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Meta is integrating its Horizon Venues live events app into Horizon Worlds | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 5 | 6 | Meta that it’s integrating its Horizon Venues event experience into its social virtual reality Horizon Worlds platform. Horizon Venues is currently a separate app dedicated to attending live events in VR that uses the same avatars as Horizon Worlds. On June 6, users will be able to attend these live events directly within Horizon Worlds and the standalone Venues app will be discontinued. “You’ll be able to catch your favorite marquee shows, from live sporting events to concerts from today’s hit artists and beyond, then hit up a comedy club or meditation session or even host your own meet-up, all from within Horizon Worlds,” the company said in a about the announcement. Meta says it has experimented with portals between Horizon Venues and Horizon Worlds over the past few months and found that users will be able to experience a seamless jump between the two via the integration. Users above the age of 18 in the United States and Canada who have access to Horizon Worlds on Quest 2 will be able to access Venues programming in the Horizon Worlds app on June 6. Users who aren’t in the United States or Canada, are under the age of 18, and/or are on Quest 1 will lose access to Venues programming when the standalone Venues app goes away on June 6. Meta notes that these users will still be able to catch highlights and replays of Venues events in Oculus TV. Meta Horizon Worlds opened up to all users over 18 years old in the U.S. and Canada after the platform was in 2019. Meta said today that it plans to expand access to Horizon Worlds in more countries this summer. Today’s news comes as the company’s CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth in a tweet that Meta is working on a web version of Horizon Worlds. The expansion would allow users to try out Horizon Worlds without having to use Quest VR headsets, which is currently the only way to access the virtual world. Meta’s plans to launch web and mobile versions of its virtual world could be seen as a way for the company to get more people to join Horizon Worlds by avoiding the need for a Quest VR headset. Meta also recently revealed that a feature that will let creators sell virtual items and effects within their worlds. The new feature is rolling out to a small group of creators to start and marks a significant next step in the company’s mission of building the foundation of virtual reality social networking. |
Simone Giertz goes from projects to products | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 6 | be royalty,” Simone Giertz laughs. “I’m happy to be a woman who does things.” YouTube’s one-time Queen of Shitty Robots didn’t renounce her crown so much as outgrow it. A few years back, the time came to put away the , the and the that slams into a keyboard and kind of rolls back and forth in a rough approximation of internet commenting. “It just started feeling disingenuous,” she explains. “If I’m not proud of it, what should I do? It’s been really interesting to find ways to shift it as I shift.” Outside of online videos, that meant moving from San Francisco to Los Angeles at the tail of a self-described “musical chairs for cities.” For the time being, at least, this one feels more permanent. Giertz purchased a house, where’s she’s been able to lifehack her way out of the traditional LA commute by setting up a workshop in her backyard. The house itself inevitably became her canvas. “I feel like I’m skipping through a field of build possibilities,” she says. “I want to build a roof deck and I want there to be a slide down to the courtyard outside of my workshop.” Filling the house full of projects has been its own reward — and fodder for the latest phase of Giertz’s YouTube journey. There’s the , and that allows her three-legged rescue dog Scraps to sit next to her as she works on her computer (as is the case on our current Zoom call). In September, she debuted the that reveals a surface for doing jigsaw puzzles. That last one played a lead role in this week’s “Is this the world’s worst jigsaw puzzle.” The video opens with a 19-hour, 23-minute time lapse of Giertz assembling an all-white, 499 piece jigsaw puzzle. There is a notable absence — a small bit of negative space where piece 500 should go. But as the title implies, it’s all by design. “It’s not the worst way I’ve spent my time,” she says in the video. “Once I locked myself in the bathroom for 48 hours, and I would much rather do this.” Simone Giertz Giertz clearly has some work to do in the pitching department (“Five Stars, Better Than Being Locked in a Bathroom”) for what turns out to be one of her first products. The video also serves as a backdoor launch for (her last name spelled phonetically in English), a new online store where you can currently pre-order “Incomplete White Puzzle” for $35 for those rainy weekends when chilling next to the toilet just isn’t cutting it. Yetch, she’s quick to explain, is more than your standard YouTube influencer merch store. It’s a step toward realizing the shape her work will take in a world beyond shitty robots. It’s a subject Giertz touched on when I spoke to her onstage at the last Disrupt before the world ended. She sat the Everyday Calendar on the table between us. Currently available on the site for an extremely on-the-nose $365, the product first appeared in a 2018 video, in which Giertz details the role it played in helping her develop a daily meditation habit. With light-up days set on a gold-colored printed circuit board, the calendar got its own Kickstarter campaign, raising nearly $600,000 on a $35,000 goal. Giertz (left), My ankle (right). TechCrunch It was a perfect template for a career pivot — one that married current success with future ambitions: make a YouTube video about creating a product, sell the product, repeat. Though Giertz says such ambition dates back well before she began work on her first shitty robot. “Even before I started my YouTube channel, I remember seeing some videos about IDEO and how they worked in developing products and solving consumer problems,” she says. “I remember running and showing my mom and being like, ‘I finally know what I want to do!’ I showed her the video and she was, like, ‘well, that’s always what you wanted to do. You’ve always wanted to solve problems and make things.’ I just never but the two together.” The pandemic — and personal health struggles that predated it — helped motivate the decision to graduate projects into products. Simone Giertz “Finding out that I had a brain tumor, there was this sense of having to take a backseat to my own life,” Giertz says. “These were circumstances that were completely out of my control, and I was just going to have to roll with the punches and try to make the best out of the situation. I was so excited about 2020, I was finally healthy, and it was going to be my year. And then the pandemic happened. It really felt similar. We’re just going to try to make the best out of the situation and try to work within these limitations. It was an opportunity to slow down my schedule and have a lot of time building things. And I think that has directly led to that product business, because otherwise I was just rushing through projects and trying to do them as quickly as possible for camera.” Yetch’s selection is small — in addition to the two products above, she’s selling a pair of complementary rings: a screw and a screwdriver. Those projects that graduate to the product phase are assessed by her small, upstart team to begin the difficult process of bringing a product to market. That includes manufacturing, navigating supply chains and — in the case of the first product — recognizing that it’s harder to create a puzzle with a missing piece than it is to design a complete puzzle and manually remove one. The missing pieces will then be mailed to Giertz. Simone Giertz Above all, the products represent the thesis at the center of much of her work: the interplay of the useful and useless. “The tagline for Yetch is unique solutions for everyday problems,” she explains in the puzzle video. “So, obviously, the first product I’m going to show you doesn’t live up to that, at all.” For her part, Giertz sees no conflict. “I don’t think it needs to be a battle. For me, they seamlessly coexist, because the useless leads to the useful. And the useless helps bring a playfulness and an openness that lets me think in ways I wouldn’t otherwise. If I were to sit down, thinking, ‘I should come up with something great,’ I’m never going to do that. I’m going to choke. So the useless is an end goal, and they’re entertaining on their own.” |
Coinbase’s NFT marketplace is off to a lackluster start | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 5 | 6 | over two weeks since Coinbase its highly anticipated NFT marketplace for select waitlisted beta users. Earlier this week, the company opened the service up to the public — and digital collectibles trading has been sluggish. Coinbase’s exchange has 24-hour , according to CoinMarketCap. Since launching on April 20, Coinbase NFT volume has reached sales worth $668,668 across a small pool of 1,287 users, according to on Dune Analytics compiled by user hildobby. So why isn’t a larger part of its exchange’s overall volume and user base flowing into its NFT marketplace? Although Coinbase’s NFT platform is fairly new, for the second-largest crypto exchange globally, you’d expect better performance. A source close to Coinbase, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, said that the Dune Analytics data doesn’t provide an overall number of how many people have signed up for the platform. “There’s that one stat that says Coinbase NFT total users, and it has been misrepresented as the number of people on the platform,” the source said. “That’s not how many people have signed up — that’s how many people have made a transaction.” In comparison, OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace globally, had nearly $3.5 billion in NFT volume across roughly 350,000 users since April 20. OpenSea’s volume was over than Coinbase NFTs during that time frame. OpenSea also makes up the majority share of NFT marketplace volume, followed by NFT marketplaces LooksRare and Magic Eden, from The Block showed. But even stacked up against second-place LooksRare, which had in NFT volume across over 21,000 users since April 20, Coinbase’s NFT marketplace has been fairly stagnant. “The anticipation of where this should be right now has not matched expectations,” Nick O’Neill, CEO and co-founder of The Nifty, said to TechCrunch. “The product is overdeveloped; we see this happen all the time.” |
Codenotary launches a full-stack monitoring solution for Kubernetes and VMware environments | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 5 | 6 | , the company behind the immutable open source database and a software supply chain security service built on top of it, today announced that it is also adding a full-stack Kubernetes and VMware vSphere monitoring service for operations and DevOps teams on top of that. Basically, while the company’s previous offering — — focused on securing the software supply chain, it is now extending its service into monitoring production systems with the launch of . Given that, at its core, Codenotary features a novel database system, it makes sense for the company to expand into other areas where it can use that to bring additional value. Codenotary The company argues that its new service allows users to monitor their full stack from the application down to the virtual machine or Kubernetes container and the networking and storage infrastructure. The company argues that its solution will be able to give enterprises a single tool to monitor Kubernetes deployments and the virtualized infrastructure, managed by tools like VMware vSphere, that they often sit on top of, all without having to resort to using multiple tools. “Our technology delivers the fastest deploy-to-value ratio,” said Codenotary co-founder and CTO Dennis Zimmer. “With Codenotary Immutable Metrics & Logs, customers see near instant results from their deployments, whether in the cloud or on-premises. Additionally, we provide the only technology that stores logs and configuration changes that are fully verifiable and auditable, making regulatory and license compliance pain free.” There are obviously other monitoring solutions on the market, but Codenotary would likely argue that its immutable database can give it a leg up against the competition, especially when it comes to audits and license compliance. In January, Codenotary it had raised a $12.5 million Series B round, which brought its total funding to date to $18 million. |
Stripe is playing checkers with Plaid | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 5 | 6 | Hello and welcome back to , a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. The crew was back at full-speed, and maybe even full excitement meets exhaustion, this week. and were on the mic with moral and edit support from the wonderful If we had to give this episode its own autobiography we’d call it: “Drama, tech twitter and therapeutic moments in between.” We got into a whole ton of news, including: |
Spotify Stations has left the station | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 5 | 6 | Spotify Stations, the streaming service’s offering easy access to curated playlists, is shutting down on May 16. The company told TechCrunch that the app and web player will no longer be available after this date. The Stations app was originally designed for those who want a more radio-like experience, rather than having to seek out music or customize their own playlists. Spotify Stations first launched in Australia in 2018 and later rolled out in the . “At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of experiments to create better listening experiences for our users,” a spokesperson for Spotify said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Some of those tests end up paving the way for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning. Our Spotify Stations Beta was one of those tests. We will be sunsetting the current feature, but users will be able to easily transfer their favorite stations and enjoy a similar radio experience directly within the Spotify app.” Spotify hasn’t elaborated on the reason behind its decision to shut down Stations, but notes that users can move all of their favorite stations to the main Spotify app to continue listening to them. The company says that while it doesn’t take sunsetting services lightly, Spotify Radio provides a similar listening experience to Stations so listeners can use that instead. Spotify Radio is a feature in the main app that creates a playlist based on any song, album, playlist or artist you select. Spotify Stations has been considered an experiment by Spotify, and by some others, a Pandora copycat due to its support for instant music playback at launch. Spotify Stations is appealing to those who prefer a simpler user interface, as Spotify’s flagship app’s look-and-feel isn’t something that everyone likes. The app provided a minimalist listening experience that seems to have appealed to some users. As of Friday morning, the Stations app has disappeared from both the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store, but the app itself seems to be functional for the time being to allow current users to move their stations to the main app. The news comes as Spotify has been making some changes to its apps. Last month, Spotify the live audio capabilities from its companion app, , within the main Spotify streaming app. Greenroom will also rebrand as “Spotify Live” as part of these changes. At launch, Spotify’s main app will only feature live content from select original programming, while the standalone Spotify Live app will continue to allow independent creators to go live. |
Watch the latest TechCrunch Live event on building a better mobility fintech startup | Matt Burns | 2,022 | 5 | 6 | This week Rachel Holt from Construct Capital and Kevin Bennett from Caribou spoke with Kirsten Korosec, TechCrunch’s transportation editor. This event was the first in our month dedicated to mobility startups — and that includes event this month. Kevin Bennett started his auto financing company in 2016. It started as MotoRefi, and rebranded in early 2022 to Caribou. But the mission remains: Transforming consumers’ financial relationship with their cars. Since the founding, Bennett has raised $74 million for the company, including early angel funding from Rachel Holt. At the time, she was a rising executive in Uber — a post she left in 2020 when she co-founded Construct Capital. Hear how Bennett pitched early investors, and what investors like Holt can provide to mobility companies. |
24 hours left to save $200 on passes to TC Sessions: Climate 2022 | Lauren Simonds | 2,022 | 5 | 6 | |
The venture slowdown isn’t coming — it’s here | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 5 | 6 | venture capitalists are deploying funding across the globe slowed yet again in April. Venture capital dollar volume, as , peaked in November 2021. Since that apogee, the value of venture investments has ticked lower in most months before dropping another $5 billion from March to April. That the venture capital industry is pulling back should not be a surprise. TechCrunch at most stages earlier this week, for example. Many companies that return to Earth, further harming investor demand for previously hot categories, and are suffering from sharp selloffs. The data matters, however, not simply because it confirms our expectations of where venture activity is heading in 2022 — it also indicates that the change in the venture capital market will prove gradual to some degree, helping explain why Q1 2022 VC data was stronger than some anticipated. Because the slowdown in VC investments won’t be a single thunderclap, we expected to see more damage arrive in Q2 than we saw in Q1, and the Crunchbase News dataset underscores the perspective. This morning, we’re parsing the latest numbers to better grok market sentiment around the current venture capital market. Which, as you will shortly see, is far smaller than it was just a few months ago. Despite the 12-month low, we aren’t witnessing a dramatic dip. According to Crunchbase, the amount invested in private companies last month is only 10% lower than in March of this year. The year-on-year decline isn’t massive either, with April 2022’s tally only 13% inferior to April 2021’s. The decline is also nuanced when looking at different investment stages. Seed funding actually increased by 14% year on year. But late-stage funding is down 19% year on year. Even though it was flat month on month, we think it is the latter figure that matters the most. |
Daily Crunch: 7 months after raising $1B, grocery delivery Gorillas exits four countries and lays off 300 | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | It’s the 24th of May, 2022, and today made us laugh with her “Welcome to Hell, we all drive Teslas,” subhead to her story about . Masterful. — and It’s mildly absurd to be alternately covering $150 million rounds and layoff stories today, but such is the life of startups. to turn streaming experiences into e-commerce opportunities, reports. In other climate news, reports that for a SaaS platform that reports grid carbon emissions. Go on, have a few more: / Getty Images As managing partner at Mayfield and a three-time founder, Navin Chaddha has seen two downturns. “I have invested in over 60 companies, and while many have gone public or been acquired, the journey has included pivots, near-death experiences and navigating through the 2008/2009 downturn,” “Every era is different, but here are some tips for our new normal.” . The retail giant is swooping in to expand its drone coverage to six states this year after extending its partnership with DroneUp. Interestingly enough, the $4 shipping fee does not deter people from selecting that method of shipment, even if they are just ordering Hamburger Helper. Among the myriad Microsoft coverage stories today, we wanted to pull out this item about one of the company’s , which previously lived within Power Apps as a component called Power Apps portals. We know, web-design tools are a dime a dozen, but what Microsoft is banking on is the product’s integration with other existing services like Visual Studio Code and GitHub. Meanwhile… |
Dyson has been secretly building robots | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | You probably know Dyson for their vacuums, or maybe that too-powerful dryer you’ve tentatively stuck your hands in while waiting for a flight. Maybe you’ve seen their hair dryers or fans. Dyson is a company that develops premium products that move air around. Basically, if they don’t suck, they blow. Recently, the firm expanded with a very strange . While showcasing the product, Dyson took pains to highlight some of the research behind it. It offered a peek into their labs, providing some insight into a future of products that expand well beyond premium vacuum cleaners. Turns out that includes robots. Today at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Philadelphia, Dyson revealed “secret robot prototypes” that are part of broader research it’s managed to keep a tight lid on thus far. The reveal included some shots of a robot arm that looks fairly similar to smaller industrial models from companies like ABB. Dyson On the face of it, the big difference here is the attachments. This includes a hand with soft graspers that look an awful lot like a human hand and, naturally, a vacuum attachment. As the firm notes, the robotic stuff doesn’t come out of nowhere, exactly — a surprising amount of vision processing, AI and autonomy go into something like a robot vacuum. But from a purely investment standpoint, this could be much more than simple baby steps. Image Credits: Dyson I’m always a little wary of these pivots/expansions. Some, like Toyota’s work with TRI, are thoughtful and deliberate, while others, like Samsung’s robotics efforts, appear to be more for show. For Dyson’s part, it says it has been refitting an aircraft hangar at Hullavington Airfield, a former RAF station in Chippenham, Wiltshire, in England that the company purchased back in 2016. It’s set to move some 250 roboticists over to the new lab. Dyson In a related press release the company notes: Dyson is halfway through the largest engineering recruitment drive in its history. Two thousand people have joined the tech company this year, of which 50% are engineers, scientists, and coders. Dyson is supercharging its robotics ambitions, recruiting 250 robotics engineers across disciplines including computer vision, machine learning, sensors and mechatronics, and expects to hire 700 more in the robotics field over the next five years. The master plan: to create the UK’s largest, most advanced, robotics center at Hullavington Airfield and to bring the technology into our homes by the end of the decade. More soon, one hopes. |
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Sequoia Capital plays Nostradamus (again) | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | Sequoia Capital, the storied, 50-year-old venture firm, has become known over the years for using sweeping memos to warn the founders in its portfolio about market shifts after the shift has become somewhat obvious. Still, while it’s tempting to poke fun at these missives — its “ ” in 2008 and its “ ” memo in March of 2020 have become legendary — many teams are wondering right now how long the current downturn could last, so it’s not surprising that the outfit has put together a new and very thorough presentation, telling the many founders with ties to the firm not to expect a quick bounce back. Indeed, a first published by The Information makes clear the firm does not believe that — as during the outset of the pandemic, when markets froze, then quickly warmed — the abrupt shift the startup world is currently experiencing will be followed by an “equally swift V-shaped recovery.” Reads the presentation, “We expect the market downturn to impact consumer behavior, labor markets, supply chains and more. It will be a longer recovery and while we can’t predict how long, we can advise you on ways to prepare and get through to the other side.” In one key slide, the firm notes what startups have already been told by a wide variety of other VCs and the broader market itself, which is that investors’ focus is shifting to companies with profitability. Writes the firm: “With the cost of capital (both debt and equity) rising, the market is signaling a strong preference for companies who can generate cash today.” In another slide, Sequoia takes shots at some of the firms that have been investing aggressively in startups in recent years, even as Sequoia has itself grown its assets under management considerably during the same period. (Sequoia Capital China alone was said to be raising four new funds totaling $8 billion in March, according to an earlier report in The Information.) Reads the slide: “[U]nlike prior periods, sources of cheap capital are not coming to save the day. Crossover hedge funds, which have been very active private investing over the last few years and have been one of the lowest cost sources of capital, are tending to their wounds in their public portfolios, which have been hit hard.” Sequoia isn’t wrong. We reported earlier this month that Tiger Global, the most active investor in the first quarter of this year, is slowing its roll for a variety of reasons, including that it has already the $12.7 billion fund it announced in March. The Financial Times separately reported that, as of early May, the 21-year-old outfit had seen during this year’s tech stock sell-off. We’ve reached out to Sequoia for further comment. Sequoia’s presentation to founders follows a string of similar advice from numerous venture firms that have been offering words of wisdom to their own portfolio companies Their guidance has run the gamut but largely focuses on getting founders to focus on extending their runway, consider extension rounds and think about how to spend in a more disciplined fashion. Famed accelerator Y Combinator has been particularly pointed about the current state of the world, telling founders last week to plan for the worst and to focus on being “If your plan is to raise money in the next six to 12 months, you might be raising at the peak of the downturn,” the firm said in the letter, titled “Economic Downturn.” Remember, YC said, “that your chances of success are extremely low even if your company is doing well. We recommend you change your plan.” Meanwhile, famed VC Bill Gurley similarly founders over the weekend on Twitter that this moment is no mere blip. “The cost of capital has changed materially, and if you think things are like they were,” he wrote, “then you are headed off a cliff like Thelma and Louise.” |
Mastercard exec is bullish on crypto, sees mass adoption ‘sooner rather than later’ | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | Both large and small companies are retaining their crypto optimism despite the recent market correction in the developing technology space. Mass adoption of blockchain technology and digital assets is going to happen sooner rather than later, according to Mastercard’s VP of new product development and innovation, Harold Bossé. There are millions of individuals today consuming and sending digital assets around the world, Bossé noted on a during Avalanche’s Powering Business with Blockchain series on Tuesday. “They are early adopters and new adopters, but we have switched toward mass markets, [and] that will be a very important aspect for financial institutions to move into the space.” However, there are a number of challenges right now that are stopping corporations from entering the market, Bossé said: lack of senior management understanding, commercial rationale surrounding scalability, cost and speed, and regulatory concerns. “No one will use digital assets on blockchains unless they’re absolutely certain this money is good money,” Bossé said. In recent weeks, there have been a number of market factors dragging the crypto industry down, including the downfall of defunct algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD ( ) and cryptocurrency LUNA and of the industry. All of these factors — and more — hint at a deeper need for security in the industry if bigger players are going to get involved. The truth, Bossé said, is that startups have to look at ideas that do not exist today and create businesses enabled by these emerging technologies. “Think about the advent of the internet; no one was thinking that Amazon could even be a concept — you need the internet for Amazon to work,” he said. “We’re in the same situation: How do we transform the lives of people and go into demographics or groups of people who don’t really think about blockchain first but think about their business problems?” That thought, alongside another trillion-dollar question Bossé asked, was how the crypto industry gets businesses to think about solving their problems in an innovative way through these new technologies, which |
Pony.ai loses permit to test autonomous vehicles with driver in California | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | The California Department of Motor Vehicles revoked Pony.ai’s permit to test its autonomous vehicle technology with a driver on Tuesday for failing to monitor the driving records of the safety drivers on its testing permit. “While reviewing Pony.ai’s application to renew the testing permit, the DMV found numerous violations on the driving records of active Pony.ai safety drivers,” a spokesperson for the DMV told TechCrunch, noting that Pony had 41 autonomous test vehicles and 71 safety drivers on its permit. Pony confirmed the revocation of its permit to TechCrunch, saying the DMV took issue with the driving records of three of its safety operators. “Because of the critical role of safety drivers to facilitate the safe testing of autonomous technology and the need for these drivers to have a clean driving record as established by the DMV’s autonomous vehicle regulations, the DMV is revoking the permit, effective immediately.” The news follows the , which allows it to test its AV tech without a human safety operator in the front seat, in November 2021 after a reported collision in Fremont, California. At the time, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration suspected a software default, so in March, with similar potential software issues. The California DMV did not respond in time to requests for more information about the status of Pony’s suspended driverless testing permit, but if the arguably safer version of that permit — the one that requires a driver to be present while testing — has been fully revoked, it’s unlikely the DMV will reinstate the startup’s driverless permit any time soon. “When there is an unreasonable risk to public safety, the DMV can immediately suspend or revoke permits,” the agency told TechCrunch. Pony responded to TechCrunch on Wednesday, saying it is proud of its safety record, and that in the over 6.8 million real-world autonomous miles, no injuries have occurred. “We are in the process of reviewing the DMV’s notice,” a spokesperson for Pony told TechCrunch. Pony currently does not hold any active testing permits in California. Meanwhile, in China, where most of Pony’s operations reside, the company just received a permit to provide driverless . The company also recently scored a . |
Kim Kardashian lends her taste buds to Beyond Meat as first chief taste consultant | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | has some new star power behind its plant-based meat brand in Kim Kardashian. The entrepreneur and influencer extraordinaire came on as the company’s first “chief taste consultant” and will be featured in a new campaign touting her recipes for using Beyond Meat and other creative content. Kim Kardashian is Beyond Meat’s new chief taste consultant. Beyond Meat “I’ve been focusing on going more plant-based and can tell you that Beyond Meat is my absolute favorite — I love how all their products not only taste amazing but are also good for me and my family,” . “As my fans know, my fridge and freezer are fully stocked with Beyond Meat’s products and I’m so thrilled to be featured in the campaign as its chief taste consultant to inspire people to include Beyond Meat in their diets.” that news of this sent the company’s shares up as much as 7% Tuesday to $26.56 before going back down to close for the day at $22.94 per share. It is also looking to be a way to help the company reverse some of its slowdown in growth, according to recent earnings reports. In Kardashian, the company also gains a powerful ally who is familiar with working with billion-dollar brands and gaining exposure. A Beyond Meat spokesperson said via email that after seeing Kardashian as a brand fan over the past few years, it made sense to create the consultant role. “We love her authentic and genuine connection to the brand,” the spokesperson said. “As an icon synonymous with impeccable taste in food, fashion, beauty and more, Kim will highlight the brand’s delicious, nutritious and sustainable product portfolio with her signature recipes and engaging creative content.” The company’s growth struggle comes as the food tech industry itself is seeing a bit of a slowdown. PitchBook’s first quarter “Foodtech Report” noted that both the number of venture deals (359) and dollars invested ($6.9 billion) were down from the first quarter of 2021. Speaking to that slowdown and how it will get the momentum back, the Beyond Meat spokesperson said, “As with any relatively nascent industry and category disruptor, there are going to be short-term fluctuations, but we believe the underlying fundamentals that have driven growth in the category over the last couple of years are still in place.” Kardashian is just one among a team of celebrities touting the plant-based meat company, which includes Kevin Hart, Shay Mitchell and Snoop Dogg. Kardashian is not the first to take on a role like this. In 2019, model Emily Ratajkowski, who has a clothing line, was , a sparkling canned wine brand. And today, in the healthier egg brand and are part of a new campaign. |
