Author: Richard Dal Porto

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 15, 2021! Big news from TechCrunch this week, namely that our events are returning to your neighborhood next year! For a rundown of what we have currently planned, head here. But Disrupt, many Sessions and more are going IRL in 2022. I will see you there! —Alex

Image Credits: Nicole Henderson for TechCrunch

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Katie Haun is leaving a16z: News is out today that Katie Haun is leaving a16z. She’s best known, TechCrunch notes, for co-leading the investing group’s $2.2 billion crypto fund. What’s she off to do? Starting a new crypto fund, of course, and she’s taking along some of her colleagues in the process. As far as crypto investing goes, this is seismic.
• Are rich tech valuations set to fall? As interest rates rise and are set to further scale next year, valuation pressure evident in the back half of 2021 could grow next year. That could mean lower top-tier revenue multiples for tech’s highest fliers and perhaps compressed valuations for slower-growing public tech companies. For startups, the impact could be constrained comps and lower private-market pricing.
• The final tech IPO of the year: Capping off a busy IPO year, Samsara’s IoT-themed public debut went well. The company priced at the top end of its range and traded up around 5% toward the end of its first day as a public company. Samsara is now worth comfortably more than $10 billion after raising hundreds of millions in its public offering.

Startups/VC

TechCrunch covered far more startup news in the last 24 hours than I can include for you in our normal format. So, I’ve written blurbs for some of the most interesting items of the day, and then included links to others, in case you are diving deep this afternoon.

• This may be the largest party round we’ve seen: Crypto custody concern Anchorage has raised a $350 million round that values it at more than $3 billion. Everyone and their dog took part in the round, including KKR, Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, Apollo (hey, it’s the parents!), Blockchain Capital, BlackRock, PayPal Ventures, Lux Capital and others. Why? “Because Anchorage received a federal banking charter, turning it into a digital asset bank,” TechCrunch reports.
• Norwest raises its biggest fund yet: Speaking of the $3 billion number, that’s also the amount of money that investing group Norwest has raised for its 16th fund. It’s also the largest capital pool that the tenured firm has raised to date. Perhaps we should just call the current venture capital cycle the Super Size Me era.
• Hong Kong accelerator raises $30M: While China figures out how to quash democratic voices and sentiment in Hong Kong, the city’s startup scene is not entirely moribund. Evidence of that fact can be found in Brinc’s recent Series B, worth some $30 million. The group is an accelerator that we’re most familiar with for its consumer hardware work, though it has expanded in scope in recent years.
• SQream buys Panoply: SQream is what TechCrunch described as a “well-funded Israel-based data analytics platform.” And it has purchased “no-code data platform Panoply in an effort to expand its cloud services.” Panoply raised $24 million before selling to its new parent company. I would also like 10 points for not using the headline “You SQream, I SQream, we all SQream for startup-to-startup no-code acquisitions.”
• Drone maker DJI makes the U.S. block list: Rising economic tensions between the United States and China are hitting more companies this week, with DJI and a half dozen other companies finding themselves on the U.S. naughty list. Why is DJI in trouble? Per TechCrunch, “alleged involvement in surveillance of Uyghur Muslims.” Seems like a pretty solid reason, frankly.
• Pool sharing makes a splash: Yep, you read that correctly. A startup focused on pool rentals from the consumer supply, well, pool, just raised a bunch of money. The startup is called Swimply. Presumably the name is a hybrid of “swim” and “simply,” even if it sounds like a neat acne nickname.

Money, money, money:

• AI-powered VFX startup Wonder Dynamics raises $10M A round
• Brazil’s Olist gets its horn with new $186M funding round
• Proov raises $9.7M Series A for at-home ovulation testing platform
• For Course Hero, venture capital was once an unobvious solution
• Noname Security hits $1B valuation after $135M Series C raise
• Brazilian consumer credit startup Open Co raises $115M in SoftBank-led round
• And there’s even more on TechCrunch.com!

Ample’s John de Souza on the merits of B2B, company culture and investors who get it

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Launching a startup is inherently risky, but scaling up a company to succeed where others have failed spectacularly is a very bold move.

San Francisco-based Ample is partnering with companies that manage EV fleets to swap its modular battery packs in and out of their vehicles. “Fourteen years ago, Better Place raised nearly a billion dollars to do what Ample’s doing, and it ended up declaring bankruptcy,” reports Rebecca Bellan.

In an extended interview with co-founder John de Souza, she asked about the company’s go-to-market strategy, its culture and why he’s certain Ample will succeed where others did not.

“The economics and operations work very well because you don’t need a large number at a single station to break even. With a small fleet, you’d have it at max 20 cars and it will break even. That’s what makes it so attractive. You don’t need to deploy the stations until you have a customer.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Amazon lowers Alexa cut: Developers building “skills” for the Alexa AI and smart-speaker line will see Amazon take a smaller cut of their revenues in the future, with the figure dropping from 30% to 20% “for Alexa skill developers who earn less than $1 million in revenue” for their work. A small change, but a welcome one.
• Aurora, Uber team up for autonomous freight: Recall that self-driving startup Aurora once bought Uber’s self-driving assets. The pair is still teaming up, this time with “Aurora’s self-driving trucks [hauling] goods for Uber Freight customers in Texas.”
• Apple backtracks on its CSAM scanning plan: After running into a wall of concern and complaint, Apple’s controversial plan to scan phones for child-abuse imagery has been removed from its website.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Tuesday, December 14! Our Space event is underway and kicking maximum Q thus far, I am happy to report. In other TechCrunch news, I just hit my two-year mark being back at the blog. Time flies! Thanks to everyone for reading my rambling so that I can stay aboard the good ship TechCrunch. Now, the news! —Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Apple’s Siri-only music plan launches: I had forgotten all about Apple’s cheaper, more limited music plan announced earlier this year. But it’s not only real, it’s here. So, if you are big into Apple speaker tech and want to save a few bucks, here’s a music streaming option for you. Notably, part of the innovation is a lower price, which, frankly, given streaming economics, is not the direction I want to see music services go.
• This may be peak SPAC: To cap 2021’s more silly stories off with a cherry, a metaverse-themed company with around $1 million in revenue is going public via a SPAC. Naturally, it has big expectations for future revenue growth. The company is betting that public-market investors are sufficiently smitten with all things metaverse to bid up its equity. Let’s see.
• Big Cartel unionizes: In the wake of news that Amazon workers died in their facility after a tornado hit it, you might be curious about the progress of unionization among workers for tech companies. Slowly, is the answer to that. But startups are taking the lead again, with Big Cartel choosing to voluntarily recognize its employee union. Confused? Yes, leadership has been scarce in this area from the corporate perspective.

