Tag: newsletters

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Welcome back to the Daily Crunch for Thursday, June 17. Thank you to Walter Thompson and the Extra Crunch staff for taking the reins I took from Alex. I was released from jury duty, so I’ll be seeing you through the remainder of the week, and we’ll be back to regularly scheduled Alex in no time.

But before we get on with the show, I want to let you know that Duolingo’s director of engineering will join us at our City Spotlight: Pittsburgh event in just two weeks. Karin Tsai joined the company in 2012 as one of its first engineers, and saw the company grow from a scrappy startup into a 400-person global business.

— Henry

The TechCrunch Top 3

Google recently discovered a bug in its Android app that could have allowed an attacker to quietly steal personal data from a device. The company caught it, plugged it and confirmed that it had no evidence that anyone’s data was compromised.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has revived a bill that would establish a new U.S. federal agency to shield Americans from the invasive practices of tech companies operating in their own backyard.

The AI-powered defense company founded by Oculus founder and seller-to-Facebook Palmer Luckey has landed a $450 million round of investment that values the startup at $4.6 billion just four years in.

Startups and VC

Unit has raised $51 million in a Series B round to further its goal of making it possible for non-fintech and fintech companies alike to build banking products “in minutes.”

Disrupting job recruitment disruption: Beamery raised $138 million to continue building out more technology and shake up online job recruitment as we know it. Ingrid reports today that the company calls itself a “talent operating system,” describing that thusly: “A way to manage sourcing, hiring and retaining of people, plus analyzing the bigger talent picture for an organization.”

Nylas, which created an effective way to integrate email, calendars and other tools into other apps using APIs, is announcing a big round of funding to expand its business — $120 million big. 

Data analytics for HR is what eqtble is offering, and it just raised a $2.7 million seed round to do it. There is a lot of data to capture when it comes to a company’s staff, and eqtble wants to help you snag it.

The industrial side of cybersecurity: Claroty, a late-stage company that protects big companies, including Pfizer (which it helped to secure its COVID-19 vaccine supply chain — raised $140 million.

5 tips for brands that want to succeed in the new era of influencer marketing

A small startup with the right message can connect with established and emerging stars on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube who will promote your company’s products and services — as long as they understand the influencer marketplace.

Creators have plenty of brands and revenue channels to choose from, but growth marketers who understand how to court influencers will make inroads no matter how small their budget. Although brand partnerships are still the top source of revenue for creators, many of them are starting to diversify.

If you’re in charge of marketing at an early-stage startup, this post explains how to connect with an influencer who authentically resonates with your brand and covers the basics of setting up a revenue-share structure that works for everyone.

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

Big Tech Inc.

If you live in New York, you can now make your way to Google’s new store, which opened today in Chelsea. The giant’s new brick-and-mortar presence joins the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Amazon so people can peruse its hardware offerings, as well as those of selected not-Google offerings.

It’s an advertising world, and we’re just living in it: Instagram today announced the global launch of ads in Reels, its TikTok rival. Sarah Perez says in her reporting that the ads will be up to 30 seconds in length and vertical in format. Like Reels, the new ads will loop, and people will be able to like, comment on and save them, the same as other Reels videos.

Google this morning announced a line of new virtual machines built on AMD’s third-gen EPYC processor. The new line, called Tau, is x86-compatible and offers a 42% price-performance boost over standard VMs. Google, of course, claims the Tau family “leapfrogs” existing cloud VMs.

Amazon this week announced its Appstore Small Business Accelerator Program, which will reduce the commissions Amazon takes on app developer revenues for qualifying smaller businesses. Previously, Amazon’s Appstore took a 30% cut of revenue, including that from in-app purchases. Now, it will take only 20% from developers who earned up to $1 million in the prior calendar year. The program will additionally offer AWS credits.

E3 2021, virtual style, wrapped this week, and, according to Brian Heater, Microsoft won the week with the announcement of 30 games. Nintendo followed with added Switch software.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

TechCrunch is building a shortlist of the top growth marketers in tech. If you’re a founder, we’d love to hear who you’ve worked with.