Bumble is planning to expand further into social networking with a new communities feature | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | Dating platform Bumble is looking to enhance its non-dating social features with a further investment into its Bumble BFF feature, first launched in 2016. This friend-finding feature currently uses the same swiped-based mechanics to connect people looking for platonic relationships but will soon expand to include social networking groups where users can connect with one another based on topics and interests, not just via “matches.” TechCrunch heard Bumble was venturing more into the social networking space, and Bumble recently hinted at this development during its , announced this month. On the earnings call, the company referenced a Bumble BFF “alpha test” that had been performing well. It described the test as offering new ways for “people to discover and get to know each other around shared joys and common struggles.” Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd added that, so far, over 40% of “active BFF users” were engaging with the new experiences being tested and the feature’s one-month retention was upward of 75%. Bumble didn’t, however, describe the product in much detail, beyond noting it offered a “new group format” for networking. Reached for further insights, product intelligence company had additional information. It had uncovered screenshots showing a women-focused “social groups” feature. There were around 30 different topics available, including things like “Women in Business,” “Networking + mentoring,” “Finding fulfillment,” “Mental health,” “Working moms,” “Body positivity,” “Self care,” “Eating well,” “Grad students,” “Money management,” “Building a better world,” “Recent grads,” “Women’s empowerment,” “Mom life,” “Breakups suck,” “Single not alone,” “Workouts,” “Study hacks + motivation,” “Path to parenthood,” “Pet Parents,” “Wanderlust” and others. Users could join the groups and create multimedia posts or reply to existing posts, similar to a threaded group chat or lightweight networking product. The topics, so far, seem to cater to a slightly broader crowd than just “young adults,” given there were groups for students as well as working moms. Bumble confirmed to us this is the same feature that was being discussed during its earnings. “We are currently testing new product features in our Bumble BFF community for a small number of people. We are assessing feedback from this test to help inform our final product decisions,” a Bumble spokesperson told TechCrunch. Bumble screenshot via Watchful (one design) Bumble screenshot via Watchful (another design) On the call, Wolfe Herd had also suggested the new BFF feature could potentially help Bumble generate revenue further down the road. “We are very focused on the product, building the ecosystem, the communities and really going into this new group format and testing the functionalities that we’ve been hard at work building,” Wolfe Herd said. “As we look to revenue in the future from BFF, there are really multiple pillars of opportunity — and one of them would be advertising,” she continued. “We will be looking at baking in functionalities to be greater economy efficient or advertising ready for the future but not to expect any near-term revenue from that,” the exec had noted. Bumble screenshot via Watchful Originally, the had been designed to help Bumble serve its growing audience of younger singles, who were often looking for new friends to hang out with, not just date. The company had explained at the time of its 2016 launch that it got the idea not only based on user feedback but also because it observed people using its dating app to make friends — particularly when they had just moved to a new city or were visiting a place for a limited time, like on vacation. Bumble BFF also allowed the company to leverage some of the same technology it was using to create romantic matches — algorithms based on interests, for example — and put them to use for helping users forge platonic connections. But in the years following its launch, friend-finding has spun out to become its own app category of sorts, particularly among the younger Gen Z demographic who’s more inclined to socially “hang out” online, including through live video, audio and chat-based groups. are a good example of this trend in action, as is Gen Z livestreaming app . Then there was dating giant Match Group’s biggest-ever acquisition with , a company that had been more focused on social networking than dating. In addition, dedicated social experiences have sprung up to serve Bumble’s core demographic of young, professional women including the motherhood-focused app; leadership network for professional women, ; creator platform for women, ; female college influencer network ; community-focused and others. Combined, these factors could create trouble for Bumble, particularly if younger Gen Z users are traditional swipe-based dating apps — or, when they do, not partners. Of these, Peanut seems to have more overlap with what Bumble is building — which is interesting, too, since Peanut was founded by former Badoo deputy CEO Michelle Kennedy who brought her understanding of dating app concepts to online socializing. (Today, Bumble, Inc. operates Bumble, Badoo and its .) Now, Peanut’s concepts are making their way back to Bumble. Asked for thoughts on this latest development, Kennedy said it “completely validates the market” that Peanut has been working in for many years — particularly as the current groups spotted had been women focused. “It’s something that we’ve always believed in. We’ve always known that it’s a huge opportunity. We’ve always seen that. And for Bumble to say, ‘yeah, we agree.’ Huge! Couldn’t be happier,” she said. Bumble has not said when it expects to launch the social features to the general public. The company just posted a strong Q1 where it reported $211.2 million in revenue, than the consensus estimate of $208.3 million and a 7.2% increase in paying users in the quarter. Bumble’s forecast for its fiscal year 2022 revenue is expected to be in the range of $934-$944 million, higher than previously estimated. |
A single question changed how Singularity viewed its market | Tim De Chant | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | started , a carbon intelligence platform that , he never thought he would focus the company on a greenhouse gas. But one conversation with a customer changed the way he viewed his product and, ultimately, his company and the type of customers it now serves. “The journey was really customer driven, to be honest. When I started the company three years ago, I wasn’t thinking of carbon at all,” Shi said. “The first idea that I had for Singularity was that we’d do intelligent control for batteries, for EV charging, for those types of things. The objective for battery control is always going to be, ‘How can I save money for the customers?'” A few years ago, Shi and Singularity had that goal in mind when working with the Harvard Innovation Lab, which houses entrepreneurial resources for Harvard Business School students. The university was looking to pair a battery with solar panels on the building’s roof. “During one of the conversations, they brought up carbon. ‘Can you actually consider carbon as a signal?’” Shi recalls them asking. The university wanted to install a battery not just to save money, but to lower the campus’s carbon footprint. “I had never thought of carbon because I was like, ‘Oh, I’m a power system guy,’” Shi recalled. But after the conversation with Harvard, “then I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a very neat idea.’ If I know how clean or how dirty the power grid is, then to me it’s another control signal. It’s an optimization objective, which should be pretty straightforward to integrate with the software.” It turned out that incorporating carbon as a control signal changed the math for Harvard’s battery project. Shi had discovered that optimizing for cost alone would increase pollution, a revelation that occurred after he started analyzing the grid’s carbon emissions on an hourly basis as opposed to the more commonly used annual averages. |
Netflix is adding four more games this month, including Exploding Kittens | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | Netflix has four more games that are launching on its platform this month, including a game that is based on a popular card game and will also be tied to an upcoming Netflix series premiering in 2023. The four new titles bring Netflix’s gaming catalog to 22 games in total. The Exploding Kittens game, which was developed by Direwolf Digital, retains the classic gameplay from the original card game, where players draw cards aiming to avoid the Exploding Kitten. Users will be able to play with two new exclusive cards, Radar and Flip Flop, to allow players to manipulate the deck in new ways. The new Exploding Kittens game will launch May 31 in more than 15 languages. Netflix One of the other titles joining Netflix’s list of games is Dragon Up, which was developed by Canadian developer East Side Games. The single-player adventure game sees players hatch and collect rare dragons in order to save their kingdom. Netflix notes that to make the game feel more magical, its graphic style takes inspiration from Scandinavian design and illustration seen in early storybooks and fairy tales. The game is launching today in more than 30 languages. The second game is called Townsmen: A Kingdom Rebuilt and is Netflix’s first game from Germany by developer HandyGames. The game sees players building a medieval city, making smart financial decisions and doing what it takes to keep their people happy. The game is available today in more than 15 games. Lastly, Netflix is adding a game called Moonlighter from Spain by developer 11 Bit Studios. In this RPG adventure game, players manage a shop in an idyllic village by day. By night, players explore dungeons, slay monsters and unlock mysteries. Moonlighter is rolling out today in more than 15 games. Netflix To access the titles on Android, you need to tap on the new Games tab in the Netflix app for Android where the games are listed. After selecting a title, users are directed to the Google Play Store to install the games, as you would any other app. Once the games are downloaded, they are available to play at any time by tapping them within the Netflix app or on the home screen of an Android device. For iOS, Netflix is using a similar system where users are directed to Apple’s App Store for downloads. |
Robotic rehabilitation glove wins Microsoft’s 20th Imagine Cup for student inventors | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | Microsoft’s Imagine Cup is something I look forward to every year. The students and young entrepreneurs who submit their extremely early-stage projects to this global competition are like the seeds of future startups and potentially world-changing projects. , created a robotic glove to help patients with neurological damage recover faster at a fraction of the price of other options. The team, from Saudi Arabia, was led by Zain Samdani, who although he is a student has been researching and inventing things in the robotics category for years. The rest of the crew are similarly at the starts of interesting careers in the industry. The ExoHeal glove is a mechanized exoskeleton made to be worn by people who have suffered neurological damage causing problems with hand movements. We’ve seen a few of these efforts come out of robotics labs and startups over the years; the general line of thought is that of replicating the work of a physical therapist, who observes a patient’s movements and creates a set of exercises to help restore lost functions. In the case of a limb injury it’s often muscles and tendons that need rehabilitation, but with neurological damage it’s also necessary to make sure that the brain is sending the right signals as well. The team was focused on making the glove portable and affordable — other things like this can rely on pneumatic or hydraulic mechanisms, which are bulky and slow. V Bionic The white structure you see in the image at top is a 3D printed exoskeleton, while the black covering and “backpack” house the sensors, servos and other electronics. “Flexor linkage-driven movement gives us the flexibility to individually actuate different parts of each finger (phalanges) whilst keeping the device portable,” said Samdani in an email to TechCrunch. “We’re currently developing our production-ready prototype that utilizes a modular design to fit the hand sizes of different patients.” In early tests, the team found anecdotally that the glove helped patients recover more quickly, though there’s a lot of work ahead for a medical device like this. “We’re conducting our final clinical trials this year to better understand the scope of recovery for a variety of users and gain regulatory/medical device approval,” Samdani said. They plan to target India first as a high-need market with lower regulatory barriers. The cash from the Imagine Cup victory will help with that — Microsoft gives them $100,000 plus $50,000 in Azure credits, and a mentoring session from CEO Satya Nadella. Check out how cute this moment was when they were told they’d won: Microsoft Love it. They were far from the only cool team in the running, though. . |
Questions arise on Y Combinator’s role in startup correction | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | , albeit . Venture capital totals are sagging in most geographies, and falling share prices for tech companies large and small have on the future value of high-growth and often cash-hungry startups. The end of the lengthy startup boom that first formed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and largely powered through until the final months of 2021 is shaking out, changing how the market views certain entities. Every business cycle has winners and losers, heroes and villains. Some earlier winners turned out to be losers. Tiger, the mega-crossover fund, has evolved from a market-dominating change agent in technology financing . SoftBank’s various Vision Fund efforts are suffering. And some crypto investments that looked to be massive wins . , CEO of (YC W22), told TechCrunch earlier this year that many founders that he has spoken to have decided to hold off on fundraising in the current climate, adding that other founders from “across the ecosystem” are saying “that if you have to fundraise right now, you basically have to cut whatever you’d planned to raise back in January .” The winners and losers scorebook isn’t that hard to draw up. But the heroes and villains ledger is a bit more difficult. But with the startup market so changed, so quickly, whiplash is setting in among the investing class. And some are pointing the finger not just at late-stage capital pools that poured too much liquidity into the startup market — some startup players are irked at accelerators, Y Combinator in particular. Let’s talk about it. The latest missives from venture players are once again downturn letters. We last saw a round of these notes when COVID-19 first hit the world outside of China, leading to economic calamity and lockdowns. Investors warned startups to buckle up for bad times. But, as we now know, the bad times never came for most of them. Instead, ironically, the pandemic became an accelerant of sorts, pushing more business toward tech companies that helped other concerns operate remotely; an accelerating digital transformation was another tailwind bolstering the tech sector, giving startups a shot in the arm. The most recent round of warnings from venture capitalists appears more frequent than we saw in 2020, leading our own to note over the weekend that Among the various firms that sent advice to their portfolios was Y Combinator. Y Combinator, or YC for short, is the world’s best-known accelerator. Its expanding cohort sizes, twice-yearly cadence and “standard deal” made it a trendsetting startup program; one that has sufficient heft to influence the overall direction of the early-stage market for funding upstart technology companies. And, after “about $20,000 for 6% of a company,” YC in 2020 to “$125,000 for 7% equity on a post-money SAFE,” along with reduced pro-rata rights “to 4% of subsequent rounds.” That changed again in early 2022, when YC , offered on an uncapped basis but with most-favored-nation status. In essence, YC conserved its ability to collect 7% of startup equity early, with extra capital provided to its portfolio companies to put to work. Over the last few years, YC has raised the valuation bar for its startups, from around $333,333 (6% of a company for $20,000) to $1.79 million (7% of a company for $125,000). Even more, the additional capital it now offers on an uncapped basis likely worked to cement early-stage startup expectations that their accelerator valuation was market valid. , an investor at Midwest-focused venture fund , told TechCrunch that her firm has “been skeptical of a couple of national accelerators’ valuation practices from an investing standpoint even before the last couple of years,” adding that changes to early-stage valuations from select accelerators — she did not call any program out by name — “made it even harder to consider those companies for an investment to the point where [M25] stopped looking at them.” |
Shellworks wants to crack makeup’s single-use plastic problem | Harri Weber | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | Is the beauty industry ready to wean itself off single-use plastic? is betting on it. Targeting cosmetics brands, the London-based biotech startup has scooped up a $6.2 million seed round to prove it can scale its petroleum-free, compostable packaging, which “performs like plastic” but breaks down in about a year, the company claims. Shellworks’ first plastic-like product was developed using shellfish waste, but less than a year into its existence the startup pivoted to using a fat-like substance extracted from bacterial cells, which “behaves like a natural polyester” and is vegan, according to co-founder and chief product officer Amir Afshar. Like , Shellworks kept its name despite the lineup change. “Our vision is to break the reliance on the petroleum industry by building a new standard of packaging that is performant, cost competitive and truly sustainable,” said CEO Insiya Jafferjee, who co-founded Shellworks after spending nearly three years at Apple. Containers made from Shellworks’ plastic alternative. Shellworks So far, Shellworks has worked with beauty brands and , as well as fragrance company . Down the line, the startup says it may expand into other areas, including cleaning products. Shellworks is one of the numerous companies busy developing , without the nasty 500-year decay time that’s estimated for some petroleum products. Other such businesses include , which makes seaweed-based pouches for sauces, , which is developing sugar-based containers for soda and beer, and , which turns shrimp shells into a Styrofoam alternative. Packaging is to blame for of the beauty sector’s carbon emissions, per the British Beauty Council, an industry group. London-based VC LocalGlobe, backer of firms like and , led Shellworks’ seed round, which will go toward expanding the firm’s team. Other investors in the round include Cambridge-based seed investor Founder Collective as well as former Blue Bottle CEO Bryan Meehan. |
Twitter rebrands its media website to focus on creators with a new ‘Create’ hub | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | Twitter today that it has rebranded its Twitter Media website to ” The social media giant says the website is a new hub for creators to access resources, product information and tips for getting the most out of Twitter. With this new rebrand, the company says it wants to make it easier for creators to understand how they can use Twitter’s creator products and connect with other creators. As part of the the new change, the Creators can access resources on the website by industry, including sports, gaming, news, podcasters, writers and more. Twitter says that by breaking down resources by categories, creators will be able to easily find content that is tailored to them. The website also includes guides for creators based on their goal on Twitter, such as earning money, engaging with their audience or further developing their brand. Notice anything different around here? Twitter Media is now Twitter Create. Same great content, with a brand new look. — Twitter Create (@TwitterCreate) “Twitter has become so much more than Tweets, which is why we’ve also expanded and enhanced the products area of the site, introducing educational hubs and how-to guides to help you get the most out of all the features and products available to you,” the website reads. The rebrand comes as Twitter has been looking to roll out new ways for creators to get the most out of the social media platform. The company recently introduced a new tool for creators called the which is designed to help creators analyze how they make money on Twitter and how much they’re earning from monetization features, such as and . Creators can also use the dashboard to search through their payment history and see information about their upcoming payouts. Twitter has said it plans to enhance the dashboard in the future and ensure that it becomes a place for creators to find ways to further grow their communities and analyze the money they’re making through the platform. Last October, the company began rolling out for businesses and creators. The new profile setting gives users additional tools to distinguish their profile, quickly promote content through ads and capitalize on Twitter’s future . Also in October, Twitter launched a for Spaces called the Twitter Spaces Spark Program. The program is a three-month accelerator that aims to reward successful Spaces on Twitter with financial, technical and marketing support. With the launch of these new features and resources, Twitter is looking to support creators on its platform and compete with the monetization opportunities offered by other digital giants, including TikTok and Instagram. |
DDG has a tracker blocking carve-out linked to Microsoft contract | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | DuckDuckGo, the self-styled “internet privacy company” — which, for years, has built a brand around a claim of non-tracking web search and, more recently, launched its own ‘private’ browser with built-in tracker blocking — has found itself in hot water after a researcher found hidden limits on its tracking protection that create a carve-out for certain advertising data requests by its search syndication partner, Microsoft. Late yesterday, the researcher in question, Zach Edwards, the findings of his audit — saying he had found DDG’s mobile browsers do not block advertising requests made by Microsoft scripts on non-Microsoft web properties. (NB: This is a separate matter to what happens if you actually click on an ad when using DDG — as its clearly discloses all privacy bets are off at that point.) Edwards tested browser data flows on a Facebook-owned site, Workplace.com, and found that while DDG informed users it had blocked Google and Facebook trackers, it did not prevent Microsoft from receiving data flows linked to their browsing on the non-Microsoft website. You can capture data within the DuckDuckGo so-called private browser on a website like Facebook's and you'll see that DDG does NOT stop data flows to Microsoft's Linkedin domains or their Bing advertising domains. iOS + Android proof: 👀🫥😮💨🤡⛈️⚖️💸💸💸 — ℨ𝔞𝔠𝔥 𝔈𝔡𝔴𝔞𝔯𝔡𝔰 (@thezedwards) Edwards had some Twitter back and forth with DDG’s founder and CEO Gabe Weinberg, who initially appeared to be the finding by emphasizing all the stuff he said DDG’s browser block (e.g., third-party tracking cookies, including those from Microsoft). Weinberg was also especially keen to make it clear the data flows issue is not related to DuckDuckGo search. However the limitation on DDG’s browser’s tracker blocking does amount to an exemption from protection against certain advertising data transfers to Microsoft subsidiaries (Bing, LinkedIn) — which could be used for cross-site tracking of web users for ad targeting purposes. Or, in other words, to undermine DDG browser users’ privacy. You can capture data within the DuckDuckGo so-called private browser on a website like Facebook's and you'll see that DDG does NOT stop data flows to Microsoft's Linkedin domains or their Bing advertising domains. iOS + Android proof: 👀🫥😮💨🤡⛈️⚖️💸💸💸 — ℨ𝔞𝔠𝔥 𝔈𝔡𝔴𝔞𝔯𝔡𝔰 (@thezedwards) In Twitter back and forth, Weinberg confirmed Edwards’ audit was correct — “fessing up to a contactual agreement that he said limited DDG’s ability to block trackers in this scenario by writing that DDG’s ‘search syndication agreement’ with Microsoft, which owns and operates the Bing search engine and index, prevents us from stopping Microsoft-owned scripts from loading.” He added that DDG was “working to change that.” This is just about non-DuckDuckGo and non-Microsoft sites, where our search syndication agreement prevents us from stopping Microsoft-owned scripts from loading, though we can still apply protections post-load (like 3rd party cookie blocking). We are also working to change that. — Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg) Asked via Twitter whether DDG’s contract included a clause that prevents it from publicly complaining about the limitations imposed upon it by Microsoft, a tech giant with , Weinberg : “Our syndication contract has broad confidentiality requirements, and the specific requirement documents themselves are additionally explicitly marked confidential.” Discussing his findings and DDG’s response with TechCrunch, Edwards described himself as “pretty shocked” by Weinberg’s public response to his audit — and for having what he summed up as “no public solutions for the problems created through the secret partnership between DuckDuckgo and Microsoft.” The issue has blown up on over the day — where Weinberg (aka yegg) has been doing more firefighting in the comments, reiterating that DDG’s hands are tied by its contract with Microsoft and further claiming it has continued to press for changes to “this limited restriction.” “This is just about non-DuckDuckGo and non-Microsoft sites in our browsers, where our search syndication agreement currently prevents us from stopping Microsoft-owned scripts from loading, though we can still apply our browser’s protections post-load (like 3rd party cookie blocking and others mentioned above, and do). We’ve also been tirelessly working behind the scenes to change this limited restriction,” Weinberg wrote on the site. “I also understand this is confusing because it is a search syndication contract that is preventing us from doing a non-search thing. That’s because our product is a bundle of multiple privacy protections, and this is a distribution requirement imposed on us as part of the search syndication agreement. Our syndication agreement also has broad confidentially provisions and the requirement documents themselves are explicitly marked confidential,” he added. While DDG’s browser clearly does not block all scripts — and no tracker blocker is going to be 100% effective as tracking techniques are ever evolving — this carve-out for Microsoft scripts looks different on merit of it being a specific exemption attached to a contractual agreement that’s linked to a commercial deal which allows DDG to use Microsoft’s search index in its core product — none of which was (seemingly) public knowledge prior to Edwards’ audit. In further public remarks on the issue, Weinberg implied that DDG is trying to balance a goal of giving browser users a very easy tracker blocker experience (i.e., to maximize accessibility), with beefing up protections that might further enhance user privacy but with a potential cost to the experience (e.g., broken webpages). However the lack of a disclosure by DDG to browser users of the Microsoft-related restriction to its protections is particularly concerning — especially in light of the stark contrast with its privacy-focused marketing which tells users they will “escape website tracking” (which clearly isn’t happening in the specific Microsoft-related instances identified by Edwards). So DDG risks misleading users and undermining its own reputation as a pro-privacy business. In a more recent response posted in response to Hacker News comments, We will work diligently today to find a way to say something in our app store descriptions in terms of a better disclosure — will likely have something up by the end of the day.” “I understand the concern here that we are working to address in a variety of ways but to be clear no app will provide 100% protection for a variety of reasons, and the scripts in question here do currently have significant protection on them in our browser,” he added. We reached out to Weinberg with questions. He sent us this statement: We have always been extremely careful to never promise anonymity when browsing, because that frankly isn’t possible given how quickly trackers change how they work to evade protections and the tools we currently offer. When most other browsers on the market talk about tracking protection they are usually referring to 3rd-party cookie protection and fingerprinting protection, and our browsers for iOS, Android, and our new Mac beta, impose these restrictions on third-party tracking scripts, including those from Microsoft. We’re talking here about an above-and-beyond protection that most browsers don’t even attempt to do — that is, blocking third-party tracking scripts before they even load on 3rd party websites. Because this can cause websites to break, we cannot do this as much as we want to in any case. Our goal, however, has always been to provide the most privacy we can in one download, by default without any complicated settings, so we took this on. We also put questions to Microsoft about the limitation it imposes on search syndication partners but at the time of writing the tech giant had not responded. Privacy trade-offs are never great but one conclusion looks inescapable here: Antitrust regulators need to closely examine the search syndication market — given it’s essentially comprised of two gatekeeping adtech giants, Google and Microsoft, which are fully empowered to enforce (unfair) terms on anyone else wanting to offer a competitive search product, or, indeed in certain cases, an alternative web browser. European regulators have recently agreed a new ex ante competition regime that’s aimed at the most powerful intermediating platforms — which the Digital Markets Act refers to as internet “gatekeepers.” The DMA is clearly applicable to search engines but it remains to be seen whether the Commission will spot the opportunity to use the incoming regulation to crack open the search market by enforcing fair usage terms around search syndication on the only two indexes that count. |
Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha: I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now | Navin Chaddha | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | at tech from both sides now (h/t ), as a three-time entrepreneur and as a venture investor through two downturns. On the startup side, my first company, VXtreme, was acquired by Microsoft and became the platform for media streaming over the internet. My second experience was the rocket ship run up to an IPO and subsequent nosedive in valuation that characterized so many startups in the dot-com era. My third startup had been in the market only a year when the internet bubble burst and had not yet found product-market fit. To survive, we had to take drastic measures, including two rounds of layoffs until we were able to merge with another company, which is still thriving today. As a venture investor, I have invested in over 60 companies, and while many have gone public or been acquired, the journey has included pivots, near-death experiences and navigating through the 2008/2009 downturn. Today, as people throw around scary words like cram downs, structure, ratchets, illiquid portfolios and wind down of funds, I truly empathize with founders of companies who are having trouble raising capital, have seen their valuation drop and are making tough survival decisions. Every era is different, but here are some tips for our new normal: In a time of contraction, firms with funds that are close to their end of life will be under tight constraints and may not have allocated enough follow-on capital for their existing investments. Reserve management can become an issue, and existing investors won’t be able to come through on their pro-rata amounts, especially if you’re conducting internal rounds or bridge extensions. So, as part of your evaluation of investors, you should ask which fund they are investing from, how far along they are in investing it and how much they hold in reserves for future rounds. This will help you ensure that they can continue to support your future capital needs. When capital is scarce, you have to be willing to kill your darlings so you can extend your runway. At Rivio, my third startup as a founder, we came up with a zero-based budget plan after the dot-com bust that assumed we’d have no access to any future capital. We then drastically cut product features, re-thought our go-to-market strategy and rightsized the business. |
PlanetScale expands its database service with built-in performance monitoring and more | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | , the highly scalable MySQL database service founded by the co-creators of the increasingly popular open source project, today announced a series of updates that push the platform beyond its basic database features by adding new enterprise features and new tools to improve the developer experience. The first of these new features is PlanetScale Portals, a new multi-region read-only replica system that will allow PlanetScale customers to replicate their data to any other AWS region (with support for Google Cloud and potentially other clouds coming later). “I in Frankfurt — — close to With this update, PlanetScale is also launching Insights, a new real-time performance monitoring service for its database system that will allow users to keep tabs on how their queries are performing without having to use a third-party system. Van Wiggeren noted that PlanetScale’s systems give the company unparalleled data into what the database is doing. “W when The last piece of news today is the launch of PlanetScale Connect. Using the service’s open-source connector, users can now more easily extract and move data from PlanetScale to other platforms like BigQuery, Snowflake or RedShift for analysis. Using PlanetScale’s ability to incrementally sync this data, the analytics database stays fresh, all without the risk to corrupting the production data. While the current iteration of this service depends on Airbyte, the company also plans to work with services like Fivetran in the future. “W Airbyte “Today’s announcement builds on our commitment to deliver , enabling companies to get out of the infrastructure business and focus on their business,” said Sam Lambert, CEO, PlanetScale. “PlanetScale’s platform-based approach lets development teams take back control of their workflow with a database that’s as easy to use as writing code.” |
Google TV is finally launching personalized user profiles after a long delay | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | After being delayed for months, it’s about time that Google rolls out its personalized profiles for Google TV. , users will get profiles “over the next few weeks.” , Google TV announced profiles that will give each user their own tailored recommendations, watchlists and personalized Google Assistant answers. While this was initially supposed to be available for users at the end of 2021, the update is finally launching. Once you receive the update, by clicking on your profile picture at the top right of the Google TV home screen. Select “Add an account” and follow the prompts to set up the profile. The update makes it easier for large households to navigate the content they want. Google TV allows up to 12 profiles on a single connected TV device. Plus, app downloads and login details appear across all profiles, excluding kids’ profiles. This makes it easier than ever to stream without having to start from scratch each time you want to set up a new Google TV profile. The tech giant has been improving Google TV, expanding it in order to be less of a single storefront experience for household members who enjoy different TV shows and movies, among other content. Last year, the company launched , where parents can choose which apps are available and set watch time limits. More recently, users also got the with personalized information and recommendation cards that show things like weather, news, sports scores, podcast links and more. |
