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HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’ is a video game adaptation that’s actually good

Lauren Forristal

This weekend, HBO and HBO Max will premiere the first episode of “ ” a post-apocalyptic thriller based on the popular video game. On Sunday, January 15, it will debut on HBO at 9:00 p.m. ET and stream in 4K on HBO Max. The series will have nine episodes in total and follows the plot of the 2013 game where a fungus outbreak turns half of the world’s population into flesh-eating zombies — a.k.a. “clickers.” Starring “The Mandalorian” actor Pedro Pascal as Joel, and “Game of Thrones” actress Bella Ramsey as Ellie, “ ” centers around these two characters who, at first, want nothing to do with each other. Joel and his confidante, Tess (played by Anna Torv), are tasked with smuggling Ellie out of the quarantine zone in Boston and across the U.S. As the story progresses, Ellie and Joel’s dynamic shifts as they start to depend on each other. “The Last of Us” is HBO’s first foray into adapting a video game into a series. But you wouldn’t know it based on the quality. After so many video game adaptation fails, the show will likely be a relief to many “Last of Us” fans. Granted, it was co-written by the game’s creator, Neil Druckmann, so there was little room for it to flop in the first place. HBO’s “The Last of Us” is Druckmann’s love letter addressed to the millions of loyal fans that help keep the decade-long franchise alive. On the surface, “The Last of Us” may just seem like another survival story with zombies. However, unlike the stomach-churning gore that’s associated with the genre, the HBO series doesn’t focus on dramatic, long-winded shootouts and shots of the undead being sliced in half. Instead, it focuses on the human relationships between the uninfected as their world turns more uncertain by the minute. What makes this show so great, in our opinion, is the fact that viewers don’t need to play the game to understand it. connect a little bit more,” co-creator Craig Mazin said in a . “If I’m watching a show in the year 2023 and it takes place in 2043, it’s just a little less real. I thought it might be interesting to just say, ‘Hey, look, in this parallel universe, this is happening right now,'” Mazin added. Another distinction that we’ve noticed so far is how in-depth the show goes with Joel’s backstory. The beginning cutscene of the video game is only about 15 minutes long, whereas HBO’s “The Last of Us” takes a more drawn-out approach. The first episode begins with a flashback from 2003, when the initial fungal outbreak occurs. In this scene, Joel appears as a less intense man, sleeping through his alarm and facing simple problems like forgetting to buy pancake mix. Also, Joel’s daughter, Sarah (played by Nico Parker), gets a a lot of airtime, with clips of her cooking scrambled eggs, fixing her dad’s watch and baking cookies with her next-door neighbor. These scenes are unique to the show and give viewers more time to get to know the father-daughter duo, which makes the events that follow that more heart-wrenching. HBO The episode then jumps to 2023 when Joel is a smuggler in a quarantine zone guarded by FEDRA (Federal Disaster Response Agency) soldiers, while a militia group led by Marlene (Merle Dandridge) called “The Fireflies” aims to revolt against military oppression and restore government control. Viewers then meet Ellie, a teen that’s immune to the fungus and is being held captive by The Fireflies. Like in the game, the series will mainly focus on Joel and Ellie’s relationship and how their views on the world differ. Other characters who have yet to be introduced include Frank (Murray Bartlett), Bill (Nick Offerman), Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), Florence (Elaine Miles), Riley (Storm Reid), Perry (Jeffrey Pierce) and Henry (Lamar Johnson). “The Last of Us” will likely do well for HBO Max, despite the streaming service its subscription price earlier this week. Similar to its other highly anticipated shows like the “Game of Thrones” spinoff, “ ,” the company went all out to promote its newest series. For instance, Warner Bros. Discovery hosted a two-hour immersive experience and screening of the first episode in New York City, giving guests an array of “The Last of Us” themed goodies, photo opportunities and more. On January 15, HBO Max is also launching hosted by Troy Baker, the voice actor who plays Joel in the game. Druckmann and Mazin will also be featured in episodes as they discuss how they made the show and other behind-the-scenes stories. Each episode will be released every Sunday in tandem with the show.

What’s going on in the Dutch startup scene?

Haje Jan Kamps

very intriguing about members of a royal family working to further the startup scene for a particular country. In a magnificently frank conversation, I spoke with HRH Prince Constantijn, fourth in line to the throne of the Netherlands, at CES earlier this month. We discussed the Dutch ecosystem, the role of government in stimulating innovation and the challenges the country is facing in helping companies to go from startup to scaleup. I think I can help. I want to continue to build a relationship with the CTA [the , which organizes CES] and help some of these companies by introducing them to corporates. Some of the companies meet with me just for the selfies. That makes me think, “Maybe cut the crap; I know what you want, so let’s just take the photo and get over it.” On the whole, I’m here to support companies. In the Netherlands, we have support programs for scaleups or companies that are a bit further along, so a lot of what we do is to build connections, introducing them to founders or investors in the Bay Area, supporting them in as many ways as I can. And [CES] is just one of those outlets. The Netherlands is a small market, and Europe is quite fragmented. The U.S. is an important market. Most companies — depending on the sector — have to go to the U.S. at some point in time. The U.S. is the biggest health market, for example, so for most of those companies, it’s important to get there early and build some relationships. The U.S. is probably the biggest automotive market, too. CES is relevant to us because it is so big and brings together a lot of different industries. Most of the big players are here. CES is not a bull’s-eye for some of the companies we have, especially the software companies, but there’s such a density of tech companies here that you find relevant contacts are really high. So that’s most important.

HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’ gets a warm welcome with 4.7M US viewers

Lauren Forristal

“ ” made its debut last night on HBO and HBO Max. The series premiere garnered 4.7 million U.S. viewers, making it HBO’s second-largest debut since “Boardwalk Empire” premiered over a decade ago with 4.81 million viewers, the company today. “House of the Dragon” remains with nearly 10 million viewers. The video game adaptation was a recipe for success given the established fan base, a star-studded cast, and an accurate representation of the franchise that many gamers loved to see come to life. While it’s too early to predict if “ ” will become the most popular game-based TV series, the viewership data is a sure sign that HBO is doing something right. Notably, “The Last of Us” is the company’s first time adapting a video game into a show. “We are thrilled to see fans of the series and game alike experience this iconic story in a new way, and we extend our gratitude to them for helping to make it a success,” said Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and HBO Max Content, in a statement. We’ll also add that the premiere caused a 69% increase in first-time U.S. downloads of the HBO Max app across iOS and Android devices, per third-party app intelligence estimates from  (previously App Annie). Plus, the HBO Max app reached #4 on the overall free iPhone app ranking on the U.S. App Store on the night of the premiere. The last time it was this high in the ranking was when it hit #3 on the list when “House of the Dragon” debuted in August 2022. However, “ ” has big shoes to fill if it wants to compete with other game-based shows like Netflix’s “Arcane,” which is based on League of Legends. Based on Netflix’s own metrics, “Arcane” had 38.4 million viewing hours during the week of November 15, 2021. Paramount+’s “Halo” for being the streamer’s most-watched series premiere worldwide. Amazon Prime Video also has video game adaptations in the works, including a “ ” series. The HBO original series will have nine episodes in total and will stream on Sundays. HBO Max subscribers were introduced to only a few characters in the first episode, so it’s likely the following episodes will feature more, such as Frank (Murray Bartlett), Bill (Nick Offerman), Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), Florence (Elaine Miles), Riley (Storm Reid), Perry (Jeffrey Pierce) and Henry (Lamar Johnson). Viewers will also finally get to see clickers in action.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone joins board of audiovisual startup Chroma

Sarah Perez

, a startup working to build a new type of audiovisual entertainment specifically for mobile devices, is now adding a Twitter co-founder to its board. The company announced today that Twitter and Medium co-founder Biz Stone, previously an angel investor in Chroma alongside Pinterest’s founders, will join the company’s board of directors to contribute his expertise in areas like design, product development, filmmaking, and scaling brands. An early Google employee, Stone worked on the Blogger team after its acquisition, ahead of helping co-found Twitter in 2006. He remained with Twitter for a number of years as the company grew to become adopted by millions of users worldwide. , as Twitter hit the users mark, the entrepreneur left to pursue new projects with , a startup incubator and investment vehicle that had included fellow Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and former Twitter exec Jason Goldman. The venture most notably incubated the blogging platform . However, in 2013, Stone and the others shifted their focus to individual startups. For Stone, that led to the creation of and search engine that was In 2017, Stone he was returning to Twitter to lead strategic vision, brand, and culture, where he remained until 2021. Over the years, Stone has also backed a number of companies, including Square, Pinterest, Slack, Nest, Intercom, and Beyond Meat, where he now chairs the Nominating and Governance Committee. Stone said what initially appealed to him about the Swedish audiovisual company Chroma was its CEO and founder, Andreas Pihlström, who he met by way of an introduction from Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp. Pihlström had previously worked as a creative director, design advisor, designer, and prototyper at Pinterest, Beats Music, and VSCO. The two hit it off and began to have monthly calls after Stone’s angel investment. “It’s really about finding people I enjoy working with and spending time with — and bouncing ideas back and forth,” said Stone. The Chroma team had a range of ideas but ultimately landed on audiovisual technologies and their intersection with music and sound. As Stone explains, the idea was about changing the nature of music and sound and making it a more interactive and immersive experience. In practice, this involves touchable, dynamic visuals that create a sound-driven digital space that users can explore and interact with for a variety of purposes. The debut product to test this concept came out last year, through a partnership with music artist Arca to create an iOS app called The app offers an audiovisual experience for exploring music from the Venezuelan producer, DJ, singer, and songwriter in a “meditative digital space,” the company said. Users fly through a virtual world, interacting with her music and sounds as part of the journey. Chroma But this doesn’t show the full potential of the technology, which could have a range of use cases — some of which Chroma is now exploring — that demonstrate other ways users could interact with audio and sound, whether for play, meditation, relaxation, music composition, and more. While the company plans to first launch a product on mobile devices, Stone believes the technology could become even more interesting when and if Apple releases its own VR/AR headset. “I think it’ll lend itself really well to the metaverse equipment when that’s more ubiquitous. But I can also see it on my Apple TV. I would love to have it on there. Anywhere there’s great sound and visuals,” he added. “Mobile [first] is just because that’s what everybody has.” Founded in 2021, Stockholm-based (5.1 million euros) from VC firms Singular and Adjacent, Berlin’s angel syndicate SpotiAngels, as well as other individual investors, including Stone and Pinterest co-founders Evan Sharp and Ben Silbermann. Chroma had previously raised 1.6 million euros in pre-seed funding. As a board member, Stone expects to be meeting with the startup several times per month, in addition to the actual board meetings. He says that with his angel investments, he typically considers himself an advisor — meaning he’s open to founder phone calls but won’t call the company unless they want him to. Chroma did. “These guys are brimming with different ideas [at Chroma]. So, the challenge has been to narrow it down because it’s a small team and to get something done they need to not do a whole bunch of stuff,” Stone said. For now, the focus is on adding a sensory experience to sound. Chroma “The bigger picture is like this idea of ‘soundplay’ . . . it’s interactive. It’s changing the nature music so that it’s richer in a 3D way, but it’s also visual and . . . you can do things to it,” hinted Stone. “Biz brings a wealth of experience in technology and design to our table. Together, we’ll pave a path to the future of sound: combining excellence in the digital space with forward thinking to shift the paradigm of music,” said Pihlström in a statement. The board position isn’t the only thing Stone has in the works, as the entrepreneur says he’s been “noodling” on something else for himself with a small group of people. So far, the project is self-funded and hasn’t officially been launched, so he’s keeping the details quiet. However, Stone says he’s interested particularly in the emerging AI space and using AI as a tool, in particular. He says he hasn’t been particularly interested in some of the other newer tech trends, like web3 or some aspects of the metaverse. “The [web3] culture doesn’t appeal to me. There’s something off about it to me,” Stone explained. As for the metaverse: “I don’t want a dystopian future where kids are up in the room with a scuba mask on all day. I don’t want that to happen. That doesn’t seem good to me,” he adds. As for Twitter, Stone admits he hasn’t been watching the situation as closely as others, but “it doesn’t seem good right now,” but said he wouldn’t make any future predictions. “Maybe it will turn out great, but it doesn’t look like it will…There’s so many people laid off and it just seems kind of chaotic…every day, there’s some new crazy thing — I mean, that was always true on Twitter, I guess. There was always something going on…this is a whole new level of that.”  

Starling Medical’s new urine-testing device turns your toilet into a health tracker

Christine Hall

If you enjoy some good toilet technology, then I think “urine” for a treat. is poised to launch its at-home urine diagnostic patient-monitoring platform, dubbed “StarStream,” that doesn’t rely on the traditional catching containers or dipsticks. Now, if you’re thinking this technology sounds familiar, you would be correct: My colleague Haje Jan Kamps wrote about , a urinalysis device, earlier this month when the health-focused consumer tech company debuted it at CES. U-Scan also sits in the toilet for at-home monitoring. However, Alex Arevalos, Starling’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that this is an underserved market — the is forecasted to be valued at $4.9 billion by 2026, meaning there is plenty of room for Withings and a scrappy startup. The Houston-based company wants to prevent hospitalizations from chronic conditions, including urinary tract infections, diabetes and kidney disease, and will eventually move into dozens of other health conditions that urine testing can detect, including preeclampsia during pregnancy. Working in concert with urologist partners and insurance providers, the patient gets a reusable device that is attached to the toilet and is connected to artificial intelligence–powered digital health analysis. If a problem is detected after a patient uses the restroom, Starling connects them with their physician to learn more. Starling’s StarStream is actually the company’s second iteration. Back in January 2020, Arevalos and co-founders Hannah McKenney and Drew Hendricks were working on a catheter device that allowed patients with neurological bladder dysfunction to pee at the press of a button. Using some AI and spectroscopy sensors, the catheter would track the urine still in a patient’s bladder to detect urinary tract infections, which can lead to hospitalizations and sepsis. While going through Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch, they got two ideas: to take the sensors and pair them with an easy-to-use at-home device that physicians and patients have been asking for, and put that device in the toilet. And, rather than focusing on just neurological bladder dysfunctions, this would open them up to work with a larger market, including those with diabetes and preeclampsia kidney disease, which ends up being about a third of all patients in the United States, Arevalos said. Over the past year, the company developed the device and the technology and has already validated its predictive models through a clinical study in partnership with Stanford University. It also closed on $3.4 million in seed funding, led by Rebel Fund. The Starling Medical team Starling Medical Also participating in the round was Y Combinator, Innospark Ventures, AI Basis, Capital Factory, Coho Deeptech, Magic Fund, Rogers Family Office, Hendricks Family Office, ReMy Ventures, Centauri Fund, Praxis SCI Institute, Gaingels and a group of angel investors. The funding will be deployed into building an engineering team, developing the device and software, and hiring nurses and support staff. Nurses review the urinalysis data and file for the remote patient monitoring reimbursements. The company now has 10 employees. In the first quarter of 2023, StarStream’s device and monitoring service will be deployed with Starling’s first enterprise customer, a large private practice in Texas with about 200,000 urology patients and the potential for $144 million in annual recurring revenue, according to Arevalos. After getting the first customer up and running, he envisions adding additional physician groups throughout Texas, even saying that there is enough patient potential to “grow Starling into a unicorn without having to leave Texas.” Arevalos touted StarStream as “the world’s first FDA-registered service,” explaining that Starling Medical can claim that title because, for one, Withings’ U-Scan is launching in Europe first and because he believes Starling is the first to apply this type of model — analysis and connection to care on the back end. “Just data out there by itself can’t really help if there’s no follow-up,” he added. “Historically, one of the challenges is just convincing people to try something new and put something in the toilet. By doing that, it allows for health improvements for the patient, new revenue for our physician partners and the cost savings for patients not having to go through hospitalization.”

Pitch Deck Teardown: Orange’s $2.5M seed deck

Haje Jan Kamps

, I wrote a story about and how it is taking a different approach to putting chargers everywhere. Instead of a few high-speed chargers, it makes it easy for multifamily dwellings (think apartment buildings) to put charger sockets everywhere there might be EVs, taking care of billing and such to turn electric sockets into a revenue stream for building owners while making it easy for EV owners to charge their cars. It’s a clever model, replicating the benefits of charging at home using simple charger infrastructure. I asked the founders if they might be interested in sharing their pitch deck. To my delight, they said yes! Orange Charging’s pitch deck is one of the best decks I’ve seen in a very long time — it looks good, it tells a coherent story and it touches on all the parts that investors want to see in a deck. It even includes great examples of slides that many startup founders get wrong. In fact, when I first scrolled through the deck, I found myself wondering if I would be using this as a teardown at all — what’s the use in criticizing something that’s almost perfect? Let’s start by taking a peek at some of the highlights. [Slide 2] Setting the tone. Orange You only get one chance to make a first impression, and Orange’s second slide does a hell of a job of that in several dimensions. Visually, this is a stunning slide; the bright orange stripe that runs along the walls of the garage (it looks like it may be a Photoshop job rather than a paint or vinyl job, but that doesn’t matter for the purpose of a slide deck); the three cars and the bright orange charger boxes are all great visuals. Then, the text. It encapsulates the problem the company is solving in a really simple and easy-to-understand way. For a perfect score here, I would have made this slide about the company. Make the text orange and change it to something like “We simplify installing, scaling and managing ⚡️ in multiunit properties.” That way, it isn’t about the problem — it’s about the company and the solution. A small box showing the company’s progress and the purpose of this fundraise (“500 chargers installed in 75 locations, raising $2.5 million to 10x our install base”) would be even better. [Slide 9] A great overview of Orange Charger’s win-win setup. Orange Instead of rapid-charging from time to time or filling up only when you are empty, the company offers a solution that people who charge at home are used to: Whenever you get home, plug your car in, and you’re good to go whenever you get back to your car. Turning this charging paradigm into a company is essentially the core of what Orange is doing. This slide helps explain why having a 110V or 240V socket installed, charging at 16 amps, is actually plenty for the vast majority of EV drivers. It also argues that lower installation costs (and the absence of a charging cable that can break) and ease of operation make its solution a great alternative to competitors. Which is a fantastic setup for the two competition slides that follow. [Slide 5] Of course electric charging is going to be huge. Orange On another slide, Orange makes the argument that EVs will cost the same as gasoline-powered cars by 2025 — I’m a little skeptical, but the date is less important than the fact that this is going to happen at some point. Add in government incentives (either punitively in the form of higher gasoline taxes or a more carrot-like approach with new incentives for electric vehicles), and you’ve got a really interesting market indeed. In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Orange could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!

Chrome for Android now lets you lock your incognito session

Ivan Mehta

Chrome is rolling out an update for Android users that lets them lock their incognito sessions with a password code or biometric info when they exit the app. The feature has been available for iOS users for some time, but now it’s being made available to folks using Chrome on Android. Users can activate this feature by going to and turning on the “Lock incognito tabs when you close Chrome” toggle. So next time when a user exits Chrome, their incognito session will automatically be locked. To unlock the incognito tabs, you can use the biometric unlock on the phone such as a fingerprint unlock or lock code. Chrome This feature works well when searching for a topic that you don’t want to appear in your recommendations or history. Because Google has just started rolling out the feature, it is possible that the update might not be available for you even if you are using the latest version. In that case, you can type in “chrome://flags/#incognito-reauthentication-for-android” and enable the flag to unlock the feature instantly. As part of a broader update, Google said it’s also updating its Safety Check feature to send users more personalized recommendations about permissions they have shared with specific sites. For instance, if a site is sending too many notifications, Safety Check will prompt you to change settings for notification access. Google

How African startups raised venture capital in 2022

Tage Kene-Okafor

When it comes to large language models, should you build or buy?

Tanmay Chopra

only be described as an “AI summer,” especially with large language models making an explosive entrance. We saw huge neural networks trained on a massive corpora of data that can accomplish exceedingly impressive tasks, none more famous than OpenAI’s GPT-3 and its newer, hyped offspring, ChatGPT. Companies of all shapes and sizes across industries are rushing to figure out how to incorporate and extract value from this new technology. But OpenAI’s business model has been no less transformative than its contributions to natural language processing. Unlike almost every previous release of a flagship model, this one does not come with open-source pretrained weights — that is, machine learning teams cannot simply download the models and fine-tune them for their own use cases. Instead, they must either pay to use them as-is, or pay to fine-tune the models and then pay four times the as-is usage rate to employ it. Of course, companies can still choose other peer open-sourced models. This has given rise to an age-old corporate — but entirely new to ML — question: Would it be better to buy or build this technology? It’s important to note that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question; I’m not trying to provide a catch-all answer. I mean to highlight pros and cons of both routes and offer a framework that might help companies evaluate what works for them while also providing some middle paths that attempt to include components of both worlds. Let’s start with buying. There are a whole host of model-as-a-service providers that offer custom models as APIs, charging per request. This approach is fast, reliable and requires little to no upfront capital expenditure. Effectively, this approach de-risks machine learning projects, especially for companies entering the domain, and requires limited in-house expertise beyond software engineers. Projects can be kicked off without requiring experienced machine learning personnel, and the model outcomes can be reasonably predictable, given that the ML component is being purchased with a set of guarantees around the output. Unfortunately, this approach comes with very clear pitfalls, primary among which is limited product defensibility. If you’re buying a model anyone can purchase and integrate it into your systems, it’s not too far-fetched to assume your competitors can achieve product parity just as quickly and reliably. That will be true unless you can create an upstream moat through non-replicable data-gathering techniques or a downstream moat through integrations. What’s more, for high-throughput solutions, this approach can prove exceedingly expensive at scale. For context, OpenAI’s DaVinci costs $0.02 per thousand tokens. Conservatively assuming 250 tokens per request and similar-sized responses, you’re paying $0.01 per request. For a product with 100,000 requests per day, you’d pay more than $300,000 a year. Obviously, text-heavy applications (attempting to generate an article or engage in chat) would lead to even higher costs. You must also account for the limited flexibility tied to this approach: You either use models as-is or pay significantly more to fine-tune them. It is worth remembering that the latter approach would involve an unspoken “lock-in” period with the provider, as fine-tuned models will be held in their digital custody, not yours. On the other hand, building your own tech allows you to circumvent some of these challenges.

Teach yourself growth marketing: How to perform growth experimentation through A/B testing

Jonathan Martinez

can be no business. So how do you drive new customers to your startup and keep existing customers engaged? The answer is simple: Growth marketing. As a growth marketer who has honed this craft for the past decade, I’ve been exposed to countless courses, and I can confidently attest that doing the work is the best way to learn the skills to excel in this profession. I am not saying you need to immediately join a Series A startup or land a growth marketing role at a large corporation. Instead, I have broken down how you can teach yourself growth marketing in five easy steps: In this fourth part of my , I’ll take you through a few standard A/B tests to begin with, then show which tests to prioritize once you have assembled a large enough list. Finally, I’ll explain how to run these tests with minimal external interference. For the entirety of this series, we will assume we are working on a direct-to-consumer (DTC) athletic supplement brand. A crucial difference between typical advertising programs and growth marketing is that the latter employs heavy data-driven experimentation fueled by hypotheses. Let’s cover growth experimentation in the form of A/B testing. A/B testing, or split testing, is the process of sending traffic to two variants of something at the same time and analyzing which performs best. In fact, there are hundreds of different ways to invalidate an A/B test and I’ve witnessed most of them while consulting for smaller startups. During my tenure leading the expansion of rider growth at Uber, we used advanced internal tooling simply to ensure that tests we performed ran almost perfectly. One of these tools was a campaign name generator that would keep naming consistent so that we could analyze accurate data when the tests had concluded. Some important factors to consider when running A/B tests: The most common reason for tests getting invalidated is confounding variables. At times it isn’t obvious, but even testing different creatives in two campaigns that have different bids can skew results. When setting up your first A/B test, ensure there’s only one difference between the two email campaigns or datasets being tested.

HBO Max’s ad-free monthly subscription is increasing by $1

Aisha Malik

HBO Max is raising the price of its ad-free monthly subscription in the U.S. from $14.99 to $15.99 plus applicable taxes, effective immediately for new subscribers. The change marks the first time that HBO Max has increased the price of its service since launching in May 2020. “Existing subscribers who are currently paying $14.99/month will see their monthly rate increase to $15.99 effective their next billing cycle on or after Saturday, February 11, 2023,” the company said in a statement. “This price increase of one dollar will allow us to continue to invest in providing even more culture-defining programming and improving our customer experience for all users.” The cost of the HBO Max’s ad-supported tier will remain unchanged at $9.99 per month. The price hike comes a few days before the debut of HBO Max’s highly anticipated TV adaptation on January 15. The launch of the TV show is seen as a way for HBO Max to convince fans of the popular game to subscribe to the streaming service. It’s an odd time for HBO Max to introduce a price hike, given that it has been from its service over the past few months. Last month, the that it will be moving over 10 HBO Max original series to third-party free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) services. These titles include “Westworld,” “The Nevers,” “Raised by Wolves,” “FBOY Island,” “Legendary,” “Finding Magic Mike,” “Head of the Class,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” “Gordita Chronicles,” “Love Life,” “Made for Love, “The Garcias” and “Minx.” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav that it will be hard to meet the company’s 2023 earnings forecast of $12 billion. The price increased announced today could be a way for the company to lessen the blow.

Inscribe bags $25M to fight financial fraud with AI

Kyle Wiggers

Conor Burke spent much of his career in the back office of a big bank in Ireland. His team was tasked with digitizing the onboarding process — particularly document-heavy manual review workflows — that were costing the bank millions of dollars every year and not catching fraud. According to him, the biggest challenge was figuring how to remove the human element without compromising risk and fraud controls. Inspired by this, Burke and his twin brother, Ronan Burke, launched , an AI-powered document fraud detection service. Built for fraud, risk and operations teams in the fintech and finance industries, Inscribe taps AI trained on hundreds of millions of data points to return results, Ronan says. “Tedious document reviews add friction to account opening and underwriting processes, but automation alone isn’t the answer,” Ronan told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We believe automation without fraud detection is reckless, which is why Inscribe is the total package that helps companies detect fraud, automate processes and understand creditworthiness so they can approve more customers, faster.” Inscribe parses, classifies and data-matches financial onboarding documents, highlighting any differences between the documents provided and documents recovered using its AI-powered fraud detection. Document details including names, addresses and bank statement transactions are digitized automatically to generate individual customer risk profiles that include snapshots of bank statements and transactions. Last September, Inscribe rolled out a credit analysis and bank statement automation component that provides most of the data points needed to make lending decisions, including cash flow details from bank statements, transaction parsing and pay stub parsing. Ronan claims that Inscribe can extract and then return key details including names, addresses, dates, transactions and salaries in seconds. Inscribe In the features that it offers, Inscribe is similar to many of the other anti-fraud tools out there, like (which raised $16.6 million n October 2021) and (which raised $7 million in July of that same year). Ronan argues that it’s differentiated by its AI-first approach, however, which hinges on original data collected through previous partnerships with customers. “We’d seen fraud detection and document automation companies in our space try to build a perfect solution right out of the gate without talking to customers — but they had since shut down. They weren’t able to get over the cold start problem; they weren’t able to build a product from the ground up because they didn’t have access to the data their customers were using,” Ronan said. “This comes back to the first rule of machine learning: Start with data, not machine learning. If you don’t have a good dataset, you’re wasting your time. You’ll end up either choosing the wrong model or training a model on data that won’t perform the way that you expect.” AI is by no stretch of the imagination perfect — history’s shown that much to be true. For example, during the pandemic, fraud detection systems that home in on anomalous behavior were by new shopping and spending habits. Elsewhere, automated algorithms to detect welfare fraud have been shown to be error-prone and designed in ways that essentially punish the poor for being poor. But setting aside the veracity of Ronan’s claims, there’s evidently something about Inscribe’s platform that’s attracting high-profile customers. TripActions, Ramp, Bluevine and Shift are among the startup’s clients. Investors, in turn, have been won over. Just this week, Inscribe closed a $25 million Series B funding round led Threshold Ventures with participation from Crosslink Capital, Foundry, Uncork Capital, Box co-founder Dillon Smith and Intercom co-founder Des Traynor. The infusion brings the startup’s total raised to date to $38 million, inclusive of a $10.5 million Series A round closed in April 2021. Perhaps it’s the comparative ease with which Inscribe’s solution can be deployed. As Ronan rightly notes, Inscribe solves the problem of having to build an in-house fraud detection solution or hire a large data science team. “AI and machine learning models benefit from as much data as possible, but each individual company is limited to only their own dataset. So a homegrown solution simply can’t be as effective as one that pulls from numerous data sources,” Ronan said. “That’s why companies partner with document fraud detection solutions instead: Criminals commit fraud in different ways, and those solutions are pulling data from across their customer base to identify coordinated attacks and emerging trends faster.” Fearmongering is likely helping, too. One recent suggests that the average U.S. fintech loses $51 million to fraud every year, a stat Ronan quoted to me during our interview. “An increasingly digital, geographically dispersed and faster world makes it more difficult than ever to know who you’re doing business with — leaving companies uncertain about which potential customers are trustworthy,” Ronan said. “Fintechs have been able to build for an online world, but traditional financial institutions are faced with the challenge of moving away from legacy systems and embracing true digital transformation. And they have to do it all while reducing fraud and friction in order to have competitive customer experiences.” Asked about expansion plans, Ronan says that Inscribe will likely double the size of its 50-person workforce over the next 12 to 18 months.

