Datasets:

sahithya20

/

tech

like 0

Gogoro, Belrise JV to spend $2.5B on battery swapping network in Indian state

Rebecca Bellan

Gogoro, the Taiwanese paladin for two-wheeler battery swapping, is working with the Indian state of Maharashtra to establish state-wide battery charging and swapping infrastructure. The initiative will be driven by a “50-50” partnership between Gogoro and Belrise Industries, an automotive systems manufacturer based in India, that will form an infrastructure company to own the batteries and swapping stations in Maharashtra, according to Gogoro’s CEO and co-founder Horace Luke. Additional infrastructure-related investors will participate down the line in the joint venture, which aims to invest up to $2.5 billion over eight years in Maharashtra, according to a non-binding MOU signed by the state, Gogoro and Belrise at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Like most infrastructure deployments, the partnership company will raise funding for the smart battery swapping buildout,” Luke told TechCrunch in response to a question on whether Gogoro would use its free cash flow to fund the initiative. Additionally, Gogoro will also form an India-based company that will run the battery swapping network, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Per the MOU, Gogoro and Belrise will start installing swapping stations in the top 10 cities of Maharashtra, starting with Mumbai in the next few months, and expand beyond that in the future. Maharashtra is one of India’s largest commercial and industrial centers. As a result, the state has some of the best installed electricity generation capacity in India, with around a quarter of its power mix coming from wind and solar capacity. Gogoro says Maharashtra has an energy surplus, making it a good launch point for a connected network. The joint venture is one of the latest of such initiatives to be announced in Maharashtra. In September, Mumbai-based battery swapping startup to set up 500 electric mobility stations in Mumbai over the next two years. Last June, Sun Mobility, a provider of energy infrastructure and services for EVs, announced the network for EVs in Mumbai in collaboration with Amazon India. Sun plans to deploy more than 2,000 battery swapping stations across the region by 2025. Gogoro didn’t disclose how many swapping stations it aims to build over the next eight years, but Luke said based on the population of Maharashtra (about 120 million), the network there will be about four times the size of Gogoro’s network in Taiwan. To date, Gogoro has 12,200 battery swapping stations in Taiwan, with more than 1.1 million smart batteries in circulation throughout its network. We can therefore infer that Gogoro plans to build somewhere in the ballpark of 50,000 stations in the region. Taiwan’s total build-out has cost Gogoro $640 million over the last seven years, a spokesperson told TechCrunch, so $2.5 billion will bring about unprecedented scale. “Battery swapping is a new category creation and we will build out the network infrastructure to induce demand,” said Luke. A big part of Gogoro’s formula for inducing demand is to provide vehicles that are built with its own battery swapping technology. In Taiwan, , including five out of the top six electric vehicle makers. Gogoro won’t be bringing its own brand of scooters to India, but the company is , a popular two-wheeled vehicle maker in India, to launch electric two-wheelers based on Gogoro’s technology under the Hero brand. That partnership was announced two years ago, but no vehicles have shipped yet. Which makes sense for Gogoro’s business model. The company wants people to use its swapping stations, so installing the publicly available swapping infrastructure before widespread rollout of electric two-wheelers is a signal that Gogoro is marking its territory.

Outrider raises $73M to bring its autonomous electric yard trucks into the mainstream

Kirsten Korosec

Autonomous vehicle technology may no longer be the fuel powering the hype machine. But companies applying the technology to agriculture, commercial and logistics applications are still attracting venture capital. Take Outrider, a Golden, Colorado startup developing autonomous electric yard trucks, for example. Distribution yards are the nerve center of the supply chain. It’s where all those goods (like those ordered from Amazon and other e-commerce businesses) make the transition from long-haul trucks to warehouses, and eventually to the consumer. Workers today use diesel-powered yard trucks to move trailers filled with goods around the yard, as well as to and from loading docks. Outrider has developed an autonomous system that includes an electric yard truck, software to manage the operations and site infrastructure. While humans may still be needed at the distribution yard, the autonomous system handles the bulk of the work, including hitching and unhitching trailers, connecting and disconnecting trailer brake lines and monitoring trailer locations. The revenue potential from this system — there are some 400,000 distribution yards in the U.S. alone — has caught the attention of a number of investors. Outrider recently closed a $73 million Series C round led by FM Capital and attracted new investors Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Nvidia’s venture capital group, NVentures. New investors B37 Ventures, Lineage Ventures, Presidio Ventures (the venture arm of Sumitomo Corporation) and ROBO Global Ventures also joined along with existing backers Koch Disruptive Technologies and New Enterprise Associates. Outrider has since its founding in 2017 under the name Azevtec. The company has made some progress since its last raise in fall 2020. Outrider founder and CEO Andrew Smith told TechCrunch that the yard trucks have new hardware designed to handle harsh environments, including robotic arms. Outrider has 20 autonomous systems in use at customer sites and its test facility as the company finishes the final capabilities and proprietary safety mechanisms of the system, Smith said. These final tweaks to the system will wrap up in 2023, he added. From there the focus will be launching commercial operations with its customers, which includes Georgia Pacific and other unnamed companies that have invested in joint product testing and pilot operations since 2019. Smith said Outrider’s customers represent more than 20% of all yard trucks operating in North America. The new funds will be used to hire in the U.S. and internationally (beyond its 175-person workforce) and transition from testing and validation to commercial operations at scale, Smith said. “It’s one thing to have a vehicle driving autonomously, it’s another thing to create a truly industrial system that can operate in a harsh environment over multiple years of time, 20 to 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” Smith said.” The productization of the system and the rolling in of these final capabilities will allow us to then scale to thousands of systems operating on Outrider software over the next few years.”

India releases guidelines for social media influencers accepting paid promotions

Jagmeet Singh

As the market of social media influencers is getting bigger in India, the South Asian nation has introduced endorsement guidelines to limit unfair trade practices and misleading promotions on the web. On Friday, the Department of Consumer Affairs to announce new guidelines to make it mandatory for social media influencers to disclose promotional content in accordance with the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. Failing to follow the guidelines will make social media influencers liable for a fine of up to $12,300 (1 million Indian rupees). In the case of repeated offenders, the penalty can go up to $61,600 (5 million Indian rupees), the Indian government department said. The department specified that the guidelines apply to social media influencers as well as virtual avatars promoting products and services online. The disclosures should be easy to notice in post descriptions where you can usually find hashtags or links. It should also be prominent enough to be noticeable in the content, the department said. When it comes to promoted content in videos, the department said that disclosures for paid promotions should be placed in the video — not just in the description — and be made in both audio and video format. Influencers must also disclose if they promote a brand, service or product during livestreams, per the guidelines. The department said the disclosures and endorsements should be in the language of the content. “Today’s guidelines are aimed at social influencers who have a material connection with the brand they want to promote on various social media platforms. So this is an obligation for them to behave responsibly,” consumer affairs department secretary Rohit Kumar Singh told reporters. The official said the department was in talks with tech companies to deploy some crawling algorithms to identify offenders. Meanwhile, consumers can file complaints if they find an influencer violating the guidelines, the secretary said. “You can never cover it 100%. This is a cat-and-mouse thing… So, the idea is to protect the interests of the consumers and let him not be taken for a ride by showing him something as unbiased whereas actually, it is a paid thing,” he added. According to the secretary, the size of the social media influencer market in India in 2022 was $157 million. It could reach as much as $345 million by 2025. Indian advertising industry’s self-regulatory body Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has welcomed the government’s move. “Influencer violations comprise almost 30% of ads taken up by ASCI, hence this legal backing for disclosure requirements is a welcome step. The [consumer affairs] ministry had been in touch with ASCI to review the various global guidelines on influencers,” said Manisha Kapoor, CEO and secretary general of ASCI.

A $32 million seed round for Chris DeWolfe’s next gaming biz defies 2023 trends

Connie Loizos

A $32 million seed round may seem like a throwback to frothier times, like … 2021. But that’s how much just raised in a deal led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). It’s a lot of moolah in a volatile market, even coming as it does from two separate a16z funds: the firm’s debut games vehicle and its crypto fund, both of which were announced last May. Then again, PLAI Labs checks all the boxes on VCs’ wish lists. First and foremost, the LA-based outfit was founded by veteran tech entrepreneurs Chris DeWolfe and Aber Whitcomb. The pair previously co-founded the once-hot social media platform Myspace (which originally sold to News Corp. for $580 million in 2005) and the mobile game studio Jam City. The latter remains privately held, but after scrapping plans to go public through a special purpose acquisition company, it managed to snag in funding in 2021 from Netmarble, Kabam and affiliates of funds managed by Fortress Investment Group, which suggests it’s doing just fine. (Indeed, Jam City, which claims to have 30 million monthly active users, announced this morning that a third co-founder, Josh Yguado, is now after serving as the company’s COO and president previously.) Beyond being launched by seasoned founders, PLAI (pronounced /plā/) is also apparently weaving every buzzy trend into one offering, its own mission as leveraging “web3 and generative AI technology to offer the ultimate online social experience.” Crypto? Check. Generative AI? Check. A new social platform? Where do I write the check, is the question the a16z team must have been asking. For what it’s worth, PLAI’s first offering sounds compelling. We’re talking to DeWolfe in the next couple of days for more information, but in a , a16z’s team describes that project, “Champions Ascension,” as a “massively multiplayer online role playing game where players can port in their existing non-fungible token (NFTs) characters, go on quests, trade items, fight in the colosseum, build their own custom dungeons, and more.” PLAI, the post continues, is also “building an AI protocol platform,” one that aims to help users generate their own content and assets with the help of generative art protocols that the outfit says it has been developing. Again, more details are coming. In the meantime, the bet is just the latest by investor Andrew Chen, who currently leads the gaming practice at Andreessen Horowitz. Just two days ago, Carry1st, a publisher of social games and interactive content across Africa, said that it had raised in “pre-Series B” funding from investors, including a16z. Andreessen Horowitz also recently led an round in Gym Class, a VR-based basketball app that passed through the famed accelerator Y Combinator. In the fall of 2021, before a16z’s gaming practice existed, its crypto team bet big on another NFT game, “Axie Infinity,” which invites users to “play to earn” crypto tokens that enable them to create and play with breedable characters called “Axies.” Though the game was big and growing at the time of that investment, the Ronin blockchain on which “Axie Infinity” is based was hacked last July and $620 million worth of crypto stolen. The company, which is still trying to , re-opened for business shortly afterward.

TechCrunch+ roundup: 2023 unicorn slump, global VC slowdown, email marketing 101

Walter Thompson

Due to a phenomenon called semantic satiation, if you repeat a word or phrase too frequently, it can sometimes lose all meaning. That’s what happened to “unicorn:” We wore it out like a pair of sneakers that leak in the rain but are too comfortable to part with. In fact, most of the startups in CB Insights’ unicorn index are on the bubble and “ ,” reports Rebecca Szkutak. “How many of these will stay unicorns through this calendar year?” Out of 35 investors she surveyed, “the vast majority felt the herd has likely already been winnowed,” she found. “It’s not just about whether they’ll still command ‘unicorn status,’ but rather whether or not they will be fundable, at any value, period,” said Harley Miller, founder and managing partner at Left Lane Capital. By all accounts, the IPO window is nailed shut. Any startups that hope to weather this downturn must raise additional funds. I’m sure the hunt is already on for another mythical animal that best represents startup attainment in a down market, like “ARRmadillo.” You can have that one for free. My greater hope: Investors and founders will use this era of austerity as an opportunity to create value and not just wealth. Thanks very much for reading, Walter Thompson Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+ / Getty Images In the third article of a five-part series, growth marketing expert Jonathan Martinez (formerly of Uber, Postmates and Chime) explains how to create and optimize email campaigns that will “push consumers through your funnel and drive conversions.” Martinez shares fundamentals for segmenting customers and anticipating where leaks will occur along the funnel you’re developing. Startups that recapture these users can eke out higher ARR, and every little bit counts. “It is crucial to distill user segments as much as possible because we must ensure that we’re sending the right messaging to the right consumers.” Nigel Sussman/TechCrunch According to CB Insights’ State of Venture report, VC funding fell 35% in 2022. Although estimated deal count didn’t drop proportionately, “global venture funding was down by 19% quarter over quarter in Q4 2022,” reports Anna Heim. “How long things will take to improve is anyone’s guess, so we will be looking forward to more data as the year progresses,” she writes. Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch Visual collaboration tool Scrintal says it has more than 40,000 people on its waitlist, but that didn’t stop its founders from raising €1 million. Co-founders Ece Kural and Furkan Bayraktar shared their pitch deck with TC+ — click through to learn why their value proposition, vision and product plans connected with investors:

Chevy announces the fastest Corvette yet, the electrified 2024 Corvette E-Ray

Matt Burns

The great American sports car is going partly electric. Chevy pulled the wraps off the 2024 Corvette E-Ray, revealing a dual powertrain affair. A 6.2L Small Block V8 sits behind the driver in a mid-engine configuration. An electric motor is connected to the front wheels, providing AWD and instant torque for improved off-the-line launches. Together they’re bringing the Corvette into the electric future. Chevy says this Corvette is the quickest production model ever made, with a 2.5-second 0-60 time. That time upsets the current title holder, the monstrous 2019 Corvette ZR-1 that can hit 60 mph in 2.85 seconds. But this electrified sports car does not need to be plugged in to recharge. Instead, the battery is exclusively charged by regenerative braking and when the vehicle is coasting. The dual-powertrain arrangement comes with more benefits. With both axles powered, the E-Ray features eAWD, giving it better performance on the track and in adverse weather conditions. In addition, drivers can opt to drive only on battery power as long as the vehicle’s speed does not exceed 45 mph. A single electric motor powers the front wheels. It produces 160 hp and 125 lb. ft of torque. Combined with the 6.2L V8, the E-Ray produces 655 hp. The Corvette E-Ray isn’t the first sports car to look at two different powertrains for propulsion. The Polestar 1 used a similar affair, but in a different configuration. The main difference is that the E-Ray allows drivers to drive on an electric motor. Chevy says that the 2024 Corvette E-Ray will go on sale sometime in 2023. The MSRP starts at $104,295 for the coupe and $111,295 for the 1LZ convertible model.

Clouds might be scattering in China’s venture capital world

Rita Liao

The outlook of investing in China is suddenly brightening up as the country gradually phases out its , which has of all kinds and for the last three years. For venture capitalists, the pandemic has been a tumultuous ride. , a partner at Northern Light Venture Capital, a China-focused VC firm with , calls 2022 the “toughest” in his 15 years of investing in Chinese startups. “Now spring is finally bringing new life to dried trees. There’s a lot of optimism for 2023,” says Wu, who focuses on the consumer internet realm at the firm, in an interview with TechCrunch. NLVC’s wide-ranging portfolio includes China’s on-demand services titan Meituan; BGI, the country’s gene giant; and Black Sesame Technologies, one of the few . What went wrong in 2022? And what makes Wu more hopeful about the coming year? In the past few years, China’s on its internet industry, coupled with COVID restrictions that , has drastically dampened investor confidence. Venture capital deals year-over-year to $62.1 billion in the first 10 months of 2022, according to research firm Preqin. Equity investments in the first three quarters of the year, shows another report from the Chinese market researcher Zero2IPO. The bearish mood of 2022 “was on par with 2008-2009,” Wu reckons. But unlike the 2008 financial crisis, he argued, this round of downturn “fundamentally hurt the vitality” of the country’s venture investment. “Money fled, talent left, and a lot of internet bosses moved to Singapore.” Regulations is nothing new in China’s tech space as the authorities are always rushing out new legislations to rein in the reckless growth of emerging sectors. But the recent wave of clampdown, which roughly started in 2020 when the government , is widely seen as the toughest in decades, forcing tech companies left and right to rethink their strategies. Companies operating in heavily-regulated areas, like social media, video games and web3, saw a narrowing window of opportunity domestically, so many of them . Their investors, especially those who raise money from international limited partners, followed suit and set up outposts in the city-state. An era of growing U.S.-China tensions further prompted Chinese companies with overseas ambitions to cut ties with home. The abrupt end to the zero-COVID policy and early signs of is giving investors hope that some aspects of the tech industry could finally be back on track. At the least, investors can meet founders in another city casually without worrying about being quarantined on their way back. Clouds seem to be slowly scattering in the regulatory space, too. In December, China granted a batch of licenses , ending an 18-month hiatus that hit gaming giants like . Wu believes regulators will also begin to lift some of the curbs on  , which overhauled its fintech business at the behest of regulators to act more like a traditional finance group. Even if the darkest days of regulations might be behind us, the revival has limitations. The reckless, high-growth era of social networks, ride-hailing and other consumer-focused businesses has come to an end. In web3, one of the few remaining areas in tech that were still delivering astonishing returns for VCs until the recent market crash, “there’s no perceivable future for China, for now,” Wu suggests. That’s a conclusion shared by many founders and investors. Over the years, China has moved to ban much of the underlying infrastructure of web3, most crucially, . Many serious web3 projects as a result. Despite the exodus of talent, Wu continues to back web3 entrepreneurs originating from China. In 2023, he plans to allocate at least 60% of his “energy” to web3, which he believes is just as disruptive to venture capital as it is to the internet. “Web3 has fundamentally changed how investment is done,” the investor observes. “In the past, you are investing Chinese founders with operations in China. Now, a web3 startup could have its R&D in China, but its product is global, and the rest of its team could be in Singapore or the U.S. It’s taking equity as well as token investment. And instead of 10%, we are only taking 1% of its stake.” who remain bullish on web3 despite the crash, Wu believes the bear market is a good time to “build” when people finally aren’t viewing crypto as a speculative asset class. “We should be looking at how many users and new developers are piling into web3 instead,” he notes. China also remains pivotal to the global development of web3 even though a domestic market doesn’t exist for the decentralized technology. Two decades of frantic growth at tech giants like Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance have given rise to a pool of skilled software engineers who are known for delivering results under pressure and strict deadlines, and who, China’s internet talent is also experienced in dealing with fast-expanding, large-scale internet services, Wu argues. “Solana is known for being fast and cheap, right? But it’s also had . The blockchain is just managing over a thousand nodes. But name any major Chinese internet firm — it easily operates hundreds of thousands of servers.” He continues. “The question is how to unleash the supply of China’s developers for the global web3 industry.” While Wu is following China’s web3 founders abroad, he’s also placing bets on domestic players in another heady area: electric vehicles. Even in the relatively new EV industry, he reckons the race has already entered “the second half” and competition is becoming “cutthroat”. China shipped around 20 million vehicles in 2022, 6.5 million or 32.5% of which were run on “new energy” like electricity or hybrid, according to . “Give or take the EV penetration rate reaches 60-70% — because there will still be some petrol cars — [a 30% penetration means] the industry is moving into the second half,” Wu says. So far, none of China’s EV companies is remotely close to the level of brand recognition enjoyed by the German luxury carmakers. But they each offer their unique selling point. Upstart Nio puts much effort into customer service and its rival Xpeng prides itself on advanced technologies like autonomous driving. Wu singles out BYD, the 28-year-old battery and EV giant, as the trailblazer in globalizing Chinese EV firms because of its incredible affordability. In December, BYD’s overseas sales — which doesn’t sound like a lot. But the carmaker is already well-established in China, often wrestling with Tesla for the top spot in the world’s biggest EV market. “The globalization of Chinese EVs is inevitable. We have a complete supply chain, and our price advantage is already pretty obvious,”  Wu argues, pointing out that BYD is the only Chinese EV maker in control of the entire supply chain like Tesla, which gives it wiggle room to lower prices. “You got to remember, these Chinese automakers are coming out of an extremely competitive environment.”

Court to decide if Elon Musk is careless or criminal, and other TC news

Darrell Etherington

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Podcast. This week Amanda Silberling is here to talk about how Dungeons & Dragons creators are fighting to keep their livelihoods and Rebecca Bellan comes on to talk about how a tweet has gotten Elon Musk into legal trouble… again. And as always, we break down the biggest stories in tech. Articles from the episode: More from TechCrunch

A new kind of PE fund plans to roll up German startups into potential unicorns and bigger exits

Mike Butcher

European startups have always suffered from the perennial startup problem: how to exit? However, in Europe the problem has always been particularly acute. How many large European industrial or corporate giants acquire or acqu-hire? Not that many, and not nearly enough. It’s part of the reason so many European startups end up heading to the U.S. The U.S. is one of the few markets where you can achieve decent scale, as well has have the potential to exit either through a sale to one of the global tech platforms or to the public markets. Now a new, but slightly different, German private equity fund hopes to solve at least part of the problem, and at least in Germany, which will be its main focus. Private equity investor (based out of Berlin) says it has now closed its second fund of €300 million with the aim of effectively rolling up medium-sized German-speaking tech companies and giving these merged entities greater global scale. This is an unusual use of PE funds, and puts FLEX into a slightly different category to the average PE outfit. Investors include fund of funds, institutional investors from Europe and the U.S. and the founders of some successful European companies, such as Christoph Jost, Peter Waleczek, Felix Haas, Jan Becker, Andreas Etten and Dr. Robert Wuttke. The opportunity appears to be there. In the DACH region (comprised of Germany, Austria and Switzerland) there are estimated to be 11,000 medium-sized internet and software companies that generate between €5-30 million in sales a year. Christoph Jost, managing partner of FLEX Capital, outlines their thinking in a statement: “In order to achieve the necessary strengthening of our own software sector in the DACH region through innovation and growth, more capital and know-how must flow into successful software and tech companies that are already category leaders… The new fund will enable us to do just that once again: to invest in outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams who are looking for a competent partner for the further development of their software companies.” Since its foundation in 2019, FLEX Capital has acquired 13 medium-sized software companies, including Nitrado (multiplayer game hosting); ComX, a B2B sales enablement platform; EVEX group, for hearing care professionals and opticians; and OMS group, a software group for output management. One of the backers of FLEX Capital is Felix Haas, best known for co-founding Amiando and IDnow, as well as being the co-organizer and host of Bits & Pretzels, Germany’s largest founders’ event. Haas explained the FLEX strategy more fully to me: “We buy 51%-100% of a company. We will focus on the smaller software startups (e.g. €15 million revenue, €3 million profit), then combine them with two or three other competitors. Then will have a much bigger leader (for example a company with €100 million revenue and €20 million profit). Then the companies are big enough for either IPO or to be sold to the more ‘normal’ private equity firms.” If Haas is right, then German startups just got a potential new exit opportunity. And in this downward-leaning macro environment, that can be no bad thing, especially if you are a startup finding it difficult to raise and are looking for the exit doors.

GM, please build the baby EV pickup of my dreams

Harri Weber

In an industry obsessed with (at least here in the U.S.), you may not’ve expected GM to show interest in an electric baby pickup, but here we are. GM is considering a pickup design that’s “smaller than the Ford Maverick and the Hyundai Santa Cruz,” with a “low roofline” and a 4 to 4.5-foot bed, according to . The publication reportedly saw a prototype of the EV at a GM workshop, and said it could feature a (that’d be pretty dang cheap compared to ). Judging by this description, the small-ish truck could serve as a spiritual successor to the Chevrolet , which briefly made history as in the late 90s. The design is definitely not final, GM design director Michael Pevovar reportedly indicated to Automotive News, saying the automaker is “creating these to get a reaction and then to try to modify it or move on.” There’s no sign that American firms will ever embrace ultra-teeny -sized pickups, but I’m still pleased to see that GM is considering making something that’s not honkingly huge. My dream is for U.S. automakers to head further in this direction, but alas, the doesn’t seem to share my appetite for trucks. The baby-pickup report preceded a busy day for GM. Though the automaker claims it will rid its lineup of gas guzzlers by 2035, on Friday it announced a plan to pump to crank out another generation of its V-8 engines. GM’s manufacturing boss Gerald Johnson explained the somewhat contradictory move in a statement to reporters. “Our commitment is to an all-EV future, no doubt about it,” he said, with a major caveat: “There are a lot of internal combustion engine customers that we don’t want to lose.” GM said it plans to invest another $339 million into three other facilities, which will produce EV components. We also learned that GM has on a fourth U.S. battery plant. One such plant is already active in Ohio, while two others are still in the works in Tennessee and Michigan.