Fill out the survey here.

If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this interview Extra Crunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon did with Susan Su, head of Portfolio at Sound Ventures, about growth marketing in 2021.

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

Thanks to a twist of fate, two large cups of coffee and help from editor Annie Saunders, the Extra Crunch team is taking over today’s edition of Daily Crunch.

Don’t worry, we’ll hand it back as soon as Henry Pickavet returns or Alex Wilhelm is back from vacation, whichever occurs first.

Since I’ve been handed the mic: We’re trying to identify the most effective growth marketers who are helping startups build their businesses. With that in mind, Managing Editor Eric Eldon interviewed growth leader Susan Su, currently head of portfolio strategy at Sound Ventures, about the need for founders to develop a growth-centered mentality as the economy reopens.

“They don’t need to memorize all the right buttons to push in an ads dashboard, but they need to be familiar and comfortable with the core work of gap-finding,” says Su.

“Founders will fail if they adopt a mentality that someone else can or should do it for them. The founder’s job is to supply ambition and opinions, and then magnetize high-quality talent to come and pull the levers and bring their creative vision to life.”

If you’ve worked with a growth expert you recommend, please get in touch and let us know.

Thanks for reading!

Walter Thompson

Senior Editor, TechCrunch

@yourprotagonist

The TechCrunch Top 3

Apple doesn’t rank with top personal health brands like Procter & Gamble, Peloton or Fitbit, but perhaps it doesn’t need to. Cupertino’s health-related products and services are broad enough to touch each of these companies — and many others — in some way.

In an interview with Apple VP of Technology Kevin Lynch, Darrell Etherington tracked the evolution of the company’s user-guided approach to developing hardware, software and data management policies around personal health.

“It actually started from Apple Watch, where we were capturing heart rate data for calorimetry activity, and [Activity] ring closure, and we needed a place to put the heart rate data,” says Lynch. “So we created the Health app as a place to store the data.”

Sarah Perez reported on today’s launch of Spotify Greenroom, a live audio app based on the code of Locker Room. In March, Spotify purchased Betty Labs, which developed Locker Room.

Best known for music streaming, Spotify has been branching out into a more robust media company in recent years. Greenroom will allow users to host and join audio chat rooms, “and optionally turn those conversations into podcasts,” says Sarah.

There’s a reason why advertising units are called “impressions.” CPG companies are eager to literally place their messages in our faces.

So it should come as no surprise that Facebook today announced its plans to start testing ads on its Oculus platform in a limited rollout. A company blog post indicates that “for now, this is a test with a few apps.”

Startups and VC

Software testing platform BrowserStack announced today that it has raised $200 million in a Series B round. The round, which values the company at $4 billion, was led by BOND, with Insight Partners and Accel participating.

PandaDoc competitor Templafy has raised a Series D worth $60 million. Since launch, the business document creation platform based in Denmark has raised $125 million, including a $25 million Series C 14 months ago.

After securing a $100 million Series E round led by Accel partners, last-mile delivery platform Bringg is now valued at $1 billion, the company confirms. CEO Guy Bloch told TechCrunch the funds will be used to continue fueling growth, expanding operations and acquiring new customers. “Companies need our urgent help to do a job,” says Bloch.

Edtech investors are flocking to SaaS guidance counselors

The prevailing post-pandemic edtech narrative, which predicted higher ed would be DOA as soon as everyone got their vaccine and took off for a gap year, might not be quite true.

Natasha Mascarenhas explores a new crop of edtech SaaS startups that function like guidance counselors, helping students with everything from study-abroad opportunities to swiping right on a captivating college (really!).

“Startups that help students navigate institutional bureaucracy so they can get more value out of their educational experience may become a growing focus for investors as consumer demand for virtual personalized learning increases,” she writes.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Facebook rolls out new tools for Group admins: Facebook launched a new set of tools aimed at helping Facebook Group administrators get a better handle on their online communities and, potentially, help keep conversations from going off the rails. (May the odds be ever in your favor!) Among the more interesting new tools is a machine-learning-powered feature that alerts admins to potentially unhealthy conversations taking place in their group. Another lets the admin slow the pace of a heated conversation by limiting how often group members can post. As the adage goes, if you can’t say anything nice, say it slower.