Match restructures executive leadership, hires former Snap VP of Product as new CTO

Aisha Malik

Match Group, the parent company of several popular dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, has announced a revamped executive leadership team. Most notably, the company is bringing on former Vice President of Product at Snap Will Wu as its new chief technology officer in a newly created role. Wu will oversee product innovation across Match’s portfolio of apps, the company says. During his time at Snap, Wu led the team charged with the creation and commercialization of Snap’s developer platforms. Wu led the creation of many of Snap’s popular features, including the “Discover” content platform, the “Chat” messaging feature and Snap’s social gaming initiative. Match says Wu will now work directly with its executives to launch new features, emerging technologies and innovative products. “Will is truly a product savant,” said Match Group CEO Bernard Kim in a statement. “For nine years, he has forged new technologies at scale that have redefined user experiences and expectations of social products, particularly amongst Gen Z. I’ve known him for a long time, and have seen the massive impact he’s had on the way people connect at Snap, and I can’t wait to see what he will bring to the dating experience. This leadership team has a deep bench of knowledge, proven track records, and we are all ready to collaborate and capitalize on the opportunities ahead.” The company also announced that Gary Swidler, who was previously the chief operating officer and vhief financial officer of Match, will become the president and chief financial officer of Group. In addition, Malgosia Green, who was previously CEO of Plenty of Fish, will become chief executive officer of Match Group Asia. Another leadership change will see Hesam Hosseini, the CEO of Match and Affinity brands, taking on a newly created role as CEO of Evergreen & Emerging Brands. In this position, Hosseini will oversee Match, Meetic, Plenty of Fish and OkCupid, in addition to emerging brands such as The League, BLK and Chispa. Last, Justin McLeod, the founder and CEO of Hinge, will now report directly to Kim. Match says the new changes are designed to maximize profitability, enhance growth, streamline operations and prioritize new business opportunities. The move comes as Match is looking to grow its business beyond traditional, swipe-based matchmaking and into the so-called “metaverse.” Match has spoken previously about its , complete with a virtual goods-based economy, real-time audio and the ability for online daters to meet up in a virtual space to have conversations.

4 practical steps for using no-code to evolve your prototype to an MVP

Katherine Kostereva

of “doing more with less” is particularly critical advice for both startups and enterprises right now. Venture funding has hit its lowest point in two years, which means startups must now focus on making hard decisions about how to utilize their limited budgets. Enterprises are likewise tightening their belts as customers feel the impact of inflation and prepare for an uncertain economy. What’s more, we are facing a global talent shortage that further puts pressure on an already constrained software developer pool. No-code development tools could not have come at a better time. By democratizing the ability to develop software through visual, drag-and-drop tools, no-code enables a range of non-developers to start building software. For a startup, this might mean the founder now can build their first minimum viable product (MVP) release themselves while bootstrapping the team. For enterprises, teams can build their own apps without having to depend upon the IT department. How does one go about evolving a prototype into an MVP using no-code? Here are four practical steps you can take: Traditional Agile methodologies for custom development have popularized breaking down larger releases into smaller releases that add features. Depending on the flavor of Agile employed, how long each release will take to be ready will vary. The Scrum version of Agile typically defines shorter “sprints” of two to three weeks. However, not all builds developed in these sprints may be ready for release to end users, who will have to wait until the next full release is complete. No-code is different: It enables delivery of features with small, quick, continual updates — what we will refer to as “everyday delivery.” This builds on concepts from Agile but does not force you into a strictly defined release duration. Instead, with no-code you can rapidly and continuously add features to the prototype and evolve it toward your MVP and release features when they are ready via smaller, incremental updates (perhaps daily). One way to do this is through the Kanban Method, which is optimally suited for no-code development. Kanban embraces a continuous “push” delivery model, where teams release features as soon as they are ready, compared to Scrum, which organizes work in sprints and defined release trains. When used together, Kanban and no-code let you update the prototype and release updates faster and more often, gather feedback from your stakeholders and end users, and respond quicker. Kanban can also be easier for non-developers to adopt — they can use it on top of existing workflows, systems and processes without disrupting what is already in place. Finally, Kanban also minimizes the need for development experience and specialist roles (e.g., Scrum master or product owner), which makes it easier and faster to adopt for non-developers. The next step is to properly scope and decompose work items in your MVP release.

Some investors are (cautiously) implementing ChatGPT in their workflows

Natasha Mascarenhas

artificial intelligence tool that achieved virality with its savvy messaging ability, has certainly struck a chord. The tool, made available to the general public just last month, is smart enough to answer serious and silly questions about profound topics, which has landed it in debates led by writers, educators, artists and more. But for investors, ChatGPT’s surge isn’t just an inspiration for them to run and back the next big AI tool. Some are thinking through ways to integrate the technology into their workflows to do their jobs better, smarter and maybe even cheaper. Many investors shrugged at the idea of artificial intelligence replacing the more monotonous parts of their work. After all, in a business driven by value-add and personality, who would want to admit that AI could do their job? But stigma aside, for years, whether in deal discovery or even investment support. But ChatGPT being a specifically text-based support tool, automation could be making its way to rejection letters, market maps or even bits of due diligence — all in order to stay afloat in a changing venture landscape. Kate McAndrew, general partner at Baukunst, said she would be “shocked” if associates weren’t using ChatGPT given that the AI is a “natural evolution of snippets.” As for herself, she admits to not even using Google’s AI autocomplete, writing all of her emails from scratch. She said that method is slow, “but feels genuine in a way that is important to me.” Some investors expressed that ChatGPT could be used for fact-checking purposes around market size claims or growth potential; at the same time, so could Google. The argument for AI, of course, would be that the content would be original and perhaps more targeted toward someone’s exact questions, while a general Google search may require extra digging and piecing different articles together. Hustle Fund general partner Eric Bahn is a proponent of ChatGPT and used it to write his end-of-year essay for his investors last month. He shared the prompt he used and the output and said investors responded well to it. Bahn hasn’t used it for pass responses, though it made sense to him that associates might.

Apple Maps teams up with parking app SpotHero to give users access to 8K parking options

Lauren Forristal

Apple Maps launched a new parking feature that provides users with parking options and availability near a specific destination. In partnership with the digital parking reservation platform, , Apple Maps users across the U.S. and Canada can now get parking information for over 8,000 locations. To use the new feature, launched late last week, iPhone and Mac users can search for a destination in the Apple Maps app and then select “More” and “Parking.” They’re then directed to the SpotHero website without leaving Apple Maps. Users can search for nearby parking and reserve a space using SpotHero’s secure payment options, the parking platform claims. SpotHero also allows users to filter their search by date and time as well as parking spots with EV charging, wheelchair accessibility, valet services and more. SpotHero, a Chicago-based company founded in 2011, connects drivers in more than 300 cities across North America to thousands of parking spaces. Its dataset of parking facility details, photos and reviews aims to help drivers find the best parking option available. “We’re constantly identifying new ways to bring easy, affordable parking to drivers. Working with Apple Maps is one way we’re doing this. Through our new integration, Apple Maps users can discover SpotHero parking right in the Apple Maps on iPhone and Mac,” SpotHero CEO & co-founder Mark Lawrence told TechCrunch. The SpotHero integration is a notable move for Apple and the multibillion-dollar parking industry as a whole. As of 2020, parking generated $131 bilion in direct revenue, . However, less than 2% of parking is digitized. It’s important that major tech companies like Apple integrate parking technology into its apps. For instance, partnered with another parking platform, ParkMobile, to let users pay for parking using their voice. The new feature also marks another step toward Apple’s goal of having Apple Maps be the go-to source for navigation. Apple Maps has launched a ton of in the past few years, including “ ,” which lets users plan out their stops before they travel as well as , , AR experiences and more.

Orange you glad this company is making it easier to get EV charging in your building

Haje Jan Kamps

One of the biggest bottlenecks in the EV rollout is charging infrastructure. There’s no shortage of companies taking a stab at it, but believes it has a smarter approach. Working within the typical constraints of multifamily dwellings (think apartment buildings, etc.), the company makes it super easy for building managers to install sockets especially for overnight charging of vehicles (as opposed to the high-voltage, high-amperage chargers you see in fast chargers). The secret sauce is making the sockets as easy to install as a standard household socket, and the company makes it easy for building managers to charge the tenants according to their usage. The company chose not to include the charger cables, so car owners need to use the 110V or 240V cables that came with their cars. It claims that this increases the uptime of the chargers. “Replacing the cable for your car is like $200, and Amazon delivers them next-day. That’s a lot cheaper than the alternatives: It costs more than that to just get an electrician to show up in a truck a lot of the time,” Orange CEO Nicholas Johnson points out. Each of the boxes includes cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, to overcome the challenge of lack of cell signal that typically exists in garages. The company is in the process of adding Wi-Fi mesh networking so each socket can extend the range of each other socket. In addition, the sockets don’t need an internet connection to start charging: A user’s phone keeps track of the amount charged, and connects with Bluetooth to activate the charging. “The mesh network is actually only there for notifications,” Johnson adds. “Such as if someone unplugged your car, or something has gone wrong somehow. The other thing we use the network for are our own data metrics, temperature measurements and other updates we may add in the future as we make improvements to our firmware.” Orange’s chargers come in 110V and 240V versions, and fit in a standard two-gang box. Car owners scan the QR code on the socket to start charging, and billing etc. is dealt with via the Orange app. . “Orange has achieved equitable access to electricity by re-thinking the entire process of vehicle charging by creating a system specifically for apartment communities, rather than pushing a public charging model that doesn’t fit onto them,” Johnson said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Most charging infrastructure to this day is sold these overpriced pedestal boxes that you don’t really need to charge your car. Most people drive 30 to 45 miles a day, rather than driving their full battery range. As long as you can plug in reliably, you can charge your car, charging becomes almost invisible: It disappears in your life. You plug in when you get home, and when you go out in the morning, it is ready for you every day.” The company tells me that it is picking a fight with the likes of grant-funded ChargePoint charging stations, and makes clear that it wants to run its company under a more compelling, sustainable business model. “Our key selling points to a property owner is lowering the up-front install cost. We can then deliver a return on investment on reselling electricity. That’s the balancing act: The person who lives in a multifamily building may pay more for electricity than a single-family home. But at the same time, they didn’t have to pay to install a charger — that was paid for. The cost of the charger becomes amortized over a three to five years payback period. And then over a 10-year period, you return an investment that’s anywhere from 150 to 200% of the original cost of the infrastructure,” Johnson explains. “The other issue is panel capacity. Every building today can only support so many EVs that can charge at once. How do you charge all these EVs as they are showing up on the market?” The company is betting that more, lower-amperage chargers dotted across a garage are better than an apartment building having a small handful of Level 2 high-speed chargers. “People were installing five $6,000 stations, putting them in shared parking spaces. But it doesn’t work; the tenants don’t get out of bed at 11 pm to move their cars,” Johnson points out. “Data shows that cars charge for three hours, then spend six hours sitting idle. Then the operators charge fees, and we’ve spoken to drivers that were getting $40-50 fees every few weeks because they forgot to move their cars in time.” A car owner activates the Orange socket. . There are currently around 500 outlets installed across 75 locations, and the company is working to accelerate its rollout. The company tells me its sweet spot is large multifamily developers. “We target developers like The Essex, Irvine, Camden, and the Greystars of the world. They have 50 or 60,000 units under management,” Johnson says, pointing out that the huge shift in EV ownership means that property managers are all trying to solve the same problem. “We target the developers, not Tesla owners who want to charge their car at their condo. We are happy to sell to them, and we help them a lot, but that’s not where we see the most value. Besides, HOAs are slow: They take six to seven months to close a deal because they have to get HOA board approval.” The company closed a $2.5 million round late last year, in a round led by . Intelis Capital, Elevation Ventures, and Wardenclyffe Partners also participated in the round. The company tells me it is gearing up to raise a larger round soon, to hire more (especially front-end developers), and ramp up production of the sockets via its contract manufacturer. an earlier version of this article stated that there was only one investor in this round. That was inaccurate, and has been corrected in the article above.

Teach yourself growth marketing: How to launch a paid acquisition channel

Jonathan Martinez

can be no business. So how can you drive new customers to your startup or keep existing ones engaged? The answer is simple: Growth marketing. As a growth marketer who has honed this craft for the past decade, I’ve been exposed to countless courses, and I can confidently attest that working is the best way to learn. I am not saying you need to immediately join a Series A startup or land a growth marketing role at a large corporation. Instead, I have broken down how you can teach yourself growth marketing in five easy steps: In this second part of my , I will teach you how to set up a paid acquisition channel to drive online traffic and, ultimately, conversions (purchases) to a landing page. For the entirety of this series, we will assume we are working on a direct-to-consumer (DTC) athletic supplement brand. Even with the most premium product on the market, most consumers aren’t going to magically discover its existence on your website. This is where paid acquisition is most effective — educating and driving consumer interest in your products. When deciding which paid acquisition channel to launch, there is one key aspect you must consider: your target demographic. Where are your target consumers spending their time online? Are they scrolling through TikTok or reading an article on LinkedIn? Once you can answer this question, it will make selecting the first channel to launch quite easy. In the event that your target demographic is already on numerous acquisition channels, you can choose Facebook or Google as your first channel. These two platforms are considered the duopoly in paid acquisition and will be the best primer for learning how to manage paid social media and paid search channels.

Teach yourself growth marketing: How to boot up an email marketing campaign

Jonathan Martinez

can be no business. So how can you drive new customers to your startup or keep existing ones engaged? The answer is simple: Growth marketing. As a growth marketer who has honed this craft for the past decade, I’ve been exposed to countless courses, and I can confidently attest that doing the work is the best way to learn the skills to excel in this profession. I am not saying you need to immediately join a Series A startup or land a growth marketing role at a large corporation. Instead, I have broken down how you can teach yourself growth marketing in five easy steps: In this third part of , we’ll examine how to set up email marketing to push consumers through your funnel and drive conversions. For the entirety of this series, we will assume we are working on a direct-to-consumer (DTC) athletic supplement brand. Even if you have the most premium product and amazing product-market fit, if you aren’t leveraging email marketing, you’re leaving huge leaks in the bucket. You can think of email marketing as a way to plug the holes that consumers are leaking out of at various stages of your funnel. The funnel for our athletic supplement would look simple in comparison to something like getting someone to sign up to drive for Uber. I’ll show what both these funnels look like below. Athletic supplement funnel: Ad view > website view > add to cart > email entered > checkout process (adding payment and shipping information) > purchase. Uber driver funnel: Ad view > website view > email entered > basic identity questions (i.e., date of birth) > sensitive identity questions (i.e., driver’s license, SSN) > KYC background check consent > download mobile app > complete first drive. As the complexity of the funnel increases, so does the potential for leaks, as do the opportunities for email marketing to plug them up. For our athletic supplement, I would start with three automated email campaigns:

Daily Crunch: Berlin-based design platform Kittl raises $11.6M Series A to take on Adobe and Canva

Christine Hall

Did you know you can buy 3D printed key caps to replace, say, your escape key with a cat? Today, that’s our delightful little morsel of whimsy, courtesy of ’s (scroll all the way to the bottom for a photo of the adorable little kitteh). — and Fintech startup Stripe has set a , either through a direct listing or by pursuing a transaction on the private market, such as a fundraising event and a tender offer, according to sources familiar with the matter. The news comes as a surprise considering the rather dry public market activity in the tech world, and report. There was a brief, beautiful moment for a few months in 2021 when it felt like robotic investments might be immune to broader market forces. We all fundamentally and implicitly understood this to not be the case, but it was a nice moment nevertheless, muses. Now, however, it’s becoming clearer that . Another handful of tech-newsy goodness: / Getty Images Despite the myth, sharks don’t need to keep swimming to keep breathing. Early-stage startups, on the other hand, are not so fortunate. If driving growth is a priority, companies must run an ongoing series of A/B tests that can help refine marketing messages and make their product pipelines more relevant to customers’ needs. In part three of a five-article series on growth marketing fundamentals, Jonathan Martinez explains how to properly manage A/B tests, identify statistical significance when reviewing data, and prioritize experiments that maximize reach and impact. Three more from the TC+ team: In a census of its own making, , reports. This is a substantial jump from the 3 million it had 10 years ago and even a healthy increase from just three months ago when Microsoft, which acquired the company five years ago, announced GitHub had . Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe got together to , including leak sites and decryption keys, reports. She writes that Hive is “one of ,” focusing mainly on healthcare and public health entities, claiming responsibility for breaches at Illinois-based Memorial Health System in August 2021 and most recently , a top power-generation company in India, in October. And we have four more for you:

Teach yourself growth marketing: How to set up a landing page

Jonathan Martinez

can be no business. So how can you drive new customers to your startup or keep existing ones engaged? The answer is simple: Growth marketing. As a growth marketer who has honed this craft for the past decade, I’ve been exposed to countless courses and I can confidently attest that working is the best way to learn. I am not saying you need to immediately join a Series A startup or land a growth marketing role at a large corporation. Instead, I have broken down how you can teach yourself growth marketing in five easy steps: In part one, I will teach you how to set up a landing page that we’ll eventually drive consumer traffic to. For the entirety of this series, we will assume we are working on a direct-to-consumer (DTC) athletic supplement brand. If you don’t have a product with a landing page or mobile app ready to go, I’ll show you how to quickly set a landing page up, as it is our one prerequisite for getting started. A landing page is the page people are taken to when they click an online ad you have purchased, and it is commonly the homepage of a website. Regardless of how a consumer “lands” on your landing page, its purpose is to encourage them to convert into a lead or purchase. In 2010, I was ecstatic when Apple introduced iWeb, which allowed users to design and publish websites without needing to write a single line of code. It was a very basic platform, though, and we’ve come a long way since. Today, there are a wide variety of advanced content management system (CMS) editors available, such as Leadpages and Webflow, which empower everyday internet users to create beautiful websites all on their own. The advantage of many of these platforms is that they will guide you through how to use premade templates and editing your first pieces of content (such as website titles, headlines, etc.). Select a platform you like and let’s get building!

As it shifts focus from DIY computer kits, Kano spins out its creative software suite as a standalone business

Paul Sawers

(“Kano”), the company for its DIY computer kits and software for and skills to kids, is spinning out its creative software suite and online community platform as an independent business. The move comes as the U.K. company has been shifting its focus away from its build-your-own PC roots in pursuit of profitability and longer-term sustainability. Founded out of London , Kano has brought various products to market through the years designed to teach the building blocks of computing to children. This includes its flagship , as well as accessories such as the , replete with a physical magic wand that works across most platforms. Kano’s Harry Potter wand. Kano Computing Kano , from its Raspberry Pi roots little more than a year ago, Kano partnered with Kanye West to , a music device that lets users isolate and remix individual elements of songs. But with West on , Kano that it was cutting ties with the rapper, though it continues to West’s involvement. And earlier this week, Kano , while teasing plans for all manner of new products, spanning everything from food to clothes. With Kano heading in a new direction, this has left a core part of its business in limbo. has been an integral part of Kano’s offering pretty much since its inception — through an online account, users can create games, animations and art, share them with the Kano community, remix other users’ work, participate in challenges, and more. The platform was designed to bring a little fun and utility to its build-your-own computer kits, though it could be used independently of Kano’s hardware. Code challenge in Kano World. Kano World Moving forward, Kano World will be going solo as a standalone business entity, led by CEO , who was formerly head of sales and education at Kano Computing. Dotsch started his new role back in August, just as Kano World was . According to a U.K. Companies House , Kano World has three main shareholders, including Kano co-founder and CEO , who holds a plurality of shares, Dotsch himself and Kano Computing. In a Q&A with TechCrunch, Dotsch explained that after leading the sales of Kano’s Windows-based PCs through to their eventual sell-out in early 2022, he floated the idea of spinning out Kano World with CEO Klein and the company’s board, cognizant of the fact that Kano was shifting its focus. “Kano Computing is now working to grow the Stem business,” Dotsch said. “The Stem focus would have left Kano World with little to no budget, resources or attention to grow it into the product and business we believe it can and will be. Now on our own, we can fundraise, build a team and dedicate ourselves to the success of our vision to empower the creative genius in all young people to create, and not just consume.” Kano World CEO Ollie Dotsch. Kano World For now, Kano World constitutes a team of just three and is funded entirely by its three main shareholders, with plans afoot to seek new funding “in the coming months.” And besides its equity stake, Kano Computing will also serve as an incubator of sorts in the short term, serving up office space in its East London HQ. “Extracting Kano World from Kano Computing is complex and will take time, but we’ve already started progressively and, once complete, leaving both companies stronger than before,” Dotsch said. If nothing else, Kano World is striving to retain at least some of the original “creator and maker” ethos of Kano, albeit with a focus purely on the software side of things. Moreover, it can be perceived as a positive step that Kano has elected to give Kano World a chance to thrive on its own, when it may have been easier to let it slowly die inside Kano, or pull the plug on it in its entirety. “In this environment, it made more sense for Kano World to grow outside of Kano Computing, than in[side],” Kano Computing’s co-founder and CEO Alex Klein said in a statement. “Kano World has had many exciting iterations over the years, even attracting the attention of Mark Zuckerberg, who using the platform with his kids. This spin-off is the logical next step to deliver new joyful creative experiences for young people around the world.” As before, Kano World offers two of its three creative tools — and — for free, including access to some of the beginner . Those who sign up to a premium subscription, which costs $10 per month or $100 per year, can access  and a broader array of challenges. Without giving too much away, Dotsch said they are actively working on building out the social community side of the platform and its creative software suite, with premium users able to access new products first. The new Kano World company intends to double its headcount to around six people by the end of February, according to Dotsch, with subsequent hires planned in the software development and creative realm.

Substack introduces ‘private Substacks’ that readers can request to subscribe to

Aisha Malik

Newsletter platform Substack today that it’s introducing several new features, including private Substacks. A private Substack is a publication that you can host alone or readers can request to subscribe to read your posts. Writers can choose to approve or decline each subscription request. In a , Substack explained that private Substack accounts work similarly to private Instagram profiles. A private Substack can be used to keep in touch with friends, build communities of interest and test the waters for a new publication, the company says. Users can change their Substack from public to private at any time by navigating to their settings and selecting “Private” in the “Import” section. Once a user makes their publication private, readers won’t be able to see any posts. When a reader requests to subscribe to a Substack, the writer will receive an email notification with their details. You can see your requests on your Subscribers page. If you approve a request, the reader will be automatically subscribed and sent a Welcome email. The launch of the new feature comes as Substack has been hoping to capitalize on Twitter’s upheaval following Elon Musk’s takeover. The company in the past few months and recently threw its hat into the ring as a more direct competitor with the , which allows writers to communicate directly with their loyal readers right in the Substack mobile app. Substack Now, the company is somewhat inching further into the social media giant’s territory by offering private Substacks. Twitter has offered the ability to make your account private for many years now, and also offers Twitter Circle, which allows you to tweet to a smaller audience of your choice. With its Chat feature, Substack was also taking on other online communities like Discord and Slack, which also both offer private settings. Substack’s new offering could be seen as a way for the company to bring its platform in line with the companies it’s looking to compete with. As for the other new Substack features rolling out today, the company is launching new updates for its aforementioned Chat feature. The new updates are designed to make it easier to start conversations with existing subscribers. Now, when you share a new post, podcast or video, you can instantly start a conversation in Chat by automatically sharing the link with a caption in your chat. For users with more than one Substack publication, the company is introducing a new feature that lets them easily toggle between publications without have to remember multiple logins and passwords. Another new feature lets users “duplicate” posts, which allows them to easily reuse templates instead of reformatting each post from scratch. The company is also introducing search improvements, as a search button is now prominently featured on the web in the top right corner. When searching keywords, the top three relevant posts will appear. Readers can now also search keywords to find posts, publications and people from their web inbox. In addition, math and science writers can now embed math equations into any post using LaTeX.

Dear Sophie: How do I change my L-1B to an H-1B through the lottery?

Sophie Alcorn

of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says , a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to in my next column.” TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; . Dear Charming, Congrats on taking the first step in seeking out new opportunities — and thanks for including me on your journey! Yes, you are correct: L visas for intra-company transferees enable you to work for the company that sponsored you for the visa. All non-immigrant work visas, including the L-1B, require you to have a job offer and an employer sponsor, and your visa is tied to your job with that employer. The short answer to your question is: Yes, you can take a new job with a different company that is willing to sponsor you for an H-1B specialty occupation visa or other work visas. Joanna Buniak / It’s great that you’re looking to make this change now, because filing fees for the H-1B and other work visas are soon to increase substantially. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), has proposed raising the fees for the L-1, H-1B and most other non-immigrant visas and green cards, as well as increasing the premium processing time from 15 calendar days to 15 business days. Under the proposal, the registration fee for the H-1B lottery would increase to $215 from just $10, and the H-1B filing fee would increase to $780 from $460. DHS, which asserts that these increases are necessary to reduce processing times and eliminate backlogs, will accept public comments on the through March 6, 2023, and I urge you to let DHS know how these changes might affect your ability to change jobs.

We flush valuable nutrients down the toilet. Wasted wants to save them

Tim De Chant

used a toilet at some point today, and you didn’t think much of it. But if you used a port-a-potty, you probably did think about it. Maybe a lot. And it probably wasn’t pleasant. “No one likes the port-a-potty,” said Brophy Tyree, co-founder and CEO of . “It’s embedded into a really antiquated operations and servicing industry and so there’s a chance to make all of that better.” But Tyree, along with co-founders Thor Retzlaff and Taylor Zehren, wants to do more than just redesign the smelly plastic boxes. The company’s first order of business is to turn the waste from port-a-potties into fertilizers for farmers. “Farmers have been applying manure and other forms of animal waste to farms for millennia,” Tyree said. “When you talk to a farmer, they completely understand the value proposition right away. You don’t need to educate them on the fact that what’s coming through our body is valuable and has nutrients, because that’s just the water that they swim in.” Human waste contains plenty of nutrients, but urine appears to be the real gold mine. Urine contains a lot of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and wastewater in cities contains enough of the nutrients to offset around 13% of global fertilizer demand, according to one . Today, human waste is used as a fertilizer in some places. King County in Washington a biosolids soil amendment to farmers and foresters, for instance, and Milwaukee sells to farmers and homeowners. They’re excellent examples of the reuse of human waste, but those products emerge at the end of a traditional sewage treatment process, which is energy intensive and vulnerable to severe storms and flooding. Wasted wants to eventually serve as a backup for traditional sewage systems or even a replacement, particularly in regions where sanitation systems are underdeveloped. But it’s starting with port-a-potties for a few reasons.

Africa predicted to experience sustained funding slowdown in 2023

Annie Njanja

the global venture funding decline in the first half of 2022 after its startups raised $3 billion, double the amount secured over a similar period the previous year. However, the VC market correction caught up with the continent in the back half of last year, when ticket sizes fell and fewer deals closed as investors tightened the purse strings. VCs now predict that the funding slowdown in Africa will be sustained in 2023 as investors continue to pull back, making it harder for new and existing startups to raise capital. “With the global economic slowdown trickling into 2023 due to inflationary pressures and tightening monetary policy, investors on the continent will maintain a judicious approach to investment and African startups will continue to find fundraising challenging,” said Bruce Nsereko-Lule, a general partner at Seedstars Africa Ventures. As a ripple effect, the operating environment for startups is expected to worsen this year, leading to a surge in layoffs, scaling down of activities, down and bridge rounds, and business shutdowns, continuing the trend that picked up at the end of 2022. Mega-rounds are expected to be scarce, too, as was the case in the last half of 2022, when no deals over $100 million were signed, according to , a database of publicly disclosed deals. Overall, six mega-rounds were closed last year (all in the first six months), half of the number of such deals closed in 2021, when VCs invested .

