Daily Crunch: Fastly CDN outage briefly takes Twitch, Reddit and Pinterest offline

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If you want to catch up on why the internet broke today, we have the story that you need. I suppose it’s nice to read that story without it being Amazon’s fault for once. Or Cloudflare. Now that we think about it, there are a lot of failure points for the internet. Today’s culprit, Fastly, went down, taking lots of the internet with it. But Fastly’s stock? Up more than 9% as I write to you. Figure that one out — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • How bottom-up sales helped Expensify blaze the path for SaaS: The final entry of TechCrunch’s deep dive into Expensify’s business ahead of its IPO is live today. Anna focused her final installment of the five-part series on how the well-known expense software company managed the growth that is helping take it public.
  • Personal computers are not dead: Remember when the iPad came out and PCs were supposedly kaput? Well, they are not dead yet, not by a long shot. In fact, here in the U.S., PC sales shot up 73% in the first quarter compared to Q1 2020 numbers. And Apple lost its top slot to HP, in America at least.
  • Investors still love software more than life: The market for high-growth technology companies is super hot at the moment, recent evidence for which was provided by Monday.com’s IPO pricing and expected investments from both Zoom and Salesforce. The Israeli company should debut on the U.S. markets later this week.

Startups and VC

We have three main blocks of startup news this morning. The first deals with consumer social applications, a category that goes through booms and busts in investor interest. The second is fintech-focused. And the third is a mix of funding rounds large and small to keep you up to date on the latest.

2 Turntables and a camera phone:

  • Dispo’s camera app confirms its Series A round: After a hyped launch and the fallout regarding a member of co-founder David Dobrik’s “Vlog Squad,” the social camera application confirmed what we had heard earlier this year: that it raised a $20 million round. It will be interesting to see when the company accesses the private markets again, if it is able to.
  • Turntable spins up beta apps for Android and iOS: Turntable, similar to Turntable.fm but not the same application, is launching early-release applications for iOS and Android. Don’t forget that Turntable raised half a million dollars earlier this year. Or that Turntable.fm, a competitor, is back from the dead. It’s very 2021 to have two startups in the market with effectively the same name.

From the world of fintech:

  • Nubank raises $750M: Brazilian neobank Nubank is now worth $30 billion and has an extra three-quarters of a billion dollars in the bank. Its new capital is a sort of extension to its known Series G, though at a higher valuation. Which means it’s a new round. But, hey, it’s 2021 and rules are over.
  • Corporate spend startup Airbase raises $60M: On the heels of competing startups Ramp and Brex raising huge new rounds, Airbase followed suit. The company is betting that its focus on midmarket companies and software will set it apart from competitors.

Our regular funding round digest:

  • What happens when you cross easy consumer credit and subprime lending scores? Kafene is going to find out. The company raised $14 million to build what one of its founders called “Affirm for the subprime.” So, buy-now-pay-later tooling, but for folks with poor, traditional credit scores. Expect the “Affirm but for rich people” to come out next.
  • Compose.ai raises $2.1M to help you write super, really, very, amazingly fast: The rise of GPT-3 has helped TechCrunch get hip to all sorts of neat language-focused startups. Compose.ai is similar, even if it uses its own AI. It wants to help everyone write faster, and, in time, offer companies the ability to have their own in-house language model to help keep everyone to the same tone [ed note:😬].
  • If you cross 3D-printing and rockets, you get to raise $650M: That’s the lesson that Relatively Space taught us this week. It’s now worth $4.2 billion after its latest fundraise, and the company thinks that it can print its new heavy rocket in 60 days. That would shake things up.
  • And the world of warehouse robotics is far from complete: So says Gideon Brothers, a Croatian robotics startup that just raised a $31 million round. Per Mike, the “investment will be used to accelerate the development and commercialization of GB’s AI and 3D vision-based ‘autonomous mobile robots’ or ‘AMRs.’”

Network security startup ExtraHop skips and jumps to $900M exit

News broke this morning that Bain Capital Private Equity and Crosspoint Capital Partners are purchasing Seattle-based network security startup ExtraHop.

Part of the Network Detection and Response (NDR) market, ExtraHop’s security solutions are for companies that manage assets in the cloud and on-site, “something that could be useful as more companies find themselves in that in-between state.”

A year ago, ExtraHop was closing in on $100 million in ARR and considering an IPO, so we spoke to ExtraHop CTO and co-founder Jesse Rothstein to learn more about how (and why) the deal came together.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Our Apple coverage is not yet complete: The company’s Realty Kit 2 is going to help developers build 3D models from iPhone photos. That’s neat-sounding tech, but I have to admit that I’m curious how it will be used in the market.

read more about Apple's WWDC 2021 on TechCrunch

To close, Google is shaking up its Android search tools after running into a regulatory buzzsaw, and Ford is making a small hybrid truck. It’s very cute.

Image Credits: Ford Motor Company

Daily Crunch: At Apple’s WWDC 2021 keynote, everything old is new again

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Today was the kickoff of Apple’s developer conference, WWDC, meaning that the TechCrunch crew was super busy all day and that we have an ocean of news from Cupertino for you to enjoy. But the startup market was just as busy, thankfully, with some fascinating funding rounds, acquisitions and more to parse through. Today we have something for everyone! — Alex

P.S. Including all of you interested in finance. Here’s a teardown of the Babylon Health SPAC deal. Enjoy!

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Apple’s keynote lucre: Apple’s keynote today was the usual affair of animation, on-screen text, musicals, and lots and lots of news. More below but iOS 15, SharePlay and iCloud+ are obvious standouts.
  • The global chip shortage: The global chip shortage won’t lift until late next year, meaning that we’re likely going to see investment in new chip-fab capacity. Like the news today that Bosch opened a $1.2 billion chip manufacturing facility in Germany. Much like the AI market is cleaving along geopolitical fault lines, in time, more countries are going to want to have domestic chip-fab capabilities as a form of self-reliance.
  • Paytm is going public: Noida, India-based Paytm, the most valuable startup in the country, will go public, it told employees recently. That’s good news for the company, we suppose, but also potentially big news for India’s larger startup and venture capital scene.