Google updates online safety curriculum for kids: Perhaps we can teach the next generation to just be nice on the internet instead of using machine learning to prevent them from rapidly disseminating vaccine disinformation? Google updated and expanded its digital safety and citizenship curriculum, Be Internet Awesome, which has lessons for parents and educators about online gaming, cyberbullying and online empathy. Fingers crossed!

Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving arm, raises $2.5B: In its second outside funding round, Waymo raised $2.5 billion to grow Waymo Driver, its autonomous driving platform, and its team. At the moment, Waymo One, a commercial ride-hailing service, operates in the Phoenix, Arizona area, and Waymo announced plans earlier this month to enter a “test run” of its trucking and cargo transportation service with J.B. Hunt.

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

Welcome back to the Daily Crunch for June 15, 2021. Henry here while your regular scribe is enjoying some hard-earned R&R.

We just secured Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto to speak at our City Spotlight: Pittsburgh event. As Brian Heater said today, Pittsburgh currently has one of the world’s most vibrant robotic startup ecosystems, is at the center of much of the world’s autonomous vehicle research, and birthed successful companies like Duolingo.

Peduto will discuss the challenges and successes in building and nurturing this ecosystem with Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian at this great (and virtual) event. Register to attend here.

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Solid Power is going public: The solid-state battery developer backed by Ford and BMW said Tuesday it would head to the Nasdaq via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Decarbonization Plus Acquisition Corp III at a post-deal implied market valuation of $1.2 billion.
• Andreessen Horowitz has launched its own media apparatus called Futre: The publication, funded by a16z funds, looks to provide content that doesn’t currently exist in the market and that can be created from the “unique, interesting perch” that the firm has, says Margit Wennmachers, the firm’s operating partner of marketing and Future. Good luck, a16z, and welcome to the jungle.
• We have a new FTC commissioner: The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Big Tech critic and prominent antitrust scholar Lina Khan as a commissioner to the Federal Trade Commission, signaling a new era of scrutiny for the tech industry. Khan was confirmed in a 69-28 vote, with Republicans joining Democrats in a rare show of bipartisan support for Khan’s ideas on reining in tech’s most powerful companies.

Startups and VC

• Solar funding: Heliogen raised $108 million in funding to test its 1,000-degree solar furnace at a few participating mines and refineries.
• In no one we trust: Elisity, a platform that looks to help organizations transition from legacy access approaches to zero trust — a security model based on maintaining strict access controls and not trusting anyone — raised $26 million for its efforts.
• From the mouths of authors: BookClub, which gives authors a chance to hold book groups, share exclusive video-based interviews and answer questions from readers, raised $20 million in a Series A round. If only Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Henry Miller and George Eliot were still alive.
• The unicorn social: IRL, a social calendar app that could have crashed during COVID, instead capitalized on finding virtual events for users to attend and leveraged that success into a fresh round of $170 million in funding and unicorn status, now valued at $1.17 billion.
• Home fires: Thumbtack, your favorite place to turn to when you don’t want to break anything in your house, raised $275 million at a $3.2 billion valuation.
• Life-saving raise: Carbyne raised $20 million to help coordinate calls to emergency response teams, ambulances, hospitals and other actors who need to work together to save a life.
• A sustainable fund: G2 Venture Partners raised $500 million to support entrepreneurs who aim to make existing industries more efficient, environmentally friendly and socially responsible.

How to identify unicorn founders when they’re still early-stage

What are investors looking for?

Founders often tie themselves in knots as they try to project qualities they hope investors are seeking. In reality, few entrepreneurs have the acting skills required to convince someone that they’re patient, dedicated or hard working.

Johan Brenner, general partner at Creandum, was an early backer of Klarna, Spotify and several other European startups. Over the last two decades, he’s identified five key traits shared by people who create billion-dollar companies.