Kenya’s growth was strongest in Africa’s VC market; clean tech, e-commerce pulled in most of the funding

Annie Njanja

As VC activity slowed down globally last year, Kenya defied odds to record the strongest growth in funding raised in Africa. Reports show that the deal count and value to the country surpassed 2021 figures owing to increased investor interest. Data from market intelligence firm , and shows Kenya raised $1.1 billion, more than double the funding that East Africa’s biggest economy got in 2021, when . Another report by , , also shows that Kenya’s funding spiked by 33% last year, to a record $758 million. Partech placed Kenya fourth in the list of the top VC destinations after Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt, respectively. The four markets account for over 70% of the total VC funding in Africa. Briter, which included country ranking this year, and Big Deal positioned Kenya as second in VC destination after Nigeria, which took the lead after raising $1.2 billion, despite the deal number and value dropping. When compared to the previous year, the amount invested in Nigeria dipped by over 36%, according to Partech, and 20% as per Big Deal’s data. South Africa’s funding stagnated as per Partech while Big Deal data shows a 42% decline. The reports show that Kenya recorded the strongest growth in the continent, as Egypt’s VC funding grew slightly too. Overall, Africa reported an increase in invested amount last year; Partech put the figure at $6.4 billion, Briter Bridges at $5.4 billion and Big Deal at $4.8 billion. Nearly all sectors in Kenya experienced increased VC interest; however, clean tech, e-commerce, fintech and food and agriculture verticals accounted for the bulk of the activity. The clean tech sector received the greatest VC interest in Kenya, as it accounted for nearly half of the total capital raised by Kenyan private venture-backed companies — buoyed by and . Both PAY-Go scale-ups are providers of solar home systems, but M-Kopa’s platform now includes financing of a range of products and services. Other clean tech ventures that attracted venture backing include BasiGo, an EV startup trying to electrify Kenya’s public transport sector currently dominated by fossil-fuel buses. Investor interest in clean tech ventures aligns to last year’s global trend that saw more capital injected into businesses that are mitigating climate change. It is expected that the clean and climate tech verticals, and more narrowly in Africa, will continue to pull VC dollars amidst slowdown in funding. Scale-ups in the e-commerce sector like and ; B2B platforms enabling informal traders to source goods directly from manufacturers and distributors; and , an e-commerce platform that taps its network of agents to serve customers in rural areas, also pulled in investors too. The aforementioned raised big rounds that saw the vertical emerge as one of the most positively impacted by VC funding. Fintechs also to attract most funding on the continent as Africa, the world’s second-fastest payments and banking market, grows. However, in Kenya, the vertical was third in VC preference, evaluated by deal value. On the other hand, the vertical experienced the most activity in terms of deal numbers. Meanwhile, despite Kenya experiencing the enormous growth last year, the market was not spared by the effects of VC slowdown, as some businesses like Kune and WeFarm wound up, as others like , and cut their staff numbers as they adjusted to .

Google says India antitrust order poses threat to national security

Manish Singh

Google warned on Friday that if the Indian antitrust watchdog’s is allowed to progress it would result in devices getting expensive in the South Asian market and lead to proliferation of unchecked apps that will pose threats for individual and national security, escalating its concerns over the future of Android in the key overseas region. “Predatory apps that expose users to financial fraud, data theft and a number of other dangers abound on the internet, both from India and other countries. While Google holds itself accountable for the apps on Play Store and scans for malware as well compliance with local laws, the same checks may not be in place for apps sideloaded from other sources,” the company , titled “Heart of the Matter.” The Competition Commission of India has against Google, alleging the Android-maker abused the Play Store’s dominant position in the country and required Android device makers to pre-install its entire Google Mobile Suite. The Indian watchdog has ordered Google to make a series of changes to its business practices that analysts say could topple the company’s financial viability in the market. Google has in Indian courts. “Google has partnered deeply with India in the last several years of its exciting digital transformation. However, at a time when only half of India’s population is connected, the directions in the CCI’s order strikes a blow at the ecosystem-wide efforts to accelerate digital adoption in the country,” the company wrote in the blog post. Google also warned that if the Indian antitrust watchdog’s orders were to be followed, app developers will have to pay higher costs. “In a forked Android environment, small developers will be forced to prioritize which of the various incompatible Android ‘forks’ they write and maintain apps for, as their costs will increase with each additional version they support,” the company wrote. “They will no longer have the level playing field they have today with Android, and larger developers, who can support a wider range of incompatible forks, will be able to dominate the market based on their scale, rather than the quality of their product.” India is Google’s largest market by users. Google’s mobile operating system powers 97% of the country’s 600 million smartphones, according to research firm Counterpoint. Google in 2020   over the coming years. It has already financed up to $5.5 billion in the   and  .

Why international DFIs are looking to African startups to scale impact investing efforts

Annie Njanja

dries up across the world, development finance institutions (DFIs) are looking to African startups to deploy their dry powder. British International Investment (BII), a DFI from the U.K., told TechCrunch recently that it will deploy $500 million into startups by the end of 2026, and half of that amount has been earmarked for African tech companies. In addition to backing VC funds in the region, the organization aims to make more direct equity investments in startups, adding to the four African companies it invested in last year. Formerly known as the Commonwealth Development Corporation, the BII is not alone: The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Netherlands’ Dutch Entrepreneurial Bank (FMO) have each invested in more than 10 startups over the last four years. The to back early-stage startups in Africa, Central Asia, Middle East and Pakistan. Often attached to countries that had colonized big parts of the continent and still have financial, social and historical ties to countries in the region, these funding initiatives are complementing and offsetting slowing investment from VC funds and other institutional investors. “It’s a paradigm shift, where ‘development finance’ looks at private enterprise as a vehicle of socio-economic development,” said Dario Giuliani, founder and director of research firm Briter Bridges. BII’s decision follows plans to  and invest . The organization has invested in eight African startups since 2020. But what’s driving these organizations to invest in Africa despite investors across the world preferring to invest only in safer bets? It seems they’re attracted to tech that enables wider socio-economic development because it offers a scalable and efficient way to make an economic impact. Usually deploying capital from national or international development funds, DFIs back development and private-sector projects in less industrialized economies to promote job creation and sustainable economic growth. Keen to align with those missions, these organizations seek to back tech startups that can make an impact — for example, tech that grants and increases marginalized populations’ access to financial services, food and energy.

Microsoft joined the layoff parade. Did it really have to?

Ron Miller

this week that it was , it wasn’t exactly a shock. Other big companies, including , and have already been down that road, and the  before on Wednesday. joined in today, announcing another 12,000 job cuts. Like these other companies, Microsoft is facing a shifting economic landscape and making adjustments to a workforce that was pumped up after the early days of the pandemic. Each of these companies added tens of thousands of employees to the payroll, and with the current economic uncertainty, they decided to dial it back (or at least use it as an excuse to cut costs). Consider that Microsoft had over 220,000 employees at the end of last year, . That’s up from 163,000 in 2020 and 181,000 in 2021, meaning the company added more than 57,000 employees in a two-year period before cutting 10,000 this week. It’s not clear where the cuts are coming from, and there has been no official word from Microsoft. Bloomberg reported that  while also reporting that took a hit after losing a . Microsoft wouldn’t comment when asked by TechCrunch where the cuts were taking place. Microsoft hasn’t exactly been doing poorly, earning over $200 billion last year to pay for gaming company Activision Blizzard almost exactly a year ago. Today, it has a market cap of over $1.7 trillion — that’s with a T. In a with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reporting the layoffs, the company indicated that it will in costs related to the layoffs in the second quarter. All of this is to say that this layoff represents a drop in the bucket for Microsoft financially, but it has a very real impact on the 10,000 people who were told they would be let go this week. If it was to impress investors, so far it’s not working — its stock ticked down in the days following the announcement before rebounding Friday. With all of those financial resources, the question is . What does Microsoft gain by cutting its workforce 5%? We spoke to a few analysts to try to figure it out. First, let’s take a quick look at Microsoft’s financials. Companies usually cut costs because the business no longer supports the workforce, but Microsoft has had a pretty decent year, as the chart below shows:

Crypto job hunters should build personal brands and be ‘obsessed with web3’

Jacquelyn Melinek

Welcome back to This month was filled with announcements from major crypto firms that were laying off employees. Of course, this “trend” is not limited to this industry — there’s a broader resizing of tech workforces: Salesforce, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft have all in recent weeks. So, this week I wrote two deep-dive articles in an attempt to help those who were laid off (perhaps you, dear reader) stand out and find a new job in this unforgiving market. We spoke to a number of recruiters, talent heads and founders — who told us the qualities they’re looking for in candidates and what the interview-to-hire process is like. The first piece of advice? “Be obsessed with web3,” Nate Holiday, co-founder, president and CEO at Space and Time, shared with TechCrunch. “If you don’t eat, sleep and breathe web3, this is probably not the industry for you.” Candidates can also stand out by building a personal portfolio with open source projects, contributing to DAOs, taking on community ambassador roles or piping up in Discord conversations, Aleksi Loytynoja, co-founder and CEO of “proof-of-talent” hiring platform Kleoverse, said to TechCrunch. Publishing work publicly and building a social media presence helps candidates find new opportunities, he added. More details below. As mentioned above, layoffs continue to spread across the crypto job market amid macroeconomic volatility and bearish market sentiments, but there are still plenty of startups looking to hire fresh talent. “Now is the perfect time to hone your skills and build products to be ready for it,” Loytynoja said. “For laid-off individuals in particular, the beauty of web3 is that there are a lot of working and contribution opportunities available that help you build expertise and get exposure within the organizations you want to join.” As big players drop talent back into the pool, this is a good opportunity for startups to snatch them up, according to recruiters. Startups are looking for candidates who demonstrate high ownership, initiative, autonomy and accountability, Zack Skelly, head of talent at crypto-focused investment firm Dragonfly, said to TechCrunch. “A ‘no task too big or too small’ mentality.” But for people looking to pivot into crypto, it’s not an easy time, Dan Eskow, founder of web3 talent agency Up Top, said to TechCrunch. “I won’t sugarcoat it…those who really want to pursue it, though, should build out their personal brands,” Eskow added. Although the crypto gaming industry remains below its 2021 peaks, it still pulled in substantial venture funding last year. But looking to the future, the subsector may look outside of tokenomics to grow and sustain itself for the long haul. “We are less interested in exploitative primary sales or cash grabs but we’re more interested in how people build long-term economies and games where a percentage of players are trading in the economy every day,” Robbie Ferguson, co-founder and president at Immutable, said to TechCrunch. Injective, a layer-1 blockchain focused on building financial applications, has launched a $150 million fund ecosystem initiative, the platform’s CEO and co-founder, Eric Chen, told TechCrunch. Its new ecosystem fund is backed by previous investors like Pantera and Jump as well as other web3 players, including Kraken Ventures, KuCoin Ventures, Delphi Labs, Flow Traders, Gate Labs and IDG Capital. The $150 million was pooled capital from the consortium and will be deployed over “a few years,” Chen said. Genesis Global Trading, a subsidiary of the crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group (DCG), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) court. Genesis Global Holdco and two of its lending business subsidiaries, Genesis Global Capital and Genesis Asia Pacific, filed voluntary petitions under the bankruptcy code for SDNY, its press release stated. “Genesis’s other subsidiaries involved in the derivatives and spot trading and custody businesses and Genesis Global Trading are not included in the filing and continue client trading operations,” it added. For this week’s , Jacquelyn talked with Mo Shaikh, co-founder and CEO of the layer-1 blockchain Aptos. Shaikh is a three-time founder with over a decade of experience in financial services as well as blockchain technology and crypto. He also worked on blockchain strategic partnerships for Novi (Facebook’s wallet) and was the strategy director at ConsenSys. Last year was huge for Aptos — as the blockchain launched publicly and raised about $400 million in funding, amid a bear market. The new layer-1 got backing from major investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Circle Ventures and the now-defunct FTX Ventures, to name a few. And even though the market is down, its token, APT, has skyrocketed over 400% year-to-date, according to CoinMarketCap . Looking forward, Aptos plans to focus on making 2023 its year of “intention,” Shaikh said. We also discussed: Subscribe to on or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the latest episodes, and please leave us a review if you like what you hear!

HBO’s ‘Succession’ Season 4 premieres on March 26

Lauren Forristal

Today, HBO announced that the fourth season of the Emmy-winning drama series “Succession” will premiere on Sunday, March 26. It will debut at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and will stream on HBO Max. “Succession” focuses on the Roy family and their media empire, Waystar Royco. Throughout the show, Logan Roy (played by Brian Cox), father and business mogul, has been making plans for when he eventually resigns as CEO. In season three of “Succession,” the Roy siblings, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Siobhan (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Connor (Alan Ruck), attempt a coup to stop the sale of their father’s company. As we enter the fourth season, tech visionary Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) is about to buy Waystar, much to the children’s dismay. In the , viewers catch a glimpse at how they deal with the news — which isn’t great. Season 4 will also feature new cast members, such as Annabeth Gish, Adam Godley, Eili Harboe and Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson.

Injective launches $150M ecosystem fund to accelerate interoperable infra and DeFi adoption

Jacquelyn Melinek

, a layer-1 blockchain focused on building financial applications, has launched a $150 million fund ecosystem initiative, the platform’s CEO and co-founder, Eric Chen, told TechCrunch. “We’ve seen a lot of ecosystem funds in the past do various things, but there isn’t really an established ecosystem fund for Injective and Cosmos as a whole,” Chen said. “We call it a venture consortium because they can get investments from there or direct institutions.” Injective was incubated by in 2018 and later backed by , Pantera Capital and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban. In the third quarter of 2022, it raised an institutional funding round from Brevan Howard and Jump. Its works with decentralized applications (dApps) such as Coinbase, Figment, Pyth and Wormhole, to name a few. Its new ecosystem fund is backed by previous investors like Pantera and Jump as well as other web3 players, including Kraken Ventures, KuCoin Ventures, Delphi Labs, Flow Traders, Gate Labs and IDG Capital. The $150 million was pooled capital from the consortium and will be deployed over “a few years,” Chen said. The group aims to support projects building on Injective or Cosmos blockchains in the interoperability, DeFi, trading, proof-of-stake infrastructure and scalability solutions sectors, it said. “It will start backing early-stage projects then slowly move from seed to later stages as the ecosystem grows as a whole,” Chen added. “With the launch of this consortium, we are going to kick off this ecosystem fund with a hackathon to bring in investors and backers. This will basically introduce a lot more opportunities for consortium members as well.” The Injective Global Virtual Hackathon will start in March for a four-week online event with $1 million in prizes, grants and investments. “It’s a pivotal time to stand up and back people building,” Chen said. “For Injective’s case, there’s a huge surge in builders coming from other layer-1 networks, but more importantly [centralized finance] builders like exchanges and trading firms that are committed to creating something truly decentralized.” In the current market, there’s a lot of quality projects looking for backing but having more difficulty reaching investors, Chen noted. “They’re still deploying and this consortium is a strong signal that they’ll be backing new projects and their funds are actively participating in the ecosystem.”

QuickNode raises $60M at $800M valuation to become the ‘AWS or Azure of blockchain’

Jacquelyn Melinek

QuickNode, a blockchain deployment platform, has raised $60 million in a Series B round for an $800 million valuation, the company’s CEO and co-founder, Alex Nabutovsky, told TechCrunch. The round was led by 10T Holdings, with participation from Tiger Global, Seven Seven Six Ventures and QED Investors, among others. This fundraise comes about 15 months after the company’s $35 million Series A round. In total, the firm has raised more than $105 million, Nabutovsky said. “When we raised a $35 million round, we were 20 people. Now we’re over 120 people,” Nabutovsky said. “We’re going to continue expanding the team. The amount of enterprise coming in is incredible, so we want to continue building these abstraction layers, grow our technology and expand to new regions.” While the capital will focus on expansion, the company also wants to use the funding for growing blockchain adoption, Nabutovsky said. “If we’re going to have mass blockchain adoption like we saw in the past year, you need to provide enterprise-grade infrastructure” he said. QuickNode was founded in 2017 and aimed to bring Web 2.0 infrastructure to web3, but snowballed over time, Nabutovsky said. The third and fourth quarters of 2022 were “record quarters for revenue,” as it rose by over 300% thanks to Web 2.0 giants and web3-native companies piling into the space, he added. Its customer base includes major Web2.0 companies like and as well as web3 platforms like , OpenSea, Chainlink, 1inch Network, Dune Analytics and . The platform handles over 200 billion API requests monthly, and is “always available” with 99.99% uptime, according to Nabutovsky. “A lot of our customers came here because we are able to guarantee 99.99% reliability, latency and speed,” he said. It also works with 16 blockchains, including Bitcoin, , , Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche and Abritrum, according to its . “We plan to add another four to five chains at minimum by the end of this year,” Nabutovsky said. “We have over 50,000 developers on the platform constantly requesting new things. But for us, the roadmap is always the addition of protocols and working with these foundations. It’s not just having a protocol, but a relationship to build with the foundations to be an extension of their ecosystems so they and their developers can have a better experience,” he said. The long-term goal for QuickNode is “simple,” Nabutovsky said. “We want to get to the point where any company that wants to build or interact with blockchain [technology] will use us,” Nabutovsky added. “We would like to be the AWS or Azure of blockchain. The industry is very ripe for that and the production happening is staggering.”

Coinbase and others back ex-FTX US president’s crypto trading infra startup Architect

Jacquelyn Melinek

It has been nearly four months since Brett Harrison as president of FTX US, the American division of the . Now, he has raised $5 million for his own startup, , which aims to make trading infrastructure for large crypto investors. “It’s a software company aiming to build institutional-grade infrastructure to connect various crypto venues across decentralized and centralized exchanges,” Harrison told TechCrunch. “We’re trying to make it easy to interface with either qualified custodians or self-custody. We’re building this single interoperability platform across crypto services with a focus on trading.” The startup has raised capital in a pre-product financing round from Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, SV Angel, SALT Fund, P2P, Third King Venture Capital and Motivate Venture Capital. Angel investors Shari Glazer, the CEO of Kalos Labs, and former White House communications director and founder of Skybridge, are also among its investors. Prior to FTX, Harrison worked at traditional financial institutions like Citadel Securities and Jane Street. He also spent about 11 years developing algorithmic trading software for global equities and derivatives markets. “Talking with many past clients of FTX and thinking about my own background, one of the biggest barriers of entry to people for trading is building the infrastructure to access all these different venues,” Harrison said. “There’s a huge technological learning curve to doing so.” Architect aims to appeal to anyone from large traders and hedge funds to trading firms, asset managers, VCs or “anyone who has to build infrastructure for crypto on more than one exchange,” Harrison said. A startup like this could meet current market demand from big players for more unified and accessible platforms to connect their crypto services, instead of having a handful of tabs and servers open. The startup is launching pre-product, so its flagship service will have to be seamless and provide an easier user experience to trump other crypto services out there. The capital will be used for hiring and product development. Architect will first develop “adaptable infrastructure products” so institutions can trade across both centralized and decentralized crypto markets. The company plans to launch its service in the second quarter of this year. “I thought that we could make a difference in increasing the security and maturity of the space by helping traders adapt with the evolution of crypto market structure without having to build that software themselves,” Harrison said. “So traders and trading firms can focus on monetization, alpha and building core components.”

Renaissance Fusion raises $16.4 million to build nuclear fusion technology in Europe

Romain Dillet

Meet , a Grenoble-based startup that has been working on nuclear fusion for the past couple of years. The company recently raised $16.4 million (€15 million) in funding in a seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital. Several European investors also participated in the round, such as HCVC, Positron Ventures and Norrsken VC. Unruly Capital led the company’s pre-seed round. “We are proud to support Francesco Volpe and his team in the emergence and industrialization in France and in Europe of a disruptive solution in energy production and distribution technologies. Grenoble is a highly strategic location that allows them to benefit from a favorable environment for the development of nuclear energy, a strong ecosystem such as the CEA and an unrivaled pool of talent,” Alexis Houssou, founder and managing partner at HCVC, said in a statement. Unlike most nuclear fusion experiments that are based on tokamaks, Renaissance Fusion is working on a . The company is well aware that there is a long and windy road ahead as it expects to be able to ship a small nuclear fusion reactor with a 1 GW capacity in the 2030s. It wouldn’t operate power plants directly. Instead, the company would sell its reactors to plant constructors and operators. “We have a technology that is pretty unique,” Renaissance Fusion founder Francesco Volpe told me. Instead of designing complicated three-dimensional coils to generate a magnetic field, Renaissance Fusion greatly simplifies this process by drawing tracks on a cylinder. After some calculation based on the magnetic field that you want to generate, the team can determine the shape of the coils that you need. The cylinder rotates around an axis while a device moves left and right to engrave tracks with a laser on the surface of the cylinder. Renaissance Fusion Cylinder blocks are then combined together to form a reactor. This modularity should help when it comes to shipment and logistics. As for the neutrons emitted by the nuclear reaction inside the cylinder, Renaissance Fusion wants to use liquid Lithium to create thick walls that separate plasma from the outside world. “We inject a layer of liquid metal. It flows around the inside of the cylinder and then it’s extracted at the bottom. It’s thick enough to absorb the majority of the neutrons,” Volpe said. This liquid metal is also used to extract heat from the stellarator, which can be used to create steam, which can be used to propel turbines, which can be used generate electricity. Renaissance Fusion According to the startup’s founder, Renaissance Fusion is quite innovative with its use of liquid metal. “We are the only one in commercial magnetic fusion where the liquid lithium faces the plasma,” Volpe said. Right now, the company can create liquid Lithium-based walls that are 1-centimeter thick. It will require a lot of iterations before it can be used in nuclear fusion as Renaissance Fusion estimates that it would require a thickness of 30 to 40 centimeters. The company is already thinking about commercial applications that could be released before the 2030s. For instance, Volpe believes that Renaissance Fusion’s coil patterning technology could be used for MRI and energy storage: “whenever you need a strong magnetic field, a large volume and high precision,” he said. With today’s funding round, Renaissance Fusion plans to triple the size of its team to 60 people by the end of 2023. In many ways, this is still the early days of Renaissance Fusion. So let’s see how it pans out in the coming years.

This startup hopes to take on Canva, raising an $11.6M Series A for its design platform

Mike Butcher

Despite Canva being worth in the region of $26 billion, it appears startups feel there is still plenty to be mined from this “easy-to-use design platform” arena. Admittedly, Professional Adobe tools remain fiddly for most people. Perhaps that’s why Berlin-based startup has now raised a €10.8 million ($11.6 million) Series A for its design platform that it claims allows people to “easily turn ideas into graphic products.” The latest funding round was led by . Also participating was Europe’s Speedinvest and a number of angel investors, including Intercom co-founder Des Traynor, former Bebo CEO Shaan Puri and product leaders from Calm, Amazon and Instagram. Left Lane Capital is a New York-based VC best known for investing in GoStudent, Wayflyer and Masterworks, among others. Co-founded by Nicolas Heymann and Tobias Saul, Kittl offers browser-based graphic design tools to create logos, labels, postcards and more. Kittl screenshot Over email, Heymann, co-founder and CEO told me: With Kittl we allow users to create professional-grade designs fast and easily by removing the barrier of a tough learning curve. Our features are designed to make complex design processes simple and accessible with a few clicks. Our competitors either focus on basic tools that only allow a small range of creative freedom, or they take a lot of training and practice to get good at. Kittl started out as Heritage Type, founded by Heymann and Saul in 2020, but went on to rebrand after raising a €1.6 million seed round in October 2021. Notably, given that AI is probably going to replace a lot of these tools fairly soon, Heymann says they plan to “double down on existing AI and machine learning efforts.” “Kittl’s easy-to-use platform democratizes the creation of professional-grade graphic design,” said Magnus Karnehm, principal at Left Lane Capital, in a statement. “Kittl has grown its user base and user engagement incredibly fast, and this is entirely thanks to their laser focus on creating a platform that spans ideation, creation and ultimately monetization of graphic design.”

Supernormal raises $10M to automatically transcribe and summarize meetings

Kyle Wiggers

Generative AI is the tech industry’s buzzword of the moment. It’s no wonder — the VC firm Sequoia not long ago that generative AI, which comprises AI that can generate text, art and more from prompts, could yield trillions of dollars in economic value over the long run. Is that simply the optimistic musing of a firm heavily invested in the space? Perhaps. On the other hand, generative AI has proven to be a . hopes to demonstrate the value of generative AI with its tech, which creates meeting notes by integrating with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other conferencing platforms. There’s lots of vendors in the meeting notes transcription space, which exploded during the pandemic as work-from-home setups became the norm. But Supernormal differentiates itself by extracting key details from meetings such as actions and decisions, relying on OpenAI’s text-processing AI to do the summarization work. It’s a strong sales pitch. Supernormal today announced that it raised $10 million in a funding round led by Balderton with participation from Acequia Capital and byFounders VC. The new cash brings the company’s total raised to around $12.9 million, which co-founder and CEO Colin Treseler says is being put toward product R&D and hiring. “Currently, Supernormal has a small team of 5, which it expects to grow to 25 by the end of 2023 — mostly across engineering, marketing and [customer] success,” Treseler told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The new funding will be used to further the mission of delivering end-to-end workflow solutions based on foundational meeting data and develop next-generation tools that deliver actions and insights from conversations across the organization.” Supernormal automatically transcribes and summarizes meetings. Supernormal Treseler co-founded Supernormal with Fabian Perez, who he met while working at a Balderton-funded company 13 years ago. (Treseler has also held product manager roles at Meta and was the chief of staff in Klarna’s risk management department, while Perez was the director of design at GitHub.) In 2020, the two spent two weeks brainstorming what to build next. After long sessions, they realized that they didn’t have any notes from the conversations, and that well-documented discussions were going to be critical to their success. “At an organization level, our meetings are a significant part of our work product that, until now, were ephemeral or too unwieldy to consume — who rewatches an hour-long meeting when the key notes are what are important?,” Treseler said. “We’ve heard in particular that for product managers, team leads and client-facing teams that this product is particularly transformative as it helps them keep track of key updates and milestones with ease.” To that end, Supernormal’s platform, powered by OpenAI’s model, writes meeting and call notes across templated categories like “presentation,” “customer discovery call” and “interview.” Supernormal extracts details like customer objectives and goals, Treseler explains, and after a meeting attempts to automate action items like follow-up emails, scheduling and making introductions. Supernormal is self-learning — as users edit their notes, they’re improving the quality of notes that they get in their next call. But they can also delete any stored data if they choose for privacy reasons. Supernormal “As companies contract, team members are going to be under pressure to continually hit deadlines and showcase value. A tool like Supernormal supports them at every stage of their job and takes that administrative pressure off them,” Treseler said. “It also takes the pressure off employees to be overly communicative and transparent, with Supernormal easily enabling this — helping to boost productivity and keep everyone connected regardless of location and time zones.” It’s here I should note that Supernormal’s capabilities aren’t  novel, no pun intended. , a competitor, recently rolled out AI-generated meeting summaries. For transcribing and highlighting key moments in meetings, there’s also , , and . But Treseler claims Supernormal is more affordable than most solutions on the market — less than $1 per meeting, on average — and already has a growing paying customer base; 50,000 users across more than 250 organizations including Netflix, Airbnb and Snapchat are actively using the platform, he says. The trick for Supernormal will be achieving profitability given the high cost of relying on the OpenAI API. The most comprehensive GPT-3 plan around $0.02 per ~750 words, which sounds like a lot — until you a 30-minute meeting transcript ranges between 3,000 and 6,000 words. Another, more existential business challenge is the desire among remote workers to move away from frequent meetings. In a July 2022 from RedRex, workers said they spent an average of 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings; 71% believed their work time was often wasted due to unnecessary or canceled meetings. Moreover, over half of the respondents said that they actively wanted to reduce how much time they spent in virtual meetings. Treseler admitted as much — and was loathe to share Supernormal’s revenue numbers. But he believes the growth is sustainable. “As more companies have gone hybrid or fully remote, Supernormal is becoming an essential tool for distributed teams,” Treseler continued. “We’ve seen explosive growth as teams try to figure out the hybrid or distributed model. As soon as one team member is distributed, a meeting documentation tool is needed.”

