Author: Richard Dal Porto

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 6, 2021. We have an absolutely packed newsletter for you today. So no jokes up top from us, just a note that we’ve put out the agenda for TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS, and it’s looking mighty fine. – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Google boosts African investment: U.S. technology giant Google is investing $1 billion into the African continent to help hasten its digital transformation, including $50 million into local startups. African startup investment has been scaling in recent quarters, making Google’s news unsurprising, if welcome when we consider the uneven reality of global venture funding.
• Opportunities abound in Latin America’s burgeoning startup market: TechCrunch dug into where investors see gaps in the funding market for startups in Latin America today, discovering that while more upstart tech companies in the region are raising funds, there are still ample blind spots where intrepid investors can find deals.
• Twitch hacked: Amazon’s Twitch video streaming service was hacked, it confirmed today. Payout details, source code — the hack was more than a simple release of user data. It’s a pretty terrible moment for Twitch, its parent company and its vast user base. Change your passwords everyone, and then get a password manager.

Startups/VC

There is a veritable flood of startup stories on the blog today, so we’re ditching our usual format and proceeding in a few discrete blocks of news. Enjoy!

• What do people think startups do with money that they raise? They spend it, in case you were curious, which leads to incredibly negative cash flow results at growing companies. That’s the goal — to invest raised funds in the name of revenue expansion. Which is what The Athletic has been doing with its venture funds.
• Here’s a host of early-stage rounds from startups we think are neat: BeeHero has raised $19 million in new capital to “find more uses for its one-of-a-kind collection of data collected from thousands of active honeybee hives.” Calgary-based CostCertified raised $8.4 million to help “contractors send a shoppable interactive estimate to homeowners so that they can choose their selections during a project.” Teen-focused neobank Copper Banking has closed $13.3 million across several rounds, TechCrunch reports. Matter put together $7 million in new funding to build a better reading application, which we are very curious about. Normative’s emissions accounting service raised €10 million from U.S. and European climate funds. Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures put $260 million into Indian cryptocurrency trading house CoinSwitch Kuber, which is now worth $1.9 billion.
• Cloud migration and management tool Logicworks is homing in on $100 million in revenue.
• Our own Frederic Lardinois reports that Databricks has purchased German startup 8080 Labs. If you are not clear on why this matters, Lardinois writes that the startup in question is “behind bamboolib, a popular GUI for the Python-based Pandas data analysis and manipulation tool.” (Go public Databricks; stop putting off the inevitable!)

Getting the details right in your pitch deck

For the Pitch Deck Teardown at TechCrunch Disrupt, Managing Editor Danny Crichton reviewed two decks, “one consumer and one enterprise,” with three VCs:

• Maren Bannon, co-founder and managing partner, January Ventures
• Vanessa Larco, partner, NEA
• Ben Ling, founder and general partner, Bling Capital

Only the most exceptional pitch decks will receive more than a few minutes of attention, so Danny selected four slides “that provoked our panelists to show how VCs can have radically different views on the same material.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

Today in our big technology section we’re starting with an automotive competition and then digging into a raft of policy-focused stories that are shaping the global technology market.

• GM intends to double revenue, take Tesla market share: By 2030, U.S. automotive company General Motors wants to double its revenues and “and take over the market share of EVs,” TechCrunch reports. Naturally, Tesla will have something to say about the latter goal, but it’s nice to see the North American EV market get more competitive.
• To do that, the company plans electric trucks, crossovers: Popular ICE vehicles from GM will make an electric transition, with the company planning electric trucks and crossovers, it said during an event that detailed its future EV plans.

And now, PolicyCrunch:

• The U.K. rolls out new regulations for protecting youths on video apps: U.K. regulator Ofcom has new rules out “intended to protect users under 18 from harmful content such as hate speech and videos/ads likely to incite violence against protected groups.” The new guidelines will impact services like TikTok, Twitch and Snapchat.
• U.S.-based companies may have to disclose ransomware payments in future: It’s always risky to cover newly proposed laws, but they provide direction regarding future regulation. In this case, a newly proposed law would “compel businesses in the U.S. to disclose any ransomware payments within 48 hours of the transaction.” Which makes sense? Frankly? Now we just need something similar for data breaches.
• European Parliament backs ban on biometric mass surveillance: Worried that facial recognition is going to take over the world and that you will never be able to travel without being under scrutiny? Well, good news if you live in Europe, where there is a new call for lawmakers to “pass a permanent ban on the automated recognition of individuals in public spaces,” except in the case of those suspected of crimes.