Startups/VC

Kicking off today, here’s a guide from our own Sarah Perez concerning what gifts to buy if you are looking to cut your, or your loved one’s, screen time. I need this.

• How many stars does your doctor have? Garner Health is betting that you want to look up doctor reviews before picking your provider. The company’s work landed a $45 million Series B, TechCrunch reports. Given just how big the healthcare market is, the company’s TAM is effectively infinite.
• The new webcam status symbol: Everyone’s talking about Opal, at least on my Twitter feed. The company built a $300 webcam that looks nifty, and, we presume, will actually be in stock. This deep into the pandemic, lots of folks still have spotty internet, poor lighting and more. Perhaps the startup didn’t miss its window.
• a16z backs PleasrDAO: The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) PleasrDAO has collected backing from a16z, which TechCrunch notes is not the first time that the investing group has backed a DAO. Pleasr’s claims to fame appear to be that it bought a doge NFT for $4 million and spent millions more on a Wu-Tang Clan album.
• Pair raises $60M: While we’re sufficiently far past the Warby Parker founding story now that the company is public, startups aren’t letting the eyeglasses game rest. Pair, which builds eyewear that allows for inexpensive modification, just closed its second round of the year. Previously, the company raised $12 million in April. A quick perusal of its service while writing this newsletter for you left me wanting a pair, for whatever my limited fashion sense is worth. It’s worth noting that Warby Parker remains above its $40 per-share IPO price. More on the Warby DTC IPO from earlier this year.
• Mixhalo raises Series B for live audio mixing: The live events business may have been little more than moribund during the last few years, but Mixhalo is far from dead, it turns out. The company, focused on live audio for, well, live events just closed a Series B.
• Mapping data is big business: If you go back into the depths of startup time, there was once this big moment for “mashups.” The idea was to take two data sets and smush them together. This led to sites like Mashable — get it? — being formed. The mashup movement wound up subsumed into other tech work. Or was it? Carto just raised a $61 million Series C for what TechCrunch describes as helping companies display “data on interactive maps so that you can more easily compare, optimize, balance and make decisions.” Maps plus data? Sounds like a mashup.
• Today’s Tiger round is Mesh Payments: Helping companies manage their spend is a simply huge startup category. Ramp, Brex, Airbase and others are working on the issue in the United States, for example. International competitors abound as well. Today TechCrunch noted that Mesh Payments, another player in the space, just raised a $50 million round led by the ever-present Tiger.
• Luxembourg-based IBISA raises microround for microinsurance: I dig this one. Focused on providing coverage for “small farmers whose livelihoods might be affected by adverse climate events,” IBISA just raised about $1.7 million in a new capital round. The company, despite its European roots, focuses on developing markets.
• Vertical SaaS remains an investable category: In the wake of Squire raising successive rounds for its barbershop vertical SaaS play, we should not be shocked that Fresha has raised a $52.5 million round of capital today. The company sells software for the beauty and wellness industry.

Finally, as we segue into today’s TechCrunch+ feature story, our own Ron Miller is not as convinced as some about the web3 hype. Others are more excited:

7 investors discuss web3’s present and peer into its future

Image Credits: Poca Wander (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

We’re years away from web3 capturing major market share, and there are valid concerns that its complexity will daunt consumers and regulators. 

However, our research indicated that the investment landscape is growing increasingly competitive as venture capitalists become more educated and less skeptical.

To get a clearer sense of where the market is, we reached out to several active investors to find out where web3 stands and what the future holds:

• Lior Messika, founder and managing partner, Eden Block
• Atul Ajoy, partner, Horseshoe Capital
• David Chreng-Messembourg, founding partner, LeadBlock Partners
• Randy Glein, founder/partner, and Sam Shapiro, principal, DFJ Growth
• Mercedes Bent, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Jai Das, co-founder, president and partner, Sapphire Ventures

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Coinbase adds image viewing feature: If you use ​​Coinbase Wallet on desktop, you can now check out your NFTs. We’d normally make some jokes here about the tech required to view images on computers, but we don’t want to get into a Twitter war with Bored Ape fans.
• Snap paid out a quarter billion this year to support its TikTok clone: Snap’s Snapchat service is an interesting social product to watch. It has never given up on its slight angle on the social world, and its parent company has not been shy in using its capital resources — the company raised debt some years ago — to keep the platform well stocked. Today the company announced that it has paid creators $250 million to make content for Spotlight, which is similar to TikTok.
• Cash App now lets users gift stock, crypto: The ability to gift crypto is not new per se, but to see Cash App roll out the capability could allow for more mass-market crypto gifting. Recall that Cash App is no longer owned by Square, it’s owned by Block, its newly rebranded parent company.
• The UK is looking to shake up Google, Apple: The war between third-party developers and the major mobile app store companies continues around the world, with news out today that the “U.K.’s antitrust watchdog has given the clearest signal yet that interventions under an upcoming reform of the country’s competition rules will target” Apple (iOS) and Google (Android).
• A self-driving setback: Daily Crunch has made much mention of self-driving milestones this year, covering new commercial partnerships and tentative in-market movements. But there was some negative progress today, namely that Chinese autonomous driving startup Pony.ai has had its California test permit revoked following a crash.
• Netflix cuts prices in India: We’ve noted in this missive that Netflix is getting into the games business. Why? Because there are only so many people with enough money and internet access out there for Netflix to sell streaming services to. Evidence of the company starting to bump up against its natural market size is that the American streaming service is cutting prices in India. As our own Manish Singh notes, this is not the first time that the company has tinkered with its pricing in the country.

