Author: Richard Dal Porto

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for September 3, 2021. As noted yesterday, most of TechCrunch has the day off so today’s newsletter is a little bit different than usual.

Up top let’s chat early-stage startups. The TechCrunch team spent an age this week cataloging a host of startups from Y Combinator’s marathon demo day, with our notes covering all presentations from day one and day two. We also yanked our favorites in two batches, in case you wanted to avoid the full download and want to skip straight to the highlights.

But that’s not all. We also dug into trends from the group and hopped on Twitter Spaces to chat about what we saw. Of course, Y Combinator is a single accelerator, but given its mammoth cohort sizes we pay extra attention to the trends that its startups detail.

That behind us, let’s take a moment to highlight some great stuff from newer TechCrunch reporters:

• TechCrunch boomerang Ryan Lawler has been busy digging into the fintech world, including a dive into the pros and cons of credit and debit cards at financial-focused startups. His look into Brex and Ramp’s diverging strategies was also a hit.
• Kate Park has dug into Asian startups, regulatory changes in South Korea that impact major smartphone players and news from Japan that could shake up Apple’s grip on its App Store.
• Christine Hall has been hall-ing ass, covering a barrage of startup funding rounds and product news. She even found time to dig into the Zoom-Box news while juggling the rest.
• Aria Alamalhodaei has been killing the transportation beat, bringing all sorts of news to the site, including coverage of the startup space race. Which isn’t always, well, very good news for the companies involved.
• Carly Page kicked off her TechCrunch tenure digging into hackers attacking employees returning to the office and has written a deluge of stories for TechCrunch including news this week that China is hacking Uyghurs on American soil.

Finally, Disrupt is coming up. So make sure that you have a ticket. As it’s a virtual event they are cheaper than they have been in years past, despite the event having perhaps its strongest content lineup ever. We’re excited!

With that, let’s head into the weekend — a long one here in the United States — and get some rest. What a week in the world at large and in our startup-focused niche. I’ll be taking all next week off, but I will leave the Daily Crunch in the very capable hands of one Greg Kumparak. — Alex

Use cohort analysis to drive smarter startup growth

Cohort analysis is a basic tool for startups that need to better understand customer behavior, but many early-stage companies let it slide.

Grouping users into “buckets” is common practice at most startups, but robust cohort analysis uncovers trends and missed opportunities that young companies can pounce on.

Don’t wait to hire a senior marketing person or a consultant to start this critical work: In a guest column, Jonathan Metrick, chief growth officer at Sagard & Portage Ventures, offers a detailed example explaining the value of this type of analysis.

If you have questions after reading this comprehensive step-by-step, please join us for a Twitter Spaces chat with Metrick on Tuesday, September 7, at 3 p.m. PDT/6 p.m. EDT. For details and a reminder, follow @TechCrunch on Twitter.

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

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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.

Community

Join Danny Crichton and Mary Ann Azevedo Tuesday, September 7, at 3 p.m. PDT/6 p.m. EDT on Twitter Spaces as they talk with Jonathan Metrick about fintech and growth marketing.

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 Thursday, September 2, 2021. TechCrunch is largely off tomorrow thanks to a pan-Yahoo corporate reprieve. But don’t worry, all systems will continue to function while we recharge ahead of the next chapter of TechCrunch’s varied history of corporate ownership. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• China is hacking U.S.-based Uyghurs: The campaign by China’s government to erase Uyghur culture and undermine the Uyghur population inside its borders doesn’t stop there. The Chinese state has been hacking Uyghurs while traveling, for example. And the FBI reports today that the Chinese Communist Party is doing the same thing inside the United States’ borders.
• SEO is far from dead: A new $55 million funding round into startup Botify underscores how the era of search engine optimization is hardly behind us. The company said that despite seeing “more and more sections of the search results coming from first-party or paid results,” organic traffic is still growing. And everyone wants a piece of that clickstream.
• Europe, where net neutrality lives on: Europe’s top court has dealt another blow to “zero rating,” TechCrunch reports. Zero rating is the practice by which internet providers don’t count certain content against bandwidth limits, giving certain materials — often their own — a leg up. It’s a practice frowned on by open-internet advocates, and the EU is apparently unwilling to bend on the matter.

Startups/VC

We’ll have a huge digest of our Y Combinator coverage so that you can peruse a few hundred different startups tomorrow in Daily Crunch. But we could not resist adding in a teaser. How’s this for a headline: “Fintech startup Jeeves raises $57M, goes from YC to $500M valuation in one year.” Even in 2021 that’s rapid valuation creation for an early-stage startup.

