know what they think is funny. The company just pulled off a successful, crustacean-fueled , but Tumblr didn’t want to quit while it was ahead. Does Gen Z think 4/20 jokes are funny? I don’t know, I’m a millennial. 420 jokes aside, Tumblr Blaze might actually make the social network some cash. You can’t ironically post something with Post+, Tumblr’s controversial paywalled subscription product. But you can ironically Blaze (lol) a post. So far, it seems like most Tumblrites are just using the feature to shitpost, like this person who spent actual dollars to make people see the opening paragraphs to the seminal fan fiction work “ .” But a payment is a payment, so who cares? Tumblr, screenshot obtained by TechCrunch In the last year alone, Tumblr has tried to profit through paid (sponsored posts don’t appear for these users), a and a marking some of the first paid features on the longstanding blogging site. And despite nostalgic looks at Tumblr from outlets like and , the platform has failed to grow its user base significantly since its fateful in late 2018. According to analytics firm Similarweb, Tumblr has not experienced a significant uptick in monthly visits worldwide on mobile and desktop since last summer. Within this time frame, the highest number of monthly visits was about 327 million in July 2021, while the lowest number of monthly visits was 270 million in February 2022. In July 2018, before the porn ban, Tumblr had nearly 600 million visits in one month. On the mobile app, Tumblr hasn’t seen much of an increase in downloads either. App analytics firm SensorTower told TechCrunch that adoption of Tumblr’s mobile app has also been trending downward year-over-year. In 2021, the app saw 8.8 million installs, down 25% year-over-year from 11.8 million in 2020. |
null | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 4 | 5 | null |
Tesla expects gigafactories to run below capacity through 2022 | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Tesla said Wednesday that a prolonged supply chain crunch has limited production capacity at its factories and expects the pain to continue through the rest of the year. “Our own factories have been running below capacity for several quarters as supply chain became the main limiting factor, which is likely to continue through the rest of 2022,” Tesla said. Tesla included the warnings in its , which beat analyst expectations on income and revenue and sent shares higher in after-hours trading. Tesla reported $3.32 billion of net income, a 658% increase from the $438 million reported for the same period last year. Tesla also reported revenues of $18.75 billion. Per data from , analysts expected that Tesla would generate Q1 2022 revenues of $17.8 billion, and $2.26 in earnings per share. Tesla’s outlook on capacity comes even as it opens two new factories in Berlin and Austin, Texas. Tesla also outlined some of strategy for handling the supply chain issue and targets for growth, noting that it plans to grow its manufacturing capacity as quickly as possible. “Over a multi-year horizon, we expect to achieve 50% average annual growth in vehicle deliveries. The rate of growth will depend on our equipment capacity, operational efficiency and the capacity and stability of the supply chain,” the company said without providing a specific year for when it aims to hit that target. In 2021, the company delivered 936,222 vehicles. A 50% increase would mean delivering more than 1.4 million vehicles a year. On the supply chain front, Tesla continues to vertically integrate to soften the impact, including “putting significant efforts into in-house cell production, raw material procurement and supplier diversification,” the company said. “Challenges around supply chain have remained persistent, and our team has been navigating through them for over a year. In addition to chip shortages, recent COVID-19 outbreaks have been weighing on our supply chain and factory operations,” the company said in its first-quarter report. “Furthermore, prices of some raw materials have increased multiple-fold in recent months. The inflationary impact on our cost structure has contributed to adjustments in our product pricing, despite a continued focus on reducing our manufacturing costs where possible.” The entire automotive industry has been hit with supply chain constraints that first cropped up during the COVID-19 pandemic, and has been further squeezed by the war in Ukraine. Some automakers have fared better than others, but it’s affected every company in some way, causing some to produce vehicles without certain features that require chips. |
Is it cake? No, it’s Netflix’s crumbling subscriber numbers | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Netflix practically admitted during yesterday’s earnings call that there is some tough competition out there and Netflix needs to step up its game. Revenue and subscriber growth have clearly slowed, and content just isn’t hitting the mark. The company acknowledges this need for improvement. Ted Sarandos, co-chief executive officer and chief content officer, Netflix, said, “Honestly, we’ve got to compete, and we’ve got to continue to improve on the core service, which is making TV series and films and now games that people really love.” Movies with big names like “Red Notice,” starring Gal Gadot, Ryan Reynolds and Dwayne the Rock Johnson have flashy action sequences and expensive-looking props, but it wasn’t enough to win an Oscar, let alone satisfy subscribers. It’s also alarming that Netflix continues to burn time and money on these big films. “Red Notice” cost to make and only has a 36% on … yikes. It’s one of the most expensive movies Netflix has made to date. “The Irishman” is a close second at $150 million. But quality isn’t synonymous with expensive, and Netflix doesn’t have to spend so much on content if they don’t really need to. Look at Apple TV+’s “CODA” which cost to make. If a simple and sweet film like “CODA” can win Best Picture without fancy casts and movie sets, then it’s something to note. If Netflix continues to largely focus on A-List cast members instead of quality storylines and content, they’re not going to be able to keep up with their competitors. On the earnings call, Sarandos also acknowledged that it doesn’t have enough hits coming often enough. “…We were not happy with the top-line subscriber growth,” he said. “We have to have an ‘Adam Project’ and a ‘Bridgerton’ every month and to make sure that that’s the expectation of the service constantly. So we’re definitely feeling the higher levels of penetration in those markets of users, and we’re definitely feeling a heightened level of competition for sure.” Choosing this strategy of pushing out hits every month could be overambitious, even for a veteran like Netflix. While Sarandos added that the company will continue to invest in quality content and bring more variety to the table, if they continue with the strategy they have now — we aren’t quite sure if this will pan out the way they hope. There is some benefit to pacing shows, as other streamers are discovering, to keep users tuning in weekly, instead of just binging and leaving. “Game of Thrones” famously accomplished this for HBO, but now it’s the across services. And while Shonda Rhimes was a great decision for Netflix, bringing valuable shows like “Bridgerton,” which had a viewership of in its first 28 days, it could have helped Netflix if it was doled out more slowly. “Inventing Anna,” with 3.3 billion minutes watched for the week of February 14, per could also have benefited from this model. However, there are other decisions that Netflix has made that didn’t work out as planned. Netflix’s unscripted series “Is It Cake?” was a miss, receiving a low audience score of on Rotten Tomatoes. The streamer latched on to a trending online meme of cake resembling objects, which is arguably overdone, and rolled with it in hopes to bring more subscriber growth. The show is also too similar to its other wild and experimental cooking titles like “Best Leftovers Ever!,” “Cooked with Cannabis” and “Nailed it.” “Love is Blind” was another fun show that did really well, especially in the context of the online dating scene with millennials and Gen Z. The show had over 1.4 billion minutes of viewing time the week of February 14, according to Nielsen. But Netflix already has an overwhelming amount of dating shows such as “The Circle,” “Too Hot to Handle,” “Love on the Spectrum” and so on. So the recently released show “The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On” unsurprisingly flopped, receiving a Rotten Tomatoes audience score of . The point is, just because one show works doesn’t mean subscribers need several others just like it. This formulaic model of programming feels too algorithm-reliant in its decision-making process. Greenlighting quality content requires a human touch. If the company focused more on acquiring carefully curated titles instead of throwing money at big names and the next big trend, maybe they could rise once again. |
Billionaire CEO’s US Senate run focuses on one issue: Banning ‘self-driving’ Teslas | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Dan O’Dowd, the billionaire founder of The Dawn Project and Green Hills Software, is running for U.S. Senate on a single issue. It’s not unemployment or inflation or even education. It’s about making computers safer for humans, starting with a ban on the Tesla-branded “Full Self Driving” beta software that some 100,000 owners currently have access to as part of a safety mission that takes inspiration from Ralph Nader. The tweet included a 60-second Tesla vehicles come standard with a driver-assistance system branded as Autopilot. For an additional $12,000, owners can buy “full self-driving,” or FSD — software that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly promised will one day deliver full autonomous driving capabilities. FSD, which has steadily increased in price and has added new functions, has been available as an option for years. However, Tesla vehicles are not self-driving. FSD includes the parking feature Summon as well as Navigate on Autopilot, an active guidance system that navigates a car from a highway on-ramp to off-ramp, including interchanges and making lane changes. The latest FSD Beta is supposed to automate driving on highways as well as city streets. This is still a Level 2 driver-assistance system that requires the driver to pay attention, have their hands on the wheel and take control at all times. Numerous videos posted since last fall showing owners’ experiences provide a mixed picture of the software’s capability. In some videos, the vehicles handle city driving; in many others, drivers are seen taking control due to missed turns, being too close to the curb, failure to creep forward, veering off suddenly toward pedestrians and in at least one incident, hitting a stationary object. Tesla began last September to determine whether owners who paid for its “Full Self-Driving” software would be able to access the latest beta version. Musk has provided frequent updates about the FSD software, stating as recently as a few weeks ago that the beta software would be rolled out to this year. O’Dowd says he is “running to draw attention to this important safety issue: Tesla’s Full Self-Driving is defective and should be banned from our roads immediately.” On his , O’Dowd notes that “connecting the power grid, hospitals, and millions of cars to the Internet with software riddled with bugs and security defects has turned these systems into potential weapons of mass destruction at the mercy of hackers.” But the first danger, in O’Dowd’s view is the deployment of Tesla’s branded FSD software. |