“A true unicorn founder doesn’t need to have all of those capabilities on day one,” says Brenner, “but they should already be thinking big while executing small and demonstrating that they understand how to scale a company.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Apple Podcasts Subscriptions are live worldwide: The subscriptions will allow podcast enthusiasts to access additional benefits for their hot listens, including ad-free listening, early access to new episodes, bonus material, exclusives and anything else that creators think their fans will fork over money for. Subscriptions are now live in more than 170 countries.
• E-commerce platform Shopify said today that Shop Pay, its one-click checkout service, will become available to any U.S. merchant that sells on Facebook or Google, even if they don’t use Shopify’s software to power their online stores.
• Over in Europe, a group of 200 startup founders, investors, associations and government members are backing a manifesto and a set of recommendations in order to create the next wave of tech giants across the continent.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

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

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

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

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

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 11, 2021. As a small note I am off next week, so my dear friend and TechCrunch lifer Henry Pickavet will be taking over. He’s more fun and a better writer than I am, so consider him a temporary upgrade. See you in a week or so! — Alex

p.s. Cheap tickets to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising are nearly gone. Flagging in case you needed a ticket and also like saving money. 

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Technology companies are trying to figure out post-pandemic work: Minor tech CEOs look to major tech companies for signals about what to do. Google, for example, is a famous cultural bellwether for other tech firms. But when it comes to post-pandemic work every tech company — big and small — is scrambling to come up with a plan that will keep control-oriented managers happy and staff from quitting en masse. TechCrunch has the rundown you need on what the majors are deciding.
• Didi’s going public! If you thought that the Uber and Lyft IPOs were fun, oh boy is this good news for you. TechCrunch has notes on the venture capital winners’ list and more on the company’s economics for your reading pleasure.
• The tech labor market is brutal: So brutal, in fact, two companies that help their customers find remote, freelance technology talent are now in a legal fight. Toptal is taking Andela to court over “the theft of trade secrets in pursuit of a perfect clone of its business,’” TechCrunch reports.

Startups and VC

• Vertical SaaS is still hot: How do we know? Fresha just raised $100 million. The company provides software for hair and nail salons, yoga instructors, and other health, beauty, and wellness SMBs. Vertical SaaS companies can often have both attractive software incomes and strong payments revenues.
• More money for neobanks: My general philosophy that there is infinite money available for neobanking startups around the world is holding up as TechCrunch broke news that “Bangalore-based neobank Open is in advanced stages of talks to raise about $100 million” from possibly Temasek and General Atlantic. The neobank could be worth $600 million after the deal, TechCrunch reported.
• The edtech boom is not over: Sure, COVID-19 is receding in some countries, and economic activity is rebounding globally, but that’s not stopping edtech companies that got a pandemic bump from raising more cash. This week it’s Indian edtech company Classplus, which could raise $30 million from Tiger Global we reported, at a valuation of up to $250 million. That’s real money.
• Neither is global interest in funding more insurtech startups: That’s what TechCrunch learned chatting up a bunch of EU-based VCs, who said that the European insurtech market is super busy, if perhaps not quite as frenetic as the market for insurance technology startups in America.

Insurtech is hot on both sides of the Atlantic

This morning, The Exchange dug into the EU insurtech market, interviewing European VCs and collating the biggest recent rounds to get a temperature of the waters across the pond:

• Alex Timm, CEO, Root
• Dan Preston, CEO, Metromile
• Luca Bocchio, partner, Accel
• Florian Graillot, investor, Astorya.vc
• Stephen Brittain, director and founder, Insurtech Gateway

Several European-based insurtech startups entered unicorn territory this year, such as Bought By Many, which offers pet insurance, London-based Zego and Alan, a French startup that raised a $220 million round.

