Author: Richard Dal Porto

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 21, 2021! News today was all over the map, including a number of items dealing with a very particular former U.S. president. TechCrunch has all the details, along with lots of crypto-focused news, product updates from Big Tech and a cacophony of startup items. Let’s go! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Say hello to the Trump social network: Former U.S. President Donald Trump is finally making good on the rumors that he intends to launch a media company. Indeed, the twice-impeached erstwhile reality television show host intends to build not just a social network, but also a video service and has plans to take on both Amazon and Microsoft. And Stripe, for good measure.
• Netflix employees walk out in solidarity with trans staff: At the junction of streaming media, comedy and a changing national dialogue concerning our trans brothers and sisters sits Netflix, which aired a comedy special that some viewed as platformed hate speech. Spotify ran into related issues when it spent heavily to bring Joe Rogan’s podcast exclusively onto its network.
• Google to reduce app store fees: The drumbeat of pricing changes among global application marketplaces picked up tempo this week, with Google announcing that it is “lowering commissions on all subscription-based businesses on the Google Play Store.” Apple has fought efforts by developers for more flexible App Store payment policies and lower take rates.

Startups/VC

Kicking off our startup coverage today, founder and operator group The Fund is putting together The Fund XX, which TechCrunch reports will become a “community of women investors and entrepreneurs that will make pre-seed and seed-stage investments.” Something to keep an eye on.

Next, we’ll take a look at a triple threat of crypto stories, and then dig into a host of discrete startup news items:

• Crypto card game raises $50M: Have you ever wanted to build your own card or board game? Struggled to find investors, backers or even friends willing to listen to your plan? Stop what you are doing, put it on the Ethereum blockchain and collect a huge check. Parallel, a sci-fi card game based on the Ethereum blockchain, is now worth $500 million after its huge funding round.
• Eyeballs for crypto? That’s the trade that Sam Altman’s Worldcoin has on offer. It has a five-pound orb — literally called “The Orb” — that will scan your eyes and award you some of its currency. Worldcoin is a Layer 2 Ethereum project.
• Of course NFT funds are a thing now: Meta4 Capital is raising capital to buy and trade NFTs, TechCrunch reports. It’s looking to raise $100 million and will be “anchored by a16z,” according to our own reporting. The a16z connection makes sense — the investing group has long-backed Coinbase, which is getting into NFTs and also put capital into OpenSea, which is also in the NFT game. So the startup investor has a huge incentive to keep the NFT magic alive.

And now, the rest of the news:

• Vertical software for parking: That’s what AirGarage is building, and it just raised $12.5 million for its efforts. The vertical software push brings targeted products to particular industries that may have lagged others in their digitization. Parking certainly fits that mold.
• Socratic bags $3M for its developer-focused task management service: This is an old round, but the startup only disclosed the capital when it decided it was time to open up a public beta of its service. Which is now. Per TechCrunch reporting, the service “wants to give engineering executives more insight into what’s happening inside their organizations,” along with helping more rank-and-file staffers.
• If at first you don’t succeed, do it all over again: Former Zenefits leader Parker Conrad’s next project, Rippling, is now worth $6.5 billion after raising fresh capital. In case you need a refresher on the Zenefits saga, we got you.
• Yummy nabs tasty $18M for LatAm deliveries: The rapid pace of North American venture capital rounds that we’ve seen in recent quarters is hardly a local affair. Yummy raised $4 million earlier this year and is back now with even more capital. The Venezuelan company wants to expand in its region, which the new funds will help facilitate.
• FlixMobility buys Greyhound: German busing startup FlixMobility has purchased the iconic — if unloved — U.S. busing company Greyhound. The operation doesn’t have a reputation for operating excellence in the United States. Perhaps it will get better with a new corporate parent.

Lessons from founders raising their first round in a bull market

The tide is high for startup founders who are looking to raise their first round in October 2021.

But easy money can create special pressure for early-stage founders, according to Lightup.ai founder Manu Bansal.

“You can’t speed up GTM with more money. If valuations go up astronomically, I remind myself that I have to deliver performance,” he says.

“If I cannot show traction, sooner or later this beast will come back to haunt me. I’d rather avoid the price runners.”

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Now anyone can host a Twitter Space: Twitter’s audio chatroom product was previously limited to folks with at least 600 followers. That requirement has been axed.
• Microsoft’s dual-screen smartphone thingy is getting better: If you are familiar with the first generation Surface Duo, the good news is that the second edition is much better. The bad news is that we don’t think that it is fully baked as of yet.
• Something something metaverse? Recall that Facebook wants to be a metaverse company now, right? Well, it’s directionally aligned that the social media giant is now “rolling out new augmented reality (AR) experiences to video calls and Messenger Rooms,” given its self-made plans for the future.
• Unity wants to make it easier to create cross-platform games: Akin to how a family might wind up with all iOS or all Android devices, gamer groups can form around console selection. Unity’s new Unity Gaming Services product may make it easier for devs to build cross-platform games. Something that we PC gamers would be just fine with.
• Why not just have a vaccine mandate? Apple will require non-vaccinated employees to be tested for COVID-19 daily, which seems very much like a faff to get folks to get vaccinated without telling them to. Which it effectively is.
• EU considers banning “creepy” ads: According to our own Natasha Lomas, “European Union lawmakers are mobilizing support for a ban on tracking-based advertising.” Given how popular that particular form of advertisement has proven, this is big news.

TechCrunch Experts

If you have a software consultant that you think other startup founders should know about, fill out the survey here.

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Consultant: ThinkNimble

Recommended by: Philip Deng, Grantable

Testimonial: “They are focused on helping startups succeed and they care deeply about the missions of the companies they help. They brought us way forward in terms of our design and also connected us with lots of thoughtful people beyond the company who have helped us move forward.”