Tesla crushes Q1 estimates, warns that supply chain issues are far from over | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Tesla said it faced several challenges in the first quarter related to global supply chain, transportation, labor and manufacturing issues and that the problems could limit its ability to run its factories at full capacity. The automaker also warned of that could hamper future production, despite the recent openings of its Gigafactories in Berlin and Texas that will build the Model Y. “Our own factories have been running below capacity for several quarters as supply chain became the main limiting factor, which is likely to continue through the rest of 2022,” the automaker said in its financial outlook. Tesla’s revenue from regulatory credits more than doubled over the previous quarter, to $679 million. Despite these rosy numbers, there is one figure that illustrates the company’s challenges. Supply chain issues are visible inside of Tesla’s listed “global vehicle delivery” number, which is measured in number of days of available supply. From a peak of nine days’ worth of cars in Q2 2021, Tesla reported just a third of that figure, a slim three days, in Q1 2022. That figure is closer to the company’s Q4 2021 result of four days’ worth of inventory, at a roughly flat production level. Same production with less slack? Sounds like a supply chain matter. |
Instagram to improve its ranking system to better highlight original content | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Instagram head Adam Mosseri today that the company is going to tweak its ranking algorithm to highlight original content more on its platform. Following the announcement, a spokesperson for the social media giant told TechCrunch in an email that Instagram is making changes to its ranking algorithm to prioritize the distribution of original content, rather than reposted content, in places like the Reels tab and feed. “This is specifically focused on the idea of originality,” Mosseri said shared on his social media channels on Wednesday. “If you create something from scratch, you should get more credit than if you are resharing something that you found from someone else. We’re going to do more to try and value original content more, particularly compared to reposted content.” 📣 New Features 📣 We’ve added new ways to tag and improved ranking: – Product Tags – Enhanced Tags – Ranking for originality Creators are so important to the future of Instagram, and we want to make sure that they are successful and get all the credit they deserve. — Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) Instagram elaborated that the platform will now be less likely to recommend reposts of Reels that are already on the app. The company will also be less likely to recommend accounts that aggregate and reshare other users’ content. Instagram notes that as it recommends more content on the app, it believes that it’s important that the credit, distribution, growth and monetization go to the original creator. In response to a social media consultant Matt Navarra, Mosseri noted that Instagram already works to highlight original content, but that it’s leaning more in this direction and will continue to do so. “As we lean more into recommendations it’s becoming increasingly important that don’t overvalue aggregators, as that would be bad for creators, and therefore bad for Instagram long term,” Mosseri said in a tweet. As we lean more into recommendations it’s becoming increasingly important that don’t overvalue aggregators, as that would be bad for creators, and therefor bad for Instagram long term. — Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) When asked how Instagram can determine the original creator of an image or a video, in a tweet that the app “can’t know for sure.” He outlined that the company builds classifiers to predict how likely something is to be original. The company also looks at things like who’s in the video and if the app has seen the video before. Instagram is flooded with popular meme accounts that repost other users’ reels and often receive tons of engagement and millions of views. The new change means that these accounts may no longer get the same reach that they currently do, as the platform works to amplify the original creator instead. Alongside the announcement about prioritizing original content, Mosseri also touched on two recent launches: product tagging and enhanced tagging. Earlier this week, Instagram that product tagging, which was previously only available to creators and brands, is now available to all U.S. users with public accounts. Now, all U.S. users will be able to tag products from businesses that are set up for Instagram Shopping. The company says the expansion will make it easier for people to discover products from people they follow and for businesses to grow their audience on the platform. As for the Instagram launched those earlier this month. They aim to make it easier for creators to receive credit for their work. Instagram says the enhanced tags allow users to share and view a creator’s specific contribution to a photo or video post. The creator’s self-designated profile category specifying their role will be displayed within the tag. With these new tags, creators will be able to tag other creatives within their posts as a way to give them more exposure for their work. |
Zoom announces Zoom Whiteboard, gesture recognition among several updates | Aliya Chaudhry | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | and new features, including a virtual whiteboard and gesture recognition. Among the updates is , which uses AI to analyze calls. Zoom Zoom added Gesture Recognition, which means that instead of clicking on a reaction you can raise a hand or put a thumbs up to display that reaction in the call. It’s only limited to those two gestures for now, and requires client version 5.10.3 or later. It’s disabled by default at the client level and you can enable it at the account, user or individual level. Zoom has also , which is built into Zoom’s desktop app, Zoom Meetings, and Zoom Rooms. Zoom plans to add support for Zoom Chat soon. It also allows you to use sticky notes and add images and save the whiteboard after the meeting. It’s available on Zoom version 5.10.3 or higher, and you can access it through the Whiteboard tab. Zoom Zoom has also improved audio quality and cut down on audio delays on audio-conferencing for users in the Asia-Pacific region. Zoom will originate Call-Me outcalls from data centers in Asia-Pacific, which have been recently updated. Meeting invites will now include new DID and Tollfree numbers when you select Asia. Other changes to Zoom include the ability to turn chat notifications on and off and create a central library of polls. Hosts in the main Zoom session can now see Breakout Room activity, including screen sharing and audio and video status, and Zoom will notify users about this when they enter Breakout Rooms. Cloud recordings can now record as many as nine spotlighted users in a meeting or webinar. There’s been an update to security as well. When Zoom detects unusual activity — such as logging in from a new device or a different country — on an account with a work email and without two-factor authentication, it will ask users to enter a one-time password. Zoom announced that they’re expanding the Expo floor for Zoom Events, now allowing 1,500 concurrent participants. They’re also raising the limit on booths to 300, including 100 sponsored and 200 non-sponsored, with up to 20 representatives per sponsor and 20 representatives per booth. Webinar attendees can now react with emojis and hosts can customize backgrounds and nametags. Zoom Contact Center now allows users to switch on or off automatic call recording for both inbound and outbound calls. Contact Center also offers analytics and allows users to create and adjust message channel flows for chat and SMS. You can also choose to show a video to customers in the Waiting Room and the inbox will also include transcriptions of voicemail. The new Chat Etiquette Tool for Zoom Chat allows admins to set up specific policies for chat and then decide what action the tool should take — like sending a warning or preventing the user from sending the message — when the tool has detected content in messages which trigger that policy. The chat app also comes with Box and Microsoft SharePoint integrations. New customers for Zoom Phone using their own carriers will have Zoom set up as the default emergency carriers for calls from U.S. and Canadian numbers. This change will roll out to existing customers in May, but they can opt-in or contact Zoom if they don’t wish for Zoom to change the default. Zoom Phone now comes with a dashboard to manage different devices and users now have the ability to let the people they call opt-in or out of SMS/MMS messages. |