TechCrunch Experts: Software Consulting and Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

We recently added another vertical to the Experts project! 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: Appetiser Apps 

Recommended by: Andre Eikmeier, founder of Good Empire

Testimonial: “They had a good reputation globally and had produced some good products. We also liked their flexible model — we were able to use our CTO to lead a team of six devs from the Appetiser team, with occasional UX/UI, product management and project management as needed; it was properly collaborative, not a blackbox agency arrangement. So we were able to build capability in-house at the same time, rather than dependency. [Working with them] allowed us to get a first iteration of product to market from scratch in three months. We were able to build iOS and Android versions simultaneously.”

We’re continuing to add content to our growth marketing vertical. Check out this article on TechCrunch+ from Danny Crichton: “As Apple messes with attribution, what does growth marketing look like in 2021?”  If there’s a growth marketer you think we should know about, let us know.

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 5, 2021. We warned you that a bunch of tech startups were going to go public in Q4. That’s coming true. But we also have video game news, crypto news and all sorts of goodies below. Let’s do it! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Facebook down, Telegram up: During Facebook’s pretty embarrassing outage yesterday, rival messaging service Telegram said that it picked up some 70 million new users. Recall that all Facebook services were down, which meant that WhatsApp also went kaput for a while there. In other Facebook news, a whistleblower from the company’s former employee ranks testified today in front of the U.S. Senate.
• IPO SZN: Get your boots on, everyone, we have some S-1 exploring to do. Yes, today TechCrunch dug into IPO filings from Udemy (an edtech unicorn) and Rent the Runway (a DTC fashion rental unicorn). Udemy should help set the tone for edtech debuts ahead of Byju’s own, while Rent the Runway will represent the direct-to-consumer market to a lesser degree.
• The final fighter in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is: Sora? Apparently? If you haven’t played the Kingdom Hearts franchise this will mean nothing to you. But according to TechCrunch analytics this was one hell of a big deal. So, here you go, by popular demand!

And from the TechCrunch Experts crew, “we’re looking to profile great software development shops that work with startups.” So if that is you, hit the link!

Startups/VC

Kicking off our startup coverage today, two accelerator classes for your perusal. TechCrunch wrote up the 23 companies that are part of the latest Alchemist batch and the 14 companies that are launching from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable group. We love an accelerator class here at the blog, mostly because they often provide an interesting perspective on where founders are finding company-worthy problems to solve.

• Launch outdated forms of government into space: That’s my takeaway from news that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) wants to launch a probe to the asteroid belt. I am in favor of any and all space launches, except perhaps those from countries with official religions and, well, monarchs.
• Appsmith raises $8M for its OSS-focused internal app service: The market for building software that helps companies create internal apps is big — and competitive. And a newer player made waves this morning by announcing that it has raised fresh capital for its open source approach. Appsmith has yet to commercialize its project, but with fresh funds and notable pickup from the open source community, it’s a company to watch.
• Podcastle raises $7M for all-in podcast service: While it is very easy to create a bad podcast, it’s actually rather complicated and difficult to create a good podcast. Happily for all the folks out there who have yet to kick off their own episodic audiocast, Podcastle just raised lots of new capital for its all-in-one (“recording, production and publishing,” per TechCrunch) podcasting service. So, now you have no excuse to have poor audio and lackluster editing.
• Contrary Capital raises $20M for second fund: Our own Natasha Mascarenhas wrote about a new venture capital fund today, the second from Contrary Capital. She writes that founder Eric Tarczynski “noticed there was an absence of venture capital firms focused on entrepreneurs within universities.” So, Tarczynski went fishing in that particular pond. It must have gone pretty well, as Contrary is now back with a second installment of LP cash to invest.
• Duality raises $30M to help companies share data securely: Cybersecurity isn’t just a big deal these days because VCs are investing in the space. It’s a big deal because the digital world is still full of holes, and attack vectors are more myriad than stars in the sky. Duality — the startup, not the excellent song — wants to use homomorphic encryption to build tools that “make it easier for companies to share data and collaborate with each other without compromising sensitive information,” we reported.