Uber, Bolt drivers hope for increased earnings foiled as Tanzania reinstates 25% commission

Annie Njanja

Barely a year after and Bolt charge their partners at 15%, the authority in charge has backtracked on the order, taking away drivers’ prospects of increased earnings. The fee was increased to 25% effective last Sunday after the Land and Transport Regulatory Authority (Latra) issued a notice on December 30, which superseded the initial direction of March last year. Latra sets and approves fares for all operators, including those in the ride-hailing sector. Uber and its main rival in Europe and Africa, Bolt, halted some of their services in April last year claiming that reducing the commission on partners would dent their earnings. However, the reduced fee meant increased incomes for drivers, who have in the past, like their counterparts in Kenya, protested poor earnings from the apps. Uber, which halted UberX, UberXL and UberSave services in April, kicked off efforts to resume full operations Monday, TechCrunch has learned, joining , whose services were restored in October. Uber charged a 25% commission, while Bolt charged 20%. Their withdrawal left the market to homegrown brands like Little, which charges a 15% commission, and Ping. “We made the difficult decision to pause our operations in Tanzania because the regulatory changes that were introduced created an environment that was challenging for our business to operate under. We have, since the pause, maintained our engagements with LATRA and other regulatory bodies in Tanzania as a show of our commitment to resume full operations in the market, providing drivers with an avenue to earn and riders an enhanced mobility option,” said Uber’s East and West Africa head of communications, Lorraine Onduru. “We welcome the new pricing order issued by the Land and Transport Regulatory Authority, which we believe will significantly contribute to the growth and development of the ride-hailing industry in Tanzania,” said Onduru. The resumption of the e-hailing services comes after stakeholders, including representatives of Uber and Bolt, lobbied for the rates to be reviewed, leading Tanzania to announce last September that a middle ground had been found and the firms would resume operations. “Our efforts and engagements were aimed at ensuring an enabling regulatory environment for mobility services in Tanzania among drivers, vehicle owners, passengers and ride-hailing operators. The overall objective was to develop the nascent ride-hailing sector in the market,” said a Bolt spokesperson, adding that the company reinstated all its services on October 13, 2022. Bolt said that following the decision by LATRA, it will soon introduce some changes on passenger fare pricing. Aside from Tanzania, Kenya also capped commission at 18% last year, after new regulations came into force. Efforts by ride-hailing operators to have new regulations scraped have been unsuccessful so far.

4 questions to ask when evaluating AI prototypes for bias

Veronica Torres

has been progress around data protection in the U.S. thanks to the passing of several laws, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act ( ), and nonbinding documents, such as the . Yet, there currently aren’t any standard regulations that dictate how technology companies should mitigate AI bias and discrimination. As a result, many companies are falling behind in building ethical, privacy-first tools. Nearly of data scientists in the U.S. are male and 66% are white, which shows an inherent lack of diversity and demographic representation in the development of automated decision-making tools, often leading to skewed data results. Significant improvements in design review processes are needed to ensure technology companies take all people into account when creating and modifying their products. Otherwise, organizations can risk losing customers to competition, tarnishing their reputation and risking serious lawsuits. According to IBM, of IT professionals believe consumers select companies that are transparent about how their AI algorithms are created, managed and used. We can expect this number to increase as more users continue taking a stand against harmful and biased technology. So, what do companies need to keep in mind when analyzing their prototypes? Here are four questions development teams should ask themselves: To build effective, bias-free technology, AI teams should develop a list of questions to ask during the review process that can help them identify potential issues in their models. There are many methodologies AI teams can use to assess their models, but before they do that, it’s critical to evaluate the end goal and whether there are any groups who may be disproportionately affected by the outcomes of the use of AI. For example, AI teams should take into consideration that the use of facial recognition technologies may inadvertently discriminate against people of color — something that occurs far too often in AI algorithms. by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2018 showed that Amazon’s face recognition inaccurately matched 28 members of the U.S. Congress with mugshots. A staggering 40% of incorrect matches were people of color, despite them making up only 20% of Congress. By asking challenging questions, AI teams can find new ways to improve their models and strive to prevent these scenarios from occurring. For instance, a close examination can help them determine whether they need to look at more data or if they will need a third party, such as a privacy expert, to review their product. is a great resource for those looking to start.

Putting numbers on the global venture slowdown

Anna Heim

I don’t know,” was my first reaction when reports on venture capital in 2022 hit my inbox this month. It is pretty clear by now that there was a slowdown, so what’s the point of harping on about it as we enter a new year? The point, as often with data, is that we can now confirm what was merely intuition until Q4 actually closed: 2022 saw fewer exits and venture deals than 2021. If we had to retain only one fact, it would be the decline in capital invested in startups last year. According to CB Insights, whose is one of our sources today, total venture funding in 2022 amounted to $415.1 billion, 35% less than in 2021. According to the , deal count was more stable, with 2022’s estimated deal count approaching 2021’s figure. But looking at quarterly data reveals that Q4 had the lowest deal count of 2022, which doesn’t necessarily bode well for 2023.

Amazon’s Music Unlimited quietly gets a price hike in the US and UK

Lauren Forristal

Starting on February 21, Amazon’s Music Unlimited streaming service will increase by $1/£1 in the U.S. and the U.K. The Amazon Music Unlimited Individual Plan is increasing from $9.99 (£9.99) to $10.99 (£10.99) per month, whereas the student plan is changing from $4.99 (£4.99) to $5.99 (£5.99) per month. The company noted the price changes on its , which was first noticed by . “To help us bring you even more content and features, we’re updating the prices of select Amazon Music Unlimited plans,” Amazon wrote. While the company mentions price hikes to its Individual Plan and Student Plan, the prices for the Family Plan ($15.99/month) and Single-Device Plan ($4.99/month) appear to remain unchanged. It’s only been eight months since Amazon last raised its prices. In May, the discounted Amazon Music Unlimited plan for Amazon Prime customers increased from . Non-Prime members didn’t experience a change this time and still had to pay $9.99 per month. Amazon also offers an Amazon Music Prime tier, which is included free with Prime subscriptions and offers ad-free listening. However, if users want HD, Ultra HD and , they have to subscribe to Music Unlimited. The e-commerce giant is currently in the middle of a cost-cutting spree, which includes the recent closure of its charity donation program , and the decision to lay off earlier this month. Amazon’s decision to jack up the cost comes on the heels of increasing its rival music streaming subscription, Apple Music, by $1 for individual subscribers and $2 for families in the U.S. Apple Music also   in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. in June 2022. Spotify is also considering raising its subscription price in the U.S., which CEO Daniel Ek noted during the company’s earnings call in October. “[Price increases] is one of the things that we would like to do,” Ek said. “I feel really good about sort of this upcoming year and what that means in pricing in relation to our service.” This would be a notable move for the company since it hasn’t raised its standard subscription cost since in 2011 at $9.99 per month in the U.S.

Norton LifeLock says thousands of customer accounts breached

Zack Whittaker

Thousands of Norton LifeLock customers had their accounts compromised in recent weeks, potentially allowing criminal hackers access to customer password managers, the company revealed in a recent data breach notice. In a notice to customers, Gen Digital, the parent company of , said that the likely culprit was a credential stuffing attack — where previously exposed or breached credentials are used to break into accounts on different sites and services that share the same passwords — rather than a compromise of its systems. It’s why , which Norton LifeLock , is recommended, as it blocks attackers from accessing someone’s account with just their password. The company said it found that the intruders had compromised accounts as far back as December 1, close to two weeks before its systems detected a “large volume” of failed logins to customer accounts on December 12. “In accessing your account with your username and password, the unauthorized third party may have viewed your first name, last name, phone number, and mailing address,” the data breach notice said. The notice was sent to customers that it believes use its password manager feature, because the company cannot rule out that the intruders also accessed customers’ saved passwords. Gen Digital said it sent notices to about 6,450 customers whose accounts were compromised. Norton LifeLock provides identity protection and cybersecurity services. It’s the latest incident involving the theft of customer passwords of late. Earlier this year, password manager giant LastPass in which intruders compromised its cloud storage and stole millions of customers’ encrypted password vaults. In 2021, the company behind a popular enterprise password manager called Passwordstate was hacked to push a to its customers, allowing the cybercriminals to . That said, password managers are still widely recommended by security professionals for generating and storing unique passwords, so long as the appropriate precautions and protections are put in place to limit the fallout in the event of a compromise.

Amazon fined by regulators for unsafe warehouse work conditions

Amanda Silberling

Federal regulators from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found that three Amazon warehouse facilities had designed to require employers to provide safe working environments. Investigations found that Amazon workers are at high risk for back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), especially in warehouse environments that prioritize speed over safety. “While Amazon has developed impressive systems to make sure its customers’ orders are shipped efficiently and quickly, the company has failed to show the same level of commitment to protecting the safety and well-being of its workers,” Doug Parker, an assistant secretary at OSHA. Amazon must pay a $60,269 fine for the violations at warehouses in Deltona, Florida; Waukegan, Illinois; and New Windsor, New York. As part of the same investigation, OSHA found in December that six Amazon warehouse facilities had worker injuries and illnesses. There are three similar, ongoing investigations at Amazon facilities in Colorado, Idaho and New York. OSHA’s findings show an ongoing pattern of employee injuries, including stuck-by injuries while handling objects over 50 pounds. An example from July reads, “crushing/smashing; face; furniture (61 lbs).” Another reads, “strain/sprain; lower leg; fitness equipment (148 lbs.)” The Florida warehouse was also cited for being too hot, which can potentially cause heat-related illness. Amazon has on-site clinics called Amcare for employees who may suffer injuries on the job, but OSHA claims that these facilities can be prohibitive to workers receiving adequate medical care. Amazon employees told investigators that the Amcare clinic in Deltona, Florida, required injured workers to wait three weeks after an injury before they could be referred to a physician. OSHA also found that if an employee suffered head trauma and dizziness, they were not immediately referred to a physician. A spokesperson from Amazon told TechCrunch that the company denies OSHA’s claims. “We take the safety and health of our employees very seriously, and we strongly disagree with these allegations and intend to appeal,” Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, said in a statement. “We’ve cooperated fully, and the government’s allegations don’t reflect the reality of safety at our sites. Over the last several months we’ve demonstrated the extent to which we work every day to mitigate risk and protect our people, and our publicly available data show we’ve reduced injury rates nearly 15% between 2019 and 2021.” Amazon said that the federal government does not offer specific ergonomics guidance to employers, so the company has invested in engineering innovations that can reduce the need for workers to bend, twist and reach in ways that can cause injury. Warehouse workers also take part in stretching groups called “huddles.” “The vast majority of our employees tell us they feel our workplace is safe,” Nantel said. “We look forward to sharing more during our appeal about the numerous safety innovations, process improvements, and investments we’re making to further reduce injuries. We know there will always be ways for us to improve even further, and we will — we’ll never stop working to be safer for our employees.” Federal regulators have found trouble in Amazon’s warehouses for years, where workers typically work physically demanding shifts of with minimal breaks. According to from the Washington State Department of Labor, the rate of strains and sprains per 10,000 employees are four times higher at Amazon than they are at other warehouses. And in 2019, OSHA found the with Amcare facilities that it’s reporting now: Amcare staff are treating employees on-site, rather than referring them to other doctors when necessary.

Twitter puts more emphasis on the bookmark feature on iOS

Ivan Mehta

After promising a feature that lets you easily bookmark tweets, Twitter is now rolling it out on iOS. The new design displays the bookmark button under the expanded tweet view. Making it easier to add a post to your bookmarks. Before today’s change, you had to tap on the share button to open the sharing card and then tap on the bookmark option to save a tweet. In addition to the new button, as soon as you tap on the button, you will see a banner at the top of the screen that says “Show all bookmarks.” The option is currently visible only on the iOS app, but we can expect that Twitter will roll this out to Android and the web soon. Twitter Earlier this month, Elon Musk promised to bring . Now, it is finally rolling out to end users. Many people have used the “Like” button as a bookmark feature — just because it was cumbersome to save and retrieve tweets as bookmarks. But this new button placement might change things a bit. Easy swipe right/left to move between recommended vs followed tweets rolls out later this week. First part of a much larger UI overhaul. Bookmark button (de facto silent like) on Tweet details rolls out a week later. Long form tweets early Feb. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Notably, if you have a Twitter Blue subscription — which is — you can use the bookmark folders feature to arrange them better. Along with this, Twitter has also updated its Android app to show the two timeline options in two side-by-side separate tabs. The company first rolled out the default “For You” timeline and chronological “Following” timeline to iOS . It’s your turn Android — no more ✨ icon. Upgrade to the latest version of the app to switch between “For you” and “Following”. — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) Later it brought this . At that time, Twitter remembered your choice of timeline even if you closed the tab. So for instance, if you chose “Following” and opened Twitter in a new tab after closing it, the “Following” timeline appeared as the default feed. However, the company now seems to have made the change in such a way that you will see the “For You” feed by default if you refresh the page or open Twitter in a new tab. Meanwhile last night, the company made changes , effectively killing third-party clients. As a result, well-known apps like .

Daily Crunch: Amazon cancels charitable donation initiative so it can focus on ‘programs with greater impact’

Christine Hall

Thursday! This week has just flown by, and we’re still reeling from the excitement that . Compliments? In this day and age? Is there actually hope for us after all?! Well, we have a compliment for ya, — thank you for spreading some joy into our day today! — and People are addicted 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, reports. Merchants are 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. Link comes to the rescue, and to help merchants accept direct bank payments. You know, like consumers in Europe have been able to do since the 1990s. 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, reports. according to fintech-investing VCs. And we have five more for you: / Getty Images In the third article of a five-part series, growth marketing expert Jonathan Martinez (Uber, Postmates, Chime) explains how to create and optimize email campaigns that will “push consumers through your funnel and drive conversions.” Martinez shares fundamentals for segmenting customers and anticipating where leaks will occur along the funnel you’re developing. Startups that recapture these users can eke out a higher ARR, and every little bit counts. “It is crucial to distill user segments as much as possible because we must ensure that we’re sending the right messaging to the right consumers.” Three more from the TC+ team: We know, it’s hard to put that phone down, and all those distracting dings and buzzes don’t help. Well, Instagram’s got your back with a and even tells your peeps you are on DND. writes that this is just one of several new changes on the app, including some other time management tools and expanded parental controls. Meanwhile, fast fashion ain’t what it used to be…valued at. reports that as it seeks to raise $3 billion in new funding. The company is said to be raising on a $64 billion valuation, down from the ; however, “Shein denies the accuracy of some of the information,” she writes. And we have five more for you:

Copilot lands $10M to help service businesses build digital customer experiences

Kyle Wiggers

, a platform aimed at helping companies, including marketing agencies, accounting firms and law firms, run and grow their businesses, today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by YC Continuity and Lachy Groom at a $100 million post-money valuation. Co-founder and CEO Marlon Misra said that the funds will be put toward expanding Copilot’s team, particularly on the engineering and product organization side, to build a “Shopify-like” app store specifically for services business. “While in the first two years we focused on building a great core product, future years will center around building out our platform,” Misra told TechCrunch in an email interview, noting that Copilot has raised $13 million in capital to date. “Thousands of tech-enabled services businesses including marketing agencies, financial services companies, consulting firms, law firms and various types of startups run on Copilot.” Misra co-founded Copilot with Neil Raina in early 2020. Prior to starting the company, the pair went through Y Combinator and worked on multiple other startup ideas, including , where they developed a gesture-based home “vision assistant.” “As a result of several company-building experiences, our team became the clients of dozens of service businesses — marketing agencies, accounting firms, immigration firms, recruiting agencies and others,” Misra explained. “Those experiences helped us identify a critical problem that almost all service businesses have. Specifically, service businesses struggle to provide clients with a streamlined user experience because they generally don’t have the technical expertise to build their own client-facing product.” Using Copilot for invoice payments. Copilot get a choice between using Copilot’s in-house apps or integrating with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product they’re already paying for. “Clients generally have no way of managing their account and no way of easily accessing important information,” Instead, clients receive email notifications from the various SaaS tools that the services business uses … We found that when companies switch to Copilot and ‘productize’ their business, they see higher customer satisfaction, improved retention, new growth channels and more efficiency.” Bill.com and Freshbooks rivals (in the payments space) but also Box and Dropbox (in file-sharing), DocuSign and HelloSign (in contracts), JotForm and Typeform (in forms) and Intercom and Zendesk (in help desks). When asked whether he anticipates challenges to 15-employee Copilot’s business down the line, Misra said that he doesn’t, pointing to Copilot’s large existing customer base. He declined to answer a question about revenue but volunteered that Copilot has more than four years of runway. “When the pandemic first started, the most immediate effect was companies closing their physical offices and investing more in their online presence, online customer acquisition and new software. Many companies tried to reinvent themselves as online-first businesses, which is why there’s now this big trend toward building these online, modern, customer-centric and highly automated businesses,” The economic slowdown in the economy that succeeded the pandemic exacerbated the need to be efficient. And here, we saw companies once again looking for more ways to automate and find more ways to consolidate their software stack. That’s benefitting us.”

Canada wants to support commercial space launches

Darrell Etherington

While the bulk of commercial space launch activity is happening just south of its border, Canada is tired of watching from the sidelines and wants in on the action: The country’s federal transport ministry announced that it intends to support commercial space launches in the near future. The plan is for Canada to host commercial launch activities starting essentially immediately on a “case-by-case basis,” using the existing regulatory framework to govern how, where and when those launches take place. That ad hoc method is expected to last approximately three years, with the intent being that Transport Canada will spend that time working with other relevant federal agencies and regulators to create a framework specific to modern space launch activities within the country. It’s not as if Canada doesn’t already participate in the space economy: To the contrary, Transport Canada said that aerospace commercial activity contributed more than $22 billion in GDP to the country’s economy in 2020. The commercial launch sector is obviously heating up, however, and Canada believes that it’s geographically and strategically well-positioned to capitalize. Already, some homegrown startups are experimenting with the possibilities of small payload launches from Canada, , which uses balloon-lofted small rockets to make the relatively short trip to low-Earth orbit. But opening up commercial activities more broadly could help Canada court existing commercial launch entities, including SpaceX, Rocket Lab and the other companies looking to join their ranks, as an additional North American take-off option.

While layoffs keep coming, so far Apple has steered clear

Ron Miller

On Wednesday, it was laying off 10,000 people. Alphabet added to the misery this morning. We’ve previously seen  at Amazon and another . You could also throw in Salesforce, which at the beginning of the month. You’ll notice one company is conspicuously missing from this wretched list, and that’s Apple, which at least until now, has remained on the sidelines when it comes to layoffs. It’s worth noting that the company hasn’t had a history of big layoffs, and the last big one was back in 1997 when Steve Jobs returned to run things and employees. That was a time when Apple was in dire straits, before Jobs led a massive turnaround that began a steady march to the company we see today. One of the biggest reasons we’ve heard for these layoffs has been over hiring, as the chart below illustrates: Macrotrends While the other organizations were adding gobs of employees, Apple has hired at a much more modest rate than its large tech company counterparts, adding only 17,000 employees during 2020-2022. Perhaps because it didn’t bring in so many employees as the others, that could account for the fact that it has yet to make big layoffs. The only layoff news so far from Apple was a pretty modest one. In August that the company quietly laid off 100 contract tech recruiters. In a company of more than 160,000 employees, that feels insignificant, but it could have been a sign that at least the company was slowing hiring. And that’s exactly what happened when the company in November. While Apple indicated that it intended to keep hiring in certain roles, it was a general freeze as a reaction to the overall economic uncertainty that all these companies are reacting to. The shifting economic climate, and overall uncertainty heading into the new year, has also been a big driver of the job cuts, but Apple has avoided using layoffs as a tool to this point. All that said, with Apple scheduled to report earnings on February 1, we’ll probably get a clearer picture of the company’s overall financial performance. Nobody can predict what will happen here, and certainly given the overall pattern of layoffs we’ve seen recently at the other companies, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect something similar, but perhaps their hiring prudence will help prevent a comparable fate and Apple will spare its employees from this trauma.

Twitter brings its “For You” and “Following” dual-timeline view to the web

Ivan Mehta

After updating its iOS app to , Twitter is rolling out this update to the web interface. Earlier this week, the company renamed “Home” (algorithmic timeline) and “Latest” (chronological timeline) to “For You” and “Following”. The “For You” timeline now appears first in both the iOS app and the web. While you have to swipe between these timelines on the phone, you have to click on the timeline tabs to switch between them on the web. The good part is that at least in the web version, Twitter seems to remember users’ choices. So even if a user closes the tab or the window and reopens Twitter, they will see whatever timeline you selected earlier. Twitter said in its announcement that this view is coming to the Android app soon, too. Algorithmic timeline for everyone! You can now easily switch between “For you” and “Following” on web. Android coming soon 👀 — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) One advantage of the new web view is that if you use Twitter lists, the revamped interface makes it easier to jump from one pinned list to another. Earlier, the only way to access lists on the web was to through Quite tedious. TechCrunch On Friday, with users of many apps being unable to access content or log into their accounts. Developers of these apps said that they tried to contact Twitter but didn’t hear back. At the time of writing the issue is still persistent.

Dry-cleaning robotics startup Presso pulls in another $8M

Brian Heater

In late-2020, . It made a lot of sense at the time. People weren’t traveling much and therefore weren’t particularly hung up on getting their business attire dry-cleaned. Certainly the hospitality industry — which had been identified as a major potential revenue sort –0 had effectively ground to a screeching halt. Around that time, the film industry was looking for a quick, safe and efficient way to clean wardrobes at the height of the pandemic, and as it happens, Presso’s hometown of Atlanta is among the top two or three filming locations in the U.S. Ultimately, however, that partnership would prove short-lived. “What we found out a few months into it was most of these productions only shoot for a few months out of the year,” co-founder and CEO Nishant Jain said on a call with TechCrunch. “So, every few months, we have to do reverse logistics, which, for an early-stage company, economically, just doesn’t make sense.” It was a good temporary partnership and a proving ground for Presso’s robotic dry-cleaning kiosk. Amid widespread reopenings, however, Presso is returning to its initial client base of hospitality/hotel companies and real estate firms. The startup’s newfound focus is being propelled by an $8 million seed raise from a slew of high-profile backers, including Uncork Capital, 1517 Fund, AME Cloud Ventures, HAX, SOSV, Pathbreaker Ventures, Cherubic Venture, VSC Ventures and YETI Capital. The round brings Presso’s total to-date funding up to $10.1 million. It’s a lot for what is still an extremely small company with a headcount of 14. Certainly no one can blame the company for a conservative approach to growth over the past three years. The new funding will be used, in part, to grow the team, bringing its number up to around 20-25 people within the next year. It will also go toward scaling its product and meeting its 80+ bookings. Presso is using a hardware-as-a-service model to effectively lease its offering to clients. The businesses both set pricing to have an article of clothing dry-cleaned and take a revenue share out of the bottom line. The latter is adjustable, based on the amount they pay up front. In additional to developing its own hardware and leasing its machines, Presso is creating other key pieces of the puzzle, including a newer, greener fluid for the dry-cleaning process. “We had chemical engineers to develop our own liquids,” says Jain. “They’re far more organic; 70% of the industry still uses industrial solvents. We invented something that is orders of magnitudes better than we’ve ever seen.” In the future, it could potentially license the liquid to third parties. For now, however, Presso is focused on building — and distributing — its dry-cleaning kiosks.