Niantic transcends Discord to build Campfire, an AR social network, and unveils Lightship VPS | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | Since the launch of Pokémon Go in 2016, players have been coordinating meetups, in-game raids and battles on platforms like Reddit and Discord. This summer, parent company Niantic is Campfire, a social networking service designed to help mobile augmented reality (AR) gamers connect. Niantic’s games incentivize people to use their technology to go outside and meet others — that’s why it calls its AR development the “real-world metaverse.” Campfire wants to make that even easier (or offer an alternative to long-running Pokémon Go Discord servers) and is supposed to be the “homepage” of this slice of techno-reality. Following in Snapchat’s footsteps as a map-based social platform, the service includes the ability to connect with people, find nearby events, join communities and message people. Users can also share their location with friends (don’t share with strangers!). The service is now available inside Niantic’s Ingress app and will roll out soon to all Niantic experiences, . “ “W … Niantic The next step in its mission to build the “real-world metaverse,” Campfire is part of a new slate of AR products unveiled today, including Niantic’s much-hyped Lightship VPS, or virtual positioning system. For years, Niantic has been inviting users on Pokémon Go and Ingress to scan local landmarks, even offering for this crowd-sourced data. Then, those short video snippets of real-world locations are validated by developers, which is then processed to become part of the AR map of the world. At launch, Niantic’s head of product for mapping Tory Smith said that San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, London and Tokyo are the most densely mapped. By the end of the year, Lightship VPS will be available in over 100 global cities. With the help of Niantic’s recent , these features will also be available in mobile web browsers. With Lightship VPS, if a user scans their location, the VPS can determine where they are, almost like a GPS (which the name of the product is nodding to). Of course, GPS shows you where you are and what’s around you, but VPS adds another layer, showing you user-generated experiences designed to enhance your real-world experience. Lightship VPS functionality will be available to AR developers via Niantic’s now. |
Stellantis to build new battery plant in Indiana | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | Stellantis and Samsung SDI said on Tuesday they will team up to build a $2.5 billion lithium-ion battery plant in Indiana. The project, which will create 1,400 new jobs and could surpass the $3 billion mark once it’s complete, is Stellantis’ first battery plant in the U.S. and its fifth worldwide. The latest factory is slated to open in 2025 near Stellantis’ engine, casting and transmission plants in Kokomo, Indiana, where the company is also investing $229 million to produce electrified, eight-speed transmissions to help reach its goal for EVs to represent more than half of its U.S. sales by 2030. The news comes one day after Hyundai’s blockbuster announcement that it plans to invest in mobility innovation in North America through 2025, including in an EV plant and battery manufacturing facility outside of Savannah, Georgia. That project represents the largest-ever economic development deal recruited by the Peach State. Stellantis’ joint venture with the South Korean battery manufacturer in Indiana will support the global juggernaut’s goal to . The Chrysler parent company is investing more than $35 billion in electrification, software, and technology through 2025, and expects to launch more than 75 new battery-electric models, including 25 nameplates in the U.S. and Canada, . Stellantis announced in March plans to invest $4.1 billion in a separate with LG Energy Solution. That plant is expected to open in Windsor, Ontario, in 2024. The new battery factory in Kokomo will have an initial annual production capacity of 23 gigawatt-hours, with the ability to increase to up to 33 gigawatt-hours in the future, said Mark Stewart, COO of Stellantis North America. |
Adam Neumann’s blockchain-based redemption story now sponsored by a16z | Anita Ramaswamy | 2,022 | 5 | 24 | In a classic “pivot to crypto to reinvent yourself” moment, controversial WeWork founder Adam Neumann recently launched a startup, , to sell tokenized carbon credits on the blockchain. Venture capitalists just can’t seem to get enough of Neumann and his spouse/co-founder, Rebekah, who started the company alongside its CEO Dana Gibber and two others, Caroline Klatt and Ilan Stern. Now, Flowcarbon says it has led by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto division (a16z crypto) through a combination of traditional VC equity and a token sale. General Catalyst, Samsung Next, 166 2nd, Sam and Ashley Levinson, RSE Ventures and Allegory Labs participated alongside a16z in the venture round, the company said, with Fifth Wall, Box Group and the Celo Foundation taking part in the token sale. Flowcarbon’s protocol helps projects sell tokenized carbon credits to companies looking to reduce their carbon footprint. The credits can then be traded on crypto exchanges, the company says. Why put these credits on-chain, though? Proponents, including Gibber, say doing so allows projects that provide these credits to more easily raise capital and boosts transparency for buyers. Of the total funds raised in this round, $32 million came from venture capital firms and $38 million from the sale of Flowcarbon’s Goddess Nature Token (GNT), a crypto token on the Celo blockchain backed by carbon credits, reported. GNT’s underlying carbon credits are pre-certified by industry groups including Verra, Gold Standard, Climate Action Reserve and the American Carbon Registry and are then sold in bundles to companies, according to Reuters. Gibber told Reuters that carbon credit providers pay a 2% tokenization fee to Flowcarbon to sell their credits on-chain, lower than the cost they’d incur when selling these credits through traditional channels, which can be up to 30% of the project value. The credit can also be isolated from the bundle and delivered physically to a token holder if that holder wants to sell it off-chain, according to Gibber. The company is playing in a crowded space, as lots of startups have hopped on board with crypto’s regenerative finance (ReFi) movement, which seeks to leverage blockchain technology to solve environmental issues. Projects like , , and are all working on crypto-based carbon credit solutions. A private sale of Flowcarbon’s GNT token ends in two days, and the company is currently allowing people to pre-register for an upcoming public sale of GNT, according to its website. |
Airbnb China closes domestic unit to cut costs as it bets on border reopening | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | Airbnb will terminate its domestic business in China, marking the partial retreat of another Western tech giant from the country. Like most of its peers, the home sharing titan is shifting its focus to China’s outbound business. Google, Facebook, Twitter and the likes don’t offer services to Chinese consumers but they are important advertising channels for the country’s booming export-oriented e-commerce sellers. Airbnb is closing down its domestic home and experiences segments in China this summer and pivoting to serve the country’s growing appetite for outbound tourism, according to a person familiar with the matter. The American company had high hopes when it entered China in 2016. It was once a popular choice for foreign tourists and Western-educated Chinese traveling in the country. But that population is in the minority after all. Over the years Airbnb has faced rising competition from domestic rivals like Tujia, , and experienced several management at the top. With China’s tourism disrupted by intermittent lockdowns since 2020 “with no end in sight,” Airbnb decided to it was time to end the business. “The domestic segment is costly and complex to operate, and COVID-19 worsened these issues and heightened their impact,” the person with knowledge said. Since 2016, Airbnb’s China listings have logged 25 million guest arrivals, but stays in China have accounted for just about 1% of the firm’s revenue for the last few years. The company will remove roughly 150,000 listings in China as part of the shutdown, reported . Airbnb is betting on the opportunity to meet China’s pent-up demand for outbound tourism once the country loosens travel restrictions. Nearly 155 million Chinese people traveled abroad in 2019, compared to just 48 million a decade ago, according to compiled by World Bank. But it might still be a long time before Airbnb gets to experiment with this new endeavor. China is one of the last countries to , limiting outbound and inbound travel. The country’s economy is also , which could continue to hurt consumer confidence even after the borders reopen. |
IP and cybersecurity disputes are top legal concerns for tech companies | Andrea D'Ambra | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | to litigation, but for the tech sector, it appears intellectual property (IP) and patent disputes, followed by cybersecurity and data protection issues, are among the top legal matters that keep tech company managers up at night. According to the , which surveys hundreds of in-house litigation leaders from global corporations, labor and employment disputes are also high on the list for tech companies. Startup teams, legal counsel and other internal stakeholders looking to address these legal challenges should consider three key factors impacting the sector. Technology respondents were more likely to be concerned about IP disputes than any other potential dispute source, with 46% listing them among the most concerning, compared to 16% across all industries. Given that the core function of most technology companies is to develop and market innovative technology and solutions, it is unsurprising that tech companies listed IP disputes as having the most relevance and importance to them. Respondents cited the critical nature of IP assets to their core business as the reason why disputes were such a concern. The costs associated with these disputes, particularly when defending against accusations of patent infringement, were top of mind for respondents. Defending against IP disputes can be a drain on resources, particularly given the continued cost and prevalence of disputes initiated by “patent trolls” — entities whose primary business is to obtain and enforce patents against technology companies — far exceed the costs associated with leveraging the patent to provide goods and services. Many respondents reportedly are expanding their legal teams. Strategies include adding additional in-house legal staff, engaging outside counsel to focus on specific IP strategies, expanding investigation and enforcement actions against potentially infringing activity, enhancing the protection of company patents and building a more mature and robust contract drafting and review process for IP-related contracts. Technology respondents listed cybersecurity and data protection issues as the top concerning dispute trend, more than any other industry — 71% reported they felt more exposed to cyber security/data protection disputes, compared to the previous 12 months. They said protecting both their own proprietary information and their customer’s information was critical, particularly in an increasingly global market. |
OpenAI: Look at our awesome image generator! Google: Hold my Shiba Inu | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | The AI world is still figuring out how to deal with the amazing show of prowess that is … but OpenAI isn’t the only one working on something like that. Google Research has rushed to publicize a similar model it’s been working on — which it claims is even better. (get it?) is a text-to-image diffusion-based generator built on large transformer language models that… okay, let’s slow down and unpack that real quick. Text-to-image models take text inputs like “a dog on a bike” and produce a corresponding image, something that has been done for years but recently has seen huge jumps in quality and accessibility. Part of that is using diffusion techniques, which basically start with a pure noise image and slowly refine it bit by bit until the model thinks it can’t make it look any more like a dog on a bike than it already does. This was an improvement over top-to-bottom generators that could get it hilariously wrong on first guess, and others that could easily be led astray. The other part is improved language understanding through using the transformer approach, the technical aspects of which I won’t (and can’t) get into here, but it and a few other recent advances have led to convincing language models like GPT-3 and others. Google Research Imagen starts by generating a small (64×64 pixels) image and then does two “super resolution” passes on it to bring it up to 1024×1024. This isn’t like normal upscaling, though, as AI super-resolution creates new details in harmony with the smaller image, using the original as a basis. Say for instance you have a dog on a bike and the dog’s eye is 3 pixels across in the first image. Not a lot of room for expression! But on the second image, it’s 12 pixels across. Where does the detail needed for this come from? Well, the AI knows what a dog’s eye looks like, so it generates more detail as it draws. Then this happens again when the eye is done again, but at 48 pixels across. But at no point did the AI have to just pull 48 by whatever pixels of dog eye out of its… let’s say magic bag. Like many artists, it started with the equivalent of a rough sketch, filled it out in a study, then really went to town on the final canvas. This isn’t unprecedented, and in fact artists working with AI models use this technique already to create pieces that are much larger than what the AI can handle in one go. If you split a canvas into several pieces, and super-resolution all of them separately, you end up with something much larger and more intricately detailed; you can even do it repeatedly. from an artist I know: The previously posted image is a whopping 24576 x 11264 pixels. There is no upscaling. In fact, I went far past 's limits.😥 The image is what I call "3rd generation" (pun intended), w/ its 420 slices regenerated from a previous image already regen'd once.🧵2/10 — dilkROM Glitches (@dilkROMGlitches) The advances Google’s researchers claim with Imagen are several. They say that existing text models can be used for the text encoding portion, and that their quality is more important than simply increasing visual fidelity. That makes sense intuitively, since a detailed picture of nonsense is definitely worse than a slightly less detailed picture of exactly what you asked for. For instance, in the describing Imagen, they compare results for it and DALL-E 2 doing “a panda making latte art.” In all of the latter’s images, it’s latte art of a panda; in most of Imagen’s it’s a panda making the art. (Neither was able to render a horse riding an astronaut, showing the opposite in all attempts. It’s a work in progress.) Google Research In Google’s tests, Imagen came out ahead in tests of human evaluation, both on accuracy and fidelity. This is quite subjective obviously, but to even match the perceived quality of DALL-E 2, which until today was considered a huge leap ahead of everything else, is pretty impressive. I’ll only add that while it’s pretty good, none of these images (from any generator) will withstand more than a cursory scrutiny before people notice they’re generated or have serious suspicions. OpenAI is a step or two ahead of Google in a couple ways, though. DALL-E 2 is more than a research paper, it’s a private beta with people using it, just as they used its predecessor and GPT-2 and 3. Ironically, the company with “open” in its name has focused on productizing its text-to-image research, while the fabulously profitable internet giant has yet to attempt it. That’s more than clear from the choice DALL-E 2’s researchers made, to curate the training dataset ahead of time and remove any content that might violate their own guidelines. The model couldn’t make something NSFW if it tried. Google’s team, however, used some large datasets known to include inappropriate material. In an insightful section on the Imagen site describing “Limitations and Societal Impact,” the researchers write: Downstream applications of text-to-image models are varied and may impact society in complex ways. The potential risks of misuse raise concerns regarding responsible open-sourcing of code and demos. At this time we have decided not to release code or a public demo. The data requirements of text-to-image models have led researchers to rely heavily on large, mostly uncurated, web-scraped datasets. While this approach has enabled rapid algorithmic advances in recent years, datasets of this nature often reflect social stereotypes, oppressive viewpoints, and derogatory, or otherwise harmful, associations to marginalized identity groups. While a subset of our training data was filtered to remove noise and undesirable content, such as pornographic imagery and toxic language, we also utilized LAION-400M dataset which is known to contain a wide range of inappropriate content including pornographic imagery, racist slurs, and harmful social stereotypes. Imagen relies on text encoders trained on uncurated web-scale data, and thus inherits the social biases and limitations of large language models. As such, there is a risk that Imagen has encoded harmful stereotypes and representations, which guides our decision to not release Imagen for public use without further safeguards in place While some might carp at this, saying Google is afraid its AI might not be sufficiently politically correct, that’s an uncharitable and short-sighted view. An AI model is only as good as the data it’s trained on, and not every team can spend the time and effort it might take to remove the really awful stuff these scrapers pick up as they assemble multi-million-images or multi-billion-word datasets. Such biases are meant to show up during the research process, which exposes how the systems work and provides an unfettered testing ground for identifying these and other limitations. How else would we know that an AI can’t draw hairstyles common among Black people — hairstyles any kid could draw? Or that when prompted to write stories about work environments, the AI invariably makes the boss a man? In these cases an AI model is working perfectly and as designed — it has successfully learned the biases that pervade the media on which it is trained. Not unlike people! But while unlearning systemic bias is a lifelong project for many humans, an AI has it easier and its creators can remove the content that caused it to behave badly in the first place. Perhaps some day there will be a need for an AI to write in the style of a racist, sexist pundit from the ’50s, but for now the benefits of including that data are small and the risks large. At any rate, Imagen, like the others, is still clearly in the experimental phase, not ready to be employed in anything other than a strictly human-supervised manner. When Google gets around to making its capabilities more accessible I’m sure we’ll learn more about how and why it works. |
SwipeRx lands $27M from MDI and Gates Foundation to digitize the pharma industry in Southeast Asia | Kate Park | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | , a platform for pharma professionals, said Tuesday it has secured a $27 million Series B round led by Indonesia’s MDI Ventures, with participation from the Gates Foundation, Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures, Susquehanna International Group and existing backers. Pharmacies in Southeast Asia were largely fragmented, mom-and-pop shops operating in silos when the company — originally known as mClinica — was incorporated in Singapore in 2014. The region had seen “lots of innovation for patients through a proliferation of telemedicine apps and even innovations for doctors, but the pharmacy and its workforce were largely unaddressed,” SwipeRx CEO said. Today, he claims, SwipeRx has transformed and digitized the pharmacy industry and become a one-stop platform for pharmacists to perform all their daily tasks, from education to purchasing to inventory financing in Southeast Asia. On the education front, he says the outfit provides online accredited education, drug information, job listings, discussion boards and everything else its community of pharmacists needs to advance professionally and better serve patients. Toward that end, the SwipeRx app allows users to keep up to date with the latest healthcare news and drug information and access free educational continuing professional development (CPD) modules, which are mandatory in many Southeast Asian countries. (Meralli insists that SwipeRx is now the largest regional provider of online accredited education for pharmacy professionals, in fact.) The app also helps pharmacists search for new job opportunities or to post job offers. Like LinkedIn, the app also invites users who aren’t necessarily on the cusp of changing jobs to expand their network by connecting to their pharmacy peers. Meralli told TechCrunch it is easiest to think of SwipeRx as a LinkedIn meets Amazon for pharmacies. According to the company, SwipeRX will use the fresh capital to scale its growth across Southeast Asia, expand its logistics network for B2B e-commerce and increase its team. Certainly, SwipeRx — which raised $6.3 million in Series A funding in 2017 — has the kind of momentum that investors like. The 400-person organization claims that more than 235,000 pharmacy professionals and 45,000 pharmacies use the app in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia. It also says that more than 8,000 retail pharmacies in Indonesia alone — accounting for about 25% of all pharmacies — are on SwipeRx, with over 5,000 users joining its digital purchasing network and transacting on its B2B platform. SwipeRx “Our growth as a company has been exponential, and the past years have allowed us to further our vision to build the largest pharmacy network in the region,” Meralli told TechCrunch. “This round of funding reaffirms our commitment to disrupt this deeply fragmented industry while improving public health by supporting the pharmacy channel.” Added Donald Wihardja, CEO of MDI Ventures: “We see great potential and promise in SwipeRx’s platform as it strives to address the challenges faced by pharmacies, especially in Indonesia, by connecting different players — big and small — all under one platform.” |
Snap says it will miss this quarter’s revenue goals and slow hiring | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in an internal memo that the company will for this quarter. Snap will also slow its pace of hiring, a that companies like Meta and Uber have employed as a way to cut costs. Though Snap continues to grow year over year, Spiegel says the company is growing more slowly than expected due to the . Snap confirmed the contents of the memo to TechCrunch; the company also submitted noting that it expects Q2 2022 revenue and adjusted EBITDA to fall below its expectations. Consistent with Spiegel’s comments on , he wrote that Snap’s revenue has fallen short due to inflation, as well as the impact of the war in Ukraine. Snap CFO Derek Andersen previously said that after Russia’s invasion in February, many advertisers paused their campaigns, but within 10 days, most advertisers resumed them. Snap also in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, noting that it won’t accept ads from entities owned by the Russian state. Spiegel also indicated that last year’s continues to affect the company. Once iOS users were presented with a choice to opt-out of off-app tracking, most users chose not to hand over more personal data to the apps they use, which impacted the ad business of social apps like Snapchat and Facebook. “Responsibly managing our expenses will allow us to invest through this period of time and emerge stronger as a business. Moving forward, we will be taking steps to reprioritize our investments — continuing to invest across our business priorities, but in many cases doing so at a slower pace than we had planned given the operating environment,” Spiegel wrote today to employees. According to the memo, Snap plans to hire more than 500 more team members this year, in addition to 900 offers already accepted. That’s a 41% increase in hiring year-over-year, but it’s not as many new hires as the company had planned as it pushes some planned hiring into 2023. Hundreds of are currently listed on Snap’s website, including 55 roles in , a growing sector of Snap’s business. Spiegel’s letter specified that the pace of hiring for unopened roles will slow, but didn’t clearly state how current open roles may be affected. Spiegel added that Snap will backfill positions if current employees leave, so long as those roles are high-priority. Plus, leaders at Snap have also been advised to review their budgets to find ways to cut costs — hopefully, that doesn’t mean , which have plagued the tech industry over the last several weeks. “Our most meaningful gains over the coming months will come as a result of improved productivity from our existing team members, as we work together and help our new team members get to know Snap and learn how to contribute to their full potential,” Spiegel wrote. “Through many ups and downs over the past decade you have made clear your ability to see through the short term and invest in our long term success.” |
Max Q: Insertion burn | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | Hello and welcome back to Max Q. In this issue: Nearly two and a half years after the first botched flight test, Boeing successfully launched its Starliner capsule on Thursday, and It’s a major achievement for the company’s astronaut transportation program, which until now has been plagued with setbacks and technical snafus. It was a high-stakes mission, to put it mildly. Starliner’s closest analogue is SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, and indeed both were developed under a NASA program called Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap). The agency (read: the taxpayer) awarded both SpaceX and Boeing billions of dollars to develop capsules capable of transporting astronauts to and from the ISS. Boeing was awarded a total of $4.82 billion for a commercial crew transportation system, and so far that money has yet to yield a single successful mission. That’s contrasted with SpaceX, which has already started ferrying astronauts to and from ISS with the Crew Dragon capsule. SpaceX’s tech has been so successful that to include three more crewed missions at a cost of $900 million. But with this successful mission, it appears that Boeing is back on track toward becoming another astronaut transportation provider. The Starliner that flew on Thursday was uncrewed, as it was just a test flight, and it will spend fived-10 days docked to ISS before returning to Earth. Watch Starliner’s docking below. The crew ship completed its trip to the station when it docked to the Harmony module’s forward port at 8:28pm ET today. More… — International Space Station (@Space_Station) A big piece of news that caught my eye this week: SpaceX is reportedly raising a fresh round of funding, to the tune of a staggering $1.725 billion, with the share price at $70, . This would mark a 25% increase from the previous share tender at $56 per share. The round would value the company at $127 billion, according to sources, making it the highest-valued startup in the country. In a separate piece of reporting, also quoted unnamed sources on a potential share sell, including Elon Musk himself sharing sells. The Post suggested that the billionaire could sell shares to help fund his $44 billion purchase of Twitter. The last time SpaceX raised funds, it was back in December, when the space company raised more than $337 million at a valuation of around $100 billion. Getty Images Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti posted this image on Twitter, taken by her from the International Space Station. That little dot near the center of the frame is Starliner! She posted some pretty , too. |
Daily Crunch: Used-car marketplace Sylndr lands $12.6M pre-seed round, sets new record for MENA startups | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | Monday May 23, 2022, and we’re listening to . In it, we talk to TechCrunch writers about the stories they’re most excited about. The first episode is live now, featuring Darrell and Taylor talking about … UFOs — and Putting robot operating systems in the cloud makes sense in a world where a lot of industrial robots have limited computing powers (and certainly no GPUs, TPUs, or FPGAs to help them along). reports on . It’s pretty depressing that there are enough layoffs happening in startup land that we’re now on our third weekly installment of a roundup of startup team reductions, but and have you covered, letting you , rather than having to read all our individual coverage. As we’re tightening our belts, battening the hatches and mumbling “winter is coming” under our breaths, has some fantastic advice for why you should start talking to bankers and buyers to if the guillotine really comes down in a big way. Some good news, too: Bloomberg / Getty Images Is networking leader Cisco in the doldrums? Ron Miller and Alex Wilhelm pored over the company’s recently released quarterly results and found that year-over-year revenue was flat, with future earnings predicted to fall well short of expectations. Last week, CEO Chuck Robbins told analysts that the company was feeling the impacts of global supply chain issues and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it’s increasingly unclear whether healthy software revenues can compensate for its sinking hardware business. “Even when the supply chain issues are solved, Cisco must find a way to innovate and monetize in networking, something it has been struggling with over the last four to six years,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research. Some M&A news courtesy of . Ron and Alex weren’t the first to get the news, but they spent some energy pondering why Broadcom might have its eye on VMware despite there not being much in common between the two. Today’s mobility news is brought you by the letter “H,” the letter “B” and the word “oops.” reported on a with claims that the ride-hailing company had plans to “further reduce commuter charges in Kenya, months after the 35% cut of 2016.” It also goes into why drivers stuck around even after the price reduction. Meanwhile, Hyundai says it will park some $10 billion into by 2025. About half of that will go into the car maker’s . Over at Boeing, its team is cheering as its after many delays and even some nail-biting events after lift-off. In streaming news, late-night funnyman Conan O’Brien must be all smiles as his , and there is some that might be making Netflix a little jealous. And now, this: |
Walmart is adding Symbotic robots to warehouses across the country | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | The push behind the massive influx of warehouse robotics funding is largely driven by one entity: Amazon. There are other factors driving the industry, of course, including the pandemic, labor shortages and supply chain constraints, but Amazon is forever looming in the corner, forcing companies to adopt creative and innovative ways to remain competitive. Not even a force of nature like Walmart is immune. While Amazon has a head start in this department, dating back to its 2012 purchase of Kiva Systems, Walmart has been working aggressively on automation in recent years — though its own track record has been a bit spotty, which has gone quiet since the company abandoned its shelf-scanning systems. Massachusetts-based Symbotic has had considerably better luck. Late last year, the company announced its intentions to go , in large part based on momentum from an ongoing deal with Walmart that brought its warehouse robotics to 25 of the mega-retailer’s distribution/fulfillment centers. Today, the pair announced an expansion of the deal that will install Symbotic systems into all of Walmart’s distribution centers in the U.S. — that’s 42 in all. While Walmart clearly has faith in the systems, it’s not an overnight deal. Symbotic says the retrofitting rollout will take more than 8 years to complete. It’s safe to say both the retail and robotics landscapes are on track to look extremely different in just under a decade. “The need for accuracy and speed in the supply chain has never been more visible, and we’re confident that now is the time to move even faster by scaling Symbotic’s technology to our entire regional distribution center network,” Walmart SVP says in a release. “Using high-speed robotics and intelligent software to organize and optimize inventory, the Symbotic System helps us get products to our customers quickly and seamlessly by revolutionizing how we receive and distribute products to stores.” Symbotic’s system is multifaceted, similar in that respect to companies like Berkshire Grey. It includes a combination of Kiva-like mobile robots for moving inventory around and robotic arms that can pick, place and de-palletize, using a variety of different attachments. Per Symbotic, the SPAC — which was initially projected for some time in H1 — is still on pace. Though given the state of the market, holding off a bit on going public might be advisable. Walmart, meanwhile, has been striking partnerships with a number of different robotics firms, including , which is outfitting the company’s Canadian subsidiary. |