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 20, 2021. It’s been quite a day, with Facebook making a number of headlines, a blizzard of IPO updates and some acquisition scuttlebutt along with a big Twitter deal. Strap in; we have some work to do.

From the TechCrunch side of things, our SaaS event is just around the corner and our space-themed Session is taking off shortly after. See you there! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Facebook said to ponder name change: Remember when Google created Alphabet, a holding company for its various ambitions? Facebook is reportedly mulling a similar reset and potentially renaming itself. Twitter immediately exploded into jokes, but the core news element — that Facebook really is focused on building a so-called metaverse company — appears serious enough. Perhaps the focus explains the company’s long-held focus on VR.
• IPO updates galore: While large technology companies and governments made much of the news today, a number of former startups busy approaching the public markets also made plenty of noise. Backblaze, for example, reported in its IPO filing that it has been a cash-efficient operation en route to going public. Separately, Udemy set an initial IPO price range, perhaps valuing the company at more than $4 billion. And Rent the Runway is pursuing an IPO at a valuation north of $1 billion, though we have yet to fully parse that filing.
• PayPal may buy Pinterest: And because the day was not busy enough, news that U.S. fintech giant PayPal may buy fellow domestic public company Pinterest raised eyebrows in both financial and technology circles. Precisely what PayPal will do with Pinterest as an asset is not clear, but there is a certain historical irony to PayPal, which famously split from eBay, potentially linking up with another non-financial company.

Startups/VC

Before we dive into pieces of discrete news, our own Romain Dillet has a great piece out today concerning how startups can go about picking the right technology stack for their business. If you are in building mode, this might be just the bit of writing you were looking for.

• Fraud prevention as a service: That appears to be the gig that Resistant AI — which just raised $16.6 million — is chasing. Per Natasha Lomas, the startup “uses artificial intelligence to help financial services companies combat fraud and financial crime.” At some point, it will be entirely possible to spin up a neobank that fully outsources every single element of its tech stack.
• Shipping carpooling is big business: Flock Freight is the newest unicorn after raising nine figures worth of cash from SoftBank in a Series D. Working in the shared truckload market, here’s hoping that Flock can do something about the global supply chain crisis.
• DeFi startups stay in the spotlight: On the day when well-known cryptocurrency bitcoin reached a new all-time value high in USD terms, Element Finance announced a $32 million Series A for its decentralized yield generating service. Polychain Capital led the deal. Per TechCrunch, the company, built atop the Ethereum blockchain, allows users to earn “predictable returns on investments.” In the age of bonds with negative yield, stronger yields from Crypto Land could prove a big draw for blockchain take as a whole.
• Stripe buys India’s Recko: Giant fintech company Stripe, which has yet to go public despite its mammoth scale, has made its first buy in India. The acquired company, Recko, has “built a platform that lets businesses track and automate payments reconciliation.” Payment reconciliation may not get you excited, but the buy shows just how big Stripe’s ambitions are as an entity.
• New IP is worth a fortune: That appears to be the lesson from Superplastic’s $20 million Series A. The company has created a stable of digital characters that partner up with real folks for collabs and the like. Mock this all you want, but it makes way more sense than paying $3 million for the digital signature to an ape image on a single blockchain.
• TechCrunch is keeping technology accessibility in our line of sight. Read more here.

The Automattic TC-1

Our latest long-form look at a notable tech company examines Automattic, “the leading commercial complement to the open source WordPress publishing platform.”

At 16 years old, the company is growing into a major media player: Its purchase of Tumblr expanded its reach into social media, and WooCommerce, its open source e-commerce plugin for WordPress users, integrates with POS systems in the real world.

Broken into four parts, this series examines Automattic from multiple angles:

• Part 1: How doing everything wrong turned Automattic into a multibillion-dollar media powerhouse (origin story)
• Part 2: There’s nothing Automattic about balancing commercial growth with an open source developer community (open source development)
• Part 3: Can social and e-commerce transform the future of the open web? (acquisitions and future strategy)
• Part 4: The future of remote work is text (remote work culture)

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

We have a lot of big technology news to get through. So, we’ve grouped entities where possible:

• Facebook: The company was fined $70 million for flouting an order from the U.K. related to its purchase of Giphy. And the company’s efforts to make its Groups feature work more smoothly continues.
• Microsoft: Remember when Microsoft said that it would allow users to run Android apps on Windows 11? Well, we now have an idea of what that will look like. How excited you are — or not — by this news will depend on your platform of choice, but recall that Linux is also besties with Windows these days, so the Android move fits into a larger thematic push by Redmond.
• Acquisitions: Developer-API company Twilio is doubling down on the marketing world with a new buy as Twitter buys Sphere, a group chat application. The founder of Sphere is a name you should recall if you were watching tech news during the Marissa Mayer-Yahoo era.
• Shopify + Spotify = Spopify: Spotify is teaming up with Shopify, with the latter company helping artists sell merch on the music service. This is good. But what would be better would be to allow users to pay more and target a chunk of their payment stream to artists of their choosing. That would revolutionize smaller genres and make Spotify a place that was more welcoming to less well-known artists.
• And from the “this wasn’t already a rule?” world, the U.S. government is banning the sale of hacking tools to China and Russia.

TechCrunch Experts

If you have a software consultant that you think other startup founders should know about, fill out the survey here.

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Consultant: OpenCubicles

Recommended by: Anonymous

Testimonial: “The OpenCubicles team helped us improve our infrastructure utilization, response time and other aspects critical to e-commerce success. We were able to rationalize cloud infrastructure costs due to thorough analysis and optimization. They helped us automate many aspects of operations. We would recommend to those looking for reliable technology services, especially e-commerce development.”