TechCrunch Experts

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, December 13! The theme of today is crypto, or web3 if you prefer that rebranding. Why? Because it turns out that an NFT project is making a game, a new startup wants to bring crypto and no-code together and there are several other bits of web3 startup news on our pages today.

Yes, we also have our normal run of funding rounds, unicorn exits and the like. But, strap in for some token talk! —Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Chinese AI IPO on hold: The SenseTime IPO was set to raise around $767 million in a Hong Kong listing. However, after finding itself on an American technology blacklist as of Friday, the IPO is on hold. As Didi looks to delist from the American markets, seeing such a high-profile Hong Kong debut on hold is not a great look for Chinese tech liquidity.
• Bored Ape Yacht Club game? If you aren’t a fan of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT series — I am not, for what it’s worth — you may not be hype to hear it, but there’s a game coming from the image collection. If this is a hit, expect many games to be built atop other NFT IP. Quickly, I wonder what the market size is for this game, given that there are only 10,000 images in the series.
• UK taking look at Microsoft-Nuance deal: A $19.7 billion deal between Microsoft and “speech-to-text specialist Nuance,” as TechCrunch put it, has picked up regulatory scrutiny by a U.K. watchdog. This is the prelude to an investigation, it appears, but the fact that Microsoft is even getting a second look could chill other large buys by the megacorps of the technology world.

Startups/VC

A few themes are obvious today, including the startup exit market and crypto. We’ll take those on first, and then close with the rest of the startup news of the day.

Exits:

• So much for that IPO pop: A number of 2020 and 2021 IPOs had super strong first-day performances and early trading gains. This led to much complaining that tech offerings were being mispriced on purpose, to the benefit of banking customers. Well, we took a look back, and the numbers with a little time are far less clear than they once seemed.
• Robot company Symbotics to go public via SPAC: After securing greater commitment from huge American retailer Walmart, Symbotics has decided to pursue a public listing via a SPAC, or blank-check company. Notably the deal will see the robot firm link with Softbank Investment Advisers’ SVF Investment Corp. 3.
• E-motorcycle company LiveWire to go public via a SPAC: Have you ever heard the pneumonia-rattle of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle? Well, it turns out that the company also makes electric bikes. Who knew! The deal, per TechCrunch, will allow Harley to hold onto a good stake in the company while also injecting capital into the business. We’re just glad that the company is making bikes that don’t sound like their engines are filled with used dentures.

And then, crypto: 

• Thirdweb raises $5M for the union of crypto and no-code: What Thirdweb is doing sounds cool. TechCrunch reports that the company’s software helps “developers build, launch and manage their web3 projects without writing any lines of code.” Anything that makes tech more generally accessible is fine by us, including, yes, crypto.
• Fractal is an gaming NFT marketplace built on Solana: Did that make sense to you? If not, let me help. Fractal is a company that is building a market to sell gaming-related non-fungible tokens on the Solana blockchain, which rivals Ethereum and Bitcoin. How does gaming come into the speculative world of NFTs? Well, there are now play-to-earn games out there, where players are rewarded with NFTs instead of, say, internet points. So you can trade those on Fractal, I suppose.
• NBA Top Shot takes another shot: Dapper Labs became known as the team behind the NBA Top Shot NFT series that was hot a while back. Now the company — worth some $7.6 billion — is back with its next product called The Warehouse. I can’t really improve on what our own Lucas Matney wrote, so here it is: The Warehouse is “an ambitious NFT storefront that the startups hope will serve as a hub for web3 digital identity, allowing users to create animated avatars and outfit them with crypto accessories.” As with all crypto projects, I have no idea if this is going to be a hit or a flop.

The rest of it:

• Prior head of Twitter India is starting an edtech startup: Twitter and India get along about as well as any authoritarian government does with the social network. But now the company’s former head in the country, Manish Maheshwari, is “leaving the firm to launch an edtech startup, according to nine people familiar with the matter.” Something to keep an eye on.
• SnapLogic now worth $1B: The NFT world may get more headlines than enterprise software lately, but that hasn’t stopped the more staid parts of startupland from still doing business. SnapLogic is indicative of that fact, raising $165 million at a new, higher valuation. The new unicorn helps companies bringing their work into the digital realm connect their various data sources and workflows.
• Weird startup names are still here: Say hello to Whym, founded by ex-Snap employees. The startup is working on mobile e-commerce, a part of the larger digital purchasing world that could still use some work. I say that as someone who, at times, buys things on his phone and has dealt with all the fun that it entails. Whym just raised $4.3 million.
• Notus wants to help you find the right influencer for your brand: The world of influencer marketing has become mature enough that finding one’s next in-market avatar is now a business. Notus has raised $1.25 million to build a software service to help brands of all sorts find whom they should hire to rep their stuff. Neat!

Conversational UX: The missing piece in your chatbot strategy

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We don’t run many TechCrunch+ articles that are focused on basic best practices, but we make exceptions when it comes to posts about emerging technology — in this case, conversational UX.

It’s notoriously difficult for software to mimic human conversation. Many chatbots are so inept, it makes one long for the days of press 0 for an operator.