• Yet more capital for neobanks: Challenger bank Point has put together a $46.5 million Series B, pouring more fuel into the startup’s goal of building a debit card that offers credit-card-level perks. Point’s service isn’t free, but for folks who don’t want to use revolving consumer credit accounts that often come with high interest rates, its model could be a neat way forward.
• Shepherd raises $6.2M for construction insurance: TechCrunch is tracking a number of B2B neoinsurance companies today, including Shepherd. The startup is working to offer excess liability insurance to construction companies, building technology usage data into its underwriting models. It’s a neat idea. Procore put capital into the funding round.
• HomeLight raises $100M: The real estate technology upstart wants to connect buyers and sellers, and also provides title and escrow services. And after its latest funding event, it’s worth $1.6 billion. HomeLight managed such a large round after projecting that its revenues will “triple to over $300 million in 2021.” So, when’s the IPO?
• Edtech’s boom is not done: That’s our takeaway from news that General Atlantic has helped pour $60 million into Panorama Education, which has built a “a K-12 education software platform,” per TechCrunch reporting. Edtech startups got a huge boost in 2020 when schools around the world went remote. It appears that that wave has yet to crest.

All the reasons why you should launch a credit or debit card

The ongoing fintech revolution continues to level the playing field where legacy companies historically dominated startups.

To compete with retail banks, many startups are offering customers credit and debit cards; developer-friendly APIs make issuance relatively easy, and tools for managing processes like KYC are available off the shelf.

To learn more about the low barriers to entry — and the inherent challenges of creating a unique card offering — reporter Ryan Lawler interviewed:

• Michael Spelfogel, founder, Cardless
• Anu Muralidharan, COO, Expensify
• Peter Hazlehurst, founder and CEO, Synctera
• Salman Syed, SVP and GM of North America, Marqeta

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

Big Tech Inc.

• All hail the Googlebot: Alphabet has built an exoskeleton, our own Brian Heater reports in his Actuator series. It frankly looks rad. At times it’s easy to forget that Alphabet retains a large skunkworks effort despite being best known today for its Android mobile software, ad technology and online document editing services.
• Virgin Galactic’s first commercial flight coming soon: After sending some folks to either space, or near-space the other month, Virgin Galactic is getting ready for commercial work. Per the company, that mission could come later this month, or in early October. For the company’s shareholders, it’s good news. Scratch that! After we wrote that blurb, news broke that the next Virgin flight is off after the FAA grounded the company. More here.
• Today in Tesla: Two things from Elon-world today. First, Tesla has been told to share Autopilot data with the United States’ traffic safety agency. And Tesla’s hyper-quick Roadster car might not come until 2023. Follow-up question: When will the Cybertruck roll out?
• And, finally, news from India: Eight banks in the country are soon rolling out “a system called Account Aggregator to enable consumers to consolidate all their financial data in one place.” India’s banking industry has a history of banding together to create products for consumers, including the “interoperable UPI rails” that many fintech companies in the country depend on, TechCrunch reports.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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.

Community

Join Danny Crichton and Mary Ann Azevedo Tuesday, September 7, at 3 p.m. PDT/6 p.m. EDT on Twitter Spaces as they talk with Jonathan Metrick about fintech and growth marketing.

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 August 31, 2021. Today the TechCrunch machine was busy covering the first day of Y Combinator’s Demo Day event, so expect to see all sorts of coverage on the site after this hits your inbox. We’ll bring you a recap in tomorrow’s edition, though we do have a first taste down below.

In Disrupt news, TechCrunch is bringing an AI investor and a science-fiction author together and will have lots on deck for startups currently raising external capital. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Databricks is now worth $38B: Data and AI unicorn Databricks confirmed its previously reported financing event today, raising $1.6 billion at a $38 billion valuation. TechCrunch spoke with the company’s CEO about what the money’s for, and we dug a bit more deeply into its revenue results. The late-stage market has been busy, but this Databricks round is big even by today’s venture standards.
• More African startups than ever in YC batch: As we write, Demo Day is ongoing, so most of our first-day coverage will be finished too late to include. But we got a look at the African startups in the summer batch, and there are more than ever. Given how active the African startup market is proving this year, we’re not surprised.
• Apna could be India’s next unicorn: Focusing on upskilling Indian consumers, Apna could become a unicorn if a Tiger Global-led round comes to fruition. TechCrunch reports that the round could be worth $100 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion. Edtech in India remains one of the key startup narratives in recent years.

Startups/VC

Because this is the last day of August, we presume that the summer lull in funding events has come and gone. Not that we really noticed a downtick in volume, frankly, but all the same, expect things to get even crazier in the coming weeks. Here’s a sampling of the rounds that we covered today:

