Author: Richard Dal Porto

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for November 2, 2021. Today has been a fun one, namely because your humble TechCrunch was in the news. Not for reasons that we’re stoked about, but the larger China-world digital decoupling is real, and we got caught in it. Let’s talk about it. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Yahoo leaves China: TechCrunch parent company Yahoo is leaving the Chinese market, pulling what was left of its services lineup from the market. TechCrunch, and its sister publication Engadget, are no longer accessible in the country. The news comes after Epic Games announced the end of its project to bring Fortnite to the Chinese market, and Microsoft decided that it was also time for LinkedIn to leave the country.
• Bird is going public: Well-known scooter unicorn Bird’s planned merger with a blank-check company has been approved and should consummate later this week. Public-market investors responded by selling stock in Bird’s SPAC partner, a somewhat embarrassing result. Precisely how much capital will be raised is not clear. For more on Bird’s changing economics, TechCrunch has your back.
• Microsoft goes metaverse: Amidst a wave of news items today — see our Big Tech section for more — Microsoft announced that its Teams product is heading to the metaverse. But unlike what Facebook Meta has planned, Microsoft’s “Mesh for Teams” service will power “shared experiences in virtual reality, augmented reality and elsewhere, with Teams and its built-in productivity tools,” TechCrunch reports.

Startups/VC

• Not into NFTs? How about PE? The acronym soup that is the modern finance world may have your head spinning. But don’t worry, startups are here to help. Aqua, for example, wants to help mom-and-pop investors gain exposure to private equity investments. Which, as you may know, tend to require more advanced net worths. As Natasha Mascarenhas points out, however, interest in alternative investing products has risen, which could provide a nice boost to what Aqua has on offer.
• Backblaze sets IPO price range: Amidst a wave of unicorn IPOs, the Backblaze public offering is notable for its modest size. That’s not a diss. It’s good to see smaller tech companies go public. If Backblaze trades well, it could help more companies pull the trigger. We hope.
• App monitoring is big business: That’s the lesson from Lumigo’s $29 million Series A that TechCrunch wrote about today. The company’s product is also expanding from serverless platforms (DynamoDB, S3 and others) to now also include containers and virtual machines as well.
• Tim Draper backs startup that wants your piss: Yep, no shit. Well-known investor Tim Draper has led a Series A round worth $6 million into Vivoo. TechCrunch writes that the “personalized nutrition and lifestyle startup sells subscription-based at-home urine test kits that work in conjunction with an app.” I for one do not need an app to tell me that I need to drink more water. I already know. But perhaps more of us could use a reminder.
• Firefox updated its mobile browser to limit clutter, if you are the type of person who doesn’t merely use default mobile software.
• To close out our startup news, Nuro has raised a $600 million round from Google and Tiger Global for its autonomous delivery vehicles.

What Netflix’s move into gaming means for developers

Some analysts predict that Netflix will spend as much as $19 billion on original and acquired content in 2025, but that figure leaves out a new frontier for the global media platform: gaming.

Netflix hired a lead for its gaming division in July and purchased Night School Studio in September, giving it access to more developers.

“It makes one wonder how Netflix’s plans will influence game developers and studios around the world,” says Sendbird CEO John S. Kim. “More importantly, how will developers respond to Netflix’s entry into the space?”

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

Big Tech Inc.

It’s a Microsoft day, so here’s the rest of our coverage from the company’s event:

• Microsoft announces new tools to modernize supply chain and manufacturing
• Microsoft’s new Azure OpenAI Service brings GPT-3 to (a few) more developers
• Microsoft brings JavaScript to Excel
• Microsoft Azure wants to make working with data on its platform easier
• Microsoft Azure expands its hybrid and multi-cloud reach
• Azure gets a Chaos Studio
• And, Microsoft is building a product called Loop that we feel shares more than a little heritage with Google’s long-dead, if yet-beloved Wave service. Frankly I cannot wait to play with it.

From elsewhere in Big Tech-land:

• Netflix’s gaming ambitions continue: Just as Spotify wants to be a serious player in podcasting, Netflix really does appear to think that games are part of its future. The company’s titles are coming to all Android-using members starting this week. Enjoy.
• Roblox’s outage Not Good: Not only did Roblox suffer a multiday outage, but the public gaming company’s downtime provided a boost to rival games. Because just as shooters shoot, gamers game, and if your platform goes down, Steam is just a few clicks away.
• Zoom is looking to cash in on the advertising boom, fueled in part by rising tech wealth, with an ad-supported version of its video chat service.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for November 1, 2021. TechCrunch hopes that you had a lovely Halloween, if you celebrate. Yes, your humble scribe had some leftover candy for breakfast. No, he doesn’t feel well.