Here are the games that were announced at the Meta Quest Gaming Showcase | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Meta might want us to do everything in VR, from to , but we often forget that playing video games is actually a pretty legit application of this technology. So, Meta is investing in some big-name IP to roll out a slate of new games on its Quest 2 VR headset this year, which the company unveiled at its today. What happened to the Oculus Quest 2? Well, Meta killed off that branding, but if you have an Oculus Quest 2, then, well, you have a Meta Quest 2. Don’t worry about it. Some of these games have already been teased, like the hyped-up “ .” But Meta confirmed that any game shown in today’s stream will come to the Quest Store by the end of 2022 (they did say in a disclaimer that “there’s always a risk of games slipping due to the very real challenges of development,” but we’ll take them at face value). The Zuck himself made a guest appearance on the YouTube livestream to share the news that via Sony Pictures Virtual Reality. In the upcoming game, you’ll work out of the Ghostbusters’ San Francisco HQ to solve a mystery while, you know, hunting ghosts. The game will also include a multiplayer mode, where you can play with up to three friends. Who you gonna call? Mark Zuckerberg, I guess. Hot take: sports are fun in VR. No, I’m not trying to go to work meetings in VR. But I do want to pretend I’m an NFL quarterback so that I can defeat Tom Brady myself. StatusPro, a VR company led by former NFL wide receiver Andrew Hawkins and former college quarterback Troy Jones, unveiled “NFL PRO ERA,” the first officially licensed NFL game to hit VR. In the game, you’ll step into the shoes of an NFL quarterback, playing through a season on your favorite team (go birds). The game will recreate NFL stadiums, and in a multiplayer mode, you’ll be able to play catch with your friends in whichever stadium you want. Hopefully, that means you’ll also be able to play games against your friends (or enemies. Tom Brady, DM me.) “Among Us” was so popular in early pandemic days that even Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) with Twitch stars like Pokimane, HasanAbi and DrLupo to encourage viewers to vote. In December, Meta announced that a VR version of the game would be coming to the Quest 2, and after appearing in today’s showcase, we know that it’ll be out by the end of the year. The immersive twist on the popular game is being developed by , and . First of all, I don’t understand the “Beat Saber” hype when “ ” exists. But to each their own. And I guess if you’re someone who likes deadmau5, Pendulum, Marshmello and other EDM artists, you’ll be excited for “Beat Saber: Electronic Mixtape” to . So far this year, Beat Saber has also unveiled its and a . I’m not sure how big the overlap is between VR gamers and , but anyone who loves to nerd out about urban planning and public transit will probably love “Cities: VR.” From Fast Travel Games, “Cities: VR” lets you build the city of your dreams — and then, you get to (virtually) experience it. Have you ever wished that you could redesign the entire MTA? Now is your chance. Sort of. Unlike some other games discussed today, “Cities: VR” actually has a release date — the game will be available in the Quest store on April 28. Here are the rest of the games showcased today, coming to the Meta Quest this year: |
Dear Sophie: Can a startup sponsor a graduating co-founder? | Sophie Alcorn | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says , a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to in my next column.” TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; . On Tuesday, April 26 at 2:30 p.m. PDT/5:30 p.m. EDT, Sophie Alcorn will answer questions about immigration law for startups during a Twitter Space hosted by Senior Editor Walter Thompson. The conversation is open to everyone, so please submit your questions on Twitter and . Dear Forward-Looking, A founder completing an advanced degree has several options! Let me take your second question first: Yes, it’s possible for a newly minted company that exists in good faith to sponsor a recent grad. For most student founders, the straight line is from OPT to STEM OPT, while getting ready to qualify for an O-1A. Once on O-1A, it’s possible to initiate the green card through EB-2 NIW or EB-1A for individuals born in India or China. All work visas and most employment-based green cards require a sponsoring company (or in the case of an O-1A, an agent). The green card and (National Interest Waiver) green card are the exceptions (they both allow an individual to file an application on their own, or an employer can sponsor an employee and file an application on the employee’s behalf). Often, employer sponsorship requires the company to demonstrate that an employer-employee relationship exists between the sponsoring company and the individual being sponsored for the visa or green card. One way to demonstrate this can be if the co-founder who is seeking a visa or green card owns less than 50% of the startup and if there’s another person at the company offering the individual a job, such as an executive or a director. Talk to your immigration and corporate attorneys as there are multiple ways to legally structure this depending on your specific desired immigration pathway. In order for a company to be able to successfully sponsor a co-founder and other prospective hires for visas and green cards, founders should be aware of all options available to them. Founders will also want prospective investors to feel comfortable investing in the company as they complete due diligence, so the proper initial company structure and legal compliance are important. I recommend you consult both a corporate attorney and an immigration attorney for assistance with charting the path forward for the startup and the upcoming graduate.
Most graduates are eligible for at least one year of employment authorization called (OPT). If the founder qualifies and receives their EAD card, or work permit, they would be eligible to work at the newly minted startup for 12 months. F-1 students may apply for OPT up to 90 days before completing their degree, but no later than 60 days afterward. Students must request that the designated school official (DSO) at their academic institution recommend them for OPT by endorsing their (Certification of Eligibility for Nonimmigrant Student Status) and updating their record in the (SEVIS). Once that’s done, students must file (Application for Employment Authorization) with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is now available for electronic filing online. |
Enter the Student Pitch Competition at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 | Marquise Foster | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | null |
Lexus unveils its first EV, an SUV that looks a lot like the Toyota bZ4X | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | Toyota’s Lexus is the latest luxury brand this week to unveil its first-ever battery-electric vehicle, a surprisingly low-range SUV called the RZ that is supposed to set the direction for its future. And that future looks a lot like the that recently launched. The 2023 RZ 450e is the first nameplate to launch under the automaker’s “Lexus Electrified” vision for its upcoming all-electric models. Lexus has set a goal to offer EVs in each vehicle segment by the end of the decade and become a fully battery-electric brand by 2035. Lexus faces stiff competition in an increasingly crowded EV landscape, with numerous luxury brands launching their own electric sedans, SUVs and crossovers. The RZ, a five-passenger SUV that will travel a maximum of 225 miles on a fully charged battery when outfitted with smaller, 18-inch tires, will go up against the likes of Audi, BMW and Cadillac, to name a few. The RZ’s battery setup will deliver even fewer miles when the crossover is equipped with a larger set of tires. That’s less range than many of the luxury EVs to debut this year, which could put the RZ at a disadvantage. General Motors, for example, says its new can travel more than 300 miles on a single battery charge. Lexus could give the RZ a competitive boost by keeping the base price below other luxury EV SUVs, including the Audi e-tron and BMW iX. Lexus has not yet released pricing for the vehicle. If it is below $60,000, the RZ will face competition from the Volvo XC40, which has a 257-mile range, and the 225-mile-range Volvo C40. It also may compete with the which can travel up to 252 miles on a full battery charge. Both are built on Toyota’s e-TNGA dedicated EV platform. That means power, performance and interior touches will matter if RZ hopes to stand out. And many of those details, including performance, price or production dates has not yet been released. But from what has been released the 2023 RZ does have some fancier details than the bZ4X, including a larger infotainment system. The 2023 RZ will use the same Lexus Interface multimedia system and 14-inch touch screen found in the latest versions of the brand’s NX compact crossover and flagship LX utility vehicle. |
Tesla says it’s also being investigated by federal equal employment agency | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | A U.S. federal agency that enforces civil rights laws against workplace discrimination can now be added to the list of agencies that is investigating Tesla. In a court filing on Monday related to a separate case, the automaker revealed that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has an “open investigation” into Tesla, a finding first reported by . The disclosure was tucked inside a filing with the California Superior Court in Alameda County related to a case involving the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Tesla lawyers asked a judge in the document filed April 18 to pause a and harassment at Tesla’s Fremont manufacturing plant. Tesla claims the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), which filed the lawsuit against Tesla in February, is exceeding its legal authority and “using litigation as a bullying tactic and to advance its turf war” with EEOC, which had already been investigating the automaker before DFEH filed its suit. (The “turf war” Tesla is referring to involves of a sexual harassment lawsuit against video game company Activision Blizzard.) TechCrunch has reached out to DFEH and EEOC for comment. We will update the article if either agency responds. When , it said it had received “hundreds of complaints from workers” and found evidence that the Fremont factory is a “segregated workplace where black workers are subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay and promotion creating a hostile work environment.” Tesla in February attacking the DFEH and calling the lawsuit “misguided.” Tesla’s lawyers noted in Monday’s filing that DFEH didn’t show worker complaints to the company until after the agency filed its February suit. In October 2021, in damages to a Black former contractor who accused the company of ignoring discrimination and racial abuse — like slurs and swastika graffiti — at the same plant. While U.S. District Judge William Orrick agreed with the jury’s finding he was compelled to reduce the punitive damages to $15 million. Previously, in 2017, a for failing to investigate claims of the employee being repeatedly called the “n-word” at the Fremont plant, which was described in that lawsuit as “a hotbed for racist behavior.” |