2022 European edtech report: Smaller rounds and fewer deals, but more angel activity

Rhys Spence

days of the pandemic, money was no object in many developed markets. Governments, public sector organizations and many private companies moved heaven and earth to ensure public safety and adequate supply of core services. Quite clearly, spending reached unsustainable levels. But 2022 was the year when this “spending” slowed and was instead more widely rebranded and accepted as actually being “borrowing.” This realization justified the beginning of deep cuts in public spending compared to before and during the pandemic. Despite these cuts, which have been always slower to implement than communicate, inflation has been rampant across Europe and beyond, partially due to supply chain issues linked to the situation in Ukraine. Wages failing to rise in line with inflation as well as cuts to public services have led to a cost-of-living crisis in many markets. These conditions are not conducive to inducing confidence for investors or founders. Edtech, and education more broadly, usually one of the more resistant sectors during times of economic crisis, has not been immune to the downturn. Against this background, we formed our annual review of . For the first time since 2014, venture capital funding to European edtech startups saw a decline year-over-year, with startups raking in $1.8 billion in 2022 compared to $2.5 billion a year earlier. The global ecosystem has been on an upward trajectory, albeit less consistently, but the declines in new investment in 2022 were steep: globally funding declined to $9.1 billion last year from $20.1 billion in 2021. This is in line with macro trends in the public markets as well as other tech sectors (both trends were highlighted in our ). Perceived declines in funding are being felt more acutely, given that 2021 was a boom year. Optimism that the pandemic was coming to an end and that the world was reopening extended to ambitious founders and early teams. This momentum carried through to the first half of 2022 for European edtech. Indeed, as , European edtech funding was up 40% in the first six months of last year compared to a year earlier. But as we now know, that momentum faltered in the second half of 2022. Optimism ebbed away, and European edtech startups raised only about $400 million in the latter six months compared to $1.4 billion in the other half of the year. That said, the sector proved more resilient in Europe than in other major regions. It’s worth pointing out that the region saw more edtech deals happening in the second half than in the first half of 2022, but they were simply smaller and more early-stage rounds at lower valuations. Europe fared well compared to the rest of the world, though: Edtech VC funding only declined 28% in Europe, compared to a 64% fall in the U.S., a 46% contraction in India, and a 32% decline in the rest of the world. Funding declined across markets but Europe saw a modest decline. Brighteye Ventures In Europe, we see the UK retaining the top spot in funding and deal activity. Edtech companies in the UK secured the most funding — $583 million across 81 deals, more than $200 million ahead of the next market, Germany, where startups raised $363 million across 34 deals. Edtech funding in Europe by market. Brighteye Ventures Italy was one of only few European markets to see increased funding and deal number. Italy’s tech ecosystem has been growing gradually as momentum has built relatively consistently since 2010. It’s also promising to see the capital secured being spread across a range of sectors, with some of the largest rounds raised by companies in fintech, healthtech and real estate. As for edtech, the market has been on a steep upwards trend since 2020. Though edtech in Italy had a record year in 2019, largely driven by the large round raised by Talent Garden, it’s quite promising to see the upward trend in 2022 being driven by smaller, early-stage rounds of less than $15 million.

Angry Miao’s AM 65 Less is both more and less keyboard than you’ll ever need

Frederic Lardinois

Nobody is going to accuse of making boring keyboards (or ). The company’s previous releases, the , and , are as overengineered as they are unique. When the company first started teasing its new 60% board, it almost looked too conventional to be an Angry Miao product, but keeping with tradition, there’s a twist here. See, the AM 65 Less: AM Compact Touch is a wired and Bluetooth-enabled 60% keyboard with an — which means there are no function keys, no numpad and, as is standard for this layout, no arrow keys. Typically, keyboard enthusiasts then put those arrow keys on a separate layer, accessed through a key combo. As you can imagine, that can be a bit of a hassle, especially if you write a lot. But having their hearts set on this layout, the Angry Miao designers decided that instead of keyboard shortcuts, they could put a small touch panel on the front of the case. The argument here is that this offers the advantages of a small 60% keyboard and symmetric HHKB layout, while still featuring arrow key functions. Did I mention Angry Miao really likes to overengineer its products? TechCrunch Originally, the company had called the board the “AM 65 Less,” but that caused a bit of confusion in the community, given that it’s not really a 65% keyboard either. The official name is now the AM 65 Less: Am Compact Touch. Angry Miao sent me a review unit in the Famicon-inspired “8-Bit” colorway last month (there are seven variants in total) and I’ve been using it almost exclusively ever since. Despite the touch panel, this is the company’s most conventional keyboard yet. It features a hotswap PCB, so you can easily change the switches if you want to, south-facing RGB lighting, and with the exception of the high front, it looks pretty normal for a small keyboard. TechCrunch Let’s talk about the touch panel first, since it’s surely the most controversial aspect of the board. It works just as described and it does what it does well, but arrow keys remain infinitely more convenient. The promise here is that you won’t have to move your wrists as much because your thumbs can handle moving the cursor, since it’s already aligned with the touchpad. In reality, you’re likely going to move your hands more, because you’ll use your mouse more. For fixing the kinds of typos you catch while writing a word, it’s easy enough to go back a few letters. For anything more, which you can do by keeping your finger on the touchpad, it becomes a bit of a guessing game whether you’ll be able to time things right to stop the cursor where you need to. I ended up putting the cursor keys on a layer, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the touchpad, of course. Your mileage may vary. The fact that the touchpad is at the front of the board also means you can’t really use a wrist wrest, something that’s exasperated by the fact that the board sits at a non-changeable 10-degree angle. I ended up putting a wrist rest a few inches away from the board, leaving enough space to still use the touchpad, though I never found the high angle to be a problem. The company recommends a split wrist wrest for users who want to use one. Like all Angry Miao products, this one is unapologetically not for everyone. The fact that it feels and sounds fantastic makes up for its quirks, but I can’t help but wonder what an Angry Miao 65% board with arrow keys would be like. One of Angry Miao’s latest innovations is its adjustable leaf spring that lets you change the flex of the PCT and hence the typing experience from very hard to soft. Currently, most other keyboards use a gasket design and very flexible PCBs to allow for a softer typing experience. If done right, that usually works, but in many of the keyboards I’ve recently tested, it didn’t seem to make all that much of a difference. Here, you can really feel the difference between the various settings (though it does take a bit of work to open up the board and make those changes to the springs). In addition to the different springs, the board also comes with all of the necessary tools to change them out, as well as a very nice screwdriver, an additional bottom foam mat, cleaning cloth, replacement cables and screws. There is no carrying case. Instead, Angry Miao opted for a soft carrying pouch. The build quality here is impeccable. The company says the CNC milling of the aluminum case alone takes almost six hours, with the case then being sandblasted and painted afterward (with all of the colorways using two colors: one for the part of the case up to the top of the first row of keys and another for the rest). Mechanical keyboard fans are nothing if not persnickety, but I think they are going to have a hard time finding fault with the execution here, be it the rounded corners, the painting or even the finishing on the inside of the board. You open the board from the top, which is a bit unusual, but it also makes it pretty easy to take it apart. Once inside, there are a few more connectors than you are probably used to — in part because of the battery and Bluetooth module. It’s also easy to see why the board sounds good. Not only is there plenty of foam but also a nice copper weight (the whole keyboard weighs in at about 3.3 pounds). Add the battery and the result is a board with very little room to sound hollow. There is also no rattle from the screw-in stabilizers. If you own one of Angry Miao’s charging mats, you’ll be able to wirelessly charge the AM 65 Less with that, too. The switches that come with the bundle version are Angry Miao’s Icy Silver switches. These are premium transparent linear switches, manufactured by TTC, with dual-stage springs and an initial force of 45 grams. There’s very little stem wobble here and they are very smooth, though one thing worth noting is that as I took off the keycaps, the switches often came out of the PCB with them. That’s not been a problem in daily usage, but worth mentioning nonetheless. The result of all of this is a keyboard that is a joy to type on. Every key press sounds like two pool balls hitting each other, which is what I personally look for. Angry Miao Like all Angry Miao products, the 65 Less doesn’t come cheap, though while high, the price isn’t completely outrageous in the world of higher-end mechanical keyboards. The standard base kit, without switches and keycaps will retail for $398; the bundle with switches and keycaps that match the variant you choose will cost $498. Given that the likes of Keychron barely charge $20 more to go from a barebones kit to a fully assembled one, that’s quite a difference, but a lot of these are custom designs and the company sells its switches for about $1 each. We’re also talking about some thick, high-quality keycaps — at least on the 8-bit version I tested. For this version, the company is using the Cherry-profile JTK Classic FC keycaps, inspired by the Nintendo Famicom of the 80s, which, best I can tell, were first available in 2020 and now available in stock at a number of vendors. These are triple-shot ABS keycaps with Latin and hiragana legends that feature a mix of the original base kit and its novelties. Other variants feature keycaps the company created in collaboration with the likes of and others. Angry Miao While I haven’t tested these, there are also two special editions. For $450 for the base kit and $550 for the bundle, the Laser kit features LED light elements on the front left and right (inspired by Tesla’s Cybertruck, the company says). The Mech Love version, at $515 and $615, features in the open spaces next to the first row and personalizable engravings on the back. It looks like the company may later make these additional LED modules available as add-ons, too. Whether these boards are worth that is going to be in the eye of the beholder. The fact that Angry Miao is launching all of these variations must mean that the company believes it’ll see a fair number of orders. It’s definitely the company’s most approachable product yet and while the prices may seem eye watering, they are within the ballgame for higher-end custom keyboards, where they keycaps themselves can often cost $150 or more. Like with so many “hobbies,” at some point, you are paying a lot more for incremental improvements. Whether you want to own a keyboard that costs as much as a laptop is something you have to decide for yourself. It’s definitely the closest we’ve seen Angry Miao come to building a straight-up everyday keyboard. The pre-launch for all of these variants will go . TechCrunch : HyperX is launching its first artisan keycap today, . The 3D-printed artisan from the gaming brand is available today (starting at 9 a.m. EST) and tomorrow and priced at $19.99. Apparently, this is the first in a series of time-limited designs the company plans to drop every month.

Proptech in Review: Investors predict slower growth in 2023

Karan Bhasin

a home has been part of human life for as long as civilization itself. But in the past few decades, the lens through which we view real estate and property development has slowly blurred. It’s not a huge stretch to say that today, as tech increasingly permeates property development and housing, few except those operating in the sector can truly pinpoint what’s happening in the fast-developing world of proptech. So in order to pull back that veil, toward the end of 2022, we decided to take an in-depth look into the trends and tech in property development and construction. We spoke to a diverse array of investors about and the move toward . But since we can’t get a full picture of the proptech space without delving into the tech driving so much of the change, we interviewed , managing director at , and , managing director at . They spoke extensively about the latest tech in property and housing development, where the next disruption is likely to happen, and other trends. We did not coin this term, but we like to use “built world” or “built environment” to capture both categories. Traditionally, we’ve referred to construction tech as solutions that touch things as they are being built (i.e., jobsite, field-level technology targeting AEC as an end customer) and proptech as solutions that touch things after they are already built (i.e., tenant engagement for office buildings, property management for rental properties). They overlap when there is something of value that applies to the entire lifecycle — construction data around plumbing that can be used for facility management or outfitting a unit as a “smart home” during the construction phase. I think of construction tech as a subset or segment of proptech. In my definition, proptech is any technology that touches the full lifecycle of a physical structure, including land acquisition, construction planning, construction execution, financing, leasing, property management, insurance and repair. Construction tech would fall into the buckets of planning and execution in the examples I just gave and could also touch financing (for things like construction loans) and repair. The sector has been hurt in 2022, in some ways disproportionally more than others, by the broader tech market reset. Several proptech companies were valued at over $1 billion in private financings or via SPAC, and virtually none of them have maintained a valuation above $1 billion today. I think part of what made it worse is the double whammy of general inflated multiples in tech/software, coupled with the fact that many proptech companies have a physical component that shouldn’t have allowed them to be valued like a software company to begin with. I think investors and companies in 2023 will exercise much more discipline and likely won’t raise too much capital until they have really found a product and sales motion that works. As a growth-stage investor, we typically don’t get involved until we see significant traction anyway, and if they can show momentum and traction in this environment, we are more than happy to lean in in a big way. I think proptech in 2023 will certainly be challenged, mainly for two reasons.

GitHub says it now has 100M active users

Paul Sawers

Code-hosting platform GitHub has that 100 million developers are now using the platform. The figure represents a substantial hike on the , the 28 million it claimed when five years ago and the 90 million-plus it . GitHub has come a long way since its launch , and now serves as the default hosting service for millions of open source and proprietary software projects, allowing developers to collaborate around shared codebases from disparate locations. For Microsoft, GitHub serves to help ingratiate it with software development sphere, having initially treated open source software , while it’s also using GitHub and its associated data — — to develop a new . But perhaps more importantly for Microsoft, in the near-term at least, is that the now contribute around . During a keynote back in 2019, former CEO Nat Friedman said that the company was aiming for 100 million developers . So it seems that it has hit that milestone a good two years ahead of plan.

US announces it seized Hive ransomware gang’s leak sites and decryption keys

Carly Page

The infrastructure behind Hive, one of , has been seized by law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe. Hive saw its dark web portal seized as part of a coordinated law enforcement action carried out by the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, Secret Service and several European government agencies, just months after the federal government’s cybersecurity unit CISA about Hive’s ongoing extortion efforts. “This hidden site has been seized. The Federal Bureau of Investigation seized this site as part of a coordinated law enforcement action taken against Hive Ransomware,” a seizure notice displayed on Hive’s dark web leak site reads. “This action has been taken in coordination with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida and the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Department of Justice with substantial assistance from Europol.” The FBI Thursday that it had access to Hive’s computer network since July 2022, allowing federal agents to capture and offer Hive’s decryption keys to victims worldwide. Since its takeover, the FBI has helped at least 336 victims of the Hive ransomware, according to the affidavit, preventing more than $130 million in ransom payments, said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland during a press conference on Thursday, According to the government, the FBI also successfully disrupted a Hive ransomware attack on a Louisiana Hospital, saving the victim from a $3 million ransom payment, and another attack targeting a school based in Texas. Hive, which operates a ransomware-as-a-service model, previously targeted a wide range of industries and critical infrastructure, with a particular focus on healthcare and public health entities. The gang claimed Illinois-based Memorial Health System as its first healthcare victim in August 2021, followed by and New York-based emergency response and ambulance service provider Empress EMS. Hive also , a top power-generation company in India, in October. Garland added that the FBI has also begun dismantling Hive’s front- and back-end infrastructure in the U.S. and abroad, which included the seizure of two of Hive’s back-end servers located in Los Angeles. The FBI did not say how it identified the Hive servers, and no arrests or indictments were announced during the press conference.

Walmart readies another $2.5 billion investment in India’s e-commerce and payments

Manish Singh

Walmart is preparing to spend over $2.5 billion in India as the retailer doubles down on the opportunities it sees in India’s e-commerce and payments markets even as the firm contends with rising costs amid the market downturns. Walmart spent about $780 million earlier this month in taxes after PhonePe, in which the retailer owns a majority stake, . Walmart is also looking to invest between $200 million and $300 million in PhonePe’s , according to a source familiar with the matter. (PhonePe declined to comment.) The U.S. company, which owns majority stake in Flipkart, is now looking to spend about $1.5 billion to buy back the e-commerce firm’s shares from early backers Tiger Global and Accel Partners, Indian newspaper Economic Times . India, the world’s second largest internet market, has become a key battleground for Walmart and Amazon. Amazon has spent over $9 billion in India (including investments for AWS cloud regions in the country) over the past decade. Walmart, which missed the e-commerce race in the U.S., has coughed up over $20 billion on Flipkart and PhonePe to buy the lion’s share in India’s e-commerce and payments markets. Flipkart leads the e-commerce market in India, according to Bernstein. And PhonePe commands over 40% of all transactions on UPI, a payments network in India built by a coalition of retail banks. UPI, which processes over 7 billion transactions a month, is the most popular way Indians pay online. As Walmart makes splashy moves, its rival is taking a different approach. Amazon has spent the past few months streamlining its business in India. It has shut some of the newer bets — food delivery, wholesale distribution, and an attempt at online learning. But the company, by all accounts, appears to be continuing to invest in its core e-commerce business in India. Amazon faced a very public setback in the country last year after India’s largest retail giant Reliance outwitted the American firm into securing retailer Future Group’s assets. Amazon went public , and then entered the quiet mode. In one of the first major announcements in two years in India, Amazon earlier this week. But the company’s top country managers were absent from the event, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A network of knockoff apparel stores exposed 330,000 customer credit cards

Zack Whittaker

If you recently made a purchase from an overseas online store selling knockoff clothes and goods, there’s a chance your credit card number and personal information were exposed. Since January 6, a database containing hundreds of thousands of unencrypted credit card numbers and corresponding cardholders’ information was spilling onto the open web. At the time it was pulled offline on Tuesday, the database had about 330,000 credit card numbers, cardholder names, and full billing addresses — and rising in real-time as customers placed new orders. The data contained all the information that a criminal would need to make fraudulent transactions and purchases using a cardholder’s information. The credit card numbers belong to customers who made purchases through a network of near-identical online stores claiming to sell designer goods and apparel. But the stores had the same security problem in common: Any time a customer made a purchase, their credit card data and billing information was saved in a database, which was left exposed to the internet without a password. Anyone who knew the IP address of the database could access reams of unencrypted financial data. , a good-faith security researcher, found the exposed credit card records and asked TechCrunch for help in reporting it to its owner. Sen has a of scanning the internet looking for exposed servers and inadvertently published data, and reporting it to companies to get their systems secured. But in this case, Sen wasn’t the first person to discover the spilling data. According to a ransom note left behind on the exposed database, someone else had found the spilling data and, instead of trying to identify the owner and responsibly reporting the spill, the unnamed person instead claimed to have taken a copy of the entire database’s contents of credit card data and would return it in exchange for a small sum of cryptocurrency. A review of the data by TechCrunch shows most of the credit card numbers are owned by cardholders in the United States. Several people we contacted confirmed that their exposed credit card data was accurate. TechCrunch has identified several online stores whose customers’ information was exposed by the leaky database. Many of the stores claim to operate out of Hong Kong. Some of the stores are designed to sound similar to big-name brands, like Sprayground, but whose websites have no discernible contact information, typos and spelling mistakes, and a conspicuous lack of customer reviews. Internet records also show the websites were set up in the past few weeks. Some of these websites include: If you bought something from one of those sites in the past few weeks, you might want to consider your banking card compromised and contact your bank or card provider. It’s not clear who is responsible for this network of knockoff stores. TechCrunch contacted a person via WhatsApp whose Singapore-registered phone number was listed as the point of contact on several of the online stores. It’s not clear if the contact number listed is even involved with the stores, given one of the websites listed its location as a Chick-fil-A restaurant in Houston, Texas. Internet records showed that the database was operated by a customer of Tencent, whose cloud services were used to host the database. TechCrunch contacted Tencent about its customer’s database leaking credit card information, and the company responded quickly. The customer’s database went offline a short time later. “When we learned of the incident, we immediately contacted the customer who operates the database and it was shut down immediately. Data privacy and security are top priorities at Tencent. We will continue to work with our customers to ensure they maintain their databases in a safe and secure manner,” said Carrie Fan, global communications director at Tencent.

Mirantis acquires Shipa

Frederic Lardinois

Container management platform , which you may remember from its OpenStack days and from in 2019, today announced that it has acquired , a startup that builds tools to help developers develop, deploy and manage cloud-native applications. Shipa previously raised a $3.75 million seed round in 2020, co-led by Engineering Capital and Jump Capital. Mirantis tells me that the price of today’s acquisition was between $10 million and $30 million (in both cash and stock). Mirantis plans to integrate Shipa into its , which promises to help businesses accelerate their cloud-native application delivery. Like Shipa, Lens aims to abstract the complexities of building and running cloud-native applications on top of Kubernetes away by providing a single platform that developers and ops teams can use to develop, deploy, monitor and debug their workloads. Mirantis, it seems, was especially interested in Shipa’s capabilities around , as well as its tooling to make updates easier. The two companies are also working on integrating the two platforms, with a first integration of Lens into the planned for March. The company will also integrate Shipa into its Mirantis Kubernetes Engine. “Our goal at Shipa, from the beginning, was to give DevOps and platform engineering teams the capability to choose their own underlying tools with a focus on automation to reduce the complexity of the technology infrastructure required by cloud-native applications,” said Bruno Andrade, co-founder and CEO of Shipa. “Our technology makes deployment and management of applications and updates much easier and faster by letting developers focus on what they do best and not infrastructure.” Andrade, together with his co-founder and VP of engineering Vivek Pandey, as well as the rest of the Shipa team, will join Mirantis. Mirantis CEO and co-founder Adrian Ionel noted that “Shipa’s technology puts groundbreaking application discovery, optimization, security and management capabilities in the hands of Lens users.” It’s worth noting that Lens, which is available as an open source product (at least for the core of its capabilities), currently has an installed base of one million users, with 50% of Fortune 100 companies using it, according to Mirantis. While Mirantis isn’t exactly on an acquisition spree, it’s worth noting that the company also in July 2022, another service that helps developers deploy their cloud-native applications. “We were the first investors in Shipa’s vision of application infrastructure-as-code, and now, as shareholders in Mirantis, we can’t wait to continue our journey together,” said Shipa investor Ashmeet Sidana, founder and chief engineer of Engineering Capital. “Mirantis has a terrific track record with acquisitions and we believe Shipa is complementary to Mirantis’ vision of simplifying the Kubernetes developer experience — adding the observability and management of applications. We are looking forward to watching the combined vision come to fruition.”

TikTok expands its DM settings to let users choose who can message them

Aisha Malik

TikTok has quietly expanded its direct messaging settings to give users a choice of who they want to receive messages from. The options are now: everyone, suggested friends, mutual followers, people you’ve sent messages to or no one. Prior to this change, only people users had identified as friends or were recommended could send a DM to each other on the platform. The change was first spotted by . The company’s that if you choose the “Everyone” option, that means anyone can send you a DM. Messages from mutual friends and people you follow will appear in your inbox, and messages from people you don’t follow will appear in Message requests. You can choose to accept, delete or report these messages. If you choose the “Suggested Friends” option, this means that recommended friends, including synced Facebook friends and phone contacts, can send you a DM. The “Mutual Friends” option means that anyone who follows you and you follow back can send you a message. If you select the “No one” option, then you can’t receive direct messages from anyone. TikTok notes that you can still access your message history in your inbox, but you can’t receive new direct messages in those chats. To change your direct messaging settings, you need to tap the Profile icon at the bottom of the TikTok home screen. Next, you need to tap on the Menu button at the top and select “Settings and privacy” and then tap “Privacy.” From there, you need to select “Direct messages” and then you will be able to choose who you would like to allow to send you DMs. The change marks the latest way that TikTok is expanding social features on its platform in a bid to compete against Instagram. Last year, the company that replaced the “Discover” tab. TikTok’s decision to move away from the Discover tab indicated that it was looking to offer a new way to recommend content based on your actual friendships. Last September, called TikTok Now that encourages users to post content everyday at a specific time in exchange for viewing posts from their friends. TikTok has already proven itself as a successful entertainment platform and is now likely looking to expand its social features to get users to spend even more time on its app.

Finn brings B2B car subscriptions to US

Rebecca Bellan

, the Munich-based car subscription startup, is expanding beyond individual consumer rentals in the U.S. and into long-term business rentals. Car subscriptions offer flexibility, maintenance, roadside assistance and, in many cases, delivery of the vehicle directly to your door, and all for around the same price of a lease. For the consumer, that sounds great. For the startup, it sounds like an overhead nightmare. It makes sense that Finn would, if not exactly pivot, open up its service to fleets, which provide a potentially more stable and lucrative business than individual consumers. Finn said it had originally trialed the B2B car subscription service in Germany and found it to be successful. In the U.S., Finn’s delivery radius covers Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. The startup is working to expand to California and Florida, and potentially other states, in 2023, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. The company said it has 2,000 cars, trucks and SUVs on the ground in the U.S., as well as a number of electric vehicle models. About 30% of Finn’s global fleet is electric. Many of Finn’s business partners are keen to test out EVs as part of their fleet, a response to the regulatory changes happening across the world that incentivize companies to electrify. If Finn wants to stay in the game, it’ll have to increase its EV mix, which might require it to raise more funds. Last May, , bringing its total funding up to $908.3 million. Until then, Finn is targeting the small-to-medium sized companies with fleet sizes of 15 to 100 vehicles, which “tend to be underserved by incumbents and a good fit for Finn’s all inclusive and flexible model,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Once Finn launches its B2B business in the States, it’ll work on rolling out its Business Portal, which is where customers can acquire new vehicles, manage current vehicles and view important documents.

European smart thermostat startup Tado raises $46.9M after IPO plans falter

Paul Sawers

Smart home energy startup has raised €43 million ($46.9 million) in a round of funding led by , as the company pursues plans to become profitable in 2023. The raise comes a year after the German company (“deSPAC”) via a special purpose acquisition company ( ), plans that ultimately failed to materialize after Luxembourg-based shell company GFJ ESG Acquisition I SE . Founded in 2011, Tado is best and platform for managing home heating and cooling systems. The platform includes geofencing smarts, which controls a home’s temperature based on whether anyone’s in the house, while it also can detect and alert users about open windows. Tado: Geofencing in action.  Tado Prior to now, Tado had raised nearly $160 million in funding, with notable investors including , not to mention industrial manufacturing giant Siemens and energy firm E.On. More than a decade on since its inception, it appeared that Tado and its big-name backers were on course to achieve their big exit last year after revealing plans to land on the Frankfurt stock exchange with a €450 million ($490 million) valuation in tow. However, Tado and its SPAC partner that they were “adjusting” the enterprise value to around €400 million ($436 million) due to “current market volatility,” before the deal finally went the way of the dodo six months later. Little more was revealed about the reasons behind this, though it was reasonable to assume that with tech valuations plummeting and economic headwinds driving major across just about every sector, Tado and GFJ ESG Acquisition simply got cold feet due to the timing of it all. And so Tado has instead chosen to double down on its recent growth, which in 2022 it claims saw it pass 3 million smart thermostats sold since its beginnings. With a fresh $46.9 million in the bank, the Munich-based company said that it’s looking to scale its business in two ways — one of which involves appealing to customers looking to through combining so-called “time-of-use” energy tariffs with its smart thermostat products. Time-of-use tariffs essentially encourage users to use electricity at specific times when it’s cheaper, and Tado last year that provides power load-shifting through such tariffs “We will double down on helping our customers to reduce heating expenses,” “So far, our focus was on reducing energy demand, now with our smart energy tariffs we also help to reduce the cost of energy. With a smart energy tariff, special heat pumps are controlled in a way that they avoid running during hours of a day in which energy prices are high. Everything happens automatically in the background while always maintaining a perfect room climate.” Additionally, Tado said that it’s planning to work with real estate companies that manage rental properties, which could help Tado scale. While it’s the that have permeated the technology industry , Tado said that it has so far not had to downsize in anyway, and doesn’t expect to do so. “We currently have 200 employees at Tado, with the majority of employees based in our Munich headquarters,” However, all this leaves one lingering question. As a 12-year-old company with around $200 million in funding, some sort of exit seems a little overdue — its was intended to be its final raise before it explored a sale or public listing. So can we expect an IPO — SPAC or otherwise — in the future? “Whilst we do want to consider the public listing of Tado in the future, we have no updates in this regard, whether publicly listing ourselves, or via a SPAC,” “Our current focus is to continue our strong growth track of doubling business on a yearly basis, while turning profitable in 2023.” In addition to lead investor Trill Impact Ventures, Tado’s latest round of funding included participation from , and (Zürcher Kantonalbank).