Startups and VC

  • Astra buys Apollo Fusion: This is a fun one. Astra, a space launch upstart that is pursuing a SPAC-led IPO, is buying Apollo Fusion, which is focused on what TechCrunch described as “electric propulsion.” So not fusion, sadly, but electric propulsion is a key space technology that allows satellites, for example, to move around while in orbit. It can also be fuel-sipping to a degree, making it a tech that could help satellites and other heavenly bodies enjoy long service lives.
  • Briq raises its construction-focused fintech service: The recent implosion of construction-unicorn Katerra is not stopping venture investment in its market. Today Briq, a startup that provides fintech solutions to construction companies, announced that Tiger Global has led a $30 million round into its business. Normally a $30 million check would give us a good feel for how big Briq’s revenue base is today. But with market scuttlebutt indicating that Tiger is content to pour capital into companies with diminutive revenues, it’s hard to say. Briq told TechCrunch that its annual recurring revenue grew by 200% in the last year.
  • Mendel raises $18M to structure unstructured medical data: Every industry creates lots of data these days, but the medical industry sweats data like a first-time Peloton user. And, as you can imagine, most of the data that off-gases from the medical world is unstructured and generally a mess. Enter Mendel, which wants to organize, share and exchange medical data after it ingests and cleans it up. I dig it.
  • Finally today, Lightspeed has acquired “e-commerce platform Ecwid for $500 million, and NuOrder, a B2B ordering platform servicing wholesales, brands and retailers, for $425 million.” The Canadian point-of-sale provider has been busy buying startups in recent years, part of a larger roll-up strategy that it expects will accrete into an enticing package of services. Or, as the company put it, the deals will help Lightspeed become “the common thread uniting merchants, suppliers and consumers.” That’s pretty heavy on the corporate-speak, but does speak to Lightspeed’s ambitions. I raise this particular set of deals because Lightspeed is not as well known as its scale might have you think.

The hidden benefits of adding a CTO to your board

Conventional wisdom says startup boards should include a few CEOs who are able to offer informed advice, but having a technical leader in the mix creates real upside, according to Abby Kearns, chief technology officer at Puppet.

Beyond their engineering experience, CTOs can help founders set realistic timelines, identify pain points and bring what Kearns calls “pragmatic empathy” to high-pressure situations.

“A CTO understands the nuts and bolts,” says Kearns.

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

Big Tech Inc.

As noted above, there’s a lot of Apple news to dig through, but we also have notes from Microsoft and Pinterest to parse. So let’s get done with WWDC and then dive into the rest.

Today’s Apple event generated oodles of coverage. Here’s what you need to know (products bolded to help you find what you need):

And there’s more to come. So, if that’s not enough from the Apple news column for you, keep your eyes on the site.

read more about Apple's WWDC 2021 on TechCrunch

Elsewhere in BigTechLandia

Pinterest is finally rolling out the ability to save items into a shopping list. The general argument for the long-term value of Pinterest has been that, sure, it has ads, but it’s also essentially an e-commerce sleeping giant. Perhaps Big Pin wants to awaken a bit faster than we had expected.

To close, Microsoft is renaming Windows Virtual Desktop to Azure Virtual Desktop. Why the change? Because, loosely, there’s lots more demand for the product in a post-pandemic world than the one that came before it, and thus the ability to “set up a full virtual desktop environment from the Azure portal” using only “a few clicks,” as Frederic reported, could be a big deal.

Community

What were you looking forward to the most at WWDC? You told us iOS updates. And there are a bunch. Come chat on the Discord server about what Apple did (and didn’t) announce.

TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility is happening this Wednesday, and there’s still time to buy tickets. On the fence? Come hang out with us tomorrow on Twitter Spaces at 4 p.m. PDT/7 p.m. EDT to get a taste of what you’ll experience at the event.

Speaking of events, keep an eye on the site for some Pittsburgh Spotlight-related news tomorrow.

TC Eventful

Whether you’re into artificial intelligence, autonomous and/or electric vehicles, robotics or hunting the next transportation unicorn, you’ll want to make sure you’re at TechCrunch’s Sessions: Mobility event this Wednesday, June 9. Bring your questions and join the conversation with CEOs and founders from Scale AI, Ford, Joby Aviation and Hyundai and discover 30 of the hottest early-stage mobility startups poised to become the next big thing. Register today and get a free expo ticket with promo code DAILYEXPO. Or save 50% for access to the entire event with promo code DAILYCRUNCH50.

Not every SPAC is pure garbage

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

Happy Saturday everyone. Despite it being a short week I feel pretty run over from the sheer news volume that we’ve put up with in the last few days. So let’s pause, repine and talk about SPACs as a nice little treat.

No, we’re not going through a SPAC investor presentation teardown today. Though we will dig into the Babylon Health SPAC on Monday. Instead, we’re discussing the SoFi and BarkBox blank-check deals.

Both began to trade this week after announcing their public debuts some time ago. And things went just fine? Here’s CNBC on SoFi’s first minutes as a public company:

SoFi, short for Social Finance, went public by merging with Social Capital Hedosophia Corp V, a blank-check company run by venture capital investor Chamath Palihapitiya. The stock closed up more than 12% to $22.65.

That’s not only a win for SoFi, but also for the somewhat-embattled Chamath Palihapitiya, whose SPAC bets have lost some luster in recent months; of course all SPAC-led debuts are speculative, but some retail traders appeared to index more on Palihapitiya’s reputation than fundamentals — what can you do!