Scenario lands $6M for its AI platform that generates game art assets

Kyle Wiggers

Depending on who you ask, generative AI is either massively overhyped or undervalued. Defined as algorithm-driven tech that creates text, art and other forms of media given a prompt, it’s captured the attention of major VC backers who’ve piled hundreds of millions of dollars into firms like and . But generative AI has yet to generate (no pun intended) correspondingly high returns, casting doubt on its near-term profit-making potential. Emmanuel de Maistre and Hervé Nivon think the problem is the application of the tech rather than the tech itself. While startups such as Stability AI aim to tackle a broad number of use cases with their generative AI, de Maistre and Nivon advocate for a narrower, slightly more focused approach. Their startup — called — lets artists and game developers create their own image generators trained on the specific style of their games. Scenario launches today, accessible via the web, mobile app or API. “Using Scenario, game developers — regardless of the level of technical expertise — can create dozens or hundreds of custom generators capable of producing entirely new game assets that are perfectly style-consistent with a given style or art direction,” de Maistre told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Our solution is the only one available that allows them to train their own AI generator based on a specific art style using first-party training data. So if you’re an independent artist or developer, you can start with a handful of assets in a given style, upload them to Scenario and create a generator specific to those assets.” De Maistre and Nivon co-founded Scenario in 2021 after spending several years in the 3D modeling and data science industries, respectively. Nivon previously was a solutions architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) working on AI products, while de Maistre sold his other startup, drone analytics firm Redbird, to the Airware. (Nivon was Redbird’s CTO.) Prior to AWS, Nivon was at Accenture, leading “innovation transformation” for the company’s France division. AI concepting is amazing! Exploring character possibilities is awesome. These characters were created on and edited in Photoshop. I'm still working to improve the faces on and already loving the results. — Rodrigo (@rodrigon) De Maistre says that he and Nivon were inspired to launch Scenario by generative AI products like OpenAI’s . The raw power of these tools was “obvious,” de Maistre believed, but the output was too inconsistent to be useful. “I knew if we could better direct that power, give users more control and consistency, that would instantly be generative AI’s killer application,” de Maistre said. “The gaming industry is the best fit for generative AI — game developers and artists have to continually produce content while time and resources are often limited. That’s why we started Scenario last year. We wanted to provide a solution that lets anyone train their own AI models — generators — using their own data so they can generate game assets faster and more efficiently, while keeping consistency and full control over the process.” The game industry indeed presents an opportunity for disruption where it concerns generative AI. Gaming requires a high volume of content — much of it artwork. Estimates are hard to come by, but one pegs the cost of creating art assets for a small-scale game at a few dollars to thousands of dollars. With Scenario, users can upload a set of visuals that define the characters, items, environments or other assets for a given video game or project. Scenario’s AI engine then learns and adapts to the visuals’ graphic style, generating new assets for games, game prototypes, game marketing materials and more from simple text-based prompts. In letting developers and artists train their own generators, Scenario hopes to sidestep the major legal challenges emerging around generative AI. Just this week, Getty Images sued Stability AI, the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion, for its content allegedly without permission and using it to train art-generating AI systems. Meanwhile, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently to revoke copyright protection for an AI-generated comic, saying copyrightable works require clear human authorship. AI Image made from to 3D model using Blender. — Robtheidiot (@Robtheidiot1) De Maistre notes that Scenario’s terms and conditions require those on the company’s platform to only use data that they own — for example, data they’ve purchased or have been granted the right to use — or open source alternatives. Scenario also doesn’t claim ownership over customers’ generators or images created on the platform, leaving most trademark — and — decisions in users’ hands. “We advise customers to work with intellectual property (IP) professionals as appropriate to ensure IP and compliance risks are mitigated, especially for commercial projects. We are a design tool and it is the user’s responsibility to ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulations,” de Maistre said. That Scenario’s attempting to wash its hands of legal liability won’t instill confidence in every customer. But de Maistre claims that 5,000 people have signed up for the platform and that 20,000 more are on a waitlist. Pricing will be usage-based, starting at $20 per month with plans for higher-volume customers to follow. “Currently, our closest competitors would be generative AI art tools such as Midjourney, DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion,” de Maistre said. “But as sophisticated as these images are, they are still evolving to fit the controlled use cases required for the gaming industry, and many users still struggle with keeping a high consistency of the outputs … Our platform has been used to create assets for various types of games, [including] mobile, cards, tabletop role playing, VR and even 3D games.” Suggesting investors are pleased with the early momentum, Scenario recently raised $6 million in seed funding from Play Ventures (who led the round), Anorak Ventures, Founders, Inc., The VR Fund, Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, Twitch founder Justin Kan and Hugging Face founders Clem Delangue and Julien Chaumont. That’s high praise considering Scenario is but one of several startups in AI-generating game asset space; rivals include , Hotpot and Pixela.ai. Scenario — which has a team of eight people — plans to put the new capital toward bringing on more full-stack engineers, data scientists and product designers, as well as a customer support team. De Maistre believes it’s the fastest way to differentiation, and — with any luck — setting Scenario well ahead of the generative AI pack. “We believe that generative AI will be as transformational for game development as Photoshop has been for digital photography, but it cannot get there without the same commitment to consistency and ease of use,” de Maistre added in a follow-up email. “We want to open the opportunity this technology brings to the gaming industry: exponentially increased production, dramatically reduced busywork and completely unconstrained creativity from AI-partnered artists.”

Analysts cut 2023 tech spending predictions as consumers hold back

Ron Miller

Predicting spending is a tricky business, especially in a period of economic uncertainty. Perhaps that’s why both IDC and Gartner have cut their fall predictions in the new year, with Gartner now predicting modest 2.2% growth for 2023, with IDC a bit more optimistic at 4.4%. In the fall, Gartner was predicting a and IDC was looking at between 5% and 6%. Both companies look at a combination of business and consumer spending in their numbers. Gartner says it’s the consumer side of the ledger that’s become a drag on their predictions, while the firm expects enterprise buyers to increase expenditures in the coming year. “While inflation is devastating consumer markets, contributing to layoffs at B2C companies, enterprises continue to increase spending on digital business initiatives despite the world economic slowdown,” Gartner analyst John-David Lovelock said in a statement. When we spoke to IDC analyst Rick Villars for , he left some wiggle room in his prediction: “Spending on core IT infrastructure, business software, professional services to implement and operate the systems — even if the economy stays flat, we expect to see continued healthy growth in the 5% to 6% range in aggregate for those spaces. It would take a more severe economic downturn from what we’re seeing for that to change,” Villars told TechCrunch. Perhaps the squeeze on consumer spending is the source of the problem, although found prices for electronics, which include items like phones and PCs, were down over 12% for the year (with prices increasing 1.9% in December). But that was more than offset by groceries, which were up 13.5% year over year, a number more likely to have a much bigger impact on consumers overall. Gasoline prices (which Adobe doesn’t measure) dropped 2% in December ( ), but fuel oil was up a whopping 41%. The bottom line is that consumers probably aren’t feeling confident right now when it comes to buying new technology if basics are costing them so much more than the prior year. The numbers bear this out as PC sales were down . That translated into a 28% drop for Q4 2022, numbers so low that Gartner reported it was the biggest single quarter drop since the firm has been tracking this data in the mid-1990s. Phone sales were similarly dismal, with sales . Numbers were off 17% in Q4 2022, down 11% for the year. While consumers are clearly cutting back, enterprises are less likely to cut their spending as tech can help blunt the impact of an economic downturn, something Villars told us in on IT spending: “The main thing we’re hearing from CIOs is that technology is part of solving the business challenges that a recession brings. And if the focus is on just cutting technology investments, they’re not actually helping the company get through the recession or through these disruptions.” Certainly, enterprises won’t be cutting back on cybersecurity as new data from Canalys shows. The firm is predicting that security spending in 2023. Consumers will probably continue to think twice about buying electronics in the first part of the year if food and fuel prices don’t come down, and that will have a big impact on the numbers overall, but as these firms predict, business spending continues to look much brighter as companies see tech as a critical budget item.

FTX’s new CEO says there’s possibility for exchange to restart

Jacquelyn Melinek

As FTX news subsided in recent weeks, the new CEO of the crypto exchange shared that he is exploring the possibility of restarting the company, according to a from The Wall Street Journal. John Ray III, the new FTX CEO, said in an interview that “everything is on the table,” in regards to reviving the bankrupt company’s international exchange and he has set up a task force to explore that opportunity. WSJ also reported that Ray is looking into whether reviving the main international exchange would provide greater value to the company’s customers and creditors as he and others try to return funds lost. Earlier this week, FTX debtors identified $1.7 billion of cash and $3.5 billion of crypto assets and $3 million of securities, according to a company . This totals about $5.5 billion in liquid assets, which Ray referred to as a “herculean” effort to assess the firm’s financial position. “We are making important progress in our efforts to maximize recoveries, and it has taken a Herculean investigative effort from our team to uncover this preliminary information,” Ray said in a statement on Tuesday. “We ask our stakeholders to understand that this information is still preliminary and subject to change. We will provide additional information as soon as we are able to do so.” The debtors also provided context to both the international and U.S.-based entities of FTX and its shortfalls. Debtors identified $1.6 billion of digital assets associated with the international exchange, FTX.com, $323 million of which was subject to unauthorized third-party transfers after it in November. About $426 million was transferred to cold storage under the control of the Securities Commission of the Bahamas, $742 million went to cold storage under FTX debtors control and $121 million is pending transfer to the debtors as well, according to the release. Meanwhile, debtors identified $181 million of digital assets associated with the U.S.-based entity, FTX US. About $90 million was subject to unauthorized third-party transfers after the bankruptcy filing, $88 million is in cold storage under FTX debtor control and $3 million is pending transfer to debtors’ control, it added. Ray and the former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried have clashed over the exchange’s position and whether or not it should have filed for bankruptcy. Bankman-Fried has in filing for bankruptcy for FTX, and in a , Bankman-Fried insisted that if he were not “forced” to declare bankruptcy that the company would have been able to repay all its customers. Bankman-Fried added, “There were numerous potential funding offers — including signed LOIs post chapter 11 filing totaling over $4b. I believe that, had FTX International been given a few weeks, it could likely have utilized its illiquid assets and equity to raise enough financing to make customers substantially whole.” In the past, Ray said Bankman-Fried has “no ongoing role at FTX” and does not speak on the company’s behalf. In mid-December during a U.S. House Financial Services Committee meeting, there were “virtually no internal controls” for FTX’s risk management systems. There were no audits of Alameda or its venture silo. But there were audits of FTX US and FTX.com, Ray said. The audits were done by Prager Metis and Armanino. “I can’t speak to the integrity or quality of those audits,” Ray said. “I don’t trust a single piece of paper in this organization.”

PC sales slip for fourth straight quarter in Q4 as demand remains muted

Ron Miller

When you look at fourth-quarter worldwide PC sales data from , and , it’s fair to say that the news was not great, with all three firms seeing precipitous declines from 2021 highs. In fact, the numbers plunged for the fourth consecutive quarter, with sales falling 28% according to IDC, 28.5% according to Gartner, and 29% according to Canalys. These numbers include laptops and desktop computers running Windows, macOS, or Chrome operating systems. The yearly totals told a similar story with all three firms coming in at around –16% decline year-over-year. But IDC analyst Ryan Reith pointed out that it may not be as gloomy as those numbers suggest because it was coming off a stellar 2021. In a statement, Reith said, “2021 was near historic levels for PC shipments, so any comparison is going to be distorted. There’s no question when we look back at this time that the rise and fall of the PC market will be one for the record books, but plenty of opportunity still lies ahead.” In terms of units shipped for the fourth quarter, Gartner reported 65.3 million units with Canalys coming in at 65.4 million units and IDC at 67.2 million units. There were no real winners in Q4 with not a single manufacturer in positive territory. The best you could hope for was minimal losses, and in most cases all three firms reported double-digit losses across the board. Apple had the least red ink on all three reports, with Gartner reporting –10.1%, Canalys reporting a –7.5% growth rate compared to last year, with IDC coming in at a more modest –2.1%. The news only got worse from there. Among the top three PC manufacturers, Dell was the biggest loser on all three reports, with all three reporting a loss of approximately 37%. After that, it was HP with –29% and Lenovo with about –28%. Those are big declines, regardless of the reason. IDC Canalys Gartner The Q4 numbers are particularly troublesome because the holidays usually represent a time when sales increase, and manufacturers made a big effort to boost sales with price cuts, but to no avail. Gartner reported it was the biggest drop they had seen for one quarter since it began tracking these numbers in the mid-1990s. What does this all mean for the coming year? In general, in spite of the uncertain economic outlook, analysts are cautiously optimistic that we will begin to see an upswing later in the year, or by the beginning of 2024 at the latest. “​​Once businesses and consumers ride out the storm, we expect delayed purchases to begin boosting the market in late 2023, with momentum picking up in 2024,” Canalys analyst Ishan Dutt said in a statement. That is in line with IDC’s thinking as well, which is predicting a rebound in 2024 with some pockets of recovery in the coming year, while Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa is predicting the malaise could continue until the beginning of 2024. While the market has taken a hit this year, it’s important to understand these numbers in context, and it appears that in spite of the precipitous drops in year-over-year percentages, when compared with the numbers prior to the lockdown in 2020, the outlook is somewhat more positive.

More money, more problems for crypto

Jacquelyn Melinek

Welcome back to Do you believe in second chances? Well, FTX’s new CEO John J. Ray III hopes so. The disgraced crypto exchange’s new chief is and possibly reviving the bankrupt company, according to a new by WSJ. Time will tell if that happens and works out for both FTX and the company’s customers and creditors. In other news, if you hadn’t heard of a little eight-letter crypto exchange called before Wednesday, you’re not alone. But apparently the U.S. Department of Justice knew what it was, and followed it so closely that they uncovered enough information to arrest the founder, Anatoly Legkodymov, for allegedly processing over $700 million of illicit funds. While this arrest brought forth a number of jokes and confusion from crypto community members, who had no idea what Bitzlato was before the announcement, it also brought on a bit of annoyance that the DOJ isn’t taking action toward bigger players in the space. Events like FTX’s bankruptcy shook the crypto industry, but longtime crypto players didn’t seem to know what Bitzlato was before the DOJ’s announcement. According to data of known wallets from Arkham, a crypto intelligence tool, wallets associated with Bitzlato contain just over $11,000; at its peak, they contained over $6 million, making Bitzlato a very small player in the industry. All in all, this arrest points to the DOJ — and the U.S. government in general — cracking down on the crypto space. Like the rapper Biggie Smalls once , ” More details below. As the crypto developer ecosystem expands, major ecosystems outside of the top two cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin and Ethereum — are growing, according to a new report. Solana saw the highest number of new developers contributing to the ecosystem, with its developer count rising by 83%, the fastest of any major blockchain. “2023 might just be the year when other devs already building on Solana collectively lead the direction of the network,” Raj Gokal, co-founder of Solana, said to TechCrunch. As mentioned above, little-known crypto exchange Bitzlato is in hot water. According to the DOJ, Bitzlato allowed users to trade cryptocurrencies without verifying their identity. The Hong Kong-registered exchange advertised itself to customers by saying that “neither selfies nor passports [are] required.” The government said that this lack of know-your-customer procedures turned Bitzlato into a hotbed for criminal activity. Ethereum’s shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) in September 2022 increased interest in staking across a number of parties — including institutions. The success of the Merge 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 last valued at over $3 billion, said to TechCrunch. “Interest from investors grew and the appetite changed dramatically.” 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 250 jobs in mid-last year. The company did not say which roles were being eliminated in the new round of layoffs but blamed the collapse of FTX, whose misappropriation of customers’ funds and bankruptcy “significantly damaged trust in the industry.” While some crypto-focused venture capitalists are bullish for 2023, others see it as a hazardous time. Many investors are trying to put last year’s chaotic market behind them and look forward to the future in a still investor-centric environment. But the competition in the market will heat up as investors write fewer checks and become more selective. Last week, Chain Reaction launched Season 2 with an with Ryan Wyatt, president of Polygon Labs, one of the biggest market shakers and layer-2 blockchains in the crypto space that’s building on top of the Ethereum ecosystem. Next week, we’ll be releasing our second episode with Mo Shaikh, co-founder and CEO of , a new-ish layer-1 blockchain that raised a total of $350 million in funding in 2022. Stay tuned. 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!

Sling TV’s subscriber base continues to tank, loses over 75K subs in Q4

Lauren Forristal

Sling TV, the DISH-owned streaming service, finished the year off with a substantial drop in subscribers, ending Q4 2022 with a loss of 77,000 subs. As reported in an on January 17, Sling TV now has a total of 2.33 million subscribers, down from in the previous quarter. While the company momentarily gained subscribers in Q3 2022, Sling TV now seems like it’s stuck in 2018 with its current subscriber base when it also had 2.33 million subs. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the live TV streamer had 2.49 million. The drop in subscribers is likely due to the and increased competition. Sling TV bumped up its plans by $5. Sling Orange and Sling Blue now each cost $40/month, whereas the bundle (Sling Orange + Blue) is $55/month. The main reason that customers switch over to live TV streaming services is that they no longer have to pay an arm and a leg for cable. However, it seems like no one can escape the high prices of live TV. It’s also possible that some customers canceled their subscriptions when briefly disappeared from Sling TV over a carriage dispute in October 2022. The channels, which included ABC, the Disney Channel, ESPN, FX, Freeform and National Geographic, were two days later. However, it’s possible that some customers never re-subscribed. Dish reported in the SEC filing that it has 9.75 million pay-TV subscribers in total, with 7.41 million customers subscribed to Dish TV, its satellite service. Dish TV lost approximately 200,000 subscribers. However, Sling TV is confident that 2023 will be a promising year for the streamer. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Sling TV President Gary Schanman at the possibility of a free offering, which could help to boost its audience. “Free is part of our thoughts about how we think about that engagement with the customer. We want a lifelong relationship with the subscriber where they see value in what we provide — and [free content is] a piece of that,” Schanman said. While it’s unclear exactly what Sling TV has in the pipeline, if the company were to offer free streaming options, there’s no doubt that more customers would flock to the service. It would also put Sling TV in better competition with free, ad-supported services like Roku, Freevee, Pluto TV, Xumo and Plex. was the latest company to experiment with a free ad-supported TV channel offering. Sling TV also just launched new features like user profiles and a Sports Scores feature. Dish its fourth quarterly earnings on February 23, 2023, revealing 2022 total revenue of $16.68 billion, down from $17.88 billion in 2021.

EU watchdogs agree on how to handle certain cookie consent dark patterns

Natasha Lomas

Cookie consent banners that use blatant design tricks to try to manipulate web users into agreeing to hand over their data for behavioral advertising, instead of giving people a free and fair choice to refuse this kind of creepy tracking, are facing a coordinated pushback from the European Union’s data protection regulators. A taskforce of several DPAs, led by France’s CNIL along with Austria’s authority, has spent many months on a piece of joint-work analyzing cookie banners. And in a published this week they’ve arrived at some consensus on how to approach complaints about certain types of cookie consent dark patterns in their respective jurisdictions — a development that looks set to make it harder for deceptive designs to fly around the EU. The taskforce was convened in response to hundreds of strategic complaints, filed between and by the European privacy rights group, — which developed its own tool to help automate analysis of websites’ cookie banners and generate reports and complaints (a smart trick by a small not-for-profit to scale its strategic impact). Cookies and other tracking technologies fall under the EU’s ePrivacy Directive, which means oversight of cookie banners is typically decentralized to regulators in Member States. That in turn means there can be varying applications of the rules around the bloc, depending on where the website in question is hosted. (Regulators in some Member States, for example, allow news sites to offer users a choice between accepting ad tracking to gain (free) access to the content or paying for a subscription to get access without tracking — although such ‘cookie paywalls’ and are unlikely to pass muster with every DPA.) Given the degree of consensus reported by the taskforce, it suggests there will be some harmonization in how DPAs enforce complaints related to the design of cookie consent banners — with, for example, the vast majority of authorities agreeing that the lack of a ‘refuse all’ option at the same level as an ‘accept all’ button is a breach of ePrivacy. So more enforcement against sites that try to bury an option to refuse tracking looks likely. The taskforce also agreed that consent flows which feature pre-checked options (i.e. as another tactic to try to nudge agreement) is not valid consent either — which should surprise no one given Europe’s top court already clarified a need for active consent for tracking cookies all the way . Over the past five or so years, since another EU law came into application bolstering the rules around consent — namely the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — DPAs have certainly been paying more attention to cookie consents. Including as complaints over piled up. This in turn has led many to update (and tighten) their guidance on this issue — making it harder for sites to claim the rules around tracking consent are unclear. And given the CNIL has had a leading role in coordinating the taskforce’s work, it appears that some of its convention is rubbing off on fellow DPAs. In a to accompany the European Data Protection Board’s adoption of the taskforce’s report earlier this week and summarize the outcome, the French regulator writes: “This report notably states that the vast majority of authorities consider that the absence of any option for refusing/rejecting/not consenting cookies at the same level as the one provided for accepting their storage constitutes a breach of the legislation (Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive). The CNIL had already taken such a position in its guidelines and in the context of several sanctions,” As well as agreement on the need for an ‘accept all’ button to be accompanied by a ‘refuse all’ one, the taskforce agreed that the design of cookie banners needs to provide web users with enough information to enable them to understand what they are consenting to and how to express their choice. And that cookie banners must not be designed in such a way as to give users “the impression that they have to give a consent to access the website content, nor that clearly pushes the user to give consent”, as the report puts it. They also agreed on some examples of cookie designs that would lead to valid consent — such as where the design is such “the only alternative action offered (other than granting consent) consists of a link behind wording such as ‘refuse’ or ‘continue without accepting’ embedded in a paragraph of text in the cookie banner, in the absence of sufficient visual support to draw an average user’s attention to this alternative action”; or where “the only alternative action offered (other than granting consent) consists of a link behind wording such as ‘refuse’ or ‘continue without accepting’ placed outside the cookie banner where the buttons to accept cookies are presented, in the absence of sufficient visual support to draw the users’ attention to this alternative action outside the frame”. So basically they got some consensus on ruling out certain common cookie banner dark patterns. But on visual tricks — such as the use of highlight colors which might be selected to draw the eye to an ‘accept all’ button and make it harder to see a refuse option, the taskforce decided that case-by-case analysis of the look and feel (and the potential for these kind of design choices to be obviously misleading) would be needed in most cases. And they agreed it’s not their place to impose a general banner standard (vis-a-vis colour and/or contrast) on data controllers. They also agreed that refuse all buttons that are designed in such as way as to render the text “unreadable to virtually any user” could be “manifestly misleading” for users. Other issues the taskforce grappled with included a more recent addition to cookie consent hell — in which sites may seek to (also) to claim a “legitimate interest” for ads processing. Sometimes adding a bunch of additional toggles alongside the consent legal basis buttons that are typically displayed only in a secondary (or other sub-menu), and where the top level does not offer a ‘refuse all’ option — instead requiring users to click through into settings to unearth this confusing mess of toggles (sometimes with the LI ones pre-checked). “The integration of this notion of legitimate interest for the subsequent processing ‘in the deeper layers of the banner’ could be considered as confusing for users who might think they have to refuse twice in order not to have their personal data processed,” the report observes on this. The taskforce also agreed on how regulators should determine whether any subsequent processing based on cookies is lawful — saying this would entail determining whether “the storage/gaining of access to information through cookies or similar technologies is done in compliance with Article 5(3) ePrivacy directive (and the national implementing rules) — any subsequent processing is done in compliance with the GDPR. 24”. “In this regard, the taskforce members took the view that non-compliance found concerning Art. 5 (3) in the ePrivacy directive (in particular when no valid consent is obtained where required), means that the subsequent processing cannot be compliant with the GDPR 5. Also, the TF members confirmed that the legal basis for the placement/reading of cookies pursuant to Article 5 (3) cannot be the legitimate interests of the controller,” they add in the report. Although they appear to have largely reserved judgement on how to handle the fresh scourge of LI toggles appearing in cookie consent flows — saying they “agreed to resume discussions on this type of practice should they encounter concrete cases where further discussion would be necessary to ensure a consistent approach”. The working group also discussed what to do about sites that seek to classify some non-essential data processing as strictly necessary/essential — and thereby bundle it into a category which does not require consent under ePrivacy or the GDPR. However they took the view that there are practical difficulties in determining which processing is strictly necessary. “Taskforce members agreed that the assessment of cookies to determine which ones are essential raises practical difficulties, in particular due to the fact that the features of cookies change regularly, which prevents the establishment of a stable and reliable list of such essential cookies,” they wrote. “The existence of tools to establish the list of cookies used by a website has been discussed, as well as the responsibility of website owners to maintain such lists, and to provide them to the competent authorities where requested and to demonstrate the essentiality of the cookies listed.” On another issue — of withdrawing consent — they agreed website owners should put in place “easily accessible solutions allowing users to withdraw their consent at any time”, giving the example of a small icon (“hovering and permanently visible”) or a link “placed on a visible and standardized place”. However they again shied away from imposing a specific standardized way for users to withdraw consent on site owners, saying that they could only be required to implement