“Though chatbots are largely meant to handle simple customer service tasks, there is an opportunity to scale both customer service and sales messaging,” writes Raghu Ravinutala, CEO and co-founder of Yellow.ai, a conversational CX platform.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Reply to that Instagram with a TikTok Reel: TechCrunch noted today that Instagram, the Meta-built photo-sharing app, has introduced “Reels Visual Replies.” The feature will allow Instagram users to create short-form video replies to other posts. So it’s like personal gifs, I reckon. Which is cool if people use them. Let’s see.
• Mozilla is a huge business: Sure, we moved to Chrome, but not everyone did. So many people, in fact, still use Mozilla products that the company should generate around $500 million this year. Not bad! And good news for browser competition.

TechCrunch Experts

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

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

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 10, 2021! Yes, it is Friday at last, which means we’re about one week away from news grinding to a halt so that we can all enter nerd hibernation for two weeks. Not that your humble servant is counting down. Still, we have a really solid mix of tech news today, featuring companies big and small. To work! —Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Better.com CEO gets the (partial) boot: It’s rare that a tech exec goes viral. Mark Zuckerberg has managed thanks to some of his more stilted attempts at engaging with regulars. But most tech denizens just aren’t pop culture figures. Until they are, of course. Such is the case with Better.com’s CEO, who went viral — everywhere, including TikTok — for callously firing a bunch of his staff via Zoom. Anyway, it turns out that he’s not a lovely person the rest of the time either and is now stepping back from his company.
• Europe’s tech boom set to continue: The Exchange crew spent a good chunk of this Friday parsing the latest Atomic-Dealroom report on the European startup scene. Our takeaway was that while 2021 was a wildly good year for EU startups, the best could be just ahead, in calendar terms.
• Hungry? Just Flink it: OK so it turns out that turning startup name “Flink” into a verb is a bit awkward, but with the German instant grocery delivery service raising three-quarters of a billion dollars in a single go — pushing its valuation to $2.85 billion — it seems fair to expect that the Berlin-based company wants to reach verb status at least in its home market.

Startups/VC

The 2021 IPO cycle is coming to a close, with just Samsara’s debut yet to come by our reckoning. So what should we make of HashiCorp’s and Nubank’s pair of public offerings that touched down this week? That the market for both OSS and fintech remains more than attractive enough to defend unicorn valuations.

• HURR wants to iterate on the Rent the Runway model: Rent the Runway’s IPO showed that the innovative business was struggling to cover its own operating costs. It has since stumbled as a public business. But that’s not stopping HURR, a British comp to the U.S. fashion rental giant. However, as TechCrunch noted in a bulletin regarding the company’s recent $5.4 million seed round, it has a few business model tweaks and additions that could prove material.
• Wisdom sounds pretty neat: Wisdom is a startup that, per TechCrunch reporting, has built a “social audio app that’s focused on surfacing ‘life advice’ and broadening access to mentorship.” It sounds a bit like the Equity podcast, and by like we mean the complete opposite. Jokes aside, Wisdom just raised $2 million more. It declined to share user numbers, instead offering up the community-adjusted EBITDA of audio startup metrics, namely that “mentors on its platform have shared some 600,000 minutes” of audio. Cool?
• Startup raises from Tiger, doubles valuation, didn’t even need the cash: I think that we could recycle that teaser line daily in this newsletter and not really ever miss. Still, today’s Tiger round is Nuvocargo, a Latin American logistics startup that is focused on facilitating cross-border trade. Its new $20.5 million round more than doubled its valuation to $180 million, up from $70 million earlier this year. “The company says it still had most of that cash in the bank when Tiger approached it,” TechCrunch notes.
• Everyone is building dark stores: The dark-store model for building rapid-delivery businesses is more than just a European project. Tiggy, a Canadian startup, just raised a $6.35 million round for its work.
• Breakout Ventures makes it to fund two: That’s the word from our own Connie Loizos. Fund II from Breakout is a $112.5 million vehicle, including money from the Thiel Foundation, oddly enough. Thiel money recycling in tech has struck us as odd ever since we realized he was funding a political candidate busy attacking tech companies.
• And in case you need to have a little fun, here’s a fast-paced Equity episode with Natasha and Mary Ann.

3 disruptive trends that will shape marketing in 2022

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Since the pandemic began, the rules of the game for growth marketing have changed considerably.

Consumers are embracing Apple’s iOS 14.5’s privacy changes, regulators are taking a greater interest in browser cookies, and The Great Resignation are just a few X factors, but there are many others.

“What worked yesterday may not work today and likely won’t work tomorrow,” writes Jonathan Metrick, chief growth officer at Sagard & Portage Ventures, and Simon Lejeune, user acquisition lead at Wealthsimple.

Here’s what they’re preparing for:

• Less data, more privacy and the return of growth hacking.
• TikTok, influencers and the dominance of native creative.
• The Great Resignation and the Gettysburg for growth talent.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Jumia reports solid Black Friday data: While Jumia’s earnings have left quite a lot to be desired, the company did share that its Black Friday cycle saw a 30% jump in GMV. That’s good. Enough to truly shake up its economic performance? We’ll see in its Q4 2021 numbers. Still, it’s a nice little data point about the growth of e-commerce in Africa.
• Coinbase Ventures backs Router Protocol: There are layer one chains in crypto, like Ethereum. And there are layer two chains, like Polygon, which sit atop the Ethereum layer one chain. Router Protocol, in contrast, is a “cross-chain infrastructure [built] to facilitate communication across layer 1 and layer 2 blockchain solutions.” Why not just build better layer one chains? Not sure, frankly.
• There’s a new zero-day vuln out there: Here’s some bad news for your Friday, namely that many popular web services are “reportedly vulnerable to a zero-day exploit affecting a popular Java logging library.” Great!
• Spain wants more tech entrepreneurs: TechCrunch reports that a draft law relating to startups is making progress in the country, hoping to “cut red tape and remove bureaucratic obstacles for founding and investing in startups” in the country.