• $200M more to roll-up Amazon merchants: Beyond Indian edtech companies, another trend that has raised nigh-infinite funds this year is startups raising capital to buy up smaller e-commerce merchants, often with a focus on those selling on Amazon. Heroes is the latest to raise capital for the concept, with the U.K.-based startup adding a few hundred million to its accounts in a single go.
• Whoop, the Peloton of Apple Watches, raises $200M: If you are a fitness-wearable user, you may be familiar with Whoop. The company’s athlete-focused wristband has helped Whoop raise more than $400 million, now valuing the company at $3.6 billion. That’s many duckets for a fitness wearable. But as Whoop has a software fee bundled into its hardware — hence our Peloton analogy — it is not simply another hardware company.
• Synthetic coffee is coming: Maricel Saenz, the founder and CEO of Compound Foods, wants to create and sell coffee sans beans. Why? Well, climate change is making growing coffee beans harder, and the process is hard on the environment to boot. So why not just synthesize your morning java? I am willing to try this out, with the caveat that coffee is delicious so it’s going to take a little convincing for me to change my routines.
• Borzo wants to bring on-demand to more markets: Delivery service Dostavista is rebranding to Borzo, bringing its multicountry business under a single brand. The startup, per TechCrunch, was founded in 2012 and has a customer base of 2 million.
• Former TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley company Quip raises $100M: Quip is best known as a toothbrush company, but it hit profitability last year, expanded its product line and landed nine figures in new capital. The company today offers a host of oral cleaning products as well as invisible teeth aligners.
• To close out our startup coverage today, Peak has raised $75 million to help non-tech companies build AI apps. The Manchester, England-based Peak wants to help companies that lack in-house AI talent apply the software technique to their own businesses. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the latest investment, which the company intends to use to scale its staff and hit up new markets.

6 tips for establishing your startup’s global supply chain

The barrier to entry for launching hardware startups has fallen; if you can pull off a successful crowdfunding campaign, you’re likely savvy enough to find a factory overseas that can build your widgets to spec.

But global supply chains are fragile: No one expected an off-course container ship to block the Suez Canal for six days. Due to the pandemic, importers are paying almost $18,000 for shipping containers from China today that cost $3,300 a year ago.

After spending a career spinning up supply chains on three continents, Liteboxer CEO Jeff Morin authored a guide for Extra Crunch for hardware founders.

“If you’re clear-eyed about the challenges and apply some rigor and forethought to the process, the end result can be hard to match,” Morin says.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• TikTok wants to help match influencers and brands: That’s the takeaway from our story today that TikTok’s “new Creator Marketplace API lets influencer marketing companies tap into first-party data.” Given how much we’ve read about astroturfing influencers, the concept makes sense. And TikTok wants its leading creators to make lots of money on its platform so they stick around. Expect to see more of this from other platforms in time.
• Windows 11 launches October 5: As a Windows fan (and a macOS fan, for the record), I am somewhat hyped to try out the latest Windows build, though I worry if my CPU is sufficiently new. Regardless, the new code drops in early October, so the wait is nearly over.
• Now you can troll your friends on Spotify with your musical tastes: Love music? Have friends that love music? And do you enjoy different music than your friends? Good news! Now you can create blended playlists with your team, so that you wind up with a playlist that pleases precisely no one.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

TechCrunch Disrupt is in less than a month, and we’re excited to share that we’re giving away one free ticket through the Experts survey. Check out the schedule for Disrupt, and read on to learn about the giveaway details:

• Have you already submitted a recommendation? That’s great — we’re counting all previous survey submissions as an entry for the Disrupt ticket.
• We’ll also enter the next 100 survey submissions into the giveaway.
• Do you want to submit 10 recommendations to increase your chance at winning? We love the enthusiasm, but we ask that you only submit one recommendation for each marketer that you’ve worked with.
• Don’t know what to say in your recommendation? Start with what traits they had, what they did to help your company, how their work affected your business and go from there!
• We manually go through all entries, so please don’t copy and paste the same response multiple times.
• Have a question about the giveaway? Send us an email at ec_editors@techcrunch.com.

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 August 30, 2021. The startup world is gearing up for Y Combinator Demo Day this week, but the rest of tech isn’t taking a pause. So we have Apple news, Telegram news, antitrust news, video game news, you name it.

But we have some TechCrunch news to start: Ryan Reynolds is coming to Disrupt to talk about his company, Maximum Effort. That’s pretty hype. And we’re going to be talking about software. A lot. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• China restricts youth gaming: To three hours per week! Which isn’t much! For a country with a large games market like China, this is big darn news. But it’s just one part of a larger regulatory push in China (including things as far afield as taking on online fan culture!) to bring its private companies more in line with the government’s plans.
• Toast’s IPO looks tasty: TechCrunch took a longer look at Boston-based Toast’s IPO filing today. Our takeaways? That the company has posted admirable growth since its COVID lows and has a very sturdy multipart business model. The company is doing the very active Boston startup scene proud.
• Spotify buys Joe Rogan, Apple buys classical music? The campaign to build differentiated music streaming services in an era when music is available everywhere hotted up this week with Apple buying Primephonic. The smaller company, based in Amsterdam, will be absorbed into Apple Music.

Startups/VC

Ready for a broadside of startup news? Good. We have what you need. But first, as a sign of the times, Telegram just crossed the 1 billion download mark. That’s an achievement, sure, but also goes to show that maybe consumers do care about privacy after all.