Building up and tearing down

Brian Heater

the remaining vestiges out of CES 2023 in last week’s Actuator. The good news is that things are starting to pick up again like clockwork. If you’ve emailed me about work stuff in the past week, I apologize for the delay — I’ve been out of one frying pan and into the next. Anecdotally, I’ll say this is a net positive. Robotics news took a brief respite over the holidays, but things are coming fast and furious again. It’s not all good news, of course. The calendar reset a couple weeks back — but unfortunately, all of the economic doom and gloom doesn’t get a fresh start with it. This year is going to be a reckoning. As ominous as it sounds, this is not a wholly good or bad thing, mind. It’s more that, after two years of relentless optimism for robotics and automation, the check is coming due for many. This will be a year of sink or swim for many. As VC becomes harder to come by, runways suddenly shorten, and to sufficiently stretch the metaphor, no one wants to deal with a shrinking runway at takeoff. If you can’t rope in that $20 million round you were banking on, suddenly you’re faced with some extremely hard decisions. That could take the form of a pivot, a severe belt tightening (layoffs, thinning out the roadmap), exploring a sell-off or other worst-case scenario. All of the above options involve an existential change for everyone involved. Again, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Some well-positioned firms will come out of it better, as a clear front runner in the category. It could mean acquiring a smaller firm, combining teams and coming out stronger for it. Heck, even those who have had to take the extremely unfortunate (and life-altering) action of layoffs could ultimately come out the other side with a kind of renewed sense of focus. Intrinsic All of this is top of mind, in part, because of , which missed the deadline for last week’s newsletter. It’s a weird one. I’m hoping to catch up with the Alphabet team soon to discuss a series of events that included a couple of acquisitions followed by a 20% staff reduction, amounting to around 40 people. Certainly I’m aware that the timeline for acquisitions and personnel decisions don’t always line up in an ideal fashion. I’m always keenly aware of how big companies like Alphabet make these sorts of decisions for their bottom line. The fact is that it can be a lot harder to justify long-tail commitments — particularly those that aren’t deemed essential to the company’s core mission. None of this should be taken as a repudiation of Intrinsic’s mission, of course — the work it and other companies are doing in the robotics software space is key to the future of industrial implementation. If I had to venture a guess (as I am contractually obligated to do), I would say that it’s more a reprioritization on Alphabet’s part. An Intrinsic spokesperson told TechCrunch: Intrinsic’s leadership has made the difficult decision to let go a number of our team members. We have communicated the news directly with them. We fully acknowledge how hard this will be and are offering as much proactive support as possible. This decision was made in light of shifts in prioritization and our longer-term strategic direction. It will ensure Intrinsic can continue to allocate resources to our highest priority initiatives, such as building our software and AI platform, integrating the recent strategic acquisitions of Vicarious and OSRC (commercial arm Open Robotics), and working with key industry partners. While incredibly tough to do, we believe this decision is necessary for us to continue our mission. No question in my mind this was a difficult decision. Among other things, it’s not the sort of vote of confidence a young company is hoping for out the gate. But Intrinsic has a lot of smart folks on board — even more so after those acquisitions — and in spite of the downsizing, Alphabet does, of course, have tremendous resources if and when it turns that faucet back on. Boston Dynamics (Image has been modified) The other bit of news I wanted to touch on off the top was yesterday’s Boston Dynamics news. One thing’s for sure — the Massachusetts firm makes a mean video. A few dropped this week showcasing new grippers for Atlas. The humanoid robot utilizes its new appendages to lend a couple of hands at a makeshift construction site. Here’s a breakdown from BD: I would caution that nothing Boston Dynamics shows should be read as anything more than proof of concept. That’s doubly the case with Atlas, which is a research robot, through and through. The caveat here, of course, is that new(ish) owner, Hyundai, has been aggressive about commercializing these products. Imagining some more productized Atlas offspring helping out around their automotive factories doesn’t seem far out of the realm of possibility, for example. Atlas certainly has a sizable head start on . It remains to be seen as well. Most of all, I look forward to a renewed, spirited debate around making robots in our own image. Image of ETHZ’s tree-sampling drone in action. ETHZ Here’s a fun piece from Devin about a drone from Swiss scientists designed to from treetops. That means cruising around picking up evidence like skin, feathers and waste to determine what animals have been hanging out in the area. Devin here: The drone looks a bit like a modernist light fixture, with a beautifully crafted wood frame and plastic shielding, and strips of adhesive tape or “humidified cotton” mounted on its lower surfaces. After being guided to a generally favorable position, it hovers above a branch to be sampled and monitors any movement like swaying or bouncing, synchronizing its approach. When it makes contact, it pushes with enough pressure to cause loose eDNA materials to transfer to the strips, but not so much that it pushes the branch out of the way. Essentially, it leans on the tree. Sega This week, German firm United Robotics Group announced last week that Spanish mobile robotics and manipulation startup/video game hedgehog antagonizer, Robotnik Automation. URG cites the company’s strong foothold in markets like Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, the U.S., France, Germany and Italy as a key motivator in the acquisition. Says United Robotics co-CEO Thomas Linkenheil: We have been working with Robotnik as our strategic partner and I am delighted to see the company join our group. We will benefit from 70 highly experienced robotics experts, especially in the areas of R&D and Software. This investment will support us in the development of further applications for CobiotX, the third generation of robots for humans. We look forward to working with the local management team around Roberto Guzmán and Rafael López who are leading the company since the very beginning. We are very confident to leverage synergies.” If there’s one thing we’re passionate about here at Actuator HQ, it’s leveraging synergies. Lastly for the week is me trying to find a way to convince the T&E team to get me back to Pittsburgh for the week, to check out the nonprofit “Robotics Factory.” With backing from CMU and the Pittsburgh Robotics Network, it’s definitely a space worth watching in the coming year. Per the : The Robotics Factory, an array of robotics programs led by Innovation Works and the Pittsburgh Robotics Network, is a part of the $63 million Build Back Better Regional Challenge grant awarded by the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) to the Southwestern Pennsylvania New Economy Collaborative. The Robotics Factory will create, accelerate and scale robotics startups in the Pittsburgh region. Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Oro, an open source B2B e-commerce platform from Magento’s co-founder, raises $13M

Paul Sawers

, an open source e-commerce platform co-created by Magento’s co-founder and former CTO, today announced it has raised $13 million in a strategic growth round of funding. Founded in 2012, Los Angeles-based Oro’s platform constitutes a range of applications, including , its flagship B2B e-commerce platform for building storefronts and marketplaces; , an end-to-end management platform specifically for marketplace businesses; a customer relationship management platform (CRM) called ; and , a rapid web app development platform. While similar players in the space and Magento largely (though not exclusively) focus on B2C brands, Oro targets its e-commerce infrastructure squarely at B2B companies such as manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and wholesalers. This, according to Oro CEO and co-founder , is more complex to execute than B2C. “B2B e-commerce has a very different dynamic to B2C commerce — instead of high-volume transactional purchases with a rotating cast of consumers, B2B brands focus on high-value deals with a smaller group of loyal customers,” Kutner told TechCrunch. “As such, B2B digital commerce solutions need to be able to accommodate the complex needs of business buyers, with large orders, split shipments, customized quotes and many other capabilities, while also supporting rich ongoing customer engagement and personalized offerings.” Oro platform example. Oro But on top of all that, B2B buyers now expect the kind of usability they have become accustomed to with B2C platforms they may use elsewhere in their everyday lives, which means that B2B merchants have had to up their game. “One of the key challenges is delivering robust and feature-rich enterprise-grade sales tools, while also delivering a consumer-grade purchasing experience, with sleek and streamlined discovery, purchasing and tracking options,” Kutner added. Things get even more complex when you consider that a single seller might have completely different and distinct markets for their goods. Kutner cited an example involving a glassware manufacturer, who might have to introduce separate sales portals targeting the medical and catering sectors, for instance. This also might require the seller to set different pricing structures for each vertical, something that Oro enables through a so-called “dynamic pricing engine” that automatically calculates new prices or discounts based on pre-set rules and business logic defined by the seller. “Coordinating those operations behind the scenes brings special challenges for B2B companies and e-commerce providers,” Kutner said. Oro’s leadership team: Left to right is Yoav Kutner, CEO; Laurent Desprez, Executive VP & GM Europe; Dima Soroka, CTO. Oro Alongside two co-founders Jary Carter and Dima Soroka, Kutner launched Oro a little more than a decade ago, shortly , which he’d for around $180 million. Adobe in 2018 and . Oro is a similar proposition to Magento in several ways, perhaps chief among them being its open source foundations, which affords more flexibility over things like hosting and deployment, while also allowing companies to tweak and adapt things to their own use cases. This means that companies can host Oro on their own infrastructure if they wish, or deploy it across any combination of on-premises or public and private clouds. “Users can also easily and rapidly switch between deployment models — for example, if an on-premises customer needs to rapidly scale up, and leverage private or public cloud infrastructure in response to a spike in web traffic,” Kutner said. “And our hybrid approach also puts customers in control of their data: If they want to run most workloads in the cloud, but operate their own secure data center, for instance, Oro makes that entirely possible. There’s really no limit to the ways that customers can leverage our hosting options to suit their needs.” Prior to now, Oro had raised $12 million , and with another $13 million in the bank, Kutner said that the company plans to “shake up the digital commerce industry for many years to come.” Oro’s latest cash injection was led by Zubr Capital, with participation from existing investor Highland Europe.

Trunk extends its developer toolkit with CI analytics

Frederic Lardinois

Trunk, a startup that aims to build a toolkit that helps developers build and ship their code faster, today announced the launch of its latest product: . The new service helps developers understand how their CI Workflows (currently with a focus on GitHub Actions) perform in the real world — and if there are any trends they should be aware of. Founded in 2021 by a group of , Trunk already offers , a tool for checking code quality, and , a service that orchestrates merging pull requests. With CI Analytics, it’s now expanding this feature set with another tool that tries to help developers work more efficiently. Trunk “I’d run these surveys and the number one issue coming back from folks is ‘the hardest part of my job is landing code and merging code into main.’ That’s insane. We’re trying to build future-forward tech to make cars drive themselves and the hardest thing for the engineers is to put their code into the codebase,” Trunk co-founder and co-CEO Eli Schleifer told me of his time at Uber. “Every company has to invest a tremendous amount of money into this stuff and you really don’t want to hire 30 engineers — that’s how many were at Uber — to build this solution, because it’s not germane to your problem space. It’s just the core tax you pay.” Schleifer described the new analytics service as an “engineering intelligence solution” that helps developers fix broken engineering workflows. He noted that while GitHub Actions has become very popular in a short amount of time, it’s also a bit of a black box. “There are a lot of engineering intelligence tools out there that will tell you that this engineer wrote this many lines of code or this many commits. We see engineering intelligence more as a tool to help the productivity of all the engineers,” Schleifer said. If Trunk can help these engineers find inefficiencies in their CI processes, then, he argues, it will make everybody in the engineering organization more efficient. “Without a proper engineering intelligence solution, DevOps and engineering teams are left operating in the dark and engineers are left to guess at what parts of their build and test workflows are slowing down engineering,” said Schleifer. “ CI Analytics eliminates the guesswork with beautiful trend lines, anomaly alerting and the ability to perform deep historical analysis within a few clicks. Operating without this level of engineering intelligence can be the difference between shipping code on time and slowly grinding to a halt.” The new service is now available to all Trunk users, with pricing starting at $7 per month and user (after a free two-week trial).

DOJ charges founder of crypto exchange Bitzlato for processing $700M of illegal funds

Amanda Silberling

In a press conference on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it has Anatoly Legkodymov, founder of crypto exchange Bitzlato, for allegedly processing over $700 million of illicit funds. “Overnight, the Department worked with key partners here and abroad to disrupt Bitzlato, the China-based money laundering engine that fueled a high-tech axis of cryptocrime, and to arrest its founder, Russian national Anatoly Legkodymov,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco. “Today’s actions send the clear message: Whether you break our laws from China or Europe — or abuse our financial system from — you can expect to answer for your crimes inside a United States courtroom.” According to the DOJ, Bitzlato allowed users to trade cryptocurrencies without verifying their identity. The Hong Kong-registered exchange advertised itself to customers by saying that “neither selfies nor passports [are] required.” The government said that this lack of know-your-customer procedures turned Bitzlato into a hotbed for criminal activity. U.S. government regulators have been cracking down on the crypto space. Coinbase, one of the most popular crypto exchanges, was recently by New York state regulators for failing to conduct adequate background checks. According to a , Coinbase employed third-party contractors to handle a backlog of more than 100,000 unreviewed transaction monitoring alerts, but Coinbase failed to conduct quality control measures, so it turned out that much of this contracted work was riddled with errors. As a result of these errors, regulators wrote that Coinbase failed to report potential instances of money laundering, narcotics trafficking and CSAM-related activity to authorities. Meanwhile, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was on federal charges of defrauding investors after his $32 billion company imploded and filed for bankruptcy. Bankman-Fried continues to assert he is and even started a to defend himself, though his former associates like FTX co-founder Gary Wang and Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison have to federal charges. Events like FTX’s bankruptcy shook the crypto industry, but didn’t seem to know what Bitzlato was before the DOJ’s announcement. According to data of known wallets from Arkham, a crypto intelligence tool, wallets associated with Bitzlato contain just over $11,000; at its peak, they contained over $6 million, making Bitzlato a very small player in the industry. Bitzlato has like 1,400 followers and hasn't tweeted in almost a year — Jacquelyn Melinek (@jacqmelinek) If convicted, Legkodymov could face up to five years in prison. “The FBI and our partners remain steadfast in our commitment to keeping cryptocurrency markets — as with any financial market — free from illicit activity,” said Michael J. Driscoll, an assistant director with the FBI’s New York field office. “Today’s action should serve as an example of this commitment as Legkodymov will now face the consequences of his actions in our criminal justice system.”

Taco Bell, KFC owner says data stolen during ransomware attack

Carly Page

Yum Brands, the parent company of fast-food chains KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, has confirmed that company data was stolen in a ransomware attack. TechCrunch first learned of an apparent incident affecting Yum Brands earlier this week, which the Kentucky-based company confirmed in a on Thursday. Yum Brands said a ransomware attack impacted “certain information technology systems,” prompting the chain to take some of its systems offline. The incident also led to the closure of roughly 300 restaurants in the United Kingdom for 24 hours, the company said. Although the ransomware attack largely affected the company’s U.K. operations, Yum Brands said it notified U.S. federal law enforcement as its investigation continues. Yum Brands said that the unidentified intruder responsible for the ransomware attack stole data from the company’s network, but added it had “no evidence” that customer data was stolen. It’s not clear if the company has the technical means, such as logs, to determine what specific data was exfiltrated. It’s also unclear when the ransomware attack began or how the company’s systems were initially compromised. Yum Brands spokesperson Rob Poetsch declined to provide more details about the incident, referring TechCrunch to the company’s statement. “While this incident caused temporary disruption, the company is aware of no other restaurant disruptions and does not expect this event to have a material adverse impact on its business, operations or financial results,” the company’s statement said.

This gentle drone collects loose DNA from swaying tree branches

Devin Coldewey

Understanding the biodiversity of forests is crucial to their conservation or restoration. Collecting “external DNA” left behind by animals is a good way to find out what lives there without having to spot them or even be there at the same time — and makes taking samples from tree limbs safer and easier. External DNA can come from lots of forms — dead skin or feathers, waste, fluids — and can be found in soil, water or on surfaces like rocks and tree branches. Basically anywhere an animal might hang out, it leaves a trace of itself and we can detect that. Until recently this type of DNA amplification and analysis might have been too complex or expensive, but the tools to do it have become much cheaper and easier to use. There remains the matter of collecting the DNA, though, and while biologists can certainly collect soil and water samples or scrape the sides of trees, high-up limbs where birds, small mammals and insects live their whole lives are inaccessible without special equipment. Try telling your department head you need an extra $20,000 to get a tree-climbing team because there wasn’t enough guano on the forest floor. The adventurous roboticists at ETH Zurich have come up with a clever method of sampling external DNA from tree branches that can easily be done from the ground. , they propose a drone-based solution: an aerial robot that can fly up to high branches and snag samples from them without damaging the branch or itself. The drone looks a bit like a modernist light fixture, with a beautifully crafted wood frame and plastic shielding, and strips of adhesive tape or “humidified cotton” mounted on its lower surfaces. After being guided to a generally favorable position, it hovers above a branch to be sampled and monitors any movement like swaying or bouncing, synchronizing its approach. When it makes contact, it pushes with enough pressure to cause loose eDNA materials to transfer to the strips, but not so much that it pushes the branch out of the way. Essentially, it on the tree. Diagram from the paper showing how the drone operates. ETHZ The initial outings with the drone in the arboretum surrounding the institute (we know a lot about forests right by universities, just as we know a lot about the psychology of undergraduates), the team was able to identify dozens of species of plants and animals (as well as microorganisms). That they collected much more before it rained than after suggests the method finds recent presence, which can be helpful or limiting depending on what a project needs. The team plans to continue working on the drone, letting it go farther into trees or higher up, or adjusting its collection technique to work in different circumstances. “Our results pave the way for a generation of robotic biodiversity explorers able to survey eDNA at different spatial and temporal scales,” write the researchers. “By allowing these robots to dwell in the environment, this biomonitoring paradigm would provide information on global biodiversity and potentially automate our ability to measure, understand, and predict how the biosphere responds to human activity and environmental changes.” You can see the drone in action below:

Sling TV rolls out user profiles, promises faster pace of innovation in 2023

Sarah Perez

Dish-owned live TV streaming service is looking to catch up with competitors with the launch of new features like user profiles and the promise of more changes to come in 2023. The company began quietly rolling out the user profiles feature just ahead of last week, initially on Android TV and Fire TV devices, with support for more platforms in the near future. Over the past several months, it’s also expanded its newer direct-to-consumer subscription integrations with , which joins 50 other services now available through Sling. And it’s made a Sports Scores feature available across Roku, Fire TV and Android TV devices. Sports Scores has been rolling out to users since last year, making it easier to access scores from NFL, college football, NBA, NHL and MLB games while continuing to watch live TV or on-demand programming. Meanwhile, Sling TV’s subscription lineup, which now nears 50 services, has been available since last . Sling TV Combined with the rollout of user profiles (which had not yet been formally announced), the changes suggest a streamer that’s again trying to innovate to attract subscribers. Though one of the early leaders in live TV streaming, , Sling TV lost traction as newer services like Hulu with Live TV and YouTube TV arrived on the market. For the first three quarters last year, Sling TV faced subscriber losses, for example. However, the company more recently earnings in November, when it reported a total of 2.41 million subscribers after 214,000 net additions. But this figure is still down from the 2.6 million subscribers Sling TV had in the third quarter of 2021, for comparison. Sling TV needs to do more — and faster. TechCrunch sat down with Sling TV EVP and Sling TV President Gary Schanman in an interview at the in Las Vegas last week, to find out what’s next for the service in the months ahead. Sling TV parent Dish hired the industry vet last year, whose experience includes pay TV with roles at Spectrum, Charter and Cablevision (now Altice USA) and in the streaming space. Most recently, Schanman served as chief product officer at Common Sense Networks, where he led the launch of . Now he hopes to revitalize the Sling TV brand. “Over the next number of quarters, you’ll see a lot faster innovation of the product and the product set,” Schanman told TechCrunch. “When people join our company, we expect them to be creative and innovative and be all about winning. And so we’re starting to bring a lot more people into the company to help grow that,” he said. The company is also looking at how it can better serve the different types of streamers and their needs in the year to come. “We’re focused on helping consumers find, consume and engage all the content they want. And we are comfortable with a variety of different types of consumers that have different needs. And that includes … people that keep our paid service — and they’re completely subscribed to all of our add-on packs. But it could also be people that come in for a period of time and want to watch some free content,” Schanman said. “Free is part of our thoughts about how we think about that engagement with the customer. We want a lifelong relationship with the subscriber where they see value in what we provide — and [free content is] a piece of that,” he added. Schanman couldn’t specifically comment on what Sling TV has in mind around any sort of free streaming plans to come. But overall, the streaming industry has shifted a lot of its focus in recent months to serving consumers free “live TV” channels, also known as FAST channels, which appear in a grid-like guide that feels more akin to a cable TV experience rather than ad-supported video on demand. Roku, for example, has launched FAST channels via its as has Amazon with , in addition to offerings from Pluto TV, Xumo and . For some services, the idea is to lure in customers with free streaming — as Roku does via its free movies and TV hub, The Roku Channel — then upsell them paid streaming subscriptions. Of course, if Sling TV were to go farther down the free route, it could complicate its relationship with streaming media platforms, like Roku and Amazon, which want to direct consumers to their own free streaming products. Beyond its plans to innovate on product, Schanman believes Sling TV has other advantages, including being simple and straightforward to use. He also touted the service’s reliability. It’s been a long time after all. But what Sling TV touts as simple could also be viewed as bare bones, depending on who you ask. Still, the company believes that Sling TV’s bigger advantage is not necessarily the user interface, but how it organizes its programming into affordable packages. Today, the streamer differentiates itself by way of a la carte programming packages that begin with a base subscription (Sling TV’s “Orange” or “Blue” packages) and various add-ons. Rival services, meanwhile, tend to bundle a larger number of channels into one offering, forcing subscribers to pay prices as new deals are forged. “From the live TV perspective, we still have the best value in the market by far. We also have the most flexibility in the market. The truth is, you know, I think we’re a very pro-consumer customer offering. Most of our competitors are what I would call true one-for-one cable replacements, but they’re in some cases more expensive,” said Schanman. The company plans to talk more about Sling TV’s affordability in the months to come, he said. That message is timely, as consumers are beginning to feel the financial impacts of having too many streaming choices and are facing a market where live TV plans are often no longer cheaper than traditional cable TV. “We start at $40. So our flexibility and choice is a huge value proposition in the market,” the exec explained. “You can switch between packages any time you want. We have over six add-on packs that, when you add them on, are still less than what you’d have to pay on YouTube TV or Hulu TV,” he pointed out. “The more consumer choices there are, the more that our service has value in the market, because the share of wallet is challenged across the board,” Schanman said.