Founder alleges that YC-backed fintech startup is ‘copy-and-pasting’ its business | Anita Ramaswamy | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | A new startup lifting elements of competing businesses is far from unusual in today’s venture world, but sometimes competing founders don’t find the imitation all that flattering. Andy Bromberg, CEO of the a16z-backed startup Eco, is claiming that , another fintech startup that came out of stealth this morning, “plagiarized” Eco’s materials and business model. Bromberg this afternoon saying Pebble engaged in “copy-and-pasting, immaturity, lying, and espionage.” In the thread, Bromberg detailed the background behind his claims, and he also spoke to TechCrunch about the allegations. Copycats are usually subtle. But Eco has one that isn’t. Imagine a company spent all day copy-and-pasting *everything*… …while raising from investors like Y Combinator and Eniac Ventures (who I bet have no idea) Well, we tracked it all. I’ve never seen anything like it 👇 — Andy Bromberg (@andy_bromberg) Bromberg claims the Pebble co-founders, CEO Aaron Bai and CTO Sahil Phadnis, impersonated Y Combinator investors to get access to Eco’s waitlist. He also alleges that Phadnis asked detailed questions about Eco’s backend under the guise of looking for employment and that multiple aspects of Pebble’s product and marketing language are essentially copy-pasted from Eco. TechCrunch earlier today that Pebble, , raised $6.2 million in seed funding from YC itself alongside LightShed Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Montage Ventures, Soma Capital and angel investors. On its website, Pebble, founded last year, calls itself “the first app that pays you to save, spend, and send your money — all in one balance.” It launched with two core products — a 5% APY interest offering for customer cash deposits, and a 5% cash back offering when customers spend at its partner merchants, which include Uber, Amazon and Chipotle, Pebble CEO Aaron Bai said. The former product is based on the model of taking in customer funds, converting them to stablecoins, and lending them out to institutions, Bai explained at the time. Bromberg subsequently told TechCrunch that both core products were based on two of Eco’s core offerings. Eco as “one simple balance that lets you spend, send, save and make money.” Eco, which was founded in 2018 and has raised over $95 million from investors, including Activant Capital, L Catterton, Lightspeed Venture Partners and to a16z, to date, has been offering up to 5% yields on customer deposits and 5% cash back through its app since inception, . Bromberg said that while its yield product has temporarily paused lending stablecoins due to current market conditions, its offering has historically been based on doing just that. “It’s just gotten so egregious at this point that we feel the need to call it out and point out that, everyone at the end of the day, everyone takes inspiration from other companies. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, and all of that’s true, but at some point, it’s just unconscionable to copy so brazenly. And if they want to talk, I’m super happy to talk to them. But I don’t really feel like going and reaching out to them in advance of making some public statements at this juncture,” Bromberg told TechCrunch in a phone interview. Bromberg’s Twitter thread includes alleged screenshots of internal customer records, which he says show multiple attempts on behalf of the Pebble co-founders to gain access to Eco. Bromberg told TechCrunch that Eco was able to link these submissions to Bai and Phadnis because they were “repeated submissions with overlapping information,” such as the same phone number and email being used numerous times under different names, including Bromberg’s own name as well as “Andy Bro Burger” and “Poopy Bromberg.” Then we discovered more: Eco’s sophisticated funnel has paths built for every persona. We found many submissions trying to discover every path… all connected to the copycats. (shoutout ) — Andy Bromberg (@andy_bromberg) Bromberg also alleges that while Eco was onboarding Phadnis as a beta customer, Phadnis inquired in detail about Eco’s costs and technology, saying he was a computer science geek interested in backend operations. Bromberg attached what he says are screenshots of conversation transcripts with Phadnis, who was a student at UC Berkeley at the time, asking if Eco was offering internships and saying he was considering applying for a job at Eco. Those conversations, Bromberg claims, took place in September 2021 — two months after Phadnis launched Pebble. But worse than that — he acted like he wanted a job. “Will you guys be offering internships?” “I am a student” “might need to apply for an Eco job” “Eco is changing the world!” — Andy Bromberg (@andy_bromberg) Using the phone number Eco originally had on file for Phadnis, Bromberg says, Phadnis started an account under the name “Sam Johnson” and submitted what Eco’s systems detected to be fraudulent identity documentation. They tried to set up an account for “Sam” but submitted fake identity information (nice one!), which our systems flagged as fraudulent. In keeping with their very-mature approach, the account’s username is “brombergluver” — thanks, I think? — Andy Bromberg (@andy_bromberg) Bromberg listed in one tweet the various components of Eco’s business he claims Pebble copied: Their site just went up, and there’s *so* much more 😳 They stole our blog posts. They stole our marketing copy. They copy/pasted our T&Cs and Privacy Policy. They copied our funnel questions. They stole our idea of checking if users have Metam*sk. There’s too much to post. — Andy Bromberg (@andy_bromberg) “Investors got duped by copycats who can’t create anything on their own. I don’t think investors knew those ideas and words weren’t original,” Bromberg added in the thread. Bromberg’s thread encouraged Bai and Phadnis to reach out to Bromberg directly. When TechCrunch first reached out to Pebble for comment on the matter this afternoon, Bai said he was in the process of trying to make contact with Bromberg and declined to comment further on the matter in the meantime. The two parties have since connected, both confirmed to TechCrunch thereafter. Bai and Phadnis called the conversation a matter of “difference of opinion,” describing it as “respectful.” They said they view Eco as a competitor similar to how Uber and Lyft compete for business. Phadnis confirmed to TechCrunch that he did create multiple accounts under aliases to try to gain access to Eco’s platform, saying that he did so in an attempt to assess Eco’s know-your-customer (KYC) onboarding process from the perspective of a new fintech founder looking to gain insight on solutions other startups were using. Bromberg told TechCrunch after the conversation that he was glad the Pebble co-founders reached out but that the opinions he expressed in his Twitter thread have not changed as a result of connecting with them. Bromberg told TechCrunch that Eco has no plans of pursuing legal action against Pebble at this time. Y Combinator could not be reached for comment on this story. |
Vibes hold steady at crypto conferences amid bearish market | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | It’s been a hard month for the global cryptocurrency market. And yet, community members continue to gather nonstop to network, learn and party at what feels like a seemingly endless loop of crypto conferences. But there seems to be a slight vibe shift between just a few weeks ago, when I attended FTX and SALT’s joint conference, , to last week, when thousands of people gathered in West Palm Beach for the conference, co-hosted by Bankless (and, disclaimer, my former employer) . There was a mixed bag of sentiments from people at the event who are deeply embedded in the crypto world. Some attendees were down bad, others fresh faced, lively and excited to meet others in the space, while many had their heads in their laptops or faces close to their phones as they tried to work and socialize amid talks of a crypto winter. But overall, many attendees seemed unbothered by the current market volatility. The past month has been tough for crypto market, with its total market capitalization down 29% from $1.9 billion on the month-ago date to $1.35 billion on May 22, according to CoinGecko . “Whenever crypto conferences come up, you never know if the market will be bearish or bullish during the week of events,” Ty Blackard, chief product officer at NFTY Labs, said to TechCrunch. To Permissionless’ credit, its main stage room was packed with over 2,000 people — not to mention smaller breakout rooms overflowing with hundreds of people — and there was only standing room available for many of the sessions. I don’t remember the last time I went to a conference with listener-packed rooms — but from my firsthand look at it, the people attending couldn’t get enough of the content. “This [time] sucks but also will be good to remove some froth from the ecosystem,” Ed Sim, founder and managing partner at boldstart ventures, said to TechCrunch. “True builders and believers will stick around and keep building.” I spoke with a handful of attendees at the event who lost their jobs — or feared layoffs — and their whole crypto investments after Terraform Labs’ algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD ( ) and cryptocurrency LUNA plummeted over 99% in a matter of a few days, shaking and with them. What was supposed to be an enjoyable event for many attendees suddenly became a job fair for some as they weaved through the sponsored booths, shaking hands and making small talk with the hope of meeting future potential employers. Don’t get me wrong — there was a lot of fun throughout the event, too, from a number of open-tab bar crawls to invite-only parties on $40 million yachts and at multimillion-dollar estates. But in a sense, it felt wrong to be celebrating while the crypto economy cratered, or came close to it. |
A group of Activision Blizzard workers vote to unionize | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | , the quality assurance testers at Raven Software, a division of gaming giant Activision Blizzard, have voted to unionize. This marks the first union at a major gaming company in the U.S. Administered through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the vote passed 19-3 and two ballots were challenged, so a total of 24 out of 28 eligible workers voted. These workers announced their intent to unionize in December, just days after Microsoft announced its plans to for $68.7 billion, which would be one of the largest tech acquisitions in history. But as the news of the pending acquisition went public, these quality assurance (QA) testers — who mostly work on Call of Duty — had been on strike for about five weeks, protesting the layoffs of 12 contractors. “On December 3, about a third of my department was informed that their contracts were going to be terminated early. And this was coming off of a five-week stretch of overtime, consistent work,” Raven Software QA tester Onah Rongstad at the time, explaining the intent to organize. “We realized in that moment that our day-to-day work and our crucial role in the games industry as QA was not being taken into consideration.” This five-week stretch of overtime work that Rongstad describes is referred to as “crunch” in the gaming industry, which has been often cited as a huge cause of burnout and stress for gaming workers. The union, which goes by the name Game Workers Alliance and is represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), can now attempt to bargain with their employer to instate rules that circumvent “crunch” or unexpected layoffs. But the problems run deeper at Activision Blizzard, which employs around 10,000 people. Following a two-year investigation, the state of California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing against Activision Blizzard in July, alleging that the company fostered a “‘frat boy’ workplace culture,” calling it “a breeding ground for harassment and discrimination against women.” Plus, CEO Bobby Kotick reportedly about sexual misconduct and rape allegations at his company, but he did not act. Kotick has been amid ongoing and in his company, but that may not happen until after the Microsoft acquisition , if at all. When the Game Workers Alliance filed for a union election, Activision Blizzard tried to block the election by claiming that any union must include all 230 employees at Raven Software, which would have made it more difficult for the QA testers to win a vote. But the NLRB ruled that the QA department could vote to unionize on its own. “Activision did everything it could, including breaking the law, to try to prevent the Raven QA workers from forming their union. It didn’t work, and we are thrilled to welcome them as CWA members,” said CWA Secretary-Treasurer Sara Steffens. Activision Blizzard has made some effort to improve working conditions since then. In April, the company about 1,100 QA contractors to full-time staffers and increased the minimum wage to $20 per hour. But Activision Blizzard claimed that, due to laws under the National Labor Relations Act, the company wasn’t allowed to change the pay rate of its employees in the midst of a union effort. The CWA, however, said that this was a “ ” attempt at union busting. Then, just yesterday, the NLRB found that among another group of workers, Activision Blizzard and upheld a social media policy that restricted workers’ rights to collective action. “Our biggest hope is that our union serves as inspiration for the growing movement of workers organizing at video game studios to create better games and build workplaces that reflect our values and empower all of us,” the Game Workers Alliance said in a statement. Last year, the 13-employee indie studio in North America. Now that a union has successfully formed at a major gaming studio, perhaps more pushes to unionize will follow. Within the next five business days, Activision Blizzard can file an objection. But since the NLRB has already ruled that the 28-person QA department had a right to organize independent of the rest of Raven Software, it’s unlikely that the decision will be overturned on those grounds. |
eBay launches its first collection of NFTs in partnership with web3 platform OneOf | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | eBay is the latest company to enter the NFT business, as the online marketplace today that it’s launching its first collection of NFTs in partnership with web3 platform OneOf. The company’s new “Genesis” NFT Collection will feature 3D and animated interpretations of the iconic athletes featured on Sports Illustrated covers over the years. eBay says the surge in the collectibles market has led to its first-ever collaboration in the NFT space. The first NFT collection, which is available starting today, will feature Canadian hockey player Wayne Gretzky. The collection includes 13 limited-edition digital collectibles as green, gold, platinum and diamond-tier NFTs. The NFTs start at $10 and contain a 3D rendering or animation of Gretzky making a signature move on the ice. eBay plans to drop additional collections featuring more athletes through the year. “Through our partnership with OneOf, eBay is now making coveted NFTs more accessible to a new generation of collectors everywhere,” said Dawn Block, the vice president of collectibles, electronics and home at eBay, in a statement. “This builds upon our commitment to deliver high-passion, high-value items to the eBay community of buyers and sellers.” Today’s launch isn’t exactly a surprise, as eBay that it was going to embrace NFTs and add new capabilities that bring blockchain-driven collectibles to its platform. eBay has a significant presence in online shopping, but the company will have its work cut out for it competing with dozens of crypto native NFT marketplaces already out there. eBay now joins a growing number of companies looking to incorporate NFTs into their platforms. Instagram recently that it will start testing NFTs with select creators in the United States. In addition, Spotify last week that it’s testing a new feature that allows artists to promote their NFTs on their profiles. |
Hyundai plans to spend $10B on EVs, AVs and robotics in the US by 2025 | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | Hyundai said it plans to invest more than $10 billion toward accelerating electrification and autonomous vehicle technology in the U.S. by 2025. Part of that pot includes the $5.5 billion Hyundai has earmarked for its in Georgia announced Friday. Non-affiliated suppliers are into that project pushing the total cost to $6.5 billion. The remaining $4.5 billion of Hyundai’s total U.S. investment will go into what the automaker has identified as “key future businesses.” In Hyundai’s view, key future businesses translates to robotics, AI technologies, advanced air mobility and autonomous driving capability. Notably, Hyundai said it will invest its funds through joint ventures and subsidiaries. The investment will also help Hyundai upgrade R&D operations for its Kia and Genesis brands, . The new EV factory is the largest economic development deal recruited by Georgia, according to officials. The 2,923-acre site is slated to break ground early next year and begin commercial production in the first half of 2025 with an annual capacity of 300,000 units. The operations will help Hyundai toward its goal of becoming a top-three EV provider in the U.S. by 2026. Mainly powered by renewable energy sources, the plant will use a highly connected, automated and flexible manufacturing system where robots will assist human workers, Hyundai said. Hyundai said the plant will produce at least some of the 23 EVs it plans to roll out by 2025. Its battery manufacturing facility will help Hyundai establish a stable supply chain. In 2020, Hyundai purchased from SoftBank an 80% stake in , in a deal that valued the mobile robotics firm at $1.1 billion. Part of its $10 billion investment announced Sunday will go toward creating a robotics value chain, from component manufacturing to logistics. Boston Dynamics has launched its first two commercial robots, Spot and Stretch, to work in a variety of industries. Spot is being tapped for use in the power utilities, construction, manufacturing, oil and gas and mining industries. Stretch, which is a robot arm that moves boxes, is being marketed for use in warehouse facilities and distribution centers. The money will also support the Hyundai subsidiary New Horizons Studio, which works on Ultimate Mobility Vehicles such as the equivalent in size to a carry-on suitcase. In 2019, Hyundai established a , a global supplier developing AV technology. , the resulting AV technology company, is currently piloting autonomous driving technology on the Lyft and Via ride-share apps in Las Vegas. Hyundai said it will “actively support Motional,” meaning the company intends to invest more money into the venture as it progresses toward commercial operations. Motional will put Hyundai robotaxis, based on , on Lyft’s network in Las Vegas next year, Chief Technology Officer Laura Major said at the TechCrunch Mobility conference on Wednesday. The cars will come with human safety operators but should be able to navigate hotel drop-off and pickup maneuvers autonomously. With an eye on the sky, Hyundai launched last year to figure out how to integrate air mobility into existing networks for intermodal travel. The venture is developing an app for customers to plan their journey using a mix of cars, trains, advanced air mobility, eVTOLs and e-scooters. It aims to begin commercial service in 2028. |
Why in the world would chipmaker Broadcom be interested in VMware? | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | , rumors began flying that chipmaker Broadcom was interested in acquiring VMware, the company best known for commercializing the virtual machine concept that gave birth to cloud computing. the potential deal on Sunday. VMware will not come cheap. It had a market capitalization in the neighborhood of $40 billion before the potential deal was reported, a figure that rose some 20% today to around $48 billion as investors placed bets that Broadcom would pay a hefty premium for the smaller company. VMware has expanded into over the years and has a diversified business, much of which is related to the cloud. Broadcom, on the other hand, isn’t involved in much of that, making it seem like a poor match. Probably because it is. Broadcom builds semiconductors. With a market cap of over $220 billion, the company has tried to diversify in recent years by acquiring software companies to take advantage of software license revenue as a hedge against the vagaries of the hardware market, just like other hardware-focused companies — . It spent to buy legacy enterprise software company CA Technologies and another $11 billion a year later . Those are very different animals from VMware, which is still a viable company and not some dinosaur with a portfolio of licensing deals on the books that a company like Broadcom can take advantage of. So why is the deal in the offing, given the apparent lack of fit from a high-level perspective? Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies, said it’s not just our lack of imagination: There really isn’t much connective tissue between the two companies. But one thing that many tech companies have today is financial liquidity. From that perspective, the potential VMware deal is all about putting Broadcom’s money to work in something other than chips. |
Take-Two completes $12.7B acquisition of mobile games giant Zynga | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | Take-Two has completed its $12.7 billion acquisition of mobile games giant Zynga, the company on Monday. Under the terms of the merger agreement, Zynga shareholders received $3.50 in cash and 0.0406 shares of Take-Two common stock per share of Zynga common stock. The deal, which was first in January, will bring Zynga’s popular games under Take-Two ownership, including Farmville and Words With Friends. “We are thrilled to complete our combination with Zynga, which is a pivotal step to increase exponentially our Net Bookings from mobile, the fastest-growing segment in interactive entertainment, while also providing us with substantial cost synergies and revenue opportunities,” said Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick in a statement. “Each of our teams has a strong history of operational execution, and together, we expect that we will enhance our financial profile through greater scale and profitability, paving the way for us to deliver strong shareholder value.” It was previously announced that Zelnick will lead the larger company with Zynga CEO Frank Gibeau. Zynga’s president of publishing, Bernard Kim, was supposed to work alongside Gibeau, but is leaving Zynga to become the at the end of this month. “We are excited for Zynga’s next-generation mobile platform, free-to-play expertise, diverse offering of games and incredible team to join the Take-Two family,” said Zynga CEO Frank Gibeau. “We are eager to continue building an unparalleled portfolio of games that will reach broader markets and lead to continued growth for this next chapter of Zynga’s history.” The acquisition brings together two gaming powerhouses, as Take-Two is known for console and PC games, while Zynga largely defined the mobile gaming genre. Although Take-Two already has a number of mobile games titles and has expanded its franchises into mobile, this will give the company a significantly larger holding in the space. As for Zynga, combining with Take-Two, which also publishes Red Dead Redemption, Midnight Club, NBA 2K, BioShock and more, will give it a large library of franchises and IP from which to build new mobile gaming experiences. Similarly, Zynga’s IP may now find new traction in different formats and different screens. The deal marks one of the several significant gaming acquisitions announced earlier this year. A week after the Take-Two and Zynga news dropped, Microsoft announced that it would in a $68.7 billion all-cash deal, inclusive of the company’s net cash. Less than two weeks later, Sony announced that it , the studio responsible for the creation of Halo and Destiny, in a deal valued at $3.6 billion. |
Reddit partners with Netflix to give Redditors ‘Stranger Things’ custom avatars | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | The social network unveiled new custom avatars inspired by Netflix’s “Stranger Things” characters ahead of the anticipated season four premiere this Friday, May 27. This is the first partnership between Reddit and Netflix, and the limited-time avatars will be available until August. Redditors can now update their avatar to become the Demogorgon (which looks oddly adorable), Eleven, police chief Jim Hopper or Steve Harrington dressed in his Scoops Ahoy uniform (see picture above). To change your avatar, simply click on your profile (via the side-drawer drop-down menu) and choose “Style Avatar.” The new Stranger Things avatars will be located in the “Explore” tab. These digital treats on Reddit are a celebration of the show and the millions of Netflix subscribers that have watched it over the years. . fans, we have a special treat for you (and no, it’s not Eggo waffles). We’ve partnered with to create four custom avatars. Head to Reddit now to transform your avatar into Eleven, Scoops Ahoy Steve, the Demogorgon, or Hopper. — Reddit (@Reddit) Netflix has heavily promoted the upcoming season with merchandise, events and more. For instance, New Yorkers can book tickets to see the “ ” in Brooklyn. In addition, developed a “mind-ordering” app, and revealed limited-edition packaging as well as teased a “Live from the Upside Down” concert happening in the summer. Also, revealed some major spoilers in its new game design, which upset some viewers and even the show’s creators who weren’t consulted about the board game (Google at your own risk). The third season of “Stranger Things” appeared on Netflix three years ago, so it’s safe to say that fans have been waiting for the new season for a while. Season three saw the Hawkins friends battling the Mind Flayer and destroying the new mall in the process. Now high school students, the group in season four will continue to experience all the weird stuff happening in town. Hopper was also presumed dead in the previous season. However, in the , we see that he is, in fact, alive and being held in a Russian prison. Viewers will see Eleven, Joyce, Will and Jonathan take on a new life in California as well. The new season will be with “Volume 1” coming to the platform on May 27 and “Volume 2” appearing on July 1. The first part will carry the bulk of the season with seven episodes, and the second part will have the longest episodes ever and a finale that’s almost two and a half hours. |
TikTok to launch LIVE creator subscriptions this week | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | TikTok is ramping up its competition with Twitch, YouTube and others with this week’s launch of TikTok LIVE subscriptions, a new program that will allow creators to generate recurring revenue via payments from their top fans. Similar to the offerings from rival streaming sites, the new service will offer subscribers a range of perks including subscriber-only chat, custom emotes, badges and more. The program will officially launch into beta testing on May 26, initially with a select number of creators who have been invited to participate, according to published by TikTok to its account. News that TikTok was a move into the subscription space was first revealed by back in January, but specific details weren’t known at the time. Over the past week or so, TikTok has been the program on the @TikTokLIVE_creator channel, which focuses on sharing updates aimed at the creator community. In a series of videos featuring creators who will be among the first beta testers, we learned that, in addition to the usual subscriber benefits, subscribers will also be able to control the cameras on creators’ livestreams. In addition, the badges will update the longer a viewer is subscribed to give long-term subscribers more visibility, and creators will be able to personalize their LIVE rooms. A number of creators have begun to share the news of their participation in the new beta with their fans across TikTok and elsewhere on social media. While some beta testers are game streamers, the program isn’t limited to that space. It appears TikTok has invited a broad variety of creators to try out subscriptions, including artists, vloggers, beauty experts, ASMR creators, Spanish-language creators, musicians, dancers and more. Each have custom-designed their own emotes for use with subscriptions. is getting Live subscriptions. Stay tuned for more info. TikTok — flywithkay (@flywithkay) Once set up, creators will have the option to turn their TikTok LIVE streams into a special “subscriber-only” mode that would give only paid subscribers the ability to comment, though anyone could watch. This could help creators get to know their best fans, offer exclusive fan Q&A’s, and potentially also limit trolling, given that people would have to subscribe to post comments. Pricing for these streams has yet to be announced, but some creators have it’s “comparable” to Twitch’s pricing and the revenue share with TikTok is the same as it is on Twitch. For reference, Twitch begin at $4.99 per month and Twitch takes a 30%-50% cut of subscription revenue (though a says that may be changing). Creators who announced their participation on TikTok’s creator channel have so far included: @shaarichie, @danielrene, @jackbethatsme, @coreyasmr, @thrdfloor, @tacticalgramma, @brklyntae and @ziggbee. The launch of TikTok LIVE subscriptions comes at a time when competition for creator talent is heating up, with top social platforms offering direct payments and bonuses designed to encourage creators to post original content to their apps. But longer term, social platforms know the best and most sustainable way to attract and retain talent is to offer creators tools to earn a living through their work. With subscriptions, creators can tap into recurring revenue streams that help them continue to fund their efforts without having to rely only on less predictable income, like bonuses, virtual tips from fans or brand deals. TikTok isn’t the only platform to newly enter the subscriptions market. In January, in the U.S., which offers follows paid access to exclusive Instagram Live videos and Stories, among other standard perks. Twitter, too, has been testing out subscriptions with which recently added the ability for for their fans. TikTok confirmed the details on its own TikTok creator account are accurate, adding that creators must be 18 years of age and have a minimum of 1,000 followers to access the LIVE subscriptions feature. Users must be over 18 to purchase a subscription and to send or receive Coins and Gifts, it also noted. |
Klarna lays off 10% of its workforce | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | Swedish payment giant is going to cut hundreds of jobs in the coming days. Today’s news comes a few days after the Wall Street Journal that the company was going to cut its valuation in order to raise fresh capital. The company currently employs around 7,000 people. Cutting 10% of the company’s workforce means that around 700 people will lose their job at the fintech company. It will potentially affect all domains and offices around the world. “I am no stranger to sharing good and bad news. However, today is the hardest one to date,” Klarna co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski wrote in a message shared with all employees. “As much as we may like it to be the case, Klarna does not exist in a bubble.” Over the coming days, some employees in Europe will be asked to leave the company in exchange for severance pay. Some employees outside of Europe will also have to leave the company but “the process for impacted employees will look different depending on where you work,” Siemiatkowski said. The company doesn’t name a single reason for the layoffs. Instead, Siemiatkowski lists different macro and geopolitical factors that have led to today’s difficult decision. “When we set our business plans for 2022 in the autumn of last year, it was a very different world than the one we are in today,” he said. “Since then, we have seen a tragic and unnecessary war in Ukraine unfold, a shift in consumer sentiment, a steep increase in inflation, a highly volatile stock market and a likely recession.” “It saddens me to say that as a result of this, approximately 10% of our colleagues and friends across all domains in the company will be impacted,” he added later. Last year, many tech startups raised mega rounds of fundings at sky-high valuations. And Klarna more specifically raised $639 million at . Klarna currently works with 400,000 merchants around the world. The company’s flagship product is a payment feature that lets you buy something now and pay it later in multiple installments. Over the years, Klarna has expanded to other markets and launched new products. It offers a shopping app so that you can manage your payments, save items for later, track deliveries and more. In some markets, the company also offers a payment card that you can control from the app. In Europe, Klarna operates as a regulated bank. Customers can open a bank account with Klarna and use the service to earn interest with fixed-term savings plans. This way, the company can raise deposits from retail investors directly. And yet, if the Wall Street Journal is correct, Klarna is thinking about cutting its valuation to a “low $30-billion-range” post-money valuation so that it can raise more money. That process may have had an impact on the current state of affairs at Klarna with some employees losing their job as a result. Unfortunately for Klarna employees, the company hasn’t said who will be affected by the job cuts. Calendar invites will be sent over the next few days. “In consideration of the privacy of the people affected by these changes, we ask everyone to work from home this week,” Siemiatkowski said. |
Arclight deserves a medal for how it meddles with the bike pedal | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | If I were to make a list of things that I didn’t think needed to get smarter, bike pedals would be somewhere near the top of the list. And yet, when showed me its shiny (literally!) new pedals, I had one of those “omg this makes so much sense” moments. In a nutshell, it’s simple: Stick bike lights inside pedals to help draw attention to the cyclist as they are pedaling about. Stationery bike lights disappear in the rich visual landscape of traffic, the company suggests, but by attaching it to the part of the bike that moves more than anything else — i.e. the pedals — the theory is that the additional movement will catch someone’s eyes and make you more visible in traffic. Makes sense to me; we’ve stuck reflectors on bike pedals for as long as I can remember (and I’m an old man who grew up in ), so it stands to reason when the technology catches up to be able to actually stick lights inside the pedals, it’s a natural evolution. They’ve crammed a lot of clever tech into the humble pedals. There are four lights (two in each pedal; a white light facing forward, a red light facing backward) that turn on when they sense motion, and off when the bike is parked. You don’t have to worry about the orientation of the pedals either; just start pedaling and the bike figures out which way the pedals are facing. Forward will always be white, and back beams red into the souls of your would-be automotive assailants. The lights have three modes, including “solid” (always on), “flash,” where the pedals blink regularly at full brightness, or “eco flash,” which saves power. The battery life is three, 11 or 36 hours, respectively. Redshift Sports The company includes a little USB hub so you can easily charge all the pedals. The pedals weigh 610 grams, which ain’t exactly light — they make — but for commuter bikes it might make sense. They cost $139.99, and are going on sale tomorrow, available . |
Latch, a proptech meets SaaS play, conducts two consecutive weeks of layoffs | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 5 | 23 | , a proptech smart lock company that raised $152 million in known private capital before debuting on the stock market through a SPAC last year, is conducting another round of layoffs. Earlier this month, the startup cut 30 people, or 6% of its total staff, per an email obtained by TechCrunch. Now, as confirmed , Latch announced that it has cut a total of 130 people, or 28% of its full-time employee base. Sources say the cuts impact chief revenue officer Chris Lee and VP of sales Adam Sold. In the email viewed by TechCrunch, Latch CEO Luke Schoenfelder told staff that the first round of layoffs were conducted to “ensure Latch is on a path to sustainable growth.” He also said that Latch will be reducing some areas of the business, but unsure if that means cutting entire products or just shrinking resources behind each vision. TechCrunch reached out to Latch about this week’s layoffs but has not yet heard back at time of publication. Two consecutive weeks of layoffs is rare, if not indicative of frantic behind-the-scenes operations. In this case, it feels like back-to-back knee jerks come after weeks of tension. In April, Latch CFO left the company less than a year after he assumed the role and after taking the company public through a reverse-merger. At the time, TechCrunch outlined the — and explained that Latch wasn’t immune. For example, Latch’s opening price, per Yahoo Finance, was $11 per share. It now trades at a little over $2 per share; representing a more than 80% decrease in value since its June 2021 debut. Such an extreme drop in value, and investor confidence, can force a company to rapidly cut costs in order to show that it’s able to get to a leaner state. Once the workforce reduction is complete, Latch expects to achieve around a $40 million annual run rate cost savings across research and development, sales and marketing and general and administrative expenses, The layoffs and restructuring will cost approximately $4 million to $6 million of total cash restructuring, which the company expects to spend in the second quarter of 2022. As we’ve seen over the past month, both public and private tech companies are announcing mass layoffs across sectors. Employees from Section4, Carvana, DataRobot, Mural, Robinhood, On Deck, Thrasio, MainStreet and Netflix have been impacted by the workforce reductions. Some bigger companies are instituting hiring freezes, such as Twitter and Meta, or announcing a shift in strategy, such as Uber. |