Finding product-market fit, from the earliest stages through growth

There’s no magic moment when a startup reaches product-market fit: no flashing lights, no siren, no balloons falling from the ceiling.

“Especially for first-time founders, assessing product-market fit at a stage where it’s mostly anticipation can be as much art as science,” writes News Editor Darrell Etherington, who interviewed three VCs about the topic for TechCrunch Disrupt:

• Heather Hartnett, Human Ventures
• David Thacker, Greylock
• Victoria Treyger, Felicis

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Facebook rolls out co-streaming to all creators: While Facebook is largely in the news for, ahem, other reasons, the company is still building stuff. Including getting the groundwork in place to allow more streamers to cast in pairs.
• TechCrunch likes the new Surface hardware: Story time! Back during my first stint at TechCrunch, I flew to Redmond to get an early look at some Surface hardware. I brought along a TechCrunch camera to snap some pics. And, in my infinite genius, took a million photos of which I swear only two or three were not entirely blurry. I nearly blacked out from panic when I got home and found out. The good news today is that my colleague Matthew Burns can actually take pictures. The better news is that he took many pictures of the new Surface Pro 8. And best news of all? He liked it, so there’s new competition out there for your computing needs.
• Apple wants to teach kids to code: 1-800-kode-for-kids is what I would have titled this piece. Aisha Malik has actually good sense, so she went with something a bit more sober. Regardless, Apple’s “Everyone Can Code Early Learners” program means that even tots can get a jump on learning how to forget where they put semicolons.
• In other news, please welcome Aisha to the TechCrunch crew by following her on Twitter!
• And, to close us out, Robinhood has finally launched 24/7 phone support: Which is big news for the stocks-and-crypto trading company that captured the attention of both retail traders and regulators during its short, high-flying life.

Introducing TechCrunch Experts: Software Consulting

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

TechCrunch Experts is expanding to another vertical! Just like with growth marketing, many startups are outsourcing their software development. You can read more about those reasons here. We want to know which software consultants you’ve worked with for anything from UI/UX to cloud architecture. Let us know here.

To start off our editorial coverage for this new topic, Miranda Halpern interviewed Joshua Davidson from Chop Dawg: “App agency Chop Dawg on helping startups build for the long term.”

As we expand into software consulting (and eventually other service verticals for startups), we’ll keep profiling growth marketers via the existing survey, which you can fill out here.

As always, as the recommendations come in, we’ll share them publicly so that startups can find the right expert for what they need.

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 4, 2021. A lot is going on today in the world of major tech companies — as you may have noticed — but don’t worry, we have lots of startup news on deck as well to keep you up to speed! Now if someone could help Facebook fix its series of tubes … — Alex

P.S. Our upcoming SaaS event is going to flat-out rule.

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Facebook goes down: The biggest news item in all of tech today was the fact that Facebook was unable to provide its services for hours and hours. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all still offline as we write to you. Given Facebook’s enormous scale, the financial damage is piling up for the social giant and its myriad customers. In other Facebook news, the European Parliament is less than pleased with the company, TechCrunch reports.
• Inside Informatica’s IPO: As technology stocks took a battering today, TechCrunch sunk its teeth into data-focused Informatica’s S-1 filing. The company went private back in 2015, moving to the cloud over the intervening half-decade. What does it look like now that it is coming back to the public markets? Indebted, for one.
• New Apple Watches drop this month: If you were hoping to snag a new Apple Watch in October, good news: The company’s Series 7 device should arrive on the 15th. As a reminder, the new Watch has a 20% larger screen, which means it can hold more text. In case you love reading from your wrist.

Startups/VC

Before we dive into a bevy of venture capital rounds, take a peek at this Mary Ann Azevedo post digging into advice from Index and Sequoia concerning how to go about raising your first dollars. It’s very good.