Curated Loop is ranging indie designer picks for an edgier take on fashion rentals

Natasha Lomas

Here’s a fashion rental startup with a twist: London, U.K.-based — which soft-launched a high-end fashion rental marketplace last week after bootstrapping to launch an MVP — is sourcing statement pieces from independent designers’ sample stock to style itself as an edgier alternative to more conventional rivals. Its approach means items available for rent on its marketplace may be literal one-offs (samples), or come from an indie designer’s prior season’s collection (aka, dead stock) or otherwise ‘stand-out’ in the sense that you won’t be able to source these garments in high street stores — or even, the startup’s co-founders contend, on other fashion rental platforms. So the promise is access to unique high-end designs. The startup argues there’s a gap for a luxury fashion rental marketplace focused on emerging independent designers and the cutting edge looks they’re stitching — which, on its marketplace, translates into a selection of bold pieces (and suggested outfits) picked to catch the eye of its target style-seeking young urban demographic (see, for example, — paired in one of its styling shots with bold-printed baggy ‘boyfriend’ jeans: £46.60 to rent the look). Curated Loop is calculating that its target users might be looking for a high-end outfit for special events (parties, job interviews, ski holidays etc) but also as statement daywear (perhaps to spice up their Instagram feed) — or even for ‘date-wear’ (it’s working on a Valentine’s Day tie-up with a dating app). Changing the economics of wearing a designer outfit opens up a whole new set of opportunities for dressing up, especially for budget-conscious younger shoppers who seem increasingly comfortable giving fashion rentals a whirl — fuelled by concern over the environmental and ethical costs of fast fashion. The U.K. has seen a blossoming in fashion rental startups in recent years, with the likes of Hurr (founded 2017), Hirestreet (2018), My Wardrobe HQ (2019), By Rotation (2019) and Rotaro (2019) popping up to offer fashion-conscious consumers a more sustainable way to stay on trend by renting high end. Some high street clothes retailers have also . So there’s competition aplenty — and, for new founders seeking an ‘in’, that means they face the age-old challenge of standing out in a crowd. Curated Loop’s co-founders, Anna Caldana and Rachel Mcluckie, bring a background in (and passion for) fashion to what they hope will be badged as a fresh approach to designer rentals. They’re drawing on their own industry contacts, plus years of scouting for fresh design talent by scouring the pages of fashion magazines, to amass a database of indie labels they want to bag for their curated marketplace. (The business model they’re starting with is a per transaction fee but they say they plan to develop the model as they grow.) Mcluckie describes the look they’re going for with their garment picks as “eclectic, city, cool, definitely unique” — arguing: “It’s got an edge to it over our competitors.” Existing (non-P2P) fashion rental platforms had failed to impress the two co-founders with a more conventional (and/or cautious) approach to the clothes they ranged for rent. “Both of us felt we would go onto rental sites and it was all quite similar — specific wedding events [etc]… it definitely has a kind of tone,” Mcluckie suggests. “And I think that doesn’t necessarily align with Anna and I, what we were after in the market.” Feeling an itch for edgier stuff to rent, the pair got together to establish Curated Loop last year. Mcluckie previously founded a subscription-based peer-to-peer fashion rental startup, at the start of 2019, with the idea of getting users renting out their own wardrobes (à la and others). But her earlier startup had a focus on live events — which the pandemic quickly put paid to — hence she began casting around for other business ideas in fashion. Then, with her friend Caldana on board, the pair hit on offering a curated pick of indie designer garments and building a marketplace that aims to cater to the needs of up-and-coming designers — helping them build brand awareness while generating a passive income by renting out stock that might otherwise be sitting in a warehouse gathering dust. (Or, even worse, tossed into landfill.) “We wanted to create a product that felt modern, inclusive and elevated in line with our target audience of Gen Z and millennials,” Caldana tells us. “That’s why it was really important for us to launch with a mobile (as well as desktop) platform. It’s very intuitive and we have plans to build out gamifications to keep our Gen Z’s engaged.” The co-founders: Rachel Mcluckie (L) and Anna Caldana. Curated Loop As well as mining their contacts books and attending fashion shows to source new designer talent, Curated Loop is working on establishing an ongoing partnership with the arts-focused London’s Central Sant Martins University — so it’s positioning itself to spot (and support) emerging talent at the student designer stage. “I’ve been in the industry for over ten years… Anna[‘s] worked with independent designers forever. And I think that is definitely our strength,” adds Mcluckie in a video call with TechCrunch to dig into their approach. “We have got an immediate network but we also have a kind of peripheral network of designers — we’ve been able to go to fashion weeks, we’ve got a nice connection with Central Sant Martins. It’s really sort of building out that network — and that network effect to grow the customer and designer base.” As with other fashion rental startups Curated Loop hinges on leaning into circularity — as an opportunity to sell the user on a way to expand their wardrobe (more) sustainably — and without having to invest huge sums of money to buy new clothes. Per the website, the cost of a Curated Loop rental starts at a tenth of the (listed) RRP of each garment. A savvy bit of product marketing that packages the price as a bargain by default. On the sustainability side, they argue their focus on designer samples and dead stock helps reduce textile waste — a high percentage of which they say comes from prototyping and sampling. Still, fashion rentals aren’t guilt free; they do entail a lot more shipping and cleaning than a garment might otherwise get if it stayed with one careful owner — so there are environmental costs to this kind of fashion-driven consumption. To help with that, another of Curated Loop’s partnership is with London-based eco laundry startup, , which does dry cleaning without solvents and uses e-bikes and electric vehicles for pick-ups to minimize carbon emissions. But the pair say they hope to do more on the emissions shrinking/offsetting front as the business develops. “We’re obviously not in the business of greenwashing and we understand that there are emissions associated with shipping — so it’s something we are really focused on,” says Mcluckie. “The beauty of also starting a company from afresh is you can put those circular practices and plans in to begin with.” As noted above, Curated Loop’s target customer is urban and on the younger side (Alpha, Gen Z, Millennials etc) — so brands are chosen for their likely style appeal to this demographic. And while there is a limited number of labels on the platform at launch the co-founders tout a pipeline of designers they’re working to add as they seek to expand the collection and scale rentals. Asked what they’re aiming for, Mcluckie says they have a rough target of hitting at least a couple of thousand rentals per month by the end of their first year running. The choice to offer a curated edit of brands and unique pieces is not only a way to appeal to a fashion-forward, self-brand-building youth demographic that wants to wear stuff that helps them stand out (not blend in), it’s also a conscious strategy to attract more indie designers into the marketplace — with the pair suggesting up-and-coming designers will feel more comfortable showcasing their designs in a carefully curated digital space where they’re not being ranged alongside lower end and/or more conventional styles that could pose a perception risk to the brands these indie fashion labels are also working hard to establish. “When we started speaking to designers we [identified] certain issues — we had designers [tell us] ‘we’re not happy in the platform I am right now, on the rental side, because I don’t know that I align with the rest of the designers on the platform’,” explains Caldana. “So that was one of the reasons why we decided to do this curated selection of designers — and emerging, independent and sustainable. Because we wanted to have every designer on our platform happy with the aesthetic their designs were sitting next to.” Garments available to rent on Curated Loop’s edited marketplace run the gamut from dresses and skirts to tops, jeans, jackets and suits — and also span a range of price-points (with rentals available from £200+ at the high end to just over a tenner at the bottom). Curated Loop Some of the items available at launch include this (listed as RRP: £350; the rental price is from £35 for four days); this (from £53.90 for four days’ rent); these (£35.40 for four days); and this (£120 for three days). Currently all the stock is what would (classically) be labelled as ‘womenswear’ — but the founders say they’ll expand to offer ‘menswear’ soon too. While there’s no option at present for Curated Loop users to pay to buy an item they’ve rented (i.e. if they’re really fallen in love with a piece), the startup says it’s working on adding the option for a user to pay to permanently add a rental to their wardrobe at a discount on its RRP. They also suggest they may expand the platform to allow peer-to-peer rentals in future — which would mean letting Curated Loop users rent out their wardrobes to each other (which could, in turn, drive purchases of rental items once that’s opened up as savvy users might seek to cash in on popular pieces by buying them to rent to their peers). So there are concentric loops that can be hooked onto to amplify this kind of circular commerce. If Curated Loop adds P2P rentals it would replicate the core offering of some of their more style-eclectic rivals (such as By Rotation) — so the gaps between startups in this space look set to blend further (if not entirely blur). Potential fluidity around functionality puts a big focus on community building — and on pulling in a user-base that’s really engaged with and excited by what the platform offers them. So being able to serve up unique styles and looks (vs more conventional rental platforms) may help Curated Loop win over style-savvy users and turn them into loyal followers. Just so long as these cool kids dig its designer picks. So that means a lot rests on the co-founders’ style edit if they’re going to hit the sweet spot where every returned garment is circled smoothly and swiftly back into a fresh rental. To this end, they note they’re focused on producing lifestyle content as part of the community building piece — emphasizing that their marketplace isn’t just going to dryly range inventory but will seek to serve users with advice and inspiration for putting together unique outfits and looks, and even offer access to events and third party partnerships (so, again, it’s picking up the baton of the traditional fashion mag to wrap glossily around the commerce component and, er, make everything more sticky). Curated Loop is consciously labelling itself as a “fashion-tech” company. The plan is to build the MVP into a more fully featured product by adding things like gamification to drive engagement. But they’re also keeping a weather eye on whatever “web 3” might mean for youth fashion — whether that’s NFTs or some other form of tokenization (potentially tied to live events), or virtual clothes for dressing up avatars, or even “metaverse fashion weeks” (which is apparently a thing some folks in the fashion industry are working on making happen). So they’re shooting for the startup to be trend-led on the tech side too. “We’ve not even dipped our toes [in web 3] but we’ve been to a few events. A lot of our friends are in that world,” notes Mcluckie, saying this emergent tech concept is an area they’re curious about right now — without being sure exactly what it may mean for the future of fashion. “It’s a really interesting space and I know at the moment it’s kind of gimmicky… ” she continues, before scattering a few more caveats about spending personal time on such stuff. “But we know it’s probably going to be the future,” finishes Caldana, adding a little Gen Z conviction to Mcluckie’s Millennial ‘reserved judgement’ on metaverse. So while the pair are currently (and for the near term) working with a tech agency, which built the MVP to their bootstring budget, the plan for later on is to take the tech piece in-house and build an engineering team so they can develop proprietary IP and reactively adapt the platform’s capabilities to mesh with howsoever tech intersects with fashion and/or reshapes demand for humans being stylish in the future. Before then, the order of the day is more prosaic: Scaling usage of the marketplace by tapping up and into more networks (of designers and users), and working to get the word out in other ways, including reaching out to select social media influencers to raise some buzz. The co-founders will also be looking to raise a seed round later this year — they say they’re targeting ~£300,000 — so they’ll be taking some time for fundraising over the coming months. And if all goes to plan, they want to expand the service to other U.K. cities and also hope to launch into the European Union “soon”. “We have a clear pipeline and roadmap for growth, and our seed investment will help us achieve this,” they suggest, adding: “We have a number of ongoing conversations with early stage investors as well as Angels, it’s obviously so important to find the right fit for the business. We had an offer from an oversees Investor pre-launch but knew it wasn’t the right step for our business at that moment. Through (a lot) of hard work and determination we self funded our MVP and now can’t wait to start scaling!”

Connect and collaborate with new founders at TechCrunch Early Stage 2023

Lauren Simonds

Successful startup founders do not from the head of whatever god or goddess keeps tabs on entrepreneurs. It takes time to educate yourself, learn essential skills and acquire a smart, connected network. Here’s the great news — taking place April 20 in Boston, Massachusetts, is designed to help both early and future founders accelerate the learning curve. , and you’ll save $200. Whether you’re still in the idea stage, working full-time while building your business on the side, or hard at work bootstrapping, TC Early Stage cuts through the hype and focuses on information to help you increase your knowledge, build your startup and improve your business future. Prepare for a full day packed with expert-led workshops and panel discussions, plus small-group roundtable discussions with Q&As that really let you dig into a specific topic. All of it’s designed to give you the tips, skills and understanding you need to kick off those bootstraps and grow with your sight set on unicorn status. Take a look at some of the topics from TC Early Stage(s) Past. You can’t minimize or underestimate the value of being surrounded by so much early-stage entrepreneurial talent in one building. It’s prime networking territory. Who knows? You might find a co-founder or the perfect code wizard or catch the eye of an investor. takes place on April 20, 2023, in Boston. . Then get ready to learn new skills, accelerate your learning curve and move your startup dream forward. .

Crypto in for a ‘choppy year’ of slow capital deployment, investors say

Jacquelyn Melinek

venture capitalists are , others see it as a hazardous time. “I think it’s going to be a fairly choppy year,” , venture capital portfolio manager at Arca, said to TechCrunch. “You’re going to have a pretty strong stomach for this over the next few years here. We’re trying to be healthy, mindful and have grounding out there and not let emotions affect us.” Many investors are trying to put last year’s chaotic market behind them and look forward to the future in a . But the competition in the market will heat up as investors write fewer checks and become more selective. Internal sentiment among VCs is a “wait and see” game, Nage said. “We’ll wait and see how things roll out for the beginning of the year.” The first quarter of 2023 may be slower than 2022. “I’d probably put money on that if I had to,” Nage said. “Rounds will also be fewer too; probably up to 50% less if I were to predict.”

Daily Crunch: GoMechanic lays off 70% after investors discover ‘founders knowingly misstated facts’

Christine Hall

Helloooo, Crunchers! The heavy goods train of tech news keeps on rollin’ down (and sometimes off) the tracks. Apropos tracks, we’ve been a little besotted with . It’s full of surprises and powerful bits — give yourself a 9-minute break and give it a listen!  — and In a press conference on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it has , for allegedly processing over $700 million of illicit funds, reports. “Overnight, the Department worked with key partners here and abroad to disrupt Bitzlato, the China-based money-laundering engine that fueled a high-tech axis of cryptocrime, and to arrest its founder, Russian national Anatoly Legkodymov,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco. There’s a bunch more stuff happening in the world of startups today: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch Dear Sophie, I’m a co-founder of a very early-stage startup. My co-founder and I are considering bringing on a third co-founder, who was recently laid off. She is currently in the United States on an H-1B with a grace period that will expire soon. What are the fastest, least risky immigration options that we should consider? What’s going on with potential increases to USCIS filing fees? — Careful Co-founder Three more from the TC+ team: The layoffs just keep coming in Tech World. The latest is , reports . The company has already made some layoffs last year, but this latest one accounts for a sizable chunk of its workforce — 5%. CEO Satya Nadella echoed other tech companies making layoffs recently in saying that the company accelerated its growth as customers grew, but when that slowed down, Microsoft had to do the same. Cybersecurity company Sophos is making a similar move, , or about 10% of its employees, reports. Meanwhile, in happier news, with better sound and “smarts,” writes. And now that you know this, has some . Here’s five more for you:

Font furore as State Department retires Times New Roman for retired Calibri

Devin Coldewey

In a heartwarming callback to the absurdly low-stakes controversies of the Obama era, the State Department is making extremely small waves by officially retiring the old workhorse Times New Roman font from official communications. It will be succeeded by Calibri, a font best known now for being . Really, though, there is no furore (let alone furor) about this, since if anyone cares enough about fonts to say anything, they probably are so tired of TNR by now that their only complaint would be “what took so long?” But it’s funny that it’s in the news at all. The Washington Post from a leaked cable sent by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken — not quite the operational security I’d hoped for from them, but we would have found out soon enough. The reason for the change is accessibility and readability: a sans serif font (i.e., without the little bits on the ends of letters) is considered by many to be easier to read at smaller sizes on digital devices, especially for those with vision impairments. (The upgrade to 14 point type will probably make it even better.) It’s a laudable goal, even if it isn’t quite that simple: a more readable font is a good idea, but accessibility needs to be built into processes from the ground up, not as a layer on top. Still, small steps count too. Funnily enough, the State Department is taking the same step Microsoft did way back in 2007, when it also replaced Times New Roman with the then-new Calibri as the default font for documents. The reasoning was largely the same: sans serif was more readable and people weren’t printing as much. Times New Roman, top, and Calibri, bottom. But that was a long time ago, and Calibri is now on its way out for various reasons, perhaps for its distastefully attenuated terminators. It’s not like it’s going to be purged from the Earth or anything like that — “not the default” isn’t a death sentence — but it’s definitely a bit strange to pick it as your “new,” highly official font given the circumstances. It’s understandable that the federal government would generally prefer a product that’s been proven over many years of use. I don’t really expect them to switch to Roboto, or Source Sans, or even my preferred font out of the Microsoft replacements, Bierstadt. Although this one based on gerrymandered districts might have been appropriate: It’s just that there’s actually a font made for this purpose: . The is a totally free sans serif font that was built from the ground up to accommodate all languages, symbols, and ordinary typography needs. It’s great for any government application that might need to be printed in several languages, but even more so for the State Department. But perhaps they have their reasons for preferring a Microsoft default to a comparatively exotic Google typeface. “Keep It Simple, State.” Design fluency is not really a federal strength, but they seem to be improving — better than many state governments, I must say, which often have agency and official pages that look straight out of 2007 themselves. In this case swapping to a more suitable font, even if it’s aged and uncool, is a good move and perhaps the trickle that precedes a flood of good, thoughtful design — of which accessibility is a part and a consequence, not just a component.

6 crypto investors talk about DeFi and the road ahead for adoption in 2023

Jacquelyn Melinek

The crypto venture capital industry has become more selective thanks to the general market downturn and wavering trust caused by a slew of scandals and market disruptions, but investors at major firms are still writing checks in the space. Amid market volatility, decentralized finance, or DeFi, is an area that continues to be in focus in both the crypto VC world and across the community as new use cases, protocols and projects arise. Anywhere from 20% to 50% of crypto-related pitches today are DeFi-focused, several investors we surveyed said. That shows there’s a vast number of DeFi projects looking for funding. “To stand out in this crowded space, founders should focus on highlighting unique technology and a clear advantage for a specific use case, as well as a defensible moat,” Alex Marinier, founder and general partner at New Form Capital said. Ultimately, DeFi is a mirror reflection of traditional finance (TradFi), and founders who have deep sector expertise in TradFi, coupled with a fundamental understanding of blockchains will stand out from the other teams, Paul Veradittakit, general partner at Pantera Capital, shared. Last year, the crypto world faced a handful of massive like the Terra/LUNA in May and the cryptocurrency exchange in early November. Both events brought down a lot of smaller startups and big players who intermingled with those now defunct market players. As the market looks toward the future, some venture capitalists are revamping their investing strategies, while others are holding to their current plans, with perhaps a small tweak or two. Read on to find out how active investors are thinking about DeFi, how they’re advising their portfolio companies amid the lack of funding, the best way to approach them and more. We surveyed: When thinking about the DeFi market, we look at the total market cap of DeFi assets, total value locked (TVL) and trading volume. While total value locked (TVL) as a metric certainly has its flaws, we think it’s still a decent measure of activity in the sector. As TVL increases, we also think it’s possible that total market cap could follow. We’re keeping a close eye on the sector’s relative activity, like trades, volumes and users, compared to centralized alternatives like exchanges. Despite the negative sentiment surrounding crypto today, we still believe activity will eventually return to the industry. However, in the aftermath of all of these dramatic centralized finance (CeFi) explosions, we think that the next time users decide to enter the space, they’re going to think twice about trusting a CeFi exchange or company and instead opt to use decentralized protocols. As with most investors in the space, our biggest challenge has been navigating the seemingly endless CeFi blowups and failures that have rocked our industry. We were able to avoid the vast majority of these blowups, as we passed on several FTX ecosystem projects. As a result, Framework wasn’t hit nearly as hard as many of the big VC firms in the space, and we’re in a pretty strong position to continue deploying capital in this new market. These CeFi incidents have caused plenty of collateral damage across the industry, so a major priority over the last 12 months has been making sure all of our portfolio companies are sound, liquid, well capitalized and can survive the next 1-3 years. This means helping the founders in our portfolio cut costs, prioritize high growth activity and providing advice on product, growth and future fundraising strategy in a less friendly funding environment. In general, our position is a validation of our core theses over the last three years, and we’re going to continue doubling down on DeFi, web3 gaming and more. Given that a lot of the other firms aren’t actively investing at this time, we see this market as a great opportunity for Framework to selectively deploy capital. We’re working with them to cut costs and focus on surviving the next 1-3 years. We believe in crypto long term, but we don’t know how quickly the market could bounce back, and so survival should be the top priority. We’re also encouraging founders to think more strategically about project development. If a team was focusing on three different areas, we’re encouraging them to instead prioritize the highest-growth activity only. These days, around 30%-35% of the pitches we receive are firmly DeFi-focused. If a DeFi project wants to really stand out, we want to see that they’re thinking about where the puck is going. We’re looking for projects that have the potential to be regulation-friendly. It’s a non-starter if the team is not thinking about regulation or thinks they can just figure it out down the line. Additionally, we’re interested in projects that have direct connections to institutions or at least a compelling growth strategy that involves institutions. We don’t think that retail will offer projects a large enough market in DeFi over the next two years, so creating something attractive to institutions should be more of a core focus than previously. We also want to see that the project is differentiated from a product perspective. We’re not interested in another Uniswap clone, or an Open Sea copycat of the flavor of the week alt-L1. In 2020, during the height of DeFi summer, the market was big enough that projects courted retail and DeFi degens [a nickname for people interested in risky, niche, speculative crypto projects]. The market is totally different now. Unfortunately, retail was blown up more than a dozen different ways last year, and they’re unlikely to come back for a few years. As a result, we’re focusing more on projects that are thinking about addressing new, more institutional users and markets. We understand that regulation is likely coming down the line, so we’re very interested in projects that are pro-regulation, or at the very least, regulation-friendly. With the Merge officially behind us, liquid staking has become a big area of excitement for us. We think liquid staking projects will receive much more attention after Shanghai goes live and users have the opportunity to withdraw their assets without worrying about illiquidity. We need to see more DeFi products and services that more realistically accommodate institutions. This means projects that have pro-regulatory elements baked into the products themselves, including KYC, the ability to limit certain assets and more. Projects that institutions will be able to transact with won’t look and feel like the traditional DeFi we’re accustomed to and will coexist as a relatively different ecosystem. At some point in 2023, we’ll have the landmark crypto regulation that everyone has been waiting on for years. More clarity could be very positive. We don’t have a firm position, but on the surface, it looks like the U.K. is rapidly becoming one of the most open, from a thought-leader perspective. We really like a good storyline. We want to know why you’re working on this problem, why it needs to be solved now, and why you think you can beat everyone else. Competitive advantage is key for us. The DeFi market is currently around $50 billion in TVL. In the next five years, we expect the market to bifurcate into two categories: permissioned and permissionless. Permissioned DeFi will gain traction among institutions, because it marries the benefits of blockchain technology with the compliance standards of traditional finance. If just a small percentage of traditional finance activity moves on-chain, it could create a market opportunity worth more than $1 trillion. When you add in permissionless DeFi, which is more geared toward individual users and makes up most of DeFi today, the combined market has the potential to become worth anywhere from $500 billion to $2 trillion by 2028. That said, DeFi’s growth will depend on more than just an increase in use cases. It will also be influenced by developments in infrastructure, regulation and financial innovation. Navigating the high-profile collapses (Terra, Celsius, FTX) was certainly the focus of 2022. We had to take more time to support our founders and ensure they have sufficient runway to endure an extended bear market. This year, our focus is on helping founders find creative ways to grow through this market and position themselves for the next bull market. We’re also focused on sourcing opportunistic investments at attractive valuations and incubating more projects in-house.