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 19, 2021! We are just over a week away from our SaaS event, which means that we’re deep into prep territory. I just got off a call for this panel that I am particularly excited about, for example. The trick will be cutting down my question list until it fits into the 30 minutes available.

In other TechCrunch news, we have a huge dive into Automattic, the company behind WordPress that also owns Tumblr, which our former parent company (Verizon Media) used to own before our parent company’s parent company (Verizon) sold us and we became Yahoo. It’s very complicated, but the Automattic TC-1 is amazing. Enjoy! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Google drops new hardware, software: On the heels of Apple’s event yesterday, Google got in on the hardware action today. If you want smartphone news, we have your back. If you want notes on Pixel Pass, we got it. Want more on the newly released Android 12? Here you go. Hell, there’s even an AI angle.
• Chinese venture capital posts epic quarter: In light of regulatory tumult as the Chinese government makes strident changes to its technology landscape, economy and culture, you would have been forgiven for expecting venture investors to slow their roll when it came to startups in the country. But, no, that’s precisely and exactly not what happened. So we dug in.
• A massive ‘stalkerware’ leak puts the phone data of thousands at risk: The latest from our own Zack Whittaker isn’t good news, but it is very important news all the same. Per our cybersecurity expert, all sorts of personal information can “be pulled from a person’s phone because of a security issue in widely used consumer-grade spyware.”

Startups/VC

What is a startup? Recently there was fresh debate on this evergreen topic on Twitter. Perhaps we should just say that any company that has raised $50 million is no longer a startup? It’s something else? Something between a startup and a unicorn?

I bring all that up because I have no idea what to call Instacart. Not really. It just dropped $350 million to buy a different startup — part of a deeper move into the technology powering physical retail — but perhaps both companies were not startups? Something to ponder. (Feel free to respond to this email with what you consider the “no longer a startup” line, if you want. I will see it.)

• OK, but surely companies that raise $1 billion rounds are not startups? That would make Gorillas not a startup. Yes, the Berlin-based on-demand grocery delivery and dark store operator just raised nearly a flat-billion in a single round, valuing the company at just over $2 billion. Given the somewhat modest valuation figure next to the raise amount, we have questions, but the investment is still net-bullish for the current boom in grocery delivery startup activity that we’ve seen.
• BluePallet proves that there are infinite spaces for tech startups to build: Per our own Mary Ann Azevedo, BluePallet is an “online marketplace connecting manufacturers with the chemical industry,” and just raised $5 million. Think about all the other industries that could use better links to manufacturers. I mean, there’s at least another few dozen vertical SaaS plays there, right?
• ITaaS: If you are familiar with Justworks’ HR efforts, you will understand Electric. It’s Justworks for IT. Justworks, in case you are not familiar, does HR stuff for other companies. Electric does that for IT, and it just raised $90 million.
• Figma cuts price of its whiteboard tool: Figma is best known for its design software, but the company has also built a whiteboard tool called FigJam. It competes with Mural, we reckon. Regardless, Figma wants more folks to use it, so it’s cutting the price. Given that we tend to see software prices move the other direction, this stood out to us. Jordan Crook, who covered the news item, connected it to a larger product expansion narrative forming at Figma.
• AIaaS: A startup called Mage wants to offer AI tooling that product teams can use, without having to go beg for help from scarce data science resources. And the company just landed $6.3 million for its efforts. Mage fits into the software theme we’ve been tracking for some time of tech products working to help non-developers be able to do more on their own.
• Wonolo proves that building for regulars can be big business: While it’s in vogue to build software tooling for rarified fields, everyone needs a little help. Wonolo is proof that you can build for non-engineers, say, and still do well. The company, which focuses on helping hourly workers book jobs, just raised nine figures.
• And because their team asked nicely, Carly Page covered the recent SOC Prime round for us. The Boston-based startup working in the threat detection market just raised $11 million.

How our startup boosted productivity with ‘get s*** done’ day

One day every other week, Travelpayouts’ “employees define clear-cut goals and receive specific, usually non-trivial, tasks with little to no communication involved,” writes Travelpayouts head Ivan Baidin.

Getting S*** Done Day allowed the team to address “sidelined” projects that may have seemed like small potatoes: rebuilding lifecycle emails, improving analytics and optimizing working hours.

Completing each of these “eternally postponed” tasks created incremental gains, says Baidin. “That is something we value a lot.”

This article contains strategic, actionable advice for implementing a GSDD program that includes the lessons learned as they identified problems with the experiment. It’s a classic TechCrunch+ “how-to.”

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

The best take from Apple’s event yesterday had nothing to do with laptops or chips. It dealt with Siri and Apple Music. Who would have guessed?

• Surveillance to go? TechCrunch has a review up of the Facebook Portal Go, if that is your sort of thing.
• Good news: Brands are going to be all over AR. By the time you and I really start to use augmented reality products, brands are going to be there. And Snap is going to help them, it turns out. The social giant is building a global studio to get — I presume — dick pills and car insurance companies into the metaverse.
• And, to close us off, the American parliament’s upper chamber wants two teams picked for future moon landings. Hell yeah. Space is cool.

TechCrunch Experts

If you have a software consultant that you think other startup founders should know about, fill out the survey here.

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Consultant: Planetary

Recommended by: Ryan Doney, Ad Lunam 

Testimonial: “I vetted several different consultancies, and Planetary not only brought technical expertise to the table, but their startup-specific mindset meant that it was incredibly easy to get aligned on our mission and how to best build it. Josh is a great talent, and he’s built a remarkable team. Their work dramatically cut down our time to market, as well as giving us a ready-made jumping-off point to start iterating on our product.”