• Casper’s unfriendly ghost fails to haunt Eight Sleep: Remember when D2C mattress company Casper went public, and it went poorly? That misstep has not stopped investors from putting new capital into Eight Sleep, which makes smart mattresses. The startup just raised $86 million in a Series C round of funding that values it at nearly a half-billion dollars.
• Prive raises $1.7M for better e-commerce subscriptions: Two ex-Uber folks are building something new to make e-commerce subscriptions, helping both retailers sell more goods and consumers get better recommendations. Win/win.
• At long last, a personal CRM? I don’t want to get your hopes up, as building a personal CRM has been a white whale in startupland for some time. But Clay, a startup that just raised $8 million, has put together what TechCrunch calls “a system designed to help you be more thoughtful with the people in your life.” Please let it be good. I need help.
• Alpaca proves that embedded fintech is still hot: TechCrunch has covered Alpaca a few times in recent years, both when it raised capital and when we were delving more deeply into the world of API-delivered startups. Today the company announced a $50 million Series B, a partnership with Plaid and support for crypto trading. Alpaca’s work to provide other fintechs with embedded equities trading appears to be going well.
• How does one become a travel influencer? I don’t know. But if you become one, Thatch wants you to be able to better monetize your recommendations. If you are currently a travel influencer, this is good news. If you were hoping that influencers would lose influence in the coming years, this is not.
• To cap us off today, Ola Electric is looking to raise between $250 million and $500 million. That’s a huge chunk of change. The deal has yet to close, but our early reporting indicates that Ola’s electric vehicle business is about to be more than flush. “Falcon Edge Capital is in advanced talks to lead the round, which values Ola Electric between $2.75 billion to $3.5 billion,” TechCrunch reports.
• Plus, over the weekend I wrote about why startups are going to win the battle to set the tone regarding remote work, in case you wanted to give that a read.

How Amazon EC2 grew from a notion into a foundational element of cloud computing

In August 2006, AWS activated its EC2 cloud-based virtual computer, a milestone in the cloud infrastructure giant’s development.

“You really can’t overstate what Amazon was able to accomplish,” writes enterprise reporter Ron Miller.

In the 15 years since, EC2 has enabled clients of any size to test and run their own applications on AWS’ virtual machines.

To learn more about a fundamental technological shift that “would help fuel a whole generation of startups,” Ron interviewed EC2 VP Dave Brown, who built and led the Amazon EC2 front-end team.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• ByteDance buys VR hardware startup: Sure, Facebook is a leader in the VR hardware game, but it’s hardly the only player. TikTok parent company ByteDance is looking to take Facebook on by buying Pico, which had raised a $37 million round earlier this year. It’s not clear how this news intersects with gaming restrictions in China, but now we should have national champions duking it out in the VR market.
• Instagram wants to know your birthday: If you aren’t into giving Facebook products more of your data, bad news today from Instagram. It will prompt users to share their birthday and only allow so many deferrals. Why? TechCrunch reports that the change is to help “personalize your experience” on the service. Which means ads.
• Ideanomics buys Via Motors: Ideanomics, a public mobility company, is spending $450 million in stock to buy Via Motors, an EV company. Shares of Ideanomics are up just over 5% today on the news.
• It turns out that most Big Tech employees aren’t opposed to antitrust enforcement, even though the ideas being bandied about the halls of Congress could make life harder for the megacorps that currently constitute the top end of the technology industry.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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.

Community

Image Credits: Diversion Books

Join Danny Crichton on Twitter Spaces tomorrow, Tuesday, August 31st at 1 p.m. PDT/4 p.m. EDT as he talks with Azeem Azhar about his upcoming book, “The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society,” which will be released on September 7, 2021.

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 Friday, August 27, 2021. What a week! In the last 24 hours we’ve had big news from around the world, including China’s latest regulatory push, Apple making modest concessions regarding the App Store and, of course, startup news aplenty.

Oh, and Canva CEO Melanie Perkins is coming to Disrupt. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• China to crack down on algorithms: The push to more closely regulate and control China’s domestic technology market continued Friday with a government body announcing a draft set of rules for algorithms. The new rules come as China seeks to limit corporate data collection and more. Irony, of course, is dead.
• Corporations can’t get enough startup equity: That’s our takeaway from digging into the recent, record results from the corporate venture capital (CVC) world. CVCs are taking part in more, bigger startup funding rounds. We dug into the why and the how of the latest data.
• Apple makes smallest App Store concession: Per a settlement today, TechCrunch reports that Apple will now allow apps to “share information on how to pay for purchases outside of their iOS app or the App Store.” Apple called the change a clarification, which was interesting. Apple’s grip on the App Store is still tight, but we may be seeing indicators that its hold is slipping modestly.

Startups/VC

Up top, let’s talk about a16z, the venture capital conglomerate. Sure, it has crypto funds and main funds and other funds aplenty. But today the group announced a $400 million capital pool just for seed deals. The fund size indicates that a16z is either expecting to pay lots for seed equity or that it is going to make a host of bets. We’ll see.