BarkBox also did perfectly ok when it began to trade this week after its own SPAC combination was consummated, as Barrons reported:

BARK stock (ticker: BARK) jumped about 7.5% on Wednesday, to trade at around $12 in the afternoon. That gives the company a market value of close to $2.4 billion.

BarkBox stock has since given up some of its gains, but managed to get public without falling below its initial SPAC price. That’s a win given how market conditions have shifted since its flotation was initially announced.

Two wins in a single week is good news for SPAC-land and the myriad players on the blank-check and startup sides of the marketplace. Naturally two solid results does not a trend make, but it seems clear that for companies with material revenues the SPAC-route is not as potholed as we might have expected.

The crypto wager

If you think SPACs are generally annoying, just wait until we fuse the blank-check boom with crypto. As we are about to do!

This week Circle, a crypto-focused company with a particular taste for stablecoins, raised $440 million. That was an ocean of capital for a company best known for the USDC stablecoin; it is also reported to be considering a SPAC-led IPO.

What is a stablecoin? It’s a cryptocurrency that is pegged to a fiat currency. In the case of USDC, as you surmised, the coin is pegged to the US dollar. Stablecoins are useful fiat comps inside the crypto world and have proven to be hugely popular.

Circle’s USDC has $22.8 billion worth of supply in circulation, it claims, and several billion in daily transactions, per CoinMarketCap data. That’s not bad! But what isn’t as clear to your humble servant is precisely how the firm generates huge revenues at super-attractive gross margins. Which is what we’d expect from a company that just locked down nearly a half-billion dollars (or USDC, we suppose) in private capital in a single go.

So, for once, bring on the SPAC. Because we want to see the damn numbers, and quickly, given our sheer curiosity.

Growth?

Wrapping, Ron and I got to dig into a number of public companies’ earnings reports the other day, essentially discovering that the vaunted digital transformation acceleration is actually coming true for some companies.

This week’s news continued the argument. Zoom’s earnings, for example, backed up our thesis. Its revenues were up 191% in Q1 F2022 compared to Q1 F2021. That’s just bonkers good.

On the other end of the spectrum are Dropbox and Box, which are under fresh pressure this week from external investors. The pair of former private-market darlings have run into a growth wall and are taking incoming fire due to it. Grow or die is more than just startup advice. It’s what software companies need to do if they want to stay in charge of their own destiny.

Alex

Daily Crunch: Facebook extends Trump’s suspension until January 2023

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 June 4, 2021. What a week, yeah? That was four super-packed days. But don’t think that the pace of news is about to slow down. It’s not. Next week is Apple’s big WWDC developer event, which we previewed here. And TechCrunch’s next event focused on mobility is just around the corner.

Here’s to catching up on sleep this weekend. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Facebook can’t quit Trump: News broke today that Facebook will reconsider its ban of former American president and wannabe autocrat Donald Trump in two years’ time. The decision fits inside of Facebook’s larger struggle to decide the rules for its hugely popular social platforms.
  • The IPO wave continues: Venture-backed startups are filing to go public at a rapid clip. Today it was Xometry (our first look here) and SentinelOne (more here). Expect to see more filings as a busy Q3 pipeline forms.
  • Governments v. Tech: The world’s governments continue to push tech companies around. Sometimes for reasons that make some sense, as with the U.S. government’s refreshed crackdown on certain Chinese tech companies. And sometimes for reasons that do not, like Nigeria trying to ban Twitter late this week. Regardless of your politics, expect more from this space every week until the end of time.

Startups and VC

  • Flink raises quick $240M: After operating in the market for just half a year, German grocery delivery startup Flink has raised a quarter billion dollars. Flink is German for quick, which relates to both its delivery timeline and its venture capital cadence.
  • GBM raises “up to” $150M from SoftBank: When is a startup not a startup? When it’s 35 years old. That’s the case with Mexican company Grupo Bursátil Mexicano, or GBM. But as TechCrunch reports, the company is seeing hypergrowth, expanding from “having 38,000 investment accounts in January 2020 to more than 650,000 by year’s end.” It is not over the 1,000,000 account mark. Not bad.
  • The BNPL market is growing quickly, still expensive: A TechCrunch analysis of recent buy-now-pay-later companies that are big enough to report earnings indicates that the popular startup market is still growing quickly, but that few if any companies working on the consumer sales model are actually making money. Yet.
  • Toyota commits $300M to startups: Toyota’s AI-focused venture capital fund is AI-branded no more, and TechCrunch reports that the corporate VC group is “commemorating its new identity by investing an additional $300 million in emerging technologies and carbon neutrality.” That’s a lot of bread to help save the world.
  • Auto SPAC: TechCrunch broke the news that “autonomous vehicle startup Aurora is close to finalizing a deal to merge with Reinvent Technology Partners Y, the newest special purpose acquisition company launched by LinkedIn co-founder and investor Reid Hoffman.”

Domain experts wanted: Submit your guest articles to Extra Crunch

Prospective Extra Crunch contributors regularly ask us about which topics Extra Crunch subscribers would like to hear more about, and the answer is always the same:

  • Actionable advice that is backed up by data and/or experience.
  • Strategic insights that go beyond best practices and offer specific recommendations readers can try out for themselves.
  • Industry analysis that paints a clear picture of the companies, products and services that characterize individual tech sectors.

Our general submission guidelines haven’t changed, but Managing Editor Eric Eldon and Senior Editor Walter Thompson wrote a short post that identifies the topics we’re prioritizing at the moment:

  • How-to articles for early-stage founders.
  • Market analysis of different tech sectors.
  • Growth marketing strategies.
  • Alternative fundraising.
  • Quality of life (personal health, sustainability, proptech, transportation).