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Kevin Rose on crypto winters, pseudonymous founders and his buzzy Moonbirds NFT project | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 5 | 15 | On the this week, we spoke with Kevin Rose, a serial entrepreneur whose efforts — including most famously Digg –have been well covered in over the past couple decades. Rose is a partner at the VC firm True Ventures, but his latest project is an NFT startup called Proof Collective, which recently launched a much-hyped 10,000 NFT collection of pixelated owls. Rose and his partners banked $80 million off the primary sale of the project, and are using that money plus a much more conventional $10 million funding round led by Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm Seven Seven Six to build a “web3 media company.” “We’re in this to build a big, massive, brand new kind of media company from the ground up,” Rose says. “We didn’t need to raise from Alexis or True Ventures, but the reason why we did is so that people could understand we were serious about building a lasting business here.” Now, those Moonbirds are trading for at a minimum of around 25 Eth these days, which tracks to about $50,000 at today’s Ethereum prices, though the exchange rate has taken a bit of a haircut in recent weeks. In our conversation, we dove into a variety of topics with Rose, including the recent market downturn, which he sums up as “risk showing itself” in the midst of a very long journey away from fiat currencies. “If nothing fundamentally about the mechanics behind the scenes has changed, which I guess obviously is not the case when it comes to something like UST or Luna, but if everything else is sound in terms of the technical infrastructure behind the scenes for Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever it may be, then I’m just of the mindset that I don’t ever really think about going back out to fiat at any point,” Rose says. The broader pullback in crypto markets has accompanied a more modest retreat in public markets over the past couple weeks, but while plenty of venture firms have seemed to be taking a hit, last week’s aggressive retreat knocked firms with substantial crypto holdings particularly hard. Rose says his firm isn’t looking to be reactive in order to try and game a potential bear market. “We’ve never sold a token, so that’s the one thing that’s awesome about our funds, we can look founders in the eye and say we’re not in this to flip it. So, I don’t care if we’re sitting on a 20x or 50x, or negative 50% discount to whatever the token price is like, we believe that it’s going to take you a decade to build something really substantial in this new space… To bail on the founder is the absolute worst thing you could possibly do and it’s just not in our DNA.” Venture firms have found plenty of new backers over the past couple years to invest in crypto-centric funds or vehicles with crypto close to their center. While many of these LPs likely are enduring their first major crypto downturn, Rose believes that most backers know what they are getting into chasing crypto returns. “I think when you talk to individual LPs, they wouldn’t be investing in a crypto fund if they didn’t understand the multiples that they were hopefully aiming for and the risks that they were taking on,” he says. “If you take a look at everything that venture is dipping their toes in the waters of — crypto is the riskiest bucket of them all.” You can listen to the (above), where we discuss his mixed feelings toward the metaverse, the challenges facing pseudonymous founders and web3’s inclusion problems. |
South Korea’s new pro-crypto president gets pushback | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 5 | 15 | One of the pledges Yoon Suk-yeol made to his voters was to implement a set of crypto-friendly policies in South Korea. Yoon, who won the presidency in March and came into office this month, said he would raise the tax threshold for crypto investment gains to 50 million won, or around $38,922. But he’s getting some resistance. The National Assembly Research Service (NARS) of South Korea, which provides information and analysis on legislative and policy issues to lawmakers, classifies crypto as a virtual asset. It says the tax threshold for income generated from virtual assets should be 2.5 million won or $1,946 with a tax rate of 20%, according to a posted last week. The tax rate, NARS maintains, is set at a similar level to that of financial investment income so the asset class is “not heavily taxed.” But the proposed threshold is much lower than what Yoon strives for. The new tax rules are set to take effect in 2023 and a new regulatory body for digital assets will be established. The country’s asset income tax system was introduced in December 2020. Yoon also vowed to support initial coin offerings, which . “What we can see now is that the government is opening up to the role of cryptocurrencies as an investment asset,” Jisu Park, CEO of Seoul-based smart contract auditing and infrastructure startup Sooho.io, told TechCrunch. “In fact, the presidential candidates expressed cautious support by proposing favorable tax laws, the potential return of IEOs (initial exchange offerings), and have even seen current President Yoon propose laws and an infrastructure for NFTs. More significantly Yoon has proposed the introduction of a new government body that would be responsible for regulating digital assets.” South Korea is one of the world’s most crypto-active countries. The market grew to 55.2 trillion won ($45.9 billion) by the end of 2021, with the number of users reaching nearly 5.58 million or around 10% of the country’s population, according to a by the nation’s top financial regulator. The crypto market in South Korea is booming but also insular in part due to regulatory restrictions. The space is dominated by five major local exchanges — Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit and Gopax. Foreign and smaller players, on the other hand, have a harder time meeting the of partnering with local commercial banks. As in other countries, , an algorithmic stablecoin that aims to maintain its pegs to the dollar using its sister coin Luna, raised the alarm about the crypto market’s volatility to regulators. South Korea’s financial authorities will speed up their pace to enact a digital asset regulation that includes consumer protection, local media . South Korean developer Do Kwon is the founder of Singapore-based Terraform Labs, which is the organization behind UST and Luna. “Despite the significant support from the public and government for digital assets, which could indicate that President Yoon’s proposals could come into effect in the future, recent issues for example with Terra and UST affected Korean investors and resulted in a call for stronger regulation in the crypto industry. In the short term, this may slow the execution of Yoon’s proposals,” suggested Park. South Korean marketplaces have moved to either suspend or warn against luna, of which value has collapsed to nearly zero. Bithumb, which plans to delist luna, currently has the seventh-largest trading volume of the coin, according to . |
Twiga starts commercial farming, looking to guarantee quality, sustain supply | Annie Njanja | 2,022 | 5 | 15 | , a B2B e-commerce food distribution platform, has today announced the launch of its new subsidiary, Twiga Fresh, through which it will farm and distribute its own agricultural produce to traders. Twiga said it has begun producing horticultural produce like onions, tomatoes and watermelons on its 650-hectare (1,606 acres) land, with an estimated output of 150,000 tons of fresh produce annually. Twiga has so far invested $10 million in the new venture, which will be backed by debt from development finance institutions. Since launch, Twiga has used technology to link smallholder farmers with informal traders, giving the producers access to new markets and a large pool of clients, all while optimizing the food supply chain in its markets. However, along the way, Twiga says they have had to deal with traceability challenges, stock outs and price volatility — which have made it hard for the company to deliver on its promise of affordability and food security. With Twiga Fresh, the latest addition to its private label business, they project a better control of production. “The volumes for other fresh products were low because we made a decision not to scale fresh produce where we did not have traceability from a food safety standpoint,” Twiga CEO and co-founder told TechCrunch, adding that the new business will not affect so many farmers. Twiga said it will, however, continue sourcing some produce like bananas — where the value chains are more “established and efficient” — from partner farmers, to serve the 45,000 traders it supplies every month. The company says its farm is one of the largest commercial fresh produce establishments targeting the domestic market since most large-scale horticultural businesses in the East African country export their harvests. “Most of the Africa-based investment in modern commercial farming has been made in the export-oriented industry over the years because of the low formality of the domestic food market. This has led to decreasing productivity of local farming, which has impacted both quality and pricing in the market,” said Njonjo who founded the company with ex-CEO . “The pricing today on basic fresh produce is one of the highest in history and we are also witnessing increasing importation of basic food items on account of this. Through building a B2B supply chain into informal retail, Twiga has been able to formalize the domestic food market using technology, putting the company in a unique situation to invest in backward integration and solve the problem of declining productivity and increasing cost of food,” he said. Beyond Kenya, Twiga plans to start operations in Uganda and Tanzania soon, and is also exploring new markets in Central and West Africa. |
Uber Eats pilots autonomous delivery with Serve Robotics, Motional | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 5 | 15 | Uber Eats is launching two autonomous delivery pilots in Los Angeles on Monday with Serve Robotics, a robotic sidewalk delivery startup, and Motional, an autonomous vehicle technology company. The new programs are a part of a range of new products Uber is launching across its ride-hail and delivery platforms, which are being announced on Monday at the company’s Global Product Event. The and marks the first time Uber is partnering with an AV fleet provider, as well as the first time Motional is trying its hand at autonomous delivery. Until this point, Motional has focused on robotaxis, securing partnerships with and . , so seeing the two partner in the delivery space isn’t surprising. But it’s notable that Uber isn’t working with Aurora on this, given the two companies’ , their shared history and the fact that Uber is a major investor in Aurora. , Uber’s self-driving arm, in 2020, and under the terms of the deal, Uber invested $400 million in the company, giving it a 26% stake. Uber told TechCrunch the company is looking at partnering with more than one player in the space, and that the public might start to see more partnerships in the future. Both of the pilots are starting out small and delivering food from only a few merchants, including, an organic cafe and juicery called Kreation. Serve’s program will focus on shorter trips in West Hollywood. Motional’s will handle longer distance deliveries in Santa Monica, according to an Uber spokesperson. “We’ll be able to learn from both of those pilots what customers actually want, what merchants actually want and what makes sense for delivery as we start to integrate our platform with AV companies,” said the spokesperson. “The hope is that they’re successful and that we learn over the coming months, and then figure out how to scale.” Serve Robotics is partnering with Uber Eats on an autonomous delivery pilot in Los Angeles. Uber Customers will be charged for deliveries with both Serve and Motional, including the cost of food, according to Uber. It’s not entirely clear how Uber and Motional will swing that, though. In California, to be able to charge a fee for autonomous delivery, Motional would need to be granted a deployment permit from the Department of Motor Vehicles. So far, it only has a permit to test with a safety driver on board. In answer to this, Uber said only that “Motional and Uber expect that certain delivery fees which might normally be applicable may not be charged during this initial phase.” Motional clarified further, saying during the pilot, there will not be fees specific to the delivery orchestrated by the Motional vehicle. There don’t appear to be any laws restricting companies from charging for deliveries made by sidewalk robots, so Serve is in the clear. Uber said that if a customer decides to tip a Serve robot, they’ll be reimbursed. Uber Eats customers will use their smartphones to unlock an autonomous vehicle and receive their food delivery. Uber In addition, per the rules of Motional’s testing permit with the California DMV, a human safety operator will be on board the vehicle during deliveries. This operator will also drive the delivery vehicle manually when near customers’ drop-off locations, as needed, according to an Uber spokesperson. “If there is a drop-off point that’s close by, but not within Motional’s current autonomous service area, the vehicle will be operated manually in order to deliver the order to the customer’s house, rather than asking them to walk to meet the AV,” a Motional spokesperson told TechCrunch. “This is done to ensure a convenient and seamless experience for customers, and to maximize the number of opportunities to provide a touchless delivery experience to customers. As Motional’s delivery autonomous service area expands, more trips will be completely fully autonomously.” Serve’s robots are capable of operating under Level 4 autonomy in some scenarios, . During the Uber pilot, the robots will be monitored by a remote operator who will take over in certain use cases, like crossing the street, Uber said. Customers residing within one of the two geofenced test zones will see an option at checkout to have their food delivered by an autonomous vehicle. If they opt in, the customer can track the food like they normally would, and when it arrives, they will get a notification to meet the AV outside. Customers will get a passcode on their phone that will allow them to unlock the vehicle and grab the food, whether the meal is in one of Serve’s cooler-like robots or the backseat of one of Motional’s cars. |
The Interchange: Things go from bad to worse at Better.com | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 5 | 15 | Ali Heron, Petal CTO Co-founder Michael Broughton / Altro Well, that’s it for this week. It felt like there was even more news than normal, which proves just how much activity continues to take place in the world of fintech. Thank you so much for reading, and see you next week! |
Crypto VCs can’t just buy ‘community’ | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 5 | 15 | Hello everyone, and welcome back to Last week, we talked about the efforts of regulators to chase crypto crime. This week, the markets have crashed, and a new generation of crypto startups are likely about to find out that you can’t pay for loyalty. This newsletter lands in inboxes every Thursday afternoon, subscribe on to get it! while you’re at it! This week was a doozy for crypto investors, there’s no other way to put it. But it was a different kind of doozy than the crashes before it. For a brief summation, hundreds of billions in value were erased from the global crypto market cap this week as top coins like Ethereum and Bitcoin saw major declines while other blockchain networks essentially imploded. Hundreds of thousands of crypto investors were liquidated on trades as tokens indiscriminately crashed across the board, meanwhile Terra’s stablecoin fiasco — which my colleague Jacquie — seems to have evaporated tens of billions in crypto wealth in the course of a day or two. For longtime crypto traders, the wild downward pressure on the markets may appear to be old hat, but the amount of money being lost and the amount of people losing money is an order of magnitude larger than ever before because crypto markets have expanded so dramatically during this bull run. If the crypto markets continue to go to hell in a hand basket, there’s going to be a lot of lasting damage when it comes to consumer onboarding as web3’s paid acquisition budget runs dry with decreased volumes. After several years of Robinhood and r/wallstreetbets retail investor gambling on public stocks, consumers were ready for crypto and the industry welcomed them with open arms. For the past couple years, venture capitalists have been making bets on crypto verticals geared towards consumers, gamifying investing with actual games that boasted tokens and NFT integrations. All the while, web3 acolytes have highlighted “community” as one of the killer features of crypto-based platforms with the explanation that giving users a financial stake in the platform will lead them to act in the platform’s best interest and spread the gospel accordingly. This has all played out well enough during the “up-only” era of this crypto bull run, but now comes the interesting part. Giving users financial incentives to enjoy your product works well enough when those financial incentives exist, but things look a little different when the air is taken out of the space and users are left with the naked and unexciting platform. Play-to-earn gaming companies have raised billions for games that are only fun when you’re getting rich and otherwise awful. NFT projects have similarly coaxed users into trading card-like mechanics that are only fun when the money is flowing. Meanwhile, VCs have bankrolled web3 media companies, publications and social networking companies that are all overly reliant on crypto speculation while generally shipping bad products. Some might read this as a general indictment of the ponzinomics of crypto, but the other way to read this is that in the gold rush of web3, blockchain founders forgot what it meant to love something because it was a great product and over-indexed on the sustainability of consumer greed or financial desperation. Now, the crypto market could bounce back tomorrow, but it won’t be any less true that you can only pay for loyalty for so long. Hello, here again. On the Chain Reaction podcast this week, Lucas and I talked about the crypto winter looming for investors. Public equities overall are taking a hit right now, with the S&P 500 falling for five days straight while crypto-linked companies such as Coinbase and Robinhood are bearing the brunt of market fears. Cryptocurrency prices are plunging, too. Bitcoin, the world’s largest crypto by market cap, is down more than 50% from its November peak. It’s dipped below $30,000 a few times in the past couple of days, which analysts say marks a crucial threshold for the coin — if it keeps dropping, it’s likely the losses will continue to grow. , which is backed partially by Bitcoin, certainly isn’t helping the situation. But crypto bulls like to speak in decades, not days, and tend to have a stomach for volatility that isn’t present in the broader market. This is far from the first time Bitcoin prices have crashed, so it’s worth taking a look back in time and seeing how Bitcoin fared throughout the last major crypto winter in 2017. Early that year, Bitcoin peaked at $20,000, but it came crashing down below $12,000 in late December as hacks, regulation and investor skittishness all came to a head. It didn’t start appreciating substantially in value again until late 2020/early 2021, when it finally passed the $30,000 mark, where it’s (mostly) stayed above ever since. This time around, things could be different for the OG cryptocurrency. Far more retail investors hold Bitcoin now, and only time will tell if they have the wherewithal to weather the storm. What’s more, Ethereum and emerging blockchains like Solana have already been eating away at Bitcoin’s competitive edge. You can read more about the issues that have been plaguing Bitcoin and what its backers are doing to help boost it in my latest feature . Don’t forget to check out this week’s episode of Chain Reaction to hear Kevin Rose, co-founder of the viral Moonbirds NFT project, share some words of wisdom amid the downturn. Subscribe to Chain Reaction on , or your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. —
This past week, stablecoins have taken the main stage across conversations in the crypto world as a number of factors shake the industry up. As the crypto market responds with bearish sentiments, a major question stands: What does this all mean for the future of stablecoins? A number of market players weighed in on what the road ahead may look like.
Speaking of stablecoins, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary sat down with TechCrunch to share his thoughts on a number of crypto-related topics like crypto regulation and why he’s pro-stablecoin. We also discussed institutional firms entering the space and the kind of crypto-focused company he would create if he decided to do so, among other things.
In other news, Coinbase NFT launched its beta mode three weeks ago from today but has still yet to pick up any adoption — even after opening its doors to the public last week. The anticipation of where it should be right now has not matched expectations, one source said, and it’s unclear if it ever will. Given the scale of Coinbase’s crypto exchange, one would think that its NFT marketplace would also succeed, but others are saying that’s unlikely and that its approach to entering the space. — Thanks for reading, and please subscribe on to get on our email list! |
Corporate venture investors pulled back in Q1 but less than you imagined | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 5 | 15 | capital market didn’t reach in a year. It will also take a good amount of time to unwind from last year’s excesses. That fact is clear in new corporate venture capital (CVC) data collected by business intelligence concern CB Insights. Per the company’s , CVC activity was strong in the first quarter, albeit with some weak spots that we suspect developed as the first quarter rolled through its final month. Given in , expecting CVC to reverse course and charge back toward records feels unlikely; more declines seem to be a reasonable expectation. That CVC is in retreat as venture capital overall decelerates is not a surprise. CVC figures were a component of venture’s rise, and as they were coupled on the way up, seeing them decline at the same time is hardly bewildering. The somewhat modest declines in CVC that we’ll observe shortly are important for reasons other than simply tracking available investment flow for startups. Recall that of historically elevated levels of CVC investment potentially converting into notable startup M&A volume this year. That corporate venture capital was not in rapid decline in Q1 2022 gives extra weight to the concept, as there are now even more potential investment deals to convert into acqui-hires as the year progresses. Let’s get our hands around the changing pace of CVC activity and then whittle down our focus to geographic trends to see where things are hotter and cooler. (Hint: Europe and China are outliers, in opposite directions.) We’ll close with a recap of the M&A argument and chat about which CVC may be the most overexposed to changing venture conditions. |
Curious Thing’s voice AI communication platform asks the right questions | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 5 | 15 | Curious Thing founders Dr. Han Xu, Sam Zheng and David Mckeague. Curious Thing Sydney-based is an aptly named startup. The voice AI communication platform can call people and ask them questions like “How are you feeling today?” and then follow up with “How does it feel compared to yesterday?” Used primarily by health and financial companies, Curious Thing announced today it has raised $7 million AUD (about $4.8 million USD) in pre-Series A funding led by Hawkstone with participation from Black Sheep Capital, January Capital and returning investors Reinventure and Qualgro. Curious Thing was founded in 2018 by CEO Sam Zheng, CTO Dr. Han Xu and chief strategy officer David Mckeague as an HR tech company, before pivoting to voice AI this year. The company says its platform has processed more than 3 million minutes of AI-human conversations so far. Its clients include Foodpanda, Quitline, Calvary and Medibank, Brighte, Humm Group and several state and local governments. Zheng told TechCrunch “instead of answering questions like ‘what’s the weather today?’ we thought, can we can build an AI that is designed to ask open-context questions and importantly derive insights from people?” “It’s a voice AI because the voice phone call carries the right characteristic of being proactive and prompt to encourage customers to share more,” he added. “We know that for the same question, people are more likely to share if they are talking.” Zheng said he usually describes Curious Thing to clients as “proactive customer care.” In the health sector, it is used for daily check-ins on patients. For example, the company worked with multiple state governments in Australia to call COVID patients about their situation and symptoms, so clinicians could give them the right kind of support. In the financial services and fintech industries, Curious Thing’s use cases include onboarding assistance, information validation, payment reminders and lapsed customer feedback collection. Some other examples of questions Curious Thing can ask include: “You have an appointment on Friday. Can I please confirm that you are coming?” followed by “Do you need to reschedule?” if a patient says no. In the financial services industry, it can ask people things like “Your membership has expired. Would you reconsider renewing if we give you 10% off?,” “Can I please understand why you decided to stop using our service?” and “Thanks for using our service. Is there any feedback you can share with us?” About 85% of Curious Thing’s revenue currently comes from Australia, and part of its new funding will be used to expand in Southeast Asia and the United States, Zheng said. It also plans to hire for its tech team. |
Binance halts Luna and UST trading following meltdown | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has halted the trading of Terraform Labs’ Terra (Luna) and TerraUSD (UST) tokens on its platform following one of the industry’s biggest meltdowns. The exchange indefinitely suspended the trading of Luna and UST tokens across all its spot, cross margins and isolated margins pairs after the tokens lost nearly 100% of their value in a span of days. The , which follows the exchange pulling support for trading of futures contracts for the Luna token earlier on Thursday, comes as Terraform Labs has increased the circulating supply of Luna tokens to , up from 386 million three days ago (according to Terrascope, a tool that tracks Terra stats) in an attempt to push its sister token, a supposed stablecoin, to regain its 1-to-1 peg to the dollar. Scores of other crypto exchanges, including FTX, Crypto.com, KuCoin, OKX and CoinDCX, have taken steps in recent hours to address the incident. In the meantime, Terraform Labs it is halting the Terra blockchain and is working to “come up with a plan to reconstitute it.” It’s the second time the Terra blockchain has been frozen this week. Earlier on Thursday, Terraform Labs to prevent any hacks. “An exponential amount of new LUNA were minted due to flaws in the design of the Terra protocol. Their validators have suspended their entire network, resulting in no deposits or withdrawals possible to or from any exchange,” said Changpeng Zhao, founder and chief executive of Binance, in a Twitter thread. “Some of our users, unaware of the large amounts of newly minted LUNA outside the exchange, started to buy LUNA again, without understanding that as soon as deposits are allowed, the price will likely crash further. Due to these significant risks, we suspended trading,” he said. TerraUSD, a so-called algorithmic stablecoin, aims to be a substitute for the dollar by intertwining with Luna, which has no fixed value. The plan is that if the value of TerraUSD tumbles below $1, it could be “burned” and exchanged for a dollar’s worth of Luna, and vice versa. But when TerraUSD fell below $1 earlier this week, a reason of which is yet to be confirmed, that algorithmic vision showed its limits and miserably collapsed. The loss of faith from the crypto community and aggressive panic selling prompted the price of Luna to nosedive to $0.0000011, from about $80 earlier this week. The value of UST was 3 cents at the time of initial publication of this story. A few months ago publicly ridiculed ETH and started relentlessly shilling LUNA. Lots of people followed These influencers are setting our industry back — Nick Tomaino (@NTmoney) Terraform Labs has been — including reportedly trying to raise money — to resolve the situation, but so far it has had no luck. Asked for his thoughts, Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of exchange FTX and investment and market making firm Alameda Research, said on Thursday that “the real, honest answer is that, probably, either UST or LUNA have to go to 0 (or both). “There’s no way to save both of them. (And it’s not clear as of now that there’s any way to save UST’s peg even if you sacrifice LUNA.),” said Bankman-Fried, who has previously helped rescue a different project (SushiSwap). Binance’s Zhao, one of the most influential figures in the crypto industry, said he was “very disappointed” with how the incident has been handled by the Terra team. “We requested their team to restore the network, burn the extra minted LUNA, and recover the UST peg. So far, we have not gotten any positive response, or much response at all.” The change in value of UST this week. (Image and data: Binance) Zhu Su, co-founder and partner at Three Arrow Capital, an investor of Terraform, said in a Twitter thread that the “attacks and subsequent de-peg risks were flagged by critics; the fast-growing ecosystem should have done more to move slowly and safely.” Su acknowledged that many industry figures had warned about such a potential attack in recent months. “The critics had genuine concerns about peg risks and going forward discussion must be encouraged, ‘FUD’ must be met with refutations, growth must be organic even if slower. This is Terra’s DAO hack moment,” he said. |
‘Move fast and break things’ is a bad idea for health tech startups | Rachel B. Goodman | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | counterintuitive, but one of the reasons some entrepreneurs are drawn to healthcare are the regulations. No industry outside of defense is as heavily scrutinized, and for good reason: When you deal with people additional caution is essential. Rules, requirements and regulatory complexity may be barriers to entry in the world of digital health startups, but they also present opportunities. Founders often find creative ways to reconcile the additional oversight, like saying that their launch is merely a proof of concept, or that they can’t justify the cost of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on advertising to attract new users. When venture funding was scarce, there was a compelling need to prioritize speed and maximize the runway provided by smaller seed rounds. The environment, however, has changed — burgeoning investor interest and ample available capital have meant that there’s an even greater need to allocate significant budget to compliance. Speed and efficiency may be essential for startups, but regulatory compliance need not be a bottleneck or a financial drain. If compliance isn’t a consideration from the start, founders will sooner or later end up in a situation where they have to scramble to fix things behind the scenes, spending huge amounts of money on legal fees — and that’s the best case scenario. In the worst case, a deal can blow up. It is understandable how these concerns can be overlooked at the beginning. There’s a certain amount of creativity and dissatisfaction with the status quo necessary for founders to conceive of building something that doesn’t already exist. But when you’re building a digital health company, the ultimate end user is a person in need of medical care. The stakes are higher than creating the next puzzle game or food delivery app. |
Hear from Aurora, Nvidia and Waymo about the two roads to autonomous driving at TC Sessions: Mobility | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | The road to commercializing autonomous vehicle technology for people has split into two paths. In one camp, AV developers like Argo AI, Aurora, Cruise, Motional, Waymo and Zoox are aiming straight for full autonomy — a system that can handle all driving within certain conditions and with no expectation for a human to take over. In other words, the passenger can fall asleep or play on their phone. Then there are some automakers, notably Tesla, that are taking an it-will-improve-over-time approach to autonomy. In these cases, an advanced driver-assistance system may offer limited autonomous features with the plan that over time a greater level of autonomy may be achieved. Billions of dollars have been invested in these varying paths — each one with its own set of true believers. And in the middle sits Nvidia, the chipmaking giant that develops and supplies automakers and AV developers with the tools they need to deploy autonomous technology. We’re excited to announce that three experts from Aurora, Nvidia and Waymo who are working on AV technology will join us onstage at to help dissect the challenges and opportunities of each approach and weigh in on which might deliver first at scale. Our speakers are Yanbing Li, senior VP of engineering at Aurora; Saswat Panigrahi, vice president of strategy, product management and data science at Waymo; and Sarah Tariq, the VP of autonomous driving software at Nvidia. Li, Panigrahi and Tariq bring decades of experience to the field. Li leads all software development for Aurora, including autonomy, ground truth, mapping, simulation, cloud infrastructure and data platform. Prior to Aurora, she was a VP of product and engineering at Google and led the Enterprise Services Platform (ESP) organization in Google Cloud. She also led product development, engineering and go-to-market strategy at VMware and worked for Synopsys in various research, development and engineering leadership roles. She holds a PhD from Princeton University, a master’s degree from Cornell University and a BS from Tsinghua University (Beijing) in electrical engineering and computer engineering. Panigrahi, who joined Waymo in 2016, manages the engineering and commercial roadmaps across its business lines of ride hailing, long-haul trucking and local delivery. Before Waymo, he was the senior product manager at Google, working on Google Chrome, Chromebooks and Android. Prior to Google, he held roles of software developer, product manager and line manager at Ericsson in Canada, China and Sweden. He also worked as a research engineer at McGill University. Panigrahi earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur, his master’s in electrical and computer engineering at McGill University in Canada and his master’s in business administration from IMD in Switzerland. Tariq helps lead Nvidia’s efforts in creating and developing its AV platform called Nvidia Drive. Her team is responsible for providing some of the core software pieces of this platform, including the perception, localization, mapping, prediction and planning and control stacks. Before joining Nvidia, Tariq spent six years at Zoox, where she worked on the perception stack, leading the vision and perception teams. Prior to this, she spent a decade working in several areas, including real-time simulation and rendering, performance optimization for high-performance computing and supercomputers and computer vision. breaks through the hype and goes beyond the headlines to discover how merging technology and transportation will affect a broad swath of industries, cities and the people who work and live in them.