According to Brittain, EU startups in this sector are “still at the very early stages of innovation,” having only shown “a fraction of what’s possible” in a market that is “as large as banking.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Everyone sucks at cybersecurity: This week’s its Volkswagen, via a third-party vendor. The vendor in question exposed 3.3 million customers’ data. At some point the fines for this sort of error have to rise to the level of pain that will force corporations to stop fucking up. Enough is enough.
• Apple hires from Canoo for car can-do: This week Apple confirmed that it hired “former co-founder and CEO [Ulrich Kranz] of electric vehicle company Canoo. Though the company declined to say what he’s working on. It’s 1,000% a new cube-shaped, six-screen iBloc, right? Without wheels?
• Sticking to the Apple beat, the company announced its “Design Award” winners. TechCrunch has the run-down you need here.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / 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.

The results from this survey will help influence our editorial coverage of growth marketing. Today, we have a guest column from Fuel Capital CMO Jamie Viggiano: 5 questions startups should consider before making their first marketing hire.

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

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 10, 2021. A short note from TechCrunch to start, namely that it’s the last few hours to get an early-bird pass to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising, coming in early July. It’s going to be pretty much amazing, so get on that, early-stage founders. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Microsoft thinks it can get cloud gaming to work: Microsoft has big plans to make cloud gaming more than whatever is left of Stadia today. Per TechCrunch, the company is preparing to “launch a dedicated device for game streaming” and wants to integrate related tech into TVs. Gamers, it’s a good time to be one of us. So long as you don’t need a new GPU.
• Klarna raises $639M: The craze to stuff capital into successful buy-now-pay-later startups continued this week, with Klarna raising a huge stack of funds at a new, greater valuation. For more on the space and its rapid growth, read this.
• Tech culture is changing: Recent unrest at Medium after related issues at Coinbase and Basecamp are bringing to light changing cultural expectations at startups and at the well-known Y Combinator accelerator. Inside these debates, it’s not hard to see growing recognition among some tech employees of the leverage that they have over their employers.

Startups and VC

Today we’re looking at a few key funding rounds from startupland, then some fund news and a roundup of recent unicorn IPOs.

• AI-powered recruiting is valuable: That’s the lesson from Eightfold AI’s recent funding round. The company just put together a fresh $220 million round at a $2.1 billion valuation, more than double what it was worth late last year. Notably, this valuation doubling was not born from Tiger Global’s largesse, but SoftBank’s second Vision Fund. The company, TechCrunch writes, “uses deep learning and artificial intelligence to help companies find, recruit and retain workers.”
• Say hello to analytics for how you spend your workday: There’s a fine line between keeping tabs on your workers and looking over their shoulders too frequently. Time is Ltd just raised $5.6 million for what we described as the Google Analytics for company time. For example, if a company wanted to know how much time its staff was spending in Slack versus, say, Teams, TiL could help. So long as the startup respects individual privacy, we’re fine with this.
• Everyone needs fintech: Including Indonesia’s micro, small and medium businesses. Evidence of that fact is evinced by a huge $60 million Series A raised by BukuWarung, a fintech company focused on just that market. Valar Ventures and Goodwater Capital led the investment. The startup has now raised $80 million, per Crunchbase.

Over on the venture capital beat itself, here’s some recent fun fund fundraising featured facts:

• Lots more capital for European startups: Perhaps to avoid having Tiger Global eat every round the world ‘round, Balderton Capital has put together a $680 million “early-growth” fund that will drop $25 million to $50 million checks into startups. That’s big coin for a growing scene.
• Serena Williams’ husband raises new fund: Well-known investor Alexis Ohanian’s new firm, Seven Seven Six, has raised a $150 million fund. And it’s involved in the latest round at Nuggs.

To round out the day’s startup news, Marqeta, Monday.com, Zeta Global and 1stDibs went public. Here’s our dig into their debuts and what they mean for the IPO market — and the value of startups more generally.

The fintech endgame: New supercompanies combine the best of software and financials

Now that we can transact from anywhere, a new, hybrid class of software companies with embedded financial services are scooping up consumers — and investors are following the action.