The Food Lab, an Egyptian cloud kitchen provider, raises $4.5M pre-seed for expansion | Tage Kene-Okafor | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | L-R: Wesam Massoud, Kareem El Daly, and Ahmed Osman |
Top SoftBank LatAm partners leave firm to start their own | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | SoftBank Latin America is certainly having massive exits, but not the lucrative kind. and , two managing investment partners of SoftBank’s Latin America practice, are leaving the firm to start their own venture practice. According to Passoni’s LinkedIn post, Nyatta and he “now move towards achieving our own dreams. In our own way. With our own culture.” The duo’s departure comes just a week after SoftBank announced that it its Latin American early-stage practice into independent firm Upload Ventures. The new entity saw managing partners Rodrigo Baer and Marco Camhaji, who were hired by SoftBank in 2021, leave to run the operation on their own. Now Nyatta and Passoni are doing the same. In just a matter of weeks, four of SoftBank’s managing partners have left the Japanese conglomerate to work on their own firms. Additionally, COO Marcelo Claure, a native Bolivian who led the charge on SoftBank’s efforts in Latin America, left the firm over a compensation dispute just months ago. Very notably, Nyatta was involved not only with SoftBank’s LatAm efforts but in recent months, he led for underrepresented founders, which Claure also had spearheaded. Claure, who launched the Opportunity Fund, resigned after what was reported to be months of negotiations over he believed he was owed. Going forward, confirms SoftBank, that Opportunity Fund will be managed by Catherine Lenson, a managing partner and longtime HR exec who also, as of late February, held the title of “ ; Brett Rochkind, a Silicon Valley investor who joined SoftBank earlier this year; and outside operator-investors Stacy Brown-Philpot and Paul Judge, who joined the investment committee of the Opportunity Fund at Claure’s invitation and right now remain on that committee. SoftBank declined to answer questions about how much money the Opportunity Fund will receive going forward, though it apparently plans to invest more than the $100 million it deployed through the strategy initially, before declaring last month that it will now operate it as an “evergreen” vehicle, meaning SoftBank will now fund it on an ongoing basis rather that dedicate a lump sum to the effort. As for Nyatta and Passoni’s new firm, expect to see fundraising in coming months. The duo clearly had experienced investing in historically overlooked founders in the LatAm region, so a continued focus would feel fitting. “I am extremely thankful to Masa and SoftBank Investment Advisers for the amazing opportunity to redraw the lines of Latin America venture and growth equity in the past 3 years,” Passoni continued in his blog post. “I received the biggest gift of them all: I learned in 3 years what would otherwise have taken me 10 in any other place in the world.” Alex Szapiro and Juan Franck will lead the SoftBank Latin American practice following these departures. |
Ant Group buys Singapore’s 2C2P to further global payments ambitions | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | Quietly, Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Group has been building a global cross-border payments network by partnering with or investing in third-party e-wallets, banks, remittance services and other ecosystem players. The latest added to Ant’s alliance is 2C2P, a Singapore-based company that helps enterprises in Southeast Asia move money across borders. According to an released on Monday, Ant will form a strategic partnership with 2C2P and become its largest shareholder, though a figure for the acquisition wasn’t disclosed. With the deal, the Singaporean firm’s network of merchants will be plugged into Alipay+, Ant’s cross-border payments platform. “Through this complementary partnership with Ant Group, 2C2P will be connected to a much larger merchant base and be well-positioned to advance our international expansion strategy,” Aung Kyaw Moe, founder and CEO of 2C2P, said in a statement, adding that the partnership will help extend the company’s “current 250 payment options” to include more e-wallets and payments methods. Rather than building its own country-specific wallet from the ground up and acquiring the needed regulatory permits to operate such services, Ant has chosen the route of partnership. It launched Alipay+ in 2020 and has so far teamed up with a slew of third-party payment methods, including banks and also e-wallets like Touch ‘n Go in Malaysia, GCash in the Philippines, KakaoPay in South Korea, TrueMoney in Thailand, Dana in Indonesia, bKash in Bangladesh and Klarna in Europe. Alipay+ comes in handy when a user traveling, working or studying abroad wants to pay a local merchant, whether it’s online or offline, in their home country’s currency. If the retailer supports an e-wallet that works with Alipay+, the user can pay using Alipay+’s partnering wallet for the transaction, skipping the hassle of exchanging currency at a bank. Alipay+ also comes with a suite of marketing tools that allow merchants to offer deals and discounts for customer engagement, a business model that it has proven in China’s mobile-first payments market over the years. The fintech giant has long had globalizing goals and set out years ago by targeting China’s outbound tourists. While Alipay focuses on China’s domestic consumers and merchants, its sister Alipay+ appears to be Ant’s ambition to go after users outside China who have similar cross-border payments needs. Ant’s plans to pursue an initial public offering were after the Chinese government ordered a regulatory overhaul into its financial practices, which subsequently made some of its China-based businesses less lucrative. Ramping up overseas expansion could be a way for the behemoth to sustain growth. Ant says Alipay+ has served more than 1 billion users in Asia and 1 million offline merchants across Europe and Asia. Online, it has connected payments providers to customers on platforms like Apple, Foodpanda, Google and TikTok. |
Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX tops $2 billion valuation in new $135 million funding | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | CoinDCX has doubled its valuation to $2.15 billion (post-money) in eight months following a fresh $135 million funding, it said today, as the Indian cryptocurrency exchange looks to aggressively expand its product offerings and talent base, including some to double down on compliances in the world’s second largest internet market. Steadview and existing backer Pantera co-led CoinDCX’s Series D financing, the firm said. Coinbase Ventures, Kingsway, DraperDragon, Republic Capital and Kindred Ventures also participated in the Mumbai-headquartered startup’s new funding. To date, CoinDCX has raised more than $245 million. The startup, the first Indian crypto firm to attain the unicorn status last year, says it has amassed over 10 million users. In addition to allowing users to buy various tokens for as low as 100 Indian rupees ($1.3), CoinDCX also provides margin trading and the option to stake digital assets. “What is interesting about this round is the quality of investors who’re coming in and the kind of strong confidence they have shown on the market,” said Sumit Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of CoinDCX, in an interview with TechCrunch. “It gives a good boost to the overall industry.” The startup’s new funding comes weeks after — 30% on the income — went into effect. The rule, which also includes a 1% tax deduction at source for each trading, has significantly impacted all crypto exchange’s trading volumes in the country, according to publicly available trackers . Gupta confirmed that CoinDCX has also been hit by the recent move, noting that the 1% TDS has made it somewhat less feasible for some high-frequency traders to go about their business. (Such traders make a large portion of the trading volumes.) “We continue to see new users come to the platform, but the growth is not as high as it used to be, say, two months ago,” he added. The startup plans to double down on its compliance efforts, he said. “We will do whatever it takes to give more comfort to the regulators,” he said. CoinDCX, which also counts B Capital among its backers, is also working to ramp up educating the retail investors and help contribute to broadening the local ecosystem, he said. The startup will populate its eponymous app with educational content and byte-sized videos, Gupta said. CoinDCX co-founders Neeraj Khandelwal (left) and Sumit Gupta. (CoinDCX) As for the new product offerings, CoinDCX recently introduced a new plan that allows individuals to keep investing a certain amount every few days. The feature is aimed at helping people understand and build a habit of making long-term and disciplined investments. More than 100,000 individuals are already using the offering, which was unveiled late last month. “So we will keep on adding more,” he said. Some offerings that you can rule out seeing on CoinDCX include wealth management opportunities such as mutual funds and stocks. Gupta said crypto remains the singular focus for CoinDCX. “As a company, we are excited about a category that is the future. We will continue to double down on crypto and not explore areas that are already solved,” he said. CoinDCX is also planning to considerably ramp up its workforce. The startup, which currently employs about 400 people, plans to have 1,000 people by the end of the year. “This is a problem, I as a founder, experience