That it’s finally November means that our two-day space-themed event is now next month (more here)! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Nubank files to go public: Brazilian neobank Nubank has filed to go public, and TechCrunch has first notes out concerning its economics. Our read of its filing left us impressed at its low-cost customer acquisition, ability to drive long-term revenue from its customers and the fact that its sales and marketing spend is minimal compared to its aggregate revenues. More to come on the intricacies of its business model.
• Epic pulls Fortnite from China: The China-world decoupling takes on many forms. One way to view it is through a rising inability for non-Chinese companies to bring their products to the country’s shores. LinkedIn is out. And now Epic Games is ending its work to make a Fortnite version for China, despite having Tencent as a key shareholder.
• Chromebook sales crash: News that global PC sales fell 2% in the third quarter might sound like bad news, but computer sales are still above their pre-pandemic levels, Ron Miller reports. But of the PC varieties out there, it appears that Google’s own Chromebook effort is taking the most stick. It dropped from 18% market share to just 9%. Good news for Windows, we reckon.

Startups/VC

Before we get into our regular run of startup news, let’s talk satellites. News that gigantic private company SpaceX’s Starlink has formed an Indian subsidiary was not a surprise. But that it came the same day that Amazon’s Project Kuiper wants to put two prototype satellites into orbit by the end of next year caught our eye. We’re seeing American companies continue to push ahead on space tech despite a more national-level space rivalry forming between China and the United States.

• OctoML raises $85M: The work of building and deploying machine learning (ML) models is big business. Startups Mage and Spice AI are working in similar areas of technology. Or more simply, in time there will be ample tooling to help companies of all sizes — and, we presume, levels of technical know-how — to get busy with ML at scale without having to fight tooth and nail to hire a full-stack, in-house data science team.
• Zendesk v. Twilio? Everyone wants to own customer data. Last year Twilio announced a multibillion dollar deal to buy Segment, allowing it to scoot into the customer data world (more here). And more recently Zendesk announced that it was dropping even more billions of dollars for SurveyMonkey, which will help it also better understand customers. They are not yet competing directly, but as we see tech companies get busy buying rivals, it’s going to be a recurring theme that two giants that previously played somewhat separately are now a bit closer to one another.
• $550M for hard venture bets: Any yahoo can stick $50 million into a growth-stage software startup that is cruising toward an IPO. Just make sure that its various SaaS ratios are in good shape and write the check. Walden Catalyst just put together a huge fund to invest in harder technology solutions to perhaps more intractable problems. The result should be higher returns on home runs. (TechCrunch also covered a new fund from White Star over the weekend.)
• Mosaic raises $44M for its construction tech: By working to automate certain parts of the residential construction process, Mosaic wants to lower the cost of such projects. Given that many nations around the world are enjoying related housing crises, anything to get more homes built sounds like a win to us.
• When I Work wants to help you tell others when you work: Shift-based work has often been organized, managed and crisis-controlled via text messages and phone calls. Stonehenge-era tech, in other words. When I Work wants to bring modern messaging to shift-based workers, allowing them to better swap, miss and snag work as they need to. It also just raised $200 million.
• Finally from our startup-related notes, Twiga raised $50M to scale its food logistics work in both Kenya and surrounding nations. As our own Tage Kene-Okafor notes, Africans spend more of their household income on food than folks living on other continents. It wants to shake up that dynamic and bring lower-cost foods to more, by our read.

When should your B2C startup enter a new market?

Many entrepreneurs say fortune favors the brave, but French microbiologist Louis Pasteur got it right: Fortune favors the prepared mind.

Bold is good, but smart is better, especially when it comes to expanding the range of a B2C startup. Introducing yourself to customers (not to mention regulators) in a foreign market comes with a lot of known unknowns.

“It may be that through luck or ingenuity, your business has thrived in your home country with minimal marketing spend, but there is absolutely no guarantee this will happen abroad,” says Jim Mann, director of acquisitions at Thrasio, a consumer goods company.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Our own Natasha Lomas has a great look into how major American technology companies worked to limit the power of European privacy laws. You won’t believe that a lot of wealthy companies worked hard out of sight to ensure that regulation fit their own requirements versus those of consumers!

• Snap is working with NBCUniversal to bring more audio to its platform: Given how clearly TikTok has shown that it is able to profit from the hybrid of tunes and video, this news is not a surprise.
• Pinterest wants you to shop live: Ever felt like you weren’t doing enough online shopping? Good news, if so, because Pinterest is building its own video service to help you spend more money while sitting down.
• Tesla opens charging network to other car companies’ vehicles: If you live in the Netherlands, a handful of Tesla charging stations will work be open to “non-Tesla electric vehicles for the first time.” Let this spread, please god.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 29, 2021. If you feel a little snowed-under after all the news from the week, we understand. This week saw Facebook change its name, new hardware from Google and Samsung, Apple laptops reviews, Sequoia revamping its entire structure, Big Tech earnings, issues at Ro, and eighty-eleven startup funding rounds and product launches.