Whalesync wants to simplify the process of syncing data between SaaS apps

Kyle Wiggers

There’s no doubt that no-code tools are transforming the way apps are made — particularly in the corporate world, where there’s often a premium placed on tech that can cut costs. According to  Gartner , 70% of new business apps will use low-code/no-code technologies by 2025, and by 2024, 80% of non-IT professionals will develop IT products and services — with over 65% of them using low-code/no-code tools. No-code is a lucrative market, then — and one chock-full of vendors. But Whalesync is doing its darndest to stand out from the crowd with a tool that bi-directionally transfers data across popular SaaS apps, including Airtable, Webflow and Notion. was co-founded roughly a year ago by Curtis Fonger and Matthew Busel. Fonger, Whalesync’s CEO, began his career at Microsoft working on OneDrive file syncing and sold his first startup, no-code website builder Appetas, to Google in 2014. Busel is a former product manager at MakeSpace and a sometime no-code consultant. Fonger and Busel met in the spring of 2021 on Y Combinator’s co-founder matching platform. They originally planned to build a no-code app builder, but after working closely with operators, they discovered a bigger opportunity: data syncing. “Users were painfully stitching together data across their SaaS apps and trying to solve the problem with automation tools,” Fonger told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Drawing on my experience at OneDrive, we realized teams could unlock new use cases by syncing their apps rather than building one-way data pipelines.” Whalesync certainly isn’t the first platform to sync data between SaaS apps — far from it. The market for enterprise file sync and share tools could be worth $12.84 billion by 2026, to Technavio. Recent no-code, data-syncing tools on the scene include , which connects a plethora of cloud apps and syncs contacts stored in those apps two-way. There’s also Airbyte-owned , an open source platform that syncs data between databases and cloud-based tools. Whalesync spreadsheet from which businesses can automatically their data across SaaS apps and manage it. Users can set up internal tools with Notion and Postgres or build no-code apps with Bubble, for example. “Whalesync is different from traditional data pipelines or automation tools,” Fonger explained. “We’re conceptually closer to Dropbox, except instead of syncing files across computers we’re syncing data between SaaS applications. All you have to do is tell Whalesync how to match up tables and fields between SaaS apps and we handle the rest.” In order to enable bi-directional sync, Whalesync stores the data that it keeps in sync, Fonger says. Users can choose to delete that data if they delete their sync configurations or close their account. Perhaps thanks in part to the tool’s simplicity, Whalesync managed to gain traction relatively early after its February 2021 launch, signing up hundreds of customers and growing recurring revenue at an average rate of 38% per month. The company recently closed an $1.8 million pre-seed round led by Y Combinator with participation from Liquid 2, Soma Capital and Ascend, signaling at least investor confidence in its approach. By the end of 2023, Whalesync plans to add another four to five team members to its six-person team. “Over the past several years we’ve seen the rise of the modern data stack. Large enterprises use extract, transform and load (ETL) and reverse-ETL pipelines to move data in and out of data warehouses,” Fonger said. “We’ve learned from these best practices and created novel technology to simplify the setup process and bring the power of data syncing to small- and medium-sized businesses, who are currently using automation tools to send data between applications.”

US federal agencies hacked using legitimate remote desktop tools

Carly Page

The U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency has warned that criminal financially motivated hackers compromised federal agencies using legitimate remote desktop software. CISA said in a joint with the National Security Agency on Wednesday that it had identified a “widespread cyber campaign involving the malicious use of legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) software” that had targeted multiple federal civilian executive branch agencies — known as FCEBs — a list that includes Homeland Security, the Treasury and the Justice Department. CISA said it first identified suspected malicious activity on two FCEB systems in October while conducting a retrospective analysis using Einstein, a government-operated intrusion detection system used for protecting federal civilian agency networks. Further analysis led to the conclusion that many other government networks were also affected. CISA linked this activity to a financially motivated phishing campaign first by threat intelligence firm Silent Push. But CISA did not name the affected FCEB agencies — and did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions. The unnamed attackers behind this campaign began sending help desk-themed phishing emails to federal employees’ government and personal email addresses in mid-June 2022, according to CISA. These emails either contained a link to a “first-stage” malicious site that impersonated high-profile companies, including Microsoft and Amazon, or prompted the victim to call the hackers, who then tried to trick the employees into visiting the malicious domain. These phishing emails led to the download of legitimate remote access software — ScreenConnect (now ConnectWise Control) and AnyDesk — which the unnamed hackers used as part of a refund scam to steal money from victims’ bank accounts. These self-hosted remote access tools can allow IT administrators near-instant access to an employee’s computer with minimal interaction from the user, but these have to launch convincing-looking scams. In this case, and according to CISA, the cybercriminals used the remote access software to trick the employee into accessing their bank account. The hackers used their remote access to modify the recipient’s bank account summary. “The attackers used the remote access software to change the victim’s bank account summary information to show that they mistakenly refunded an excess amount of money, then instructed the victim to ‘refund’ this excess amount,” CISA said. CISA warns that the attackers could also use legitimate remote access software as a backdoor for maintaining persistent access to government networks. “Although this specific activity appears to be financially motivated and targets individuals, the access could lead to additional malicious activity against the recipient’s organization — from both other cybercriminals and APT actors,” the advisory said.

Upp wants to add more broccoli to the plant-protein mix using big automation

Natasha Lomas

What is automation good for? Harvesting more broccoli than human laborers can, according to , a Shropshire, U.K.-based agtech startup that’s using computer vision AI plus farm-sized proprietary machinery to expand crop yields. Its pitch is not only that its specialist, AI-driven harvester will make it more efficient to pick a familiar crop but also that the process will reduce waste — by being able to extract more nutritious protein from a field of broccoli without needing an army of extra human workers to do it. Upp says the smart machinery it’s developing will enable broccoli farmers to harvest more of the plant than they feasibly could using human field laborers because the AI-plus-tractor-tool combo will do it all: Fully automating the spotting, cutting, lifting and carrying, at a rate of up to 3km/h. This AI-driven approach allows for farmers to “upcycle” the 80% of the broccoli plant (i.e extra stem and leaves) that’s normally left as waste on the field, per Upp, and sell that as a additional product that can be processed into a form it suggests is comparable to pea protein. The startup’s concept system, which CEO and co-founder, David Whitewood, tells TechCrunch it’s been developing with help from technologists at the University of Lincoln, involves a tractor kitted out with a 3D camera and an on-board computer running a computer vision AI model that’s been trained to identify when broccoli heads are the right size for picking (with better-than-human accuracy, is the claim), along with a proprietary (patent pending) tractor-pulled cutting-and-harvesting tool. “The job of harvesting broccoli is — firstly — you’ve got to recognize which heads are ready to be harvested. So we’ve been cooperating with the University of Lincoln’s agri products team who’ve been developing the machine learning and AI,” he explains. “We’ve been testing a whole bunch of cameras with them and dealing with the difficult problem of occlusion [where leaves may partly obscure the camera’s view of the broccoli head]. “They’ve using a depth-sensing camera with the 3D piece in it to determine the size of that head. Because we don’t cut every head — we only cut the ones at the right size as demanded by the supermarkets… That then says ‘cut’ and that sends a signal to our on-board computer and then we actuate our patented mechanism that grabs the plant — which would be the same as a human grasping the plant stem — and then a very sharp knife flies in and cuts it in a fraction of a second. And then the plant is lifted away.” The extra edible plant matter harvested in this way isn’t intended for supermarket shelves — where the stringent cosmetics standards grocery retailers typically apply to their suppliers is a major contributor to food waste by refusing to stock less than perfect looking fruit and veg — rather the idea is for it to be processed into a protein- and nutrient-rich ingredient for selling to the food industry. Upp envisages the dried broccoli protein being used in a range of products — from sports-style protein drinks to pre-prepared meals and baked goods. The bits of the broccoli it’s targeting for upcycling are 30% protein by dried weight, per the startup’s website, and also packed with nutrients (vitamin A, B, C, E, K, calcium, iron, potassium, phosphorous, zinc) — as well as being high in fiber. Upp does not appear to have had any trouble getting early interest from the food industry for the upcycled edible plant-protein — with Whitewood noting it already has a trio of industry partnerships inked (he can’t yet name names but says one is a global “functional drinks” giant; another is a big UK food brand; and the third is a specialist confectionary bakery). “They’ve very interested in the health aspects of broccoli,” he goes on. “They’re interested in the fact that it’s clean and sustainable… So they’re excited, shall we say. I don’t think we’ve got a problem with a market for it — once we’ve got it off the field.” On the processing piece, Upp is working with experts at the in Dundee to figure out how best “to recover the fractions from that plant that makes it suitable for the food industry primarily”, per Whitewood. Zooming out, Upp is developing what it bills as a specialist “circular plant protein” business against a backdrop of growing demand for alternative, plant-based proteins as the food industry looks for ways to shrink its reliance on animal-derived proteins in order to reduce its carbon footprint — with global pressure on farmers and food companies to hit climate targets. Hence the startup is projecting that its AI-harvested broccoli protein could grow into a multi billion-dollar market in the coming years. On the marketing side it claims an added environmental upside — suggesting broccoli protein is cleaner than pea protein (being 4x less carbon intensive to produce), while also arguing it avoids the deforestation problem that’s tainted the reputation of soya crops. So the pitch is this is an plant protein. One potential PR wrinkle is there will inevitably be some (human) worker displacement as a result of automating the harvesting of broccoli. While the 2022-founded startup’s tech has been developed to the concept stage it’s gearing up for the next stage — to hone a robust technology that can be commercially deployed — with a series of “field-to-protein” pilots planned this year in the U.K., Spain and California. It’s expecting to start commercial production (and generate its first revenues) in late 2024 — projecting revenues will exceed £50 million in its three pilot markets in 2027. The business was established last year as a spinout from another U.K. agtech business called — where Whitewood had been CEO before moving over to Upp as a co-founder when they decided to separate into two distinct businesses. Today the startup is announcing a £500,000 pre-seed investment from , a decarbonisation, sustainability and social impact investor, to fund the field trials — ahead of planned commercial deployment later next year. Whitewood says the first commercial use of the tech will likely be in Spain or the UK, owing to seasonality, before Upp moves on to pitching California’s broccoli growers on automated crop yield optimization. Why hasn’t anyone done thought about extracting more of the good stuff from broccoli plants before? Whitewood says people have been thinking about the potential to do this for over a decade but he suggest it’s just “really hard” — given the selective harvesting required, as well as the need to separate out the harvested crop, with part (the broccoli crown) going to supermarkets (to be sold fresh) and the rest requiring additional processing. “It sounds simple — a lot of people have tried and a lot of people have failed,” he suggests. “It’s only since you’ve got a specialist harvester that can handle all the bulk that suddenly you can start to deal with the rest of it. You need automation — and it needs big automation. Little robots aren’t going to deal with crops of this scale, this bulk… You need farm-sized machinery.”

India’s antitrust order will stall Android’s progress in the country, Google warns

Jagmeet Singh

Google has warned that growth in the use of Android in India may stall due to an issued by the Indian antitrust watchdog last year over the U.S. company’s domination in the country. The order, which was issued by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) in September, found that Google had abused its dominant position in the market for mobile operating systems by imposing restrictive contracts on mobile manufacturers. The CCI ordered Google to change its contracts with manufacturers, allowing them more freedom to install rival apps and services on Android devices. According to a , Google filed a challenge with India’s Supreme Court and said that the order would require some modifications of its existing contracts and new license agreements. It would alter the company’s existing arrangements with over 1,100 device manufacturers and thousands of app developers. “Tremendous advancement in growth of an ecosystem of device manufacturers, app developers and users is at the verge of coming to a halt because of the remedial directions,” the company said in the filing, as quoted by the news agency. “No other jurisdiction has ever asked for such far-reaching changes based on similar conduct.” After three and a half years of investigation, the Indian watchdog fined Google $161.9 million for its anti-competitive practices related to Android devices in several markets, such as licensable OS for smartphones, app store, web search services and non-OS specific mobile web browsers. The regulator concluded that the Android maker dominated all those markets. Google had and said that it was a “major setback for Indian consumers and businesses.” The company also to the country’s appellate tribunal, the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT). Last week, the tribunal dismissed Google’s plea for an interim stay on the antitrust order and directed the company to pay 10% of the $161.9 million penalty while the case is due for hearing. This is not the first time Google has been subject to an antitrust investigation. The company was previously investigated by authorities in other countries. For instance, Google eventually lost its appeal in Europe.

New Jersey and Ohio are the latest states to ban TikTok on government devices

Aisha Malik

New Jersey and Ohio are the latest states to ban TikTok on government-owned devices over national security concerns. The two have joined at least 20 other states in doing so. The move comes amid fears that collected data could allow the Chinese government to spy on Americans. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy on Monday that the state issued a cybersecurity directive to prohibit the use of high-risk software and services, including TikTok, on government-owned devices. In addition to banning TikTok from state devices, Murphy said the state was also banning products and services from numerous other vendors, including Huawei, Hikvision, Tencent and ZTE. On the same day, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine banning on government-owned devices the use of any application owned by an entity located in China. DeWine said in the order that “these surreptitious data privacy and cybersecurity practices pose national and local security and cybersecurity threats to users of these applications and platforms and the devices storing the applications and platforms.” Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers that he planned to join other states in banning the popular short-form video app from state-owned devices as well. Calls to ban TikTok from government devices mounted after FBI Director Christopher Wray that the app poses national security risks. In December, President Joe Biden that prohibits the use of TikTok by the federal government’s employees on devices owned by its agencies. The its service members from using TikTok on government devices, fearing the app could potentially expose personal data to “unwanted actors.” There are also efforts to ban TikTok from consumer devices across the United States. Last month, Senator Marco Rubio that would ban TikTok nationally. Rubio said that the app allows the Chinese government “a unique ability to monitor more than 1 billion users worldwide, including nearly two-thirds of American teenagers.” TikTok has been a source of  for several years. Given the increasing  of TikTok, this may be just the start of the challenges to come for the company in the year ahead.

Hawk AI, an anti-money laundering and fraud prevention platform for banks, raises $17M

Paul Sawers

, a German company developing anti-money laundering (AML) and tangential fraud prevention smarts for financial institutions, has raised $17 million in a Series B round of funding. Prior to now, Hawk AI had , and with a fresh $17 million in the bank, the company said that it plans to bolster its product development and global expansion plans. The Series B round was led by Sands Capital, with participation from Picus Capital, DN Capital, Coalition and BlackFin Capital Partners. It’s estimated $2 trillion of ill-gotten gains are laundered each year, representing as much as 5% of global GDP, with of these illegal profits recovered. And this is where Hawk AI is setting out its stall. Founded out of Munich in 2018, Hawk AI serves to improve how banks and payment companies manage their compliance risks through a cloud-native, modular AML surveillance system that promises the “highest level of explainability” in its AI-powered decision-making engine, which is pivotal for audits and regulatory investigations. “Financial Institutions and regulators need to be able to understand and trust AI-driven decisions,” Hawk AI co-founder and CEO Tobias Schweiger told TechCrunch. “Full explainability of such an AI is the key to establishing trust and acceptance.” Hawk AI AML transaction monitoring, explainable results. Hawk AI Hawk AI offers products such as , , , and , which allows its customers to build their own risk-rating model by combining static data (e.g. product or geographical data) with dynamic data (e.g. transaction data such as suspicious activity reports). Among its customers are European , U.S. payments processing company and Brazil’s . Besides the legacy incumbents in the space such as , and , there are other notable newish-comers in this space, including and . However, Hawk AI is touting its cloud-native credentials and SaaS business model as one of its core differentiators, versus the clunky on-premise deployments of many of the legacy players. But the company is keen to stress its focus on addressing the “ ” world that AI and machine learning algorithms typically inhabit — understanding why an algorithm made a specific decision is key, and companies need to be able to justify why one customer was flagged as a potential fraudster. Hawk AI: Customer risk rating. Hawk AI It’s worth noting that other anomaly detection software do give insights into what factors led to a flag. But Hawk AI says that its patent-pending technology also tells users what the “expected range” of normal behavior is, giving a score for each risk-factor using natural human language. The company says that this context is essential in terms of evaluating whether a case qualifies as suspicious activity or not. “For Hawk AI, explainability is made up of two areas,” Schweiger said. “What is the justification for an AI-driven, individual decision, and how were the algorithms that contribute to AI developed? Compliance officers need to have transparency over both.”

Twitter is now accepting Community Notes contributions from four more countries

Ivan Mehta

Twitter’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program, Community Notes, is now open to contributors in the U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Twitter said over the weekend that it was expanding the contributor base by 10% per week by onboarding new individuals to the program. The social media company has also promised to include people from other countries. We admit new contributors in batches, growing the contributor base by ~10% per week. We’re monitoring quality and continuing to expand to new countries over time 🌎🌍🌏 — Community Notes (@CommunityNotes) Community Notes aims to allow users to add more context to tweets through links and reports. The program has been widely used to debunk or correct claims made in popular tweets. Twitter introduced the social fact-checking program . In September, Twitter just ahead of the U.S. midterm elections. A month later, it made After Elon Musk started managing Twitter, he renamed “Birdwatch” to “Community Notes” — despite former Twitter chief Jack Dorsey it is the “most boring Facebook name ever.” Musk believed that the project  In December, the social network said that it is making Community Notes . However, the contributions just came from users based out of the U.S. With the latest announcement, the company is changing that. If anyone wants to join the program, Twitter requires them to have a verified phone number and a six-month-old account. However, one requirement that seems to throw people off is a “Trusted network provider.” Many have complained that their network is not eligible and Twitter doesn’t have a list of trusted carriers. It is likely that the company is . But in that case, it needs to be transparent about the process and work with network providers to avoid spam. Mine comes back as an untrusted phone carrier? — Steve Dresser (@dresserman) Not a good start. What's wrong with on the network? — Nick (G7IZR) Ⓐ ⛧ (@NikTheGeek) Last week, it also started showing these notes under quoted tweets on the iOS app and on the web. Community Notes are now also shown on Quote Tweets 🎉 This change boosts the impact of contributors’ efforts, and helps ensure context is shown everywhere it can be helpful. Live now in the web app, and coming soon to iOS and Android. — Community Notes (@CommunityNotes) Over the last few months, Twitter has also made several tweaks to the Community Notes algorithm, including , expanding and stabilizing . After Musk’s takeover, Twitter has cut — including people working on trust & safety and content moderation. This has impacted the social network’s ability to filter out harmful content and, in turn, keep . So it is not surprising to see the company is pushing the program that puts the onus of fact-checking on users.

Coinbase to cut 20% jobs, abandon ‘several’ projects to weather downturns in crypto market

Manish Singh

Coinbase plans to cut 950 jobs, or about 20% of its workforce, and shut down “several” projects as the U.S. crypto exchange giant looks to reduce its expenses to increase its “chances of doing well in every scenario.” This is the , which eliminated 18% of its workforce, or nearly 1,100 jobs last June, but there was “no way to reduce our expenses significantly enough, without considering changes to headcount,” Coinbase co-founder and chief executive Brian Armstrong Tuesday. The moves are part of the company’s efforts to cut its operating expenses by about 25% quarter over quarter, he said. The company estimates that it will incur approximately $149 million to $163 million in total restructuring expenses, consisting of approximately $58 million to $68 million in cash charges related to employee severance and other termination benefits, it (PDF) in an 8K filing with the SEC Tuesday. In the filing, Coinbase also disclosed that it expects its adjusted EBIDTA losses for the year ending in December 31, 2022 to be within “the negative $500 million loss guardrail” it set last year. As with firms in other industries, crypto firms are aggressively undertaking major decisions to survive the downturn in the broader market, which has reversed much of the gains from the 13-year bull run. Kraken said in November that it , or 30% of its workforce. Armstrong said the crypto industry is reeling from the fallout from “unscrupulous actors,” likely referring to , the founder of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX (which stole billions of dollars of customer funds), and disgraced crypto hedge fund founders Kyle Davies and Su Zhu, and warned that “there could still be further contagion.” “As we examined our 2023 scenarios, it became clear that we would need to reduce expenses to increase our chances of doing well in every scenario. While it is always painful to part ways with our fellow colleagues, there was no way to reduce our expenses significantly enough, without considering changes to headcount,” he wrote. “Dark times also weed out bad companies, as we’re seeing right now. But those of us who believe in crypto will keep building great products and increasing economic freedom in the world. Better days are ahead, and when they arrive, we’ll be ready. Thank you for everything you’ve done to get us this far, and everything you will do to carry us forward.” Shares of Coinbase are down 83% in the past year. Armstrong did not specify which projects the firm plans to shut down, but said those projects had a “lower probability of success.”

Ethereum’s shift to proof-of-stake draws increasing institutional interest

Jacquelyn Melinek

proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) in September 2022 increased interest in staking across a number of parties — including institutions. The propelled Ethereum from “a smart contract platform lagging behind” into “something that was doing things right,” Diogo Mónica, co-founder and president of Anchorage Digital, a crypto bank , said to TechCrunch. “Interest from investors grew and the appetite changed dramatically.” And it’s true: Institutional interest in ETH staking increased after the Merge, Matt Hougan, CIO at Bitwise Asset Management, said to TechCrunch. “All of a sudden, by holding Ethereum, you went from holding a bet on smart contract platform to holding a bet that holds yield,” Mónica said. Staking is a way of earning rewards for holding a certain token (in this instance, ETH) for a certain amount of time. In return for staking, people are paid out yield or additional rewards in exchange for holding their coins to secure the network. In a way, it’s like having cash in your wallet or parking your cash in a bank CD, Hougan said. “You lock your money up in the CD and the bank pays you interest. In this example, you lock your ETH up in a staking pool and earn interest.”

Solana co-founder sees potential for devs to lead its network in 2023

Jacquelyn Melinek

As the crypto , major ecosystems outside of the top two cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin and Ethereum — are growing, according to a new report. About 72% of monthly active developers (devs) are working on blockchains that are not part of the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, according to the , which trawled code commits across open source repositories. saw the highest number of new developers contributing to the ecosystem, with its developer count rising by 83%, the fastest of any major blockchain. Compared to that, Polygon saw a 40% rise in developer count, Cosmos saw 25% and Polkadot saw 2%, the report showed. “Developers will build where they see technology advantages, and Solana delivers faster transactions and lower costs than alternatives,” Solana co-founder Raj Gokal told TechCrunch. “But they will also build where they see other kinds of advantages, such as an active community.” The growth of the developer ecosystem on Solana can be attributed to a mix of education efforts and resources, community engagement, technical advantages and business opportunities, Gokal said. Even with around 2,000 total developers as of December 2022, Solana is still about 3,500 developers short of Ethereum’s count, which had a total of about 5,700 developers. It’s important to note, though, that Ethereum launched in 2013 and Solana launched in 2018, so the former has enjoyed a five-year head start. These Solana developers are working on “a range of use cases,” from evolving the NFT and DeFi spaces to getting retailers to experiment with decentralized payment rails like Solana Pay, Gokal said. “Right now, game devs on Solana are very active and innovating heavily to create games that are both fun to play and rewarding for players to participate.”

Amazon launches freight service Air in India

Manish Singh

Amazon has launched Amazon Air, its dedicated air cargo fleet, in India as the e-commerce giant bulks up its logistics infrastructure in the key overseas market where it has deployed more than $6.5 billion. The retailer has partnered with the Bengaluru-based cargo airline Quikjet to launch its maiden air freight service in the country, which it said will enable the firm to speed up its delivery. Amazon, which is utilizing the Boeing 737-800 for the service, said it will initially use Amazon Air to deliver goods in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. An Amazon executive described the launch of Amazon Air as a “huge step forward for the aviation industry,” without explaining how. Amazon with over three dozen Boeing freighter aircrafts. It also briefly tested the program in the U.K. India is the third market where Amazon has launched its freight service. The company said Air fleet includes more than 110 flights across 70 destinations worldwide and it has invested “hundreds of millions of dollars” in its air logistics capabilities. (Amazon calls its air freight service Amazon Air, but confusingly still uses the Prime Air moniker on the plane even as the latter unit now looks at drone deliveries.) Amazon Air launched in India (seen in pic) while starting his speech, asks if is still with India? Amit has been spending more time in the US and has expanded role of APAC market as well. — digbijay mishra (@digbijaymishra1) The move follows Amazon , businesses and direct-to-consumer brands in the country late last year. “Amazon India uses its own services for delivery of around 80-85% of orders and has opened up its delivery arm to others sellers. Delivery itself is a business which can achieve massive scale in India. So it makes sense for them to start this in India,” said Satish Meena, an independent analyst who tracks the e-commerce sector in the country. India is one of the key overseas markets for Amazon. But the company is , Walmart-backed Flipkart, in the country. Amazon has struggled to make inroads in smaller cities and towns in India, analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein said last year. The company also shut down at least three business units — , and — in India last year.

App Store developers have earned $320 billion to date, says Apple

Sarah Perez

Apple today on its subscription businesses and global App Store, noting that the tech company has now paid out a record $320 billion to app developers since 2008 — a number that reflects the revenue apps have generated, minus Apple’s commission. In addition, the tech giant said it now has more than 900 million paid subscriptions across Apple services, with subscriptions on the App Store driving a “significant” part of that figure. Apple The company’s App Store in 2022 faced one of its tougher years since its founding, with lawsuits and antitrust actions aimed at limiting its market power. The U.S. Department of Justice is said to now be in the against Apple, even recently to point out to the court why the original ruling — which had decided that Apple was not a monopolist — had misinterpreted antitrust law. the Android-iOS duopoly, with a specific focus on browsers and cloud gaming services. Apple also this year had to make concessions over various parts of its App Store business. For example, in the Netherlands, that allowed dating apps to use third-party payments. Multiple are probing its App Tracking Transparency framework for antitrust issues. And last month, Apple loosened its grip on App Store pricing with the and rules that now permit developers to set prices that don’t end in $0.99 to combat complaints that Apple doesn’t let developers run their own businesses as they see fit — a result of a class action lawsuit  settled Despite its challenges, Apple’s App Store business continues to grow. The company noted that more than 650 million visitors from 175 regions worldwide visit the App Store every week and it’s still delivering new experiences. Among the highlights was the launch of Apex Legends on mobile earlier this year, and the growing popularity of a new form of social networking with Apple’s game subscription service, Apple Arcade, also grew in 2022 with the addition of more than 50 titles, including Warped Kart Racers, Jetpack Joyride 2, Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, Wylde Flowers and Cooking Mama: Cuisine. The service now hosts more than 200 games in total. Apple Apple also highlighted stats across other services, noting Apple Music has topped over 100 million songs, and growing Spatial Audio adoption with monthly listeners tripling since launch. Shazam’s 20th anniversary in 2022 saw it hitting the milestone of 70 billion all-time Shazams. (It didn’t report on its Podcasts figures, however.) Apple Fitness+, meanwhile, grew its library to 3,500 workouts and meditations. And Apple TV+ became the first streaming service to win an Academy Award for Best Picture with “CODA.” In February, the Apple TV app , after the announcement of a 10-year partnership between Apple and the league.

Mushroom protein company Meati Foods opens ‘mega’ facility; closes $22M in new funding

Christine Hall

is closer to full-scale production of its whole-food protein made from the structural fibers of mushrooms, known as mycelium. The company announced Thursday the opening of its production facility, dubbed “Mega Ranch,” in Colorado. The 100,000-square-foot facility was financed in part by a of capital raised last year and a brand new extension round of $22 million. This will enable Meati to produce an annual rate of tens of millions of pounds by late 2023. Once fully ramped up, the facility will have the capability of producing more than 45 million pounds of product. Tyler Huggins, co-founder and CEO of Meati Foods, told TechCrunch that the company wasn’t actively seeking additional capital, but had decided to keep the Series C round open due to additional investor interest. “There was more interest than room in the $150 million round, so we continued to keep it open,” he said. “We also wanted to bring in value-add folks and pour more fuel on the fire which would help us move faster, get into more doors and unlock more capacity.” The use of mycelium is growing as not only an alternative protein source, like what fellow food tech companies ,  and  do, but also in clothing and leather. In the past few years, many food tech companies are joining Meati Foods in going from the R&D phase to building facilities. For example, announced new funding earlier this month to build a 200,000-square-foot manufacturing plant to scale its alternative protein, while both   and   raised capital in 2022 to build production facilities. With a focus on providing products that are sustainable, nutritious and taste good, Mega Ranch enables Meati Foods to grow, harvest and process its mycelium and then produce its products under one roof. The company touts its proprietary production capability to grow a teaspoon of spores into the equivalent of hundreds of cow whole-food protein in just a few days. Its Eat Meati product line is already being produced at the Mega Ranch and currently includes four products: the Classic Cutlet, Crispy Cutlet, Classic Steak and Carne Asada Steak. Crispy Cutlet. Meati Foods The products are sold through retail and foodservice partners, including Sprouts Farmers Market, Sweetgreen and Birdcall. It is also doing small drops of products online that Huggins said continuously sell out quickly. In addition, he plans to get Meati products into 7,000 doors by the end of the year. The new capital round was led again by Revolution Growth and also included Rockefeller Capital. Now, the company’s total funding to date is over $250 million. “The next few years will see a seismic shift in how we eat, and Meati’s state-of-the-art, scalable production capabilities coupled with its focus on meeting consumer needs for clean, whole-food protein position the brand to lead,” said Fazeela Abdul Rashid, partner at Revolution Growth and member of the Meati Foods board, in a written statement. “Tyler and the team have a vision for a new food category with pure ingredients and taste that doesn’t compromise. We are excited to continue working with them to reach the next level and bring Meati to more consumers across the U.S.” When I spoke with Huggins in 2022, he mentioned the company’s goal of reaching a $1 billion in revenue run rate by 2025. The company expects to bring in tens of millions of dollars in revenue this year with plans to reach hundreds of millions in 2024. With the new facility and funding, Meati is on par to reach that sales rate. In addition to what he called the “core four” products, Huggins said the company’s technology can make other products all from one processing line. Meanwhile, the company is also scouting out a location for what Huggins called “Giga Ranch,” which will be Meati’s flagship facility that will be able to produce hundreds of millions of pounds of its mycelium product annually. Huggins said that “2023 will be a big moment” for the company in terms of production, building its brand and educating people about mushroom protein and its capability to provide more nutrition and be a net benefit to the world’s food system. “There is no shortage of stuff coming out, and we have no lack of demand,” he added. “Our pipeline is robust, and everything we produce in the next year or more is already pre-sold. It’s now about unlocking capacity to get the product out there.”