a lot. There’s a lack of talent pool. There are limited number of people who have experience of working in the crypto space. How can we built a sort of mechanism, where more and more gain understanding and contribute to the ecosystem,” Gupta said. The exchange, one of the largest in India and which also helps power the orderbook of (valued at $1.9 billion), is also exploring building a ventures arm, as is popular among other global exchanges such as Coinbase, FTX and Binance , Gupta said, but it’s not something CoinDCX is planning to launch anytime soon, he suggested. “We have the right infrastructure and distribution, it’s very much on the cards,” he added. “We have long been impressed by CoinDCX’s vision to build a thriving Web3 ecosystem in India and it has been our pleasure to support the team’s execution in building the most customer-centric and feature rich crypto exchange in India following our initial investment in 2021,” said Ravi Mehta, managing director of Steadview, in a statement. “We are excited to now deepen our investment to fuel the growth of one of the most loved Web3 companies in India.” Unlike Binance, which has its own token, called BNB, and FTX, which runs FTT, CoinDCX is not looking to introduce its own native token, Gupta said. “We don’t want to launch a token for the sake of it. Token is generally useful when you want to get the network effects faster. It’s something you try to solve massive adoption early on. I think we’re already doing pretty well. We are very cautious about each new feature or product we introduce as it’s an irreversible thing. I have been telling the team, for example, if we do something, we need to do it right,” he said, pointing to exchanges such as Coinbase and Kraken that don’t have their own tokens. |
Square Peg on building its foothold in Southeast Asia | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | , one of Australia’s largest venture capital firms with current assets under management of about $3 billion USD, is digging deeper into Southeast Asia. The firm is currently raising $550 million in new funding, and if its recent investment history is anything to go by, a good chunk of that will be invested into Southeast Asian startups. Tushar Roy, partner at Square Peg Capital, told TechCrunch that Southeast Asia has been the firm’s fastest-growing geographical footprint (it is also known for investments in Israel). Half of the firm’s last $275 million fund, called Fund 3, was invested in Southeast Asia. Across all its funds, Square Peg has now invested a total of about $250 million in Southeast Asia. It now has 18 companies in its portfolio from the region. The ones that have been made public are: , , , , , , , , , , and . The $550 million in new funding, which Roy said is set to close in the next quarter, will be spread across two funds. One is an early-stage venture fund that will invest in seed through Series B-stage tech companies across Southeast Asia, Australia and Israel. The second, called Opportunities Fund 2, will be for later-stage follow-on investments in Square Peg’s best-performing companies from its earlier funds. Over the firm’s history, it has deployed $900 million and has a net IRR of 37%. Square Peg’s first investment in Southeast Asia was about eight years ago, in WeGo. Since then, its interest in the region has ramped up considerably, especially in the last two years. “I joined Square Peg seven years ago and almost from day one, I focused on Southeast Asia region,” Roy said. “The first five years were us going from the region being a bit of a curiosity to us, essentially looking more deeply at the region to now doubling down, and it’s a key driver of strategy for our firm.” In 2020, just as COVID was ramping up, he moved to Singapore to establish Square Peg’s office there. The pandemic accelerated investment in the region because deals were being done over Zoom, opening it up to investors without traveling. “It’s really through the period of COVID 2020, 2021 that you saw a massive acceleration in some of the international funds’ interest in this region, as more international funds set up offices in the region,” Piruze Sabuncu, partner and another member of Square Peg’s Singapore office, said. COVID and remote work also opened up new workers to help companies scale up. For example, Indonesian companies started working with employees in Vietnam, Singapore or India. “This really brought in the right level of talent to get to the next stage as well,” said Sabuncu. As for the first-quarter slowdown in funding, Roy said, “I think founders’ expectations on valuations are a bit more muted than they were at the end of last year,” but there is still a small number of companies “that everyone wants to invest in and so the valuations are holding up, it’s continuing to go up in those cases.” Square Peg’s next funds will focus on software as a service, consumer internet, fintech, health education and the future of work, as well as a growing focus on web3 or crypto-enabled business models. Roy said Square Peg is interested in working with the founders for five to 10 years or more to help them build “iconic companies.” “You might see many funds around that have 30, 40 to 50 investments. In our funds, it’s much more typical to have 15 to 20 and that’s across three geographies,” said Roy. “What that leads to is a much more concentrated portfolio, not in terms of just capital, but also in terms of relationships. We really invest a lot of energy on a smaller set of people.” |
VP Harris: US commits to no anti-satellite tests that fill orbit with debris | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | The U.S. has declared it will no longer perform anti-satellite missile testing, a practice nearly universally deplored by the space community for its tendency to fill orbit with dangerous debris. Vice President Harris announced the new policy today in hopes of leading by example — though it hasn’t been that long since we were doing this too. The anti-satellite commitment is the first in a planned series of new “space norms” being contemplated by the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the State Department and others concerned about the safety and security of orbital operations. Being able to take out a satellite in orbit is one of those capabilities that military forces around the world just love to demonstrate, generally under the fig leaf of showing it can remotely deorbit a malfunctioning piece of their own hardware. Of course, the primary purpose is to show they can knock anyone birds out of the sky, should that be deemed necessary. China performed an ASAT operation in 2007; the U.S. did one in 2008; India took its turn in 2019; and Russia most recently in late 2021. Though everyone claims they know more or less how the debris cloud and other factors will play out, the simple fact is each of these operations blasts hundreds or thousands of objects into uncontrolled trajectories. With thousands of satellites being launched yearly now these untracked debris events are not an academic threat. At a visit to Vandenberg Space Force Base, Harris said the U.S. will to no longer conduct “destructive, direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) missile testing,” which leaves things open to lasers and other methods, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. The U.S. “seeks to establish this as a new international norm for responsible behavior in space.” It’s a tricky thing, getting people to agree about what can be done in space and how, since it’s legally speaking rather a wild west even with numerous agreements and pacts in place. “There are tons of different norms conversations happening — there’s no one size fits all solution for how to develop them,” said Robin Dickey, space policy analyst at the Aerospace Center for Space Policy and Strategy. “The approach that you take is likely to be very different depending on the content and context.” Sometimes that means working with partner agencies to find shared best practices; sometimes it’s going through the U.N. to make sure it’s a global conversation; sometimes (this time, for example) a unilateral decision is made in the hopes that it will establish a new normal. Though 2008 and our last ASAT test wasn’t that long ago, the space community has changed immeasurably since then and what was merely inadvisable at that time is now unconscionable. (The cynics may point out that, having demonstrated the capability, there’s no reason for us to do so again, making this commitment a bit redundant.) “Setting these common expectations for what’s acceptable and not acceptable in space is a crucial step to make sure that space is safe and usable for all in the decades to come,” Dickey said. Of course in the context of Russia and China disconnecting their space programs from those in the U.S., Europe and beyond, there’s a more pointed purpose to this — establishing more actions like the most recent test as not just unwise but out of step with international expectations. |
null | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 4 | 20 | null |