But we made it through, so let’s go back over today’s biggest news and then get right into this weekend! —Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Public cloud revenues reach $45B: In the third quarter, the value of public cloud revenues from Google, Microsoft and Amazon hit $45 billion, a figure good for a $180 billion run rate. That figure underscores how far the cloud has come in recent years and represents spend from a host of companies big and small, tech and otherwise. TechCrunch dug into what impact the chip shortage is, and isn’t, having on growth amongst the public cloud lords, in case you were curious about that particular dynamic.
• Trump’s social network already in trouble: Sure, it was mocked when it was announced. And, yes, pranksters got busy in a hurry. But the biggest threat to former U.S. President Trump’s Truth Social product is an open source project that you’ve not heard from in some time, namely Mastodon. Per TechCrunch, the social project “alleges that Truth Social is passing open source software off as its own and has given them 30 days to fix this.”
• The American heartland is startup-central: After our look into the larger Midwest startup market in the United States, TechCrunch took the time today to parse results from the city of Denver. Along with regional siblings, startups in the Mile High City are raising huge amounts of capital. But what we learned is that Denver’s startup boom came after a long period of investments in its local technology scene from the industry’s biggest players.
• And, for something lighter, Google’s partnership with Jio to create and sell a budget smartphone in India is bearing hardware fruit.

Startups/VC

• Kurly targets $5.9B IPO: Grocery delivery comes in a few forms. There’s the “instant” players, the two-hour delivery crew and then what Kurly is up to in Korea, namely delivering foodstuffs the next day. The slower model hasn’t harmed the unicorn, which intends to list next year at a valuation that could reach nearly six billion dollars.
• Celebrities back electric boat venture: A bit like how venture capitalists will keep backing email startups in hopes of eventually solving their personal communications crisis, a number of celebrities are backing Arc, which makes a very snazzy, if expensive electric boat. With a price tag around $300,000, it’s not a surprise that well-known celebrities-cum-investors Will Smith, Kevin Durant and Diddy are backing the company given that its product is inside their price range. You and I will have to get by with a Matchbox version.
• Patreon wants to say yes to crypto: Creator payments and content platform Patreon may get in on the crypto boom. TechCrunch repots that the company is looking into how crypto might intersect with its creator-heavy user base.
• Social Chat bets consumers want higher-touch digital shopping experiences: Personally one of the best things about online shopping is not having to talk to other humans. However, many consumers disagree, Social Chat appears to be arguing. The company just raised $6 million to help make online shopping more like buying stuff IRL.
• And in case you want to know which three funding rounds the Equity crew thought were the hottest of the week, well, we have your back.

Predicting the next wave of Southeast Asia tech giants

Is Southeast Asia about to hit an inflection point for tech startups?

Four hundred million people in the region already use the internet, but by year’s end, one estimate suggests that 80% of the population over the age of 15 in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam will be digital consumers.

“As per Jungle Ventures’ calculations, the total value of the region’s digital companies is around $340 billion today and is estimated to grow to $1 trillion by 2025,” says founding partner Amit Anand.

E-commerce, fintechs and the rapid digitization of the region’s SME workforce are a few of the factors reshaping the landscape for Southeast Asia’s startups, but supply chain technology is also a major opportunity, Anand says.

“With new deals and intentions to list in the U.S. being announced more frequently, the region shows no sign of slowing down and the birth of many more unicorns is on the horizon.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• If you are on iOS, you now have access to Super Follows: Twitter’s product barrage has generated hits (Spaces) and flops (Fleets). But Twitter is forging ahead with more product work on its Super Follow product, regardless of early momentum or a lack thereof. Now all iOS users – globally! – can pay to “Super” follow creators.
• German company to invest more in chip production: In the future, chip independence will replace food independence in terms of national security precedence. And Germany might sit pretty when it does, as domestic concern Robert Bosch GmbH is dropping nearly a half-billion into boosting chip output. More of this, please.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 28, 2021. With our SaaS event now behind us — a big thanks to the TechCrunch events and sales teams who keep crushing it for the publication — we can pivot our focus back to, well, the metaverse? — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Facebook goes Meta: By creating a brand above its preceding corporate domicile, Facebook has created a meta-entity to include its various projects. And one of those is the metaverse. Thus, the new name for the company — Meta — makes pretty good sense. Most folks don’t seem to like it much, but it’s hard to weed the General Facebook Snark from the Actually About The Name Snark, if that makes sense. More in our Big Tech section down below.
• NerdWallet writes its way to unicorn valuation: As online finance content empire NerdWallet approaches the public markets, the writing-centric company will garner a valuation north of $1 billion, per its latest IPO filings. TechCrunch, a words-first publication, had thoughts on the matter.
• Facebook is cross with Apple: Facebook — Meta, I suppose — took a few potshots at Apple during its big event today. They are worth considering apart from the larger branding and VR efforts that the company announced. Apple’s changing privacy rules have taken a toll on Facebook, and the social giant is not pleased about it.

Startups/VC

Before we get into the startup news, former startup Allbirds is going public, and TechCrunch has the details on just what it is worth. And, in the wake of Rent the Runway, we are starting to see a valuation band created for tech-enabled IPOs.

