Author: Richard Dal Porto

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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.

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.

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.

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):

• TechCrunch’s liveblog of the event can be found here. It’s, as always, fun and fast and funny.
• Apple unveils iOS 15 with new features for FaceTime and better notifications
• Apple refines iOS 15 notifications with Focus, Summary features
• Apple introduces SharePlay for co-watching, streaming and screen sharing over FaceTime
• Apple announces FaceTime updates
• Apple’s Live Text lets you interact with text in your photos
• Apple Maps upgrade brings more detailed maps, transit features, AR view and more
• Apple (finally) updates its weather app with dynamic backgrounds, maps and way more data
• iPadOS 15 announced at WWDC, features improved multitasking and surprising Swift Playgrounds features
• Apple announces iCloud+ with privacy-focused features
• watchOS 8 brings new mindfulness features and respiratory tracking
• Apple unveils macOS 12 Monterey
• Apple unveils new iOS 15 privacy features at WWDC
• Apple is bringing Shortcuts to the Mac and starts transition from Automator
• Apple TV to support using HomePod Mini as speakers, among other updates

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

• All about Elon: The only thing more certain than more venture rounds and SPAC news in the tech game these days is the inevitably of Elon Musk making news. This week was no exception, with the Tesla boss in the media today for turning on in-car cameras when their driver assistance is switched on and his Boring company’s Las Vegas tunnel challenges.
• The EU examines TikTok: The tech-and-government theme we’ve tracked all week continued today with the European Union launching “what it described as ‘a formal dialogue’ with the video sharing platform over its commercial practices and policy.” The social media giant’s kid-focused policies appear to be in the EU’s crosshairs.
• Healthcare can be lucrative startup ground: That’s what we learned reading Doximity’s IPO filing this morning. The venture-backed health tech company grew like a weed during the COVID-19 pandemic and is capitalizing on its gains by going public while markets are hot.

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

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.

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

• Lots of people are working on NFTs: Whether you’re a crypto fan or not, you’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.
• Europe probes American clouds: Here at Daily Crunch, we’ve noted a number of government-and-tech stories in recent weeks, none of them positive. Today’s news is another note in that particular theme, with Natasha reporting that “Europe’s lead data protection regulator has opened two investigations into EU institutions’ use of cloud services from U.S. cloud giants.”
• A window into the economics of fintech: Also out today was news that Acorns, an American consumer fintech company that helps regular folks save and invest their money, is going public via a blank-check company. We dug into its results, learning that such fintech startups can build great businesses. It’s just expensive to do so.

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.

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