Richard Dal Porto

December 27, 2021

The US government needs a commercialization strategy for quantum

Laura E. Thomas Contributor

Laura E. Thomas is the senior director of National Security Solutions at quantum sensing and computing company ColdQuanta. She is a former Central Intelligence Agency case officer and Chief of Base who built and led sensitive programs at CIA headquarters and abroad in multiple international assignments.

The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics.

Quantum computers, sensors and communications networks have the potential to bring about enormous societal and market opportunities — along with an equal amount of disruption. Unfortunately for most of us it takes a Ph.D. in physics to truly understand how quantum technologies work, and luminaries in the field of physics will be the first to admit that even their understanding of quantum mechanics remains incomplete.

Fortunately you don’t need an advanced degree in physics to grasp the magnitude of potential change: computers that can help us design new materials that fight the climate crisis, more accurate sensors without a reliance on GPS that enable truly autonomous vehicles and more secure communications networks are just a few of the many technologies that may emerge from quantum technology.

The challenge of the quantum industry isn’t ambition; it’s scale. Physicists know how to design useful quantum devices. The challenge is building larger devices that scale along with innovative business models. The confluence of talented physicists, engineers and business leaders tackling the problem is reason for much confidence. More private investors are placing bets on the technology. They can’t afford not to — we may look back on the commercialization of quantum and compare it to the steam engine, electricity, and the internet — all of which represented fundamental platform shifts in how society tackled problems and created value.

More difficult than quantum physics, however, is getting the U.S. government’s regulatory and funding strategy right toward the technology. Aligning various government entities to push forward an industry while navigating landmines of regulation, Byzantine government contracting processes and the geopolitical realities of both the threats and disruptions that quantum technology portends will be a challenge much greater than building a million-qubit quantum computer.

While this claim may be slight hyperbole, I’ve now worked in both worlds and seen it up close and personal. As a former CIA case officer, even at the “tip of the spear,” I’ve seen how slowly the government moves if left to its own devices. However, I’ve also seen the value it can bring if the right influencers in the right positions decide to make hard decisions.

The government can help pave the pathway for commercialization or cut the industry off at its knees before it has a chance to run. The U.S. government needs a quantum commercialization strategy in addition to its quantum R&D strategy. We need to get out of the lab and into the world. To push the industry forward, the government should:

Push more funding to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). We can thank DARPA for the internet and GPS. I imagine we will one day thank DARPA, and some parts of the Department of Energy, for quantum. With increased funding, DARPA should consider allocating larger amounts per company focused on longer-term research in quantum error correction and quantum navigation.
Ask the National Science Foundation (NSF) to buy 20 different universities different types of quantum computers for use by researchers and students. The NSF should provide grants to physics departments at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and at economically disadvantaged schools in the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program to increase diversity in the quantum technology industry.
Create a large, well-funded program within the Department of Defense for quantum sensors that goes beyond small-scale research. For example, the Pentagon could fund a $200 million dollar program to field a quantum positioning system (QPS) that is rugged, compact, more accurate and more secure than current GPS systems.
Like ambitious defense programs for new fighter jets and nuclear modernization, deep tech companies cannot cross the “valley of death” on one $800,000 contract at a time. They need significant long-term commitments, especially in such a hardware-intensive field like quantum technology. Otherwise, we’ll condemn physicists and engineers to spending their time writing proposals to compete for future projects in order to keep the lights on.
The government should also provide exponentially more funding to the Pentagon’s National Security Innovation Capital (NSIC) program. NSIC’s role is to help hardware-focused companies cross the valley of death with non-dilutive investments. If the government is really serious about this, then these investments need to be at the level of at least $5 million and above.
The money going into this hardware commercialization will inevitably lead to devices used by the average person and other discoveries. The same quantum positioning systems that power submarine navigation can also power commercial autonomous vehicles and sensors for smart and more environmentally-friendly cities. Smartphones, the internet and MRI machines are examples of unintended discoveries. The U.S. taxpayer will recoup their money in long-term value creation even when some companies inevitably fail or miss their intended targets.
Despite the government’s important role, it needs to know where to stay out of the way. The government shouldn’t create additional regulation through export controls until U.S. companies have built a globally dominant quantum capability. I understand the national security threats we face in emerging technologies and the U.S. government’s desire to stop rampant IP theft, anti-competitive practices and the use of these technologies for authoritarian ends and power projection purposes. But a key element to our national and economic security has been our openness. Regulation at this early stage will only stymie our ability to build global quantum companies and be a greater threat.

The U.S. government must inject more money more quickly into the commercial sector for these emerging technologies. This new technological era demands that we compete at a pace and scale that the government budgeting process currently is not built to handle. Smaller companies can move fast and we are in an era where speed, not efficiency, matters most in the beginning because we have to scale up before our geopolitical competition, which is directly pouring tens of billions of dollars into the sector.

When I was at the CIA, I often heard the words “Acta non verba” or “deeds not words.” In this case, the deeds are putting money on the table in the right ways, as well as not regulating the industry too early. Not everyone in senior U.S. government positions has to believe in quantum’s potential. I wouldn’t blame them if they have some doubts — this is truly beyond rocket science. But the smart move is to hedge. The U.S. government should make such a bet by pushing a commercialization strategy now. At the least it shouldn’t stand in the way of it.

December 26, 2021

How to avoid falling into China’s ‘data trap’

Dr. Samantha Hoffman Contributor

Dr. Samantha Hoffman is a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre and an independent consultant.

The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics.

Recent prominent data breach incidents, such as hacks of the Office of Personnel Management, airline passenger lists and hotel guest data have made clear how vulnerable both public and private systems remain to espionage and cybercrime. What is less obvious is the way that a foreign adversary or competitor might target data that is less clearly relevant from a national security or espionage perspective. Today, data about public sentiment, such as the kinds of data used by advertisers to analyze consumer preferences, has become as strategically valuable as data about traditional military targets. As the definition of what is strategically valuable becomes increasingly blurred, the ability to identify and protect strategic data will be an increasingly complex and vital national security task.

This is particularly true with regards to nation-state actors like China, which seeks access to strategic data and seeks to use it to develop a toolkit against its adversaries. Last month, MI6 chief Richard Moore described the threat of China’s “data trap”: “If you allow another country to gain access to really critical data about your society,” Moore argued, “over time that will erode your sovereignty, you no longer have control over that data.” And most governments are only just beginning to grasp this threat.