• Atlys wants to make visa applications quicker: And it just raised $4.25 million for its work. Sure, fewer of us than normal are flying overseas, but eventually we’ll get back on planes and go places. And when we do, well, the paperwork will beckon. Perhaps Atlys can take some of the sting out of stapling photos of yourself to a packet that you then mail to the black hole of an embassy.
• Soon we shall all live in pods: Prefab pods, if Cover gets its way. The startup creates walls and other similar home components in its factory. Those bits are then shipped to building sites and set up sans a crane. Frankly, let’s hope this works? We have a housing crisis in the United States, and any movement toward alleviating it is welcome. The company also just raised $60 million.
• Inrupt’s plans to reclaim internet privacy raising capital: The deal isn’t done yet, but TechCrunch broke news today that Tim Berners-Lee’s Inrupt startup, a company that wants to build “a platform that gives users control of their data” online, is looking to raise between $30 million and $40 million.
• What if Nextdoor was even more insular? Well, that’s what OneRoof is building, an even more hyperlocal Nextdoor, the social network known to bring neighbors together so that they can argue and throw racist invective at one another. Now you will be able to do so in even tighter-knit circles. The company just raised $1.25 million.
• Healthcare remains a lucrative market: That’s our takeaway from Hinge Health raising $400 million in a new round. The company is focused on chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, which encompass things like aching backs and knees. Given how large the American healthcare market is, the company’s $6.2 billion valuation may make a mote more sense than you are mentally giving it credit for.
• Alchemy raises $250M in competitive round: Every venture investor is in awe of Amazon’s AWS group, because it eats growth and shits operating profit. It’s worth a zillion dollars. So it’s perhaps not surprising that the competition to put capital into Alchemy was more than hot. The firm provides basic infra to other crypto companies, and a grip of crypto companies that you know of are already Alchemy customers.
• Yugabyte raises yuge venture round at yuger valuation: Yugabyte is now a unicorn, which feels like a very 2021 sentence. The database company just added $188 million to its own financial database at a valuation of $1.3 billion.
• Dragos raises $200M, soars to $1.7B valuation, sadly isn’t about dragons: Dragos works in industrial cybersecurity, which matters. Keeping IRL infra safe is a pretty big deal. But when I read the company’s name I was frankly hoping for mythical beasts. Alas.
• And to close out our startup notes, TechCrunch’s Neesha Tambe has notes from a chat with Sequoia concerning fundraising tips for today’s startups.

Credit card and payments companies compete for a slice of the growing BNPL market

Giving consumers the convenience of deferring payment for a product is not a new idea, but now that upstarts like Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm have taken the concept to the next level, legacy credit card companies and payment firms are taking notice.

Mary Ann Azevedo and Ryan Lawler have identified a “slow emergence” in the BNPL space “of a symbiotic relationship between traditional financial institutions, payments upstarts and leading companies.”

Visa announced yesterday that many companies are using its technology to power point-of-sale BNPL solutions; last month, its rival rolled out Mastercard Installments, its bespoke offering.

“It’s not really a surprise that these credit card companies are stepping it up when it comes to BNPL,” reported Ryan and Mary Ann. “If anything, it’s a wonder that it took them this long.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

Before we get to our Facebook News Roundup, Twitter also made a bit of noise today. Users will now be able to record Spaces, its audio chat rooms. And its subscription “Blue” service will include early feature access.

The rest of what Facebook announced:

• Facebook teases Polar, a mobile app for creating AR filters
• Facebook Messenger audio calls are coming to Oculus Quest
• Facebook opens Oculus Store to 2D progressive web apps
• Slack is coming to the Oculus Quest
• Company formerly known as Facebook unceremoniously kills off ‘Oculus’ brand

And from the rest of Big Tech:

• Digging into majors attacking the BNPL market: While Affirm is best known as an early BNPL startup that made it to the public markets, Big Finance is not going to let tech have all the fun. Mary Ann and Ryan investigate.
• And in news that is sure to make other companies as happy as the privacy changes, Apple’s “App Privacy Report” is now in beta. Do note, please, that the more Apple pisses off other companies regarding data privacy, the better off consumers may be — but also that Apple is only doing this for its own results, not because it likes us.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 27, 2021! We are live all day at our SaaS event, which means that a good chunk of TechCrunch has been busy putting questions to tech experts and investors. But that doesn’t mean that we went light on covering the news. Hell, we even dropped a huge TC-1 on Bowery today! Strap in! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Can Ro expand past generics? In a detailed report, TechCrunch’s Natasha Mascarenhas dug into Ro, the company behind Roman and other health-focused services as it works to expand its product mix and keep growing. Other issues at the company, per a host of sources, include low morale and refusal of “​​basic feedback.”
• Rent the Runway sees strong public debut: Yesterday evening, Rent the Runway priced at $21 per share, the top end of its IPO range. TechCrunch read the strong pricing event as indicative of a warm IPO market not only for pure tech companies, but also unicorns that are more tech-enabled than tech tech. The company began trading today, initially rising before losing ground as the day grew late. (More on the company’s financials here.)
• Uber to rent 50,000 Teslas:  Remember when Hertz announced that it was buying a host of Tesla electric cars? It turns out the news wasn’t just PR. The company is working with Uber to rent tens of thousands of the cars to Uber drivers. The result could be a higher-end, and perhaps greener, Uber fleet.