• An NFT and a virtual avatar walk into a bar: OK so that’s the setup for a lame joke I couldn’t figure out how to finish (The barkeep asks, “What do you think this is, the metaverse?”) but in real news, NFT impresario Dapper Labs is buying virtual avatar startup Brud. Per TechCrunch, Brud has 32 staff, all of which will make a move to Dapper. Recall that Dapper Labs was last valued at $7.5 billion, so it 100% has some stock to throw around.
• We had two insurtech rounds today worth discussing. The first is from Stable, which is building an insurance product concerning the price of commodities. The value of oil, soybeans and pig bellies — not to mention copper, silicon metal and corn — can jump around quite a lot. For many producers, that’s suboptimal. Stable has raised more than $46 million to help provide more price stability — get it? — to folks previously at the vicissitude of the markets, who we presume were too small to hedge their own risk.
• The second is from Ladder, which just put together a $100 million funding round to remake the life insurance industry. That we have two large insurtech rounds land in a single day implies that venture sentiment around startups in the space has not waned to quiescence in the wake of public markets devaluing several public neoinsurance companies that went public in the last year.
• Wasp raises $1.5M for faster web app construction: Recent Y Combinator graduate Wasp has put together a nice little round for its technology that aims to “help programmers code the business logic side of the application faster,” TechCrunch reports. It’s always nice to see a smaller round, reminders that not every company is raising nine figures in a single go these days.

As Apple messes with attribution, what does growth marketing look like in 2021?

Cupertino introduced app tracking transparency in April, giving users the ability to prevent their iPhones from sharing data about their behavior. Later changes in iOS 15 permit consumers to opt into mail privacy protection and exert greater control over app permissions.

This is all good news for privacy-minded consumers, but for startups that live and die by their ability to measure growth and engagement, there’s widespread confusion and uncertainty.

To learn more about how growth marketers are recalibrating data collection, Managing Editor Danny Crichton interviewed three experts at TechCrunch Disrupt:

• Jenifer Ho, marketing VP, Elation Health
• Shoji Ueki, head of marketing and analytics, Point
• Nik Sharma, owner, Sharma Brands

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Only you can help prevent scammy apps: Smokey the Bear Apple would like your help rooting spammers and scammers and other miscreants off of its application marketplace. It turns out that inside of iOS 15 there’s now a way to report apps to Apple. Which is good, if Apple will, you know, ever email you back.
• To wrap up news for the day, Qualcomm intends to buy Veoneer for $4.5 billion, which means that the smaller company’s deal with Magna is kaput. Veoneer is a “Swedish automotive tech company,” TechCrunch writes, which helps put the deal in context. Qualcomm makes chips — and cars, as we have learned in the last few months, really do need them.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Are you all caught up on last week’s coverage of growth marketing? If not, read it here.

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.

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 1, 2021! What a week, y’all. With the third quarter of 2021 now behind us, it’s time to gird ourselves for earnings season, new VC data drops and what we hope — pray? — is one more IPO cycle before the year ends. And with the holiday season starting in roughly 1.5 months, there’s not that much time left. So, make sure you’re reading your friendly neighborhood TechCrunch. We’ve got you covered. – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Nigeria may unban Twitter: After fail-whaling Twitter across the country, the Nigerian government may unblock the social service if it meets certain conditions. Some have been agreed to. Others appear less certain, like Twitter building an office in the country. We’ll see, but the Nigerian beef with Twitter matters as we have seen other nation-states quash the service to varying degrees; China does so fully, for example, while India has leaned into the intimidation side of influence. In other Twitter news, the company has a service for professionals coming out.
• Startups find money outside venture circles: TechCrunch spends quite a lot of time tracking the financial flows between startups and their venture backers. But not all dollars and yen that flow to startups come from the sale of equity. And the methods by which startups can raise alternative funds are becoming increasingly mature. This is good news for upstart tech companies around the world. (More on the pace at which capital is flowing into startups here.)
• Oyo files to go public: Perhaps the Q4 IPO cycle will be, as they say, lit? Oyo is at least jumping into the mix with a public offering that could raise more than $1 billion. TechCrunch has a dive into the filing in the link; recall that Oyo is a SoftBank-backed company that hit some growth issues over the last few years.