If you’re a skillful entrepreneur, founder or investor who’s interested in helping someone else build their business, read our latest guidelines, then send your ideas to guestcolumns@techcrunch.com.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Today’s Big Tech news is essentially a huge slug of Facebook. So, if you are irked by spending more time than you have to considering Zuckerberg’s empire, feel free to move on to the Community section of today’s missive!

Facebook land was more today than just the news regarding former U.S. President Donald Trump. Big Blue also got busy buying a gaming company and getting hit with antitrust probes in the U.K. and EU.

On the gaming front, Facebook announced today that it is buying Crayta, which TechCrunch described as a ”a Roblox-like game creation platform.” Roblox, of course, recently went public via a direct listing after seeing its fortunes rise during the COVID-19 pandemic. TechCrunch also wrote that Facebook has been buying one-off VR startups as well. So, there’s something of a larger gaming push afoot at the company, perhaps. If there is any rule to Facebook’s actions, it’s that if it sees any other company doing a thing and making money, it has to copy it.

To close out Big Tech for the week, Facebook is under new scrutiny by both the U.K. and the EU, this time for its use of data from advertising customers and the folks who use its single-sign-on tool. TechCrunch reported that the investigations are “looking at whether it uses this data as an unfair lever against competitors in markets such as classified ads.”

Community

Thanks for joining us yesterday for our chat about the future of e-commerce. It’s nice to be able to dive deeper into the things we write. Twitter Spaces was fun to use, but sadly our friend Brandon Chu from Shopify wasn’t able to join from his Android device (yay beta apps!). Just means we’ll have to do it again.

Speaking of doing Twitter Spaces again, we’re going to be pregaming WWDC on Monday, led by our hardware editor, Brian Heater. We’ll start bright and early at 8:30 a.m. PDT/11:30 a.m. EDT, so bring all of your thoughts and questions then.

Daily Crunch: Canada and Australia get first look at Twitter Blue subscription service

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 June 3, 2021. If you are a startup founder or early employee or investor, there’s good news on the TechCrunch front today: The start of the Disrupt agenda is live! It’s going to be one hell of a show for anyone interested in startups and how they grow. See you there! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • United goes Boom: News broke today that United Airlines has agreed to purchase 15 supersonic jets from Boom, a startup focused on building them. For Boom, the deal is a big happening, evidence of material market demand for its products. And, given how much planes cost in general, a huge set of bookings for the company to show to its investors that have plowed nearly a quarter billion dollars into the company, according to Crunchbase.
  • Twitter is Blue: No, the social media company isn’t sad. Quite the opposite. Instead, Twitter’s subscription service Blue is going live in two markets for a few dollars per month. It’s something of a very public test of what Twitter hopes — we presume — will be a globally available subscription option for those of us who can’t stop tweeting.
  • Women’s health remains an underinvested startup niche: TechCrunch’s Natasha Mascarenhas dug into the world of hormonal health for the blog today, asking why there aren’t unicorns in the huge market. It’s a great read.

Startups and VC

We’re dividing up today’s startup and venture capital news into two buckets. The first comprises early-stage rounds, and the latter investments in upstarts that are a bit more mature.

  • India’s early-stage market accelerates: Manish Singh reports for TechCrunch that a host of Indian startups are in the process of raising money. He broke an ocean of news in his piece on the matter, not only underscoring how active the global venture market is, but just how hard it can be to keep track of all the activity.
  • Simplified raises $2.2M to support marketing creative: Marketers are expected to generate lots of content. Simplified is taking on Canva and that huge market need in a single go. And now it’s backed by Craft Ventures.
  • Ganaz raises $7M to help agricultural workers get paid: Not every tech company has to cater to the tech elite or the wealthy. Ganaz is betting that its business — focused on what we described as changing “how people with little documentation and no bank account get paid and send money with a modern workforce stack” — is going to be a hit. Given how huge the agricultural sector is, its wager makes some sense.

And then, on the late-stage front:

  • Gong raises $250M for sales automation: Gong’s rapid growth and latest funding was part of my column this morning because of how interesting they proved to be. In short, the sales automation company has roughly tripled its valuation to more than $7 billion since last August. How? By growing by more than 2x in the last year.
  • Realtime Robotics raises $31M for real-time robotics: Boston’s startup scene is more than biotech, it should be clear by now. Realtime Robotics is one such Beantown startup that isn’t building new drugs. Instead, Brian Heater reports, it’s building robot software to “help companies deploy systems with limited programming, offering adaptable controls that work for multiple systems at once.”
  • LeoLabs raises $65M to keep satellites from hitting each other: As SpaceX sends bushels of internet satellites into space, the issue of crowding in near-Earth orbit will only get stickier. LeoLabs is betting that keeping expensive space tech from hitting other space tech, or even space trash, is going to be a growth industry.

3 lessons we learned after raising $6.3M from 50 investors

Two years ago, founders of calendar-assistant platform Reclaim were looking for a “mango” seed round — a boodle of cash large enough to help them transition from the prototype phase to staffing up for a public launch.

Although the team received offers, co-founder Henry Shapiro says the few that materialized were poor options, partially because Reclaim was still pre-product.

So one summer morning, my co-founder and I sat down in his garage — where we’d been prototyping, pitching and iterating for the past year — and realized that as hard as it was, we would have to walk away entirely and do a full reset on our fundraising strategy.

In a guest post for Extra Crunch, Shapiro shares what he learned from embracing failure and offers three conclusions “every founder should consider before they decide to go out and pitch investors.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

Big Tech was busy yet again today, with news from Waymo, Twitter and Blackstone. We also have to talk about the law.