Startups/VC

The 2021 IPO market is not going quietly into the night. It’s working to close out the year with a bang. News today indicates that Paytm could snag a $20 billion valuation when it goes public, setting records for its native India, while Brazil’s Nubank dropped a post sharing that it has filed privately to go public. The company will list in the United States with some trading planned for its own domestic market.

• Abacus.ai wants to democratize ML: As far as goals go, Abacus’ plan to simplify machine learning model creation, as our own Ron Miller put it, is a good one. Tools like what the startup has in mind could lessen a market crunch in data talent and perhaps empower more workers to execute their own data-focused tasks.
• Plant-based chicken is expensive: At least if you want to buy into the companies creating it. Today, Daring Foods announced that it has raised an eye-popping $65 million Series C, and that its plant-based chicken comp product will find shelf space in 3,000 Walmart locations. Given that Walmart is not the first megaretailer we’d anticipate would roll out fake chicken, the partnership could indicate that plant-based meats are more generally popular than we thought.
• Groopit wants to help corp leaders listen to staff more effectively: The startup — founded by a longtime Microsoft staffer — just raised $2 million to build a product that, in the words of its founder Tammy Savage, “combines data collection and real-time data sharing into one lightweight workflow.”
• SoftBank writes checks this small? It turns out that the SoftBank Vision Fund 2 is capable of writing eight-figure checks. The investing group just put $25 million into Israeli startup OurCrowd. The startup operates a so-called venture platform, making its own fundraising slightly meta.
• Truepill turns its sights to the corporate world: According to TechCrunch reporting, from a focus on “telehealth, diagnostics and pharmacies for consumers,” Truepill is now “targeting healthcare incumbents.” The company just added $142 million to its accounts, valuing it at $1.6 billion.
• Broad productivity app ClickUp now worth $4 billion: Flush with $400 million worth of new capital, San Diego-based ClickUp has scaled its user base around 4x in the last year. What does it do? It brings together a bevy of features including chat, tasks, to-dos and more into a single package. Yes, all of tech is bundling and unbundling.
• And from the podcast team, a warm if somewhat sad goodbye to Danny, who is leaving Equity after a long, successful run on the hosting team.

The Bowery Farming TC-1

Just over a tenth of Americans have jobs in food and agriculture, so it’s easy to see why many of us lack a keen awareness about what we’re eating or where it comes from.

Our food supply isn’t as secure or predictable as we assumed: Climate change, safety recalls, the COVID-19 pandemic and even immigration policies can directly impact what’s available at the store. The technological leaps that made it possible to feed (most of) the world will not see us through the next century unless we change course.

Plant-based protein has gotten a lot of press, but vertical farming that leans on hardware and robotics has reached scale, reports Brian Heater, TechCrunch hardware editor.

In a four-part series, he explores the origins and operations of Bowery Farming, a profitable startup that has raised almost $500 million since 2015 to create new tech and facilities that raise leafy greens sold in nearly 900 markets.

Part 1: Bowery Farming is forcing us all to look up at the future of vertical agriculture

Part 2: Hacking lettuce for taste and profit

Part 3: Can LEDs ultimately replace the sun?

Part 4: The voracious fight for your salad bowl

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

Big Tech Inc.

TechCrunch has a startup focus, but we do watch former startups after they reach the public markets. For a few quarters, at least. Today shares of Robinhood — until very recently a private unicorn — are off after the company reported results and forecasts that came in under market expectations. What its lackluster performance data will mean for other transaction-based trading platforms is not clear at this juncture.

• LinkedIn’s freelance push goes global: After testing in the United States market — LinkedIn’s home turf, if you will — the company is bringing its “Service Marketplace” to more geographies. If you are familiar with Fiverr, this is perhaps comparable. Regardless, the move shows that LinkedIn is capable of making headlines that are not discussing major retrenchments.
• Amazon cuts climate checks: The megaretailer is putting its $2 billion climate fund to work by putting capital into three startups. TechCrunch has the deets.
• Google will now allow under-18s to delete images of themselves from search: Announced back in August, this new Google capability reminds me a bit of what Europe has mandated for its own lands. Perhaps we will get more EU-style digital tooling for consumers here in the United States.
• Which tech giant is the podcast king? Spotify is deep into an effort to broaden its content base away from tunes to include a deep podcast library that may be bearing fruit. Per the company, it is now the leading destination for podcast listening in the United States. I’ve requested our own podcast results from Spotify as, well, I am now curious.
• Robotaxis, delivery vehicles are just around the corner: Like, really. Per GM’s Cruise group, commercial operations of its self-driving cars could come in 2022. That’s brilliant news. Please, megacorps of the world, spare me having to drive for the rest of my life. I want to quietly read a book while a computer handles the turn signals.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 26, 2021! Our one-day SaaS event — extravaganza? — kicks off tomorrow morning and I could not be more hype. In fact, I am taking a break from honing my questions list for our data-focused panel (DataRobot, Monte Carlo and AgentSync; it’s going to be a blast) to write this newsletter for you. See you there! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Sequoia rebuilds itself for the future of venture capital: With capital now a commodity and nearly every VC focused on offering services, standing out is hard in the venture game. As are the harsh realities of startups staying private longer and restrictions on how venture capitalists can invest. Sequoia thinks that it has the solution.
• Jessica Rosenworcel to lead FCC: Rosenworcel will be the first woman to ever lead the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which is at once good news and an indictment of my nation’s governmental diversity through the years. Also, Gigi Sohn, whom TechCrunch called an “FCC veteran and tireless policy advocate,” was nominated to the group. Sohn is well known for her work on net neutrality.
• Inside the Sweetgreen IPO filing: Heavily VC-backed fast-casual food chain Sweetgreen is going public, so TechCrunch spent time mucking about in its numbers. Our takeaway is that the company has identified a notable portion of the economy where it can plug a need, but that it loses too much money.
• By the time this newsletter reaches your inbox, Rent the Runway should have priced its IPO. Our initial notes concerning its business are here; more in the a.m.