In testimony to Congress last month, I argued that in order to defend democracy now, we need to better understand how particular datasets are collected and used by foreign adversaries, especially China. And if we’re to properly defend strategic data (and define and prioritize just which datasets should be protected) in the future, we need to get creative about imagining how adversaries might use them.

The Chinese state’s use of technology to enhance its authoritarian control is a topic that has received considerable attention in recent years. The targeting of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, aided by invasive and highly coercive use of surveillance technology, has been a focal point of this discussion. So, understandably, when most people think about the risks of China’s “tech authoritarianism” going global, they think about how similarly invasive surveillance can go global. But the real problem is far more significant and far less detectable because of the nature of the digital and data-driven technologies concerned.

The Chinese party-state apparatus is already using big data collection to support its efforts to shape, manage and control its global operating environment. It understands that data that seems insignificant on their own can carry enormous strategic value when aggregated. Advertisers may use data on public sentiment to sell us things we didn’t know we needed. An adversarial actor, on the other hand, might use this data to inform propaganda efforts that subvert democratic discourse on digital platforms.

The U.S. and other countries have rightly focused on the risk of malicious cyber intrusions — such as the aforementioned OPM, Marriott and United Airlines incidents that have been attributed to China-based actors — but data access needn’t be derived from a malicious intrusion or alteration in the digital supply chain. It simply requires an adversary like the Chinese state to exploit normal and legal business relationships that result in data-sharing downstream. These pathways are already developing, most visibly through mechanisms like the recently enacted Data Security Law and other state security practices in China.

Creating legal frameworks to access data is only one way China is working to ensure its access to domestic and global datasets. Another way is to own the market. In a recent report, my co-authors and I found that for the tech areas examined, China had the highest number of patent applications filed compared to other countries but didn’t have a correspondingly high impact factor.

This didn’t mean that Chinese companies were failing to lead, though. In China, the R&D incentive structure leads to researchers developing applications that have specific policy objectives — companies can own the market and refine their products later. Chinese leaders are very aware that their efforts to achieve global market dominance and set global tech standards will also facilitate access to more data overseas and their eventual integration across disparate platforms.

China is working on ways to marry otherwise unremarkable data to yield results that in aggregate can be quite revealing. After all, any data can be processed to generate value if put in the right hands. For example, in my 2019 report, “Engineering Global Consent,” I described the issue through a case study of Global Tone Communications Technology (GTCOM), a propaganda department-controlled company that provides translation services through machine translation. According to its PR, GTCOM also embeds products in the supply chains of companies like Huawei and AliCloud. But, GTCOM isn’t just providing translation services. According to a company official, the data it collects through its business activity “provide[s] technical support and assistance for state security.”

Moreover, the Chinese government, assuming better technical capabilities in the future, collects data that aren’t even apparently useful. The same technologies that contribute to everyday problem-solving and standard service provision can simultaneously enhance the Chinese party-state’s political control at home and abroad.

Responding to this growing problem will require thinking about the “tech race” with China differently. The issue is not simply about developing capabilities that compete but the ability to imagine future use cases to know what datasets are even worth protecting. States and organizations must develop ways of assessing the value of their data and the value that data may hold for potential parties who may gain access to it now or in the future.

We’ve already underestimated this threat by assuming that authoritarian regimes like China would weaken as the world became increasingly digitally interconnected. Democracies are not going to self-correct in response to the problems created by authoritarian applications of technology. We must reassess risk in a way that keeps up to date with the current threat landscape. If we fail to do so, we risk falling into China’s “data trap.”

December 25, 2021

Infinite revenue multiples

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Today is Christmas Day, so I don’t know precisely how many of you are actually here. Hello to the seven of us avoiding our families, I suppose.

But before we’re called back to actually Talk To Other People, let’s talk about two quick things, yeah? Let’s have fun one last time in 2021. Thanks for reading, by the way. I appreciate you.

By far the best story of the week wasn’t Jack directly calling bullshit on web3, but a funding round. The round itself wasn’t that fascinating, but the story behind Airbyte’s round was.

Airbyte, for reference, is an open-source startup that helps customers move data. That’s a big market, frankly, because there is a lot of data out there, and it simply doesn’t stay put. Companies want to move it here and there. And doing so is hard work. I am not going to shout about extract, load and transform (ELT) at this juncture at you as there’s no need, but that’s the general market that Airbyte competes in.

In business terms, the company has a free open source product, natch, and a paid service. The paid version of Airbyte includes the usual enterprise-friendly tooling that you would expect; things like SSO, for example. And hosting. So, a pretty standard OSS play thus far, yeah?

Back to the money. Airbyte raised a seed round in early 2021 per Crunchbase data. Then the company raised a Series A in May. At that point the company had landed more than $30 million this year, which was a lot of money.

The sum was also diddly compared to what came next. Airbyte closed a $150 million Series B this week at a roughly $1.5 billion valuation. And even better, the company has revenues today of less than $1 million (annual recurring revenue, or ARR).

I joked on Twitter that the company was flexing a revenue multiple of 1,500x. People found that funny.

Turns out it was only half the joke. After the Airbyte news dropped, I heard that the revenue number is probably a bit more under the $1 million mark than I first thought. That means that Airbyte actually has an ARR multiple of way more than 1,500x.

Effectively it’s infinite. That’s amazing and is where venture capital was always going in 2021. What do I meant by that? Well:

Bigger funds have been investing earlier and earlier in the startup lifecycle lately to both deploy more capital and ensure that they can get allocation in later rounds of hot companies.
This means that more startups than ever have been able to raise huge rounds based more on FOMO than revenues than before.
Then 2021 came around and there was even more money floating around, seemingly, and the above two points got exacerbated.
I heard about Series B rounds being done at six-figure ARR, while back in the old days (2019) it was a rule of thumb that to raise a Series A, $1 million in ARR was the minimum.
And now, with Airbyte, it appears that we’re seeing there be no effective limit on how much a company can be valued when compared to its revenue base.

How did Airbyte manage the feat? I have a hunch. An open source company has a simply great set of non-revenue metrics that it can dangle in front of investors when it raises. For example, usage and contribution information for its open source project. So, my guess here is that Airbyte has a hot level of community usage, even if its paid products are more than nascent.

Is the Airbyte round dumb? Who knows! All we can say is that there was enough data somewhere for investors to feel comfortable putting nine-figures of capital into the company at a ten-figure valuation, despite far fewer digits of revenue.

This is bullish for open source startups, right? I reckon it is.