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 18, 2021. Yes, it was an Apple event day, so we have a pile of coverage for you to enjoy down below. But we also have a mess of startup stories and some IPO notes to boot. Let’s go! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Here’s everything Apple announced today: Apple’s event included new AirPods, new MacBook Pros, new chips — the lot. If you are in the market for a new Apple laptop and don’t want something as light as possible, it was a pretty good day. Unless you hate notches. Meanwhile, Wall Street was bored by the whole affair.
• Amazon in hot water over congressional testimony: After testifying that Amazon didn’t use third-party marketplace data to guide its own first-party product decisions, the company is in the soup after the press disclosed that it did just that. Amazon reiterated its policy against such actions, despite former employees claiming that breaking the rule was standard practice. Congress is peeved. And Amazon is under fire for allegedly preferring its own products, despite saying that it doesn’t. As an aside, if Amazon is unable to enforce its own policies due to its size, it’s not really doing itself or any of its fellow technology giants much of a favor as they fend off regulatory scrutiny.
• Inside Expensify’s IPO filing: Another week, another S-1 filing to enjoy. This time it’s Expensify’s turn to go public. The Portland, Oregon-based company is bouncing back from COVID impacts to its business, with growing revenues and historical profitability. It’s a neat IPO, though we’re not entirely sure yet where it will price.

Startups/VC

Kicking off today’s startup digest, a note for startups building in the MENA region: We want to chat.

• What you should know about going public: Are you a startup founder with hopes of eventually taking your company public? Good news: We recently sat down with a group of experts on the matter, including investor and operator perspectives. So if you want to get a leg up on your own future, this is for you.
• TripleBlind raises $24M for corporate data encryption: Data privacy is an increasingly key concept for global companies loath to run afoul of regulators — or consumers. TripleBlind is building a service that has “devised a way to encrypt data so that it can be shared without ever being decrypted or even leaving the data owner’s firewall and keeping the whole process compliant with data protection regulations,” which we quite like the sound of. Notably, the company is based in Kansas City, Missouri.
• Deel shows that remote hiring is hot: Talk to an early-stage startup today, and you’ll be regaled with tales of how they are eight people in four time zones across five countries. But supporting remote employees in different locales is not easy. Taxes alone can get messy. Deel manages that headache for other companies, and it just raised $425 million at a $5.5 billion valuation. That’s one hell of a load of cash wagered on remote hiring not just sticking around, but growing.
• Allplants wants to make all-plant TV dinners: If it comes in a box and goes in the microwave, it’s probably not that good for you. That’s been a reasonable sentiment for ages. Allplants wants to shake that up with vegan meals that come in a box. Draper Esprit led its Series B, putting £38 million into the company. Frankly, that’s a metric tonne of sterling. If I can find an Allplants meal to buy and try, I will report back.
• African startups take more accelerator spots: As the African startup market accelerates — data here — we’re seeing more startups from the continent take part in the global accelerator market.
• And because I cannot help but mention it, the company that sailed a drone sailboat into a hurricane the other week just raised $100 million.

Leveraging customer feedback and data to iterate on your product

Very few startups go to market with the product they first envisioned.

Iteration is a key process for early-stage companies, but it’s also an acquired skill. To learn more about how operators can lean on data to accelerate the product development process and segment users into useful cohorts, Anna Heim spoke to:

• Jean-Denis Grèze, CTO, Plaid
• Stephanie Mencarelli, VP, Product Design at InVision
• Pete Thompson, SVP & Chief Product Officer, eBay

 (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Amazon to expand Zoox trial to Seattle: Recall that Amazon owns Zoox. The news today that Zoox is expanding autonomous driving trials to the Seattle area now makes more sense. Providence next, please.
• Toyota earmarks $3.4B for battery production: How big is the battery game going to get? Much, much bigger. Aside from what that means for certain mining operations, news is out today that Toyota plans to pour billions into “battery development and production in the United States through the end of the decade.” The days of internal combustion are numbered.

TechCrunch Experts

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you’re a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this article on TechCrunch+ from Jonas van de Poel, “Smart growth tactics can put account-based marketing within reach for startups and SMBs.”

Community

Join Walter Thompson on Twitter Spaces, tomorrow, October 19, at 3 p.m. PDT/6 p.m. EDT as he hosts a Q&A about what TechCrunch looks for in guest contributions.

Next Week! TC Sessions: SaaS Kicks Off

Join TechCrunch on October 27 for TC Sessions: SaaS, where we will delve into all things software as a service. From talks with big names like SAP and Databricks to pitch sessions with up-and-coming SaaS startups, it’s going to be a conference to remember. Tickets start at just $35 — book yours today.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 13, 2021! Today’s newsletter features fan favorites in space, a startup called “Karat,” and the final resting place of ClassPass. But before we get into the latest from startupland, if you are into the realm of digital security, this is for you. – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Stripe gets back into crypto: Online payments giant Stripe is building a crypto team despite having pulled support for bitcoin payments back in 2018. The decision by Stripe — one of the more respected global technology unicorns — to get back into the blockchain world was cheered by crypto fans. Precisely what sort of competitive impact the move may have on other companies was less clear.
• Mindbody buys ClassPass, raises $500M: After a number of pivots, ClassPass stayed afloat long enough to find a new home, we learned today. Selling itself to Mindbody in an all-cash transaction likely wasn’t what ClassPass initially had in mind, but the deal has obvious synergies and with lots of fresh capital aboard, the combined corporate entity could have a neat future.
• Shatner in space: If you are a Star Trek fan, and I have to admit that I am not, it was a big week as series actor William Shatner took a quick joyride to space aboard one of Jeff Bezos’ rockets. Naturally, market excitement at events like this will fade in the coming years as such flights become more mundane — but today, folks still do really care. There’s so much interest in space flights that, well, we can’t help but keep writing about them.