Startups/VC

We have a lot of startup news to chat about today, but first, TechCrunch dug into the American Midwest yet again this morning, this time asking CEOs and investors in the region what impact the fundraising boom and increasingly flat global talent and capital market are having on area startups.

• Indian AgTech accelerates: Sure, it seems that every day another Indian startup raises a nine-figure round. But this time it’s DeHaat, which focuses on agriculture, catching my eye. Per TechCrunch, the company built “an online platform that offers full-stack agricultural services to farmers in India.” Given how many farmers its market includes, DeHaat should not lack for TAM.
• Gusto buys RemoteTeam: U.S. HR and payroll-focused startup Gusto bought another company, it announced this morning. With an eye on supporting more international hiring, it picked up RemoteTeam. The increasingly global and distributed tech talent pool likely helped pull Gusto in this particular direction.
• DealShare set to raise more capital: Returning to India, TechCrunch can report from several sources that “Tiger Global and Falcon Edge Capital are looking to double down on their bets on DealShare,” perhaps putting more than $225 million into the company at a unicorn valuation. DealShare exists in the social commerce space, in case you were wondering.
• How often do we get to talk about startups from Connecticut? Not very often. But today was a nice exception with LogicBroker raising $135 million in a single go. The startup builds software for the shipping world (think e-commerce and drop-shipping) and now certainly has as much capital as it could have dreamed about at its fingertips. Good on the Nutmeg State.
• Piiano raises $9M to help keep PII safe: Get it? PII-ano wants to help you keep PII, or personally identifying information, safe. The company likely competes with Skyflow, which raised a bunch of money just the other week. The market for data protection services is hot and potentially lucrative given that there is lots of data in the world, and that leaking it is bad. (Note that this is not Piano, the subscription media software startup.)
• SoftBank backs Pipefy: Gone are the days when SoftBank would drop a flat trilly on a dog-walking startup or zero-gravity pinball maker. Instead, the Japanese telco, conglomerate and frenetic technology investor has put $75 million into a low-code workflow management startup. How very pedestrian!

And there was so much more. Fabric raised $200 million so that robots can help with e-commerce order fulfillment. Indian busing startup Chalo bought another bus-focused startup. Jay-Z’s venture capital firm just closed its second fund and Devo raised $250 million on the back of rising global cybersecurity spend.

To close us out, TechCrunch has a great story on what happens when you mix fiction, community, NFTs and copyright questions.

Bridging the gap: What CISOs must do to get the C-suite on their side

On a good day, most people forget the chief information security officer even exists. But if something should go wrong, everyone will demand answers.

Keeping a company’s security measures up to the mark while getting all stakeholders to implement safe security practices is a tall order, complicated by the fact that many CISOs aren’t inside the executive decision-making loop.

According to Sean McDermott, founder and CEO of RedMonocle, CISOs should meet executives where they are.

“You already know why cybersecurity investment is essential to your role. Now step into your leadership’s shoes to explain why it’s crucial to theirs,” he writes.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Social media goes to Congress: It appears that social media companies want to avoid the fate of Facebook, namely becoming a company better known for obfuscation and late fixes. So, before Congress today, TikTok, Snap and YouTube shared new changes to their products that may help protect kids. TikTok, however, was a bit more coy about data than we’d have liked.
• Apple will roll out its software bundle to 17 new markets: In early November, that is. Per TechCrunch, the service, called Apple One Premier, will include “Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+ and 2 TB of iCloud storage” for a flat fee. In other news, remember when Apple product names were good?
• And from Adobe, much news, including that the company is keeping up its cloud push and following the times by adding support for NFTs to its products.

TechCrunch Experts

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 25, 2021. What a day. We kicked off with news that a major, multibillion-dollar tech deal was kaput and closed out the trading day on news that another tech firm had reached the trillion-dollar market cap threshold. Facebook also reported earnings right after the bell, and TechCrunch dropped a host of hardware reviews. Tired yet? It’s Monday. – Alex

P.S. Our SaaS event is in two days; get hype.