European banks struggle with AI, while US banks lead the field, according to a new index

Mike Butcher

In the wake of a seminal wave of new artificial intelligence startups such as OpenAI, a new U.K. company claims it can track and rank banks on their ability to develop and deploy AI platforms. , a benchmarking and intelligence company, says its inaugural Index can rank the 23 largest banks in North America and Europe on their competence in AI. “As the real-world application of AI accelerates at astonishing speed, we believe that this transformation is too important — for managers, for investors, for society at large — to be happening in a darkened room. Our Index measures the race to banking AI maturity in a way that brings transparency to the top of the agenda,” said Alexandra Mousavizadeh, Evident co-founder and CEO in a statement. Over a call she added: “Setting our methodology onto the banks felt like the right place to start because this is a sector that has been really focused on this for a number of years. After this we plan to go into insurance and the health sector as well as the energy sector, manufacturing and so on.” The Evident AI Index is based on “millions of public data points” says the company, “without resting on proprietary surveys that suffer from self-reported biases.” The results make for interesting reading. Evident AI Index rankings. Evident JPMorgan Chase comes out top, leading on all pillars, and scoring 63% of the available points. The bank is joined in the top five by Royal Bank of Canada, Citi, UBS and Wells Fargo. North American banks listed in the index tend to appear ahead of European counterparts in building AI capability, said the company, making up some 7 out of the top 10 rankings in the Index. It would appear European banks are at risk of being left behind in the AI race, according to this inaugural index. Only three European banks make it into the top 10: UBS, ING and BNP Paribas. Evident is being backed by $3 million in funding from VCs and angel investors, including Venrex Investment Management (an early backer of Revolut); Scott Galloway, NYU Professor and co-host of Pivot podcast; Robin Saunders, CEO, Clearbrook Capital; David Brierwood, former COO of MSCI; Dimitri Goulandris, CEO, Cycladic; and Gary Ginsberg, former senior vice president Softbank Corp. and executive vice president of Time Warner. “This is the year of AI, and we are seeing a rapid rise in AI use in almost every single sector. As the market begins to discern winners from losers based on their capability in AI, robust metrics and insight become key to stakeholder value. Evident is uniquely placed to provide that clarity,” Galloway added in a statement.

Solana price spikes as newly launched dog coin BONK gains community hype

Jacquelyn Melinek

Last week, Solana ( ) fell to its lowest level since February 2021. But its price has risen over 12% in the past 24 hours on Tuesday after almost nine days of consecutive losses that brought its price to around $8 on Friday. Amid Solana’s movement, the two largest cryptocurrencies by market cap — — both shifted less than 1% in the past 24 hours, showing some stability. Solana has been volatile for a number of reasons in recent weeks, including one of its most prominent backers being the now-disgraced former FTX CEO and its blockchain. But some are crediting the recent spike to interest from Solana community members in Bonk ( ), a new meme token that airdropped about 50% of its 56 trillion token supply to users last week. Airdropping is when a cryptocurrency sends a free supply of its token to a number of crypto wallets in a way to gain users or reward loyal community members. “We’re here to reward everyone that made #Solana what it is today,” the Solana-focused dog coin about a month ago before gaining traction. About 20% of Bonk’s total airdrop supply went to Solana NFT , which consisted of almost 300,000 individual NFTs. The Shiba Inu–themed cryptocurrency has risen about 96% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko . Even some major Solana projects have considered (or did) adopting the newly launched token from large decentralized exchanges like to NFT markets like . While Bonk gains steam, it’s highly likely that it will have a similar fate to other meme or dog-focused crypto tokens that often see a pump, followed by a steep dump and little to no recovery. In the meantime, however, it has helped the Solana ecosystem gain momentum in a time when many crypto players saw it as a goner. As there has been some slight recovery for Solana, its future remains uncertain even amid its dog coin–related hype. As of today, Solana has dropped from being the fifth-largest token in early November to the 15th largest and is the number one cryptocurrency on CoinMarketCap.

No Meat Factory eats up new capital to build bigger protein production plant in US

Christine Hall

Scalable production of alternative proteins continues to be a big challenge for companies in this sector, and wants to help with that. The Canada-based company, which produces alternative proteins for third-party customers, took in $42 million in new Series B capital to build a bigger manufacturing facility in the U.S. No Meat Factory has now raised $60 million to date. New investor Tengelmann Growth Partners led the round and was joined by existing investor Emil Capital Partners, who initially invested in No Meat Factory when Dieter Thiem and Leon Bell initially co-founded the company in 2019. Both Bell and Thiem have plant-based food production backgrounds, and Thiem was even a master butcher in Germany. Their goal is to expand their production footprint in North America. No Meat Factory’s current 30,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in British Columbia produces meat alternative products, like nuggets, hamburgers and whole-muscle cuts, Bell told TechCrunch. The new capital would enable a second facility to be built in the Pacific Northwest that, at 200,000 square feet, would make similar products as well as add capability to make sausages, hot dogs and deli-sliced meat alternatives. The new facility is expected to go online toward the end of 2023, he added. No Meat Factory began working with clients in September of 2020 and is bringing in revenue; however, Thiem and Bell declined to provide specifics on year-over-year traction other than to say there has been “consistent growth.” , but the jury is still out if meat alternatives will fill that gap and gain mainstream popularity. Many companies are working on it, with being one of the more recent to attract venture capital for its plant-based steak alternative. And, with more consumers making healthier and more sustainable food choices, additional industrial-scale manufacturing capabilities are likely to help increase the output as demand for plant-based products grows. Other companies are also working to add capacity to the industry. For example, both and raised capital in 2022 to build production facilities. No Meat Factory’s investors agree that additional capacity is needed for this industry. “As more brands understand the need to provide customers with delicious plant-based alternatives, companies like No Meat Factory are poised to experience rapid growth and increasing demand for its manufacturing capabilities,” added Daniel Bentrup, investment partner at Tengelmann Growth Partners, in a statement. More manufacturing capabilities should also assist in narrowing the gap between the cost of producing plant-based meat and animal-based meat. Though traditional meat prices rose significantly during the global pandemic, looked at average retail prices from 2019 and found that the cost for plant-based meat was double that of beef, with it being two or three times the cost of chicken and pork. Meanwhile, with increased demand for meat alternatives on the horizon, Bell said the company will work on expanding its customer base and adding to its 40-person workforce. “Working with brand owners on the additional capacity coming unlocks some opportunity for us that we can pursue,” he added. “We will also focus more on a private label strategy as well, for example, offer our products and our ideas to some of these private label manufacturers. With our phase one site, we were limited given the size of some of the private label opportunities in the market.”

Project Eaden’s fiber technology poised to spin threads into whole cuts of ‘meat’

Christine Hall

, a Berlin-based food technology company, believes it has cracked the code for producing whole cuts of plant-based meat alternatives using a proprietary . Investors think so too, adding €2.1 million (about $2.3 million) of additional funding to a previous seed round so that Project Eaden can continue development and accelerate the launch of its first product, a plant-based steak, this year. Materials scientist David Schmelzeisen, mymuesli founder Hubertus Bessau and ex-Zalando manager Jan Wilmking founded Project Eaden in early 2022. The pre-revenue company is using bio fibers, the building blocks of most animals and plants and a key component in the creation of meat cuts, as the center of its technology, Schmelzeisen explained to TechCrunch. Project Eaden produces edible plant-based protein fibers, similar to those already being used by the textiles, aerospace and automotive industries, that mimic the texture and appearance of animal meats. The fibers start out thin, like thread, and increasingly are built upon and wound around spools and fed into a machine that bundles the fiber together into the finished product. Schmelzeisen says this type of technology yields a better-tasting product that looks and acts like traditional meat; for example, it is juicy. “The major thing is texture,” he added. “We create fibers which have several material components so that when you bite through each of the million fibers, you have this kind of bite resistance that real meat has when you chew it. It makes a real difference. We believe we have a unique chance to build an outstanding company, from a unique technology angle and to create something that is cool.” U.S. regulators are still developing . Meanwhile, with being some of the biggest , Schmelzeisen believes the fiber technology is more scalable and can be used beyond traditional meat, like chicken, pork and beef, but also to make fish and seafood. In addition, it is less costly than other methods of producing alternative proteins, like extrusion, which extracts moisture to create a “lump” of plant-based protein that can be shaped into various meat-like products. Project Eaden is one of a handful of companies utilizing fiber spinning technology and attracting venture capital for its approach. Last March, for its fiber technology that it uses to create both plant-based and cell-cultivated proteins. The new portion of capital was driven by Creandum, Magnetic and FoodLabs and closed in December. Including the seed extension, Project Eaden has raised €10.1 million (about $10.8 million) in seed funding to date. A previous round of €8 million was raised last June from a group of investors, again , and included FoodLabs, Shio Capital, Trellis Road and a group of angel investors, including former Rügenwalder Mühle managing director Godo Röben. “Eating meat is associated with excessive land and water usage and unsustainable levels of greenhouse gas emissions,” Carl Fritjofsson, general partner at Creandum, said in a statement. “But, for most people, it’s simply too much of a pleasure to give up on. Until today, existing plant-based options haven’t solved this dilemma, as they lack compelling taste, texture and look despite higher prices. Project Eaden has the potential to become the industry’s game changer.” The majority of the financing will go into technology development, including building up Project Eaden’s R&D and food grade materials teams and partnering with culinary experts that will debut the product once it is ready. Additionally, the company is refurbishing a manufacturing space so that it can produce its own product at scale, Wilmking said in an interview. A future round of funding will accelerate the plant build, Schmelzeisen said. The company is currently at a stage where a laboratory is set up and will begin prototype production soon, with plans to be able to go to market toward the end of this year. Looking into the future, plans are for the company to move from prototype manufacturing to a highly automated production facility, and then potentially into more facilities and or partnerships, Schmelzeisen added.

Women-founded startups raised 1.9% of all VC funds in 2022, a drop from 2021

Dominic-Madori Davis

startups with all-women teams received 1.9% (or around $4.5 billion) out of around the $238.3 billion in venture capital allocated, according to the latest PitchBook data. That percentage is from the 2.4% all-women teams raised in 2021. The decline was expected, given the economic climate of last year: the bear, the bust, the winter. In fact, aside from 2016, the last time all-women-led startups raised such a low percentage of funds was in 2012, of funding decline economic uncertainty and an election. Fitting, almost. And naturally, the increases when an “all-women team” turns into having “at least one women founder,” signifying the importance of always keeping a man in the room. The augmentation is quite noticeable, too: All-women teams raised 1.9% of VC funds last year, a percentage that skyrocketed to 17.2% when the team was mixed-gender. This trend has remained consistent for at least a decade. “When the economy tanks, discrimination feels justified,” , a partner at Anthemis Group, told TechCrunch. “Managers double down on what they perceive as ‘safe’ and ‘boring.’ Investing in women is still perceived as high-risk. LPs need to look beyond manager diversity and into their investment portfolios if we want to change this industry; 1.9% is deplorable.” There is good news, however.

Losing the horn: VCs think majority of unicorns aren’t worth $1 billion anymore

Rebecca Szkutak

years have been a rollercoaster for the startup world’s herd of unicorns. Two years ago, we saw a of companies cross the $1 billion valuation milestone. But that to a trickle last year, and this year’s market conditions look likely to reverse course to a point that we may witness some of those companies losing that status. are likely to become the norm this year as venture firms and investors look to bring valuations back to earth. We’ve already started to see some decacorns, like and , lowering their valuations, but they are so highly valued that they aren’t at risk of losing their unicorn status. But most unicorns don’t enjoy that luxury. CB Insights’ unicorn shows that there are 1,205 companies currently worth over $1 billion. But if you look closely, you’ll notice that the majority of these startups are actually hovering right at the $1 billion mark. Currently, 685 unicorns were last valued between $1 billion and $2 billion — that’s more than half the list. How many of these will stay unicorns through this calendar year? To find out, we recently more than 35 investors on how many startups they thought would drop below the $1 billion valuation mark in 2023. While nobody could peg a specific number, of course, the vast majority felt the herd has likely already been winnowed.

Danish startup Kanpla wants to help canteens cut food waste

Paul Sawers

As much as of all food produced each year goes nowhere near a human mouth, resulting in economic, environmental and social costs of an estimated . While there are a multitude of social, cultural and even technological reasons for these staggering statistics, we’ve seen a slew of startups emerge with propositions on how to solve the food-waste problem. Last year, for software that digitizes the ordering, supply chain and communications processes for suppliers and restaurants. Elsewhere, there are companies serving to help retailers optimize their stock replenishment, while others have built marketplaces . There’s even a company setting out to . Another fledgling startup called , meanwhile, is focusing its efforts on cutting food waste in one very specific vertical: canteens. Founded out of Denmark in 2019, Kanpla initially targeted school canteens, serving up software for parents to preorder food for their kids (children under the age of 13 are not allowed a debit card in Denmark), which gave schools a good idea of how much and what kinds of food to prepare. Today, the company targets all manner of canteens, with paying customers including shipping giant Maersk and Danish brewer Carlsberg, as well as industrial canteen providers such as and , which serve more than 230 canteens across the Nordics. In 2022, Kanpla said that its software was used in some 1,500 canteens, and it expects to triple that number this year as it expands into more European markets. In preparation for this growth, the company today announced it has raised €2.2 million ($2.4 million) in a seed round of funding. There are two core elements to the Kanpla platform. For kitchens, Kanpla offers what it calls an “operating system” for managing their whole canteen from a PC or mobile device, including creating digital menus, support for different payment types, collecting and presenting sales data, and more. Through this, companies can understand which food sells best, allowing them to stock up on the right kinds of ingredients thereby minimizing produce that might otherwise go to waste. Kanpla canteen stats. Kanpla On the “diner” side, users can access a mobile or web app for perusing menus and ordering food, meaning that their food can be waiting for them when they arrive in the canteen. Kanpla for canteen diners. Kanpla On top of that, the Kanpla platform has features specifically for addressing food waste. For example, it enables kitchens and canteens to sell surplus food from their lunch or buffet menus as takeaways to guests. Through the admin dashboard, they simply list the amount of food available and the price, and a communication is sent to each Kanpla diner’s app. Kanpla: Selling surplus food.  Kanpla And Kanpla also has a food-waste registration feature, currently in beta, which brings together data such as the number of people entering a canteen and the amount of food that’s wasted across categories (e.g. in production or uneaten buffet food). This requires kitchens to weigh the food before they throw it out. Kanpla: Food waste registration and insights. Kanpla Perhaps the most curious aspect of Kanpla’s offering is that it’s so narrowly focused on canteens, something that Kanpla CEO and co-founder Peter Bæch said was simply due to his own experiences. “The idea to target the canteen industry came from our experience at our local canteens,” Bæch explained to TechCrunch. “We saw firsthand a canteen which threw out huge amounts of food at the end of the day. We thought about how we spent half of our lunch-break waiting in lines. These inconveniences led us to dive into the pains, finding an industry that was heavily behind on digitalization, with additional problems of forecasting, limited tools to manage guest relations and a high degree of manual work for print and billing. These insights became the beginning of our journey to digitalize this industry.” While canteens undoubtedly share many of the pain points of other eating establishments, each come with their own unique problems and opportunities that require a different approach from a technology standpoint. “Canteens differentiate from cafes and restaurants by having recurring guests, coming back day after day, giving them a unique potential to connect with their guests” Bæch continued. “Additionally, they have the added complexity and issues due to menus switching daily, and payments working often through hybrid approaches that may include card, invoice and salary deduction.” Kanpla’s seed round was led by Netherlands-based VC , with participation from a handful of angel investors. The company said it will use its fresh cash injection to expand beyond its native Denmark and into the U.K., Norway and the Netherlands in 2023, with plans to extend its reach into the U.S. and other European markets the following year. Denmark has spawned a number of sizeable tech companies through the years, such as expense management software provider , which , while local neobank achieved a . And then there is, of course, , which was bought out by a private equity firm for . HenQ partner Jan Andriessen reckons that Kanpla can blaze a similar trail to Zendesk by cashing in on what initially seems like a niche vertical. “At first, the canteen industry can seem obscure, but it’s a big market with huge potential,” Andriessen said in a statement. “Many B2B software products have blossomed in seemingly non-obvious markets. Zendesk, one of Denmark’s greatest tech businesses, was founded well before customer success software became a well-defined term. Kanpla can be the same, and that’s what makes them the type of B2B business we’re excited to support.”

A peek into the future as Sam Altman sees it

Connie Loizos

Late last week, in a rare sit-down before a , this editor spent an hour with Sam Altman, the former president of Y Combinator and, since 2019, the CEO of , the company he famously co-founded with Elon Musk and numerous others in 2015 to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” The crowd wanted to learn more about his plans for OpenAI, which has taken the world by storm in the last six weeks owing to the public release of its ChatGPT language model, a chatbot that has educators in particular both dazzled and . (OpenAI’s technology, which enables users to create digital images by simply describing what they envision, generated only slightly less buzz when it was released to the public earlier last year.) Because Altman is also an active investor — one whose biggest return to date comes from the payments startup Stripe, he said at the StrictlyVC event — we spent the first half of our time together focused on some of his most ambitious investments. To learn about these, including a supersonic jet and a startup that aims to help , tune in for the 20-minute video below. (You’ll also hear Altman’s thoughts about Twitter under the stewardship of Elon Musk, and why Altman is “not super interested” in crypto or web3. “I love the spirit of the web3 people,” Altman said with a shrug. “But I don’t intuitively feel why we need it.”) You can check out the second part of our conversation — about OpenAI and the future of AI more generally — . In the meantime, below is an excerpt from our discussion about one of Altman’s biggest bets: a nuclear fusion company called that, like OpenAI, is aiming to turn another long-elusive promise — this one of abundant energy — into reality. The excerpt has been edited lightly for length and clarity. I try to just do things that I’m interested in at this point. One of the things I have realized is, all of the companies I think I have added a lot of value to are the ones that I think about in my free time on a hike or whatever, and then text the founders and say, ‘Hey, I have this idea for you.’ Every founder deserves an investor who is going to think about them while they’re hiking. And so I’ve tried to hold myself to the stuff that I really love, which tends to be the hard tech, [involving] years of R&D, [is] capital intensive or is sort of risky research. But if it works, it really works. Or many people who would [invest it] in one risky fusion company. I mean, probably on a multiples basis, definitely on a multiples basis: Stripe. Also I think that was, like, my second investment ever, so it seemed a lot easier. This was also a time when valuations were different; it was great. But, you know, I’ve been doing this for, like, 17 years, so there’ve been a lot of really good ones, and I’m super grateful to have been in Silicon Valley at what was such a magical time. Helion is more than an investment to me. It’s the other thing beside OpenAI that I spend a lot of time on. I’m just super excited about what’s going to happen there. I’m super happy for them. I think it’s a very cool scientific result. As they themselves said, I don’t think it’ll be commercially relevant. And that’s what I’m excited about — not getting fusion to work in a lab, although that is cool, too, but building a system that will work at a super-low cost. If you look at the previous energy transitions, if you can get the costs of a new form of energy down, it can take over everything else in a couple of decades. And then also a system where we can create enough energy and enough reliable energy, both in terms of the machines not breaking, and also not having the intermittency or the need for storage of solar or wind or something like that. If we can create enough for Earth in, like, 10 years — and I think that’s actually the hardest challenge that Helion faces as we sketch out what it takes operationally to do that, to replace all the current generative capacity on Earth with fusion and to do it really fast and to think about what it really means to build a factory that’s capable of putting out two of these machines a day for a decade — that’s really hard but also a super fun problem. So I’m very happy there’s a fusion race, I think that’s great. I’m also very happy solar and batteries are getting so cheap. But I think what will matter is who can deliver energy the cheapest and enough of it. Yeah, well, that thing, , I think probably will work, but to what I was just saying earlier, I think it will be commercially irrelevant. They also [themselves] think it’ll be commercially irrelevant. The thing that is so exciting to me about Helion is that it’s a simple machine at an affordable cost and a reasonable size. There’s a bunch of different elements of it other than the giant [ being developed by these nations], but one that is very cool is that what comes out of the reaction is charged particles, not heat. Almost all other [alternatives], like a coal plant or natural gas plant or whatever, makes heat that drives a steam turbine. Helion makes charged particles that push back on the magnet and drive an electrical current down a wire. There’s no heat cycle at all. And so it can be a much simpler, much more efficient system. And that is missed out of the whole discussion on fusion but [is] really great. It also means we don’t have to deal with much nuclear material. We don’t ever have dangerous waste or even a dangerous system. You could touch it pretty shortly after it turns off. We’ll have more to share there shortly.

Web3 developer activity spiked in Q4 2022 despite market volatility

Jacquelyn Melinek

still grew in the last quarter of 2022, according to a new report, despite crypto market volatility and stacks of negative headlines. Ethereum, one of the largest layer-1 (L1) blockchains in the crypto ecosystem, had a 453% increase in mainnet smart contract deployments in the fourth quarter of 2022, signaling high developer momentum amid crypto market volatility, according to Alchemy’s Web3 Development . “As we saw in Q3 as well, web3 devs are long-term committed to building out this ecosystem because they believe in the technology,” Jason Shah, head of growth at Alchemy, said to TechCrunch. “That durable belief, paired with more reliable infrastructure, better tooling and increasing consumer adoption every quarter, is compelling devs to dig their heels in despite unfavorable market conditions.” The global market capitalization of the crypto market has fallen from over $2 trillion at the beginning of 2022 to about $800 billion by the end of the year, according to CoinMarketCap . The two biggest cryptocurrencies, and , fell 14% and 8.77%, respectively, from the beginning to the end of the fourth quarter. “Specifically in Q4, developers appear to be entering a period where deploying more smart contracts is relevant given product maturity, and post-Merge, there is renewed confidence and more affordable deployment costs,” Shah said.

Clearco co-founder Michele Romanow steps down, cuts 30% of staff

Natasha Mascarenhas

In pursuit of profits, Clearco co-founder has stepped down as chief executive of the company around a year after assuming the official role. The shift comes alongside yet , this time impacting 30% of staff across all teams, Romanow confirms. Now, Clearco only has 140 staff, down from 500 just last year. “We don’t ever lie, we are under the same pressures as every other company to become a profitable business. And so we’ve just continued to make the hard decisions…and continue to be ahead of the curve,” Romanow said in an interview with TechCrunch, explaining the shift. There’s in-house precedent for both of these changes. Clearco has undergone numerous rounds of layoffs over the pandemic, including Additionally, in 2022, Toronto-based fintech saw its other co-founder, Andrew D’Souza, , to be replaced by Romanow. Now, both the co-founders will assume executive chairman positions. With its co-founding team gone, and yet another round of layoffs, Clearco has a, well, clear challenge ahead of it: How does it turn things around, and ? For now, Romanow tells TechCrunch, the answer is discipline. And Andrew Curtis, who will take over the chief executive role at Clearco after spending two decades of his career in the financial services world. Curtis, who is CEO effective today, said in an interview with TechCrunch that “the whole reason I’m here is to push the company toward profitability and cash flow break-even.” While Romanow denied any potential of her perhaps starting a new company given today’s change, she did confirm one detail: the entrepreneur will continue to be on Dragon’s Den, a spin-off of Shark Tank, despite the current kerfuffle. “This is not about me having an ego and needing a certain role,” Romanow said. “I’m a growth CEO, and now we need a CEO that is very financially-driven, and is going to get us to the next period of break-even business.”

A lot of fintechs ‘have to fix their business models,’ say VCs who invest in fintech

Connie Loizos

In recent years, working for, or banking with, a traditional financial institution was decidedly uncool. Far cooler was working for or banking with one of the many fintech startups that seemed to thumb their nose at stodgy bank brands. Then the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates, stocks tanked and a lot of fintech outfits that appeared to be doing well began looking far less . The question begged now is whether fintech as a theme has lost its mojo. According to VCs Mercedes Bent of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Victoria Treyger of Felicis and Jillian Williams of Cowboy Ventures, the answer is resoundingly “no.” In a panel discussion late last week in San Francisco, however, the investors didn’t sugarcoat things. Led by moderator Reed Albergotti — technology editor of the news platform — all three acknowledged a variety of challenges in the industry right now, even as they outlined opportunities. On the challenges front, startups and their backers clearly got ahead of themselves during the pandemic, Albergotti suggested, observing that fintech was “going gangbusters” when “everyone was working from home” and “using lending apps and payment apps” but that times have turned “tough” as COVID has faded into the background. “SoFi is down,” he said. “PayPal is down.” He brought up Frank, the college financial aid platform that was acquired by JPMorgan in the fall of 2021 by blatantly lying to the financial services giant about its user base. Said Albergotti, “They don’t really have 4 million customers.” Williams agreed, but said there are positives and negatives for fintechs right now. On the positive side, she said, “from a consumer standpoint, it’s still rather early days” for fintech startups. She said that “demand and desire from the consumer” still exists for new and better alternatives to traditional financial institutions based on available data. Dani Padgett for StrictlyVC More problematic, said Williams, is “that a lot of these companies have to fix their business models, and a lot of the ones that went public probably should not have. A lot of the usage is still there, but some of the fundamentals need to be shifted.” (Many outfits, for example, spent too heavily on marketing, or right now face rising delinquency costs, having used comparatively loose underwriting standards compared with some of their traditional counterparts.) Further, Williams added, “The banks are not dumb. I do think they have awakened and continue to wake up to things they can do better.” Treyger also voiced concerns. “Certain sectors of financial services are going to have a brutal year ahead,” she said, “and in particular lending. We will see very large losses coming through in lending . . . because unfortunately, it’s like a triple whammy: consumers lose their jobs, interest rates [rise] and the cost of capital is higher.” It’s a challenge for a lot of players, including bigger outfits, Treyger said, noting that “even the big banks announced that they are doubling their loan loss reserves.” Still, she said, it could prove worse for young fintechs, many of which have “have not managed through a downturn — they started lending in the last six years or so,” which is where she expects to “see the most casualties.” Bent, who leads a lot of Lightspeed’s Latin America investments and is on the boards of two Mexico-based fintechs, seemed the most sanguine of the group, suggesting that while U.S. fintechs may be facing serious headwinds, fintech outfits outside the U.S. are continuing to perform well, perhaps because there were fewer alternatives to begin with. It “just depends which country you’re in,” said Bent, noting that the U.S. has “one of the highest adoptions of fintech and wealth management services, whereas in Asia, they are actually much higher in lending and their consumer fintech services.” Either way, it’s not all doom and gloom, said all three. Treyger recounted, for example, that before becoming a VC, she was part of the founding team at SMB lender Kabbage. There, “once a month, we would meet with the new innovation arm that has just been formed by bank XYZ,” she said with a laugh. “And they would want to learn how you get ideas and how to drive innovation.” What “happens in a downturn is CEOs and CFOs cut back on the areas that are not critical,” Treyger continued, “and I think what’s going to happen, is that all of these innovation arms are going to be cut.” When they are, she said, it will create “significant opportunity for fintechs that are building products that basically add to the bottom line.” CFOs, after all, are “all about profitability. So, how do you reduce fraud rates? How do you improve payment reconciliation? That’s where I think there is a lot of opportunity in 2023.” If you’re a fintech founder, investor or regulator, you might want to catch the full conversation — which also touches on regulation, talent in the industry and crypto — below.