And finally, Juna

I caught up with Juna founder and CEO Peter Arian the other day to chat about what his startup is doing. The gist of the startup is that it is working with insurance providers to provide low-cost sexual wellness testing for sexually active folks. It’s applying a hybrid DTC and health tech model to young people, hoping to shift the convention around testing to something that you do proactively, instead of reactively.

Not to drag COVID into everything, but I wonder if we’re all now a bit more accustomed to getting tested these days. I am off in a few minutes to get my nose poked by a swab, if that’s still how COVID tests go. The delights of modern life.

Juna is neat not only in that I think it’s product is cool and is something that I would have used when I was younger and not married but also thanks to its marketing strategy. You hear a lot about brands leveraging social media to garner attention, right? Well, Juna is making TikTok work for its business.

Per Arian, the company’s waitlist for access is growing between 15% and 20% per month, which seems pretty healthy. Juna is targeting a February launch, so it still has time to add more names. Perhaps its use of TikTok will keep paying out?

The company is putting together some capital but isn’t quite done with that yet. So, I’ll circle back to chat with Arian when he closes the round and opens the waitlist. Testing is not sexy, but sexing tested people is? Something like that.

—Alex

December 24, 2021

Can America meet its next Sputnik moment?

Megan Lamberth Contributor

Megan Lamberth is an associate fellow with the Technology & National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). She is the co-author of the CNAS report “Taking the Helm: A National Technology Strategy to Meet the China Challenge.”

The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics.

The Soviet Union kicked off the Space Age when it propelled the world’s first satellite into space from a desert steppe in Kazakhstan on October 4, 1957. The launch of Sputnik I — a small aluminum orb, no bigger than a beach ball — proved a transformative moment for the United States. It triggered the U.S.-Soviet space race, served as the impetus for new government institutions, and precipitated substantial increases in federal R&D spending and funding for STEM education.

Sputnik was a galvanizing force, providing the shock and momentum needed to revolutionize the country’s science and technology base. In recent years, government officials and lawmakers have called for a new “Sputnik moment” as they reckon with how to successfully compete economically and technologically with China. While a singular, transformative “Sputnik moment” has yet to occur, there is growing consensus in Washington that the U.S. has fallen or is at risk of falling behind China.

The U.S.-China competition is novel in many ways, but that doesn’t mean America’s way of competing has to be. To reclaim its inimitable role as a driver of American innovation, the U.S. government must muster the kind of energy it did in the aftermath of Sputnik — mobilizing the country’s remarkable talent, institutions and R&D resources — to successfully compete with China.

First, it’s important to revisit what happened 60 some years ago. In the months following Sputnik’s launch, the U.S. government created two new institutions. Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act in July 1958, creating NASA and placing the country’s space program under civilian control. NASA’s primary objective was to land a man on the moon, and it was given a lot of money to do it. Its budget increased almost 500% from 1961 to 1964, accounting for nearly 4.5% of federal spending at its peak. NASA took Americans to the moon and contributed to the development of major technologies with wide commercial application.

The federal government also established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) with the mission to prevent future technology surprises. Its research and work contributed to a variety of technologies that remain critical to America’s economic competitiveness, including GPS, voice recognition, and most notably, the foundational elements for the internet.

The Sputnik launch also motivated the passage of the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958. The NDEA devoted federal funding for STEM and foreign language education and established the country’s first federal student loan program. The NDEA explicitly linked the promotion of education to addressing America’s defense needs, recognizing it as an integral component of U.S. national security.

Sputnik spurred massive growth in federal R&D spending, which was instrumental in creating today’s robust tech and startup community. The federal government was funding close to 70% of total U.S. R&D by the 1960s — more than the rest of the world combined. Government R&D investment has declined in the decades since, however. As the Cold War ended and the private sector started spending more on R&D, federal R&D spending as a percentage of GDP fell from about 1.2% in 1972 to approximately 0.7% in 2018.

As policymakers deliberate on how the U.S. should compete technologically, economically and militarily against China, they should heed the lessons learned in the Sputnik moment.

First, while Sputnik provided the political capital to create new institutions and increase spending on R&D and education, the groundwork for many of these efforts was already in place. NASA built off the work of its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and the preparations for many of the provisions in the NDEA were in motion for some time. Sputnik provided shock and urgency, but the momentum and much of the legwork was already underway. Today, the U.S. government should commit to sustained investment in its science and technology base — ensuring a strong foundation for American innovation no matter what challenge the country faces in the future.

Second, the federal government should establish clear national objectives to direct technology investment and motivate the public to contribute to those priorities. President Kennedy’s call to land a man on the moon was unambiguous, inspiring and provided direction for R&D investment. Policymakers should identify specific goals with measurable metrics for critical technology sectors, explaining how these goals will bolster American national security and economic growth.

Finally, while the government’s R&D investments helped spawn remarkable technological advancements, its approach for allocating and overseeing that spending was equally important. As Margaret O’Mara explains in her book, “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,” federal funding flowed “indirectly” and “competitively,” giving the tech community “remarkable freedom to define what the future might look like” and “push the boundaries of the technologically possible.” The U.S. government must again take care that its investments fuel technological competitiveness without morphing into what could be conceived of as broad-based, inefficient industrial policy.

The phrase “Sputnik moment” is often invoked in an attempt to spur government action and public involvement. And indeed, actions taken in Sputnik’s aftermath are illustrative of what the U.S. government can accomplish when its approach is unified and driven by clear objectives. Rarely, however, has America achieved comparable improvements to the country’s innovation base. That doesn’t have to be the case. After Sputnik, the U.S. government reinvigorated its science and technology base by investing in the people, infrastructure and resources that would ultimately establish American technological hegemony. A new Sputnik spirit today can power American technological competitiveness into the future. Time is of the essence.

December 23, 2021

US government must embrace stablecoins to maintain dollar dominance

Connor Spelliscy Contributor

Connor Spelliscy is a blockchain researcher focused on policy and governance. He founded the DAO Research Collective and co-founded blockchain advocacy organizations in the U.S. and Canada.

Stablecoins’ exponential growth

Mainstream use of stablecoins is picking up, with the market growing from $5 billion in December 2019 to more than $158 billion in December 2021.

One reason for this growth is stablecoins’ inherent advantages over current financial technologies. For instance, stablecoins can be transferred instantaneously to anyone around the world with little to no transaction cost.