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SkySpecs watches wind turbines from above, lands $80M led by Goldman Sachs | Harri Weber | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | As wind energy in the U.S., is using drones and AI to detect future equipment failures before they grind those giant turbine blades to a halt. The company, which works with wind farms to monitor the health of turbine blades from above, has locked down a fresh $80 million Series D round led by Goldman Sachs to expand its “geographic footprint” and software tools. SkySpecs is one among many drone businesses to focus on . Along with Goldman, investors in the new round include energy company NextEra, Düsseldorf-based VC Statkraft Ventures and Postmates backer Huron River Ventures. Though Goldman aims to funnel as much as into climate tech, the financial behemoth also continues to back the . |
Uber shareholders get closer to passing lobbying disclosure proposal | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | Uber shareholders voted against a proposal that would have required the ride-hailing company to activities and expenditures, according to a regulatory released Thursday. The measure has been proposed and rejected by shareholders before. But this year’s results show a growing number of shareholders are keen to require full disclosure. About 45% of shareholders voted in favor of the measure as opposed to around 30% last year. Two-thirds of shareholders need to vote in favor for a proposal to be approved. The uptick in votes in favor signals a win for advocates in what will surely be a years-long process to encourage companies like Uber to be more forthcoming in their spending. The proposal, submitted by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, argues that Uber’s lack of full disclosure around its lobbying activities represents multiple risks for the company. The most obvious one is the potential reputational risk to the company if it’s revealed that it backs a cause considered unsavory by its users. The real risk, argues Teamster senior government analyst Michael Pryce-Jones, is to the sustainability of the business itself. “How much do you have to lobby to grow your markets or defend your markets? Because that goes to the resilience of how you’re earning money,” Pryce-Jones previously told TechCrunch. The vote comes as Uber, along with other app-based gig companies, continues to lobby hard and support so-called grassroots organizations dedicated to independent worker rights in order to keep gig workers classified as contractors, rather than employees. Uber’s business model depends on not paying drivers and delivery workers as employees, which includes benefits like minimum wage and sick leave, as well as protections like workers’ compensation. Most infamously, Uber contributed around $30 million to a campaign (that ended up raising more than $200 million) in California to pass Proposition 22. The company is actively working to pass similar laws in other states around the country, like Massachusetts, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Washington. Three other proposals were submitted and approved Monday, all with recommendations from the board to vote in favor. The first is a proposal to elect 11 directors to serve until the 2023 annual meeting and until their successors are elected. The directors selected are currently serving on Uber’s board. Uber’s shareholders also voted to approve, on a non-binding advisory basis, the 2021 compensation of Uber’s named executive officers. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s target compensation broke down into 6% in salary, 12% in cash bonus and 82% in long-term equity. In practical terms, that comes out to $1 million in salary, $16 million in stock awards, $2.4 million in non-equity incentive plan compensation (which is essentially just a bonus) and $507,738 in other compensation (mainly for security and personal safety costs), totaling a whopping $20 million in 2021 CEO compensation. For other executives, the breakdown was 9% salary, 9% cash bonus and 82% long-term equity. Here’s a breakdown of total compensation for the executives: Uber has a philosophy for how it compensates executives that backs its objectives to attract and retain talent, align executive incentives with company performance, provide further financial incentives for reaching certain milestones and “reinforcing cultural norms,” whatever that means. In order to promote long-term stockholder value creation and link the compensation of our executive officers to these long-term strategic goals and key drivers of our business, the primary focus of our compensation philosophy and program is on the long-term elements of target total compensation. Finally, Uber’s shareholders voted to ratify the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as the company’s independent registered accounting firm for 2022. Nothing surprising there, as PwC served as Uber’s accounting firm for the last two financial years, as well. |
Daily Crunch: Key Twitter executives depart following Elon Musk ownership deal | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | It’s Thursday, May 12, so Happy Friday Eve. Congrats to the “GoogleCrunch” team, which wrote something like 28 stories yesterday to cover Google I/O. . is enjoying a couple of days off, and I fear you will now know who the funny one is. See you tomorrow! – / Getty Images Emotion and intuition often drive a lot of hiring inside early-stage startups, but when a company reaches product-market fit and finds its target audience, “it signals that hiring a growth marketer will enable your efforts to be scaled much faster than without one,” says Jonathan Martinez, who has helped scale companies like Chime, Uber and Postmates. In a TC+ post, Martinez explains how to identify the right kind of growth hire, which traits to look for, and how to set clear expectations and milestones once they’re on board. “Priority tasks should consist of setting up a growth tech stack, creating a testing road map to find the most efficient growth levers, and robust creative and copy testing in the first 90 days.” |
Congress asks Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter to archive evidence of Russian war crimes | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | Four U.S. representatives to the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter urging them to archive any content uploaded to their platforms that could be used as evidence of Russian war crimes. As TikTok booms in popularity and , the rise of short-form video has offered unprecedented access to live footage from war zones — not to mention that Meta, YouTube and Twitter continue to capture our attention, too. These members of congress — Representatives Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Stephen Lynch (D-MA) and William Keating (D-MA) — think that social media uploads can be instrumental in holding the perpetrators of human rights violations accountable. Graphic wartime videos are often removed from social platforms, since they can violate terms of service that prohibit violent content. But according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) , which is cited in these letters to CEOs, it’s not clear what happens to these videos once they’re removed from the public-facing apps. Facebook, for example, says it keeps deleted data for at least 90 days, but Facebook told the HRW that it sometimes retains data for longer when requested by law enforcement. “We are concerned that social media platforms [ … ] do not have adequate procedures in place to archive this content so that it can be made available to international organizations conducting investigations into allegations of war crimes and other atrocities,” the representatives’ reads. In particular, the four representatives are calling on these platforms to preserve and archive potentially useful content for an extended period of time; coordinate with international human rights organizations to develop a legal, established way to share such content; increase transparency around AI-based content moderation systems and how they interface with war content; and, creating a way for users to flag content that they think might contain evidence of war crimes. “Photos, videos and other content posted on social media have increasingly supported accountability processes, including judicial proceedings, for serious international crimes, both at the national and international level,” the HRW report . The HRW states that there have been at least 10 cases in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden where people involved in war crimes in Iraq and Syria have been persecuted using evidence from social media posts. Though this evidence can aid international legal systems, these bodies will also have to be careful not to fall prey to misinformation, which may be used to facilitate a wrongful conviction. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, there have been many instances of fake videos going viral on social media, like that’s presented as though it were filmed on the ground in Ukraine. TechCrunch has reached out to Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter for comment. We will update this post with any response. |
Gusto raises an extension round, following Faire as unicorns react to a changing market | Anita Ramaswamy | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | , an HR technology unicorn worth nearly $10 billion, has raised an extension to its . That funding event included $175 million in primary capital, a tranche of secondary shares and a tender offer. first noted the new capital raise from Gusto based on its review of publicly available filings, which TechCrunch can confirm. Precisely how much capital Gusto raised to extend its Series E is slightly more opaque; however, it appears to be around the $55 million mark. That Gusto is raising money as an extension of its Series E, implying that it added the capital at a flat valuation to its 2021 raise, should not be considered a negative sign. The market for startup investments has , with the public value of technology companies trending negatively for nearly two quarters now; companies that raised last year are now confronting a new reality regarding investor expectations. With its extension, Gusto now likely has sufficient cash to see it through the present trough and perhaps to go public once the IPO window opens. How long of a wait that will prove is not clear, making the act of taking on additional funding reasonable. The extension, along with a secondary offering Gusto conducted (also of unclear size), was executed to satisfy high investor demand for the Series E, a source with knowledge of the matter told TechCrunch. The company is not alone in upsizing its latest fundraise. , Faire also added more capital to its coffers as an extension round. “In the current market environment, a ‘flat’ extension round to a 2021 raise should be considered a win,” , co-founder and chief strategy officer at EquityZen, told TechCrunch. Haslett noted that raising a “flat” extension can help companies avoid a down round or valuation drop and that he expects to see more of these types of raises from “even the strongest companies.” How many such rounds we will see is not clear, and it is also unclear how many we will be able to detect. Extensions are a bit quieter in filing terms and from a PR perspective; companies that trumpeted huge rounds last year that they extend in the present downturn may not want to broadcast that they are selling more shares at a dated price. If that’s indeed true, they will be making an error. Why? One issue that later-stage private companies have compared to their public counterparts is the cost of opacity. More simply, public companies can be vetted by potential customers as solvent. Private companies are harder to see inside of. If a unicorn shares that it raised another chunk of funds at a flat price this year, it would combat market concerns about continuing viability in today’s turbulent market. This fits neatly in TechCrunch’s more general perspective that sharing more information, as opposed to less, would be good not merely for our ability to cover the startup market, but for the companies themselves. Flat is the new up. . |
Scott Galloway’s edtech startup, Section4, lays off a quarter of staff | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | , an upskilling startup launched by prominent NYU professor , has laid off a quarter of staff sources say. The layoffs, which occurred last week, affected employees across all levels of seniority and teams, but specifically targeted a majority of the product team. The startup first splashed onto the scene in 2019 with a goal to scale business school-quality courses in a more affordable, and entirely virtual, way. CEO confirmed layoff details to TechCrunch over email and said that 32 people were impacted. The executive declined to disclose specifics on what impacted employees were offered but said that the severance package was “at market or better.” Shove added that there is no hiring freeze and that the company will continue to employ folks in engineering and enterprise. Part of that hiring focus, he adds, is that the startup is moving faster in serving the enterprise than individual consumers, so hiring will reflect that. Sources back it up. They say that Section4 is having a full reorganization as a company because it is not hitting consumer growth numbers. In March 2022, Section4 hinted at potential underlying tensions with monetization: The company started offering unlimited courses for a single membership price rather than selling each course for $995. The startup last raised in March 2021. Per Shove, Section4 is aiming to serve 15,000 students and 200 enterprise customers by the end of the year. The company’s reasoning for the layoffs, per sources, largely came from financial mismanagement, not yet having product market fit and hiring too much. , Section4 has 142 employees that work there. Sources say that leadership also pointed out that its main product — two- to three-long week courses taught by prominent professors from top schools — was too costly to produce. Put differently, the startup’s initial goal was to create a more affordable way (think $700 per course versus $7,000) for managers to upskill themselves — and that is not working as planned. As of March 2021, the startup was hitting 70% completion rates and had taught 10,000 students. “Graduate education was transformative in my life, and I enjoy teaching, and we thought there was an opportunity — because of the pandemic and changing behaviors — to start an online ed concept that tried to deliver 50% to 70% of the value of an elite MBA elective at 10% of the cost and 1% of the friction,” Galloway previously told TechCrunch. Market shifts have rippled across tech in the past few weeks, as layoffs rocked unicorns and early-stage startups alike. Edtech, more specifically, enjoyed a capital injection during the early innings of the pandemic — and now, as consumer habits change, there’s a correction starting to play out. Last month, , richly valued Indian edtech Unacademy laid off 1,000 employees as part of a cost-cutting measure. The same outlet reports that Vedantu, another edtech unicorn, Public edtech companies have also seen stock values slashed: Duolingo is currently trading at $65.58, down sharply from a 52-week high of $205; Coursera is trading at $13.89, also remarkably down from a high of $46.99. These cuts, along with Section4’s layoffs, all signal that edtech isn’t an exception when it comes to the Great Reset in tech. |
Simulation meets observation in first image of the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s center | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | and general news outlets have reported today, the image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, is a fabulous scientific achievement. But one aspect that hasn’t gotten quite as much attention is the central role played by simulations and synthetic data in the discovery. If you haven’t read about this awesome science news yet, the is a great place to get the gist. Based on years of observations from around the globe, a huge team at over a hundred institutions managed to assemble an image of the black hole around which our galaxy rotates, despite its relative closeness and the interference from light-years worth of dust, nebulae and other vagaries of the void. But this wasn’t just a matter of pointing the telescope in the right direction at the right time. Black holes can’t be observed directly using something like the Hubble or even the still-warming-up Webb. Instead, all kinds of other direct and indirect measurements of the object must be made — how radiation and gravity bend around it and so on. This means data from dozens of sources must be assembled and reconciled, itself an enormous task and a big part of why observations made in 2017 are only now being published as a final image, which you can see below. But because this project really has no precedent (even the famous M87* image, though superficially similar, used different processes) it was necessary to essentially test multiple possibilities for how the same observations might have been made. For instance, if it’s “dark” in the middle, is it because there’s something in the way (and there is — about half the galaxy) or because the hole itself has a hole (and it seems to)? The lack of direct observational data makes it hard to say. (Note that the images here don’t simply show an image based on visible light, but the inferred shape based on countless readings of radiation and other measures.) EHT Think about viewing an ordinary object from a distance. From straight on it looks like a circle — but does that mean it’s a ball? A plate? A cylinder viewed end on? Here on Earth you might move your head or take a few steps to the side to get a little more info — but try doing that on a cosmic scale! To get effective parallax on a black hole 27,000 light-years away, you’d need to go quite a distance and probably break the laws of physics in the process. So the researchers needed to use other methods to determine what shapes and phenomena best explained what little the observe. To systematically explore and evaluate the imaging algorithms’ design choices and their effects on the resulting image reconstructions, we generated a series of synthetic data sets. The synthetic data were carefully constructed to match properties of Sgr A* EHT measurements. The use of synthetic data enables quantitative evaluation of image reconstruction by comparison to the known ground truth. This in turn enables evaluation of the design choices and imaging algorithms’ performance. In other words, they generated oceans of data relating to different possible explanations for their observations and looked at how predictive these simulated black hole environments were. Lia Medeiros from the Institute for Advanced Study, in a very interesting Q&A worth watching in its entirety if you have the time, explained a bit of this in regard to how and why the study looked at the spin of the black hole and how that related to the spin of materials around it and to the galaxy at large. “What was really exciting about this new result, compared to what we did in 2019 for M87, was in paper 5 we actually include several simulations where we explore that [i.e., the spin relationships],” she said. “So, there are simulations where the spin axis of the black hole is not aligned with the spin axis of the matter that is swirling around the black hole, and this is a really new and exciting simulation that was not included in the 2019 publications.” EHT Naturally these simulations are unbelievably complicated things that require supercomputers to process, and there’s an art and a science to figuring out how many make sense to do, and how close together they should be. In this case the alignment question being looked at is of inherent scientific value but could also help interpret, for example, the interference caused by gases and dust swirling around the black hole. If the spin is like , its gravity would affect the dust like , meaning the readings should be read like . “Our simulations, when we look at the simulations compared with the data, we tend to prefer models that are almost pointed at us — not pointed directly at us but off by about 30 degrees or so,” Medeiros continued. “And that would indicate that the spin axis of the black hole is not aligned with the spin axis of the galaxy as a whole, and if you believe what I said earlier, the disk does prefer to be aligned with the spin axis of the black hole. It does seem like the disk and black hole are aligned, but that neither are aligned with the galaxy.” In addition to going after specific aspects like this, there was the more general question of what shape (or “underlying source morphology”) would produce the readings they got: essentially the “ball versus plate” question, but way, way more complicated. In one of the papers released today, the team describes building seven different potential morphologies for the black hole, reflecting different arrangements of its matter, from ring to disc and even a sort of binary black hole — why not, right? They simulated how these different shapes would produce different results in their instruments and compared those with a more computationally (and linguistically) demanding “General relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic” or GRMHD simulation. You can see those in a combination of two images from the paper here: EHT The idea was to find which of the simulations produced results most like those they actually saw, and while there was no runaway winner, the ring and GRMHD sims (which it must be said were rather ringlike — produced the most consistent results.) This informed the way the data was interpreted for the final interpretation of the data and resultant image. (Note that I am broadly summarizing a wildly complex process here.) Considering these observations were made some five years ago and much has happened since then, there’s still plenty to investigate and more simulations to run. But they had to hit “print” at some point and the image at top is their most informed interpretation of the data produced. As observations and simulations stack up we can no doubt expect even better ones. In fact, as the University of Texas, San Antonio’s Richard Anantua put it at the Q&A session, you might even give it a shot yourself. “If you’re in sixth grade, and you can get access to some of your school’s computers, I think there’s EHT imaging, and we have all sorts of pipelines and tools that you can teach your class,” he said, seemingly only half-joking. “The data for some of this is public — so you can start working on this now and by the time you’re in college, you pretty much have an image.” |
Reggie Fils-Aimé talks web3, AR and his gaming SPAC | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | , Reggie Fils-Aimé announced that he would be leaving Nintendo after 16 years — 13 of which were spent as the president and COO of the company’s North American division. It was a fruitful run, filled with more ups (Wii, Switch) than downs (Wii U) during a time of tremendous growth for the gaming industry. A lifelong serial executive, Fils-Aimé has retired from that aspect of the industry, while still maintaining a presence in gaming. He sat on GameStop’s board (later resigning in 2021), joined investment and consulting firm Brentwood Growth Partners, and even briefly hosted a gaming podcast (as one does during a global pandemic). which charts his journey from the Bronx to the Nintendo boardrooms. We caught up with Fils-Aimé to discuss his time at Nintendo, plans for a $200 million SPAC and where he sees gaming headed. My form of retirement is doing things that I like, with people I like doing them with. So whether it’s board service, whether it’s the SPAC that I’m involved in, whether it’s been writing and launching the book, it’s my form of retirement, and I’m having a lot of fun. The SPAC is in the broad digital entertainment space. We went public in December of last year. We were oversubscribed by about a billion dollars, so we went public. $230 million is our war chest. But with a billion dollars left on the table, it means we can go after a fairly large acquisition and take it public through the SPAC process. We’ve got until September of next year to identify our target and execute the transaction. We’re in the process of meeting with a lot of different companies and a lot of potential players. Brian Heater I do believe that web3 is going to create some opportunities. In particular, I think blockchain could lead to some unique types of digital entertainment. I also believe that the creator economy has unique opportunities. Everyone wants to be a creator. These tools and companies that are leveraging this have an opportunity to do quite well. Another thing I would highlight is that, while there have been a number of large acquisitions in the gaming space, I do believe that’s going to give rise to new, independent companies, led by creators who just don’t want to be part of these larger organizations. I do. There are a number of companies that are approaching the creation of that next platform in new and unique ways. Look at what Valve is doing on the PC side. You’ve got Steam and Steam Deck. What they’re trying to do is create a portable experience for largely PC-type games. That could grow to be a separate platform, potentially. I think what Epic is doing is very interesting. Obviously, you’ve got Unreal, that’s become a foundation for game developers. Unreal now is also being used by animators and people in the film industry. That can become a different type of platform. Unity is playing in the same space, though I think they’re a little bit further behind. I do think that there is room for other platforms, but they’ll be defined differently than, say, a Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo. I’m very bullish on AR. I think that AR leads to more communal-type of experiences, and there are already proof points as to what AR gaming can be. I am not sold from a gaming perspective on VR. I think VR has some very interesting business applications, but I haven’t yet seen a great gaming experience in VR. One of the lessons from Virtual Boy is not letting the hardware fully dictate the content. Obviously that pre-dates you, but there were struggles with the Wii U, as well. Absolutely. Nintendo has heeded that message, more times than not, and I think more times than any other older platform. Their mentality has always been, it’s got to be about the games, it’s got to be about the gameplay. Their developers always want to bring unique forms of gameplay. And that’s what drives the tech to bring it to life. It’s always got to be in the games. HarperCollins Leadership Myself and my team embraced the role of educating the developers in Kyoto around what were key trends to be thoughtful about, to be aware of how the industry was shaping up. The fact is, you need to communicate these forward-looking pathways constantly. And you need to repeat yourself constantly, in order to get traction. But once the company would really believe in a direction and come up with a unique approach, then typically, they would break through with incredible successes. I do believe that’s true. I think a lot of that started with Satoru Iwata. He very much embraced new and different ideas. And I think he certainly drove the company in that direction. The company has always had a history of innovation and a history of doing things quite uniquely. But under his leadership, there was an embrace of taking risks and moving forward aggressively. And I do believe that continues today. The game pad, as an innovation, did not deliver in the way we hoped. The company really believed it would allow different types of gameplay maybe best exemplified by Nintendo Land. In the end, the company was not able to deliver on that proposition. The second thing I would highlight was the pace of content was not sufficient in order to maintain momentum. For the launch, the games came out way too slow. The third piece I would highlight was that we still utilized predominantly internal development software that was not easy for external developers to utilize, and therefore to create content for the system, which further exacerbated the lack of content, because the first party wasn’t able to deliver the games on time. Those were some very harsh lessons that we’ve positively applied to the Nintendo Switch. The core proposition of the Switch, that you could play on your big screen TV and then undock the platform, take it with you, is a core proposition that resonated for the player. The conversations are incredibly tough. The fact of the matter is, there’s not always agreement. I pushed incredibly hard, as an example, to try and get the complete proposition down to $99. I was convinced if we could do that, we would have sold another 50 million units of hardware for the Wii and an associated level of software. But unfortunately, the economics of the system didn’t allow that to happen. For the Wii U, it became clear after we’d already done a price decline — after we’d already used traditional tactics, skill bundles and color changes — the platform still was not performing to our expectations. It was an incredibly tough conversation with the key developers in the Kyoto headquarters to begin working on the next system and begin thinking about what that would be. But also, back at Nintendo of America, to keep focus on engaging with the retailers, keeping focus on launching some key pieces of software to maintain some semblance of momentum. Nintendo I look back at moments, key decisions, and acknowledge that the end decision didn’t go the way I wanted. The pricing decision for the Nintendo 3DS is a classic example from my Nintendo days. I was convinced that launching at $249 was not going to go well and argued to the best of my ability to launch at a $199 price point. In the end, Mr. Iwata had the ultimate decision, and he said “no.” Within months, we had to do a massive price decline down to $169. I believe if we had launched at a $199 price point, we would have been successful from the start. But what do you learn from that? How do you, in the future, be more effective in selling that type of controversial decision? You never say never. But I don’t believe so. Right after I retired, I was approached to lead a significant organization. Like any smart person, you evaluate it, but in the end, I decided that running a large business isn’t something that today excites me. What excites me is making a trip to the Bronx, and spending time with young people and sharing my story and encouraging them, to follow their passions and to live their dreams. What excites me is writing the book, and sharing my principles. What excites me is being in the boardroom and sharing my experiences with other senior leaders to help them grow and manage their business more effectively. Those are things that I can’t do at the scale I’m doing now as an executive. We talked a bit about the SPAC. It could be that as we find a private company, and look to take them public, that I may need to play a role with that company, maybe be chair of the board or some other type of role. Certainly if that comes to pass, it’ll be something that I’ll consider and do. But my mindset right now is to share my experiences and to encourage and empower that next generation of business leaders. |
Crypto winter is coming | Anita Ramaswamy | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | Hello and welcome back to the podcast, where we unpack and explain the latest crypto news, drama and trends, breaking it down block by block for the crypto curious. You’ve probably gotten the memo that the markets are suffering, and crypto is getting hit especially hard. On this week’s episode, we talked through what an imminent “crypto winter,” or downturn, could mean for both public and private companies after a period during which huge crypto funding rounds seemed to occur on a near-daily basis. We’ve been following , which runs the UST algorithmic stablecoin and its sister currency, LUNA. UST is supposed to track the U.S. dollar, with 1 UST = 1 USD at all times, but it lost its peg this week and chaos has been unfolding ever since, putting downward pressure on the largest cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum. If that sounds abstract and confusing to you, we feel you. That’s why we took some time to break down what’s actually going on behind the scenes with UST and why this emerging stablecoin is so important to the crypto ecosystem right now. Who better to share words of wisdom for startups and investors facing off with a market rout than someone like Kevin Rose, an investor at True Ventures, this is his “10th or so” crypto downturn? Kevin also co-founded Proof Collective, a private community of NFT collectors, that launched the viral Moonbirds NFT project last month. He dished to us about the ethics of running a crypto project, why he took money from a traditional VC despite raising tens of millions just from the Moonbirds mint and his thoughts on charging people $40,000+ for a JPEG (the current price to snag a Moonbird). |
Ex-Meta crypto chief David Marcus launches Bitcoin payments startup backed by a16z and Paradigm | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | After his departure from Facebook in November, many crypto industry insiders speculated where long-time executive David Marcus would land. Today, the former Messenger boss and Paypal executive offered some early details on his next company Lightspark, which will be building on Bitcoin’s Lightning network. Marcus will serve as CEO with a number of ex-Meta crypto team members serving in executive positions. Details are scant on what exactly the startup is doing. A short press release notes that the startup is aiming “to explore, build and extend the capabilities and utility of Bitcoin.” Bitcoin’s lightning network allows for cheaper and faster transactions than the base level network allows, making it a more ideal platform to leverage for payments and decentralized apps. The firm did not disclose funding amounts oddly but is sharing that their first round is co-led by a16z Crypto and Paradigm with participation from Thrive Capital, Coatue, Felix Capital, Ribbit Capital, Matrix Partners and Zeev Ventures. The timing for the reveal could have been better as Bitcoin and the broader crypto market have sustained massive losses in recent days. A prolonged crypto bear market could mean reduced investor interest and a smaller potential hiring pool. |