TechCrunch Experts

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 9, 2021!  Yes, we’re one day closer to the Christmas holiday for all those who celebrate, so we published part two of our 2021 venture capital book recommendation guide today. Part one is here. There’s a lot of books in there, so make sure to curl up before year’s end and recharge with some reading! —Alex

Image Credits: TechCrunch

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Italy fines Amazon $1.3B: The fine is due to the U.S. e-commerce giant having “abused its dominant market position and pushed third-party sellers to use the company’s logistics service Fulfillment by Amazon,” TechCrunch reports, citing the Italian Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato. Most tech fines are too small to even note. This one will sting.
• Build a unicorn with this one weird trick: All you have to do, it appears, is tell investors that you are raising capital to launch or aggregate e-commerce brands in a particular market, and, viola, unicorn status. That’s our takeaway from not only covering dozens of rounds in the e-commerce rollup market lately and the fact that Merama went from zero-to-unicorn in less than a year.
• The EU gets ready to change the gig labor market: If your company depends on using contract labor in the European Union, bad news. Things are likely changing in the coming years. Per our own Natasha Lomas, “EU lawmakers have formally proposed legislation for the gig economy they hope will improve conditions for platform workers across the bloc.”

Startups/VC

Before we dive into the day’s mix of startup happenings, one more piece of data for you to chew on. Silicon Valley may be seeing its status as the The Startup Market being challenged both at home and abroad, but another market is not changing as quickly. Namely the funding landscape for women founding business-focused software companies. Given just how big a chunk of the startup market such businesses comprise, the gender gap is staggering. (A small shoutout to our own Ron Miller for his consistent reporting on inequities in the startup industry is in order, I think.)

• Robotic Research raises nearly a quarter billion dollars: $228 million, to be clear, which is darn close. What does the company do? It turns out that Robotic Research has “spent the last two decades developing on- and off-road autonomous vehicles for the Department of Defense.” So, yes, this is another huge funding round for autonomous vehicles. Let’s hope that this check is indicative of progress made, instead of progress anticipated, regarding the huge problem space that the startup is tackling.
• Today in Very Good startup names: If you were founding a startup that made underground drilling tech, what would you call it? Perhaps Petra? That would be a good name. And the robot itself? How about Swifty? Well, if you thought those would be good names, the Petra crew would agree. They just raised a $30 million Series A for their very not boring boring work.
• Ledger to launch crypto debit card: If you own a lot of crypto, how to actually spend the stuff can be an issue. Ledger is working on a debit card to help the crypto-rich use that wealth IRL. In the meatspace, if you will. Coinbase has a similar product, to give an example. Even the Hodl Gang have to pay rent.
• Deed’s better corporate giving platform lands $10M: Many companies have a corporate giving plan in place. Some companies, for example, match employee charitable giving. Deed wants to help more companies do more with their giving work. The startup just landed $10 million for its efforts.
• Today in $8.5M-$8.7M rounds: Rare is it that we see two rounds with the same dollar amount under the $10 million mark. Today we have effectively three. First, Bird Buddy raised $8.5 million for its smart bird feeder tech, no joke. Second, Airplane raised $8.5 million for its developer workflow automation service. And Mio raised $8.7 million to help make enterprise messaging services like Slack and Teams interoperable.
• And then there was Rho, which is seeing its corporate spend product rapidly scale. So quickly in fact that investors just gave it a $75 million Series B.
• Closing out today’s startup notes: Acronyms. Namely fintech acronyms. What would happen if you took B2B and smushed into BNPL? Aside from creating the simply awful B2BBNPL (B2BNPL? BBNPL? 2BNPL 2FURIOUS?) acronym, Affirm spinout Resolve just raised $25 million for its efforts to bring the buy now, pay later payments and debt phenom to the business-to-business market.

Usage-based pricing is a companywide effort

Image Credits: We Are (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

In his latest guest post for TechCrunch+, OpenView partner Kyle Poyar explains why usage-based pricing “is a companywide effort” that “requires ditching the old SaaS metrics playbook.”

It’s no fad: UBP went mainstream because SaaS companies that use it see dramatically higher growth and retention rates.

Citing examples from powerhouses like Twilio, Stripe, AWS and others, Poyar explains how UBP companies “share their customers’ success” and reduce their risk of ending up with a CRM packed “with lots of unprofitable customers.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Spotify and chill: Sure, “hanging out” to watch “Netflix” may have become an only marginally coded phrase in English of late, but with Tinder partnering with Spotify to allow users to “hear a 30-second looped preview of a potential match’s chosen song while checking out their profile,” we are curious about how long a variation of the theme will come to market.
• Netflix takes on SEO spam with new website: American streaming giant has come out with a new website called “Tudum,” which, if you say it out loud, sounds roughly like the noise that the Netflix logo makes when you fire up its app on your television, staring down another night at home thanks to COVID-19. Tudum! Anyhoo, the website “will host consumer news about renewals and release dates,” TechCrunch reports. Which means that those articles about “What To Watch On Netflix November 28, 2021” may lose some of their SEO juice.
• GM locks in supplies to build domestic EV tech: Deciding to build electric vehicles is a step in a longer journey that includes some delicate sourcing work. Getting one’s hands on the raw materials required for battery production is no easy task. Nor is “locking in a domestic source of rare earth minerals, alloy and finished magnets for the electric motors” work that GM has recently undertaken.
• And, finally for today’s news roundup, Meta has rolled out new tooling for Facebook Live users.

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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, “How to acquire customer research that shapes your go-to-market strategy.”