Using data from a Battery Ventures report about “the intersection of software and financial services,” this post examines why these companies can be so hard to value and offers a framework for better understanding their business models and investor appeal.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Waymo’s self-driving push continues: Alphabet’s huge running bet on self-driving technology is partnering with J.B. Hunt Transport Services to test self-driving trucks in the busy Texas market. It’s long been thought that freight vehicles that don’t spend much time on side streets could make good early targets for self-driving tech. Let’s see. While we’re on the subject of autonomous transit, Scale has news on the data side of the equation.
• Stripe brings sales tax to its payments platform: Stripe, while still private, is worth 84.2 zillion dollars, so it counts as Big Tech. The payments unicorn announced a new piece of tech today, namely the ability for its payments stack to handle sales tax both internationally and domestically. Sales tax is a huge problem, and handling it could provide Stripe with a nice edge over some of its competition.
• Apple to (probably) kill Dark Sky: After Cupertino bought weather service Dark Sky, it was presumed to be on its way to the wood chipper. Thus ends many a technology exit to a bigco; the larger entity really wants the tech and team, but doesn’t want to keep the company’s app alive. Apple, to its credit, won’t axe Dark Sky until 2022. After that, it’s all bets off.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

TechCrunch wants to help startups find the right expert for their needs. To do this, we’re building a shortlist of the top growth marketers. We’ve received great recommendations for growth marketers in the startup industry since we launched the survey yesterday, and we’re excited to read more responses as they come in!

Fill out the survey here.

We look forward to publishing more about growth marketing. Check out our most recent offering, Growth marketing amid the pandemic: An interview with Right Side Up’s Tyler Elliston.

We’re excited to continue our editorial coverage about growth marketing with posts from the TechCrunch team and guests. If you’re interested in writing a guest column, read more here.

Community

Come chat with us about Pittsburgh on Twitter Spaces tomorrow 6/11 at 1 p.m. PDT/4 p.m. EDT ahead of our upcoming TC City Spotlight series event.

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

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 9, 2021. Today was TC Sessions: Mobility, a rollicking good time and one that we hoped you enjoyed. Looking ahead, we’re starting to announce some speakers for Disrupt — including Accel’s Arun Mathew. Mark your calendars, Disrupt is going to be epic this year. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Biden tears down Trump’s Chinese app wall: After a very confusing episode in which the former U.S. president demanded that TikTok sell to an American company and that the U.S. government get a cut, things are mostly back to normal today after President Biden “signed an executive order revoking actions targeting TikTok and WeChat,” TechCrunch reports. Biden also signed a “new order requiring the Commerce Department to review apps with ties to ‘jurisdiction of foreign adversaries,’” so this story is not yet finished.
• Billions for battery tech: Northvolt has raised a $2.75 billion round to build its in-Europe battery manufacturing capacity to 150 GWh by 2030. While 2030 may sound far away, it’s under a decade from now. The news of Northvolt’s round underscores how many regions want to ensure that they can build core technology products like batteries, chips and AI on their own as a way to limit geopolitical risk.
• Everyone wants to fund AI startups: The era in which every startup claimed to be an AI company is behind us, leaving us with the era in which every VC wants to fund AI startups. That’s the gist of a recent TechCrunch dig into the hot and busy fundraising market for startups leveraging artificial intelligence.

Startups and VC

• Branch finds more backers for its insurtech service: Bundled home-and-auto insurtech startup Branch has raised a $50 million round led by Anthemis Group. The company’s pitch is that it starts customers off with a bundle, meaning that it doesn’t have to cross-sell them later on. VCs are still more than willing to pour capital into neo-insurance providers, despite some struggles from unicorns in the space after they went public.
• ShelfLife wants to help you source raw materials: Ever wanted to produce and sell your own version of White Claw? Lillian Cartwright and some fellow Harvard Business School folks had that idea, but ran into supply issues. Cartwright built ShelfLife, which helps brands by providing “a directory and marketplace of raw material suppliers based on what brands actually, specifically need, allowing them to secure quotes quickly.”
• If you are tired of insurtech rounds, how about an NFT round? Mythical Games announced a $75 million round despite fading near-term momentum in the market for blockchain-specific digital ownership writs. Regardless of what you think about NFTs, it’s clear that VCs are bullish and are willing to pay up to not miss a possible trend.
• American political luminary Stacey Abrams’ Now raises $9.5M: Now is a fintech company that buys corporate invoices for a fee, allowing companies to unlock revenue before they get paid. Provided that it can properly assess nonpayment risk, it’s a pretty business-friendly model.
• Behead your CMS: If you are not hip to headless CMS tools, imagine WordPress but without the bits that make it render in your browser. The headless model has attracted backers in a more fractured end-user device world, where users might access content on everything from smartwatches to tablets to desktops to VR helmets. And now Contentstack’s headless CMS service is $57.5 million richer after an investment led by Insight Partners.