For a tangible example of the impact of stablecoins, consider their use by migrant workers. Typically, workers send their money home through traditional financial institutions. The process can take weeks and costs, on average, 7% of a worker’s earnings in transfer and conversion fees. Stablecoins, on the other hand, allow migrant workers to send their wages home instantaneously for almost no cost.

Stablecoins increase demand for USD

Since all major stablecoins are denominated in USD, their exponential adoption around the world gives the U.S. a critical opportunity to expand dollar dominance. Meanwhile leading stablecoin issuers like Circle hold their reserves in USD and short-term U.S. Treasuries. This both increases demand for USD and makes dollars more accessible to buyers across the globe. These developments make the U.S. better positioned than any other country to take advantage of consumer interest in this new technology.

The stablecoin market will likely sustain outsized demand for USD given the network effects reinforcing the existing popularity of USD-backed stablecoins. This is particularly true in countries with unmet demand for USD, like Argentina, where the government limits its citizens’ access to hard currencies.

What could go wrong for the U.S.?

Despite its potential, poorly crafted regulations could kill the stablecoin sector in the U.S. while the industry thrives abroad. A lack of regulatory clarity for blockchain companies has already pushed U.S. founders to move their operations to jurisdictions with clearer and/or more permissive regulations, like Singapore, Portugal and the Cayman Islands. Fidelity Investments, one of America’s best-known investment advisers, notably launched its Bitcoin ETF in Canada as regulators have not yet authorized a similar offering in the U.S.

Further, the recently passed infrastructure bill contains unworkable digital asset tax reporting requirements that, if left unchanged, would deepen a growing trend of blockchain companies moving offshore. Policymakers have responded to this threat by trying to amend these requirements, including through the bipartisan Keep Innovation In America Act, but they may not be successful in time.

On stablecoins specifically, policymakers are split. The recent Senate Banking Committee hearing on stablecoins struck a harsh tone. Senators cited many of the same concerns they had with Libra, demonstrating a lack of understanding or interest in the different types of stablecoins. Meanwhile a bipartisan congressional committee surprised observers with its enthusiasm for stablecoins at a key hearing earlier this month. Equally surprising were Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s comments this month that “stablecoins can be a useful, efficient, consumer-serving part of the financial system if they are properly regulated.”

To keep stablecoin innovation in the U.S., policymakers and regulators need to provide the industry with clear guardrails that don’t stifle innovation. Regulations should ensure stability and transparency, without limiting the industry’s potential to grow through innovations like decentralized reserves.

Policymakers should also account for negative externalities that stablecoins can have for countries that can’t compete with the U.S. While stablecoins help citizens disempower autocratic and corrupt governments they may equally undermine the monetary controls of friendly nations with weak currencies.

If the U.S. — purposely or inadvertently — pushes stablecoin issuers away, offshore industry and foreign governments will happily take their market share.

Foreign issuers have already launched stablecoins in other currencies, including in Euro and the Canadian dollar. Demand will continue for USD-denominated stablecoin, but if unreasonable U.S. regulation pushes the industry offshore, the U.S. will have less leverage to set requirements around USD reserves and transparency.

China, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden and others are taking a more active approach to stablecoin development and promotion than the U.S. by piloting stablecoins backed by their respective central banks, known as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). While it remains to be seen whether CBDCs become popular among consumers, particularly given privacy concerns, they could erode the stablecoin dominance the U.S. currently enjoys.

Global currency competition is here and scaling quickly. Nations that don’t embrace it will be left behind. The U.S. is no exception.

December 22, 2021

To protect the future of the internet, US-led tech diplomacy must change tack

Andrew Bennett Contributor

Andrew Bennett is a senior policy analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, focused on internet policy and geopolitics. He recently co-authored "The Open Internet on the Brink: A Model to Save Its Future."

The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics.

In the wake of its recent Democracy Summit, the U.S. has proposed that “like-minded democracies” should form a new “Alliance for the Future of the Internet” to uphold open, liberal values online. The latest in a long line of cooperation initiatives, it is a promising candidate for delivering progress. But in its current guise, it risks falling short. Now, with disagreements between officials delaying the launch, the U.S. must take this opportunity for a rethink.

The underlying logic behind the Alliance remains sound: Internet freedoms are increasingly under threat globally, governments are competing to assert their authority, and a decades-long governance system formed of voluntary bodies is now creaking. As Tim Wu, adviser to the Biden administration on tech policy, recently said, “we are on the wrong trajectory.” Against this backdrop, a new initiative to promote and defend open, liberal values in the internet era is sorely needed.

In practice, however, the U.S. focus on “like-minded democracies” working together risks undermining its own objectives. That’s because the future of the open internet will not be secured either by a small club of democracies talking only to themselves or by employing coercion alone. Instead, any Alliance must be far more inclusive, focusing on setting the economic and security incentives right from day one to build a wide and sustainable coalition for the long term.

This would represent a much more internationalist approach to internet policy than the U.S. has usually needed to take. For decades, America’s outsized jurisdictional power has underwritten the open internet model: Despite only 7.1% of the world’s internet users being based in the U.S., it is home to 61% of core infrastructure services for the global internet. Its dominance has supported the model of permissionless innovation, interoperable networks and “dumb pipes” — infrastructure that can’t see what content it is transporting — which has generated such immense economic and social value. Only China, home to 19% of global internet users, has comparable geopolitical sway.

Yet U.S. hegemony can be relied upon no longer to maintain a free internet. Many countries are at a tipping point in how they govern the internet, with authoritarian internet models including censorship, surveillance and shutdowns quickly gaining ground. And today, 3.7 billion people still do not have internet access.

As connectivity improves, the developing countries that are home to most of this group will come to determine the future of the internet — and at present they are likelier to receive the necessary financing from China than anywhere else. The shift to a multipolar internet is a given, but its direction — open or closed, liberal or authoritarian — is not.

On these trends, focusing only on cooperation among today’s democracies amounts to overindexing on an ever-smaller section of the internet. Organizing solely around values also highlights those areas where traditional allies are not yet in agreement, such as the EU and U.S. on several areas of internet regulation. For any alliance to succeed, therefore, it must move beyond the accepted cliché of “like-minded partners” and adopt a twin approach — prioritizing economic and security incentives alongside commitments on internet openness, such as a ban on internet shutdowns — to encourage a broader set of countries to join.