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 8, 2021! TechCrunch is getting into the holiday spirit with some end-of-year content, including our Vaunted, Famous and World-Renowned gift guides. Lucas dug into camping gear, if that is your jam. And Anna and I have the first of two book guides, sourced from venture capital recommendations. Enjoy! —Alex

Image Credits: TechCrunch

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Byju’s buys Austrian edtech startup GeoGebra: Indian edtech giant Byju’s is once again buying a smaller company, this time GeoGebra, or what TechCrunch described as an “interactive and collaborative mathematics learning tool.” We reported the purchase price as around the $100 million mark.
• That awful CEO is sorry about how he fired you: By now you have seen the video of Better.com CEO Vishal Garg firing a big chunk of his staff in a stilted video call, despite having pulled forward hundreds of millions of dollars from a future fundraise to finance his company’s operations. He went viral, amazingly, with TikToks cropping up mocking his pretty sucky way of firing a bunch of folks before the holidays. Now he’s apologizing. Surely he will shape up now and stop committing such epic gaffes. We’re certain.
• Synthesia’s bet on corporate avatars: Jordan Crook wrote up a $50 million round for a startup betting on synthetic avatars and the work of turning PowerPoints into videos. It’s one of those ideas that if it takes off, will appear obvious in hindsight. Today, the future is less certain. Still, when it comes to doing something fresh, Synthesia is a good example of how startups can tinker with the digital world and perhaps write a new path forward for businesses more generally.

Startups/VC

Before we get into a chunk of the day’s incremental startup news, Ron Miller wrote up Twilio’s new corporate venture capital fund. CVC is not a new idea, but it has seen its activity soar in recent quarters. Companies like Coinbase are rewriting the rulebook on how to invest from the corporate perspective. So, it’s not a huge shock to see Twilio jump into the game.

• And speaking of new venture funds: TechCrunch has a brief look today at Black Ops Ventures, a new $13 million fund built to invest in Black founders. While some progress has been made in terms of investing more frequently — more equitably, really — into Black-founded startups, the venture capital market remains markedly imbalanced. Here’s one step toward a more fair future.
• Gadget raises $8.5M from blue-chip backers: Bessemer and Sequoia have teamed up to put $8.5 million into Canada-based Gadget, which builds software for developers. Per TechCrunch, the startup “bundles the tools, libraries, APIs and best practices needed by developers into a single experience.” DevOps is a huge industry, frankly, so this round is not a shock to our sensibilities.
• Software supply chains need protection as well: Never before have we spent so much time as a society discussing supply chains. I bet you know where more ports are than ever before. But physical supply chains are hardly the only type out there, it turns out. Chainguard just raised $5 million to help protect software supply chains, an important project given how some cyberattacks are targeting software dependencies to carry out impressive hacks.
• Electric boats? Boats may be the plaything of the wealthy, but they are also a pretty good way to pollute the planet. Candela wants to fix the latter half of the preceding sentence with electric boats and just raised $24 million for its business.
• Afero raises $50 million for its IoT platform: The IoT hype has died down, and from its ashes a number of companies are doing rather well. Samsara is going public next week — more here, if you’d like — and security-focused IoT platform Afero just put together eight figures of capital to scale its own service.
• Bento targets Kenyan, Rwandan, Ghanan markets: Bento is a Nigeria-based “digital payroll and human resource management platform,” TechCrunch reports. Just don’t expect it to stay within its national borders — the startup has eyes on six new markets in the next year. Payroll and HR software, of course, are big the world around, so it’s not a surprise to see Bento scaling well in the African market.
• Lydia adds crypto to its platform, then $100M to its accounts: TechCrunch noted when Lydia, an aspiring European financial super app, added both equity and crypto trading to its service. Today, the company announced a fresh $100 million funding round. The company is a reminder that France’s startup scene is not one that you should ignore.
• Tipalti now worth $8.3B: While midmarket accounts payable automation may not be the Most Fascinating Topic in the world, that fact doesn’t stop it from being lucrative. As Bill.com has built a huge business helping SMBs with the financial back office, Tipalti wants to help businesses one level larger. It just socked away $270 million at a new $8.3 billion valuation. The company was worth just $2.2 billion last October when it raised $150 million.

Bay Area’s share of U.S. VC funding falls to lowest level in more than a decade

Image Credits: da-kuk (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Seven years ago, San Francisco Bay Area startups attracted more than 40% of all U.S. seed- and early-stage venture dollars.

But according to “Beyond Silicon Valley,” a report released today by investment firm Revolution and PitchBook, that percentage fell to 27% this year. 

“It’s been more than 10 years since that percentage fell below 30%,” reports Mary Ann Azevedo, who interviewed Case and studied the report’s findings.

She identified several factors that are pushing investors in major tech hubs to venture outside their own backyards in search of opportunities. Many readers will be surprised to learn which city is now the top destination for dollars from NYC and SF-based investors.

“This momentum we’re seeing now? You ain’t seen nothing yet,” said Case.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Volkswagen partners up for EV push: Things sometimes change slowly and then all at once. Electric cars feel that way. After a slow slog to modest market share, EVs are exploding around the world in popularity. So, Volkswagen is adding three partners to help its own EV push, it announced today.
• TwitterTok? While we don’t anticipate having to talk about this for long, Twitter is working on a TikTok-style service. Why? We don’t know.
• And, finally, Facebook is rolling out a new “Professional” mode for creators, TechCrunch reports. Sorry, Meta has done this. We’re still writing “Facebook” on checks, to our embarrassment.

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.

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 8, 2021! TechCrunch is getting into the holiday spirit with some end-of-year content, including our Vaunted, Famous and World-Renowned gift guides. Lucas dug into camping gear, if that is your jam. And Anna and I have the first of two book guides, sourced from venture capital recommendations. Enjoy! —Alex

Image Credits: TechCrunch

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Byju’s buys Austrian edtech startup GeoGebra: Indian edtech giant Byju’s is once again buying a smaller company, this time GeoGebra, or what TechCrunch described as an “interactive and collaborative mathematics learning tool.” We reported the purchase price as around the $100 million mark.
• That awful CEO is sorry about how he fired you: By now you have seen the video of Better.com CEO Vishal Garg firing a big chunk of his staff in a stilted video call, despite having pulled forward hundreds of millions of dollars from a future fundraise to finance his company’s operations. He went viral, amazingly, with TikToks cropping up mocking his pretty sucky way of firing a bunch of folks before the holidays. Now he’s apologizing. Surely he will shape up now and stop committing such epic gaffes. We’re certain.
• Synthesia’s bet on corporate avatars: Jordan Crook wrote up a $50 million round for a startup betting on synthetic avatars and the work of turning PowerPoints into videos. It’s one of those ideas that if it takes off, will appear obvious in hindsight. Today, the future is less certain. Still, when it comes to doing something fresh, Synthesia is a good example of how startups can tinker with the digital world and perhaps write a new path forward for businesses more generally.