• Rivian files to go public: In case you were looking for yet another EV company to add to your personal investments, good news! Rivian has filed privately to go public! Frankly, we’re excited by this deal; Lordstown this is not. The company recently closed $2.5 billion in external capital, bringing it to more than $10 billion in total. We want to know what all that funding has bought the firm in terms of results.
• Forbes is also going public: Via a SPAC, we should note, but yes, Forbes the media-and-magazine company is taking advantage of the boom in blank-check combinations to take itself public. We dug into its deck to see what the company has coming up and how heavily COVID-19 impacted its results.
• Toast is also going public, but your humble servant failed to get a post up on the matter by the time it was newsletter o’clock. More to come on TechCrunch.com.
• Payroll API startup Zeal raises Series A: The embedded fintech space is busy, and competitive, which makes what Zeal is building rather interesting. Is there a big enough market for just a payroll API product? A few years ago I would have quibbled, but if the OKR startup world has taught me anything, it’s to not underestimate how much demand there is in the world for software.
• Sitenna wants to help telcos place 5G antennas: Coming in the next batch of Y Combinator-backed startups, Sitenna is looking for a piece of the capital wave that will push 5G mobile connectivity into our lives. The startup is neat, so read the post, but also keep in mind that demo day for YC is next week, so we’re heading into a very heavy news cycle over the next few days.
• Sastrify raises $7M: Based in Cologne, Sastrify wants to help companies buy and manage their SaaS spend. Why does the world need this? Well, now that all software is a subscription fee, not overpaying and generally knowing what one is paying for is a big deal. And big deals plus some founder work equals a startup. Notably, Sastrify is already cash-flow-positive despite its youth.

The pre-pitch: 7 ways to build relationships with VCs

Many founders must overcome a few emotional hurdles before they’re comfortable pitching a potential investor face-to-face.

To alleviate that pressure, Unicorn Capital founder Evan Fisher recommends that entrepreneurs use pre-pitch meetings to build and strengthen relationships before asking for a check:

This is the ‘we actually aren’t looking for money; we just want to be friends for now’ pitch that gets you on an investor’s radar so that when it’s time to raise your next round, they’ll be far more likely to answer the phone because they actually know who you are.

Pre-pitches are good for more than curing the jitters: These conversations help founders get a better sense of how VCs think and sometimes lead to serendipitous outcomes.

“Investors are opportunists by necessity,” says Fisher, “so if they like the cut of your business’s jib, you never know — the FOMO might start kicking hard.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Peloton’s bad week: What happens when you have a lackluster earnings report — by Wall Street’s standards — and then get “subpoenaed by both the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security”? Well, your share price goes down, and you hope that Monday will wind up much better than how Friday went.
• Tesla wants to sell power: This is a fun one. Per an application, the world learned that Tesla wants to sell power in Texas under the rubric of being a retail electric provider, meaning that it may “purchase wholesale electricity from power generators and sell it to customers,” per TechCrunch.
• Twitter tried to bring back the old times: By having its service stutter and go down for folks today. Remember the good old times, when Twitter broke all the time? Personally, I miss the Fail Whale. Twitter, we reckon, does not.
• To close us out, Venky Adivi from Canonical has some thoughts on open source software and the U.S. government. Spoiler: The news is mostly good.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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: Natalia Bandach, Hypertry

Recommended by: Jean-Noel Saunier, Growth Hacking Course

Testimonial: “Natalia is someone with an out-of-the-box approach to growth drivers and experimentation, full of creative solutions and many ideas that she quickly tests through experimentation. Rather than focusing on one area, she tries to verify what makes the most sense to a business and designs experiments that are crucial not only [in the short term] but also [in the long run]. She is an ethical growth manager, likes to know that the business brings real value, and is ready to pivot in every direction, [which] she does fast — however, with a focus on the team’s well-being, professional growth and always avoiding burnout.”

Community

Join Danny Crichton on Twitter Spaces on Tuesday, August 31st at 1 p.m. PDT/4 p.m. EDT as he talks with Azeem Azhar about his upcoming book, “The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society,” which will be released on September 7, 2021.

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.

‘Ello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 26, 2021. Or as someone called it recently, Friday Jr. We have lots and lots of news today, with a slight bias toward big items from Big Tech companies. But first, do note that we’re going to spend a lot of time talking fintech at Disrupt this year, and TechCrunch just announced that Techstars’ Saba Karim is coming. It’s going to be great! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Airbnb expands who can help host Afghan refugees: Want to help with Airbnb’s push to house refugees fleeing Afghanistan? The company announced today that it will allow anyone to help, not merely existing hosts. Hopefully this expands the pool of housing stock available and gets more folks housed. We’re all human, so let’s help one another.
• Apple’s commission rigidity fades further: Apple’s hard-line 30% commission is softening yet again, with the company planning to offer lower take rates for news purchases, at least for publishers who take part in the Apple News app. So it’s good news, with a strong arm-twist to go along with it. Why is Apple fighting so hard to continue rent-seeking in the mobile economy? Because it’s lucrative as heck, that’s why.
• Major tech companies pledge huge dollars for cybersecurity: U.S. tech giants Apple, Google and Microsoft are pledging to work on cybersecurity with extra fervor, they said in a White House meeting. Microsoft is pledging to spend $20 billion on the effort, and Google $10 billion. Apple has promised to “establish a new program to drive continuous security improvements throughout the technology supply chain,” TechCrunch writes. All this is good news, but we do wonder how much of the pledged spending was already penciled into future budgets.