Sophos to lay off 450 employees globally

Jagmeet Singh

Sophos is laying off about 10% of its global workforce, TechCrunch has learned. Sophos confirmed the layoffs in an email to TechCrunch. “Sophos today announced an internal restructuring which has resulted in job losses and the start of consultation periods that potentially will affect 10% of our global employee base,” said Jitendra Bulani, a spokesperson for Sophos. The company said the layoffs were to ensure the company achieves “the optimal balance of growth and profitability,” amid the ongoing and deepening economic global slowdown. TechCrunch learned that about 450 people were let go during this round of layoffs, though Sophos would not confirm the exact number of affected employees. TechCrunch first learned of the layoffs after hearing of several employees in India who were let go. Some affected employees in the country were informed on Tuesday and asked to submit their resignations. “Sophos is taking these steps for two main reasons: first, to ensure that we achieve the optimal balance of growth and profitability to support Sophos’ long-term success, which is particularly important in the midst of a challenging and uncertain macro environment; and second, to allocate our investments across the company to support our strategic imperative to be a market leader in delivering cybersecurity as a service.” Sophos told TechCrunch that the layoffs may affect all job roles, but declined to provide further details. Sophos said the plan to cut jobs was to focus more on cybersecurity services, specifically on “managed detection and response.” This is to achieve its goal of becoming a top player in the global cybersecurity market, the spokesperson said. More than half a million organizations worldwide use Sophos’ technologies, including endpoint detection and network, email and cloud security, which generate more than $1 billion in revenue, the firm said. Sophos said its managed services business generates over $175 million annually and is growing at over 50% per year. In March 2020, private equity firm Thoma Bravo . “We are grateful for the contributions of all our team members, past and present, in building Sophos into a cybersecurity leader, and in helping to keep the world safe from the evils of cybercrime,” the spokesperson said. Sophos is joining a growing list of technology companies that have had to lay off their workforce due to financial difficulties. Tech giants including , and have also had to let go of thousands of employees in recent months.

Goldenset launches out of stealth to make equity investments in creators

Amanda Silberling

is launching out of stealth with a $10 million seed round to deploy equity investments in digital creators. The company was founded by Darren Lachtman and Nick Millman, who previously founded , a brand partnership marketplace acquired by Twitter for over $50 million, and then a Gen Z entertainment network. “For most creators, really the only option for financing is debt, and I think it’s pretty scary to get debt as an individual,” said Lachtman. “So that’s the idea for Goldenset. We’re not attaching any debt to creators, we actually want to just provide them with financing and services that help them actually grow their businesses.” So far, the company has deployed $1 million in capital to seven creators, including , , and . TechCrunch viewed a sample agreement between Goldenset and a creator, with the numbers redacted. According to the sample contract, Goldenset invests a sum of money into a creator’s business in exchange for a certain percentage of their revenue — this encompasses brand deals and on-platform monetization, but not a creator’s day job or freelance income if that’s separate from their social media channels. The creator won’t have to start paying out their revenue share for a year, unless if they surpass a certain gross revenue threshold first. Then, the creator starts paying a different percentage of revenue until they reach certain milestones based on the proportion of the investment that they’ve paid back. The contract has three termination options. In one scenario, the creator can back out of the investment during the first six months, so long as they return the capital. Or, when Goldenset has received a certain return on their investment, the creator can terminate the revenue share. In the final case, the agreement terminates by default after a certain period of time, so long as Goldenset has recouped a set amount of the investment. Like any equity investment, there are pros and cons for the creator. An infusion of startup capital can accelerate business growth, but if the creator can’t make as much income as expected, they could be locked into this deal with Goldenset indefinitely. However, there’s no scenario in which the creator is on the hook for debt to Goldenset. As part of their deal with Goldenset, creators get free access to LLC and corporate formation, two years of accounting and tax advisory services, payroll services, legal support, PR support and business strategy consulting. “We believe creators are not merely ‘influencers’ to be rented like billboards by other companies and brands, but are founders of high-growth start-ups with Fortune 500 potential,” the company’s reads. Other companies like  and have experimented with the idea of investing in creators. In the case of Spotter, which raised $200 million last year, the company will pay creators a sum of money in exchange for all of the ad revenue from their YouTube back catalog for a set period of time. Like Goldenset, neither Spotter nor Creative Juice require creators to take on debt. “I don’t think anyone is doing actual true equity investments into these creators the way we are,” Millman told TechCrunch. But Goldenset’s approach doesn’t resemble that of a traditional VC firm. “We’re not trying to do the venture model, which is like, you bet on 10 people and one of them needs to work and get 100x,” Lachtman said. “We’re pretty confident that most of these creators will continue to have a pretty established career. If they outgrow us and we can get out of our deals with just a couple X return, then we’re super happy with that too.” Goldenset’s $10 million seed round is led by A.Capital and Lerer Hippeau with participation from Kevin Durant’s firm, 35 Ventures, among others.

Bitwarden acquires Passwordless.dev to help companies authenticate users without passwords

Paul Sawers

Open source password management platform has made its first known acquisition, snapping up a fledgling Sweden-based startup called , which specializes in helping developers integrate passwordless authentication technology into their software. The news comes shortly after 1Password and LastPass rival Bitwarden , securing $100 million from PSG and Battery Ventures. The company also revealed at the time that it had raised a previously undisclosed Series A round in 2019. Similar to other password management services, Bitwarden is designed to make it easier for individuals and enterprises to automatically create hard-to-guess passwords, and store them all in a secure vault. It’s all about helping people to not re-use the same predictable password across all their online services. Bitwarden’s key selling point, though, is that it’s open source — or, at least, it’s source available, meaning that it promises full transparency into the codebase, while also allowing the community to contribute and help develop new features. Now, Bitwarden is looking to capitalize on a burgeoning trend in the online security sphere, one that is looking to consign passwords to the history books — compromised passwords, after all, are . Indeed, there has been a concerted push toward passwordless authentication across the technology landscape. Last year, in support of a new password-free sign-in standard called , while separately that allows people to use their Apple device to log in to online services without passwords. Elsewhere, passwordless-focused startups , and have attracted VC dollars to bolster their respective efforts. Bitwarden, for its part, already offers some support for passwordless authentication, for , while it also supports physical two-factor authentication (2FA) security keys such as YubiKey. But by bringing Passwordless.dev under its wing, Bitwarden wants to make it easier for developers to bake native biometric sign-in smarts into their software, while allowing enterprises to modernize their existing applications that currently rely on passwords. Founded out of Sweden in 2020, Passwordless.dev has largely flown under the radar since its inception. But the company provides APIs , a web standard developed by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to support secure password logins. Passwordless.dev essentially makes it easier for developers to bring WebAuthn to software with a few lines of code, reducing many of the costs and complexities involved in introducing passwordless authentication to software. Passwordless.dev allows companies to implement password-free authentication in minutes. Passwordless.dev From today, Bitwarden has launched a new beta service called Passwordless.dev by Bitwarden, which allows any third-party developer to embed biometric sign-in technology such as Touch ID, Face ID and Windows Hello into their apps. “This saves weeks of coding do-it-yourself passkey implementations,” Bitwarden CEO Michael Crandell explained to TechCrunch in an email. “Enterprises also have business applications that still rely on passwords for authentication and want to provide users with passwordless experiences. Bitwarden Passwordless.dev helps them quickly add WebAuthn and passwordless authentication features into these applications.” Passwordless.dev by Bitwarden will be free through its initial beta period in Q1 2023, after which the company said it will offer paid plans that cover certain levels of usage and features. While Bitwarden isn’t disclosing how much it paid for the startup or how many employees it’s taking on as part of the deal, it did confirm that Passwordless.dev hasn’t raised any external funding in its two-plus years in existence, meaning it likely didn’t break the bank for the acquisition. Bitwarden also confirmed to TechCrunch that Passwordless.dev will continue to be offered to developers independently of other Bitwarden products.

Tabby raises $58M at $660M valuation as PayPal Ventures makes first investment in the GCC

Tage Kene-Okafor

Mailchimp says it was hacked — again

Zack Whittaker

Email marketing and newsletter giant Mailchimp says it was hacked and that dozens of customers’ data was exposed. It’s the the company was hacked in the past six months. Worse, this breach appears to be almost identical to a previous incident. The company said in an that its security team detected an intruder on January 11 accessing one of its internal tools used by Mailchimp customer support and account administration, though the company did not say for how long the intruder was in its systems, if known. Mailchimp said the hacker targeted its employees and contractors with a social engineering attack, in which someone uses manipulation techniques by phone, email or text to gain private information, like passwords. The hacker then used those compromised employee passwords to gain access to data on 133 Mailchimp accounts, which the company notified of the intrusion. One of those targeted accounts belongs to e-commerce giant . In a note to customers, WooCommerce said it was notified by Mailchimp a day later that the breach may have exposed the names, store web addresses and email addresses of its customers, though it said no customer passwords or other sensitive data was taken. WooCommerce, which builds and maintains popular open source e-commerce tools for small businesses, relies on Mailchimp for sending emails to its customers. WooCommerce is said to have more than five million customers. If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it is. Last August, Mailchimp it was the victim of a social engineering attack that compromised credentials of its customer support staff, granting the intruder access to Mailchimp’s internal tools. In that breach, data on some 214 Mailchimp accounts were compromised, mostly of cryptocurrency and finance-related accounts. Cloud giant DigitalOcean was compromised in the incident, and harshly criticized Mailchimp’s handling of the breach. Mailchimp said at the time that it had implemented “an additional set of enhanced security measures,” but to tell TechCrunch what those measures entailed. With a near-identical repeat of its past breach, it’s not clear if Mailchimp properly implemented those enhanced measures, or if those measures failed. It’s not immediately clear who, if anyone, is responsible for cybersecurity at Mailchimp following the departure of its chief information security officer Siobhan Smyth shortly after the August breach. When reached by email, Intuit spokesperson Derrick Plummer declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions, or say who was presently responsible for security at Mailchimp.

Wallapop, the circular marketplace out of Spain, raised $87M more at a $832M valuation led by Korea’s Naver

Ingrid Lunden

— a peer-to-peer marketplace based out of Barcelona that made a splash at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic with consumers who were looking for more localized, less wasteful, and more ecofriendly routes for buying and selling items — has raised more money to continue its expansion in Europe. The company has picked up €81 million ($87.4 million), which it will be investing into its operations in Spain, Italy and Portugal after seeing its 2.4 million downloads in the first half of the year in Italy (a newer market for the app) and a 600% increase in cross-border activity between Spain and Italy in that period. The company also plans to put more into data science and other areas of R&D — critical given that discovery, personalization and other tools to connect buyers with items they want is critical to people coming back and using Wallapop again and again. The company is describing this as an extension to its Series G — a that it raised in February 2021. That was before the bottom fell out of the tech market (and investing dropped along with it), so it is notable that Wallapop has raised here. Its valuation is up, but only in line with the amount being put in. It says that the figure now stands at €771 million, compared to €690 million previously. (In terms of USD, that works out to $832 million at current rates, which is actually lower than its previous dollar-value valuation, because the euro is significantly weaker right now against the dollar.) This is an inside round, meaning all investors were already backers of Wallapop, which is not uncommon at the moment: The market tough right now and so it makes sense to turn to existing investors to shore up capital. The latest investment is being led by Naver, the Korean internet company, and Naver’s European investment partner Korelya Capital, which were both in the original Series G. Accel, 14W and Insight are also participating. Naver — the company behind messaging app Line and other holdings — has been making efforts to expand its reach beyond Korea, most notably last year. Spain is Wallapop’s home market, but it’s been gradually using that as an anchor to go into adjacent countries, with Italy launching in 2021 and Portugal in September 2022. The company’s growth is a useful barometer of just how enduring circular economy marketplaces can be: Buying and selling items from other private owners took on a new profile when COVID-19 was in full bloom. People did not want to go to stores as much, and some couldn’t because stores were closed, but consumers were also becoming more conscientious of how they were spending their money (not least because many were losing jobs or getting furloughed), and the swing away from the normal pace of modern life left many thinking about how they could potentially live life to a different, perhaps less wasteful way. Fast-forward to today, and we’ve seen consumers shifting back into their old patterns: lots of single-passenger car traffic on roads; people flocking to physical stores (and using less e-commerce services); and in many cases less community engagement than they were willing to have during lockdowns and urgent requests to stay close to home. There are signs that Wallapop is sustaining its growth, despite those shifts. It said that its 2022 financial year had revenues of €72 million, up 40% on FY 2021. Meanwhile, Wallapop Envíos, its end-to-end shipping service (versus users seeing to sending off packages themselves), grew to €32 million from €17 million in that period. Subscription services — a service that it offers to professional sellers — brough in €10 million in revenes, up from €6.7 million in 2020. They are signs not just of the maturing of the platform, but also of how the company is also trying to diversify how it makes money. “In the past years, Wallapop’s expansion efforts have allowed more and more people to benefit from our fundamental purpose -facilitating a more conscious and human way of consumption that creates economic opportunities for people- which in today’s socio-economic environment remains as relevant as ever,” said Rob Cassedy, CEO of Wallapop, in a statement. “We are focused on driving the reusing revolution within Southern Europe, prioritizing a healthy growth model that allows us to increase our impact while we scale and create a unique inventory ecosystem that can continue expanding further in our future. Our investors, NAVER and Korelya as well as others, share our vision.” Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that circular economy remains niche for now. It’s been 10 years since Wallapop was founded. In between then and now it made an ambitious effort to expand into the U.S., by way of a  , in 2016. That plan was shelved by 2018, when Wallapop   for $189 million. (LetGo   around that time, but its fate was not to remain independent: it was   in the virtual classifieds space, OfferUp, in 2020, for an undisclosed sum.) Meanwhile, the more European focused Wallapop today only sees traffic of 15 million monthly active customers across 100 million listings (that is the number of listings in aggregate over the year, not at any given time). Not only is that 15 million figure just a fraction of the number of online consumers in Southern Europe — which total by one estimate — but it’s the same number of users Wallapop said it had in 2021 when I covered the original Series G. In other words, growth is not coming fast. The company did not provide any comment from its investors in its official statement confirming the investment. We’ve reached out to ask for this and will update when and if we get more. More generally, Naver is a strong player in and apps in its home market and it has been making a number of moves to increase its holdings internationally, including with that Poshmark acquisition.

Deal Box’s venture arm to invest $125M in startups using web3 technology

Jacquelyn Melinek

Deal Box, a capital markets advisory and token offering packaging platform, has launched its venture arm with plans to invest $125 million in startups using web3 technology, the company shared Wednesday. “We believe in the transformative power of web3, and we plan to invest in both web3 startups and companies that use web3 technology, including blockchain, to impact and reshape people’s everyday lives,” Thomas Carter, CEO of Deal Box, said to TechCrunch. Deal Box was founded in 2005 and has more than $200 million in total deal flow with over 500 packaged clients, according to its . It has partnered with investing- and digital asset-focused businesses like Tezos, Vertalo, tZERO, Texture Capital, Fundopolis and Resolute Capital Partners, to name a few. The venture arm, Deal Box Ventures, will focus on startups across five fund areas: emerging growth, real estate, fintech, social impact and what it calls “FunTech,” which will look at “action sports, innovative leisure and experiential consumer products changing the way we rest and play,” the company stated. “On the FunTech side, we know that football, soccer and basketball teams have emerged as behemoths in terms of team valuations,” Carter said. “There’s a lot of consolidation opportunities in action sports and the potential is quite large. It’s an extraordinary moment for these action sports categories as they become institutionalized and more recognized.” For the fintech category, AI and blockchain will be the quickest path to enterprise value creation, Carter added. Each fund totals $25 million, and the sum across the five funds is $125 million, Carter said. “This will be an achievable target to raise per fund, and we will have larger funds launching after.” This amount is “the best foundation for achieving the results we want to achieve over the next three to five years,” Carter added. Deal Box has taken strategic institutional funds from family offices and high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals, Carter shared. There has also been interest from institutional investors, other family offices and sovereign wealth funds, Carter added. “So far, we’ve brought in just under $5 million and have circled close to $40 million.” The firm has closed initial strategic investments in three startups — Total Network Services, Rypplzz and Forward-Edge AI — as part of its web3 investment thesis. The resilience of the web3 companies that can survive the recent downturn should be an indicator of them “doing something with significance that meets a real need in the market and hopefully good decision-making,” Carter said. Many projects in the web3 space were speculative, but Deal Box hopes to show investors and founders alike that blockchain and web3 technology can be used while “still playing within the boundaries” of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “There’s never been a time for technology to make a bigger impact on innovation and people’s everyday lives,” Carter said. “This is the beginning of a new wave. We’re witnessing the rise of the fourth industrial revolution.”

Maritime giant DNV says 1,000 ships affected by ransomware attack

Carly Page

DNV, a Norwegian shipping classification society, has confirmed its systems were hit by a attack, affecting around 1,000 ships that rely on its technology. The Oslo-based DNV said in a on Wednesday that its ShipManager software was targeted by file-encrypting malware on January 7, forcing the organization to shut down its servers. ShipManager is a fleet management software that allows DNV shipping customers to monitor the operational, technical and compliance features of a shipping fleet, and is used by more than 7,000 vessels owned by 300 customers, according to the company’s . DNV said that 70 customers operating around 1,000 vessels were affected by the attack, close to 15% of its total fleet. In a statement given to TechCrunch, DNV spokesperson Margrethe Andersen confirmed that all impacted vessels can still use the onboard, offline functionalities of the ShipManager software. “The cyber-attack does not affect the vessels’ ability to operate,” said Andersen. DNV also says it’s confident that other DNV servers have not been affected. However, when asked whether any data was compromised as a result of the attack, the company declined to comment. DNV also declined to say whether the attack would result in any delays for ships and their onboard cargo. The company said it is cooperating with the police. “We cannot release information that could harm or delay the investigation,” the spokesperson said. It is unclear how DNV was compromised, if the company received a ransom demand or who was behind the attack. TechCrunch checked the websites of several major ransomware groups but found no mention of DNV. “DNV is working closely with global IT security partners to analyze the incident and ensure secure online operations as soon as possible,” the company said. “All affected customers have been advised to consider relevant mitigating measures depending on the types of data they have uploaded to the system. The ransomware attack on DNV is one of many to have impacted the shipping industry in recent weeks. The Port of Lisbon, the third-largest shipping port in Portugal, was the target of a ransomware attack on Christmas Day.

Chord connects new funding to predictive commerce metrics so brands can grow

Christine Hall

Commerce has gone through quite a change over the past three years. First was the quick shift to online during the pandemic, then came the reckoning after people began venturing out again. During this time, commerce companies, both brick-and-mortar and online, were looking to technology to get their companies up-and-running, but were finding it a bit tough with the absence of a big developer team to manage deployment. Bryan Mahoney and Henry Davis, both former Glossier executives, saw the writing on the wall in 2020 and started Arfa, which is now , a platform as a service, to provide commerce infrastructure software that gives brands and startups sophisticated technology and data without the requirement of a huge technology team. We profiled the company in 2021 when it raised an . They found that . However, as spending in places like Facebook and Google became more expensive and it was harder to acquire customers, companies started to see how data and technology could work in their favor. “Companies are realizing they don’t have to be technology companies,” CEO Mahoney told TechCrunch. “We talk an awful lot in the industry about headwinds, and those headwinds to some extent are accelerants pushing these brands a little bit closer to the core, but making them realize that the solutions they’ve had, or the reluctance to spend on technology, is not going to work.” Chord has 21 customers signed onto its platform, including Blue Bottle Coffee, Caraway, Loverboy and Joopiter. Meanwhile, Mahoney said December was the company’s busiest month so far, and year over year revenue growth was an increase of 360%. For the past 18 months many of the customers were asking to see how their data could be used in more predictive capabilities. To do that, Chord is back with a $15 million Series A extension co-led by new investor Bright Pixel Capital and existing investor Eclipse. New investors in the round include GC1 Ventures, TechNexus Venture Collaborative and Anti Fund VC joining existing investors Imaginary Ventures, Foundation Capital and White Star Capital. The new funding enabled Chord to build on its leadership team to add former Mailchimp chief data science officer David Dewey as new chief technology officer; Susie Korb as vice president of finance, a similar role she held at Toast; and Jamie Deveney, vice president of data, who was previously in the same role at Imperfect Foods. In addition, Mahoney intends to deploy the new funds into data capability expansion, marketing, product development to support larger customers and its machine learning-powered data infrastructure that provides brands with a look at how key customer metrics will change over time. In total, Chord raised $33 million. Mahoney did not disclose the company’s valuation, but did say “it’s in line with current multiples in the market.” Technically the company should have looked at raising a classic Series B, but Chord wasn’t quite there yet, Mahoney admits. Proving that sometimes the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, he explained that the company’s initial investment came with a big valuation, which put pressure on the company to grow into it, even with no customers and no revenue at the time. When Mahoney and Davis reached out to investors last summer, they took that past pressure into account, and as they spoke with investors, realized that they were actually in between a Series A and B, but didn’t want to push themselves in another “grow into the valuation” situation. “We said let’s be really honest about what is going on in the market, and let’s be honest about where we are,” Mahoney said. “We are still a Series A company, but having really good traction is the time to get the fundraising going regardless of how we finally reach out to the investors.”

ThriveCart, which sells tools to build e-commerce carts, raises $35M

Kyle Wiggers

Often, first-time e-commerce entrepreneurs don’t know what they need to build an effective funnel and cart experience for their platforms. It’s not their fault; the problem’s challenging. According to one , the average cart abandonment rate across all industries is 69.57%. That means roughly seven out of 10 shoppers won’t complete their transaction, to an estimated $18 billion in segment-wide lost sales revenue each year. Startup founder Josh Bartlett several years ago proposed a solution in , a toolkit small- and medium-sized businesses can use to build e-commerce carts and funnels. ThriveCart quickly caught on with businesses, it seems, growing to tens of thousands of customers and more than $1 billion in sales processed annually. The rapid growth piqued investors’ interest. ThriveCart today announced that it raised $35 million in a funding round led by LTV SaaS Growth Fund, the company’s first public outside investment. Kevin McKeand, who was recently named the company’s CEO, said  the fresh cash will be put toward further developing ThriveCart’s platform and tripling the size of the company’s workforce. “The pandemic prompted many people to start their own digital businesses. The recent slowdown in tech has not been seen among small businesses and entrepreneurs, the core users of ThriveCart’s tech,” McKeand told TechCrunch in an email interview. With ThriveCart, businesses can create upsell funnels, bump offers (i.e. offers for other services shown during checkout), trials and “pay what you want,” split payments, monthly subscriptions and more. The platform provides codes for embeddable carts that can be added to existing websites, as well as backend dashboards that can be connected to tools like third-party fulfillment services. ThriveCart can calculate sales tax rates based on location and product type, tracking totals with reports. It also allows for automation rules, for example automatically following up with visitors who abandon a cart, modifying affiliate commissions based on refund rate and sending notifications to let customers know when payments are due. “ThriveCart’s solution does the heavy lifting for site engagement, funnel and checkout experiences, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on developing great ideas,” McKeand said. “Our affiliate partners are talking with veteran and new entrepreneurs every day, guiding them on the best practices for launching digital-first businesses and acting as ambassadors for ThriveCart’s solutions.” ThriveCart presumably collects a fair amount of personal customer data to accomplish what it does. TechCrunch asked McKeand about the company’s data usage policy, but discouragingly, he initially declined to answer. He sent this statement in a follow-up email: “ThriveCart values our customers’ privacy and adheres to industry best practices with respect to data protection.” ThriveCart’s competitors include Gum Road and SamCart on the cart and checkout side. Other rivals are Snipcart, which web building platform Duda in September 2021, and , a plug-in that automatically categorizes what shoppers add to their carts. While McKeand declined to reveal ThriveCart’s revenue figures, he said that he’s pleased with the company’s current growth trajectory and believes ThriveCart is “poised for growth” as a result of the “rise of the digital entrepreneur.” In an emailed statement, LTV SaaS Growth Fund VP of investments Marina Vizdoaga added:  “ThriveCart is one of the most exciting ecommerce investment opportunities we have seen in some time that will deliver a strong growth profile with attractive economics. Loyalty among their affiliate network and their end customers is unrivaled. We firmly believe in the company’s growth trajectory, and we are already seeing how the infusion of capital allows them to think and plan big with respect to the product roadmap, market penetration and expansion and strategic alliances. The popularity of the creator economy made this a perfect time to invest in a cart and funnel solution for digital products.”