  • You can now hail Waymo taxis in Google Maps: Vertical integration, baby! It’s a jam if you are a platform company that makes self-driving cars, operates a taxi service, and also publishes what I presume is the most popular mapping software in the world.
  • In related news: Waymo, bring self-driving taxis to Providence, Rhode Island, you cowards!
  • In related apologies: Waymo is not made up of cowards, but merely businesspeople who should invest more of their testing budget in Providence, Rhode Island.
  • Twitter wants to hear you talk: Twitter is bringing its Spaces product more front-and-center in its mobile experience. Sure, all you use Twitter for today is tweets, but Big Tweet will soon want to send your newsletters, host your chats, and, well, distribute your Fleets as well.
  • A court case draws limits around a controversial American hacking law: Per TechCrunch, the U.S. Supreme Court “ruled that a police officer who searched a license plate database for an acquaintance in exchange for cash did not violate U.S. hacking laws” in a “landmark ruling [that] concludes a long-running case that clarifies the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA.”
  • In terms of legal news and tech, it’s nice to have some good news.
  • And, finally, Blackstone is buying IDG: While your humble TechCrunchers are somewhat sensitive to the idea of private equity buying media properties, the Blackstone-IDG deal is yet another example of the trend.
  • The deal means that titles like “CIO, Computerworld, InfoWorld, Macworld, Network World, PCWorld, and Tech Hive” are changing hands, along with IDC itself.

Daily Crunch: Spotify’s new ‘Only You’ feature expands on personalization investment

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 June 2, 2021. It’s a good day in the tech world because former unicorn Spotify is out with new features about you. Yes, the company is taking its yearly listening review to a midyear format and packing its app with even more personalized mixes. My playlists are why I won’t leave Spotify until the heat death of the universe, so I suppose it makes sense that the service is doubling down on its personalization feature set.

And yes, I do listen to a lot of Taylor Swift in the morning. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Stack Overflow sells for $1.8B: Well-known developer community and hub of copy-pastable coding snippets for software engineers of all skill levels Stack Overflow is selling itself to Prosus for nearly $2 billion. What’s Prosus? It’s part of Naspers, a South African investing group that you may have heard of. Naspers is perhaps best known for owning a large stake in Tencent.
  • Guild Education raises $150M: The company, focused on providing what TechCrunch described as “employer-sponsored learning opportunities” for employees, is now worth $3.75 billion after its latest funding round. For the burgeoning edtech startup market, the round is big news. There’s still lots of capital for tech companies tackling the various sides of the education market.
  • The great technology company liquidity run continues: As well-known tech startups like Marqeta look to list, other companies are jumping on the bandwagon. TechCrunch reported this morning that fintech firm Yieldstreet may go public via a SPAC, and data-centered unicorn Confluent is also going public.

Startups and VC

The week’s busy startup fundraising cycle continued today with a host of companies from the very earliest stages to the most mature unicorns raising capital. What follows is a selection of the day’s hottest deals. We’re starting in the world of wheels:

  • Faction raises $4.3M for three-wheeled delivery vehicles: That are driverless, we should add. Daily Crunch is certain that, simply given the sheer amount of capital that has gone into the various projects of this sort, it will eventually work. Perhaps Faction will be the company to get it right.
  • FlixMobility raises $650M for its low-cost bus service: If you are American, you may have not heard of FlixMobility, which operates FlixBus and FlixTrain, low-cost transport services in Europe. The company is also working to expand in the U.S. For reference, the new Flix round is a Series G.
  • Tier options $60M for e-scooter network: Electric scooter shares are not dead, it turns out. Sure, Bird’s SPAC demonstrates how difficult the economics proved for the model in some markets, but Tier now has access to a “highly scalable asset-backed debt facility,” in the words of its CFO, to keep growing. The company also has some neat battery tech aboard its portfolio.

Now, today’s other rounds of note tackling a more diverse set of industries:

  • Stemma raises $4.8M for managed Amundsen: What’s Amundsen? Per Ron, it’s a “data catalogue project that [Lyft built] to manage its massive data requirements.” And now there’s a startup offering it as a service. This reminds me of BuildBuddy to a degree, in which a startup takes on a BigCo tool, helping others access and leverage it.
  • $131M in total capital for Jeeves: It’s $31 million in equity funding and $100 million in debt access, which we presume is a revolving facility of sorts because Jeeves is building a multinational expense management platform. You know, for companies that have employees everywhere. Like every single early-stage startup we talk to these days.
  • Divido raises money because apparently we still need more buy now, pay later (BNPL) services: Divido has put together a fresh $30 million round to bring its BNPL service to more markets, TechCrunch reports. The startup BNPL market has been hot because the companies in it have been doing well. But at some point we hit saturation, right? Right?

With $1.6B Depop purchase, Etsy asks, ‘How do you do, fellow kids?’

News broke today that Etsy will buy used fashion marketplace Depop in a transaction that values the U.K.-based startup at $1.625 billion.

Depop showed 100% year-over-year growth to reach $70 million in revenue last year, but it’s still worth asking whether Etsy paid a premium to expand its reach into the hearts, minds and wallets of Gen Z and young millennial consumers.

To frame the deal’s overall value in a larger context, let’s look at revenue multiples for rivals Poshmark and ThredUp. If large e-commerce players are willing to splash out for youth-approved marketplaces, there’s a good reason why.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Big Tech was super busy today, Spotify aside. Today we’re talking Amazon, Apple, Facebook, GitLab and Huawei:

  • Welcome to 2021, Amazon: The American e-commerce giant is doing away with cannabis testing of its employees. Our first reaction to this news was that Amazon was drug testing its employees?
  • Apple thinks highly of itself: Apple has a study out saying that it facilitated more than a half-trillion dollars in commerce last year. We are sure that Apple really put itself to the test in coming up with the number.
  • Facebook does two things that don’t suck: Today Facebook opened up its Messenger API to all companies, which is good. And Big Blue put together a research API. Both are good things from Zuck’s empire. Which is nice to say for once.
  • GitLab buys UnReview: GitLab is north of $100 million in revenue and is slated for an eventual IPO, so it’s big enough to warrant inclusion in this section. Regardless, the GitHub competitor has bought a startup that “helps software teams recommend the best reviewers for when developers want to check in their latest code” using machine learning. Honestly, that sounds cool.
  • Huawei’s new OS loves Android: TechCrunch has lots of details on HarmonyOS, the new operating system from Huawei. It turns out that it uses some Android code. All hail Google, we suppose.