Startups/VC

Before we get into a chunk of the day’s incremental startup news, Ron Miller wrote up Twilio’s new corporate venture capital fund. CVC is not a new idea, but it has seen its activity soar in recent quarters. Companies like Coinbase are rewriting the rulebook on how to invest from the corporate perspective. So, it’s not a huge shock to see Twilio jump into the game.

• And speaking of new venture funds: TechCrunch has a brief look today at Black Ops Ventures, a new $13 million fund built to invest in Black founders. While some progress has been made in terms of investing more frequently — more equitably, really — into Black-founded startups, the venture capital market remains markedly imbalanced. Here’s one step toward a more fair future.
• Gadget raises $8.5M from blue-chip backers: Bessemer and Sequoia have teamed up to put $8.5 million into Canada-based Gadget, which builds software for developers. Per TechCrunch, the startup “bundles the tools, libraries, APIs and best practices needed by developers into a single experience.” DevOps is a huge industry, frankly, so this round is not a shock to our sensibilities.
• Software supply chains need protection as well: Never before have we spent so much time as a society discussing supply chains. I bet you know where more ports are than ever before. But physical supply chains are hardly the only type out there, it turns out. Chainguard just raised $5 million to help protect software supply chains, an important project given how some cyberattacks are targeting software dependencies to carry out impressive hacks.
• Electric boats? Boats may be the plaything of the wealthy, but they are also a pretty good way to pollute the planet. Candela wants to fix the latter half of the preceding sentence with electric boats and just raised $24 million for its business.
• Afero raises $50 million for its IoT platform: The IoT hype has died down, and from its ashes a number of companies are doing rather well. Samsara is going public next week — more here, if you’d like — and security-focused IoT platform Afero just put together eight figures of capital to scale its own service.
• Bento targets Kenyan, Rwandan, Ghanan markets: Bento is a Nigeria-based “digital payroll and human resource management platform,” TechCrunch reports. Just don’t expect it to stay within its national borders — the startup has eyes on six new markets in the next year. Payroll and HR software, of course, are big the world around, so it’s not a surprise to see Bento scaling well in the African market.
• Lydia adds crypto to its platform, then $100M to its accounts: TechCrunch noted when Lydia, an aspiring European financial super app, added both equity and crypto trading to its service. Today, the company announced a fresh $100 million funding round. The company is a reminder that France’s startup scene is not one that you should ignore.
• Tipalti now worth $8.3B: While midmarket accounts payable automation may not be the Most Fascinating Topic in the world, that fact doesn’t stop it from being lucrative. As Bill.com has built a huge business helping SMBs with the financial back office, Tipalti wants to help businesses one level larger. It just socked away $270 million at a new $8.3 billion valuation. The company was worth just $2.2 billion last October when it raised $150 million.

Bay Area’s share of U.S. VC funding falls to lowest level in more than a decade

Image Credits: da-kuk (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Seven years ago, San Francisco Bay Area startups attracted more than 40% of all U.S. seed- and early-stage venture dollars.

But according to “Beyond Silicon Valley,” a report released today by investment firm Revolution and PitchBook, that percentage fell to 27% this year. 

“It’s been more than 10 years since that percentage fell below 30%,” reports Mary Ann Azevedo, who interviewed Case and studied the report’s findings.

She identified several factors that are pushing investors in major tech hubs to venture outside their own backyards in search of opportunities. Many readers will be surprised to learn which city is now the top destination for dollars from NYC and SF-based investors.

“This momentum we’re seeing now? You ain’t seen nothing yet,” said Case.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Volkswagen partners up for EV push: Things sometimes change slowly and then all at once. Electric cars feel that way. After a slow slog to modest market share, EVs are exploding around the world in popularity. So, Volkswagen is adding three partners to help its own EV push, it announced today.
• TwitterTok? While we don’t anticipate having to talk about this for long, Twitter is working on a TikTok-style service. Why? We don’t know.
• And, finally, Facebook is rolling out a new “Professional” mode for creators, TechCrunch reports. Sorry, Meta has done this. We’re still writing “Facebook” on checks, to our embarrassment.

TechCrunch Experts

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

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

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 7, 2021! It’s nearly time to reflect on the year, a period in which so very much changed for the global startup world. One of the most interesting themes? Rising venture investment for African startups. Long ignored by the global investing set, startups from the African continent are having a barnstorming year. Sure, we have data to back up that claim, but with even more nine-figure deals landing in Africa it’s a market that any technologist now must keep an eye on. More on the MainOne-Equinix deal here. —Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Twitter buys Quill, will work on DMs: Let’s be clear, Twitter is a fun place to hang out, but its private-messaging service is pretty basic. But there’s good news on the horizon with the social media company buying the business messaging service’s team to work on DMs. Quill will not survive, but it’s hard to compete against Slack.
• Meta: Facebook’s parent company is busy generating headlines this week, with the head of its Messenger service leaving the company, adding to a roster of exits in recent months (more here and here). And ahead of a congressional hearing, Instagram is rolling out parental controls.
• Discord working on paid memberships: In the larger creator economy, chat service Discord has found an interesting niche. And it’s working to take advantage of the communities that have been built atop its platform, working on a “new way for creators to make money by offering community members access to paid, subscriber-only content,” TechCrunch reports.