This strategy will be particularly important to convince those countries that are increasingly considering more restrictive internet policies. For example, since 2015, 31 of 54 African countries have blocked access to social media to some degree. Undoubtedly, some of these shutdowns have been due to overt repression and must be met with a strong international response. Yet other interventions have been less ideological: When violent content online has left leaders worried about public safety, a combination of muddled policy, low state capacity and underinvestment in content moderation from major social media services has led to regrettable actions that might otherwise have been avoided with greater support.

It is not too late to arrest this trend and secure core internet freedoms. But such efforts will not succeed through coercion alone. While the fight against authoritarianism is crucial, allowing every debate to get wrapped up into polarized “democracies versus authoritarians” language can actually close off opportunities for cooperation, only accelerating greater restrictions and fragmentation. The effect of this corrosive discourse can already be seen in Africa, where the West too often treats states as little more than sites for “proxy battles” in a larger U.S.-China “cold war.” Neither of these conceptions are helpful.

China is not a monolith: It is a partner, competitor and adversary to the West all at once. The U.S., EU and others cannot force China out of the global internet infrastructure market, and nor should they want or need to. Africa, the U.S. and China would all be better served by a globally competitive market for internet infrastructure, with no one state either monopolizing provision or footing the entire bill.

Similarly, not only do African countries have their own political priorities and challenges, but it is often in the West’s own economic interests to offer support. Connecting all 3.7 billion people without internet access would, for example, cost just 0.02% of the gross national incomes for OECD states — a group of countries including the U.S., UK, Korea and Japan — while generating a huge 25x return.

Yet when the G7 launched its “Build Back Better World” project this year, designed to compete with China’s infrastructure offer, it came with no new money. Meanwhile there has been little effort to reform World Bank and IMF development programs, which the U.S. could influence, despite them being uncompetitively bureaucratic, risk averse and expensive for many African leaders facing fragile development pathways and urgent job-creation demands.

For years, we’ve lacked the necessary political leadership and ambition for a program of this kind. But the Alliance for the Future of the Internet has the potential to provide a reset. To succeed, it must show there is no pathway to prosperity that undermines core internet freedoms, while also providing the right guidance and incentives to enable a different approach. While there will always be some countries who never sign up, these strong incentives could persuade many “swing states” — such as Indonesia, Kenya or Brazil — to join. Only by building wide, internationalist coalitions that are in everyone’s economic and security interests to sustain will the open, global internet truly be protected for the long term.

December 21, 2021

Daily Crunch: Bitcoin is religion; web3 is greed

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

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 21, 2021. This is my final Daily Crunch with you for the year. So, let me just say thanks for reading since I took over writing the newsy bits of this newsletter. It could have gone horribly, frankly, given how much folks hate change in their inboxes. But, with open rates at an all-time high, y’all have welcomed the New Daily Crunch Crew with open arms, and we’re grateful. Here’s to an even better 2022 — and more jokes. —Alex

P.S. You should follow Miranda (Experts), Walter (TC+), Annie (editing) and Richard (editing) as they make this newsletter sing. Richard declined to share a link. He’s a ghost! But a friendly one.

The TechCrunch Top 3

Bitcoin is religion; web3 is greed: After Jack Dorsey kicked up a firestorm by inveighing against web3 and the current wave of crypto projects, TechCrunch dug into the debate because how could we not. Whether you are a bitcoin maximalist or a big NFT stan, we have something that will annoy you!
EU clears the Microsoft-Nuance deal: The $19.7 billion deal in which the Redmond tech giant will buy the medical transcription company has a green light from the European market. See, not all major tech deals are getting cut down to the nubbin with regulatory concerns and then canceled!
Via shuttles toward the public markets: Public transit software and shuttle company Via is going public in early 2022. The company announced today that it has filed privately for its IPO. We’ll know a lot more when we actually get the S-1 document, but the company joins Reddit on our list of public debuts that we anticipate in Q1 of next year.

Startups/VC

But wait, there’s even more public market news! Yes, Snapdeal filed to go public, and our own Manish Singh (follow him; he’s amazing!) has the details. SoftBank is a backer of the New Delhi-based startup. Per its prospectus, the company anticipates raising around $165 million in its public-market debut. Recall that Snapdeal “once competed with Amazon and Flipkart in India [but] has lost considerable market share in recent years,” we wrote.

And speaking of companies going public, remember the Better.com fiasco in which the company’s CEO went viral for firing a bunch of staff on Zoom? And then a bunch of whacko stuff from the company came out? Well, we’re curious why Vishal Garg still has a job, so we did a little digging. There’s more to come on this story.

Next, a few new funds:

Array Ventures raises $56M to back really hard enterprise tech: Shruti Gandhi’s fund intends to invest its new capital pool on 30 startups “working on technical, back-bone enterprise tech.” Given the fund size and number of checks, we’re talking very early money in the case of Array.
Targeting AI automation, Calibrate Ventures raises $97M: With 25% more capital than in its first fund, Calibrate has reloaded its wallet. The firm previously invested in Built Robotics, Embodied, FarmWise, Soft Robotics, Talage and TruckLabs, TechCrunch reports.
Chapter One raises capital to invest in web3: Don’t tell Jack, but there’s even more money on tap for web3 projects. The $40 million fund will be joined by a $20 million “opportunity” fund, provided that that latter vehicle closes on target. Notably, Chapter One’s Jeff Morris Jr. is a solo investor.

And a few rapid-fire pieces of startup news:

Justin Kan’s NFT platform suffers rocky debut as scammer makes off with $150K in user funds — Not a good look for crypto is our $0.02.
Patreon CPO says the company will double in size in 2022 — The creator economy is still hot, we reckon.
The eVTOL take-off: Four trends that shaped 2021 — Sadly, none of these contraptions are currently on tap to fly us home for the holidays.
The Ubiquitous platform brings all the influencers to the yard — Haje loses 10 points for the headline, but the startup here seems cool.
Ampla raises $40M Series A for its business of providing credit to commerce brands — Providing credit is a big game for startups, as banks have long been too stingy with funds.
Airtable acqui-hires Walrus.ai’s founding team — Remember when acqui-hires were the jam? That was a fun time. I miss it.
Newly minted unicorn Tackle plans to use $100 million Series C to accelerate the future of software sales — Tackle will take down its market! It will tackle the competition! It has the software game on the run!

Demand Curve: How Ahrefs’ homepage educates prospects to purchase

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If you’re building a homepage, the goal should be to increase desire while eliminating labor and confusion in order to increase conversions.

“People have short attention spans, so if your homepage is confusing, they’re going to leave,” Demand Curve’s Joey Noble writes in a guest post.