Community

Tomorrow (Thursday) at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT, we’ll be chatting on Twitter Spaces about the future of e-commerce with Accel’s Ethan Choi, who wrote this piece for Extra Crunch recently. Joining him will be our very own Danny Crichton, Shogun CEO Finbarr Taylor and Shopify’s VP of Product and GM of Platform, Brandon Chu. Keep an eye on our tweets for details and come have a listen (and bring your thoughts and questions!).

TC Eventful

Are you a founder trying to get your startup off the ground? If so, TC Early Stage: Marketing & Fundraising is here to help! During this two-day bootcamp, leading experts will guide you through marketplace positioning to growth marketing and content development. Get an additional 10% off early-bird pricing if you register before this Friday with promo code DAILYCRUNCHRegister Now!

Daily Crunch: Wefox CEO says $650M Series C was ‘much more than we wanted to raise initially’

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 June 1, 2021. We’re back from a long weekend here in the United States, which means that the blog has been humming all day. Today’s tech and startup news had a fun mix of the old going new (7-Eleven adding EV charging points), and new going old (check out this new diaper startup), but mostly we had funding rounds. Lots of them. So let’s get to work! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • European tech is hot: EU-based insurtech startup Wefox announced a $650 million round today. The huge round will surely help burnish Europe’s Q2 venture capital results, while also underscoring how the neoinsurance provider boom that we’ve seen in America is hardly a domestic affair. Expect more investment and startup activity in this space during the rest of 2021.
  • Hadoop is not: Cloudera and Hortonworks were once hot startups. They both went public. And then they struggled. So they teamed up in a $5.2 billion merger. And then they struggled. And now their combined entity is being taken off the public markets by a pair of private equity companies for $5.3 billion, a modest premium on their pre-deal value. Thus concludes Hadoop’s startup run.
  • The IPO boom continues: But while The Artist Formerly Known As Hortonworks takes its leave, many companies are looking to join the public markets. Sprinklr, for example. The New York-based customer experience startup is looking to list on the back of modest revenue gains and possibly improving profitability.

Startups and VC

The last 24 hours have brought a steady deluge of startup rounds. We can’t fit them all in the newsletter. But here are some of our favorites all the same:

  • Molecule.one raises $4.6M for computational chemistry: Former TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participant Molecule.one wants to “bring theoretical drug molecules to reality,” we reported, creating workflows to help labs figure out how to make exotic molecules from known materials and methods.
  • project44 raises $202M for supply chain APIs: project44 uses APIs to provide “connective tissue” between the myriad players in the supply chain world. The company is now worth $1.2 billion, a rapid-fire doubling of its prior valuation. That’s thanks to money from Goldman Sachs and rapid growth. TechCrunch reports that the company has “crossed $50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), which is up 100% year over year.”
  • Redacted raises $60M for proactive cybersecurity: Most cybersecurity software feels defensive. Redacted, fresh out of stealth, wants to flip that narrative and, instead, “proactively [go] after the hackers to recover data loss and disrupt their activities.” There are probably fun legal questions at play here, but it’s a nice mental image at least.
  • Truebill raises $45M for its personal finance app: Early in life Truebill was a neat way to cancel subscriptions. But like all consumer fintech products in 2021, it has become a broad service that offers a host of features and capabilities. Savings? Sure. Credit information? Why not. You get the idea.
  • Belvo raises $43M for fintech APIs: Since Belvo first took part in Y Combinator, we’ve been pretty positive about the company’s chances. Building a sort of Plaid for the Latin American market, it seemed like a pretty darn good bet. And today’s news that the company has put together a fresh $43 million in funding somewhat backs up our early read.

 4 proven approaches to CX strategy that make customers feel loved

People have been working to optimize customer experiences (CX) since we began selling things to each other.

A famous San Francisco bakery has an exhaust fan at street level; each morning, its neighbors awake to the scent of orange-cinnamon morning buns wafting down the block. Similarly, savvy hair stylists know to greet returning customers by asking if they want a repeat or something new.

Online, CX may encompass anything from recommending the right shoes to AI that knows when to send a frustrated traveler an upgrade for a delayed flight.

In light of Qualtrics’ spinout and IPO and Sprinklr’s recent S-1, Rebecca Liu-Doyle, principal at Insight Partners, describes four key attributes shared by “companies that have upped their CX game.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

Big Tech news on the blog was somewhat light today thanks to the pace of startup happenings. But we still found time to discuss how Twitter is making room for more ads on its service. But don’t worry — unless you use its Fleets service, you probably won’t see them.

While Daily Crunch has been positive concerning Twitter’s general product work of late, this is one update that we’d be happy to skip.

Then from Line, news that the messaging app best known for its market share in certain Asian markets is now a bank. Basically. TechCrunch wrote that the well-known tech company “launched a digital banking platform in Indonesia today” that will include “deposit accounts, microcredit products, and remittance and payment services.”

It’s a joke in tech that every messaging app is really a dating service. That’s so old-fashioned. Now every app is simply a service that exists somewhere on the evolutionary continuum of becoming — slowly or quickly — a horizontal fintech offering.

Community

Another IPO, but will it be a successful public offering? Tell us what you think will happen with Sprinklr.

You’ve probably heard about our upcoming field trip to Pittsburgh, which even the mayor is excited about. Have friends building companies in the Steel City? Ask them to sign up to pitch during the event.