Startups/VC

The other day we noted that our own Brian Heater was launching a newsletter. He still is, and one of its pre-launch entries today sports a headline that I cannot improve upon: “I don’t know what to do with those tossed salads and robot legs.” Heater gets 100 points for getting that past the editors. You can sign up for the robot newsletter here.

• Otter.ai expands transcription capabilities: If you need to record a conversation and transcribe it, Otter is a great tool to use. I know that because I’m an Otter customer — with my own money — and depend on it heavily. Its news today is that the service is rolling out its “Otter Assistant feature for Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Cisco Webex,” after previously launching support for Zoom.
• Compa raises $3.9M to build better job offer software: Hiring is a pain in the backside, and in today’s superheated talent market for a number of startup-friendly gigs, it’s even more irksome. To combat those facts, Compa has built software to support recruiters in their work by helping them “manage their compensation strategies to create and communicate offers that are easy to understand and are unbiased.” The startup just came out of stealth.
• Playbook wants to build the Dropbox for designers: Yes, in years past Dropbox was the Dropbox for designers, but today it’s an enterprise storage and productivity tool. So now there’s Playbook, which wants to assume Dropbox’s old mantle. And it just raised $4 million in a round led by Founders Fund.
• Picsart raises $130M: Today’s SoftBank and/or Tiger round is Picsart, for whom the Vision Fund 2 just led a $130 million transaction. Details were light, but the company is now a unicorn that crested the $100 million revenue mark. So if you were curious if mobile-first creator tools could scale, well, they can.
• Atheneum raises $150M for its research and survey product: When I first saw this news I was very excited. Because I live near a private library called the Athenæum. However, this is not that, and so my local temple to books did not just raise $150 million. A startup with the name did, however, and the customer base for its research and survey service is already 500 big companies deep.
• Leapwork proves that no-code is still hot by raising $62M Series B: Based in Denmark, and raising that country’s largest-ever Series B, Leapwork is making waves with its no-code tool that helps with process automation. I suppose at the union of two hot trends it is not a surprise that the company is doing well — process automation is booming, and everyone is short on developers.
• Finally, recent TechCrunch hire Kate Park is out today with a piece digging into AI voice and synthetic speech startup LOVO, which just put together a $4.5 million round. Perhaps it can fill in for TechCrunchers on our podcasts when we have colds.

You can’t hack your YC application, but here’s what to avoid

Forget what you’ve heard: There are many shortcuts to success.

Tapping into someone else’s experience is a tried-and-true method, which is why two-time Y Combinator participant Chris Morton wrote a guest post for Extra Crunch with advice for founders hoping to be accepted by the famed accelerator.

Morton, who has also reviewed thousands of YC applications, shares his thoughts on when to submit an application, what to do if you miss the deadline and whether you’ll need to relocate if accepted.

“Remember that your application should be good enough to get an interview, not win a prize,” says Morton. “Go back to work instead of spending more time perfecting an application.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

To close out our news roundup today, a wall of Big Tech news for your diversion:

• Google kills Streams, its clinician support app: Google is very good at making things and even better at killing them. If Google was a novelist, it would self-kill so many darlings that it would only produce novellas. Regardless, that Streams is dead is not a huge surprise, but for some likely a real bummer.
• Want some Netflix games? Move to Poland: Netflix is getting into games, which is not a huge surprise given that games are a bigger business than movies, to pick an example. But not everyone is going to get their hands on its mobile titles at once. Poland is up first. That’s not shocking as far as market selection goes, given the popularity of video games in Europe and the reasonable size of the Polish market.
• Facebook considers launching an election policy decision board group oversight Entmoot coven thing: In more evidence that Facebook may be slightly too large a company to fit into the modern world as a single entity, and that maybe single-human, complete shareholder control should go the way of monarchy, the social giant is “looking to create a standalone advisory committee for election-related policy decisions.” Does that inspire confidence? You tell me.
• Lordstown gets new CEO: This is a hard, high-profile gig, so it must have been something of an adventure to fill. Still, troubled public EV company Lordstown has secured new leadership that TechCrunch reports is “Daniel A. Ninivaggi, a longtime automotive executive and former head of Carl C. Icahn’s holding company.” Let’s see if he can turn the company around.
• Wrapping up, if you are a paid YouTube subscriber, here’s some good news.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 25, 2021. If you wanted to know just how fast the technology news cycle is running today, look no further than our lead story. You’ll note that it is a complete reversion of the week’s previously most important news item! What a world! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• OnlyFans backtracks, will allow adult content: So much for all that. After igniting an online firestorm by announcing that it would end support and sale of most adult content, OnlyFans has changed course. Now it won’t block the material. For more on the topic, the Equity podcast crew has notes.
• Warby Parker is going public: After a short summer lull, we could be gearing up for yet another IPO cycle. This time the lead-off hitter may be D2C eyewear purveyor Warby Parker. We’ve all heard of the company, so TechCrunch was excited to get into its numbers. Our take? It’s a very neat company, albeit one that has an interesting time defending its final private-market valuation.
• Headspace + Ginger: News broke today that meditation service Headspace and mental-health-focused startup Ginger are merging to create Headspace Health. The combined entity will be worth $3 billion and have 800 employees. Headspace has long been in competition with Calm, another massive player in the meditation market.