He tears down SEO platform Ahrefs’ homepage, providing actionable strategies you can use at your startup, including how to handle objections, use social proof to build urgency and establish credibility, and catering to your audience.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Tracking Microsoft’s retreat from China: Managing to simultaneously keep the Chinese Communist Party happy and your international business in good standing is increasingly difficult. Microsoft struggled to make it work, TechCrunch notes by tracing both LinkedIn and Bing’s histories in the country.

TechCrunch Experts

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

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Marketer: Brent Payne, Loud Interactive SEO

Recommended by: Brad Schnitzer, Techstars Chicago

Testimonial: “He’s the best SEO in the Midwest. He ran SEO for the Tribune and has now taken those skills to help early-stage founders achieve the same success. He’s honestly changed the trajectory of so many of the ~42 startups I have invested in at Techstars Chicago over the past four years.”

December 20, 2021

Daily Crunch: YouTube TV settles its contract dispute with Disney, credits customers $15

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

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, December 20! Now deep into the second half of December, you’d think that we’d be down to spare news pickings. Not a bit of it! We had a 10-figure deal today, an IPO filing and startup news galore. So strap in — no taking breaks quite yet! To work! —Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

Oracle buys Cerner in $28B deal: This is a big darn deal. Oracle everyone is familiar with, but what is Cerner? Per our own Ron Miller, Cerner is an electronic healthcare records company. Naturally, a major tech company buying something in the health data space may have your hackles up, but analysts that TechCrunch spoke to generally liked the deal, so what’s worry about?
Inside Justworks’ IPO filing: Late last week, SMB-focused HR software provider Justworks filed to go public. Today, TechCrunch took a deeper look into its filing, curious about its economics and overall business performance. The company raised extensive capital during its life as a private company, so this is a big venture-backed exit to keep tabs on in early 2022. (Along with Reddit!)
Rocket buys TrueBill for $1.275B: And because one billion-dollar-plus deal wasn’t enough to keep us busy today, Rocket Companies announced its huge buy of consumer fintech TrueBill in an all-cash deal. TechCrunch noted that with TrueBill set to reach around $100 million ARR this year, per its acquirer, the transaction felt somewhat inexpensive. For investors that got a quick double on their most recent investment, it’s a nice win.

Startups/VC

There were a number of huge pieces of startup news today, and a plethora of smaller, yet still critical, updates. So, largest first, and then as many of the smaller notes as we can fit into this newsletter!

Rec Room raises $145M at a $3.5B valuation: Why is a social gaming platform raising that kind of money? Well, Roblox. That’s the answer. How so? Because Roblox showed that user-created games atop a centralized platform can generate simply huge incomes, and investors are betting that Rec Room’s twist on the concept is going to be a cash cow in time. The company was worth $1.25 billion earlier this year, so its new valuation may be frothy, but investors are willing to pay up in part thanks to Roblox being worth north of $58 billion as of this afternoon, no doubt.
ZeroFox is going public via a SPAC: This is a fun one. Per TechCrunch, ZeroFox is an “enterprise threat intelligence cybersecurity startup that helps companies detect risks found on social media.” So, it’s a software company going public via a blank-check company. The deal values ZeroFox at around $1.4 billion. You can read the deck here, if that’s your jam. But the deal shows that the SPAC boom is not over — yet.
$100M for fast groceries in India: Zepto is a fast grocery delivery service, the sort of business that wants to bring you items in 10 minutes or less. The model is proving popular in Europe and North America, with companies like Zapp and Gopuff putting up big numbers. Zepto is a notable round because the deal is a big one, and because it more than doubles the company’s valuation “to $570 million from $225 million less than two months ago as [the company] expands into newer cities.”
Remote hiring is big business: That’s what Turing’s new round tells us. The company just raised an $87 million Series D for its “talent cloud,” a service that “uses AI to source, evaluate, hire, onboard and then manage engineers remotely,” TechCrunch reports. The new capital pushes Turing’s valuation to $1.1 billion.
Kneron raises $25M for AI chips: Given the global chip shortage/fiasco, I am in favor of more capital flowing into chip companies, startups included. What Kneron is building won’t help Ford build more trucks, but its AI chips are “semiconductors designed to accelerate machine learning” we wrote, which still sounds pretty important.
Nonprofit startup works to lessen predatory inmate pricing: Not every startup that is built is designed to either save a pension fund or allow a venture capitalist to finally stop flying business class. In the case of Ameelio, the company is building free calls for inmates. If you aren’t familiar with the U.S. carceral state, know that my nation has found it palatable, somehow, to profit off the incarcerated through both private prisons and exorbitant costs for the locked-up to access phone calls and other services. Ameelio could shake that up with no-cost video calling services. Let’s hope.
Adventr rminds m of th Wb 2.0 glry dys: Remember when startups would just drop letters from a word and call it a name? It was a good time. Adventr is bringing the trend back with its name and the fact that it is working to make video more interactive. Very Web 2.0, once again in a way that I don’t mind. The company just raised $5 million.
The AI dentist will see you now: Overjet is a company I’ve covered before, so it’s nice to see it crop up again on our pages. The company is now worth north of $400 million thanks to a new $42.5 million Series B. Overjet uses AI to help dentists make decisions about teeth, which I dig thanks to the fact that I ate too much candy as a child and didn’t floss during much of my 20s.
Stenon is working on dirt data: Agtech is a fun part of the technology world because it involves the application of new methods to what is just about the oldest human endeavor there is, namely trying to coax food out of the ground. Stenon is directly involved with that work, providing farmers with what TechCrunch described as a “real-time soil-sensing solution.” That means data from the dirt. Why does that matter? Well, soil water content can greatly impact harvest timing, for example. Stenon just closed a $20 million Series A.

The growing power of digital healthcare: 6 trends to watch in 2022

Doctors at the University hospital in Aachen use telemedicine for the treatment via internet of Covid-19 patients, on January 20, 2021 in Aachen, western Germany, amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. - To discuss the most serious Covid-19 cases, Andreas Bootsveld is not alone. In addition to colleagues in his intensive care unit, he can draw on the advice of several experts. However, this panel of specialists is not on the clinic premises, but some 20 kilometres away. Telemedicine, which is carried out via videoconference visits, is accelerating with the pandemic. (Photo by Ina FASSBENDER / AFP) (Photo by INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images)

Image Credits: INA FASSBENDER (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The pandemic ushered in “the digital healthcare revolution,” and patients and providers alike are unlikely to turn back.