And while you’re clicking around, come visit us on Discord.

TC Eventful

You’re invited to tomorrow’s Extra Crunch Live event, where Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra and Madrona investor S. Somasegar will break down how Coda managed to rise above the noise in the collaborative software space and raise $140 million in funding. You’ll even get your chance to show off your pitching skills during the pitch-off. Grab your seat tomorrow at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT by registering here!

Crypto sure requires a lot of fiat

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

Hello from Friday, I presume that you are currently enjoying the long weekend. In celebration for this week’s Exchange letter we’ll try something new by being brief. 

If you are tired of hearing about cryptocurrencies, I have bad news. They are not only not going away, but it appears that the financial cannon that have helped clear the fields for their general advance are reloading with even more financial ammunition.

At least that’s what Eric Newcomer is reporting in a post out this week aptly titled “a16z Crypto Fund Balloons to $2 Billion.”

This raises a few points. First! That there is enough LP demand to fund a crypto vehicle to the tune of $2 billion. Second! That there are enough hot crypto ideas out there worth sticking $2 billion into.

I can entirely believe the former, but the latter stretches my brain a little. Not that there aren’t great companies being built in the blockchain space; Coinbase’s Q1 earnings indicate that you can make money with crypto. But it seems that the firms that have proven the most successful thus far are more a hybrid of the traditional banking world and the crypto space than entirely inhabitants of the latter.

But as those ideas have been mined to increasing perfection, we should anticipate seeing money chase the more experimental crypto ideas. As I noted in the Daily Crunch yesterday, there’s a lot of money already going into those markets:

[Y]ou’ve heard of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. If you have already digested the NBA TopShot hype wave, buckle in, because a lot of folks are still building in the NFT world. That includes Anima, which is bringing AR to NFTs and just raised new capital from Coinbase, and Infinite Objects, which just raised $6 million to help folks bring their NFTs IRL.

This is where venture investing in crypto — and that mammoth a16z fund — gets interesting.

Sure, crypto exchanges can make money. But what about the further reaches of the crypto economy? Can they build material revenues that the fiat world can understand and go public? (Do they even want to go public?)

It’s a pleasure to watch other people wager other people’s money on ideas that may fail. Heads they lose, tails we win. Not bad!

Twitter’s subscription (and media?) moment

Twitter’s “Blue” subscription product is slowly dripping its way into the market. I’m going to buy it, whatever it is.

But what I can’t get out of my head is that Twitter is very well positioned to build a sort of creator nirvana. After all, Twitter is already where many writers, journalists and artists hang out. Where we already have a following. Why not help us weirdos leverage all the time we’ve spent on the platform?

You can see how this could scale. Now that Twitter has bought startups Revue and Scroll, it could build a newsletter platform where Blue subscriber money is divvied up amongst writers for its platform. Or Twitter could buy Medium, as a friend suggested to me the other day. Medium has a huge subscriber base, which Twitter could merge into Blue and provide a sort of extra-social-network-network for writers and other creatives. Right?

If I had a few billion dollars, a few thousand engineers and a dictate from shareholders to grow, I’d go hog-wild and do some crazy shit. Let’s see what Twitter comes up with, but let’s hope that they aren’t making small plans.

Closing, you can catch up on all we wrote on The Exchange during the week here. Have a truly lovely break, we all need one.

Alex

Daily Crunch: Tesla switches on camera-based driver monitoring for Autopilot users

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.

Welcome to the Daily Crunch for May 28, the last edition before a long weekend here in the United States. But impending holiday or not, there’s plenty to catch up on, not the least of which today is Elon Watch in our top-three rundown. Let’s get into it! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

Startups and VC

Let’s wrap this week with startups that are challenging the status quo, shall we?

Penfold just raised $8.5 million to keep pensions alive: In your part of the world the pension may be dead, but Penfold wants to keep the retirement plan alive in the U.K. With a mobile app. Sure, your company has probably given up on the idea that it should materially provide for workers’ post-work existence, but Penfold is betting that its freelancer-friendly pension system will find purchase in its market.

Kitt put together a $5 million round to build out your next office: Parts of the world are slowly circling back to the idea of going to the office. Kitt wants to take advantage of the trend by “a ‘fully customizable’ workspace solution to tenants via its landlord partners,” TechCrunch reports. Everyone seems to agree that post-COVID office life will look different. Here’s a startup trying to help design that future.

Anthropic pulls together $124 million to make AI more steerable: Some of the folks behind GPT-3 have a pile of new money for their AI-focused startup. But unlike most AI-centered startups, the company appears to be working on model tuning over building something to, say, do one particularly focused task.

“Today [in AI] the general rule is: The more powerful the system, the harder it is to explain its actions,” Devin reports, adding that that’s “not exactly a good trend.” Perhaps Anthropic can build the AI tuning dials we’ve long needed. It certainly now has the money to pursue its vision.

Dismantling the myths around raising your first check

The growing complexity of fundraising has the opportunity to make tech either inclusive or exclusive. For new founders looking to raise money, let’s dismantle the myths about raising your first check and instead focus on how investors and other successful founders describe the nuance needed to secure money.

Natasha Mascarenhas spoke to Elizabeth Yin, founding partner of Hustle Fund, and Leslie Feinzaig, founder of Female Founders Collective, to get their candid thoughts about the challenges first-time founders face when fundraising.

According to Yin, all startups should be able to reach one of two goals: by the fifth year, achieve $100 million ARR or a $1 billion valuation.

“This is hard to do,” she said. “And most businesses will never get there — not for a lack of trying — but there’s a lot of luck whether your idea has that much demand that quickly.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

Closing this week with a mote of Big Tech news, once again centered around the rising tension between technology companies and the Indian government. Our own Manish Singh reports that “Google, Facebook, Telegram, LinkedIn and Tiger Global-backed Indian startups ShareChat and Koo have either fully or partially complied with the South Asian nation’s new IT rules, according to two people familiar with the matter and a government note obtained by TechCrunch.”