Startups/VC

• Megabucks for ghost kitchens: That’s a brand-new sentence, I reckon. Regardless, the news today is that All Day Kitchens, which operates a network of ghost kitchens for smaller restaurants to leverage for delivery prep, has raised a $65 million round. Precisely why venture capital is the right choice here is somewhat opaque, but the new capital brings All Day Kitchens’ historical fundraising to more than $100 million, a sum that is impressive for the food space.
• Smallerbucks for influence connecting: The influencer economy is still going strong, it appears, with fresh evidence coming today in the form of a $1.67 million round being raised by ProductWind. The startup “aims to connect brands with influencers in one click,” TechCrunch reports.
• DAOs, utopial thinking and you: The DAO space, or the market for decentralized autonomous organizations, is hot in that it’s something that tech folks are thinking and talking about. And funding, it turns out, as Utopia Labs has put together $1.5 million for its infrastructure work for DAOs. DAOs are a hybrid of capitalism and democracy, implying a future where the two are in closer harmony. Hence “utopia” in the name. You won’t find snark about utopia in this newsletter, or aspirations thereof. As Oscar Wilde said, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.”
• LeadIQ just landed a $30 million round for its sales software: LeadIQ helps save sales reps time by handling some of their rote entry, freeing those folks up for more creative work. And the startup has plans to better unite sales and marketing teams’ data, which its CEO reckons could help boost sales numbers.
• From the TechCrunch+ side of things, we have pieces from Disrupt that cover our talk with Reid Hoffman on blitzscaling, how startups can spend their newly raised capital (and what the hiring market is doing to profligacy!) and how to scale science.

Ben Rubin explains why the Web3 era of social media will help everybody get paid

Web3 is still taking shape, so it is hard to define.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, Houseparty founder Ben Rubin emphasized decentralization as Web3’s central feature. In today’s Web 2.0, individuals give money and personal data to network operators in exchange for access to information.

“In Web3 there is a possibility — not saying that it’s going to actually 100% gonna happen — but there is a possibility where the network owns the network,” said Rubin. “And that’s, I think, the simplest way, the shortest way I can explain it.”

In conversation with reporter Taylor Hatmaker, Rubin said NFTs show that individuals can benefit from Web3 adoption, while decentralized finance and cryptocurrency trading are more commercialized forms.

“It’s not going to be perfect, but it’s going to be a better incentive alignment than we have right now. And that will create competition on incentive alignments with their users,” said Rubin.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Blue Origin is a mess: It’s never a good week when your rocket company gets hit with allegations of sexism (very bad) and unsafe tech (also very bad). And yet that’s where Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin finds itself. The company is now in damage control mode. And we presume, rocket QA mode.
• For you Apple-heads out there, a bug in iOS 15 that was messing with Watch unlocking is set to receive a fix.
• Tech companies line up behind stronger EU disinformation code: Per TechCrunch reporting, Clubhouse and Vimeo are among a list of tech companies “preparing to sign up to a beefed-up version of the European Union’s Code of Practice on Online Disinformation.” Notable.
• Finally, the Zoom-Five9 deal is dead: Why did it fail? A number of reasons, possibly including a too-low offer price, sliding share prices post-agreement, and antitrust and security concerns. Other than that, the transaction went great.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

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 interview with Anna Heim and Tuff: “Growth marketing is not a magic trick, says Ellen Jantsch of Tuff.”

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 September 29, 2021. Welcome to what feels like fall on the East Coast of the United States. Yes, the seasons are changing, but the technology and startup worlds are refusing to shift from the high-velocity pace that they’ve held for what feels like years at this point. Someone should tell them to drink hot tea by a window looking out at trees for a few days instead of doing, well, all that follows in this letter. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Google announces slew of search updates: Alphabet company Google is the world leader on search, but with competition starting to nip at its heels, the company is busy rolling out upgrades to its tech. Today the company announced some redesign work, better wildfire tracking and an effort to bake more context into results. All of that is welcome, but doesn’t cut at the core issue of rising ad loads on prime search real estate.
• Direct listings are hot: Recent public-market debuts from Amplitude and Warby Parker indicate that the direct-listing route to public-market liquidity is more than open today. For unicorns perhaps uncomfortable with the traditional IPO, it’s more than good news.
• SoftBank pours $200M into Andela: While Tiger is making the largest media waves these days, SoftBank is still busy doing deals. Today the Japanese telco and investing powerhouse announced a deal to put several hundred million dollars into Andela, a startup that connects tech talent from Africa with companies elsewhere in the world. The round fits neatly in the talent crunch narrative we’ve heard so much about from companies in recent quarters and greater global respect for Africa’s tech scene that we’re seeing in venture capital results as well.

Startups/VC

Before we get into our general startup news roundup, let’s talk climate. Earlier this week TechCrunch put together a deep dive into the huge opportunities for startups working on climate-related issues, efforts that could improve the world and make piles of money. Today’s news really underscores the point.