“Healthcare deals were hot in the first nine months in 2021,” GHI Fund President Bill Taranto writes in a guest post. “They brought in a total of $21.3 billion in venture funding across 541 deals, dwarfing the previous record of $14.6 billion set in 2020, according to Rock Health.”

Taranto rounds up six trends to watch in the New Year:

Telemedicine changing how chronic conditions are treated.
Digital therapeutics rewriting the future of healthcare.
Social determinants of health resulting in greater health equity.
Remote health monitoring improving outcomes and lowering costs.
Real-world data delivering real-world results.
Healthcare becoming truly patient-centric.

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

Big Tech Inc.

YouTube TV and Disney make nice: There is an interesting, recurring game of chicken that content providers and content deliverers play when it comes to your cable bill. And even Alphabet’s YouTube TV is not immune. After a spat with Disney over money — what else, with the mouse company — a deal has been reached that will see Disney channels stay on YouTube TV. Customers of the latter service will get a $15 credit for the disruption.
Meta sues phishers: The company formerly known as Facebook is suing a phishing group that went after its users’ account credentials. One, good. Good on Facebook for doing this. And, two, why don’t we hear more about this sort of work more often?
Line to pursue more NFT work in 2022: You cannot shake a stick in technology today and not wind up accidentally hitting an NFT play, so, here’s today’s. Line, the popular messaging service in Japan, is launching an NFT service in markets outside of Japan next year. But don’t worry if you are in Line’s main market — the company is “separately operating its NFT market beta version through Line Bitmax wallet that is fit” for Japan, TechCrunch writes.

TechCrunch Experts

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

If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this article on TechCrunch from Joyce Chou: “Demand Curve: Avoid these 10 copywriting mistakes to get more conversions.”

December 19, 2021

Putin and Xi’s evolving disinformation playbooks pose new threats

Jessica Brandt Contributor

Jessica Brandt is policy director of the AI and Emerging Technology Initiative and a fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics.

As the information domain becomes an increasingly active and consequential realm of state competition, two countries have gone all in. Both China and Russia have developed sophisticated information strategies to advance their geopolitical interests, and their playbooks are evolving. No longer primarily relying on proxy troll farms to generate large quantities of polarizing content, the Kremlin has turned to military intelligence assets to carry out more targeted information operations designed to circumvent platform-detection mechanisms. And motivated by concern that it might be blamed for a pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than five million people worldwide, Beijing has become considerably less risk-averse in its use of “wolf warrior” diplomats to push conspiracy theories online. To sustain its vision of a free and open internet, Washington must develop a strategy to push back.

Moscow’s information manipulation playbook is evolving

Russia, a declining power by many measures, seeks to compensate for its relative weakness through asymmetric means, by disrupting the institutions, alliances and domestic politics of its neighbors and geopolitical competitors in the near term. With little to lose and much to gain from public awareness of its activities, the Kremlin is not particularly sensitive to attribution or concerned about repercussions. And so, in order to keep the transatlantic community distracted, divided and unable to carry out a confident, coordinated foreign policy that could be detrimental to its interests, the Kremlin uses disinformation to stoke chaos and promote disorder.

To accomplish this, Moscow uses at least two techniques that represent a maturation of its playbook since its “sweeping and systematic” campaign to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. First, it regularly co-opts domestic voices and institutions within target societies in order to cast information operations as authentic advocacy, often by hiding trolls within a target population, renting the social media accounts of local citizens or recruiting real activists to stoke protests. It does so partly to evade increasingly sophisticated platform-detection mechanisms and partly to exacerbate the politicization of content moderation debates within the United States.

Second, the Kremlin‘s disinformers recognize that they do not need to perpetuate an operation at scale in order to create the impression that they or others have, and that the impression alone is enough to sow doubt about the legitimacy of election results and exacerbate partisan discord. Moscow can thus leverage widespread concern about the potential for manipulation, particularly in an election context, to achieve its goals by claiming that manipulation has happened — even in the absence of a successful operation.

Beijing is taking a page from Moscow’s playbook — and writing some of its own plays

China, meanwhile, is a rising power with little to gain and much to lose from public awareness of its interference activities. Unlike Russia, it prefers a stable international order, but one that is more conducive to its interests than the current U.S.-led framework. As a result, its activities in the information domain are primarily geared toward promoting China’s image as a responsible global superpower and stifling criticism that would tarnish its prestige, while denting the appeal of democracy by casting the United States and its partners as ineffective and hypocritical.

For Beijing, pursuing these interests has entailed a three-pronged strategy of piggybacking on the propaganda networks of other strongmen, manufacturing the appearance of popular support and co-opting conversations on its rights record. Lacking an influencer network of its own, China regularly relies on the constellation of alternative thinkers, many of them Western, that are a fixture of Russian propaganda. Highlighting the difficulty of generating support for pro-China positions on a platform Beijing has banned at home, China’s wolf warrior diplomats regularly engage with false personas on Twitter. And in order to push back on criticisms of its rights record, it attempts to co-opt discussions on the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang using hashtag campaigns and slick videos.

Autocrats align — but only sometimes

Despite important differences in their long-term goals, Moscow and Beijing share multiple immediate objectives: denting the global prestige of democracy, weakening multilateral institutions and undermining democratic alliances. As a result, the two countries deploy several of the same tactics.

Both use “whataboutism” to paint the United States as hypocritical, particularly on issues of race. Both use clickbait content to generate large followings on Twitter, recognizing that an audience is a strategic asset. Both regularly traffic in multiple, often conflicting, conspiracy theories to cast doubt on official accounts of political events, evade blame for their activities and create the impression that there is no such thing as objective reality. Both operate extensive propaganda apparatuses that spread their preferred narratives.

They also deploy many of the same narratives. Both countries have worked to diminish confidence in the safety record of certain Western COVID-19 vaccines and portray the United States and its allies as ineffective. That said, Russia is primarily focused on pushing divisive content that deepens polarization and diminishes trust in institutions and elites, all while pushing back on what it characterizes as anti-Russian bias in established media. China, for its part, is primarily interested in highlighting the benefits of its governance model, while painting critiques of its rights abuses as hypocritical. Kremlin state media almost never cover Russian domestic politics. Moscow’s goal is to drive audiences away from the political West, not pull them toward Russia. For China, the opposite is true.