Singh goes on to note that “Twitter has yet to comply with the rules.” We saw earlier this week how Twitter is pushing back against the Indian government after it tried to use force to intimidate the American social network into going against its own policies in defense of its party’s political goals.

American social networks born in an environment where they had plenty of room to experiment and maneuver have a history of running afoul of foreign governments with either rising autocratic tendencies or a fondness for full-blown control. This is no exception. The question is whether Twitter will wind up a cautionary tale in its argument with the Indian government, or a guiding light.

TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing

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Image Credits: Getty Images

We’re thrilled with the responses to our survey about the top email marketers. It’s not too late to weigh in: Fill out the survey here.

If you’re a growth marketer, pass the survey on to your clients — we’d love to hear from them!

To find out more details about this project and how we plan to use it to shape our editorial coverage, visit techcrunch.com/experts.

Daily Crunch: Saving-investing app Acorns files to go public in $2.2B SPAC deal

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, May 27. From the home desk, TechCrunch has a few notes to share. First, we’re hosting a virtual meetup in Pittsburgh as part of our national tour spotlighting neat startup markets. And if you are a super early-stage founder, you can still apply to take part in the upcoming Battlefield competition at Disrupt. Do it. It’s going to be a blast. See you at both! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

Startups and VC

We have our usual mix of funding rounds below, but first a note on diversity in the venture capital world. Collab Capital this week announced a $50 million fund to invest in Black founders, which TechCrunch covered here. And today we wrote about a $250 million growth fund that will reserve half its profits to donate to historically Black colleges and universities. More of this, please.

Now, the day’s hottest funding rounds:

Breinify raises $11M to bring data science to marketing: A good theme in tech recently has been bringing capabilities previously reserved for the technically trained to teams of nontechnical folks. No-code does this at times, for example. Breinify is doing something related, namely “working to apply data science to personalization, and do it in a way that makes it accessible to nontechnical marketing employees to build more meaningful customer experiences,” according to TechCrunch. For marketing teams currently stuck waiting for the engineering team to get back to them, this will prove more than welcome.

RevenueCat raises $40M to help developers leverage in-app subscriptions: RevenueCat now has a huge new check at a $300 million valuation, but more than that, it’s changed its cost structure, offering different tiers of service that are priced not on a per-head basis, but on how much revenue a company is tracking at any given point in time (on-demand pricing is hot). RevenueCat, you can math out, costs 0.8% to 1.2% cut of tracked revenue, depending on what sort of functionality a company needs. For anyone building in-app subscriptions and looking for help, RevenueCat wants to be cheap to start and lucrative as its customers scale.

And then there were robots: Our own Brian Heater compiled a super great look at the world of robotics startups and their recent fundraising. TerraClear recently raised $25 million for its rock-picking-up tractor-robot. Bowery Farms recently raised $300 million as we noted here at Daily Crunch, but we failed to mention how “robots, sensors and AI are a big part of [its] vertical farming approach.” Very cool.

Heater has more notes in the posts, but the key takeaway is that not every robot comes from the weird place between Uncanny Valley and Boston Dynamics.

SaaS needs to take a page out of the crypto playbook

It seems like a great time to launch a SaaS startup, but the landscape is crowded with well-designed applications that promise “blazingly fast and delightfully simple” experiences.

Most of these will fail, but not because of a marketing campaign or server downtime. In most cases, SaaS startups fall victim to what seed-stage investor John Chen of Fika Ventures calls “the myth of frictionless onboarding.”

Despite the hype, enterprise companies are always asking us to learn how to use new tools. “Just like with a new fitness program, participants feel good after completing the workout, but it takes a lot of activation energy to start and hard work to get there,” says Chen.

Instead of putting the onus on customers to roll up their sleeves, SaaS startups should learn from cryptocurrency culture and find ways to “incentivize users to do the necessary work to have the right experience.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

Today we’re mostly talking about Twitter, but before we do, is Ford about to win a chunk of the electric vehicle market? Two years ago I would have scoffed at the notion, but between what feel like strong pre-orders for its electric pickup and a huge bet on internal battery R&D, it’s now a question worth asking.

On the Twitter front, there are two things to know. First, that Twitter is not taking incoming fire from the current Indian government sitting down. And, second, that Twitter’s product work has been pretty fast-paced lately, which is more than welcome.

Regarding India, TechCrunch’s Manish Singh reports that “Twitter called the recent visit by police to its Indian offices a form of intimidation and said it was concerned by some of the requirements in New Delhi’s new IT rules.” Good.

Here at Daily Crunch, we called the matter attempted intimidation, so it’s nice to see the company also stating the obvious. And fighting back. The Indian government’s push to censor Twitter smacks of a CCP-style crackdown on speech that the ruling regime deems too true to be read. Down with that sort of thinking.

On the product front, Twitter is rolling out its Clubhouse-competing Spaces product to desktop machines. Normally I’d skip such an incremental Twitter feature, but in this case it fits into the recent rapid-fire product cadence from the social network, which was famously slow for years and years. Then something changed, allowing the company to ship all sorts of products and services. The company’s even moving toward some sort of email newsletter-subscription-audio-tipping product amalgamation that could prove to be very, very interesting to creators.

Who expected to be excited by Twitter’s dev team this year? It’s a nice surprise.

TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing

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Image Credits: Getty Images

TechCrunch Experts is still collecting survey responses to help us identify the top email marketers in tech!

At this time, we’re not looking for self-nominations — we’re only seeking nominations from clients. We want to hear all about your experience and how you found the right expert for your needs. Fill out the survey here.

We’re excited to move this project forward. Visit techcrunch.com/experts to find out more!