Getting high on HRI | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | teasing how excited I am about July’s big robotics event, but it’s precisely because of panels like the one we announced earlier this week. We’ve got Rodney Brooks and Clara Vu teaming up for to discussing the changing face of human-robot interaction. It’s a big, broad and important topic, as robotics take an increasingly larger role in our lives. Honestly, I couldn’t think of a better duo to discuss the topic with (that’s the nice thing about running programming for an event). TechCrunch Brooks is the co-founder and CTO of deep learning robotics software firm Robust.AI. He also co-founded iRobot and cobot firm Rethink Robotics, and served as the director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for a decade. Vu is the co-founder and CTO of collaborative robotic safety firm Veo and a co-founder of Harvest Automation. Both Brooks and Vu have appeared onstage at TC Sessions: Robotics in previous years, and I’m psyched to have them in conversation this time out. All right, that’s enough plugging from me this week. Qualcomm Kicking things off with Qualcomm this week. Unsurprisingly, the company is making a new push into the robotics world this week, in hopes of leveraging its 5G technologies for autonomous robotic systems. The is a development kit announced this week at the company’s 5G summit, and the Southern Californian chip maker is casting the net quite wide here, with a focus on drones, delivery robots, collaborative systems and more. Says Qualcomm’s Dev Singh: Building on the successful growth and traction of Qualcomm Technologies’ leading robotics solutions, our expanded roadmap of solutions will help bring enhanced AI and 5G technologies to support smarter, safer, and more advanced innovations across robotics, drones and intelligent machines. We are fueling robotics innovations with 5G connectivity and premium edge-AI that will transform how we think and approach challenges and ever-evolving industry expectations in the digital economy. RB6, which is built on top of the Qualcomm Robotics Platform, arrives along with the RB5 AMR Reference Design to help kickstart robotics hardware development that utilizes the firm’s components. Given the recent explosive growth of automation, it’s clear why companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia and Intel are all making pushes to get in on the ground floor of development. Some fun research out of Hangzhou, China’s Zheijang University this week. The school is showcasing drone swarming in a difficult to navigate forest setting. The 10 drones are controlled by a central computer, flying in formation and following human subjects, all while avoiding crashing into trees. DJI Speaking of crashing into trees, we’ve done our fair share at TechCrunch while testing DJI drones. The company’s got a new version of , which weighs in at 249 grams. That’s precisely one gram from the FAA cutoff that requires drone users to register their systems. It has been fascinating watching the company iterate on the folding Mavic line over the last several years. These things are getting impressively powerful at their size, and much as smartphone innovations have created components that have launched several other fields, it seems likely that the work being done in the consumer drone space is going to have a profound impact in the broader automation field, going forward. Oh, and the new version of the Mini has even more safety features, theoretically making it more difficult to accidentally slam into trees. Theoretically. Hyundai This one completely flew under our radar a few weeks back. Hyundai is recommitting to some of those wild Ultimate Mobility Vehicle (UMV) concepts by The Bozeman, Montana-based studio will be focused on iterating some of those ideas courtesy of a $20 million investment over the next five years. As to why the company chose Montana, New Horizon head John Suh says, “Montana is quickly becoming a hub for high-tech companies and entrepreneurs with a growing talent pool of skilled labor in the field of engineering, research and natural science. Bozeman is a thriving and economic micropolitan city. Nestled near dozens of off-road trails with more than 150 miles of terrain and mountain access for UMV testing — it’s the perfect fit for our new R&D Lab.” As for the concepts the team is working on, Hyundai notes, “The first is an uncrewed transforming intelligent ground excursion robot (similar to what was revealed at CES in 2021) designed to carry various types of payloads while traveling over treacherous terrain. The second, inspired by Elevate, is a larger (size of a two-person ATV) vehicle with robotic legs that can address challenging driving situations and potentially save lives as the first responder in natural disasters.” Eureka Robotics This week was a little light on actual funding news, but we’ve got one addition, just under the wire: Eureka Robotics. The Singapore-based firm caused a minor online sensation back in 2018 with its . Turns out its technology was successful enough to earn it for robots that can drill, inspect, assemble and perform other complex tasks. The round, which was led by The University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners, will be used to deploy and accelerate development on the company’s flagship Eureka Controller. The company co-founder, Dr. Pham Quang Cuong, tells Catherine, “while the core technologies are mature and have already been deployed in production, we want to make those technologies really easy to use by System Integrators. Making advanced technologies easy to use by non-programmer engineers is actually difficult.” ABB Robotics Closing us out this week for good measure is an featuring a car-painting robot. Haje notes: For this PR stunt, the company collaborated with eight-year-old Indian child prodigy Advait Kolarkar and Dubai-based digital design collective Illusorr, to create the world’s first robot-painted art car. The project is showing off the company’s PixelPaint technology, which is basically an inkjet printer with 1,000 nozzles mounted on an industrial robot. Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch |
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Tidio raises $25M to automate customer service interactions | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | During the pandemic especially, it’s become overwhelming for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to answer all of their customer service requests. A Freshworks found that companies experienced a 71% increase in overall contact volume between February 2020 and January 2021, and expect it to increase further. At the same time, customers — while empathetic — have become more demanding. The same poll shows that 68% of customer service managers have seen an increase in customer expectations. What’s a company to do? Automation is one route to more manageable customer experience workloads, potentially. Enter Tidio, a platform that aims to become a one-stop shop for companies corresponding with customers across different channels (e.g., email and SMS). Leveraging a combination of live chat apps and AI-powered chatbots, as well as analytics, Tidio attempts to scale customer service operations even at small companies without the benefit of dedicated staff. Customer service automation platforms like Tidio aren’t exactly cutting edge. To name a few, there’s , a data-ingesting, bot-builder platform and , which offers a service for businesses to create AI-based communication flows. Ada also slots into the category — it features chatbots powered by a natural language processing engine. What makes Tidio stand out, co-founder and CEO Tytus Gołas asserts, is its simplicity in terms of implementation and structure. Tidio integrates with third-party services including email providers, Facebook, Instagram, WordPress and Shopify, allowing teams to manage customer interactions from a shared inbox. Plans range from free for two users to $332.50 per month (billed annually) for unlimited users and other extras. Creating a conversation flow using Tidio’s visual dashboard. Tidio “Most of our clients get up and running within minutes and are seeing the value of our product within the same day. Our impact is twofold — you can streamline communication and increase your sales with our chatbot functionality,” Gołas told TechCrunch in an email interview. “[O]ur chatbots and sales generation features have a direct impact on return on investment and help increase sales and revenue — sometimes covering the entire cost of the Tidio subscription in one day.” Tidio is the brainchild of Gołas and Marcin Wiktor, who co-founded the company in 2013. What started as a digital advertising agency targeted at SMBs evolved into a development house for online marketing tools, one of which was Tidio. After the tool gained traction, Gołas and Wiktor decided to pivot and make it their focus. Investors endorsed the move. Today, Tidio announced that it raised $25 million in a Series B round led by PeakSpan Capital with participation from Inovo Venture Partners and InPost CEO Rafał Brzoska, bringing Tidio’s total raised to $26.8 million, Tidio provides a list of visitors on a company’s website, which owners can use to interact with them in various ways — either in real time (via chat) or automatically (via chatbot). For example, the platform can be programmed to send a “Welcome back” message to a return customer along with a unique discount code. Tidio also captures information like the source of web traffic, the amount of time customers spend on particular webpages and which products are viewed most often. “We are using our custom dataset and state-of-the-art models to improve the language understanding capabilities of our models,” Gołas said. “[One of these models] automatically detects any question topics in each new chat conversation. The platform then groups the topics by popularity, with the system recommending a user configure their [chatbot] to automate answers to the most common customers’ questions, such as those pertaining to order status, shipping status and returns.” This type of automation — assuming it works as advertised — can save businesses time on repetitive tasks, Gołas argues, allowing them to focus on building customer relationships. Of course, not all customers , and privacy-forward browsers might obfuscate the customer data Tidio collects for personalization. But the startup’s sales pitch seemingly won over the more than 23,000 businesses that currently pay for Tidio, which used the platform to automate over 86,000 conversations in the last month alone. Gołas says that Tidio has been cash-flow positive and seen 7.7x revenue growth for the last three years — further highlighting the demand. The company claims that its platform is used by more than 510 million unique users and 3% of the merchants on Shopify. “Customer experience is very often connected with how businesses are communicating with customers and they can see excellent results by showing that they care and understand their customers’ problems,” Gołas said. “With that in mind, it’s imperative that give store owners the space and time to have those meaningful conversations.” Tidio plans to put the new capital toward marketing and expanding its 140-person workforce. The company aims to hire 100 people in the next year. |
Terra resumes blockchain production after halting to prevent hacks amid UST crash | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | Terraform Labs, the company behind the Terra USD (UST) and Terra (LUNA) cryptocurrencies, briefly the Terra blockchain for two hours on Thursday following the Terra ecosystem’s meltdown this week, which caused its stablecoin, UST, to crash, taking with it the rest of the cryptocurrency market. The halt meant no new blocks were being generated on the blockchain network after its , and holders couldn’t move their Terra assets until the blockchain was unfrozen. “Terra validators have decided to halt the Terra chain to prevent governance attacks following severe $LUNA inflation and a significantly reduced cost of attack,” the company tweeted. The move comes after Terra’s not-so-stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) and plummeted over 99% earlier this week. The company previously that delegations will be disabled once block production resumes, and the network should go live again once two-thirds of the voting power comes online. Do Kwon, the founder behind both cryptocurrencies, yesterday in hopes of fixing the situation. “Before anything else, the only path forward will be to absorb the stablecoin supply that wants to exit before $UST can start to repeg,” Kwon wrote in a . “There is no way around it.” Kwon planned on endorsing that would increase the amount of LUNA that could be minted by four times so that holders can “absorb the UST more quickly” or sell because only a certain amount of UST can be sold daily. But by increasing the minting capacity, LUNA’s price would be susceptible to dropping even more; indeed, it’s plummeted significantly since yesterday. As it stands, about 352,345,072 votes (based on the number of LUNA tokens, not per user) have been cast in favor of the proposal and zero votes against it. The number of votes has increased 270% from 95,200,000 votes on Wednesday. It’s unclear whether Kwon will continue to support the proposal after Terra halted the blockchain today. “For the uninitiated, when a cryptocurrency collapses and becomes incredibly cheap and more is being minted, anyone can just scoop up majority control of the network,” Zack Guzmán, a former crypto reporter at Yahoo Finance, said in a . “That would obviously not be good as a bad actor could do anything they want with it. Halting is a last option.” In the past few days, LUNA has fallen over 99% to $0.01479, while UST fell 62.7% to from its $1 peg, according to CoinMarketCap. |
Want to attend TechCrunch Disrupt for free? Find out how | Alexandra Ames | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | Well, all you have to do is for work exchange at on May 17, 18 and 19, and not only will you get a behind-the-scenes look at how TechCrunch events run, you’ll also earn a free General Admission pass to attend , our three-day flagship conference in San Francisco this October. Whether you dream of becoming a startup founder, marketer or event coordinator, this is a great way to see what it takes to produce a world-class startup event and meet our staff. Plus, after your volunteer shifts end, you can take part in all of the expert-led workshops covering essential topics like accelerating user growth, finding funding and building your brand. We expect more than 2,000 people at and volunteers will handle a variety of tasks to help make this startup event a worthwhile experience for everyone. At any given time you might help with registration, wrangle speakers, direct attendees, scan tickets or help with general event set up. We need volunteers from May 17 through May 19. Lend us a helping hand, and we’ll hand you a free Disrupt pass. Save money, gain real-world experience and still have plenty of time to hear valuable insights from industry leaders, expand your network and test drive the latest e-bikes, e-scooters and AVs this event has to offer. |
Watch the latest TechCrunch Live here: Raising monster rounds for self-driving mobility startups | Matt Burns | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | Yesterday’s TechCrunch Live featured the Raquel Urtasun, the CEO of Waabi, and the company’s Series A lead investor Sven Strohband from Khosla Ventures. Urtasun founded Waabi in 2021 after spending nearly three years as Uber’s R&D head of Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Waabi’s mission is to develop the an AI-first approach to speed up the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles, starting with long-haul trucks. To do so, her company raised a $83.5 million Series A with Khosha Venture’s Sven Strohband leading the round. Watch the event , or subscribe to the podcast ! |
Going, going … grab one of the last 2 demo tables at TC Sessions: Climate before they’re gone | Lauren Simonds | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | Climate-change warriors heed this call! If you want to demo your climate tech at on June 14 at UC Berkeley, time is running out. We have only two — count ‘em two — Startup Demo Packages left, and your last day to purchase one is May 14. — while you still can — before May 14. Let’s talk about value-add. The $525 package includes four all-access passes to the conference. More than 1,000 people dedicated to stopping this existential crisis in its tracks will be in the house. Don’t miss this opportunity to showcase your early-stage climate tech in front of this influential, highly targeted audience. We’re talking about climate entrepreneurs — like Impossible Foods’s Patrick Brown and Novoloop’s Miranda Wang — scientist/VCs like SOSV’s Pae Wu and DCVC’s Kiersten Stead. Check out the impressive . You’ll have access to CrunchMatch, our free, AI-powered networking platform. It’s the perfect tool to help you find the people who align with your business goals. Connect and schedule meetings to pitch investors, look for talent, collaborate with other founders or expand your customer base. Use those three extra passes to bring your team, increase your reach and still have time to attend presentations, 1:1 interviews, breakouts and roundtables. Here are just a few examples, and you can see more programming in . Climate tech is a hot area for investment once again, but the money going in this time around is a lot smarter on the subject than it has been in the past. Balancing hope and hype is still a major challenge, however, especially at the earliest stages, and we’ll dive into how the best and the brightest on the investment side are picking their winners — with Christian Garcia (Breakthrough Energy Ventures), Kiersten Stead (DCVC) and Pae Wu (SOSV). This panel jumps into the breakthrough tech innovations that are transforming industries to build a radically better world. How can business, government, philanthropy and the startup community come together to create a better tomorrow? Hear from these seasoned investors and industry veterans about how technology can not only shape the future, but also where the biggest opportunities lie — with Jamey Butcher (Chemonics International), Philipp Gruener (Decisive Capital Management SA) and Bill Tai (Extreme Tech Challenge). Recycling has been an environmental buzzword for decades, but the reality of reusing waste products hasn’t always lived up to its potential. A trio of startups on the cutting edge of the industry will discuss recent breakthroughs and what the future looks like for recycling, from sorting robots to ocean plastics and batteries — with Matanya Horowitz (AMP Robotics), Megan O’Connor (Nth Cycle) and Miranda Wang (Novoloop). takes place at UC Berkley’s Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley on June 14 with an online event on June 16. Literally hundreds of the leading climate tech founders, scientists, investors and entrepreneurs will be in the house. Don’t miss your last chance to showcase your climate tech and talent. Buy one of the two remaining two today! .
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Amazon’s ‘Alexa Together’ elder care subscription service for families now supports up to 10 caregivers | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | Amazon is two new features for its elder care subscription service. The subscription expands on Amazon’s existing product Alexa Care Hub and includes an emergency helpline, fall detection response features, a remote assist option that allows family members to manage settings on the elderly person’s device and an activity feed for family members that notifies them when their loved one is active or if there has been a lag in usual activity. With a new “Circle of Support” feature, aging loved ones can now have up to 10 caregivers on their subscription. Both the aging person and the primary caregiver can now add additional caregivers, or “circle members,” to care for an aging loved one. Amazon notes that circle members can be siblings, cousins, friends or close neighbors. Circle members can also include the spouse of the primary caregiver so each spouse receives alerts on their smartphone. Additional caregivers will get access to things like daily alerts and quick check-ins through the activity feed. The new feature is now available to all Alexa Together users. In addition, the service’s remote assist functionality will soon allow primary caregivers to remotely set up Alexa Routines, which are designed to group together actions seamlessly. For example, if a primary caregiver’s loved one starts every morning by turning off their alarm, turning on their bedroom light, asking about the weather and then the news, the primary caregiver can set up a personalized routine that does all of these actions automatically. By bundling actions together in a routine, aging loved ones don’t have to ask Alexa to do each action separately. “Primary caregivers will be able to set up Routines for their aging loved ones just like they do on their own accounts, like turning on all of the household’s smart lights at sunset or setting up a goodnight Routine where Alexa will turn off smart lights and play sleep sounds,” the company outlined in a blog post. “Amazon will automatically send an email about the newest Routine to the aging loved one so they are informed whenever a new Routine is set up.” Amazon has been invested in using Alexa to care for the elderly and infirm. In addition to Care Hub and Alexa Together, the company that it was bringing Alexa to hospitals and senior living centers, like Atria and Eskaton living centers and hospitals including Cedars-Sinai, BayCare and Houston Methodist. The company has also said it would work with partners who can tap into Alexa Smart Properties tools and APIs that allow them to develop specialized solutions for the elderly care market. Although these elderly care solutions are designed to be sold in a business-to-business (B2B) environment, Alexa Together targets the consumer market. Alexa Together works with supported Alexa devices, like the Echo, Echo Dot or Echo Show, and is available either as an add-on service or in a device . The subscription service costs $19.99 per month or $199 per year. |
Daily Crunch: Better.com CEO Vishal Garg says he’s on the hook for $750M SoftBank loan | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | It’s Friday the 13th, and I hope nothing nefarious happened to you today. At least the weekend is here! At the very least, you can catch up on the latest Terraform Labs news — — and some . And make sure to secure your “seat” for our June 1 . See you Monday! – Dutch As CEO and founder of virtual veterinarian care platform Dutch, Joe Spector initially intended to raise a $15 million Series A, but his pitch deck so skillfully blended visuals of lovable pets with market research and traction metrics, he ended up closing a $20 million round. With flair, Dutch’s deck tells a convincing story of how the company used its seed funding to launch a service within three months, establish a brand identity, build a team, and expand from 12 to 32 states, Haje Jan Kamps writes in the weekly Pitch Deck Teardown. If you’re working on a pitch deck and are in need of inspiration, start here: All 17 slides are available to TC+ members. : That’s right folks, Peloton is trying to end a on a positive note by adding another oar into the competitive rowing machine market. After selling my Peloton bike in 2019, this caught my attention as I discovered a love for rowing. Here’s hoping the price tag is a little bit more friendly to my budget than the bike was. : The video communication giant is acquiring conversational AI company Solvvy in an effort to offer customer service experiences within Zoom’s toolset. Company shares are up on the news, so it seems Zoom chose wisely. Don’t miss out on these stories: |
Twitter is testing a new ‘Liked by Author’ label for tweets | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | Twitter is testing a new “Liked by Author” label that appears when the creator of a tweet likes your reply. A reporter on the TechCrunch team spotted the new label in the Twitter Android app. A spokesperson from Twitter confirmed to TechCrunch that the company has been testing different labels to help give people context about the tweets they see, but said the social media giant doesn’t have more to share on this specific label. From what we can tell so far, once the author of a tweet likes a reply, it’s marked with a badge that is visible to both the person who left the reply and to others viewing it. Although it’s unconfirmed if the label is being tested globally, we’re seeing reports of users in several countries spotting the label. Screenshot/TechCrunch It’s worth noting that the new label is similar to TikTok’s “Liked by Creator” badge that similarly appears when the creator of a video likes a comment. Twitter’s new label could be bothersome for some users who see it as a distraction or unnecessary addition to what could be an already crowded tweet. It may also seem a bit redundant when it’s displayed next to a reply that only has one like. On the other hand, some users may see it as a welcome addition, especially if they want to showcase that their tweet was liked by a notable user, such as a celebrity. In addition, the new label may also be useful in instances where a tweet has received numerous replies and the original poster wants to highlight a few of them without having to directly reply to them. Given that the label is still in the testing phase, it’s unknown if Twitter plans to officially roll it out to all users. |
48 hours left to save $200 on TC Sessions: Mobility | Alexandra Ames | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | Attention mobility startups, professionals, investors and enthusiasts! You have just 48 hours remaining to save $200 on , our first in-person mobility event since 2019. The event takes place on May 18-19 in San Mateo, California with online analyst commentary on May 20. It’s the must-see mobility event of the year, and you have until Sunday, May 15, to save $200 on a . Once Monday hits, the price for a pass goes up to $495, so take advantage of these savings while they last. Join us at next week’s event and you’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of trends and market influences that can help you position your business for success. Here’s what serial entrepreneur Parug Demircioglu, CEO at Invemo and a partner at Nito Bikes, told us about his experience. “We were planning to launch Nito Bikes in the U.S., and the conference was an excellent opportunity to gain a solid grasp of the micromobility space. We heard from industry experts, learned about current and future trends and checked out the competition. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.” is jam-packed with mobility focused content, from main stage keynotes to topic-driven breakouts and smaller, more intimate roundtable discussions. There’s something for everyone — click We not only have fantastic speakers and companies onstage, but we have the future of mobility on our expo floor with more than 50 early-stage startups. Get your ticket and get hands-on with the latest and greatest in mobility tech and who knows, maybe you’ll end the week by meeting your next co-founder. In fact, you can take that next step in finding your future investor or co-founder on our AI-powered platform. It’s a smart, targeted and efficient way to meet the right people — in person and/or online — and maximize your time. Can’t make it in person, but want to soak up all the great content and networking? We’ve got that covered with our Online Only ticket offering. Enjoy recorded content that drops on May 20 and meet fellow attendees on CrunchMatch. takes place in person on May 18-19 in San Mateo, California, followed by an online event on May 20. and you’ll save $200. Now, get ready to connect with the influential people who can help you drive your business forward.
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Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal says he fired key execs due to ‘challenging’ economy | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal has largely remained silent through the , even as its likely future owner Elon Musk continues to very much do the opposite. But Agrawal finally broke his silence following an especially tumultuous week at the company, which saw him Twitter’s head of product Keyvon Beykpour and Bruce Falck, who led the revenue side of the company. “The truth is that this isn’t how and when I imagined leaving Twitter, and this wasn’t my decision,” Beykpour , which happened while he was out on paternity leave. Beykpour explained that Agrawal asked him to leave the company due to a desire to take the consumer team “in a different direction.” In his new tweet thread, Agrawal deftly said a lot without saying much of substance, a classic CEO skill not really shared by his often casual, off-the-cuff predecessor. We announced changes to our leadership team and operations yesterday. Changes impacting people are always hard. And some have been asking why a “lame-duck” CEO would make these changes if we’re getting acquired anyway. The short answer is very simple: — Parag Agrawal (@paraga) Agrawal explained that he does expect the Musk deal to close, but that under his watch, Twitter needs to “be prepared for all scenarios.” His comments mostly gesture at the current economic climate, in which the tech industry and the broader stock market have come from recent highs. are battening the hatches, trimming costs and putting hiring freezes in place to weather the storm. According to Agrawal, Twitter is doing the same. “People have also asked: why manage costs now vs after close?” Agrawal said. “Our industry is in a very challenging macro environment – right now. I won’t use the deal as an excuse to avoid making important decisions for the health of the company, nor will any leader at Twitter.” What’s less clear is how Agrawal’s decision to cut influential leaders in the company squares with whatever vision Musk has in store. While Twitter languished for the better part of a decade without new products or investor-pleasing growth, the company has looked like a very different beast over the last year, shipping new consumer products left and right, solving for hard problems like harassment and experimenting with new revenue streams to set it free from advertising. Whatever Agrawal’s moves ultimately mean, the company appears to be switching tracks, getting rid of two figures who laid a lot of recent groundwork for growth in the process. If Agrawal will survive that process and stick it out into the Musk era is anyone’s guess at this point. Meanwhile, the Musk sideshow goes on. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO , but he continues to sow chaos and rack up likely SEC fines nonetheless. On Friday, Musk cast doubt over the whole thing, claiming that the deal is as he reviews the social network’s ratio of bots to real accounts, just one of the platform’s many existential issues but the one that happens to be pet issue. At the time of writing, that supposed development wasn’t supported by any financial filings or corroborating evidence. While it’s possible Musk is trying to back out or re-price his purchase somehow, it’s just as likely that the notoriously mercurial billionaire is just tweeting his passing thoughts stream of consciousness-style, SEC fines be damned, in this case to the detriment of the company he’s ostensibly trying to buy. |
DOJ warns that misuse of algorithmic hiring tools could violate accessibility laws | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | AI tools for the hiring process have become a hot category, but the Department of Justice warns that could lead to violations of U.S. laws protecting equal access for people with disabilities. If your company uses algorithmic sorting, facial tracking or other high-tech methods for sorting and rating applicants, you may want to take a closer look at what they’re doing. The department’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which watches for and advises on industry trends and actions pertaining to eponymous matters, has on how company can safely use algorithm-based tools without risking the systematic exclusion of people with disabilities. “New technologies should not become new ways to discriminate. If employers are aware of the ways AI and other technologies can discriminate against persons with disabilities, they can take steps to prevent it,” said EEOC Chair Charlotte A. Burrows in the announcing the guidance. The general sense of the guidance is to think hard (and solicit the opinions of affected groups) about whether these filters, tests, metrics and so on measure qualities or quantities relevant to doing the job. They offer a few examples: This is not to say that none of these tools or methods are wrong or fundamentally discriminatory in a way that violates the law. But companies that use them must recognize their limitations and offer reasonable accommodations in case an algorithm, machine learning model or some other automated process is inappropriate for use with a given candidate. Having accessible alternatives is part of it but also being transparent about the hiring process and declaring up front what skill will be tested and how. People with disabilities are the best judges of what their needs are and what accommodations, if any, to request. If a company does not or cannot provide reasonable accommodations for these processes — and yes, that includes processes built and operated by third parties — it can be sued or otherwise held accountable for this failure. As usual, the earlier this kind of thing is brought into consideration, the better; if your company hasn’t consulted with an accessibility expert on matters like recruiting, website and app access, and internal tools and policies, get to it. Meanwhile, you can , with a brief version aimed at workers who feel they may be discriminated against , and for some reason there is another truncated version of the guidance . |
To win insurtech 2.0, focus on underwriting before growth | Jamie Hale | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | markets poised for change, the insurance industry has already seen its first wave of innovation. Similar in many ways to the initial novelty of opening a bank account online, insurtech 1.0 brought a centuries-old product into the digital era by giving customers a way to apply for insurance online. Customer excitement translated into investor excitement, and everybody rode off into the sunset. Well, not quite. It seems some might have flown a little too close to the sun instead: Focusing on customer experience on the front end leads to rapid growth indeed, but failing to focus on underwriting on the back end can lead to a very large number of claims, very quickly. That’s because insurance, fundamentally, is about risk. It follows that digital insurance innovation should primarily focus on digital underwriting innovation — in essence, using technology to correctly assess and price risk in real time. The truly magical (and most misunderstood) fact is that everything else can simply flow from that innovative underwriting foundation: an instant, digital customer experience, sustainable growth unburdened by excessive claims and the ability to embed insurance in other digital journeys, creating better experiences for consumer, partners and insurtechs alike. By focusing first on growth and then on underwriting, the insurtech 1.0 wave essentially flowed in the wrong direction. But there is plenty of time to reverse the tide — consumers’ enormous appetite for convenient, modern insurance products has only been whet. So what does focusing on next-generation underwriting really look like, and how should you build upon it? Here’s our five-step playbook for winning in the insurtech 2.0 era. Refocusing on underwriting innovation starts with refocusing your business. Ask yourself the following questions: If you’ve answered no to one or more questions, it might be worth rethinking your goals, metrics and organizational structure. Nobody likes to qualify growth, but in insurtech, smart growth is the name of the game. Resist the urge to rapidly scale acquisition before you’ve built confidence in your underwriting engine. But how do you do that? |
Postmates founder banks $23 million for his new crypto startup TipTop | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | Postmates founder Bastian Lehmann’s new crypto startup was lightly teased out a few weeks ago, but now the stealth startup is sharing some info on its early funding, though there’s not much info on what they’re actually doing with that money. Lehmann notes that the company has raised a $23 million Series A from a16z with Marc Andreessen himself joining the startup’s board. Other backers in the round include Sam Altman, Naval Ravikant, Andy McLoughlin, Jeff Clavier and Dan Romero, among others. The startup is keeping things as vague as possible on its website and job listings with redacted graphics promising “consumer finance solutions for a changing web” and that they’re “building protocols and infrastructure,” doing something “at the intersection of fiat and crypto.” It’s all publicly unclear, but investors seem eager to throw some money behind Lehmann after Postmates’ $2.65 billion exit to Uber in mid-2020. This round’s announcement comes at a rough time for the broader crypto markets after this past week’s crash, which was brutal even by crypto standards. That hit is leaving plenty of venture firms in a tough spot and likely questioning their commitment to the sector. This lack of volume, specifically from growth firms, could make scaling a crypto business more difficult in the coming years if the sector is indeed on the cusp of a “crypto winter.” For repeat founders like Lehmann and ex-Meta executive David Marcus who also announced venture backing for his new crypto startup yesterday, these issues will obviously be less pronounced. |