To round out our startup news today, two things: The first is that Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra and his buddy Todd Goldberg, the founder of Eventjoy, have formalized their investing partnership in a new fund called Todd and Rahul’s Angel Fund. That name has big “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” vibes, albeit with a larger, $24 million budget.

And fresh on the heels of the Equity Podcast diving into hormonal health and the huge startup opportunity that it presents, there’s a new startup working on PCOS on the market. Check out our look at its early form.

Don’t panic: ‘Algorithm updates’ aren’t the end of the world for SEO managers

SEO expert and consultant Eli Schwartz will join Managing Editor Danny Crichton tomorrow to share his advice for everyone who gets nervous each time Google updates its algorithm.

To set a foundation for tomorrow’s chat on Twitter Spaces, Eli shared a guest post that should deflate some myths. For starters: A drop in search traffic isn’t necessarily hurting you.

Instead of chasing the algorithm, he advises companies that rely on organic search results to focus on the user experience instead: “If you are helpful to the user, you have nothing to fear.”

Just like you release product updates based on feedback and analytics, Google’s improving its products to offer a better user experience.

“If you see a drop, in many cases, your site might not have even lost real traffic,” says Eli. “Often, the losses represent only lost impressions already not converting into clicks.”

Tomorrow’s discussion is the latest in a series of chats with top Extra Crunch guest contributors. If you’ve worked with a talented growth marketer, please share a brief recommendation.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Google is building a huge fiber trunk to Argentina: Imagine you were a megacorp. And the internet was a bit slow between your headquarters, and, say, Argentina. Do you curse your luck? Stamp your feet? Or do you announce that you are going to “build a new subsea cable that will connect the East Coast of the U.S. and Las Toninas, Argentina — with additional landings in Brazil and Uruguay” as Google did? We hope it’s the final option.
• Did you know that it’s Facebook’s creator week? It is, as it turns out. Big Blue announced a “native affiliate tool” for Instagram that will allow “creators to recommend products available on checkout, share them with followers and earn commissions for sales their posts drive.” The idea may prove annoying for non-influencers, but for the folks with large followings it could be a boon.
• $270M for end-point security shop 1E: Rising acceptance of remote work means more and more end points for companies to secure. To see Carlyle pick up 1E for a quarter-billion, then, is not a surprise in substance. Crunchbase has no funding data from the London-based company, so perhaps this was a pretty big exit for its team.

Introducing TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

TechCrunch is back with our next category for our Experts project: We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices.

Fill out the survey here.

We’re excited to share the results we collect in the form of a database. The more responses we receive from our readers, the more robust our editorial coverage will be moving forward. To learn more, visit techcrunch.com/experts.

Community

Join us for a conversation tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. PDT / 3:30 p.m. EDT on Twitter Spaces. Our own Danny Crichton will be discussing growth marketer Eli Schwartz’s guest column Don’t panic: ‘Algorithm updates’ aren’t the end of the world for SEO managers. Bring your questions and comments!

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

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

The TechCrunch Top 3

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

Startups and VC

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

2 Turntables and a camera phone:

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

From the world of fintech:

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

Our regular funding round digest:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Tech Inc.

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

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

Image Credits: Ford Motor Company

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

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

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

The TechCrunch Top 3

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

Startups and VC

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

The hidden benefits of adding a CTO to your board

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

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

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

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

Big Tech Inc.

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

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

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

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

Elsewhere in BigTechLandia

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

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

Community

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

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

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

TC Eventful

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