Startups/VC

Before we get into our usual grip of startup news items, if you are tracking the GitLab IPO, we have the latest for you on what the company is worth (lots) and how its possible valuation stacks up against many market comps (well).

• Today’s Tiger round is Karat: Yes, the technical interviewing service has raised capital from Tiger, stacking a $110 million round at a valuation of around $1.1 billion. The round is notable for a Seattle-based company and is indicative of just how hungry the market is for technical talent. Karat is hardly swimming upstream in its target market.
• How TripActions pivoted its business and rebuilt its value: If you think back to the early days of COVID-19, startups that provided travel-related services took a whacking as their market dried up from underneath them. One such company was TripActions. But the company is back, Mary Ann Azevedo reports for TechCrunch. And it has a new, bigger price tag to boot.
• The scale of content moderation will surprise you: What does it take to keep a major social platform free of gunk? Or at least free enough from crap? A lot, TikTok tells us. The company removed 81,518,334 videos in Q2 2021 alone. That’s probably not a cheap bit of work.
• ScienceIO is taking on messy medical data: And it has raised $8 million for its efforts, TechCrunch reports. ScienceIO is “using natural language processing and data analytics to create a massive database of patient data that can help stakeholders better understand, and treat, people holistically,” we wrote. ScienceIO reminds us a bit of what Truveta is trying to do. Truveta is a major healthcare data sharing effort led by a former Microsoft muckety-muck that we’ve written about previously.
• Weights & Biases raises huge Series C for MLOps work: DevOps is a well-known category of software. MLOps, or machine learning operations, is less established. But Weights & Biases just raised nine figures for its MLOps service and has a host of major venture capital firms backing its efforts. Our read? Building tooling for technical talent is hardly a complete task.
• And, from Canada: One of the best parts of covering startups is talking to folks around the world building neat new companies and products. We’re always learning about industries and markets that are less familiar to our current lives. Such is the case with Rose Rocket, a Toronto-based startup that is taking on the TMS, or transportation management system, market with new software. It turns out that the world of freight trucking is not fully digitized, and the startup wants to change that fact.

Inside Plaid’s plans to build a new, global finance network

January 2020 seems like a long time ago: Billie Eilish swept the Grammy Awards, Tesla’s market cap made it America’s most valuable car company, and Visa announced plans to purchase Plaid for $5.3 billion.

A year later, the credit card giant balked at the deal after it attracted regulatory scrutiny, but Ryan Lawler reports that “the year wasn’t a total loss for the data connectivity startup.”

He spoke to CEO Zach Perret, CTO Jean-Denis Greze and COO Eric Sager about what they learned while working with Visa and looked at some new platform features designed to build customer trust while eliciting better insights.

“Despite the outcome not being what we predicted when we went in, I think we as a company grew a lot and learned a lot,” said Perret.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• TechCrunch’s Apple Watch Series 7 review is here: Writing this to you while wearing an Apple Watch, I fully understand the irony of my following comment, but who the hell is naming these things? Apple Watch Series 7 — which, incidentally we liked — is as good a name as Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium. Jokes aside, our own Brian Heater took some darn fine images for the above review, which we wanted to highlight and praise.
• Draft Irish decision against Facebook could wind up toothless: A draft decision concerning Facebook, the Irish Data Protection Commission and GDPR could fine the social giant some $36 million. Which is akin to fining you a fiver. It’s not much of a penalty, and as far as warnings go, it’s the very opposite. Keep an eye on this space.

TechCrunch Experts

We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here.

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Marketer: Kaveh from WITHIN

Recommended by: Anonymous

Testimonial: “Kaveh is one of the most empathetic and collaborative marketers I have ever worked with. Our team was largely brand marketers and Kaveh did a great job of bridging their world and our profit-optimized media strategy seamlessly (even if it meant an after-hours marketing jam session). Not only that, but you could tell he really cared about the brand, catching small issues with the site and sharing them with the team proactively, etc.”

Community

Join Danny Crichton on Thursday, October 14, at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT for a Twitter Spaces interview with Jacob Helberg, author of “The Wires of War,” which will be released tomorrow.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 12, 2021. So far Q4 is cracking good fun. We’ve got IPO filings aplenty and, as you will see below, more startup news than you can shake a stick at. Heck, Apple has another event coming. So much for a fourth-quarter slowdown, yeah? – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Coinbase gets in on the NFT game: Early crypto-marketplace pioneer Coinbase is following smaller rivals into the non-fungible token (NFT) game. NFTs have seen their popularity rise in recent months as speculation concerning blockchain-specific ownership signatures for digital images has spiked. Folks are hype for JPGs, as they say, and Coinbase, which generates the vast bulk of its revenues from transactions, doesn’t want OpenSea to win the NFT market. Ironically, Coinbase was famously backed by a16z, which is also an investor in OpenSea. That’s spicy.
• The unicorn traffic jam is only getting gnarlier: New data concerning the Q3 venture capital market makes it clear that there’s more capital than ever pouring into global startups. One result of the financial deluge is that more unicorns are being born than ever. And that’s leading to an ever-longer jam of yet-private unicorns in need of eventual exits. TechCrunch dug into what could go wrong.
• Soon all blogs will be newsletters: The success of Substack in creating a better-known paid-newsletter economy continues to attract rivals. This time it’s Memberful, a Patreon product. In contrast to Substack, Memberful will take a smaller cut of writer revenues, which will balance out with a flat-fee structure. For folks with a following, the savings could add up.

Startups/VC

Our leading startup story today is news that Indian neobank Open has raised new capital, partially from Google. Any large market with rising digital penetration and a population that isn’t fully banked will be fertile ground for neobanking startups. India appears to be one such market, if recent fundraising results from Open are any indicator. It just put away $100 million at a $500 million valuation, per TechCrunch reporting. Temasek led the round, which also included funds from Google and Tiger.