Today on TechCrunch we learned about DroneSeed’s $36 million round that could help with habitat restoration post-wildfire; how climate volatility helped agtech startup Semios land $100 million; and that two new funds (Investible with AUD$100 million and Energize Ventures with $330 million) are also looking at the climate-tech space.

That’s quite the thematic bundle. Now, the rest of it:

• Read AI wants to help you shut up: Are you in lots of video meetings? Do you talk too much? It can’t just be me. Folks dominating conversations is enough of a problem that Read AI is building tech to help meeting attendees track their speaking time and get it under control. The company just raised $10 million to fuel its efforts.
• Starfish Space is building space tugs: The current space race is not just SpaceX versus whatever else billionaires can cook up. There are a host of startups building for a space-friendly future in which in-space servicing is going to really matter. Starfish just raised $7 million for its work on building space tugs. Which are like tug boats, but smaller, and in orbit. Space tugs! That rules!
• Tonic.ai raises $35M: Today from the enterprise beat, Tonic just raised a huge grip of cash to grow its service that helps provide engineers with synthetic data sets. What are those? Per TechCrunch, it’s “production-like data” that they can use for testing without annoying regulators both inside and outside their companies. So it’s like lorem ipsum, but for even bigger nerds than lorem ipsum is for, I suppose.
• Cocoon raises $20M, wins prize in our hearts for having a good name: Cocoon is building a platform to help employees and employers alike better understand and manage leave. Hence cocoon, aka the thing you spin yourself into when you are not at work. The name is good, the product is neat — admit it, you don’t really understand your corporate leave policy! — now let’s see what market appetite is for the startup.
• VCs want to buy shares in startups working to help workers at venture-backed startups buy shares of their own: Today TechCrunch wrote about EquityBee and its new $55 million investment. The company helps workers at venture-backed companies exercise their options, a process that can be fraught with both tax implications and high cash costs.

3 questions startups must answer before taking on their largest competitors

There is no level playing field in capitalism, but it is easier than ever for a scrappy startup to go head-to-head with industry leaders.

Warby Parker is reshaping consumer expectations about eyewear, just as Poshmark and thredUP made a direct run at eBay and the luxury resale market.

In a world where customers are more loyal to value than branding and 18-month roadmaps are the norm, startups that develop solid competitive plans have an advantage, says Sudheesh Nair, CEO of business intelligence company ThoughtSpot.

“Successful startups will inevitably draw the attention of powerful incumbents in their industry,” he writes for TechCrunch+. “They will fight you, but if you are positioned well for the challenge there has never been a better time to prevail.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• YouTube cracks down on vaccine misinformation: Google’s video giant is now taking its ban-stick to more content than just videos casting bullshit doubt on COVID-19 vaccinations. Now it’s taking on videos casting bullshit doubt on any vaccines. Good. This is going to save lives.
• Everyone’s favorite software company General Motors has a new platform dropping in 2023: It’s called Ultifi — Ult-iffy? Ulti-ee-fee? Ult-ih-fy? — and TechCrunch reports that the company expects the platform to “usher in a sweeping set of capabilities including giving drivers access to in-car subscriptions and using over-the-air updates to offer new apps and services.” Let’s hope.
• Twitch bolsters channel control after hate-raids poison its service: After nasty hate brigading hit a number of Twitch streamers, the Amazon-owned video service announced “new channel-level security features to help curb harassment on the platform.” Good!

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

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.

At Disrupt, Jordan Crook was joined by Ryan Reynolds for a conversation about marketing. You can read the recap on TechCrunch+, “How Ryan Reynolds has mastered authentic marketing.”

72 hours left to save $100 on passes to TC Sessions: SaaS 2021

We’re less than one month away from TC Sessions: SaaS 2021, but your chance to save $100 on the price of admission disappears in just three days. Stop procrastinating, beat the deadline and purchase your pass before the early-bird price expires on October 1.