The slow-burn standardization of venture capital

Natasha Mascarenhas

It took me a while, but I’m realizing that my startup love language is discussing any attempts to standardize the opaque and often informal world of venture capital. The clear tension is what entices me: How do you automate a process such as writing checks, which requires human buy-in and the art of trust in a way that leaves both parties happy. There are funds Or tools that help startups see all their Or, as I covered this week, a tool for startups that lets companies simultaneously blast out the same application — or pitch — to multiple angel and pre-seed investors. The tool, started by pre-seed firm Afore Capital, is based on which sends one application to multiple colleges and universities. Afore’s take on the idea is to help founders rapidly pitch expert investors while also helping those investors get differentiated deal flow on a consistent basis. While it appears to be a low-stakes instrument — free for both parties to use — ease can sometimes come with a side of questions. Is Afore being too altruistic and sharing its intel? Does a blast offer the same signal as a warm intro? Afore general partner Anamitra Banerji thinks that a funding-focused version of Common App will solve a classic conundrum: What happens when a startup isn’t a fit for your firm but is still a smart company that may make sense for your climate-focused emerging fund manager friend? Sometimes, those smart companies get lost in the cracks — think about the number of companies that don’t get into Y Combinator by a razor-thin margin — instead of being passed on to another firm. Originally, Afore was thinking about sending companies that didn’t make it to its accelerator program to its network of outside investors. But Banerji said that now Afore sends startup applications to the network as soon as they submit, meaning that Afore sees it at the same time as other pre-seed investors. “We’re taking the risk of exposing it to everyone else in the group and maybe losing the deal and allocation and things like that … but that kind of demonstrates to them, to us, that we’re not only sending them things we have passed on,” Banerji said. You can read my whole piece on TechCrunch+: DM me on or if you want a discount code for TC+. In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll talk about Carta, investor’s secret workflows and when the Kardashian strategy doesn’t quite work. , alleging that he sent and received “sexually explicit, offensive, discriminatory and harassing messages with at least nine women including during work hours and on Carta’s systems.” The lawsuit isn’t the only sign that Carta may be dealing with internal strife. The company confirmed that it had to lay off 10% of its staff in its second known workforce reduction over the pandemic. It doesn’t help that several users of Carta’s services, which range from cap table management to fund administration, have been less than impressed by the platform in the recent months. who was transitioning away from the platform and who claims that his team had four different account managers in a less than two years, which “certainly didn’t help with continuity and understanding of our fund and needs.” Carta FTX’s infamous founder and former chief executive this week. As my colleague Mary Ann Azevedo noted, it’s “a very unusual move for someone who was recently arrested and is facing eight counts of U.S. criminal charges.” As we discussed on Equity, is not going to work for this former billionaire. There’s a weird sentiment around SBF’s actions lately, whether it’s calling him for pleading not guilty or laughing at his Substack. that adds levity to a situation that ultimately should be taken quite seriously. Him starting a Substack is no different; we’re all talking about it, thinking about him sidestepping his lawyer. But what if this isn’t as radical as we think? What if SBF sees that his noisy, outward conversation gets noticed, covered and amplified every time he speaks up, just because no one else has before? It’s a distraction; one that we may see more of until his expected trial in October. Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency / Getty Images You’ve probably been reading a lot about ChatGPT, OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tool that achieved virality with its savvy messaging ability. The tool, recently made available to the general public, is smart enough to answer serious and silly questions about profound topics, which has landed it in debates led by writers, educators, artists and more. But beyond the initial excitement around the tool, I wanted to follow up on if it is actually making its way into people’s workflows. So, I dug into in a piece for TC+ with Kyle Wiggers and Christine Hall. Some investors expressed that ChatGPT could be used for fact-checking purposes around market-size claims or growth potential; at the same time, so could Google. , of course, would be that the content would be original and perhaps more targeted toward someone’s exact questions, while a general Google search may require extra digging and piecing different articles together. As a nod toward the beginning of this newsletter, ChatGPT could be looked at as yet another way that venture tries to automate itself. It just depends on if investors think it is smart enough to reject startups, or if feedback is valued as the key currency of network building. Carol Yepes / Getty Images With that, I’m off to enjoy a weekend in Providence with some old friends. New England, how I missed you, your indulgently cozy weather and nostalgic streets. Chat soon,

Boston Dynamics’ latest Atlas video demos a robot that can run, jump and now grab and throw

Matt Burns

Boston Dynamics just released the latest demo of its humanoid robot, Atlas. The robot could already run and jump over complex terrain thanks to its feet. Now, the robot has hands, per se. These rudimentary grippers give the robot new life. Suddenly, instead of being an agile pack mule, the Atlas becomes something closer to a human, with the ability to pick up and drop off anything it can grab independently. The claw-like gripper consists of one fixed finger and one moving finger. Boston Dynamics says the grippers were designed for heavy lifting tasks and were first demonstrated in a Super Bowl commercial where Atlas held a keg over its head. The videos released today show the grippers picking up construction lumber and a nylon tool bag. Next, the Atlas picks up a 2×8 and places it between two boxes to form a bridge. The Atlas then picks up a bag of tools and dashes over the bridge and through construction scaffolding. But the tool bag needs to go to the second level of the structure — something Atlas apparently realized and quickly throws the bag a considerable distance. Boston Dynamics describes this final maneuver: “Atlas’ concluding move, an inverted 540-degree, multi-axis flip, adds asymmetry to the robot’s movement, making it a much more difficult skill than previously performed parkour.” Boston Dynamic’s Atlas is a research platform, and not available for purchase. It’s long been the star of many viral videos, and has effectively demonstrated Boston Dynamic’s robotic capabilities. In the small world of humanoid robotics, few competitors have shown similar capabilities of the Atlas. Only NASA’s Robonaut offers similar hand-like grippers.  

Nest co-founder Matt Rogers’ new startup is trash

Tim De Chant

next 20 years of my life. This is not like, build the company in four or five years and sell to Google. This is a big, long journey.” , who co-founded Nest with Tony Fadell back in 2010, was talking about his new startup, and he thinks it’ll be big. He’s probably right, but it’s also trash, in a way. Today, Rogers, co-founder and the rest of the team at are launching their first product. At first glance, it doesn’t look like much, maybe a sleek trash can. That’s not an unfair assessment, but the Mill bin is a lot more than just a receptacle. Mill’s kitchen bin gobbles up food scraps, dries them out and grinds them to bits overnight. It also neutralizes odors with a charcoal filter. When the bin is full, Mill automatically mails a box to return the waste back to the company, where it’s cleaned, sifted, pasteurized and bagged to be sold as chicken feed to farmers. The goal is to eliminate the climate impact of food waste. “This feels like the most tractable of all climate problems,” Rogers said. “We don’t need to invent nuclear fusion. We don’t need to figure out how to build a low weight aviation fuel. It’s just like, don’t put food in the trash.”

Sequoia injects $195 million into an ever-eager seed environment

Natasha Mascarenhas

, a storied venture capital firm, that it has launched a $195 million dedicated seed fund, its fifth. The vehicle will be used to back founders across the United States and Europe; the capital will also be used to invest in future cohorts or its program, an internal Sequoia initiative that invests between $500,000 and $1 million into rising founders across the world and that’s currently . The capital comes as the pre-seed and seed world, already a growing part of the startup ecosystem, becomes even more attractive to investors who want to steer clear of the turbulence of the later-stage market. AngelList data, tells part of the story, noting median pre-seed valuations held consistent quarter over quarter last year while later-stage deals, such as Series B, fell by nearly a third. Jess Lee, a Sequoia partner and All Raise co-founder, said that the firm will be looking at all verticals for potential outlier founders, but specifically called out artificial intelligence and consumer social as two areas she’s investing in. announcing the seed fund, other partners similarly hinted at areas of interest. Alfred Lin pointed to augmented reality and virtual reality as the makings of the “next consumer platform to drive wide-scale innovation.” Shaun Maguire said that “hardware will always have my heart.” Roelof Botha, the , kept it simple, writing in the post that he’s looking for founders who are taking advantage of a more disciplined market, and the decreasing cost of automation, artificial intelligence and even genetic sequencing. In an email exchange this morning, Sequoia partner Stephanie Zhan said that it’s “never too early to partner with Sequoia. We want to meet founders right at the beginning of their thought process” and to “play an active role early on: fleshing out ideas, posing questions as food for thought, introducing them to potential customers, and dreaming together about their vision.” Zhan noted that Sequoia has written seed checks into a number of once-fledgling startups that developed into major brands, including Airbnb (Sequoia initially invested around $600,000 in the company); Dropbox (it plugged in around $950,000 early on) and Nubank ($1 million). Zhan observed that Sequoia also partnered with the still-private payments giant Stripe “when they didn’t have a single line of code”; it was the first investor in WhatsApp; and Palo Alto Networks and YouTube were incubated at its offices. Sequoia, like many firms, has seen its portfolio humbled during the downturn, which may impact how partners are handling due diligence and sourcing in the year ahead. Just this past week, Sequoia-backed company , with its founder admitting in a LinkedIn post that the outfit made “grave errors in judgment as we followed growth at all costs.” Other Sequoia portfolio companies with sizable cuts include Bounce, Ola and well, FTX. Indeed, Sequoia’s $200 million investment in FTX has brought fair criticism to the firm’s decision-making track record. Lin, who TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos interviewed last week at her StrictlyVC event, said the experience hasn’t soured Sequoia’s interest in crypto. Though he said that just 10% of Sequoia’s crypto fund has been deployed one year after it was launched, he added that Sequoia remains “long-term optimistic” about crypto. Lin also told Loizos that “not-so-fun years are the best times to invest, because all of the tourists are gone,” a sentiment that Zhan echoed today in her exchange with TC. Wrote Zhan: “The end of the frothy market of recent years is a positive. Constraints breed creativity and discipline. Many of today’s most transformative companies were founded during periods of uncertainty, and we believe the same to be true now.”

Pitch Deck Teardown: Scrintal’s $1M seed deck

Haje Jan Kamps

of tools for brainstorming, collaboration and keeping all your knowledge in one place. Still, judging from the number of new tools that come to market on a regular basis, it seems that people are frustrated with the available tools. recently to build its visual collaborative knowledge base tool and shared its deck for us to take a peek under the hood. Scrintal is entering a crowded and chaotic market; without really trying, I can name five or six well-established competitors in that space. The good news is that the company seems to know that and tackles its advantages head-on. [Slide 6] Having a clear value prop helps tell the story. : Scrintal [Slide 7] Scrintal does a great job at making its early customers do the bulk of the storytelling. : Scrintal The stats shown on the slide (66% fewer apps used, 50% less time spent, 30% fewer meetings) tell one part of the story. The headlines tell another. The quotes are helpful for filling out the story even further, and even doing a quick skim of the job titles of the people sharing the testimonials helps give an impression of the breadth of how the companies are able to draw benefits from Scrintal. I presume that the places it says “user name” are redacted and that the “real” deck shows the names and businesses that are using the product, but even without that, it shows how well you can use testimonials and user interviews to your favor. For startups, this slide is a lesson in how to think creatively about sharing your journey to date with potential investors. I’m not in love with how much text there is on this slide — you wouldn’t want to use this for a presentation deck — but it’s a great slide for a send-home deck. It adds a lot of context and does so in a way that is super easy to understand even without a voice-over or additional information. [Slide 13] Including a clear vision for the near future is helpful. : Scrintal This slide isn’t a complete slam dunk, however, and there are a few things that could be improved. I wish the vision was clearer: “transform the way 1B+ people create ideas” is pretty fluffy. Yes, the company wants to transform it, but from what to what, and why? It’s also a little confusing to me why the company is talking about the European market only — it’s a big world out there, and the company’s pricing is in U.S. dollars, so seeing the “platform expansion” limit itself is confusing. In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Scrintal could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck! One of the big things investors are looking for when evaluating a startup is whether it is able to gradually de-risk what it is doing, stage by stage. A million dollars isn’t a huge fundraising round by most standards, and the company is likely at the earliest stages of its value-creation journey. That means that the deck needs to make something pretty clear: What is it doing in the current stage to prove some of its hypotheses? Sadly, the Scrintal deck is a little lacking on that front.

What’s next for the entrepreneur behind Layoffs.FYI

Theresa Loconsolo

Hello and welcome back to , a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single person, think about their work and unpack the rest. This week, interviewed , an entrepreneur who’s spent the better part of a decade building tools for employees and employers alike. Lee is the creator of and co-founder of and . Here’s what we got into:

Sophia Amoruso launches Trust Fund for founders

Natasha Mascarenhas

creator of and , has , has empowered generations of women and has — the last of which she doesn’t necessarily recommend to other founders because “it’s a distraction.” She’s also raised down rounds, run out of venture capital funding, and “I’ve seen the full gamut of what worked and what didn’t,” the entrepreneur said in an interview with TechCrunch. “It’s the not-so-great stuff that I can often help founders anticipate, or just avoid.” It’s her high-profile and rocky experience in Silicon Valley’s spotlight that has finally given Amoruso the operating experience needed to launch her own venture firm, Trust Fund, named ironically, Amoruso says, because “nobody handed anything” to her, is launching with a $5 million target, targeting a check size between $50,000 to $150,000. She’s already landed checks from the who’s who in tech. Prominent investors include a slew of a16z partners such as Marc Andreessen, Andrew Chen and Chris Dixon, entrepreneur Ev Williams and icon Paris Hilton, as well as support from investors Ryan Hoover and Cleo Capital’s Sarah Kunst. Trust Fund is looking to back digital consumer companies, and has already put money into an undisclosed workplace collaboration tool. Amoruso has been angel investing for four years, and has put $1 million of her own capital into 23 startups, including Pipe, Liquid Death and Public. “As a small fund, I am not necessarily looking for diamonds in the rough,” Amoruso said. She noted that other funds have the resources to do more due diligence and legitimize companies, while Trust Fund will look for social proof in some way. She prefers lean companies that make money and behave like they’re bootstrapped. Alongside the launch, Amoruso tells TechCrunch that she is dedicating a $1 million allocation of the fund to people outside of her network. Accredited investors are to write checks, between $2,000 and $10,000, into the debut investment vehicle. She’s looking for diversity on her cap table — “because there’s a lot more women who can write $2,000 checks than there are who can write $200,000 checks.” Community raise aside, she doesn’t have a diversity mandate when it comes to portfolio construction. “I plan to invest in men and women, and everything in between. And if anything, like why not invest in the privilege and ride the coattails of a dude?” Amoruso said. “As a woman, why wouldn’t I want to invest in the advantage that a man has, like, feel free to publish that — it’s true.” While the entrepreneur is certainly looking outward to fuel her next venture, she’s also looking inward. A large part of Amoruso’s brand is associated with Girlboss, a word she coined to describe self-made, entrepreneurial women. Girlboss became a memoir, company, Netflix show and movement associated with empowerment — before it twisted into a sexist trope, used to describe controversies around high-profile women in leadership, often stepping down from their posts. Amoruso is no exception from this volatility. The entrepreneur stepped down from her company, Nasty Gal, in 2015 after being embroiled in multiple legal suits, as well as the difficulties of a growth at all costs mindset. “I’ve raised too high of a valuation at Nasty Gal, we were doing $12 million in revenue profitably when Index valued us at $350 million. The expectation of the next raise was to be at a billion-dollar-plus valuation was unrealistic.” When asked about Girlboss, Amoruso said that it “was a huge part of my story. But also…at what point can I tell a new story?” The entrepreneur views her past as both a fading story, and a competitive advantage, adding that she doesn’t “consider honesty a risk.” Among the attributes that the Trust Fund advertises as a value-add, she included: “building a non-shitty culture because we’ve done it wrong… and right” and “navigating the media when they love you and when they don’t.” What’s clear is that similar to her past endeavors, the Amoruso brand is what is getting people to bet on her again. She has more than 120,000 newsletter subscribers, over 100,000 followers on Twitter and well over half a million followers. It’s a following she believes she can use to “evangelize” her portfolio companies, similar to celebrities, but also with operating experience that founders value during a downturn. A16z’s , who says he invested personally in Amoruso’s new fund, described her as a “0-1 founder who’s seen and done it all…[there are] very few people who’ve done all this and want to dedicate their career to helping the next gen of founders.”

Shein valuation reportedly plummets by a third as it seeks $3B

Rita Liao

Shein, the fast fashion behemoth that has swept across the world, is raising a significant down round as the startup world . The e-commerce platform known for jaw-dropping outfit prices and savvy TikTok marketing is seeking $3 billion at a valuation of $64 billion, down from the , according to . Shein denies the accuracy of some of the information, a spokesperson for the firm told TechCrunch when asked to confirm details from the report. One must wonder which part of the report got it wrong. To be fair, Shein’s plunging valuation is not an abnormality in today’s e-commerce world. Pinduoduo, the marketplace that has managed to threaten the dominance of Alibaba’s Taobao in China by offering attractive deals, has seen its market cap plunge to around $100 billion from a peak of $240 billion in February 2021. Pinduoduo is now pinning its hope on its sister platform for overseas shoppers, Temu, which is Sea, which operates the Southeast Asia-focused e-commerce giant Shopee, has lost over 80% of its market cap since November 2021. Shopee cut roughly 7,000 jobs within just six months to offset losses, Bloomberg in November. Compared to other e-commerce counterparts, Shein’s drawdown doesn’t look too terrible. Shein is still planning to forge ahead with its IPO, which could launch as early as this year, according to the FT report. There is a lot for Shein, which emerged from China’s reckless, cut-throat world of export e-commerce, to sort out before going public. The company has been preparing. For one, it has , at a time when China tightens up regulations around overseas listings and cross-border data transfers, and as U.S. regulators heighten scrutiny over China-related tech companies. Shein has also its ESG — environmental, social and governance — efforts. But it’s unclear how the firm can remake itself to be “socially responsible” without disrupting its business model, namely, fast fashion, which is fundamentally destructive to the environment. Multiple investors TechCrunch previously talked to also pointed to potential “accounting compliance” issues, as China’s clothing manufacturing industry is notorious for murky invoicing practices and tax evasion.

Build a company, not a feature

Haje Jan Kamps

are incredible idea generators and hackers; they have a knack for seeing something that’s broken or something that could be better and creating a solution around that. The problem is this: It’s rare that even very good features make good companies. It’s rarer still that companies built on a feature make for VC-investable companies with the potential for VC-scale returns. A lot of no-code products fall into this category. So do you have a company or merely a feature? Let’s explore the red flags investors will look for to determine which bucket your startup falls into. A nontrivial percentage of the companies that come to me for advice about how to make their pitch decks better have a problem far bigger than a subpar deck. Fundamentally, the idea doesn’t work as a VC-scale startup; and if that is true, it doesn’t really matter how good your idea is. You will never raise money because ultimately, . The red flags fall into three categories: Let’s take a closer look at all three scenarios, as well as how you can evaluate whether these conditions are true for your company.

7 space tech predictions for 2023

Mark Boggett

industry have recently set their sights on direct-to-mobile connectivity from space. While it’s still a very early market with limited existing capabilities, companies such as Apple, T-Mobile, Globalstar, SpaceX, AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global are targeting this area. Multiple mobile network operators are already on board, even before some of the first operational spacecraft have been launched. Apple has partnered with Globalstar to provide , and to begin low-earth orbit (LEO) connectivity in 2023 through SpaceX, which recently filed an application with the US FCC to include direct-to-cellular capabilities in its Gen 2 Starlink satellites. Amazon is also set to launch its first batch of LEO satellites for . Most of these early projects will not provide high-speed broadband from space, and will instead offer low-bandwidth connectivity suitable for emergency calls and texts. All of this aims to service the currently underserved population around the world, which does not live within reach of traditional cell tower networks. Extensive government and commercial efforts are underway to head “back to the Moon” decades after the Apollo program finished in 1972. This has been kicked off by NASA’s Artemis program, which saw the returning to Earth after spending almost a month traveling around the Moon. At almost the same time, the first fully-privately-funded lunar mission was launched by SpaceX for Japanese company iSpace, which is taking a fuel-efficient trip to the Moon and is due to get there in April. This would be the first fully commercial mission to land on the Moon, a milestone in the cooperation between Japan and the U.S. in space. Other commercial companies, such as Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic, are also targeting Moon landings. With the first commercial companies headed moonward alongside national efforts, we expect 2023 to be a breakthrough year for the cislunar ecosystem. Developments in the defense, cybersecurity and climate sectors will prove to be strong tailwinds for revenues in spacetech in 2023. Record growth in defense budgets driven by the war in Ukraine and rising geopolitical tensions will drive business, and governments’ increasing desire for sovereign capability from space assets will lead to some huge orders in the sector. And, since cybersecurity is another tool in the geopolitical toolbox, satellite resilience against attacks is a priority. A growing reliance on datasets generated in orbit means the security demands for the flow of data from the satellite to the cloud and ground stations are growing exponentially. We see 2023 as the year when the industry embraces quantum capabilities.

Crypto.com cuts 20% jobs amid ‘significant damage’ to industry from FTX

Manish Singh

Crypto exchange Crypto.com is cutting its global workforce by 20%, it said on Friday, as it navigates ongoing economic headwinds and “unforeseeable” industry events. This is the second major layoff at the Singapore-headquartered Crypto.com, which cut — though a suggested that more than 2,000 people were either let go or left at their own will. The company did not say what roles were being eliminated in the new round of layoffs but blamed the , whose misappropriation of customers’ funds and bankruptcy “significantly damaged trust in the industry.” “We grew ambitiously at the start of 2022, building on our incredible momentum and aligning with the trajectory of the broader industry. That trajectory changed rapidly with a confluence of negative economic developments,” Kris Marszalek (pictured above), co-founder and chief executive of Crypto.com, in a blog post. As with firms in other industries, crypto companies are aggressively undertaking major decisions to survive the downturn in the broader market, which has reversed much of the gains from the 13-year bull run. Coinbase in its second round of major layoffs at the firm. Kraken said in November that it , or 30% of its workforce. Even then Crypto.com had a especially rough last year. The firm received some criticism for its cringey/overly enthusiastic Matt Damon ad; accidentally sent an Australian customer more than $10 million in a snafu and grappled with industry concerns over its financial health performance. The firm received a vote of confidence from auditing firm Mazars, which said Crypto.com users’ crypto assets were fully backed one-to-one. But days later, Mazars, which also audited Binance, said it had paused its work with crypto clients. “The reductions we made last July positioned us to weather the macro economic downturn, but it did not account for the recent collapse of FTX, which significantly damaged trust in the industry. It’s for this reason, as we continue to focus on prudent financial management, we made the difficult but necessary decision to make additional reductions in order to position the company for long-term success,” Marszalek added.

Vimeo enters 2023 with a round of layoffs impacting 11% of employees

Lauren Forristal

rings in the new year with another round of , affecting 11% of its workforce. In an email to staff today, CEO Anjali Sud an “uncertain economic environment” as the reason for the reduction. “This was a very hard decision that impacts each of us deeply. It is also the right thing to do to enable Vimeo to be a more focused and successful company … It positions us to both invest in our growth priorities and be sustainably profitable while continuing to innovate to bring the power of video to every business in the world,” Sud wrote. She added that impacted employees were told via individual emails and were sent an invitation to meet with their team leader and a member of human resources. Employees in the Sales and Research & Development departments made up the majority of the layoffs. This isn’t the first round of layoffs for the video hosting platform, which cut of its staff in July 2022. Since the July layoffs, Vimeo has seen a “further deterioration in economic conditions, in the form of prolonged geopolitical conflict, rising interest rates, and global recession fears,” Sud said. In November, the company its third-quarter earnings, showing a loss of about 100,000 subscribers from the and an operating loss of $22.9 million. However, Sud is confident that Vimeo can make a comeback. “We are entering 2023 with a more focused strategy to simplify Vimeo, and ultimately, our team size and composition needs to reflect that focus,” she wrote. “This reduction enables us to achieve our growth and profitability goals in a way that is far less dependent on the broader market, putting us in full control of our destiny.” In May of last year, Vimeo went on the New York Stock Exchange. Launched in 2004, Vimeo now claims over 260 million users, including big corporations, small businesses, organizations and content creators. As of , Vimeo employed 1,219 full-time workers, per its annual regulatory filing. Vimeo joins the growing list of tech companies that have downsized in the past few months, from and to , and more.

Fintech in 2022: A story of falling funding, fewer unicorns and insurtech M&A

Mary Ann Azevedo

Meanwhile, global venture funding reached $415.1 billion in 2022, marking a 35% drop from a record 2021.

Gas, Slay, what’s next? Fire?

Natasha Mascarenhas

Hello and welcome back to  , a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week,     and  jumped on the mic to talk through a diverse news week. Shout-out to our producer, Theresa Loconsolo, for putting together a script, and TC’s Andrew Mendez for this feedback: “Y’all slayyyed  that recording and honestly can’t wait to   you all up on social media when this  episode drops.” Yes, we’re talking about Gen Z, and yes, if you can’t already tell, we had fun on this week’s recording: On that note, we appreciate you all and thank you for the refreshing flood of feedback and compliments to start off the year. It always makes our day, and we hope we can lighten up and inform yours.

Kenyan fintech Kwara raises $3M seed extension, signs deal to reach over 4,000 credit unions

Annie Njanja

, a Kenyan fintech digitizing credit unions (Saccos), more than doubled its client base last year, and it’s eyeing enormous growth in the coming years after raising a $3 million seed extension and signing an exclusive digital solutions distribution agreement with the Kenya Union of Savings & Credit Cooperatives (Kuscco), the national umbrella body representing Saccos. Following the Kuscco partnership, Kwara said it has gained connections to a pool of over 4,000 Saccos for its banking-as-a-service offering. As part of the exclusive deal, Kwara is also set to acquire Kuscco’s subsidiary IRNET, a software company and provider for Saccos, for an undisclosed amount. Kwara says the Kuscco deal comes at the right time in its plan to double down on Kenya. “We think we’ve barely scratched the surface in the Kenyan market. And so, we are just going to be really investing in products and services that deepen our relationship here,” Kwara co-founder and CEO told TechCrunch. “The rationale (of the deal) is clear, first it is an opportunity to generate leads and distribute our core product as fast, and to deepen our competitive moat. We’re entering an exclusive partnership, which also means no other tech company will be able to market with Kuscco. They are stacking their bets on us but we have been able to prove that we can do it as we continue to grow,” said Wandia, who co-founded the fintech with (COO) in 2019. The seed extension round had the participation of existing investors DOB Equity, Globivest and Willard Ahdritz, the founder of Kobalt Music. New backers One Day Yes, Base Capital, as well as fintech executives, including Mikko Salovaara, the CFO of Revolut, also joined the round. The new funding brings the total seed amount raised by the startup to Initial round saw participation of several investors, including Breega, SoftBank Vision Fund Emerge, Finca Ventures, and New General Market Partners. Kwara, which also has a presence in South Africa and the Philippines, has grown its clientele base to 120 from 50 at the end of 2021, maintaining a 100% customer retention — a proof of the value it delivers to its clients. The automated onboarding process, the startup says, has ensured customer success and growth. Kwara’s product upgrades the back-office operations of credit unions helping them to shift away from tedious paper-based processes and physical branches, opening up new avenues for them to sign up new members and create novel products. The company also has a next-generation neobank app that gives members of partner credit unions access to additional services such as instant loans and third-party services such as insurance. It said the user base of the neobank app, which also allows users to deposit money directly into their Sacco accounts, and track their finances and payments, has grown 35-fold since launch last year. The fintech is planning on adding more features to cater to the Saccos, and additional products for the neobank app users too. “We continue to ship more or less enterprise grade features for the large saccos that are well capitalized, the ones who are at the same size and level as some of the banks. There are specific features they need and specific ways they need to be taken care of so we will continue investing in that,” said Wandia, adding that Kwara is also investing on improving the neo-banking experience. They are set to add more features that will help members build “a personalized view of their own goals and really start working towards achieving them.” They will also sign more third-party partnerships to add more value to the app users. “We believe that every time a sacco member leaves their sacco to get another service just because the sacco doesn’t provide it is a missed opportunity for that member to actually profit from the returns of that product. All income earned on those products actually flows back to the members as dividends,” she added. Credit unions are formed by people with a common interest or members of an industry, like farmers or teachers, who buy shares in the institution, save money and take loans. They are popular especially in developing regions due to their low-interest-rate loans and ease in accessing credit when compared to conventional banks. In Kenya, only 175 deposit-taking saccos are licensed, as a vast majority remain unregulated.