• Privateer wants to locate space trash: Incidentally, “space trash” is also my favorite genre of novel. Regardless, Privateer wants to help locate and map garbage in orbit around the planet. That there’s too much crap flying around the planet is a known fact. Precisely where that detritus is at any given point, however, is less clear.
• Big bucks for AI chips: The global silicon market may be a hot mess at the moment, but Hailo is not letting that bum it out. The AI-focused chip company just raised $136 million at a valuation that TechCrunch reports is around the $1 billion mark. Different computing workloads perform better on different chip designs, in case you were curious why Intel isn’t crushing the global AI chip market. Just don’t expect the global chip shortage to be over any time soon.
• Atomic is building payroll APIs: The banking-as-a-service world is hot, and startups are diving into new areas of the financial market to bring more and more of it into the modern era. Atomic is one such startup. Its product helps consumers link their income streams to different services and verify both their employment and pay data.
• SoWork is betting that virtual co-working is here to stay: Tired of working from home, alone? SoWork thinks you might be. The virtual co-working startup just raised $15 million. How you feel about virtual hangs may depend a bit on how comfortable you are on long-form audio calls — gamers are already accustomed to this — but it’s neat to see companies like SoWork raise even as some companies begin a slow march back to offices.
• MentalHappy wants to take on mental health with targeted groups: Even if you have insurance, getting a therapist is about as much fun as arguing with your insurance company. Perhaps because it often involves precisely that. MentalHappy is a startup that isn’t setting out to solve the therapist shortage — or the high cost of therapy. Instead, for a low monthly fee, it offers peer support groups. Frankly, I dig it.
• EngFlow wants to speed up application compiling: Look, this comic wouldn’t exist if compiling code didn’t take a minute. Sadly, EngFlow wants to delete the engineer equivalent of a smoke break by cutting down on compilation lag. And it just raised a few million bucks for its efforts.
• Plume’s mesh Wi-FI service raises $300M: Here’s a company that we should have probably noted before today. Plume is “a communications startup that partners with carriers to provide smart mesh Wi-Fi to improve broadband connectivity in homes, and then offers other smart home services on top of that network,” per TechCrunch. And it is now worth some $2.6 billion. Who knew!
• And, finally, Canva is getting into video.

Selling into the enterprise: How Slack and other startups get it wrong

Going up against large enterprise companies may be daunting for a startup, but Scribe CEO and co-founder Jennifer Smith says you’re never too small to start.

Much to their detriment, many early-stage companies wait too long to spin up strategies for competing with industry leaders, she writes. One example: Twelve years after its founding, Slack exited to Salesforce for $27.2 billion.

“The question is, if Slack had considered selling into the enterprise sooner, could it have survived as an independent public company?”

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Google flips the script, demands cash from Epic: As gaming company Epic takes on both Google and Apple in court, it’s showing just how long a road may be ahead of companies looking to break the status quo in operating-system-locked application marketplaces. Apple is appealing one modest ruling, and Google is now demanding financial relief from the Fortnite maker.
• A TechCrunch guest post dug into the UI of Apple Fitness+, which I quite enjoyed.
• Twitter is launching an audio accelerator for its Clubhouse-competing Spaces product: Here at TechCrunch, we honestly like Twitter Spaces because they are easy to spin up and reside where we already spend too much time. It will be notable to see which service can attract and retain the most in-demand talent over time.

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Community

Join Danny Crichton on Thursday, October 14, at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT for a Twitter Spaces interview with Jacob Helberg, author of “The Wires of War,” which will be released tomorrow.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 11, 2021! It’s Monday, y’all, and that means we’re all strapping back into work mode. Looking ahead, we’re expecting two public debuts this week (GitLab and AvidXchange), and we’re just heading into earnings season. Get hype! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Apple appeals Epic decision: Remember when Apple managed to avoid a monopoly ruling and wound up being told by a judge to let third-party developers tell users that there were other ways to buy their iOS software? Well, Apple isn’t really big about the idea. So it’s appealing the ruling and asking for a stay. In an era when Microsoft is building inroads with developers, Apple appears confident in its market position to the extent that it’s comfortable moving in the opposite direction. (I’m reminded of the old-timey phrase my dad learned from a farmer: “Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.”)
• Reddit hires former Google Cloud exec: Reddit, a place where communities can run forums for anything under the sun (from the niche to the mainstream), is building out its executive team. Normally, we’d add “in anticipation of an IPO” to that comment, but given that Reddit is having a smashing time raising private capital, we doubt that any sort of liquidity event is in the near-term offing.
• Inside NerdWallet’s IPO filing: Not every venture-backed company is building enterprise software. NerdWallet is one such company. It’s essentially a content play that writes stuff for consumers and SMBs in search of financial products and advice. The goal is to provide unbiased commentary — and make fat commissions. It’s a pretty good business overall, though its IPO filing details the impacts of both COVID (on growth) and a recent push on the advertising front (harming profits).