Apple said to be testing a switch to USB-C for future iPhones | Darrell Etherington | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | It’s neither surprising, nor necessarily new scuttlebutt, but one of the most reliable Apple news scoopers of all time has chimed in to say that Apple is indeed at least serious enough about a potential switch from Lightning to USB-C on future iPhones that it’s doing testing with models equipped with the latter connector. Bloomberg’s in recent months, and that it’s also working on an adapter that would allow iPhones equipped with the more ubiquitous connector to still work with accessories designed with Lightning in mind. Don’t chuck those Lightning cables in the trash just yet: Gurman’s report says that the earliest this could possibly happen is 2023, as the design for the current new iPhones likely arriving fall 2022 are set with Lightning on board like their predecessors. As Bloomberg notes, a big driver for considering this change could be the that approved a requirement that consumer electronics companies adopt USB-C as a common wired connection standard. Apple could theoretically work around the requirement in other ways, but standardizing USB-C as the connector of choice across all their devices would probably also be a win for them in the consumer satisfaction department, especially after moving to using it in other mobile devices like the most recent iPad and iPad Pro tablets. Dropping Lightning would be a headache in other ways, for both Apple and consumers: It would mean Apple loses out on licensing fees and parts supply revenue for third parties looking to get official “MFI” status for iPhone accessories, and it would mean iPhone users have to either replace existing Lightning accessories or go with the rumored adapter. Plus, AirPods also still rely on Lightning for the time being, so you still can’t shift to a fully USB-C lifestyle. USB-C is also one of the most confusing connector technologies out there in terms of the different types of cables it terminates. An older USB-C cable might provide exclusively power transfer, for instance, and very low wattage to boot. The situation has gotten a bit easier to parse with more recent cables and devices, though, so at least the possibility would exist for people to streamline their charger and cable mix. Selfishly, I want Apple to do this because I obsess over the arithmetic of how many cables and chargers I need to pack on trips to keep all my kit charged with a necessary, but minimal, amount of redundancy. As with any reports detailing work at this stage of development, however, there’s always the chance Apple could abandon this development direction and go with Lightning again in 2023 and beyond, however, dooming us to a more complicated cable nest for the foreseeable future. |
TechCrunch+ roundup: Find your valuation, international visas, hiring for growth | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | The ongoing market correction and the cratering of several leading crypto tokens are erasing wealth so quickly, you can almost hear it. Companies in other industries are on a hiring spree, but startups like Robinhood, Better.com and Peloton are laying off thousands as FAANG companies slow down their recruiting and look for places to save money. For many tech workers, this is the first time they’ve experienced real uncertainty. Investors are affluent, and founders will weather this storm just fine, but in downturns like these, rank-and-file employees are the first to feel any pain. So, if your face doesn’t appear on the team slide in your startup’s pitch deck, this would be a good time to cancel your upcoming vacation. And maybe one of your subscription boxes. In this environment, every entrepreneur should be fluent with their key metrics. If you can’t recall exactly how much runway you have left by the time you finish reading this sentence, I’m a little worried for you. For her latest TC+ column, angel investor Marjorie Radlo-Zandi addresses a related question on every founder’s mind: For many startups, finding that figure requires more art than science, since pre-revenue companies are still gathering data and fine-tuning their products. “Many traditional valuation methods, such as discounted cash flow, aren’t as useful for valuing early-stage startups,” she writes. “This means investors have to gauge other factors that aren’t so easily measured.” There’s no antidote for uncertainty, but it can be mitigated: dive into your data, activate your personal network, and look for ways to support your co-workers. Thanks very much for reading TechCrunch+. Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch+
Dutch As CEO and founder of virtual veterinarian care platform Dutch, Joe Spector initially intended to raise a $15 million Series A, but his pitch deck so skillfully blended visuals of lovable pets with market research and traction metrics, he ended up closing a $20 million round. With flair, Dutch’s deck tells a convincing story of how the company used its seed funding to launch a service within three months, establish a brand identity, build a team and expand from 12 to 32 states. If you’re working on a pitch deck and are in need of inspiration, start here: all 17 slides are available to TC+ members. / Getty Images Emotion and intuition often drive a lot of hiring at early-stage startups, but when a company reaches product-market fit and finds its target audience, it’s a signal that “hiring a growth marketer will enable your efforts to be scaled much faster than without one,” says Jonathan Martinez, who has helped scale companies like Chime, Uber and Postmates. In a TC+ post, Martinez explains how to identify the right kind of growth hire, which traits to look for, and how to set clear expectations and milestones once they’re on board. “Priority tasks should consist of setting up a growth tech stack, creating a testing roadmap to find the most efficient growth levers, and robust creative and copy testing in the first 90 days.” Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch / Getty Images Understanding your customer’s needs is paramount to any marketing strategy, but it can be hard to test your hypotheses when your budget is limited. However, by adopting a “jobs-to-be-done” framework, early-stage startups can define, categorize, capture and organize all their customers’ needs, writes Michael Popchuk, co-founder and CEO of Saldo Apps. Using real-life examples, Popchuk explains how startups can employ and leverage the JTBD framework to improve their SEO strategy, marketing, and product development. “Thinking of and using the jobs users want to accomplish to inform your strategy will help boost SEO, improve conversion on generic pages and increase the virality of your product.” Bill Hinton / Getty Images Electric vehicles are the prime market for battery startups these days, but some enterprising companies are foraying into new territories with batteries that can do more than a typical lithium-ion cell. Natron Energy, whose batteries use Prussian blue coupled with a sodium-based electrolyte, can charge up much faster and can withstand discharge cycles more than “5x to 10x what lithium-ion batteries are capable of,” reports Tim De Chant. This capability gives these batteries unique use cases, such as power back-ups for data centers. Moreover, “because the batteries can charge rapidly over and over again without risk of significant degradation, data center managers can task them with shaving power demand when prices spike.” |
Flume lights up dark fiber to bring fast internet to more people | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | It’s the darnest thing — in major cities, around 30% of homes have a fiber cable running past the house due to a local cell site or enterprise customer, but a bunch of humans are still on dial-up speeds. is tapping into the under-used fiber capacity in order to make high-speed internet available to more people — including the New York Housing Authority, its partner for bringing high-speed internet to populations that traditionally have been low priority for telcos. The company’s aim is to use its asset-light approach and scale into more than 20 markets in the next few years with infrastructure partners and asset owners. A large part of its mission is to connect under-connected neighborhoods. The company’s anchor customer in New York is NYCHA with hundreds of homes connected to Flume via the government’s Affordable Connectivity Program. The company has seen rapid growth coming out of the pandemic as many cities and apartment building owners want cheaper, high-speed options. A major part of their vision is to accelerate fiber builds across the remaining 60% of residences in the country in a carrier-neutral manner. The company suggests that only around 9% of homes have an option for true fiber to the home — in other words, that the entire network between your home and the provider’s data center is fiber. Flume has developed a compact edge data center that enables it to serve thousands of gigabit customers out of a single rack of data center space. They use this technology to map out and power broadband over unused or “dark” fiber cables in cities around the U.S. to bring home broadband options to residences and apartment buildings at a fraction of the cost. The company claims that most cities have 10-15 unused fibers for every residential building. Its aim is to be the largest fiber ISP in the U.S. that still controls the packet path from the end consumer to the data center, i.e. not buying or reselling last-mile traffic. Flume lit up $3.5 million worth of funding late last year, but decided to announce the round now. Amplo and Hyperplane.vc co-led the round, with involvement from the Citi Impact Fund and The Fund NY. The company’s service is now available in ‘thousands’ of homes, and its plan is to be available in 20,000+ homes by the end of the year. |
Investors reward battery startup SES for losing money (but not too much) | Tim De Chant | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | startup SES’ investors are quite happy with its first earnings report. The company went public in February via a SPAC merger, and to no one’s surprise, reported a loss. And its investors don’t seem to mind. The company posted an operating loss of $19.2 million in the first quarter quarter. General and administrative costs accounted for much of that, at $15.1 million, while R&D ate up another $4.1 million. It reported a net loss of $27 million, or $0.12 per share. At the end of the quarter, SES had $426 million in cash and expects to have enough runway to enter commercial production in 2025. Battery startups like SES all lose money, and it looks like the company is losing just enough to stay in the race, but not so much that it would burn through its reserves before it has a commercial product. Developing and commercializing a new battery is a long, expensive game and investors seem to be happy with SES’ balancing act. If it spent too much, it would risk bankruptcy, of course. And if it didn’t spend enough, it would risk falling behind its competitors. Investors also appear to be rewarding other battery startups that have gone public via SPAC in the last year, including Solid Power, which is up 10%, and QuantumScape, which is up 13%. The balance of general expenses versus R&D suggests that while work continues on its lithium-metal technology, an increasing amount of the company’s cash hoard is being spent on building larger scale facilities in the ramp up to commercial production. Indeed, in an interview earlier this week, CEO Qichao Hu told TechCrunch the company is continuing to develop its Shanghai Giga site and another facility in Korea, which was announced earlier this year. Currently, the Shanghai site has an annual production capacity of 0.2 GWh, which Hu said is “more than enough” for what they are making right now. “In March, we started building cells for Hyundai and Honda out of our Shanghai facility, and for GM out of Korea facility,” he said. The company is testing these cells in-house and then sharing the data with partners. By first quarter next year, Hu expects to begin shipping cells directly to automotive companies so they can do their own testing. |
Hulu partners with Xbox to bring PC Gamers free games in a bundle deal | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | and have announced a partnership deal that gives existing U.S. Hulu subscribers three free months of PC Game Pass as part of the Hulu “Friends with Benefits” initiative. The move to target gamers follows Netflix’s entry into the gaming market, where the streamer has made a number of ad-free mobile games a part of its subscription service. Hulu and Xbox’s offer is a limited-time deal, however — not a new gaming initiative. The companies said this current offer is redeemable until July 23, 2022 and is only valid for PC Game Pass, not Game Pass Ultimate. It also may only be redeemed by Hulu subscribers in the U.S. who are to new Game Pass. This appears to be the first time Hulu has done this type of deal with a gaming company. Xbox worked with Disney’s other streaming service, Disney+, in 2020, offering Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers . , “At Hulu, every decision we make starts with the viewer. We do this through the stories we bring to life, and by giving Hulu subscribers the opportunity to engage with their favorite shows, films and brands through select perks and activations, including the ‘Hulu Friends with Benefits’ initiative, Hulu’s way of thanking you for simply being a fan—because that’s what friends are for.” Normally, PC Game Pass costs $9.99 a month, so this offer is a chance for PC gamers to try out over 100 different games, including titles such as Minecraft, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Forza Horizon 5, Halo, as well as access to EA Play games like The Sims 4, It Takes Two and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. PC Game Pass also gives access to many new games the same day they release at retail. Xbox that more games would be coming out in the next three months. While hardcore gamers love to play on consoles, there are a surprising amount of dedicated PC gamers. shows there are 1.77 billion of them globally, and the number is expected to rise, potentially exceeding 1.9 billion in 2024. On the other hand, believes the number of PC gamers will only decrease in 2022, and mobile games will dominate. This could explain why Netflix approached instead of PC. Mobile gaming is another impressive competitor in the gaming space, and Netflix has catered to this demographic of more casual, on-the-go gamers. According to , Netflix’s mobile games have been installed more than 8 million times since it launched. In March, Netflix announced its only first-person shooter title , which could broaden its appeal to more gaming enthusiasts. In addition, pointed to an older Netflix that may have hinted at the company planning to expand into console and PC gaming. The job listing was for a video game tech artist and said that the ideal candidate “has shipped three or more console or PC games as an engineer or equivalent.” Its League of Legends animated series “Arcane” was a hit for the streamer, so it’s not a shock that its game Hextech Mayhem, licensed from developer Riot Games, has garnered some success with 58% of League of Legends fans in the U.S. more likely to subscribe to Netflix than other streaming services, per Fifty-five percent of all gamers choose to subscribe to the streamer whereas 27% and 16% of gamers pick Hulu’s ad-supported plan and ad-free tier, respectively. Overall, Netflix has 221 million global subscribers and greatly disappointed shareholders with a loss of in its recent quarterly earnings report. For , total combined subscriptions for Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ exceeded 205 million, with Hulu contributing 45.6 million subs. While there’s no indication that Hulu will take the same route as Netflix, it is interesting that more streaming services have begun following each other down the gaming rabbit hole. |
Better.com CEO Vishal Garg says he is ‘personally liable’ for $750M SoftBank investment | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | Better.com CEO Vishal Garg has acknowledged to employees that he “personally guaranteed” $750 million in post-closing convertible notes that would be provided to the online mortgage lender should it still go public under the original SPAC agreement, according to an email seen by TechCrunch. Let’s start at the beginning. Last May, Better.com announced that it was going public via a that would value the company at nearly $7 billion. Then on November 30, the company announced that blank-check company Aurora Acquisition Corp. and SoftBank decided to amend the terms of their financing agreement to they committed immediately instead of waiting until the deal closes. But what wasn’t revealed at that time, as reported last week, when SoftBank ponied up $750 million in November, it was Garg — not the company as a whole — who assumed responsibility for compensating the Japanese investment conglomerate for any losses in connection with the remaining $750 million that was to be paid out in post-closing convertible notes should the deal actually close. You see, when Better announced it was going public via a SPAC last May, SoftBank had put together a $1.5 billion private investment in the deal’s public equity, or PIPE, in effect repricing its own preceding investment. It paid out $750 million last year, but when it came to the post-closing convertible notes. Specifically, an S-4 filing by Aurora states: The Better Founder and CEO, in his personal capacity, has agreed to enter into a side letter with SoftBank, pursuant to which he may be liable for realized losses or receive payments in certain circumstances from SoftBank in connection with the Post-Closing Convertible Notes, which could divert the resources and attention of the Better Founder and CEO from our business and have a negative impact on his personal financial situation. Notably, the amount of losses covered by the side letter is uncapped, and Garg alone “remains responsible for all such losses, which could require him to, among other things, sell a significant portion of his holdings in Better Home & Finance common stock, which could negatively impact the trading price of Better Home & Finance common stock.” As mentioned above, in response to details of the arrangement being made public, Garg sent an email — viewed by TechCrunch — to all current Better employees, acknowledging personal responsibility for the private investment that was committed to by SoftBank last year In the email, he admitted that he “personally guaranteed” SoftBank $750 million of the $1.5 billion that SoftBank had agreed to invest in the company of last year because he “wanted the capital to build our dream,” knowing “the world was about to get ugly.” I might be foolish, but I believe in us. I believe in you. I believe in our mission. I believe in our vision. And I believe that we are the only people on this planet who will do everything needed to make homeownership better, faster, cheaper, and make it possible for everyone everywhere…. I am fully committed with everything I own and will ever own….Five years from now, when that SoftBank $750 million loan comes due around my 50th birthday….if it means I have nothing. Well, at least we will have given it a real shot…This is true. I did personally guarantee three quarters of a billion dollars and I’m personally liable for it. Meanwhile, multiple sources also have shared that Better.com in recent weeks offered its workers in India the option to leave under a voluntary separation agreement. Apparently, more workers put their hands up — a reported 90% of 2,100 — than the company expected and it had to put a cap on how many workers could leave. Sources said it was mostly “closers and analysts” who were allowed to leave, and about 920 workers total had their resignations accepted. One individual shared an email from HR India turning down their request saying that the worker was “part of a mission-critical team” at Better. A separate email that went to the company’s operations team outlining a structural reorganization said the need to offer voluntary separation to the company’s India employees was due to recognition that “there are declines ahead and responding to these to ensure Better is positioned for profitability remains essential.” Better did not respond to requests for comment. |
Inflection AI, led by LinkedIn and DeepMind co-founders, raises $225M to transform computer-human interactions | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | , the machine learning startup headed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and founding DeepMind member Mustafa Suleyman, has secured $225 million in equity financing, to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The source of the capital isn’t yet clear — Inflection didn’t immediately respond to a request for more information — but the massive round suggests strong investor confidence in Suleyman, who serves as the company’s CEO. Palo Alto, California-based Inflection has kept a low profile to date, granting relatively few interviews to the media. But in CNBC from January, Suleyman described wanting to build products that eliminate the need for people to simplify their ideas to communicate with machines, with the overarching goal being to leverage AI to help humans “talk” to computers. “[Programming languages, mice, and other interfaces] are ways we simplify our ideas and reduce their complexity and in some ways their creativity and their uniqueness in order to get a machine to do something,” Suleyman told the publication. “It feels like we’re on the cusp of being able to generate language to pretty much human-level performance. It opens up a whole new suite of things that we can do in the product space.” The concept of translating human intentions into a language computers can understand dates back decades. Even the best chatbots and voice assistants today haven’t delivered on the promise, but Suleyman and Hoffman are betting that coming advancements in AI will make an intuitive human-computer interface possible within the next five years. They’ll have competition. Just last month, , a startup co-founded by former DeepMind, OpenAI and Google engineers and researchers, emerged from stealth with a similar concept: AI that can automate any software process. DeepMind itself has an approach for teaching AI to control computers, having an AI observe keyboard and mouse commands from people completing “instruction-following” computer tasks, such as booking a flight. Regardless, the size of Inflection’s funding round reflects the high cost of building sophisticated AI systems. OpenAI is estimated to have spent millions of dollars developing GPT-3, the company’s system that can generate human-like text given a prompt. , another startup developing cutting-edge AI models, recently raised over half a billion to — in co-founder Dario Amodei’s words — “explore the predictable scaling properties of machine learning systems.” AI expertise doesn’t come cheap, either, particularly in the midst of a . In 2018, a tax filing spotted by the New York Times that OpenAI paid its top researcher, Ilya Sutskever, more than $1.9 million in 2016. Inflection recently poached AI experts from Google and Meta, CNBC in March. “Even at the bigger tech companies, there’s a relatively small number of people actually building these [AI] models. One of the advantages of doing this in a startup is that we can go much faster and be more dynamic,” Suleyman told CNBC. “My experience of building many, many teams over the last 15 years is that there is this golden moment when you really have a very close-knit, small, focused team. I’m going to try and preserve that for as long as possible.” A cloud surrounds Inflection, somewhat, following that Suleyman allegedly bullied staff members at Google, where he worked after being placed on administrative leave at DeepMind for controversy surrounding some of his projects. Google launched an investigation into his behavior at the time, according to the , but it never made its findings public. |
Peloton is releasing a rowing machine | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | Peloton punctuated a with a bright spot, teasing the next major addition to its home exercise offerings. In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, the connected fitness brand confirmed the forthcoming release of a home rowing machine. Beyond the quick glimpse and a “coming soon” graphic, that’s apparently all we’re getting for now. From the quick shots, the rower is aesthetically right in line with the company’s existing bikes and treadmills. It appears to be an all-black sit-down machine with a standard resistance cable and a large display for watching Peloton’s fitness courses. The system was briefly unveiled as part of its two-day “Member Event.” The company notes, “Peloton will be bringing its best-in-class fitness experience to the world of rowing! Combining cardio and strength — Peloton is excited to add this total body workout into its powerhouse arsenal of content.” Peloton The product has been rumored since last year, though it seems likely the company’s continued financial struggles derailed an earlier release. New CEO Barry McCarthy outlined the company’s existing inventory issues on a recent investor call, noting: The balance sheet challenge has been managing inventory. We have too much for the current run rate of the business, and that inventory has consumed an enormous amount of cash, more than we expected, which has caused us to rethink our capital structure (more on this in a moment). Fortunately, the obsolescence risk is negligible, and we believe the inventory will sell eventually, so this is primarily a cash flow timing issue, not a structural issue. Launching an entirely new product line is a risky move for a company struggling to move old stock. Of course, financial issues aside, the Peloton brand is still a strong one in this category, and the addition of a much requested piece of hardware could certainly drive adoption. Rowing machines have become an increasingly popular third option for full-body workouts, after fitness bikes and treadmills. Companies like Hydrow and Ergatta have been pushing to fill a large segment of the home fitness enthusiast that Peloton has thus far left on the table. Peloton Along with the rower tease, Peloton also announced a raft of new features, including Invite Friends, which lets users schedule collaborative workouts within the app. Just Workout, meanwhile, makes it possible to track non-Peloton running, cycling and walking in the app, so users can add up their outdoor excursions. The company says Just Workout was “consistently a top requested feature.” The company also announced plans to open its Peloton Studios in New York and London for member workouts. |
null | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 5 | 12 | null |
As FTX’s CEO eyes Robinhood, will we see crypto exchanges move into equities trading? | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | parties harder than I do, I spent a portion of my week reading through Coinbase’s investor call after its earnings report. The U.S. crypto exchange pulls in some questions from non-analysts during its chats, which makes for a slightly more entertaining set of prompts and responses. You can read it all . I bring it up because someone asked Coinbase if the company could spot a “strategic advantage in acquiring or merging with Robinhood.” You might be shocked to learn that Coinbase wasn’t entirely effusive about the idea. And then, yesterday, the CEO of Coinbase rival FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, that he had purchased 56,273,469 shares in Robinhood, representing around 7.6% of common stock in the company. Shares of Robinhood are up hugely in pre-market trading, rising nearly 24% in the wake of the news. Why? Because investors are hoping that FTX will scoop up Robinhood for a premium. If FTX was to buy Robinhood, investors would likely expect an exit price far above its depressed share price. Therefore, as the FTX CEO moved into the stock, its potential near-term exit value shot higher, making it a buy. Per Bankman-Fried’s filing, he thinks that the Robinhood shares “represent an attractive investment.” There is an interesting tension between the Coinbase and FTX news that we should unpack. It’s Friday, and we deserve a bit of a think. Let’s have some fun! A running joke at TechCrunch is that all fintech companies, regardless of where they start, wind up looking about the same. A good example of this is SoFi, best known for its student loan refinancing work, which now offers credit cards, mortgages, business products, checking accounts and more. SoFi even offers crypto investing to a degree, which might seem like a pretty big stretch from its origin point. The fact that SoFi went broad is not a diss; instead, it’s a reminder that acquiring users in the fintech market is expensive. That high cost makes it good business to try to get every user at your fintech company to use as many products as possible after they are acquired. The logic here is simple: CAC is CAC, so if you want to bolster customer leverage, tack on more LTV. (In venture-speak, CAC means “customer acquisition cost,” while LTV refers to the lifetime value of a customer.) This is also why we’ve seen Square become Block and spread its wings across the fiat and web3 economies, why you can buy and sell crypto with PayPal, and so forth. And yet when Coinbase held its earnings call, president and COO Emilie Choi said the following response to the question about possibly buying Robinhood (emphasis TechCrunch): |
PSA: Owl City remixed Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | My Chemical Romance yesterday released their . Kendrick Lamar just dropped . But did you know that this morning, Owl City Smash Mouth’s seminal hit “All Star”? You might be wondering why we are covering this on TechCrunch, which is not a music website. My editor is probably wondering the same thing. But here are the tech angle(s): Anyway, if you want to distract yourself from the of tech, have you considered listening to Owl City’s remix of “All Star”? Have you read the in which Smash Mouth’s Paul De Lisle calls the song “a wonderfully creative and unique reimagining,” noting that it is an “honor” that Owl City remixed it? Did you know that Adam Young says “All Star” is one of his favorite songs of all time, and is he serious, or is that part of the joke? Did he really get 1,000 hugs from 10,000 lightning bugs ? Okay, here’s the song: |
Zoom dives deeper into intelligent customer service with Solvvy acquisition | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | Zoom swung for the fences last summer when its stock value was soaring, to get into customer service. Eventually when , but Zoom’s desire to get into customer service one way or the other didn’t diminish. Earlier this year, the company announced , which would take advantage of existing Zoom capabilities. As the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new service: Combining contact center functionality with Zoom unified communications solutions, Zoom Contact Center can operate as a standalone customer experience solution or integrate directly into an existing website or application. Zoom customers who use Zoom Meetings, Zoom Phone, and/or Zoom Chat will recognize the agent and supervisor interaction handling experience, as it is part of the same Zoom application. By pulling together some existing functions, the company was able to offer a customer service experience inside the Zoom tool set. Today, the company announced plans to extend that , a nine-year-old startup that concentrates on conversational AI. With Solvvy, the company gets more automation and intelligence and the ability to clear routine questions without having to speak to a person. Velchamy Sankarlingam, president of Product and Engineering at Zoom, certainly recognizes that this acquisition gives the company crucial functionality for competing in this space. “Solvvy’s proprietary technology will broaden Zoom Contact Center’s offering with scalable self-service and conversational AI. Our customers will benefit from an automated, integrated, and easy-to-deploy contact center, which will help answer end-customers’ questions and solve issues faster – improving the overall customer experience and driving operational savings,” Sankarlingam wrote in announcing the deal. Brent Leary, principal analyst and founder at CRM Essentials, who watches the customer service space, says that this may be a more practical deal than the one with Five9. “I think this could actually be a better fit for Zoom than Five9 would have been. Conversational AI integration with Zoom’s communications platform seem like a nice combination that strengthens both sides and potentially creates better experiences for both customers and employees interacting with each other,” he told TechCrunch. While the companies did not share a purchase price, Solvvy, which launched back in 2013, raised $16.5 million along the way, according to Crunchbase . The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of this fiscal year. Zoom stock is up over 9% in early trading this morning. |
This week in TechCrunch podcasts: Chain Reaction, Found, Equity and The TechCrunch Live Podcast | Matt Burns | 2,022 | 5 | 13 | than just a site with words. We’re also building a growing stable of podcasts focused on the most critical topics relating to the startup and venture capital worlds. To help you find the right show for your interests, we’ve compiled our audio output from the week. Embedded below is the latest from , our new and stellar crypto-focused podcast hosted by and . You will also find , a long-form bit of work that goes deep on the real saga of company formation from and . There’s an audio-only version of hosted by that features founders and investors discussing successful pitch decks. Finally, there’s , TechCrunch’s long-running, Webby-award-winning podcast focused on venture capital and the latest startup news, hosted by , and . We have more coming, so stay tuned. And if you are more into the written over the spoken word, well on the above topics as well. Welcome back, this week Lucas and Anita discuss turmoil and heartbreak in the crypto markets as Bitcoin and Ethereum get hit hard, a number of other popular tokens get crushed and crypto-aligned public stocks like Coinbase and Robinhood see their share prices tank. What caused this bloodbath? Well, a major catalyst was the disastrous implosion of Terra’s Luna token as a result of ongoing stablecoin woes. In their interview this week, Lucas and Anita chat with Kevin Rose. Kevin is a serial entrepreneur who founded Digg in the early 2000s and is now an investor at True Ventures and a co-founder of the Proof Collective. His startup recently raised $10 million from Seven Seven Six and launched its NFT project Moonbirds, which has quickly become one of the most popular NFT efforts out there. Listen along as we discuss the crypto crash and its fallout, and the challenges up ahead for NFTs. Subscribe to to dive deeper. Raquel Urtasun founded Waabi in 2021 after spending nearly three years as Uber’s R&D head of Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Waabi’s mission is to develop an AI-first approach to speed up the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles, starting with long-haul trucks. To do so, her company raised an $83.5 million Series A with Khosha Venture’s Sven Strohband leading the round. Both will speak to Urtasun’s unique (and commanding) perspective, and what allowed the company to raise the massive Series A. This event is also available on . See upcoming events ! Sassie Duggleby is leading the team at Venus Aerospace to develop a spaceplane that could go from LA to Tokyo in an hour. As CEO, Sassie sets the tone that her team doesn’t have to adhere to the typical startup grind to solve some serious deeptech issues. She talks with Darrell and Jordan about honoring the company’s namesake — Venus, the goddess of love — and loving her customers and her employees well, all while working to bring the world closer together with greener, more efficient travel. Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week. Happily once again we did not start the day by talking about Elon Musk and Twitter, though the news was not really very good: This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, and asked: The question comes after Natasha’s recent Startups Weekly column, In the piece, which , she explored the idea of employee whiplash, and why this moment in pullback is different than what we saw in March 2020. The goal of the episode was to humanize the tech layoffs we’ve seen ripple across the startup ecosystem, from buzzy, big names like Cameo, On Deck and Robinhood, to B2B platforms like Workrise and Thrasio. , the common thread between most of these layoffs, according to founders, is that there’s been a shift in the market and a serious pivot in business is required. A pivot, that is, that hurts the employees that built your product up after high demand. This week we recorded live, which is always good fun, meaning that we took some questions from the audience. If you want that version of the show, we have a YouTube archive of it here. For those of you more into audio, we have you covered here. Natasha, Alex and Grace teamed up with Julio and Yashad to host the shindig, allowing us to cover the following: |
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