Startups/VC

While the year is coming to a close, the IPO cycle is not yet done. We have HashiCorp’s debut on the way and Nubank in the wings. But don’t forget about IoT shop Samsara, which could become a decacorn in its upcoming IPO.

• Therify wants to make therapy more accessible: Finding a therapist is not easy if you’re a cishet man. I can attest to this. But if you are a “person of color or someone with disabilities, there are few or no people sharing your experience available,” TechCrunch notes. Therify just raised $1.3 million to work on the problem.
• Jupe is “not making … glamping tents for bros at Coachella:” So what is the startup building? Housing for the roughly 1.5 billion people — by its count — that lack sufficient shelter. The company just raised $9.5 million.
• Torq puts points on the board for the Portland, Oregon, tech scene: The startup formerly known as StackPulse is building a no-code tool for security workflows. And that effort helped it raise a simply massive $50 million Series B. Yes, the pre-IPO rounds of old are today’s early-stage investments. Get used to it. Regardless, we don’t hear that much from my home state, so it’s nice to see Torq doing well. SentinelOne led the round.
• SendOwl raises to help creators sell digital goods: No, we’re not talking about NFTs. Instead, SendOwl wants to help “creators and businesses sell digital goods such as e-books, podcasts and online courses.” There is a big market for such content, even if SendOwl is not the only startup that we can name that is working in the space. Defy.vc and Stripe put up the capital for SendOwl’s $4.5 million seed round.
• Today’s neobank funding round is MAJORITY: We recently discussed a neobank aimed at SMBs. Today, immigrants. MAJORITY has raised a $27 million Series A for its work, bringing its total capital raised to some $46 million, per TechCrunch reporting. The company now allows folks to sign up sans a Social Security number, which feels notable.
• I thought Circle was a book? Or the crypto company going public via a SPAC? Turns out it’s also a startup helping creators build and manage their community. Which seems cool, but we’d politely ask the company to rebrand to avoid us talking in circles on Slack. Regardless, Circle just raised at a $200 million valuation.
• AgentSync is today’s new unicorn: Fundraising rocket ship AgentSync announced a $75 million funding round today, pushing its valuation up to the $1.2 billion mark. Working in the insurtech API infra space, AgentSync is proof that there is big money in connecting disparate informational elements of antiquated industries.
• Honey, you’ve barely touched your brewed protein! We kid, but if The EVERY Co. has its way, we’ll be eating fermented animal protein equivalents in due time. The company just landed a huge $175 million round to help it bring the future it envisions to life. The startup was previously known as Clara Foods, for reference.
• Pento raises pile of capital: Today’s main Tiger round is Pento, a U.K.-based payment automation startup that just raised $35 million. Running payroll is a pain, and even more so for small companies. Pento of course has lots of competition, but certainly doesn’t lack for TAM.
• To round out our startup coverage today, TechCrunch wants to meet your startup at CES!

Image Credits: TechCrunch

AWS re:Invent 2021 was more incremental than innovative

Image Credits: Amazon

We’re used to Amazon making news: It’s the world’s third-largest company, and its founder is planning to build his own private space station.

But at last week’s re:Invent, the annual conference for AWS customers, “it felt more like Amazon was checking boxes and filling in holes in the product road map,” writes enterprise reporter Ron Miller.

After going virtual in 2020, this year’s in-person return to Las Vegas saw updates from incoming CEO Adam Selipsky, CTO Werner Vogels and others, but “nothing came out of the 2021 re:Invent that felt really cool.”

A few highlights: AWS unveiled the Gravitron 3, its latest Arm-based processor, along with re:Post, a managed Q&A service that replaces AWS forums, and Amplify Study, a no-code/low-code service for devs building cloud-connected applications.

But notably, “this is the first re:Invent in a long time where AWS did not announce a new database,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research.

Ron’s recap of the week’s announcements — and the lack thereof — points to a company in transition: “Perhaps Amazon is becoming a bit more like Apple.”

Big Tech Inc.

Cybersecurity:

• Microsoft takes on Chinese hacking ring: TechCrunch reports that Redmond-based software giant Microsoft has “seized control of a number of websites that were being used by a Chinese government-backed hacking group to target organizations in 29 countries, including the U.S.” Good news that the company did that, but bad news that it had to.
• Google disrupts Russian botnet: At some point we’ll get a handle on rampant cybercrime, but today is not that day. Not yet. Progress is being made, however, with U.S. software giant Google taking on a Russian botnet of “technical sophistication,” to quote the firm. Again, good to have this happen, bad that it was a required action.

Twitter:

• The Twitter-Quill news was only one headline from the social service, with Big Tweet also rolling out the ability for all iOS and Android users to listen to recorded Spaces and executing work regarding reported tweets that will not force users to “specify which of Twitter’s policies they believe a tweet is violating.”

The rest:

• App stores big: You knew that, but the data is actually somewhat staggering even given our expectations. Per Sarah Perez, first-time app installs are expected to reach 143.6 billion this year, with consumer app spending reaching some $133 billion. No wonder Apple is loath to loosen its grip on its own app-related incomes. They are huge.
• Netflix gaming is really, actually a thing: I keep expecting this story to go away, but it’s doing the opposite. Again. TechCrunch noted today that video-streaming service Netflix has added three gaming titles to its larger portfolio. Instead of doing this, frankly, I’d hazard that Netflix would be better served just sponsoring its own League of Legends team, but, hey, that’s just me.
• Something something Snap metaverse something something: Today Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, held something called Lens Fest. Yes, this was AR and Spectacles and the like. Our own Lucas Matney has the information you need.

TechCrunch Experts

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TechCrunch wants you to recommend software consultants who have expertise in UI/UX, website development, mobile development and more! If you’re a software consultant, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.