China’s work automation startup Laiye raises $160M, acquires France’s Mindsay | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | An ambitious Chinese startup wants a slice of the flourishing global work automation market. Laiye, a Beijing-based company that provides a one-stop platform for automating office tasks of varying degrees of complexity, just picked up $160 million from a Series C funding round to expand globally. Guanchun Wang, Laiye’s founder and CEO, saw the “value of artificial intelligence” in the years he worked at Baidu’s smart speaker department after was sold to the Chinese search engine giant. At the time, he also realized traditional industries were well underserved compared to the attention that internet platforms like short videos and news apps received from AI entrepreneurs. To fill the gap, he started Laiye in 2015. Laiye’s Series C financing came in three tranches, with the last one to have recently closed at $70 million, an oversubscribed round led by influential Chinese private equity firm Hopu Magnolia. Other investors include VMS Group from Hong Kong, Chinese private equity firm Youshan Capital, as well as existing investors Lightspeed China and U.S.-based Lightspeed Venture Partners. Adding Hong Kong-based investment firm VMS Group to the company’s cap table will bring the resources needed for a potential initial public offering in the city, said Wang. The company doesn’t have a timeline for its IPO yet but will hold early discussions with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in the coming months. Concurrent with the fundraising announcement is Laiye’s acquisition of Paris-based chatbot service provider Mindsay for an undisclosed amount and transaction type. The two met through the , and the acqui-hire will pave the way for Laiye’s entry into the Europe market, said Wang. In Paris, Laiye is slated to assemble a product and engineering force, building on top of Mindsay’s 30-people team. Much of the top developer talent in China has gotten just as expensive as their counterparts in Western countries, observed Wang, who holds a PhD in machine learning from Princeton. Laiye picked Paris as its springboard for entering the rest of Europe partly because Mindsay is there, but France itself is also a great source of science and engineering talent, the founder said. Mindsay nicely complements Laiye’s main product offerings, which include conversational AI and robotic process automation (RPA), a technology that mimics repetitive human actions interacting with digital interfaces, such as processing an insurance claim, and one that has been popularized by . While RPA software has universal adaptability, the success of scaling conversational AI is “highly dependent on language processing and data collection, which is why expanding RPA across different regions can’t happen overnight,” explained Wang. Acquiring Mindsay naturally allows Laiye to leapfrog the development challenges of training algorithms for a new language. Wang also saw a strong “cultural alignment” between his business and the French startup led by a team of young founders. Laiye CEO Guanchun Wang. Laiye Laiye has aggressive goals for global expansion. Right now, the company generates just about 20% of its revenues outside China, with customers spanning Europe, the Americas and Southeast Asia. It aims to raise that ratio to 50% by 2025, at which point it expects to be operating several tech development centers across various continents. Twenty percent of its employees are outside China at the moment, but it expects the proportion to reach 50% in a few years’ time. The startup appears ready to have a crack at the international business front after bringing on a group of international C-suite executives. Ronen Lamdan, its CEO for international markets, for example, was a former sales director at Microsoft and led business process automation company in Asia. In terms of operational metrics, Wang said Laiye’s products for individual as well as SME users have already turned profitable, while its segment targeting Fortune 500 clients still requires significant investments in product development and sales. “[Large corporations] are the biggest opportunity for us,” said Wang, who believed the competitive edge of his startup is its ability to provide an “integrated” platform that covers the full scope of an employee’s daily routines, from answering calls to processing documents, rather than solving just one single process. Wang declined to disclose the valuation of his company, saying an announcement will be made when it reaches “unicorn status.” Worldwide Laiye has nearly 200 large corporate customers and global consultancies as strategic partners including Deloitte and KPMG. Its software suite is and Alibaba Cloud across the globe, and it boasts a community of 600,000 developers working on all forms of work automation solutions. |
Daily Crunch: 2 unannounced rounds boost Clipboard Health to $1.3B valuation | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | Welcome to the Daily Crunch for Monday, April 18, 2022. There’s been a ton of fun and — dare we say it — surprising content on TechCrunch over the past few days. We were psyched to read , the weirdest little hand-held gaming console that’s seen the light of day. We also loved the discussion of , so be sure to give that a listen as well. Have a delightful week, y’all. — and Over on TC+, by 20%, and Natasha observes that , overall. The two articles make for a really fascinating read side by side. The amazingly and to deal with the messy logistics of settling in these United States. I truly wish this was around when I first landed on these shores; what a good idea. In other words: Follow-on investors who take advantage of the closing IPO window to foist unfavorable terms on founders are “the bottom feeders of the venture capital business,” writes Steve Blank in TechCrunch+. As the IPO window slams shut, it’s common for entrepreneurs who have invested years of their lives into a startup to accept “take-it-or-leave it” terms, says Blank, an adjunct professor at Stanford and senior fellow for Innovation at Columbia University. Ultimately, “VCs will stop playing this game when founders stop negotiating.” |
Music streamer Deezer is going public via SPAC at a $1.1B valuation | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | A European music streamer, Deezer is going public via a , valuing the Spotify competitor at $1.1 billion. Deezer will merge with the “blank-check” company I2PO, which is headed by former WarnerMedia executive Iris Knobloch. Founded in 2007, the company previously in 2015, only to reverse course and raise and Series F rounds in 2016 and 2018. Around the time of its first attempt at an IPO, investors were worried about the profitability of music streaming, since Pandora had just in one quarter. Since then, highly resourced streamers like Spotify, Amazon and Apple have only continued to grow, renewing market interest in music. But Deezer has also struggled to compete with these behemoths — as of Q2 2021, Deezer of the global streaming music subscription market, though it’s more popular abroad than in the U.S. In France and Brazil, the company of the market share respectively. MIDiA According to the Wall Street Journal, Deezer yet, but per this deal, it hopes to be profitable by 2025. Deezer currently has 9.6 million subscribers, offers 90 million streaming songs plus podcasts and audiobooks, and generated €400 million in revenue last year. Spotify, for comparison, has and a total of 406 million monthly active users including its free tier. But Deezer offers HiFi audio, while Spotify still hasn’t . Deezer has also expressed interest in a more , while Spotify has been for offering low streaming payouts. “Today marks an important milestone in Deezer’s history as we embark on a journey to become a publicly traded company on Euronext Paris,” said Jeronimo Folgueira, Deezer’s CEO, in a statement. “We are uniquely positioned on the growing music streaming industry, with a very competitive product, a clear strategy and an experienced and renewed management team to seize this opportunity and create substantial shareholder value.” |
How to think like an investor: Understanding the actual cost of fundraising | Rebecca Mitchem | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | funding so confusing? Isn’t the formula simple? Well, to start, the presumption that a company knows what its investors expect with full clarity is a lofty one. Investors will have both financial and non-financial milestones they expect a company to achieve between raises, and these milestones can differ greatly between stages. Even with this information, it can be difficult to project how long it will take to achieve these goals. Finally, is it even correct to assume that minimizing dilution is the singular goal? With the caveat that every company journey, fundraising environment and investor preference is different, let’s put aside all of the truths we think we know and start at the beginning: In all likelihood, the first question a founder must answer is how much money to raise. This question considers a lot of inputs, but the three that are the most opaque to founders are: Let’s take these questions one at a time. Before we address the inputs in the equation, we need to understand if the output — minimizing dilution — is exactly what we should solve for during each raise. To do this, let’s look at the median amount of dilution companies have taken at each stage over the last several years. To put it into useful context, let’s look at dilution for each $1 million raised. This graph shows us that for every $1 million raised in a seed round, it costs ~10% of the company. By Series B, the dilution per $1 million falls to ~1.2%, and by Series E, each $1 million of capital raised costs ~0.2%. In other words, the cost of capital dramatically decreases as a company grows. This deep decline in the cost of funding at progressive fundraises is what I like to call the Venture Capital Price Curve. Does the Venture Capital Price Curve prove that the singular goal of a company fundraise should be to minimize dilution? Not quite. |
Why does a16z need its own Y Combinator? | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | , Andreessen Horowitz has quietly piloted its own take on an accelerator for early-stage entrepreneurs, and today, the firm announced the program’s official debut. In exchange for an unannounced percentage of ownership, “a16z START” will offer early-stage founders up to $1 million in venture capital. The checks are backed by a , which closed in August 2021. The remote-first program will accept founders on a rolling basis and wants to connect folks with partners for advice, potential customers or investors, and of course, other entrepreneurs. On the relatively brief application form for START, a16z names six categories — American dynamism, consumer, enterprise, fintech, games or other. Investment terms will be discussed with final candidates, the form says. This program extends Andreessen Horowitz’s stamp of approval to the earliest step of an entrepreneur’s journey: the idea stage, or the pre-quitting-your-day-job part of startup life. The company has invested in solo founders before their companies ever existed, but this program appears to be a more formal effort to bring folks into entrepreneurship. Notably, there is no mention of a diversity mandate or focus. The list of early participants in this program shows that a16z is certainly interested in international entrepreneurs, similar to how Y Combinator has increasingly . Some of START’s first entrepreneurs include executives from Rappi, a Colombian unicorn. TechCrunch reached out to Bryan Kim and Anne Lee Skates, the two partners running the program, for comment, but has not yet heard back. Until then, let’s walk through my biggest question for the duo: I know that it’s not entirely fair to compare the two institutions beyond their focus on empowering early-stage founders with capital, networks and advice in exchange for equity. In fact, over the years, a16z has often led some of the buzziest rounds coming out of Y Combinator, including Tandem, Queenly and Contra — essentially sourcing deal flow from the accelerator. |