The TechCrunch Top 3

• PayPal calls off Pinterest deal: So much for the fintech-social media tie-up of the decade. U.S. fintech giant PayPal has killed off its potential buy of Pinterest. Shares of PayPal rose. Shares of Pinterest cratered. I suppose our general skepticism of the deal wasn’t too far off the market.
• Tesla reaches $1T market cap: You may have missed it, but Tesla is now worth more than Facebook these days, cresting the $1 billion market cap market today during regular trading, while the social network closed the day worth a few dozen billion less. What drove Tesla’s gains? Hertz, amazingly enough.
• Facebook misses revenue expectations, promises reporting changes: After the bell today, Facebook reported its Q3 2021 earnings, including a revenue miss, a per-share profit beat, and news that it intends to break out its AR and VR revenues into a separate category from here on out. The latter is good news, though we’d appreciate more granular financial reporting from across the Empire of Zuck now that we know the company is capable of it. Shares of Facebook are up slightly, if still underwater from their Friday declines that came in the wake of Snap’s Q3 report.

Startups/VC

Before we get truly underway with all of our startup coverage, we have a new item from Unicorn Land: New York tech company Braze is going public. While it was not a unicorn when it last raised capital, the company will nearly certainly crash through the $1 billion valuation mark when it debuts on the public markets.

• All hail our commercial space future: A consortium of firms are coming together to build a commercial space station. Given how rapidly the ISS is showing its age, this is a good thing. Sierra Space announced that “Blue Origin and Boeing would be joining the team to send the [private space station] to orbit in the second half of the decade.” We are closer and closer to our Bond-villain future that we’ve all long awaited.
• Selfbook raises capital, pivots to business focus: The pandemic shook up quite a lot. Where we work. How we socialize. For hotel-booking company Selfbook, it shook up its business model. Now working for other companies, Selfbook “claims that its software gives hotels a way to accept ‘one-click’ payments directly on their websites while eliminating fraud and reducing chargebacks.” The startup is now worth $125 million.
• Cameo books acquisition: The celebrity-booking service Cameo has proven to have a popular model. You can pay a fee and have a celebrity or other notable figure record a message for you. I once got one from an Eagles player that a friend commissioned for me. Fun times. Anyhoo, the company has made its first acquisition, picking up Represent, which TechCrunch describes as “a marketing and merch company that helps celebrities and brands set up individualized online storefronts.” You can see the synergies, obviously.
• Are all the startup names taken? Here at TechCrunch, we joke that there are too many venture capital firms, so much so that they are starting to double-up on names. For Example, Shine Capital and Shine Capital. Regardless, a startup called Y42 has raised funds, showing the world how to avoid using someone else’s name. The Berlin-based startup has built a low-code data platform and just raised a $31 million Series A.
• Even more money to roll-up e-commerce brands: The race to buy e-commerce sellers continues this week with Boston-based Thrasio raising $1 billion more for its efforts. The company is now worth $10 billion. That’s a lot of money. Per TechCrunch, the company is buying more than a brand each week, and has 200 in its portfolio. Wild.
• New task app aims to tell you what you’re supposed to be doing right now: Meet Routine, a new startup working on a productivity tool that should help you manage your work day more efficiently. It’s a brand new take on to-do lists as it combines both tasks, non-actionable notes and a daily planner.

Fintech’s growing role in the healthcare revolution

Health care spending accounts for almost 18% of U.S. GDP, so it’s no surprise that digital health is attracting record levels of investment. This year, VCs have flowed $14.7 billion to health tech startups, compared to $14.6 billion in all of 2020.

Given the high cost of care in the United States compared to other nations, pairing fintech with health tech is just good business.

Simon Wu, an investment director with Cathay Innovation, says he’s paying close attention to these areas of convergence:

• Data and the transition to value-based care.
• Gamifying consumer wellness to stave off chronic illnesses.
• Fintech for affordability and reducing friction.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Look, it’s hardware season. You can tell because it’s getting colder outside. That means that Christmas is coming. That means consumers are looking for stuff to buy. So, new hardware.

TechCrunch has you sorted, if you require a set of reviews to help you decide what piece of hardware you need. So, here’s our Google Pixel 6 review and our review of Apple’s new Airpods and its new 14-inch MacBook Pro. Apple’s new OS is also now live.

• YouTube warns creators on lame kids’ content: If you churn out content on YouTube that you claim is for kids, but is “low quality, encourages negative behavior or attitudes or is heavily commercial,” get ready to stop making money on your videos. YouTube is going to yank monetization of videos thereof. This raises questions, like, “If YouTube can tell which kids-focused videos are low quality, why did it let them onto its platform in the first place?” And, “Is demonetization enough?”
• Microsoft to bring Shopify merchants to its platforms: Following in Google’s footsteps, Microsoft has teamed up with e-commerce giant Shopify to help get merchants that use its services onto Bing, Edge and other Redmond software products. Bing retains search market share, mind, so this is good news for Team Shopify.
• In the Good News files today, Best Buy and Home Depot are halting sales of hardware from “Chinese video surveillance technology makers Lorex and Ezviz” over what we described as “links to human rights abuses.”