Much has been made about the state of cooperation between Russia and China in various domains of their respective competitions with the United States. Evidence suggests there is very little formal coordination of their information activities beyond largely symbolic agreements to distribute one another’s content. That is not entirely a surprise. Beijing doesn’t need to formally cooperate with Moscow in order to amplify Kremlin-promoted narratives or to emulate other successful elements of the Kremlin’s information strategy.

What’s to come

Both Russian and Chinese information strategies are evolving. Russia’s disinformation activities are becoming more targeted and harder to detect, while China is taking a more assertive, less subtle approach than before. For Russia, these changes appear to be driven by growing awareness of its activities since 2016, which simultaneously prompted the implementation of new platform policies and detection mechanisms and ushered in an era of partisan debates over election legitimacy that reverberate today. For China, changes to its information strategy seem to be primarily motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic, a global crisis of unique salience to its geopolitical standing that will continue to create opportunities for Beijing to test new approaches.

Recognizing these consequential changes to the way Russia and China approach the information domain, the United States needs a playbook of its own. A robust strategy would include harnessing truthful information to highlight the failures of repressive rule, deploying American cyber capabilities to prevent or impose costs on those who would conduct destabilizing disinformation campaigns and implementing legislation that would make platform transparency, particularly with trusted researchers, the norm. Finally, because it is good for democratic societies and creates challenges for their authoritarian competitors, the United States should more forcefully defend freedom of information worldwide.

In the consequential contest between democratic and authoritarian societies, autocrats have seized the initiative. This collection of measures represents a starting point for bold and responsible action to ensure that the United States regains it. To succeed, the U.S. and its democratic partners must act quickly.

December 16, 2021

Daily Crunch: TechCrunch’s 2021 holiday gift guide: Our favorite gadgets for less than $100

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

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, December 16! A small note that Greg is taking over this newsletter tomorrow, as I am burning through a spare personal day that I had to use or lose. From the TechCrunch side of things, it’s a great day to check out all our Totally Awesome newsletters. Tap into our reporting and thinking! For free! —Alex

P.S. This gift guide is a godsend for anyone on a budget!

Image Credits: TechCrunch

The TechCrunch Top 3

Byju’s could go public via SPAC: In the wake of Grab’s mega-SPAC deal, Indian edtech giant Byju’s could be prepping to take a similar path to the U.S. public markets, TechCrunch reports. Our own Manish Singh notes that Byju’s is “seeking a valuation of over $45 billion and looking to raise as much as $4 billion” in the transaction.
Reddit files to go public: Speaking of mega-public offerings for early 2022, Reddit announced today that it filed to go public. The social company’s filing is still private, but TechCrunch has questions, y’all. It’s a tossup regarding which dataset we’re more excited about between Byju’s and Reddit, but the start of next year is looking busy. Already.
Tech’s collective lobbying group falls apart: The Internet Association is winding down, TechCrunch reports. The lobbying group once represented a diverse set of tech companies, which was perhaps its downfall. Given that its members don’t agree on all matters, the shattering is not a surprise in retrospect. And considering how much tech regulation could land in the next few years, what rises in the void left by the Internet Association will be fascinating.

Startups/VC

As we did yesterday, we’re taking a deeper look at a few key startup stories today, and then running through a host of smaller items so that we can get as much of our reporting into the newsletter as possible!

You can’t kill Cockroach Labs: Not that anyone was trying — that’s just the wittiest riff we could come up with to introduce our reporting that the database company just raised a bunch of new capital at a $5 billion valuation. That’s up from $2 billion earlier this year. Our own Ron Miller writes that Cockroach “has 200 paying customers, with the cloud side of the business growing at 500% over the last year and ARR tripling YoY from Q3 to Q3.” We want hard numbers, but those are at least directionally interesting.
Gopuff is raising $1.5B, could go public next year: Circling back to 2022 IPOs, quick delivery company Gopuff is working to raise around $1.5 billion in convertible debt at a roughly $40 billion valuation. And, our own Ingrid Lunden reports, the SoftBank-backed company could go public next year. If it does, the debut could lead to even more investment into related companies around the world — consumers wanting stuff, fast, is popular the world ‘round.
Vertical farming grows vertical valuation: Europe-based vertical farming firm Infarm raised $200 million this week, pushing its valuation north of the $1 billion mark. Vertical farming brings food creation nearer to urban hubs, potentially limiting carbon output. The concept appears to be growing and could prove nutritious for both consumers and investors alike.
Why do play-to-earn games sound like a job? Voodoo, a French company, is going to put hundreds of millions of dollars into so-called “play-to-earn” games. Today, Voodoo is known for its casual games that have racked up billions of downloads. In the future it will also have blockchain games in the market, where players can earn digital currency or NFTs for their playing.

And then, a host of other happenings for your further research:

Dear Sophie: How to maneuver the latest travel bans, H-1B alternatives

lone figure at entrance to maze hedge that has an American flag at the center

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Dear Sophie,

The 2021 H-1B lottery process has been quite a rollercoaster!

We sponsored several people in this year’s lottery. One of our registrants was selected in the first round in March, but none were selected in the second round in July.

We just found out another of our registrants was selected in November, however, he’s from South Africa and restricted from traveling to the U.S. due to omicron.

What should we do? Any suggestions for what to do about our other prospective hires who didn’t get selected?

— Eager Employer

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

Big Tech Inc.

Apple drops Swift Playgrounds 4: This bit of news means that app development on your iPad is now easier, thanks to the new edition of Swift Playgrounds from the Cupertino-based tech giant. The boundaries for getting into development work are slowly falling, and I consider this particular item indicative of that trend.
You can now embed a mini-profile from Instagram into your website
Spotify hearts podcasts: Today the music streaming company brought podcast ratings to its platform and announced that it has purchased podcast tech company Whooshkaa, which has a simply great name.
Alphabet folds Sidewalk Labs into Google: Yes, you had forgotten about the smart city project Sidewalk Labs, but don’t feel bad about it. Google parent company Alphabet is baking the project into new parent company Google.
And, finally from Alphabet, the Waymo car that hit someone was in manual mode: Here’s an example of bad, but weirdly good news. No, it is not good that a Waymo car hit someone. But, yes, at the same time, it’s weirdly good that it was not in self-driving mode. Why? Because the accident won’t hit the brakes on self-driving development. Which is good because I don’t want to drive.

TechCrunch Experts

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If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this article on TechCrunch+ from Lucy Heskins that we published last week, “How to acquire customer research that shapes your go-to-market strategy.”