Startups/VC

Before we dive into a number of thematic pairs of startup news, Kanye West. He’s out with a gadget called the “Stem Player,” which, per TechCrunch, is “designed to isolate stems — specific elements like vocals, bass, samples and drums” from musical tracks. It’s a somewhat neat idea. The fact that Kanye is doing it should provide it with a bit of a marketing boost.

From the fintech startup world today, we have two stories, both of which make us wonder just how much money can heavily populated fintech verticals absorb before investors get bored?

• Flink raises $57M more to build the Robinhood of Latin America: Flink raised earlier this year, a $12 million Series A. Now it is back with a pile of new capital. Akin to how every VC wants to fund the next Coinbase, trying to score a piece of the next Robinhood is also big business.
• Shares has raised $10 million to build a European consumer stock trading service with a social twist. Sure, there are already consumer stock trading services targeting the European market, but private-market capital is betting that there’s room for yet another. The world is going to need more active investors if all the startups hoping to serve them are going to survive.

From the logistics realm this afternoon, two stories that may give you hope for a future in which having stuff brought to your house has a lower carbon footprint and, perhaps, a cheaper price point:

• Alphabet’s drone delivery business scales: That’s the news from Down Under. Wing, Alphabet’s drone delivery company, has reached the 100,000-delivery mark, it recently announced. The service is currently live in Logan, Australia, where around 300,000 folks live. Alphabet, please bring this to Providence, Rhode Island.
• And Coco has raised $36M for super-cute delivery robots: Somewhere in time there was a committee meeting that I missed at which it was decided that all delivery robots had to be cute. I don’t know why. Coco’s delivery robot is, however, adorable. And now very well funded thanks to capital from a Series A led by Sam Altman of Y Combinator fame.

Staying close to the logistics theme, here’s a pair of stories dealing with the world of digital commerce in Europe:

• YC-backed Membo is building an “app-based marketplace for local food producers to sell directly to consumers.” It’s based in Estonia and is taking part in the current Y Combinator batch. Expect to hear more from the company next week during the accelerator’s demo day event.
• Membo will compete to some degree with a host of European “instant grocery” delivery companies that have raised some $2 billion, Picus Capital’s Alexander Kremer recently detailed. The investor thinks that startup lessons from China indicate that “instant delivery is not the magic bullet to crack the dominance” of traditional grocery players.

And to round us out, cybersecurity venture capital activity has reached new high, and cannabis-focused startup Jane just put together a $100 million round.

India’s path to SaaS leadership is clear, but challenges remain

By 2030, India’s SaaS industry is estimated to comprise 4%-6% of the global market and generate between $50 billion and $70 billion in yearly revenue, according to a SaaSBOOMi/McKinsey report.

“With the right approach, it won’t be long before the Indian SaaS community becomes a large-scale employer of talent, a significant contributor to India’s GDP and a creator of unmatched products,” says Manav Garg, CEO and founder of Eka Software Solutions.

In a guest post, he lays out several key growth drivers, which include “the largest concentration of developers in the world” and the fact that “SaaS is not a winner-take-all market.”

Even so, the region still faces challenges, since “growth requires a growth mindset.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• The PC isn’t dead: So much for iPads taking over the world, new data from Canalys indicates. Per the data company, PC sales rose 17% from year-ago totals, while tablet sales went sideways. Perhaps having full-power machines is more popular than ever, as we all have more work to do than, well, ever? Regardless, the PC news is good for a host of big technology firms, including HP and Lenovo.
• Hulu launching HDR viewing for some content: Better late than never, U.S. video streaming service Hulu started rolling out HDR content support on August 19, which “should be available to all users with HDR-compatible devices in the coming days,” TechCrunch reports. So far HDR playback only extends to certain, high-profile Hulu content.
• South Korea delays proposed “anti-Google law”: If passed, TechCrunch’s own Kate Park writes, “South Korea will be the first country to prohibit such global tech giants from imposing billing systems on in-app purchases.” Apple and Google, naturally, oppose the measure.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 24, 2021. Today’s news cycle was particularly beefy, so we have a lot of ground to cover. Especially if you want to know the latest from Spotify, Waymo and other large tech companies.

But before we do, Disrupt is less than a month away and will feature the two heirs apparent of Salesforce, Stewart Butterfield and Bret Taylor. Get hyped! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Airbnb to house 20,000 Afghan refugees: Corporate gimmicks are hollow gestures at best. What Airbnb is promising is the opposite. By offering free housing to tens of thousands of refugees from Afghanistan, the company is using its business network for material good. Other wealthy tech companies, what are you going to do?
• Ramp raises $300M at $3.9B valuation: The startup war to own the growing corporate spend market heated up even more today with Ramp raising fresh funds. Brex and Ramp and Airbase are locked in a multiparty duel after erstwhile competitor Divvy sold to Bill.com. Ramp also made its first acquisition, it announced.
• For more on the Ramp-Brex rivalry, and what their acquisitions may detail about their diverging strategies, head here.
• Boom times in Beantown: The global startup scene is accelerating, but few markets have turned on the afterburners to the same degree as Boston. The venerable startup hub is putting up record venture capital tallies across more rounds than ever. And a bevy of local investors don’t see the momentum slowing in coming quarters.