TechCrunch Experts

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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Friday! Dear friends, we made it to the end of the week. It was a big, busy few days, so give yourself a round of applause. Looking ahead, not only do we have earnings from Facebook and Alphabet and Microsoft and Robinhood next week, but our super-great SaaS event is taking place on Wednesday. I’m hosting and doing a panel or two, so see you there for all the fun! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Public markets welcome Trump SPAC: Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s new media company announced yesterday that it would go public via a SPAC-led transaction. Today, investors spent quite a lot of money bidding up shares in the blank-check company that will take Trump Media and Technology Group public. In retrospect, however, of course the SPAC became a memestock given its lack of fundamentals or, well, product.
• Snap suffers from supply-chain, Apple woes: U.S. social networking company Snap saw around a fifth of its value disappear today after it reported earnings following the end of trading yesterday. In short, despite a pretty good quarter, Snap’s growth expectations for Q4 were way under expectations. Why? Changes to iOS from Apple and supply-chain issues leading to reduced advertiser demand. TechCrunch also discussed how Snap’s issues help make the argument for Facebook’s metaverse push.
• Brex raises again (again): The corporate spend and expense reporting market can apparently absorb an infinite amount of capital, a fact that we learned again recently after TechCrunch broke the news that Brex once again raised more money at a higher price. This may kick off fundraising for Brex’s various competitors.

Startups/VC

We have our usual run of startup news below, but before we get into that, TechCrunch spent a few words today thinking through Rent the Runway’s expected IPO price range and how it stacks up against related companies. We have questions.

• Startup hopes to help you grow backbone: We really shouldn’t make spine-based jokes given that someone will find them in poor taste, but Haje Jan Kamps started with his headline, so please direct all complaints in that direction. Regardless, Intelligent Implants has raised $8.7 million for its health-focused hardware that could help with back health.
• How Lunchclub landed a preemptive term sheet from Lightspeed: One of TechCrunch’s best — if also best-hidden — talents, Neesha Tambe wrote up a recent talk we had with a startup concerning how it managed to raise preemptive cash from a major investor. Founders, this is for you.
• More money for cloud kitchens: The global effort to build and fund shared kitchens for meal prep tuned for delivery continues to attract capital; this time with a16z and Base Partners dicing up $15 million for Bogotá-based Foodology. Here’s hoping that the startup uses the funds to help make meals and doesn’t make a meal out of it.
• Transport companies can now “Pledge” to offset their carbon footprint: A startup called Pledge wants to help “freight forwarding, ride-hailing, travel and last-mile delivery” companies dispense with the implicit carbon costs of their businesses. The startup just raised $4.5 million from “Visionaries Club with participation from Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital and Zinal Growth,” TechCrunch reports.
• OfBusiness in talks to raise again (again!): Er, OfBusiness is back in our pages. The company raised money this April. And last month. And now it is doing so again. This time at a valuation of more than $4.5 billion, TechCrunch reports. That’s a 50% bump from its last round.

Hiring is just the first step when building an early-stage comms team

There are a few places where founders can cut corners, but your first comms hire is not one of them. Companies that choose not to invest in finding the best person for this role will inevitably regret it later.

Since these are the people tasked with bringing your message to the outside world, “look for a strategic partner rather than a manager,” advises Yousuf Khan, partner at Ridge Ventures.

“They should be able to discuss your product and industry as well as anyone on your sales team. If that sounds like a tall order, it is — yet another reason to properly invest in the role.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Tech watchdog isn’t big on Big Tech’s leverage of small biz for PR: Facebook and other tech giants love to tell you stories about how their products and services help one small business or another. It’s a way of both humanizing megacorps and creating a smokescreen to avoid more lucid scrutiny. Main Street Against Big Tech is spending money to push back on the matter.
• SpaceX’s Starship rocket could fly as soon as next month: But it will need regulatory approval, TechCrunch reports. Regardless, the news is good for you spaceheads out there — the sooner SpaceX can move the commercial space industry forward by another peg, the sooner its competitors will have to catch up, benefiting us all.
• Twitter now allows users to subscribe to Revue newsletters in their timelines: Twitter is probably going to get away with favoring its own product given its modest scale when set next to companies like Facebook, but its product work on Revue — a newsletter product it previously bought — is turning heads all the same. Twitter is currently taking on two well-known a16z bets, namely Substack (with Revue) and Clubhouse (with Spaces).

TechCrunch Experts

TechCrunch wants to know which software consultants you’ve worked with for anything from UI/UX to cloud architecture. Let us know here.

If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this interview Anna Heim did with Yasser Bashir, co- founder of Arbisoft, “Arbisoft co-founder Yasser Bashir on building trust with early-stage startups.”