Link raises $30M to help merchants accept direct bank payments

Kyle Wiggers

People are to credit cards — and it’s no wonder, given the lucrative rewards that many of them offer. But for merchants, credit cards tend to be less appealing. That’s because they’re on the hook for interchange fees, or transaction fees a merchant’s bank must pay whenever a customer uses a card to make a purchase. Some interchange fees can exceed 3%. That got Eric Shoykhet and Edward Lando thinking. The two entrepreneurs — friends since their first day as Wharton undergraduates — for years closely followed the adoption of open banking and bank account-based payments in Europe. They came to the conclusion the same thing would ultimately transpire in the U.S., and that the timing was right to launch a stateside startup — — to ride the wave. “It became evident through early discussions with partner merchants that [our idea] was a game changer for them,” Shoykhet said. “That made us step on the pedal and recruit a product, engineering and sales team across San Francisco, Austin, Miami and New York City with payments knowledge from a range of backgrounds.” Link claims to be one of the first companies in the U.S. to enable customers to make online payments using their bank accounts. Since its founding, it’s attracted interest from investors including Valar Ventures, Tiger Global, Amplo, Pareto Holdings, Quiet Capital and Shutterstock co-founder and CEO Jon Oringer. Valar led a $20 million Series A funding round in Link while Tiger led a $10 million seed round; to date, Link has raised $30 million. “Link effectively combines the best of cards with the benefits of via open banking,” Shoykhet told TechCrunch in an email interview. “From day one, Link focused on building an enterprise-grade solution that is always available and works as expected every time so merchants can trust us with their payment processing.” Merchants can build Link into their existing purchase flows, whether web- or app-based. (Link also offers a Shopify app.) Alternatively, merchants can accept payments via a Link-hosted checkout page using a “dynamic links” feature to generate and share payment links with customers. Link customers pay by bank transfer, sending funds directly from their bank to a merchant’s business account. Link guarantees the funds, taking on customers’ credit risk — an AI model tries to identify potentially fraudulent or risky transactions before they’re processed. The Link experience. Customers sign up with their bank account information and pay within the flow. Link “We offer various dashboards that allow merchants to easily monitor payment activity, generate reports and more,” Shoykhet said. “We also offer APIs for merchants that have specific needs to consume their transaction data in a certain way.” Link is promising a lot, including reduced chargebacks, reduced churn and coverage of roughly 95% of all bank accounts in the U.S. Whether it delivers on all those fronts remains to be seen, but many merchants — who paid $25 billion in fees last year — appear convinced. Shoykhet says that Link already has “several billion” in annual payment volume committed from brands including Misfits Market, Play By Point, Thrivos and Passport Parking. “LinkPay is a complex product that involves interacting with multiple third-party services and managing the state of transactions. However, this complexity is hidden behind a simple software development kit, which is what matters to merchants most,” Shoykhet said. Shoykhet acknowledges that there’s formidable competition in the payments space — not only from incumbents like Venmo, Amazon and PayPal but from buy now, pay later vendors such as Afterpay and Klarna. Recently, Discover into the accounts-to-accounts space, partnering with payments fintech Buy It Mobility so that its partner merchants can accept card-free payments. One has the digital payments market growing to a whopping $20 trillion by 2026, driven both by new and existing vendors. Other data volume on ACH — the backbone of U.S.-based electronic money and finance data transfers — increased 8.7% year-over-year alone in 2021, and that transactions by open banking could hit $116 billion globally by 2026. But Shoykhet welcomes the rivalry. “ To Asked about macroeconomic headwinds, “We started in the pandemic, so there isn’t a measurable impact,” Shoykhet added. “An economic slowdown is likely to accelerate adoption of pay-by-bank and Link as companies look to cut costs and focus more on profitability.” With the funds from the recently closed Series A, Shoykhet says that Link will launch account verification, which will verify bank accounts and ownership information to bring merchants in compliance with Nacha’s new . (Nacha is the organization that manages the development and governance of the ACH network.)

P2P lending platform PeopleFund raises $20M Series C extension led by Bain Capital

Kate Park

a South Korean marketplace that connects borrowers and investors to enable lending, has recently added $20 million to its $63.4 million . Existing backer Bain Capital led the extension, with participation from previous investors such as Access Ventures, CLSA Capital Partners Lending Ark Asia, D3 Jubilee Partners, 500 Global, Kakao Investment, TBT Partners and IBX Partners. The additional funding brings PeopleFund’s total raised to around $100 million in equity. Apart from the capital, PeopleFund also secured $240 million in debt financing in 2022 from Goldman Sachs, CLSA Lending Ark Asia and Bain Capital. The company did not disclose its valuation when asked. In 2021, PeopleFund (75.9 billion won) in equity for Series C, also led by Bain Capital, to further develop its credit-scoring system. PeopleFund plans to use its new capital to continue to advance its AI-powered risk management and credit scoring system for its users, which includes borrowers and lenders. On top of that, the startup aims to launch a B2B service this year to provide AI-enabled customized credit scoring system services to financial institutions. Another reason for its runway extension is to meet one of the requirements for a P2P lending license, according to industry sources. In South Korea, P2P lending marketplaces must pass yearly requirements to get a license from Financial Services Commission (FSC) to run their business. To operate its business in 2023, PeopleFund, which reports that it is making a profit loss, must own a minimum capital ranging from $400,000 to $2.4 million, depending on its loan balance. (The loan balance is the remaining amount of loans made by PeopleFund that the borrowers have not yet repaid.) PeopleFund’s loan balance was $264.3 million (326.8 billion won) as of December 2022, the company said. That means the outfit’s requirement capital is around $1.5 million to $2.4 million, according to the industry sources and local media. Joey Kim, founder of PeopleFund, said in a statement that “2022 will be marked as a year of turbulence for fintech, with the global public market adjustment alongside changes in the macro environment. Meanwhile, the Korean consumer lending market has undergone a dramatic transition into the mobile sphere, with big players like KakaoPay and Toss leading the change. This transition, coupled with the instability of the credit market, is opening up opportunities for tech-based digital lenders and its technologies to highlight our competence compared to traditional financial institutions.” PeopleFund The outfit says its total amount of loans deployed to borrowers to date was estimated at $1.3 billion in December, up from $936 billion in October 2021. The startup says it has seen more than 56.7% growth in the number of borrowers and 9.6% in the number of lenders compared to the previous year. The number of its borrowers and lenders was 20,688 and 2,943,883, respectively, as of December last year. The Seoul-based P2P lending startup, founded in 2015, successfully closed its extension. Still, the impact of the extremely tough market condition was inevitable, leading to several tech industry layoffs in the last few months. PeopleFund confirmed that it had cut about 10% of its staff in the fourth quarter of 2022 to “operate the business efficiently and effectively” amid the possibility of a worsening economy. PeopleFund had nearly 150 people as of December 2021.

Despite 2022’s headwinds, women’s health startups did better than ever before

Dominic-Madori Davis

months since Roe vs. Wade was overturned, and the dust has barely begun to settle. Politically, voters have expressed their for a person’s right to access abortion. Grassroots campaigns continue, and technology-wise, innovation in the wider women’s health sector is . But have things improved at all for the sector? Or has the souring of sentiment across the political spectrum only scared investors off? TechCrunch conducted a vibe check to see where this sector stands, and found a prevailing sense of guarded optimism. For Oriana Papin-Zoghbi, CEO and co-founder of early ovarian cancer detection company AOA, the sector has tons of potential to grow, but raising capital remains a challenge, as some investors still as a “niche market.” However, things are changing slowly but surely: “Women still comprise the majority of investors who most deeply understand our product, but we are luckily seeing an increase in the general population who are interested in investing,” Papin-Zoghbi told TechCrunch. She closed a $7 million seed round last year and is now raising a Series A. “We still have a very long way to go in changing opinions about the importance of investing in women’s health. We are not a niche market as 50% of the population.” Janna Meyrowitz Turner, the founder of Synastry Capital, echoed similar sentiments. She noted that women’s health startups are looking for funding, turning to avenues such as family offices, corporate venture capital, and crowdfunding. She’s also heard conversations about strategic mergers and joint ventures. “I foresee capital to healthcare companies increasing in 2023,” she told TechCrunch. “But I’m not as optimistic when it comes to misogyny in the investment and medical fields shifting as quickly as public sentiment has on things like abortion or even health benefits of the female orgasm.” The funding for women’s healthcare companies doesn’t look all that bad, though. According to PitchBook, such startups raised around $1.16 billion in 2022, less than the $1.41 billion they raised in 2021. The good news is that the $1.16 billion is much closer to $1.41 billion than it is to $496 million, which was the amount women’s health companies raised in 2020, and $476.8 million, the amount raised in 2019. This indicates that investors didn’t revert to pre-pandemic levels and the sector is still trending upward. In fact, women’s healthcare tech companies, also known as “femtech,” did quite a lot better in 2022 in relation to digital healthcare funding. Even though funding in the digital health sector fell to about $8.6 billion in 2022 from around $16 billion a year earlier, femtech’s share rose substantially from previous years — the sector’s share of digital health funding was 13.26% in 2022, compared to 8.75% in 2021, 7.6% in 2020, and 11.8% in 2019.   If anything, there appears to be increased investor interest to continue funding innovation in this sector, despite the economic and political headwinds standing in the way.

US sues Google over ‘anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful’ ad tech monopoly

Darrell Etherington

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against Google over alleged antitrust issues, claiming the search giant has monopoly control of the digital ad market. The DOJ is joined by eight states in its complaint, including New York, California, and Colorado. Together they aim to “halt Google’s anticompetitive scheme, unwind Google’s monopolistic grip on the market, and restore competition to digital advertising.” This action, , is distinct from a over Google’s dominance in the online search market, , and of course its . The lawsuit, filed today in Virginia’s Eastern District federal court, describes a pattern going back to the company’s purchase of DoubleClick in 2008. This “vaulted Google into a commanding position over the tools publishers use to sell advertising opportunities, complementing Google’s existing tool for advertisers, Google Ads, and set the stage for Google’s later exclusionary conduct across the ad tech industry.” The DOJ argues ill intent by Google in architecting the digital ad market in a way that unfairly favors its own products. From the complaint: One industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising. Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies. From there, the DOJ describes the company’s behavior as follows: Google’s plan has been simple but effective: (1) neutralize or eliminate ad tech competitors, actual or potential, through a series of acquisitions; and (2) wield its dominance across digital advertising markets to force more publishers and advertisers to use its products while disrupting their ability to use competing products effectively. … Each time a threat has emerged, Google has used its market power in one or more of these ad tech tools to quash the threat. The result: Google’s plan for durable, industry-wide dominance has succeeded. The enormous complexity of the ad tech market and tools is gone into considerable detail over the course of the 153-page document. But fortunately the DOJ was able to deploy a suitable analogy early on, coined by none other than Google itself via one of its executives in an internal communication: “Is there a deeper issue with us owning the platform, the exchange, and a huge network? The analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE.” You don’t have to be a judge in a federal court to get the feeling that yes, there’s something amiss in arrangement. For its part, Google has frequently reiterated that the digital ad market is healthy and competitive, citing strong competitors, including Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, to name a few. The company is also likely to point to growing competition from platforms such as TikTok and Instacart, which have for most of recent history. In a statement, Google wrote that the “DOJ is doubling down on a flawed argument that would slow innovation, raise advertising fees, and make it harder for thousands of small businesses and publishers to grow.” It referred to what it described as a similar case recently dismissed, but the DOJ probably has better lawyers than Texas AG Ken Paxton. Google later expanded on its reasoning in , listing digital ad markets in which Google is not competitive. If you want a good grounding in the ad tech world and what Google has done to dominate and manipulate it — this part seems undeniable even if a jury rules it is not monopolistic — the opening section of the lawsuit provides a very readable and chronological account in fairly easy-to-understand language. by on Scribd [This story is developing and the article has been substantially updated throughout.]

Dear Sophie: What are some fast options for hiring someone on an expiring grace period?

Sophie Alcorn

of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says , a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to in my next column.” TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; . Dear Careful, It’s wonderful to hear that you’re expanding your team and supporting your prospective co-founder. This is the right time to hire international talent, since filing fees for most work visas and green cards will likely increase later this year. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), earlier this month issued a that would substantially increase fees for many non-immigrant visas and would slow the premium processing time from 15 calendar days to 15 business days (roughly three calendar weeks), among other changes. For instance, the filing fee for an H-1B application (new, renewal or transfer) will increase from $460 to $780. DHS is accepting public comments on this proposal until March 6, 2023, and I urge you and other employers, particularly early-stage startups, to weigh in on these changes. Joanna Buniak / Before I dive into your first question, I highly recommend talking with an immigration attorney ASAP about your prospective hire’s situation and timing. An immigration attorney can suggest strategies tailored to your startup and aimed at mitigating risks. Calculating the grace period after a layoff can be tricky, as it involves a lot of factors, and you want to ensure that your co-founder maintains valid status in the U.S. and has the proper authorization for any required international travel. Since your prospective co-founder’s 60-day grace period is ending soon, she can get additional time quickly by applying online for a change of status from H-1B to B-1 business visitor status, which will enable her to request to stay in the U.S. for another six months. It will also give you time to prepare an H-1B transfer filing and seek to change her status back to an H-1B or another work visa. Remember that the B-1 status is not a work visa and does not grant work authorization, which means she will not be authorized to be employed by your startup. However, she can do a few things that immigration officials do not consider as work, such as:

Twitter rival ‘T2’ raises its first outside funding, $1.1M from a group of high-profile angels

Ingrid Lunden

It hasn’t decided on a name, it’s still on the hunt to fill some important roles and its early alpha has less than 100 users as of today. But, riding the wave of interest in the current state of Twitter, a startup hoping to disrupt it has raised $1.1 million in funding. , the project being led by Gabor Cselle, has closed its first outside investment from a group of angels that includes Bradley Horowitz, Rich Miner and the former CEO of Wikipedia, Katherine Maher. Cselle himself has founded and sold startups to Twitter and Google, and he spent a number of years at both companies building products. In recent times, he has also been a popular presence on Twitter on subjects like building companies and products. His track record shows in the list of people who have pitched in money to back him and his latest efforts. Horowitz, a seasoned exec at Google, has led and built a number of products there (including some ill-fated social efforts like Google+); he also wrote the first check for Slack. Miner is one of the co-creators of Android and also helped build out the powerhouse that is Google Ventures (now known as GV). Others in this early seed round — 17 in all — include Kayak’s Paul English, Hubspot’s Dharmesh Shah, Twitter’s ex-engineering director Vijay Pandurangan, Mercury CEO Immad Akhund, Paul Lambert (an ex-Twitter, ex-Google director), Jackie Bernhelm (a director of Area 120 at Google), Coco Mao of OpenArt.ai, Yelp’s ex-SVP of engineering Michael Stoppelman, Brian McCullough of the Techmeme Ride Home Podcast via his Ride Home Fund (independent of Techmeme), the ex-product lead of Twitter’s consumer division Jeff Seibert, YC partner Jared Friedman, the former head of news partnerships at Google Natalie Gross, Squarespace’s Janani SriGuha, and CEO and co-founder of Byteboard Sargun Kaur. T2, to be clear, is not the company’s final name. It is the working title for the startup and its new service. That service had a somewhat unlikely beginning. It started life as a series of Cselle’s Tweets, where he thought aloud about the missed opportunity at Twitter in the wake of Musk’s takeover. Those eventually evolved into statements (Tweets) about what Caselle saw as a prime opportunity to build on that potential. Those then became his battle call, and he launched the T2 effort in earnest . Since that early public commitment, T2, based out of the Bay Area, has launched a very early-stage closed alpha. It has already brought together a staff of seven, including some Twitter alums like Cselle himself. He tells me the plan is to use the funding both to continue hiring in a range of roles, some of which are pretty big — he’s in the market for a CTO — and to continue developing the product and the concept behind it. That concept is less set in stone than you might think. Speaking to Cselle, the idea with T2, he said, is to create a “familiar place that is very close to the original.” But what version of “the original” he means is still up in the air, since Twitter has shifted quite a lot over the years, and T2 is being selective on what it’s prioritizing to build and what it might leave out altogether. (For one thing, the character count on the “original” Twitter was 140 characters. In the purple-hued T2 it’s 280.) The overriding aim seems to encourage use of T2 by making it as easy as possible to use, and the route to that ease is coming from tapping into familiarity. The hope is that activity will breed conversations and connections. “In consumer social, it’s all about the community,” said Cselle. There is probably a key critical mass that it will need to reach, too. Right now, there are still less than 100 people in this early version. But Cselle tells me that the sign-up list is in the region of tens of thousands already, and it wants to onboard more of them. “We have a product and we are going as quickly as possible,” he said. Growth will be intrinsically connected not just to T2 understanding whether it has something here worth building and the makings of that community, but to it raising more money. He told me that he’s already having early conversations with VCs and other institutional investors. But they will be unlikely to back T2 until it reaches some milestones. Specifically the metrics they are looking for are 5,000 active users. In the meantime while the product is being developed, there is a second track of messaging happening over a publicly accessible , titled “What Would It Take To Build Another Twitter.” which not only is meant to steer the effort (Twitter is the north star) but to serve as a kind of out-in-the-open brainstorm for Cselle and his team and those watching. (If the world is roughly divided into people who like to write out plans/put things into forms and lists; and those who do not; Cselle is in the former category. “I plan family vacations in spreadsheets,” he told me.) T2 may be one of the first to close (modest) funding in the wave of services out there, established and emerging, that are looking to dethrone Twitter, but it’s not the only one that will be looking to capitalize on the situation. Among them, , founded by Twitter alums, is also looking to raise some ; Post, already well backed, is looking to raise more at a . The big questions for T2, or whatever it will be eventually called, will be the same faced by other would-be competitors. Will Twitter face a sustained exodus of users and will it be to another product similar to it or something else entirely?

Qiara is a new home security service for the French market

Romain Dillet

If you live in France and you want to add a security system to your home, you don’t have a ton of options. You can contact a home security company like and . But you’ll end up paying expensive subscription fees with long-term contracts. You can also buy your own security camera and connected sensors. But, in that case, there won’t be anyone monitoring your home for you. wants to modernize the good old home security market with live agents. The company wants to sell security products and subscriptions directly to end customers through its website without any long-term commitment. Users first choose the security products that they need from the company’s own portfolio of products. Qiara sells a camera, a door sensor, a keypad, a siren and a motion sensor. After that, users can pay €29.99 per month for the service with live agents. If an alarm goes off, the monitoring agent tries to call you and checks the video feed from the security camera. If you don’t answer the phone and there’s something suspicious going on, the company will call the police for you. The company gives you a €10 discount on your subscription fee for the first year. There’s also a cheaper subscription for customers who don’t need 24/7 monitoring — but that defeats the purpose of the service. In addition to the keypad, Qiara offers a mobile app that lets you trigger the alarm and look at the live video feed from the security cameras. You can configure your system so that it is automatically turned off when your phone is around thanks to Bluetooth. You can also enable a privacy shutter when you’re at home so that the security camera isn’t filming your family. All modules work with batteries except the security camera. If there is a power or network failure, Qiara can still protect your home thanks to Sigfox network support. Founded by Alexis Bidinot, a former executive at Iliad, the company has decided to design its connected devices in-house. In many ways, Qiara looks a bit like in the U.S. By default, you set up the security modules yourself and then you’re good to go — it’s a DIY home security system. So let’s see if Qiara can start from scratch and capture some market share in the home security market in France.

Getsafe expands to France starting with home insurance

Romain Dillet

German insurtech startup is adding a fourth market with today’s product launch. In addition to Germany, Austria and the U.K., Getsafe is now going to offer insurance products in France. The company will first offer a home insurance product. Getsafe is trying to disrupt the insurance market with a focus on digital-first insurance products. It sells its products directly to end customers through its website and app . In its home market, Getsafe originally started with a home contents insurance product. But it has greatly diversified its lineup of products with the addition of private health insurance, drone liability insurance, pet health insurance and even some financial products like private pension plans. In October 2021, when the company a Series B extension of $63 million, Getsafe had 250,000 customers. It now has 400,000 clients as it is about to accept new customers in France. Getsafe has its own insurance license from Germany’s financial regulator, BaFin. On the French market, the company is going to offer an all-in-one home insurance product. This kind of insurance product is particularly popular in France as home insurance is a legal requirement whether you own or you’re renting your home. It usually protects the house or apartment against fires or water damages as well as the contents of your home. It also includes home liability insurance. It’s going to be interesting to see if Getsafe manages to capture some market share as this is a crowded market. All legacy insurance companies offer home insurance products and still represent the majority of contracts. When it comes to newcomers, French startup also started with home insurance and now has 400,000 customers. Last year, Luko , a German competitor. In other words, Getsafe and Luko now both operate in Germany and France. Lemonade, the publicly traded American insurtech, also its renters insurance in France. While Lemonade performed quite well on the stock market after its initial public offering, its shares quite dramatically in late 2021 and 2022. The company’s market capitalization is now just above the $1 billion mark. Lemonade’s performance could have a chilling effect on the insurtech startup market. But that doesn’t seem to stop Getsafe as the company already plans to launch more products on the French market thanks to its digital-first approach and direct-to-consumer distribution strategy. You can expect a private health insurance product, some travel insurance offerings or pet health insurance plans by the end of 2023. Getsafe

Welcome to the Jungle grabs $54M for its slick job platform

Romain Dillet

French startup has raised a new $54 million (€50 million) Series C round. The startup helps other companies recruit new employees more easily by creating sophisticated profiles packed with a ton of information. In particular, Welcome to the Jungle sends a photo and video crew to your office so that they can shoot some high-quality photos and record some quick interviews with employees. Essentially, a profile on the platform should look like a feature article in a fancy magazine. Clients also add job openings and more information about benefits, corporate culture and the existing team. Job seekers can then browse job offers and learn more about companies on Welcome to the Jungle’s job board. The startup has also developed its own applicant tracking system, and some companies use the platform directly for their hiring processes. And if you want to recruit more easily, companies can also optionally pay for exclusive content, boosted job offers, more metrics and integrations with third-party recruitment tools. Three existing investors are putting more money on the table — , and Digital Ventures’ fund. Five other investors are joining Welcome to the Jungle’s cap table —  , , , Kostogri (Betclic CEO Nicolas Beraud’s investment company) and . As Welcome to the Jungle originally started with tech startups, there are still a lot of highly skilled job opportunities on the platform. If you’re living in France and you’ve graduated from a leading engineering or business school, chances are you’ve browsed Welcome to the Jungle at some point during your job-seeking process. This is changing over time as the company keeps adding new clients and industries. The company says that it currently attracts 3 million unique monthly visitors. It now works with 5,000 customers and the startup generates €30 million in annual recurring revenue. That’s an impressive revenue metric and it probably explains why the company has managed to raise €79 million since its inception in 2015. There are already more than 300 people working for Welcome to the Jungle. “It’s quite an achievement given the current economic climate. Now more than ever, we have what it takes to keep revolutionizing the staffing sector and start a new chapter in Welcome to the Jungle’s history,” co-founder and CEO Jérémy Clédat said in a statement. Up next, Welcome to the Jungle wants to expand to the U.S., which will require some localization efforts as well as new hires. This isn’t the company’s first international expansion, as the platform is already live in Spain and the Czech Republic. Of course, the startup also has on its platform to facilitate its hiring strategy.

Daily Crunch: ‘Network issue’ causes cloud outage that takes down multiple Microsoft services for 4+ hours

Christine Hall

Hello, Crunchers! We’re pretty excited about ’s TechCrunch Live, where he talks to . Mark your calendar for February 1!  — and Injective, a layer-1 blockchain focused on building financial applications, has launched a $150 million fund ecosystem initiative, the platform’s CEO and co-founder, Eric Chen, told in her article, . One of the most remarkable things about construction robotics is the sheer breadth of tasks that can potentially be automated, writes. He believes the entire category is a prime target for robotics startups, given that it addresses the three big Ds of automation — dull, dirty and (quite often) dangerous. It makes sense, then, that . Fun stuff. There’s five more, too: / Getty Images Americans spent nearly $20 billion on pizza deliveries in 2021. Most people could probably bake one at home, but speed and convenience are powerful incentives at dinnertime. The same holds true for machine learning algorithms: Should companies select open source models, license large language models without modifications, or customize them and pay much higher usage rates? “While building looks extremely attractive in the long run, it requires leadership with a strong appetite for risk over an extended time period,” writes ML engineer Tanmay Chopra. Three more from the TC+ team: took a look at what event and found that the open source framework got some new graphics capabilities, and is launching its first efforts to compile Flutter to WebAssembly and is working on some RISC-V support. He writes, “Virtually all of these capabilities still sit in canary branches and behind experiment flags, but they do show where Google plans to take this project in the months ahead.” Now here’s five more for you:

Meta will restore Trump’s Facebook account ‘in the coming weeks’

Taylor Hatmaker

Two years after the company formerly known as Facebook , it’s bringing him back. Meta announced its decision to restore former president Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts on Wednesday, adding that it would do so in “the coming weeks.” The company was on Trump’s fate. Meta’s semi-independent external policy committee the Oversight Board when given the chance two years ago, but it did . That expired this month. As a general rule, we don’t want to get in the way of open debate on our platforms, esp in context of democratic elections. People should be able to hear what politicians are saying – good, bad & ugly – to make informed choices at the ballot box. 1/4 — Nick Clegg (@nickclegg) In tweets and a , Facebook Global Affairs president Nick Clegg said that Meta was done evaluating if the “serious risk to public safety” that Trump posed two years ago remains. “Our determination is that the risk has sufficiently receded, and that we should therefore adhere to the two-year timeline we set out,” Clegg said. “As such, we will be reinstating Mr. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks.” Clegg also cited new guardrails that will keep Trump operating within the rules, namely “heightened penalties for repeat offenses.” Meta issued that apply to public figures stoking civil unrest and under those guidelines Trump would be suspended for anywhere from a month to two more years if he offends again. Back in 2021, the Oversight Board criticized Meta for Trump’s ambiguous, open-ended punishment, which it issued after the former president incited violence during the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Twitter was less equivocal at the time, issuing Trump a . Twitter’s own decision seemed permanent, but two years later SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased the social company, and many other suspensions that the company made in the course of enforcing its guidelines against hate and harassment. While Trump’s path to a mainstream social media return is now cleared, the former president . According to SEC filings, Trump remains under an exclusivity agreement with his own social media company Truth Social that requires he post content there six hours before sharing it to other platforms. Beyond that, Trump is “generally obligated” to stick with Truth Social rather than mainstream social networks like Twitter and Facebook, though the contract expires in June and he’s . Meta’s Oversight Board noted that it was made aware of the company’s decision yesterday and while it had no role in dictating the outcome, it approved of the company’s process. “Today’s decision by Meta is a pivotal moment in the debate over the best way to handle harmful content posted by politicians on social media,” the Oversight Board . “As Meta wrote, there are arguments on both sides of the debate over where to draw the line on what content should be allowed online. Independent oversight of decisions related to speech on social media platforms is why the Board was set up — to ensure that companies act in a transparent and accountable manner.”

Critical Role’s second campaign will get its own Amazon animated series

Taylor Hatmaker

Amazon is deepening its ties to hit actual play series , entering a multiyear deal with the growing role-playing content empire that will see any new adaptations spring up under the umbrella. The company will also bring Critical Role’s second campaign to life, showcasing the ragtag fantasy group of reluctant adventurers known as the “Mighty Nein” in its own animated series. The campaign two adaptation will begin production soon but there’s no firm release date yet. Curious beginnings indeed. Mighty Nein, from the brilliant minds behind Critical Role, is coming to . — FanologyPV (@FANologyPV) Under the deal’s terms, Amazon will get first-look rights for any movie adaptation of Critical Role’s sprawling original fantasy world, crafted by dungeon master Matt Mercer. Critical Role’s episodes have — including the animated “Vox Machina” season 3 debut and a two-part live play special that served as an epilogue for campaign two, which wrapped up in 2021 — but to date Critical Role has yet to produce a feature-length movie adaptation. “With the success of our animated series ‘The Legend of Vox Machina,’ we are looking forward to continuing our relationship with Critical Role and expanding its universe with ‘Mighty Nein,’” Amazon Studios Head of Global TV Vernon Sanders said. “Expanding these iconic franchises for our global Prime Video customers continues to be an ambitious and rewarding journey and we are eager to see where this new series takes us.” As far as adaptations go, Critical Role is pretty safe territory for the tech giant’s experiments in original content. The show, which streams weekly on Twitch, boasts a famously committed community that buys up its books and merch, celebrating the group’s creative endeavors in whatever form they take. According to , Critical Role was the highest paid streamer on the platform, with the long-form D&D actual play show beating out even the most popular pro gaming personalities. Critical Role’s second campaign could also bring new fans into the franchise. While the group’s first campaign followed a more traditional fantasy trajectory — hero archetypes, dragons and the like — the “Mighty Nein” campaign offers quirkier characters and an at-times subtle exploration of political intrigue and spirituality in an imagined world that often defies expectations. Critical Role, which began as a casual home game among friends in the voice acting community, has grown into an entertainment behemoth in a few short years. Amazon picked up Critical Role’s first campaign, “The Legend of Vox Machina,” in 2019 after the role-playing crew smashed Kickstarter records by raising $11.3 million for an animated adaptation. The second season of “The Legend of Vox Machina” debuted on Prime Video this month and Amazon Studios ordered a third season of the show last year.