Startups/VC

So much happened in the last 24 hours that we’re forced to proceed in sections. Make sure you are following TechCrunch on Twitter so that you can stay up to date all day long.

We start in India:

• Bankers hunt Byju’s: Its IPO, that is. Per our own Manish Singh, bankers are pitching the famous edtech startup, hoping to secure a piece of its future IPO action. And the numbers being thrown around are truly astounding: “Most banks have given Byju’s a proposed valuation in the range of $40 billion to $45 billion, but some including Morgan Stanley have pitched a $50 billion valuation if the startup lists next year,” he writes.
• Khatabook raises $100M more: Now valued at around $600 million, Khatabook’s business of digitizing India’s myriad SMBs is doing well, it appears. The company’s fresh Series C will help power its 10 million monthly active users, and likely help it expand its staff of 200 people.

To lead us into startup rounds more generally, our own Natasha Mascarenhas published an article today digging into NoRedInk’s huge $50 million Series B. Its goal is to help students become better writers. I asked her why she picked the round to cover, to which she said the following:

Usually, I see edtech companies working on subjects that have one right answer, or at least can be sorted into a single category the way STEM or coding often are. NoRedInk caught my eye because it wants to bring tech to a highly emotional and subjective subject: writing. That’s a hard challenge, but it’s cool to see the education community bet on ambitious projects beyond teaching more students to code.

Next up we have a few regular startup bulletins:

• Substack buys the team behind Cocoon: Substack is having quite the week. After hiring a general counsel, the startup announced that it has acquired the team at Cocoon, what TechCrunch described as “subscription social media app built for close friends.”
• Maybe 3D-printed homes will be a thing? Investors are betting that they will be, pouring $207 million into ICON after its 3D-printed home business saw revenue growth of 400%. In realistic terms, we have a national housing crisis. So if this leads to more, cheaper homes, it’s hard to oppose.
• Sora raises $14M for HR ops automation: Sora is back this year with a fresh capital raise, after scaling its customers by 7x and revenues by 8x since its 2020 seed round. Now flush with Series A cash, the startup has big plans to grow its team and double down on making the HR tech stack work in concert, cutting out busywork as it does so.
• And in a slightly related area, Tango announced that it has raised $5.7 million to grow its process documentation service. The startup watches how employees execute a particular task, and then creates a how-to guide so that others can follow in their footsteps. For new employees, especially in a remote world, it could be a neat service.
• Finally from startupland, Sara Mauskopf (CEO and co-founder of Winnie) and Elana Berkowitz (founding partner at Springbank Collective) wrote an essay for TechCrunch noting that one industry in particular is huge, yet somehow devoid of venture dollars: childcare.

Back to the suture: The future of healthcare is in the home

It was once common practice for doctors to visit sick patients in their homes: In 1930, 40% of all consultations were house calls. By 1980, that figure was less than 1%.

Today, urgent care centers occupy Main Street storefronts and 33% of medical expenditures occur in hospitals. This leads to higher prices, but not necessarily better results, according to Sumi Das and Nina Gerson, who lead healthcare investments at Capital G.

“We can improve both outcomes and costs by moving care from the hospital back to the place it started — at home,” they write in a post that explores five innovations enabling at-home care and identifies investment opportunities like acute care and infrastructure development.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Kicking off our Big Tech rundown today, our own Ron Miller has a neat look into how Cisco makes acquisitions. The dotcom boom company is among the most acquisitive companies in the world, making its approach to snagging startup talent and products worth understanding.

And now, the crush of Big Tech news:

• Your iPhone isn’t safe from this spyware: That’s the gist of the latest Zack Whittaker story, delving into how a zero-click attack executed by NSO software broke the security of a “Bahraini human rights activist’s iPhone.” Not good!
• Peloton’s Tread is back, hopefully safer: One of the weirder self-inflicted wounds in the world of exercise tech came when Peloton tried to argue that its treadmills were safe. They weren’t. Peloton eventually relented and offered a recall. Now they are back!
• TikTok keeps making business moves: This time the social giant is moving further into e-commerce, it announced today, detailing an expanded partnership with Shopify. A service called TikTok Shopping is also coming to the U.S., the U.K. and Canada.
• All U.S. podcasters can now access Spotify’s subscription option: Paid podcasting is big in China, but less popular elsewhere in the world. Spotify is betting that the model will have legs into other markets as well. Now all U.S. podcasters can access the paid service if they so choose.
• To round us out, Waymo is rolling out its self-driving car service to San Francisco. Given the City by the Bay’s inability to ever finish a roadworks project, this is big news. As someone who doesn’t want to drive, that’s great news.

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Testimonial: “They have a hands-on approach and worked with my team to not only drive results, but educate us on how we can grow our company further.”