Startups/VC

• LA works to figure out air taxis: Once, when visiting Brazil, I was told that the São Paulo elite get around by helicopter. That made sense given that the traffic I experienced in that lovely city was fang-meltingly miserable. LA is something akin to the American São Paulo from a traffic perspective. So it’s not a huge shock that LA is ahead of the market on figuring out how air taxis are going to work. If they are going to work at all.
• Space factories? Varda Space is going to get its first space factories into orbit in 2023 thanks to SpaceX launch systems and hardware help from Rocket Lab. It’s going to send up three vesicles, which will include a factory (manufacturing?) module and a way of coming back to Earth. In time, space factories will make stuff that is supposed to stay in space, but it appears for now that Varda wants to do work in low grav that is hard to do elsewhere and bring the goods back planetside when done.
• FrankieOne raises $16M for fintech fraud prevention: Breaking out a particular problem from a busy industry and offering a solution as a service is good business. Many startups work along those lines. One such company is FrankieOne, which TechCrunch writes offers financial technology companies “ID and fraud management as a service.”
• French round No. 1: Swile has raised $200 million from SoftBank for its employee card service that puts benefits on said plastic. What do cards from the new unicorn unlock for staff? TechCrunch writes that benefits like “meal vouchers, gift cards and sustainable mobility vouchers” are typical.
• French round No. 2: Homa Games has raised $50 million in a round led by Northzone for its mobile games business. The company has racked up hundreds of millions of downloads just this year.
• Mono raises $15M: Er, no, Mono has nothing to do with mono. Instead, it’s a startup in Africa that is building a Plaid-like service for its continent. Which is super neat, and, frankly, an easy thing to fund for VCs, we reckon. African fintech has been hot lately, so who wouldn’t want to put capital into its connective tissue?

BaaS served three ways: A closer look at a rapidly evolving market

Ryan Lawler continues his exploration of the emerging banking-as-a-service sector by examining three different BaaS strategies:

• Turnkey banking as a service.
• Playing matchmaker between banks and fintechs.
• Buying a bank to get into BaaS.

“If you’re looking to spin up a new fintech app or want to add banking, debit cards or other financial services to your existing business, knowing how each of these competitors is positioned to work with customers and bank partners is key,” he writes.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Facebook’s oversight board to meet with whistleblower: The latest page in the current chapter of the long saga of Facebook’s product decisions is that the company’s “external policy review board will meet with Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who went public with her concerns about the company last week.” What the faux regulatory body will do afterward is not clear, but the news itself matters.
• Hey, look, Robbie is on TechCrunch: Former Engadget hack, genial human and Bay Area musical legend Roberto Baldwin has written about Ford’s electric Mustang for our pages. Robbie is a journalist par excellence and a gearhead to boot.

TechCrunch Experts

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Community

Join Danny Crichton on Thursday, October 14, at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT for a Twitter Spaces interview with Jacob Helberg, author of “The Wires of War,” which will be released tomorrow.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 8, 2021! It’s Friday! We made it! If you are tired, consider how weary the Instagram team must be. Their service is having even more uptime issues this afternoon. Between that and announcing that its users are no longer allowed to sell bits of the Amazon rainforest, it’s a banner week for Zuck’s empire. Now, let’s talk tech! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Elon’s mystery gas: Big plans from SpaceX regarding its largest rockets are missing a few details on where the company intends to find tens of millions of cubic feet of natural gas that it will need. Sure, Tesla is petrol-free, but SpaceX has left a few question marks in a draft programmatic environmental assessment (PEA) regarding combustible gas that have us scratching our heads.
• Europe’s startups set to receive pre-seed boost: Early-stage founders in Europe are about to have a few new accelerators in their neighborhood, courtesy of Techstars. The accelerator collective is opening programs in Paris (again) and Stockholm, in addition to its current efforts on the continent. Per Techstars’ CEO, there’s far more founders in Europe today than are being served, despite record venture capital totals.
• Tesla to move its HQ to Texas: Ah, taxes. Tesla will move its headquarters to Austin, Texas from its traditional California home, but it won’t stop investing in the West Coast state. Indeed, the company intends to boost “output at its Fremont gigafactory by 50%,” TechCrunch reports. So, Texas taxes. That’s what this move appears to be about.

Startups/VC

• TechCrunch’s Annie Njanja reports that “economic growth and the rapid expansion of digital and mobile services” in markets like Kenya and Africa as a whole could lead to a boom in insurtech products. Insurtech has proved fertile ground for founders and investors alike in North America and Europe. So, why not Africa as well? African startups have proved strong in the fintech market, so perhaps the push into insurtech is overdue.
• Today’s Tiger round is actually news of an impending round. Namely that the investing impresario may put capital to work in Slice. Slice is an Indian company looking to bolster credit card usage in the country. Tiger may put $100 million into the company, per TechCrunch reporting. Manish Singh writes for the blog that Slice “raised around $30 million in its previous equity financing rounds and was valued at under $200 million in a round earlier this year.” More soon, I reckon. (Note: Slice, the American pizza software service, is not the same thing as the above Slice. Also note that startups should come up with more distinct names!)
• Next up: Alpha Paw, which just raised $8 million. If you are ready to mock a pet wellness startup for raising venture capital money, I can tell that you have not been to the vet recently. If you can keep your pets healthy, you might be able to save big bucks. Alpha Paw “offers pet products for dogs and cats like food and supplements that are customized with pet breed in mind,” to be specific. Given that about half my generation has more dogs than children (current score is 3-0 in my house), I fully expect Alpha Paw to raise $800 million more by December.
• Closing out our startup coverage today, Productfy has raised $16 million for its banking-as-a-service (BaaS) product. I have to admit that I have lost track of all the different BaaS (pronounced like the fish, if you were wondering) startups out there. They all seem able to raise capital, so there must be growth to be shared. But in time are we going to see BaaS consolidation? We’re finally seeing a little movement in the hot OKR startup space, and BaaS feels even more crowded. For now, however, Productfy “aims to stand out with its mission to build DeFi for traditional finance, according to founder and CEO Duy Vo,” per our own Mary Ann Azevedo.

Private equity is ready to take MSP consolidation to the next level

Good news: Businesses of all stripes are digitizing their operations faster than ever before, creating huge advantages for companies that start the work now.

Bad news: Many technical workers are already looking for new jobs, and companies must compete to find the right people who can build robust, secure IT environments.