Decodable wants to take real-time stream processing mainstream

Frederic Lardinois

, the real-time data engineering and stream processing platform based, in part, on the open source project, is launching a major update today that aims to make the service more attractive to large enterprises. In addition to expanding its library of connectors to enable data ingestion from more sources and a new enterprise support option, the marquee feature here is the launch of its automated task-sizing capabilities. Thanks to this, Decodable can now dynamically configure workloads as needed to optimize performance and cost. As Decodable founder and CEO Eric Sammer told me, he believes that while stream processing itself is quickly becoming mainstream — with Apache Flink becoming the de facto standard — what happens around that isn’t quite mainstream yet, in part because until now, only businesses with highly sophisticated engineering teams were able to build on top of this technology. “The analogy I think about is networking switches,” he explained. “We can move packets back and forth. The next iteration of that — the part that I don’t think is fully mainstream yet — is the processing capability on top of that — the ability to transform and aggregate. What I think we would have called streaming analytics 10 years ago.” Decodable The likes of Lyft, Uber or Stripe are able to create this enterprise-grade layer of abstractions on top of these real-time data streams. Others, he argues, need a tool like Decodable to do so, especially if they want to build consumer-facing applications. “Streaming is one piece of technology,” he also noted. “It’s a collection of Debezium plus Kafka or Redpanda or whatever — plus Flink, plus APIs and all these other kinds of things. And it’s cost prohibitive to stand up a team and operationalize that. That’s where we add value. And that’s why we focus on developer experience and self-service and enterprise features.” As for the new task sizing feature, Sammer noted that users can tell the service how many tasks they want to dedicate to a given workload. Decodable will then scale up to this maximum number of tasks — or scale down, if warranted. For a lot of users, this may result in lower spending overall. And while that may also mean they won’t spend as much on Decodable, Sammer believes that if the company can make stream processing easier and more cost effective for its users, these users will bring more workloads to the service. “There are very few cases where you wouldn’t want fresher, more accurate data — or be able to make a better decision in real time,” he said. “So from that perspective, every time we make it cheaper for someone to run a workload on Decodable, they add more workloads.”

South Africa’s Flow gets funding to automate social media advertising for real estate agencies

Tage Kene-Okafor

The process used by millions of agents and thousands of property portals globally to reach buyers and sellers on digital channels is highly fragmented. And it’s evident that proptech, unlike other industries, has lagged in utilizing social media to make sales. South African startup wants to change how real estate agencies,  developers and agents interact with their end customers. With its APIs, Flow connects to the websites of estate agencies and property developers and automates advertising for them on social media channels like Instagram and Facebook. The proptech marketing platform is announcing that it has raised $4.5 million in pre-Series A funding. Flow intends to use the funding to include other social media platforms such as TikTok and LinkedIn and other advertising channels like digital out-of-home billboards. The investment will see co-founders and co-CEOs and drive the business’s B2B growth strategy and integrate Flow’s social media–driven real estate marketing platform into existing international property portals and CRM platforms. Sperling and Levy founded Flow in 2018 as an app that rewards tenants for early rent payments. However, before Flow, both founders previously built an adtech and performance marketing company, Popimedia, which was the largest buyer of Facebook media inventory in Africa for some of the world’s biggest brands. While they to global communications group Publicis in 2015, it was some of the knowledge gained while running Popimedia that they drew on to pivot Flow into its current business model three years later. “With our first adtech business, we never dealt with real estate or property as we could never really service them in this country [South Africa]. And the biggest problem was that as much as real estate is the biggest asset class in the world and very valuable vertical, it is the least innovated around because it’s just highly fragmented,” Sperling told TechCrunch on a call. “When buying and selling homes, if you take South Africa, for example, 40,000 agents are marketing 300,000 listings at any time. Every agent is essentially a little small business because they’re commissioners, and there’s no way that they can afford to each have a marketing, data science department, and design department like big businesses can, and that is one reason why we couldn’t conduct ads or performance marketing for many of them.” With Flow, the founders want real estate agencies and property developers they couldn’t reach with their former startup to connect with customers on digital channels. The proptech startup automates the marketing for real estate agents for developers and works hand-in-hand with real estate websites to pull listings and automatically create ads on Facebook, Instagram and other digital channels. According to Flow, its proptech marketing platform improves revenue for agents and experiences for property buyers and sellers. On the other hand, Levy points out that the startup makes money when these agents use its SaaS platform and via a percentage cut from their marketing spend. He added that revenue has been growing 20% month-on-month within the past year. “Our route to market, for the most bit, has been going door-to-door from franchisor to franchisee to different offices within that group. And over the last couple of months, we’ve identified the enterprise channel, as we call it, which is more associated with strapping on our technology to portals,” stated the co-CEO. “So our next phase of traction and growth will come from those relationships, which are significant in our world. And that’s why we’ve just gone through this capital raise to experiment with that essentially.” Flow currently has over 300+ clients using its platform — a client being a real estate agency or developer where each office has about 15 to 20 smaller agents. So more broadly, Flow is used by nearly 6,000 agents across South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mauritius and Australia. It is in talks with partners, mainly property portals and CRM platforms, to expand into Europe (France, Germany, Belgium and the U.K.) where it’ll face stiffer competition — which the co-founders hope Flow will edge out with its technology and attention to design — but a more extensive market base. Futuregrowth Asset Management led Flow’s pre-Series A round with $2 million. Endeavor Harvest Fund and serial entrepreneur Steven Heilbron participated, while existing investors Kalon Venture Partners, Vunani Fintech Fund and Buffet Investments also doubled down. “We’ve keenly followed Flow’s progress in South Africa and Australia and integration into the B2B side of the global property industry as the next natural step in the company’s evolution,” says Futuregrowth Asset Management head of Private Equity and Venture Capital, Amrish Narrandes, on the investment. “We share Daniel and Gil’s vision to bring the property industry into the 21st century and know they have the expertise and experience to make it happen — and we’re pleased to be able to be part of a South African company taking bold steps that will bring much-needed change to an essential global industry.”

Zack Snyder’s ‘Rebel Moon’ is set to arrive on Netflix in December

Lauren Forristal

“Rebel Moon,” Netflix’s highly anticipated space fantasy epic, is coming to the streamer on December 22, 2023, the company announced today, alongside a of over a dozen titles that are also arriving on the streamer this year. The sizzle reel shows a first look at the sci-fi adventure film, giving viewers a glimpse at the star-studded cast, crazy action sequences, explosives and a quick yet steamy make-out sesh between “Kingsman: The Secret Service” actress Sofia Boutella (who plays Kora) and “Sons of Anarchy” actor Charlie Hunnam (character yet-to-be-named). The movie is set in a colony on the edge of the galaxy that’s threatened by the armies of the tyrannical Regent Balisarius (played by Ed Skrein). The peaceful colony sends Kora out to neighboring planets to recruit warriors that can help them. “Rebel Moon” also features Anthony Hopkins as the voice of a sentient battle robot named Jimmy, Djimon Hounsou as General Titus, Ray Fisher as Blood Axe, Jena Malone, Bae Doona, Cary Elwes, Corey Stoll and more. “Army of the Dead” director Zack Snyder first announced “Rebel Moon” back in July of 2021, tweeting out teasers every so often like and behind-the-scenes images. So, it’s about time it gets an official release date. It’s clear that Synder is a “Star Wars” fan, as the upcoming movie appears to take a lot of inspiration from the hugely popular franchise. According to , Snyder first pitched  “Rebel Moon” to Lucasfilm as a potential “Star Wars” movie over 10 years ago before Disney acquired the production company in 2012. Synder has since signed a first-look deal with Netflix. Synder also told the publication that he hopes “Rebel Moon” turns into “a massive IP and a universe that can be built out.” It wouldn’t be surprising if “Rebel Moon” became a franchise, as Netflix is known for investing heavily in its content, focusing on over-the-top action films and hiring A-list actors to draw in a big crowd. Currently, Netflix has a “ ” universe in the works. Other titles coming to Netflix later this year include the comedy movie “You People,” “Murder Mystery 2” with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, the romance movie “Your Place or Mine” and “The Mother,” starring Jennifer Lopez, among many others.

Good Meat approved to sell serum-free cultivated meat in Singapore

Catherine Shu

announced today it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency to use serum-free media for the production of its cultivated meat. The brand, which is the cultivated meat division of U.S.-based food startup Eat Just, says it is the only cultivated meat producer in the world with the ability to sell to consumers. Its lab-grown chicken meat is currently available in Singapore, where Eat Just to sell it in 2020. “Today’s news is another historic milestone for us and for the entire industry as it brings us all closer to a more scalable and sustainable production of real meat without slaughter,” said Eat Just head of communications Andrew Noyes. “Our R&D team worked diligently to replace serum with other nutrients that provide the same functionality and their hard work over several years paid off.” The latest approval from the SFA means Good Meat will be able to sell chicken meat cultivated without using animal serums. Serums like fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is made from the blood of fetuses extracted from cows during the slaughter process, are usually needed for cells from a living animal to duplicate. Finding ways to produce cultivated meat without animal serums is one of the key challenges . Good Meat is currently working on its Singapore production facility, which it says will house the largest bioreactor (a 6,000-liter vessel built with ABEC) in the cultivated meat industry. Once it opens next year, the facility will be capable of using the serum-free production process and producing tens of thousands of pounds of meat. Eat Just’s backers (the sovereign wealth fund of the state of Qatar), Vulcan Capital and C2 Capital Partners, which . The Singaporean government has as the island nation seeks to make its food industry more self-sustaining. In a statement, Singapore Economic Development Board executive vice president Damian Chan said, “Good Meat is a key member of our growing ecosystem of more than 70 alternative protein companies and we look forward to their continued contributions in driving agrifood innovation from Singapore for the region and beyond.”  

Netflix’s ‘Wednesday’ gets a second season

Lauren Forristal

After surpassing viewed in the third week of its debut, Netflix’s “Wednesday” has been renewed for a second season, the company today. The series originally premiered in November with eight episodes. It’s centered around the popular “Addams Family” character, Wednesday Addams (played by Jenna Ortega), as she begins her first year as a Nevermore Academy student. There, she hones her psychic ability and tries to solve a supernatural mystery that haunts the town. Netflix tweeted the announcement alongside a that shows a recap of season one, with Wednesday being hunted by the Monster of Nevermore Academy (aka the Hyde), haunted by her ancestor, Goody, and more spooky antics. In the video, Ortega says, “Over the past few weeks, I’ve been hunted, haunted, and mimicked millions of times across the internet. It’s been pure torture. Thank you.” “Wednesday” season two should be a shocker to no one as the first season was streamed by more than 150 million households, making it the second most popular English-language series on Netflix. Since the season one premiere, the show took the internet by storm, becoming a trending hashtag on TikTok and the culprit behind the revival of The Cramps song “Goo Goo Muck.” It also managed to earn a noteworthy accomplishment for a family-friendly title. Fans can tune into the award ceremony next Tuesday, January 10, to see if the comedy series gets a Thing-friendly thumbs up or not. Needless to say, many Netflix subscribers will be pleased to watch another round of adventures from their favorite outcasts and freaks. “We can’t wait to dive headfirst into another season and explore the kooky, spooky world of Nevermore,” the co-showrunners of “Wednesday,” Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, in an interview with Tudum, the official Netflix blog. “It’s been incredible to create a show that’s connected with people across the world. We’re thrilled to continue Wednesday’s torturous journey into Season 2.” Millar also pointed to the season one finale as a hint of what viewers can expect in the next season. For those that watched the finale, we know that Wednesday gets a text from an unknown stalker, signifying that the threat of the Hyde still remains. “[The stalker proves] that threats remain out there … to both Wednesday and the school,” Millar added. “Not all loose ends have been tied up neatly as she thinks they have.” A release date for season two has yet to be revealed. Hopefully, we’ll soon find out what awaits for the characters of Nevermore.

Oversight Board presses Meta to revise ‘convoluted and poorly defined’ nudity policy

Devin Coldewey

Meta’s Oversight Board, which independently evaluates difficult content moderation decisions, has overturned the company’s takedown of two posts that depicted a nonbinary and transgender person’s bare chest. The case represents a failure of a convoluted and impractical nudity policy, the Board said, and recommended that Meta take a serious look at revising it. The decision concerned two people who, as part of a fundraising campaign for one of the couple, were hoping to undergo top surgery (generally speaking the reduction of breast tissue). They posted two images to Instagram, in 2021 and 2022, both with bare chests but nipples covered, and included a link to their fundraising site. These posts were repeatedly flagged (by AI and users) and Meta ultimately removed them, as violations of the “Sexual Solicitation Community Standard,” basically because they combined nudity with asking for money. Although the policy is plainly intended to prevent solicitation by sex workers (another issue entirely), it was repurposed here to remove perfectly innocuous content. When the couple appealed the decision and brought it to the Oversight Board, Meta reversed it as an “error.” But the Board took it up anyway because “removing these posts is not in line with Meta’s Community Standards, values or human rights responsibilities. These cases also highlight fundamental issues with Meta’s policies.” They wanted to take the opportunity to point out how impractical the policy is as it exists, and to recommend to Meta that it take a serious look at whether its approach here actually reflects its stated values and priorities. Essentially: Even if this policy did represent a humane and appropriate approach to moderating nudity, it’s not scalable. For one reason or another, Meta should modify it. and includes a link to a more complete discussion of the issues. (When I asked about previous times they had challenged this policy, involving breast cancer awareness.) The obvious threat Meta’s platforms face, however, should they relax their nudity rules, is porn. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has said in the past that making his platforms appropriate for everyone necessitates taking a clear stance on sexualized nudity. You’re welcome to post sexy stuff and link to your OnlyFans, but no hardcore porn in Reels, please. But the Oversight Board says this “public morals” stance is likewise in need of revision (this excerpt from the full report lightly edited for clarity): Meta’s rationale of protecting “community sensitivity” merits further examination. This rationale has the potential to align with the legitimate aim of “public morals.” That said, the Board notes that the aim of protecting “public morals” has sometimes been improperly invoked by governmental speech regulators to violate human rights, particularly those of members of minority and vulnerable groups. Moreover, the Board is concerned about the known and recurring disproportionate burden on expression that have been experienced by women, transgender, and non-binary people due to Meta’s policies… The Board received public comments from many users that expressed concern about the presumptive sexualization of women’s, trans and non-binary bodies, when no comparable assumption of sexualization of images is applied to cisgender men. The Board has taken the bull by the horns here. There’s no sense dancing around it: The policy of recognizing some bodies as inherently sexually suggestive but not others is simply untenable in the context of Meta’s purportedly progressive stance on such matters. Meta wants to have its cake and eat it too: give lip service to people like the trans and NB people like those who brought this to its attention, but also respect the more restrictive morals of conservative groups and pearl-clutchers worldwide. The Board Members who support a sex and gender-neutral adult nudity policy recognize that under international human rights standards as applied to states, distinctions on the grounds of protected characteristics may be made based on reasonable and objective criteria and when they serve a legitimate purpose. They do not believe that the distinctions within Meta’s nudity policy meet that standard. They further note that, as a business, Meta has made human rights commitments that are inconsistent with an approach that restricts online expression based on the company’s perception of sex and gender. Citing several reports and internationally negotiated definitions and trends, the Board’s decision suggests that a new policy be forged that abandons the current structure of categorizing and removing images, substituting something more reflective of modern definitions of gender and sexuality. This may, of course, they warn, leave the door open to things like nonconsensual sexual imagery being posted (much of this is , something that might change under a new system), or an influx of adult content. The latter, however, can be handled by means other than total prohibition. When reached for comment, Meta noted that it had already reversed the removal and that it . It added: “We know more can be done to support the LGBTQ+ community, and that means working with experts and LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations on a range of issues and product improvements.” I’ve asked for specific examples of organizations, issues, or improvements and will update this post if I hear back.

Delphia co-founder placed on leave after sexual assault allegations from former employee

Jacquelyn Melinek

, a mobile investment platform, is facing a lawsuit and allegations that its co-founder and CTO Cameron Agius-Westland sexually assaulted and harassed a former employee, according to a complaint filed on Monday and shared exclusively with TechCrunch. The complaint alleges that on August 17, 2022, Westland “sexually assaulted and harassed Plaintiff for at least 30 minutes, as he rubbed her back and legs in a hot tub in a sexual manner during a work retreat.” The complaint was filed in both the U.S. and Canada. “Later in the night, Westland whispered in Plaintiff’s ear — ‘what do you say, we should do this, you and I, let’s do this.’ Plaintiff acted like she did not understand or hear him,” the document alleged. “Then at her first opportunity, Plaintiff told everyone she was going to bed, went into her room, and locked the door.” In the complaint, the former employee also alleges that she later received a text from Westland asking, “Want to cuddle?” to which she says she did not respond. The following day, Westland is said in the complaint to have at least partly acknowledged his behavior by sending the Plaintiff and two other colleagues the following message, as shared in a screenshot in the document:   After the alleged incident, the Plaintiff was fired in mid-November 2022, after Westland wanted to “change company strategy,” according to the document. She was replaced shortly after by what the former employee’s complaint characterizes as Westland’s “close friend,” Max Cameron, who is now director of community products at Delphia. Andrew Peek, CEO and co-founder of Delphia, shared a statement with TechCrunch in response to the lawsuit allegations: Delphia closed a led by Multicoin Capital in June 2022. Other investors in the round include fintech-focused Ribbit Capital, M13, Lattice Ventures and the now-defunct FTX Ventures. In December 2022, Delphia its acquisition of Fathom Privacy, a data rights company that aims to provide individuals the ability to own personal application data.

TechCrunch+ roundup: Space tech predictions, startup IP strategy, finding feasible funding

Walter Thompson

I once aspired to own San Francisco real estate. Now, I’m only interested in acquiring intellectual property. Case in point: “Scooby-Doo” aired on TV before I was born, but the spin-off “Velma” just premiered on HBO Max. It’s getting ripped to shreds on social media, which means people watched, so we can expect more to come. Hollywood studios are adept at wringing every ounce of value from their IP. Similarly, , according to Kyle Graves, counsel at Snell & Wilmer, but only if founders are vigilant. Do you have IP counsel? Does your app have a UX protection strategy? Have you ever conducted an audit? “There are a thousand little oopsies that can become big oopsies when word gets out that a big payday may be coming.” Thanks for reading, Walter Thompson Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+ / Getty Images As of January 17, Wikipedia notes that there have been eight successful spaceflight launches so far this year. New spaceports are entering operation, cell phone users will soon have connectivity from space and the Artemis program backed by NASA is one of several ventures that will bring robots (and eventually human crews) to the moon. “Despite the economic uncertainty, we believe new records will be established in space tech as giant commercial projects get funded,” says Mark Boggett, CEO and co-founder of Seraphim Space Manager LLP. Getty Images Raising money without a detailed business plan is a proven way for losing value. Before seeking capital, founders need a firm plan for ramping up hiring, going to market and expanding into new areas. Otherwise, they may be “mistaking funding for validation,” writes Carlos Antequera, CEO and co-founder of Novel Capital. “Not all capital providers are equal, so seeking financing isn’t just about securing capital. It’s a matter of finding the right source of funding that matches both your business and your roadmap.”

Fledgling startup founders — buy an early-bird ticket to build your future

Lauren Simonds

The early stages of building a startup is no cakewalk even during a strong economy — much less during the uncertain one we’re currently living in. If you’re an aspiring or newly minted founder, you’ll find invaluable information, guidance and support — at an early-bird price you can afford — during , a one-day founder summit on April 20 in Boston, Massachusetts. and tap into a day packed with: We’re building out a strong agenda, and we’ll share it with you in the coming weeks. In the meantime, these categories and topics — from previous years — will give you a sense of what you can expect at TC Early Stage 2023. Don’t let an uncertain economy sideline your startup dreams. Learn directly from founders who have paved the way. They, and a host of other startup ecosystem experts, will help you understand best practices, avoid pitfalls, determine your next steps and immerse yourself in a supportive community of fellow travelers. takes place on April 20, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts. Jump in and save with early-bird pricing. and save $200. We can’t wait to see what you’re building! .

Daily Crunch: Apple powers up 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M2 Pro and Max chips

Christine Hall

Good news — we are back with another round of events for TechCrunch, and we have in Boston in April. Woohoo! Today, we also particularly enjoyed ’s .  — and ChatGPT, the AI that can write poems, emails, spreadsheet formulas and more, has attracted a lot of negative publicity lately, writes. That’s perhaps why AI21 Labs, an Israeli startup developing text-generating AI systems along the lines of ChatGPT, tried a different tack with its . A part of AI21’s expanding suite of generative AI, Wordtune Spices doesn’t compose emails and essays like ChatGPT. Instead, it suggests options that change the voice and style of already written sentences, also offering up statistics from web-based sources to “strengthen arguments.” Apropos robots that write…On the heels of raising at a $1 billion valuation last week, , the first extension for a startup that made its name from its popular AI-based translation tools, , er, . Write is a new tool that fixes your writing — catching grammar and punctuation mistakes, offering suggestions for clarity and more creative phrasing and (soon) giving you the option to change your tone. There was a lot of fun startup news on the site over the past few days, so it was hard to choose just five to load up in our little recommendation engine, but here’s what we came up with: / Getty Images At the time of this writing, Wikipedia notes that there have been eight successful spaceflight launches so far this year. New spaceports are entering operation, cell phone users will soon have connectivity from space, and the Artemis program backed by NASA is one of several ventures that will bring robots (and eventually human crews) to the moon. “Despite the economic uncertainty, we believe new records will be established in spacetech as giant commercial projects get funded,” says Mark Boggett, CEO and co-founder of Seraphim Space Manager LLP. Three more from the TC+ team: Extra, extra, read all about how the that disrupted postal service in the United Kingdom. writes that the confirmation comes a week after the Royal Mail said it was that caused it to not be able to dispatch items overseas. CEO Simon Thompson said he didn’t believe customer data was compromised, but notified authorities in case that changes. Some reports say the LockBit ransomware group is behind this, and Carly is working on confirming that. And we have five more for you:

Does everyone want to be a landlord, or what?