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 back to Daily Crunch for September 28, 2021. A big thanks to y’all for the response to yesterday’s TechCrunch+ rebrand. It was a real treat. Next up from TechCrunch is our killer SaaS-focused event, which you can save some money on here. I am hosting, so I promise a retinue of medium-quality jokes to go along with the day’s panels and chats. It’s going to be a real good time! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Amazon releases a metric fuckload of hardware: Including a robot, it turned out. The company also dropped a video calling device along with a fitness wearable. The company’s $999 Astro robot is driving the most attention today, but the company’s list of new hardware was extensive. On the heels of the Microsoft Surface event, it’s important to remember that every major software company also has a hardware effort.
• The Rivian EV truck is good: TechCrunch’s inimitable transportation guru Kirsten Korosec has notes on the 2022 Rivian R1T electric truck on the blog today, and she’s largely impressed. What did she like? Terrain flexibility, acceleration speed and internal details. Not to mention that the R1T is “no delicate flower” despite its premium finishes.
• The huge opportunity in climate tech: Korosec dropped another major piece recently, this one focused on the “enormous challenges and abundant opportunities” for startups amid the rising climate crisis. Startups have shown a strong ability to drive software revenues. Perhaps upstart tech companies will also play a role in keeping our planet — our home! — cool in the coming years.

Startups/VC

Before we get too deep into the day’s venture capital roundup, TechCrunch took a look ahead to the third quarter’s venture capital results, detailing the five questions we are most curious about. Those include what’s up with venture investment in China, what Latin American tallies will tell us about the spread of startup activity in the region and more.

• TechCrunch’s Tage Kene-Okafor dug into Backdrop, a startup that has built a “photo-sharing app that merges tech, social media and travel,” asking if we really need another mobile application to help us find gorgeous places while we travel. Perhaps Instagram has real competition on the horizon?
• Highnote wants to take on Marqeta: The world of card issuance is a busy one — more here from TechCrunch+ — and is about to get busier. Flush with $54 million in capital, Highnote just dropped its stealth tag and showed the world what it is building, namely what we described as a way to make it “easy for any company of any size to provide virtual payment cards to their customers.”
• Stark wants to make software more accessible: It’s not just Microsoft that is busy making technology products more accessible. Stark is building tech to help lots of companies get in on the work. The company’s product is now in private beta, allowing users to upload designs, which Stark will then parse to identify possible accessibility issues along with suggesting possible changes. Cool!
• Heydoc raises $8.3M for medical data management: Heydoc’s work to build a “system for managing the medical data and admin tasks” that healthcare workers run into all the time is now flush and has designs to break out of its current market in the U.K. to other locales.
• Today’s Tiger round is Lifebit: Another day, another huge check from Tiger. This time it’s Lifebit, which works to provide access to biomedical data that could help in drug discovery. This reminds me a bit of what Cellino is up to, albeit from a different angle. See, not all startups have to build enterprise-focused software. How nice to be reminded of that!
• Rize raises $11.4M for embedded fintech, with a twist: Embedded banking solutions are pretty common these days. What sets Rize apart, in its view, is a method of uniting different account types under a single user profile. Synthetic accounts, in its own verbiage.

 Which form of venture debt should your startup go for?

Startup founders have more options than in years past when it comes to fundraising, thanks in large part to a surplus of liquidity. Besides traditional VC, crowdfunding, venture banks and venture debt funds are all viable options.

In a detailed overview of venture debt options, Andy Weyer, managing director of technology at Runway Growth Capital, shares three use cases depicting how debt capital can benefit borrowers hoping to retain leverage for future rounds or access working capital.

“Think of capital availability as a spectrum, from low risk and low return (venture banks) to high risk and high return (venture capital), with venture debt funds sitting somewhere in the middle,” advises Weyer.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Today in application store drama, Microsoft: The sound and fury of app marketplaces’ take rates and level of openness took on a new tune today with news from Microsoft. The Redmond-based software giant’s store will now allow for third-party storefronts. If this is more sea change than PR effort, we leave to your discretion.
• Blue Prism sells for £1.095B: The RPA market is seeing some consolidation, it appears, in the wake of the UiPath IPO. Vista is buying Blue Prism for just under 1.1 billion pounds, with an intention to unite the company with another of its own portfolio entities. Blue Prism is a public company, mind, so you should have heard of it.
• And, finally, Cloudflare takes on AWS: Cloudflare is best known for its content delivery work, not for providing the sort of cloud infra that Amazon’s AWS is famous for selling. And yet Cloudflare intends to poke the dragon with R2, a forthcoming service from the public company that will take on Amazon’s S3 storage product. Notably, R2 will delete data egress fees, perhaps putting Amazon into something akin to a pricing tight spot.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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TechCrunch wants to help startups find the right expert for their needs. To do this, we’re building a shortlist of the top growth marketers. We’ve received great recommendations for growth marketers in the startup industry since we launched our survey.