Managed services providers (MSPs) are filling the gap, and private equity firms are paying attention.

“MSPs have all the ingredients that private equity loves,” write Mike McGill and Kevin Jolley of Cowen and Company, LLC.

“A strong demand trend, low risk of obsolescence, a ‘sticky’ service that attracts long-term customers and high recurring revenues, strong cash flow margins and a relatively ‘asset-light’ business.”

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Google, YouTube to ban climate denial ads: Mountain View-based Alphabet has decided it no longer wants to profit from folks who deny climate change. To that end, the company will “no longer allow ads or monetization for content that promotes climate change denialism.”
• Google to distribute physical hardware keys to 10,000 users under threat of Russian hacking: At some point we have to come up with a better solution to state-sponsored hacking than Google sending out security keys, but for now this counts as good news.
• And Pinterest is building something called havens that are “space on its platform to explore the relationship between mental health and rest.” Which sounds nice, I suppose.

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Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Consultant: ManagedKube

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Testimonial: “[They have] a deep understanding of cloud technology and how to use that in combination with open source software to get us an infrastructure that is scalable but easy to understand and maintain. They were literally trying to make themselves obsolete!”

We’re continuing to add content to our growth marketing vertical. Check out this article on TechCrunch+ from Jonathan Martinez: “5 common growth marketing mistakes startups make.”  If there’s a growth marketer you think we should know about, let us know.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 7, 2021! Sure, we’re excited about software here at TechCrunch, but we also keep at least one eye on the sky at all times. Which is why our upcoming Sessions: Space event is going to be out of this world. Sorry. – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Global startups raise record sums. Again. Another quarter, another set of record funding totals for global startups. New data from CB Insights indicates that upstart companies around the world managed to just beat the records that they set in Q2 of this year. All told, 2021 is going to be a barn-burning year of venture capital investment that we may never beat in our lifetimes.
• Microsoft buys OKR software startup Ally: TechCrunch has long tracked the OKR software market as crowded and incredibly busy when it comes to raising capital and posting big ARR growth numbers. Today, Microsoft shook up the startup niche by buying one of its better-funded competitors. Now what?
• Developers are building tools to get around the Apple tax: While global regulators figure out what to do with app marketplace payment lock-in, startups are getting to work. Paddle is building what TechCrunch describes as a “new in-app purchasing (IAP) system aimed at iOS developers that’s designed to be a drop-in replacement for Apple’s own IAP.” Good!

Startups/VC

• I am here for robot tire changing: I don’t know how to change a tire, as I am a useless man-child who types for a living. But even among folks who know how, the rote task isn’t likely popular. Enter robots! RoboTire wants to bring robotic tire changing to the car service world and has raised a $7.5 million Series A round to fund its aspirations.
• You can no longer pay real money to buy fake stock in real companies: A day after Visionrare announced a marketplace where you could buy NFTs of fake shares of real startups, that appears to be over. Sadly. It was great for headlines.
• We’re holding you to this deadline, Cruise: Well-funded self-driving car company Cruise intends to have tens of thousands of self-driving cars on the roads by 2030. If the company misses this deadline, I have decided that all its execs have to bike to work for the next decade. (Sticking to the theme of my personal incompetence, driving is hard and I do not like doing it.)
• Startup with video game name that doesn’t deal in video games raises money: If you have ever heard of the game Chrono Trigger, you are excused from wondering if Chronosphere is a gaming company. It is not. It is, instead, a data observability company. And it has put together a $200 million round, which should be more than enough capital to take on Monte Carlo and other players in its niche.
• Instacart buys FoodStorm: Grocery delivery behemoth Instacart announced this morning that it has purchased FoodStorm, what TechCrunch describes as “a SaaS order management system (OMS) that powers end-to-end order-ahead and catering for grocery retailers.” Terms were not shared, and because both companies are private, that doesn’t tell us too much.
• Microservices meshing is macro business: Our own Ron Miller has a story out today looking at Solo.io, which provides software that helps customers “mesh” microservices together. I know what that means only from a very high perspective. What matters to both of us is that the company is now a unicorn, putting up some early points in Q4 for the larger Boston startup scene.
• Slackify in all the things: That’s what Cord wants to do, put Slack-like features into any application. It offers its service via an API — naturally — and just banked $17.5 million for its project.
• Nigerian American company raises for cross-border African payments: The growing African e-commerce market is creating demand for new products, a trend that Klasha hopes to ride with its service that helps consumers pay across national borders on the continent.
• And to round out our startup coverage today, ghost kitchens are not merely a trend in the United States. They are also taking off in India. Evidence of that fact? Rebel Foods just raised at a unicorn valuation on the back of its own dark kitchen work in the country. It seems that good startup ideas are reaching international ubiquity faster than ever.

After a proxy fight victory, it’s time for Box to make some bold moves

The last few years included a delayed IPO filing and a proxy battle with a major shareholder, but events are now unfolding nicely for Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie.

Enterprise reporter Ron Miller says this is “a pivotal moment for the cloud content management company,” so he interviewed Levie to learn more about his plans, particularly in light of the company’s recent revenue growth.

For balance, Ron also spoke to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis.

“The next year is pivotal for Box,” he said. “It has to prove that it was right to win the proxy fight. To do that, it has to evolve the Box platform and grow steadily but surely and continue to carve out a niche for itself in the market.”

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Will someone please cry for the billionaires? Please. Anyone?
• U.S. Department of Justice to ensure federal contractors disclose cyber issues: If you sell goods or services to the U.S. government and are hacked or breached, you had best fess up. Or, literally, else.
• Twitter puts capital into Facemoji: I laughed when Snap bought Bitmoji and wound up looking real dumb. Perhaps this deal also makes sense. Whoknowsmoji.

TechCrunch Experts

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