GSA looks into facial recognition bias and improving accessibility in federal web services | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | The U.S. General Services Administration, which procures and investigates tech for things like government websites and online services, is making a two-pronged push for accessibility in its recently released Equity Action Plan. Websites must be made accessible beyond the bare minimum, it said, and bias in facial recognition systems means the feds will be avoiding it wherever possible. The Action Plan is the result of a bit of introspection at the GSA, which “conducted equity assessments and identified a set of actions for three high-impact focus areas,” one of which is “federal technology design & delivery.” “Those who most need government services will often have the most difficulty accessing them,” reads the memo’s intro. “We are dedicated to actions that prioritize equitable user experience as a core design principle, mitigate algorithmic bias, improve digital accessibility, and modernize the delivery of government services to the American people.” To that end the GSA identified two major problems with the recent approach to providing those services. One is an under-commitment to accessibility, or perhaps it is better stated as a firm commitment to bare compliance and not meeting the community’s needs. “Often government applications and websites have minimal language accessibility, confusing navigation, and poor design practices resulting in user mistrust and frustration,” the GSA assessment reads. In particular it noted that the habits of visually impaired users who rely on screen readers differ from the assumptions made in designing government sites. Basic tasks like logins and account checks may not respect these common choices or may require tools (such as cursor use) that are often unavailable to users. To improve this, the GSA says it will expand usability testing with communities that have been underrepresented in the design process. (As accessibility advocates have told me over and over again, these communities need to be involved from the start or the outcome will be exactly what the agency described above.) It will also work on making sites perform better on old computers, phones and devices with limited bandwidth. The second problem is that facial recognition services are racially biased. This likely will not come as a surprise to readers of this website, but government procurement and deployment processes are slow and weird, so it’s not entirely surprising that the feds will only now be catching up with what the tech community has been warning of for years. “Through our own testing, GSA learned that major commercial implementations of facial matching had disproportionately high ‘False Rejection Rates’ for African Americans,” the memo reads, noting at least that this is consistent with the larger body of research in this domain. Its approach here: Address discrimination in emerging technologies and data sovereignty. To provide an equitable remote identity-verification experience for a diverse population, GSA’s Login.gov team will perform research studies on equity and bias in facial matching services. Further, GSA will apply an equity lens to the user guides it publishes, which influences governmentwide and industry best practices. Frustratingly vague, but a broad response can indicate systemic change as well as lip service. Further research on bias in facial recognition services will almost certainly lag academic and industry research by years, but the GSA probably wants to be able to cite itself as a disinterested party. The “equity lens” may or may not be helpful, but one hopes that, as in so many companies and industries, there are some people who have been flagging problems along these lines for years and can’t get anyone to listen. Perhaps this is an opportunity for those voices to be given the attention they deserve. The GSA also lists plenty more ways it can improve accessibility and equity in the full document, or view below. [scribd id=570477803 key=key-8Lh6eRzUBoqfUzBDJvUx mode=scroll] |
Max Q: Up, up and away | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | Hello and welcome back to Max Q. The big news from me this week is that…I’m buying Twitter! Just kidding. But I do occasionally tweet over at ; say hi, or send an email to . In this issue: This week 24 companies, including ULA, SpaceX, JPL and Rocket Lab, , with regular check-ins to keep each other honest. According to the Space Workforce 2030 pledge, the companies agreed to “significantly increase the number of women and employees from underrepresented groups in our collective technical workforce,” and in senior leadership positions; to work with universities to improve the diversity of aerospace engineering programs; and to sponsor K-12 programs that reach at least 5 million kids annually. The companies say they will aggregate their numbers on the employment goals and present them at the Space Symposium conference each year. They’ll also meet to share best practices, and encourage others to join the pledge. Getty Images Stay with me here: Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter isn’t exactly space news, but seeing as how Musk is the head of the world’s most successful space company, it feels worth mentioning. TechCrunch covered the story from a few different angles; I’ve rounded them up below: Getty Images Luisa Buinhas: At Vyoma, I support Phase B activities of our satellite mission. Critically, on this very week, we are conducting the final evaluations of potential ground communications networks that we will use to talk to our satellites. At the same time, I intend to finalize and submit to DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt, or German Aerospace Center) a proposal we have on the pipeline dealing with automation of decision-making in space traffic management. The announcement of three new heavy-lift rockets that will put thousands of Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites in low-Earth orbits. In total, 3,236 new satellites will be added to an already crowded space in the coming years. Although there is value in providing broadband connectivity, particularly to remote corners of the world, this will further stress an over-congested space environment and exacerbate the issue of space debris. Seven billion people on the planet depend on space-based services, from navigation to communications and weather forecast. With the increase in space traffic, the risk of these services start being disrupted because of in-orbit collisions (between satellites or between satellites and debris) rises exponentially, bringing life here on Earth to a standstill — even flights cannot take off without satellite services! As a tragedy of the commons, this is yet another reminder of the extreme importance of keeping our orbits clean for generations to come. Since we moved to a new office here in Munich recently, I look forward to decorating it with new furniture and matching wall art this week. On a personal level, a friend of mine who I have not seen (in person) in three years is coming to Munich tomorrow and I could not be happier to catch up. Finally, Easter is just around the corner, so I look forward to catching a flight back to Lisbon for a few days and go chocolate egg hunting with family. To our dismay, our dog always ends up discovering (sniffing out) the secret locations where we hide the chocolate, so Easter games are a lot more fun for her. Lately, I’ve had a huge nostalgia of my teenage years living in São Paulo, Brazil, so Zeca Pagodinho (“ “) and Zélia Duncan (“ “) have heavily featured on my playlists. from on . , the TechCrunch podcast where founders talk about the stories behind their startups, is nominated for a Webby for best technology podcast. Help them win the People’s Voice Award by casting your vote before April 21 . |
Facebook is losing interest in its podcasting plans, new report claims | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | Last April, Facebook a suite of new audio products, including new support for podcasts and a Clubhouse live audio competitor, which was an indication that it was taking the threat from other audio platforms more seriously. Now, barely a year after Facebook began its foray into podcasting and audio features, the company’s interest in the space is reportedly starting to fade, a report claims. Facebook is said to be pulling back from its foray into podcasting and is looking to prioritize other initiatives in collaboration with its podcast partners, according to a new report from According to its sources, Facebook is now focused on pursuing other opportunities with podcast partners — like events in the metaverse and e-commerce. Facebook’s parent company Meta is also said to be prioritizing short-video projects above other initiatives, likely due to increasing competition from popular short-form video app TikTok. In an email to TechCrunch, a Meta spokesperson said the company is seeing good engagement with its audio features and believes that audio is an important medium for expression. The company also said it’s been getting feedback from creators on what’s working well and what it can improve on. Meta did not elaborate on the matter any further. Bloomberg notes that Facebook had looked into creating a training program to bring creators to its platform at one point, but never went through with the idea. In addition, after sponsoring the Podcast Movement conference last August, Facebook didn’t sponsor the conference’s offshoot event last month and reportedly didn’t send a Meta employee to attend the event either. Bloomberg also reports that some of Facebook’s initial Live Audio Room deals have not been renewed. Meta’s pivot to the metaverse in regards to its relationship with its podcast partners isn’t exactly a surprise, however — especially given its parent company’s recent and decision to prioritize the metaverse above certain other things. For example, Meta recently announced that it developer conference this year in order to focus on the metaverse. Facebook’s foray into audio was a competitive move a year ago when and Spotify and Apple were dominating the podcasting market. But it would take a lot for Facebook to compete with Spotify and Apple, even if the company has loads of money to spend on its podcasting endeavors. The metaverse will also be pricey — there’s a question as to how long Meta can even afford to bankroll its investment here, given that it earlier this year it’s dropped nearly $10 billion on the effort to date. And it’s just getting started. As for the live audio market, that’s still largely dominated by Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, both of which are continuing to develop more features. Live audio grew in popularity amid the pandemic as people around the world were confined to their homes. But, as restrictions have been lifted for the most part around the world and in-person events have returned, Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces have been looking to retain users by reworking and enhancing their platforms. For example, Clubhouse has a new in-room gaming feature that is designed to spur conversation and help people get to know each other better. On the other hand, Twitter is continuing to make and has launched new features such as and the ability for |
Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms | Zack Whittaker | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | Good news for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists: Scraping publicly accessible data is legal, according to a U.S. appeals court ruling. The landmark ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals is the latest in a long-running legal battle brought by LinkedIn aimed at stopping a rival company from web scraping personal information from users’ public profiles. The case last year but was sent back to the Ninth Circuit for the original appeals court to re-review the case. In its second ruling on Monday, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed its original decision and found that scraping data that is publicly accessible on the internet is not a violation of , or CFAA, which governs what constitutes computer hacking under U.S. law. The Ninth Circuit’s decision is a major win for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists who use tools to mass collect, or scrape, information that is publicly accessible on the internet. Without a ruling in place, long-running projects to archive websites no longer online and using publicly accessible data for academic and research studies have been left in legal limbo. But there have been egregious cases of web scraping that have sparked privacy and security concerns. Facial recognition startup Clearview AI claims to have scraped billions of social media profile photos, prompting against the startup. Several companies, including , Instagram, , and Clubhouse have all had users’ data scraped over the years. The case before the Ninth Circuit was originally brought by LinkedIn against Hiq Labs, a company that uses public data to analyze employee attrition. LinkedIn said Hiq’s mass web scraping of LinkedIn user profiles was against its terms of service, amounted to hacking and was therefore a violation of the CFAA. LinkedIn first lost in 2019 after the Ninth Circuit found that the CFAA does not bar anyone from scraping data that’s publicly accessible. On its second pass of the case, the Ninth Circuit said it relied on last June, during which the U.S. top court took its first look at the decades-old CFAA. In its ruling, the Supreme Court narrowed what constitutes a violation of the CFAA as those who gain unauthorized access to a computer system — rather than a broader interpretation of exceeding existing authorization, which the court argued could have attached criminal penalties to “a breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity.” Using a “gate-up, gate-down” analogy, the Supreme Court said that when a computer or website’s gates are up — and therefore information is publicly accessible — no authorization is required. The Ninth Circuit, in referencing the Supreme Court’s “gate-up, gate-down” analogy, ruled that “the concept of ‘without authorization’ does not apply to public websites.” “We’re disappointed in the court’s decision. This is a preliminary ruling and the case is far from over,” said LinkedIn spokesperson Greg Snapper in a statement. “We will continue to fight to protect our members’ ability to control the information they make available on LinkedIn. When your data is taken without permission and used in ways you haven’t agreed to, that’s not okay. On LinkedIn, our members trust us with their information, which is why we prohibit unauthorized scraping on our platform.” |
Andreessen Horowitz unveils piloted program for early-stage entrepreneurs | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | For more than a year, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has quietly piloted its own take on an accelerator for early-stage entrepreneurs; today, its partners the program’s official debut. In exchange for an unannounced percentage of ownership, a16z START offers early-stage founders up to $1 million in venture capital. The checks are powered by a16z’s seed fund, that closed in August 2021. Specific investment terms, such as ownership stake or how the firm decides what specific fraction of $1 million to invest, is not yet disclosed publicly and will be discussed with final candidates. for START, a16z names six categories — American dynamism, consumer, enterprise, fintech, games and “other” — within which it’s looking for founders. The areas largely line up with a16z’s carved-out funds, though surprisingly don’t include a mention of crypto, despite a16z “If founding a technology company is a dream of yours—even if you don’t yet have a fully formed idea and haven’t yet quit your day job—we want to hear from you,” the firm writes in its landing page for the program. The remote-first program, which accepts founders on a rolling basis, wants to connect folks with partners for advice, potential customers or investors and, of course, other entrepreneurs, because networks are powerful. Notably, there is no mention of a diversity mandate or focus on the landing page. The firm also does not specify how long the program runs or who is mentoring the startups. Further, while the company is offering up to twice the $500,000 that famed accelerator Y Combinator now promises some of its startups, it has not divulged publicly whether part of its investment will come — as with YC — in the form of an uncapped SAFE, meaning that the company’s valuation will be determined in the next subsequent round. TechCrunch reached out to Bryan Kim and Anne Lee Skates, the two partners running a16z’s START program, for more information, but we’ve yet to hear back. A16z’s newly announced program is its formal foray into the earliest stage of entrepreneurship. While it has long seed-funded companies, it has not worked with founders at the formation stage. The thinking inside the firm may be that rather than backing the startups that graduate Y Combinator, why not get there before the accelerator ever does? It continues the trend of investors going earlier and earlier when it comes to investing, thanks to the potential upside and a grossly competitive seed market. In a16z’s case, I doubt we’ll see the institution ditch the late stage like some Tiger-like investors have, but it’s remarkable to see it finally catch up and commit to more pre-seed investing. Last month, with an emphasis on backing early-stage “outlier” founders from across Europe and the United States. Cohorts of about 15 startups will go through eight-week sessions and, similar to a16z, Sequoia plans to invest $1 million in accepted founders and doesn’t disclose ownership targets. The big question, or perhaps stress test, for the firm is if a16z can convince high-quality founders to take its capital and ownership targets despite tons of hungry capital being thrown around, from equity-crowdfunding to rolling funds. These days, there’s even discussion that “equity” as a way to upfront attract interesting founders to your community is outdated. I wonder how investors feel about that. A16z has a notorious reputation, given past successes and well-known partners, but is that enough for founders to trust them with first-check fundraising? And rather, will the first checks be truly unlocking a new cadre of founders who otherwise wouldn’t have received funding from a Y Combinator or party round, or is it just taking a bite of the same, homogenous, cohort? |
Spotify says my imaginary iguana Gerald likes Doja Cat | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | Spotify will make you a custom playlist based on your pet’s personality and your own listening habits. While the streamer this feature in 2020, it made the experience last week in honor of National Pets Day (which is apparently a thing). Growing up, my family had an extremely anxious, Prozac-prescribed Shih Tzu who needed to listen to very boring, chill doggie music whenever we left the house. But Spotify’s pet playlists aren’t just made up of dull instrumentals — they’re probably meant more for the pet owner than the pet (though if you have an anxious canine companion, Spotify says its “ ” playlist has been played over 330% more since last year). Spotify I don’t have a pet, so I made up an imaginary pet named Gerald. He is an energetic, friendly iguana. My pet playlist for Gerald was a surprisingly good mix of artists I actually listen to (Hop Along, SZA, The Shins) and thematically appropriate bands (Iguana Death Cult is one hell of a name). But it also introduced me to artists I never would’ve encountered ordinarily, like Kyoto-based singer-songwriter Kaho Nakamura. She is good. Is this feature just a way for Spotify to get us to share cute little graphics and distract us from the fact that artists don’t think the streamer is ? Yes. Does my imaginary iguana Gerald have great taste in music? Also yes. |
Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov is coming to TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 to talk about progress and pitfalls of scaling robotaxis | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 4 | 18 | null |
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