We’re excited to read more responses as they come in! Fill out the survey here.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for September 27, 2021. Today’s TechCrunch news is big news, so instead of jamming it into the intro, we’re just going to dive in! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Say hello to TechCrunch+: TechCrunch’s Extra Crunch product is now called TechCrunch+ for a host of very good reasons. This brand changeover is something that has long been in the works, and frankly I am pretty excited about it. Read more at the first link, or give us money here. (Support journalism!)
• Facebook pauses kids’ Instagram: Today’s other big news comes from Facebook, a company that has been in the news just a little bit lately. Now, after withering feedback on its work to build an Instagram for kids, the company is hitting pause. It still thinks the product is a good idea, mind. It just wants to convince the market first. Let’s see how that goes.
• Coinbase makes it easier to bet on crypto: By letting you put part of your paycheck into its service, TechCrunch reports. Obvious snark aside from the more conservative investors among us, the move makes some sense. It’s standard to put a slice of your income into investment accounts, perhaps tuned for retirement. If you think that Solana really is the future, why wouldn’t you want to put a percentage of your income into that particular digital asset? Akin to my index funds, it’s just a number on a screen, after all.

Startups/VC

Before we dive into the startup news of the day, TechCrunch spent a little time today noodling on the IPO pricing problem and how direct listings may improve price discovery for unicorns, and we also tucked into the interest viz startup valuations discussion!

• Malloc wants to help you combat mobile spyware: Your mobile phone may be the center of your life. A sort of planning-communications-gaming-dating device that also has all your photos. And it’s not that secure, thanks to companies with a bit more focus on profits over privacy and even more nefarious actors. Y Combinator-backed Malloc and its service Antistalker are helping consumers fight back.
• EdSights raises $5M to help keep students from churning: Sure, it may seem a little wacky to think of students as income-generating assets that can churn, but they are, and they do. So, here we are. Now with 6x revenue growth, the edtech service is flush and ready to expand.
• Fake meat bulletin: Two fake meat stories for you today, the first of which being that New Age Meats has raised $25 million for its cultured meat products. Second: Beyond Meat’s plant “chicken” tenders are coming to grocery stores. Nerds who are watching your weight, rejoice. (It can’t just be me right?)
• Astera Laba shows that there’s capital in the market for chip startups: Even fabless concerns like Astera. The company just banked $50 million at just under a $1 billion valuation. Startups, get on solving the chip shortage please and thank you.
• Flat6Labs raises $10M for Tunisian startups: Speaking of startups, upstart tech shops in the Tunisian Republic have a new seed fund to hit up. More good news from Africa, it appears, at least from a capital-access perspective. The continent has had a hot year when it comes to fundraising.

Creative capital is the secret sauce, not venture capital

Before a startup lands its first customer or investor, its founders must invest time and energy to develop intellectual property.

In some cases, IP can be as tangible as a patent, but strategic assets can also take the form of product visualizations, target audience data or early product/engineering prototypes.

Brett Lovelady, founder of design firm Astro Studios, defines these design and development assets as “creative capital,” which “can ultimately last longer and potentially become more valuable” than venture capital.

In a guest post for TechCrunch+, he describes different types of creative capital and includes multiple examples of how startups can leverage it for success.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• YouTube TV, now even more like cable: I preface by admitting that I am a regular YouTube TV customer. And I hate that it is, like cable, stuck in an era of coverage blackouts if the football team you want to watch is in a different part of the country. But now YouTube TV is bringing yet another Cable Innovation to its own service, namely content blackouts over contract gripes. NBC Universal might yank 14 channels from the YouTube product. Woot. Progress.
• TikTok reaches 1 billion monthly active users: In case you were curious if TikTok is still cool or has been slowly flattened into another medium for advertising and Coca-Cola ads, here’s your answer.
• U.K. clears Facebook’s purchase of CRM maker Kustomer: A small entry here, but one that matters. The U.K. competitive watchdog is cool with the Facebook deal to buy the small CRM maker. Not all purchases from Big Tech companies are dying on the vine.
• Apple is rolling out 3D view to LHR, LAX, JFK and SFO: Good news if you live in one of those four cities. Sadly for those of us with backyards in places like Providence, we have to wait.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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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 interview we published last week with Anna Heim and Ammo, “Australian growth marketing agency Ammo helps startups calibrate their efforts.”