Mary Ann Azevedo

Helloooo and Happy New Year! Feels like it’s been a while since I sat down to write this newsletter. I’ve missed it! Before I dive into the news, I wanted to say that I hope you all had a restful and fun holiday. Ours was super low-key but that’s not a bad thing. Still, I will admit it has taken a bit for my brain to switch back to work mode this week…so bear with me. On Friday, I published an article on . The story was among the most read on the site that day, further evidence that people are in technology that relates to the property rental market, specifically when it comes to investing. For its part, Doorstead says it’s more than a full-service property management company, in that it guarantees the homeowners it works with a minimum amount in rent. If it can’t get the amount that it promises, it will cough up the difference. If it gets more, well, the owner gets the extra — not the company. Doorstead says it intentionally opted to only make money by charging an 8% management fee so that its incentives are aligned with that of the homeowners it works with. By being willing to pay the difference, the company says that it’s able to reduce the amount of time rental properties sit vacant. So, homeowners are not only getting a guaranteed rental income, but they are also having their properties rented out faster and making more money that way, the company’s founders, Ryan Waliany and Jennifer Bronzo, say. Notably, Doorstead also announced that it picked up the Boston assets of another venture-backed proptech, Knox Financial, whose I had covered in 2021. I don’t have details as to what led to the latter company winding down its operations, but I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this sort of thing in 2023. And by “sort of thing” I mean startups acquiring assets from other startups. To hear the Equity Podcast crew’s thoughts on Doorstead’s model, head . Over the break, we published that I had conducted with ’s Hans Tung and Robin Li during the fourth quarter. For the unacquainted, GGV is a venture firm with $9.2 billion in assets under management that invests in startups from seed to growth stages across a variety of sectors, including consumer, internet, enterprise/cloud and fintech. Some highlights of the interview include Tung’s views on down rounds not being the end of the world. He told me that he’d rather see a startup raise a down round than shut down, and that what matters in the end is the outcome. Refreshing! He also shared some of the advice he’s giving to his own portfolio companies, among other things. Meanwhile, Li provided her thoughts on why embedded fintech will remain hot. While I’m sure there were already many down rounds in 2022, Tung expects we’ll see even more in 2023 as startups that had raised in 2021 began to get low on cash. I agree with his view that there’s no shame in raising a down round. Valuations were overinflated and any down rounds that are announced this year are in most cases reflecting valuations that are more realistic and easier to defend. Doorstead co-founders Ryan Waliany (CEO) and Jennifer Bronzo (COO) Doorstead On January 6, self-described family fintech  launched , an interactive, curriculum-based financial literacy game. Clearly the company is trying to appeal to the younger generation’s love of playing games digitally, although one has to wonder what took it so long to include a game in its offering. Via email a spokesperson told me: “Kids can earn virtual coins, experience points, and engage with real-life money lessons through dynamic graphics, story-driven gameplay, and animations on their cell phones or tablets — taking the principles of gamification and applying them to one of the essential skills they’ll need for their entire lives.” Of course, the gamification of finances is not a new concept. Last year, I wrote about Truist, one of the nation’s largest financial institutions, in its efforts to appeal to a younger clientele. BaaS startup said it is teaming up with (meaning “One” in Arabic), a digital Islamic investment platform that describes itself as the world’s first halal investment app. Synctera says it is providing the infrastructure for Wahed to make its services available to the 3.5 million residents of Muslim faith in the U.S. Presently, Wahed has more than 200,000 clients in the U.K. and Malaysia and is using Synctera’s offering to build bank account products and roll out a debit card program linked to its app for Muslim Americans. Specifically, a Synctera spokesperson told TechCrunch that “Wahed currently offers halal investments, structured in accordance with established Islamic principles and standards, to US customers. With Synctera, Wahed will be able to provide their customers with bank accounts (making funds transfer easier and smoother) and debit cards (for convenient access to funds).” Synctera CEO/founder Peter Hazlehurst wrote via email: “We’re really excited to help Wahed launch banking products for their U.S. customers….We expect to see a wave of mission-driven companies like Wahed embrace embedded banking to help people brighten their financial futures.” In recent years, we’ve seen more and more fintechs shaping their offerings to cater to very specific demographics such as Hispanics, Blacks, Asian Americans and immigrants generally. Only time will tell if that sort of niche focus will pay off. In that vein, Boston-based — which describes itself as “a female and Latinx-founded fintech, AI, and cybersecurity venture capital firm” — — its third. Unfortunately, the firm would not share how much it has raised so far but did say in a press release that the fund “will prioritize investing in early growth stage startups with a focus on diverse founding teams.” Hey, we’re always here for any initiatives aimed at elevating diverse founding teams, especially in light of headlines such as To kick off the year, ‘ managing director Victoria Treyger penned for TechCrunch, offering up her predictions and where she sees opportunities in the fintech space. Meanwhile, Bessemer Venture Partners told us via email that he believes that “With FedNow finally slated to launch more broadly in mid-2023, all eyes will be on opportunities around faster payments. While adoption of the Clearing House’s RTP scheme has been moderate to date, we expect FedNow’s use of the existing FedLine network to accelerate faster payment adoption beginning in 2023. There will be a lot of opportunity to build the enabling modern infrastructure for use-cases like payroll, insurance disbursements, supplier payments and more and at the application layer for more seamless b2b and consumer payments experiences.” He’s also still bullish on the continued institutional adoption of blockchain technology in some large areas of financial services. For example, he predicts that  SWIFT “will continue to experiment with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) while more banks will join the USDF Consortium to facilitate compliant transfer of value over blockchains via bank-minted tokenized deposit stablecoins.” Speaking of blockchain, , a crypto-focused startup that has built a cross-border payments network, has now launched a BaaS solution, which it claims “unlocks a unique feature — the ability to manage banking and crypto accounts within a single platform.” A spokesperson for the company told me via email the goal is to make it easier for traditional banks to open crypto accounts for their users and to give crypto platforms a way to open bank accounts that would allow their clients to store, transfer and pay in fiat/crypto. I covered the company’s in June of 2021. It was cool to see a startup whose raise I covered last year be named a . last May to grow its offering, which aims to help people build credit through recurring payment forms such as digital subscriptions to Netflix, Spotify and Hulu. Personally, I am a fan of the startup’s inclusive credit-building efforts, which challenge the antiquated credit score model here in the U.S. Last week, Darrell Etherington and Becca Szkutak were joined by co-founder and co-CEO Henrique Dubugras to and why the friends, who met online as teenagers, decided to be co-CEOs, among other things. According to pay transparency tracker , is not exactly so transparent about its pay. The fintech giant does not include salary ranges in its or job posts. The tracker also found that a strategic account executive at fintech startup Bolt can make — you ready for this? —  (If you could see me, I’m making the Kevin in “Home Alone” shocked face right now). As reported by Manish Singh: “Suhail Sameer, the chief executive of , will leave the top role later this week as the Indian fintech startup scrambles to steer the ship after kicking out its founder last year for allegedly misusing company funds.” More . Greenlight While we’re not seeing many megarounds in the fintech space here in the U.S., TechCrunch’s Manish Singh reports that India saw two significant raises in the world of fintech in recent weeks: Meanwhile, in South Korea, fintech Toss bumped its valuation up to a staggering $7 billion: Other funding deals reported on the TC site include: And, that’s a wrap. I’m not typically one for resolutions but I can say that I trying to start this year off on a more upbeat note. Last year was challenging in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t help to be negative or doom and gloom. There is still so much good news and things to be grateful for. So, my wish for 2023 is more resilience and optimism for us all because while we can’t always control what happens, we control how we react. Thanks again for reading, and for your support. I’m always here for your feedback! Until next week…xoxoxo Mary Ann

4 tips to find the funding that fits your business

Carlos Antequera

clear: Startups are finding funding increasingly difficult to secure, and even unicorns appear cornered, with many . But equity rounds aren’t the only way for a company to raise money — alternative and other non-dilutive financing options are often overlooked. Taking on debt might be the right solution when you’re focused on growth and can see clear ROI from the capital you deploy. Not all capital providers are equal, so seeking financing isn’t just about capital. It’s a matter of finding the right source of funding that matches both your business and your roadmap. Here are four things you should consider: It’s easy to take for granted, but securing financing begins with a business plan. Don’t seek funding until you have a clear plan for how you’ll use it. For example, do you need capital to fund growth or for your day-to-day operations? The answer should influence not only the amount of capital you seek, but the type of funding partner you look for as well. Start with a concrete plan and make sure it aligns with the structure of your financing: Your term of repayment must be long enough so you can deploy the capital see the returns. If it’s not, you may end up making loan payments with the principal. Say, for example, you secure funding to enter a new market. You plan to expand your sales team to support the move and develop the cash flow necessary to pay back the loan. The problem here is, the new hire will take months to ramp up. If there’s not enough delta between when you start ramping up and when you begin repayments, you’ll be paying back the loan before your new salesperson can bring in revenue to allow you to see ROI on the amount you borrowed. Another issue to keep in mind: If you’re financing operations instead of growth, working capital requirements may reduce the amount you can deploy. Let’s say you finance your ad spending and plan to deploy $200,000 over the next four months. But payments on the MCA loan you secured to fund that spending will eat into your revenue, and the loan will be further limited by a minimum cash covenant of $100,000. The result? You secured $200,000 in financing but can only deploy half of it. With $100,000 of your financing kept in a cash account, only half the loan will be used to drive operations, which means you’re not likely to meet your growth target. What’s worse, as you’re only able to deploy half of the loan, your cost of capital is effectively double what you’d planned for. The second consideration is balancing how much capital you need to act on your near-term goals against what you can reasonably expect to secure. If the funding amount you can get is not enough to move the needle, it might not be worth the effort required.

Twitter rivals, unicorn trivia and valuation homework

Natasha Mascarenhas

Welcome back to  , the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It’s Tuesday, not Monday, but hey, the week ahead is as busy as ever. Here’s what I chatted about today: As always, you can support me by following me on and The show also tweets from , so follow us there and turn on notifications to never miss a new update from your favorite podcast team in tech (ugh, you shouldn’t have).

Fintech predictions and opportunities for 2023

Victoria Treyger

an eventful year. Fintech has fallen from the highs of 2021, and while 2022 was largely about the reset of the funding environment, 2023 is going to be a year of recalibration for fintech companies. The great news is that large enterprise and midmarket companies care more than ever about bottom-line impact. As revenue growth slows down, cost savings and efficiency have become critical. Larger companies are more likely to cut back on internal innovation efforts and technology investments that are not core to the business. This opens the door for fintechs that can deliver real improvements to the bottom line by eliminating manual processes and saving their customers money. First, let’s take a look at the sectors likely to be most challenging: lenders, neobanks and fintechs that serve SMBs. Lending is going to be hit hard. Lenders have to manage three big tailwinds in today’s market: The rise in delinquency rates and charge-offs from non-paying customers will be tough to manage for newer fintechs that have been operating for less than five years. These younger companies don’t have the models fully built out to predict which customers are likelier to default. Managing risk during a downturn can be brutal, and lenders will feel this most acutely. Neobanks transformed the customer experience of traditional banks by offering better digital products and lower costs. While big players, like Chime, who raised large amounts of capital will be fine, expect to see consolidation among the smaller neobanks. The reality is that many neobanks have customers with small average deposit balances, and deposits are critical to banking business models in the long term. Neobanks will also be downstream victims of layoffs — if any of their customers are laid off, the banks will see their direct deposit flows diminishing. Small businesses are more likely to shut shop during a recession. In turn, fintechs that serve SMBs rather than larger midmarket and enterprise customers are more likely to lose their SMB customers. This is why you already see businesses moving away from serving SMBs. The opportunities for fintechs in 2023 lie in the “boring” areas like fraud, compliance, payment operations, taxes and infrastructure. CFOs will be more focused than ever on bottom-line impact. Fintechs that are able to demonstrate a measurable improvement in payment authorization and reconciliation rates or a reduction in fraud will be able to weather the downturn and grow.

UK privacy watchdog silent as Google flicks off critique that its Topics API fails to reform ad-tracking

Natasha Lomas

Late last week, it emerged that Google intends to ignore a call by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) — the international body that works to guide the development of web standards — to rethink the Topics API: A key ad-targeting component of Google’s so-called Privacy Sandbox proposal to evolve the adtech stack that Chrome supports for targeted advertising. Topics refers to an ad-targeting component of the Sandbox proposal that is based on tracking web users’ interests via their browser. The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) following a request from Google last March for an “early design review” of the Topics API — writing last week that its “initial view” is Google’s proposed Topics API fails to protect users from “unwanted tracking and profiling” and maintains the status quo of “inappropriate surveillance on the web.” “We do not want to see it proceed further,” added Amy Guy, commenting on behalf of the TAG. The TAG’s take is not the first downbeat assessment of Topics. Browser engine developers and also recently gave a thumbs-down to Google’s approach — with the former warning against preexisting privacy deficiencies on the web being used as “excuses for privacy deficiencies in new specs and proposals” and the latter deeming Topics “more likely to reduce the usefulness of the information for advertisers than it provides meaningful protection for privacy.” And the risk of the web user experience fragmenting if there’s only limited support among browsers for Topics — which could lead to implementing sites seeking to block visitors who are using non-Chromium browsers — is another of the concerns flagged by the TAG. Despite deepening opposition from the world of web infrastructure to Google’s approach, the U.K.’s privacy watchdog appears content to stand by and let Google proceed with a proposal that technical experts at the W3C are warning risks perpetuating the kind of privacy intrusions (and user agency and transparency failures) that have mired the adtech industry in regulatory (and reputational) for years. The Information Commission’s Office (ICO) is a key oversight body in this context as it’s actively engaged in assessing the Sandbox’s compliance with data protection law following a (CMA) which it . Asked whether it has any concerns about Topics’ implications for privacy, including in light of the TAG’s assessment, the ICO took several days to consider the question before declining comment. The regulator did tell us it is continuing to engage with Google and with the CMA — as part of its role under commitments made by Google to the competition watchdog. The ICO’s spokesperson also pointed back to a , published by the prior U.K. information commissioner on the topic (ha!) of evolving online advertising — which set out a series of “principles” and “recommendations” for the adtech industry, including stipulating that users are provided with an option to receive ads without — and which the spokesperson said lays out its “general expectations” in relation to such proposals now. But a more fulsome response from the ICO to a detailed critique of Topics by the W3C TAG there was none. A Google spokesman, meanwhile, confirmed it has briefed the regulator on Topics. And responding to questions about the TAG’s concerns the company also told us: While we appreciate the input of TAG, we disagree with their characterization that Topics maintains the status quo. Google is committed to Topics, as it is a significant privacy improvement over third-party cookies, and we’re moving forward. Topics supports interest-based ads that keep the web free & open, and significantly improves privacy compared to third-party cookies. Removing third-party cookies without viable alternatives hurts publishers, and can lead to worse approaches like covert tracking. Many companies are actively testing Topics and Sandbox APIs, and we’re committed to providing the tools to advance privacy and support the web. Additionally, Google’s senior director of product management, Victor Wong, took to Twitter Friday (following on the implications of the TAG’s concerns) to a threaded version of sentiments in the statement (in which Wong also claims users can “easily control what topics are shared or turn it off”) — ending with the stipulation that the adtech giant is “100% committed to these APIs as building blocks for a more private internet.” So, TL;DR, Google’s not for turning on Topics. It announced this component of Sandbox — replacing a much criticized earlier interest-based ad-targeting proposal, called FLoCs (aka Federated Learning of Cohorts), which had proposed grouping users with comparable interests into targetable buckets. FLoCs was soon — with critics arguing it could amplify existing adtech problems like discrimination and predatory targeting. So Google may not have had much of a choice in killing off FLoCs — but doing so provided it with a way to turn a PR headache over its claimed pro-privacy ads evolution project into a quick win by making the company appear responsive. Thing is, the fast-stacking of critiques of Topics don’t look good for Google’s claims of “advanced” adtech delivering a “more private internet” either. Under the Topics proposal, Chrome (or a chromium-based browser) tracks the users’ web activity and assigns interests to them based on what they look at online, which can then be shared with entities that call the Topics API in order to target them with ads. There are some limits — such as on how many topics can be assigned, how many are shared, how long Topics are stored, and so on — but, fundamentally, the proposal entails the user’s web activity being watched by their browser, which then shares snippets of the taxonomy of interests it’s inferred with sites that ask for the data. This is not 100% clear to (and controllable by) the web user, as the TAG’s assessment argues: The Topics API as proposed puts the browser in a position of sharing information about the user, derived from their browsing history, with any site that can call the API. This is done in such a way that the user has no fine-grained control over what is revealed, and in what context, or to which parties. It also seems likely that a user would struggle to understand what is even happening; data is gathered and sent behind the scenes, quite opaquely. This goes against the principle of  , and we believe is not appropriate behaviour for any software purporting to be an agent of a web user. … Giving the web user access to browser settings to configure which topics can be observed and sent, and from/to which parties, would be a necessary addition to an API such as this, and go some way towards restoring agency of the user, but is by no means sufficient. People can become vulnerable in ways they do not expect, and without notice. People cannot be expected to have a full understanding of every possible topic in the taxonomy as it relates to their personal circumstances, nor of the immediate or knock-on effects of sharing this data with sites and advertisers, and nor can they be expected to continually revise their browser settings as their personal or global circumstances change. There is also the risk of sites that call the API being able to “enrich” the per-user interest data gathered by Topics by using other forms of tracking — such as device fingerprinting — and thereby strip away at web users’ privacy in the same corrosive, anti-web-user way that tracking and profiling always does. And while Google has said “sensitive” categories — such as race or gender — can’t be turned into targetable interests via the Topics processing that does not stop advertisers identifying proxy categories they could use to target protected characteristics as has happened using existing tracking-based ad targeting tools (see, for example, “ ” ad-targeting on Facebook — which led to warnings back in 2016 of the potential for discriminatory ads excluding people with protected characteristics from seeing job or housing ads). (Again the TAG picks up on that risk — further pointing out: “[T]here is no binary assessment that can be made over whether a topic is ‘sensitive’ or not. This can vary depending on context, the circumstances of the person it relates to, as well as change over time for the same person.”) A cynic might say the controversy over FLoCs, and Google’s fairly swift ditching of it, provided the company with useful cover to push Topics as a more palatable replacement — without attracting the same level of fine-grained scrutiny to a proposal that, after all, seeks to keep tracking web users — given all the attention already expended on FLoCs (and with some regulatory powder spent on antitrust Privacy Sandbox considerations). As with a negotiation, the first ask may be outrageous — not because the expectation is to get everything on the list but as a way to skew expectations and get as much as possible later on. Google’s highly technical plan to build a new (and it claims) “better-for-privacy” adtech stack was formally announced back in 2020 — when it set out its strategy to deprecate support for third-party tracking cookies in Chrome, having been dragged into action by far earlier anti-tracking moves by rival browsers. But the proposal has faced considerable criticism from publishers and marketers over concerns it will further entrench Google’s dominance of online advertising. That — in turn — has attracted a bunch of regulatory scrutiny and friction from antitrust watchdogs, leading to some delays to the original migration timeline. The U.K. has led the charge here, with its CMA extracting a series of commitments from the tech giant — over how it would develop the replacement adtech stack and when it could apply any switch. Principally these commitments are around ensuring Google took feedback from the industry to address any competition concerns. But the CMA and ICO also announced jointly working on this oversight — given the clear implications for web users’ privacy of any change to how ad targeting is done. Which means competition and privacy regulators need to work hand-in-glove here if the web user is not to keep being stiffed in the name of “relevant ads.” The issue of adtech for the ICO is, however, an awkward one. This is because it has — historically — failed to take enforcement action against current-gen adtech’s systematic breaches of privacy law. So the notion of the ICO hard-balling Google now, over what the company has, from the outset, branded as a pro-privacy advancement on , even as the regulator lets privacy-ripping adtech carry on unlawfully processing web users’ data — might look a bit “arse over tit,” so to speak. The upshot is the ICO is in a bind over how proactively it can regulate the detail of Google’s Sandbox proposal. And that of course plays into Google’s hand — since the sole privacy regulator with eyes actively on this stuff is forced to sit on its hands (or at best twiddle its thumbs) and let Google shape the narrative for Topics and ignore informed critiques — so you could say Google is . Hence unwavering talk of “moving forward” on a “significant privacy improvement over third-party cookies.” “Improvement” is of course relative. So, for users, the reality is it’s still Google in the driver’s seat when it comes to deciding how much of an incremental privacy gain you’ll get on its people-tracking business as usual. And there’s no point in complaining to the ICO about that.

Cost-effective IP strategies can lead to massive exit valuations

Kyle Graves

on intellectual property rights and exit events often recite the anecdotal experience of software founders operating in industries dominated by strong network effects and natural monopolies. These unique circumstances often lead to first-mover advantages that displace consideration of intellectual property protection strategies. However, overreliance on conventional wisdom also allows valuation destroying time bombs to hide within successful businesses, only to detonate during a liquidity event as the buyer or investor counsel begins due diligence. At hardware startups or startups in markets without natural monopolies, stronger appreciation of intellectual property strategies may inoculate companies against these mistakes. Non-software startups frequently receive advice that — perhaps inadvertently — pushes them along a favorable path for massive exit valuations. However, as an IP and deal lawyer, I have seen a few recurring false steps that harm valuation across domains, even if hardware startups often avoid the worst offenses. With this in mind, here are a few cost-effective IP strategies that you may employ to optimize your exit valuation. Beta testing activity often triggers patent filing deadlines that cannot be unwound. The practice is understandable, as cost management is typically critical during pre-revenue beta activity. However, startups should consider using provisional patent applications followed by Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) patent applications to defer patent costs when pre-revenue and avoid the negative effects that missing these critical patent deadlines will have if the beta proves to be successful. Filing cheap provisional patent applications early and often, then combining them in tranches within a fewer number of PCT patent applications, allows startups to defer the expensive “back-and-forth” prosecution part of patenting for as long as 30 or 31 months from the time the initial provisional patent application was filed. The goal is to allow the product to mature sufficiently so that you can focus on only the IP that will spur revenue. Companies following this strategy typically obtain fewer, higher-quality patents and often see better value because fewer good patents often cost less than many, lower-quality patents. This strategy also maximizes flexibility if an acquirer, investor or early significant customer takes the product in a new direction. Because it can be worse to obtain patents that cover a product that the market, investors or customers no longer want than to obtain no patents at all, this strategy uses legal, procedural strategies to manage the patent timeline and facilitate later-stage pivots. Many deals have been stymied by an early independent contractor who signed an NDA form the founder found online but omitted an assignment of rights clause. Sometimes, critical early vendors become more important to the success of a product than was initially appreciated, and agreements with these vendors may have deal-killing clauses. For instance, a hosting provider may have a non-assignment clause that limits future stock or asset sale transactions. You should find out if you have such agreements right now not on the eve of a huge exit.

Wyze goes back to its roots with the Wyze Cam OG and OG Telephoto

Frederic Lardinois

Back in 2017, Wyze made a name for itself with the launch of its original . Over the years, it released its fair share of iterations of the Wyze Cam, with . Today, it’s launching both a new iteration of the original Wyze Cam, dubbed the Wyze Cam OG, with a launch price of $20 (later $24) as well as a new member of the family, Wyze’s first telephoto camera, the aptly named Wyze Cam OG Telephoto. The Wyze Cam OG Telephoto will retail for $30 at launch, with the price going up to $34 later. While the regular camera provides a 120-degree field of view, the Telephoto version has a 3x zoom and a 27-degree field of view. Otherwise, they are pretty much identical. These are 1080p HD cameras that feature Wyze’s color night vision, two-way audio support and motion detection, including support for its with features like a web view and AI-powered package, vehicle and pet detection. In their daytime mode, these cameras record up to 20 frames per second, while at night, that drops down to 10 frames. Wyze Both cameras are IP65 rated, so they should be quite usable in most outdoor settings (though Wyze recommends you use its $14 outdoor power adapter for this). Both also still use a micro-USB plug. You’re not going to move these cameras around a lot, so that’s not likely an issue. Still, it would be nice to see USB-C here, given that most devices are moving this way. The only major difference here is that the Wyze Cam OG features an integrated 40 lumen spotlight, which can automatically turn on when the camera detects motion in very low light. Thanks to updated chips, both cameras can now detect motion and send out notifications three times faster than the company’s other cameras, and an upgraded mic and speaker should make two-way audio clearer. Live video in the Wyze app from these cameras also now loads significantly faster. Wyze While you can use the OG Telephoto camera as a standalone device, a lot of people will likely use it to augment an existing Wyze camera, maybe to specifically zoom in on a door. For those users, Wyze is launching a new kit with a mount and dual-power cable that allows you to stack both OG cameras on top of each other (in any combination). To enable this, the new cameras now feature a simple hot shoe-like indentation on their tops. On the software side, this is enhanced with Wyze’s new Picture-in-Picture view. Sadly, this PiP view isn’t available for older Wyze cameras. As for the overall design, Wyze switched things up here a bit, going from the original folding base to a more basic pole the camera now screws into. It makes the camera look a bit more pedestrian but I think it’s a worthwhile tradeoff since it will allow for more accessories and makes the stand easily replaceable. I’ve tested both cameras for the last week or so and there haven’t been any real surprises. Setup is about as easy as it can be. Indeed, it’s easier than before, since you don’t have to hold any QR code in front of the cameras anymore to connect them to your Wi-Fi network. Instead, the app now finds the new camera for you, you select the network in the app, enter your Wi-Fi password and the camera connects. All of that takes maybe 30 seconds, whereas with earlier Wyze cameras, it could be a few minutes. That’s not exactly a gamechanger, but a nice feature nonetheless. Overall, video from both cameras is more than sharp enough and the 3x zoom makes for a nice addition, though at least for my use case (watching over my backyard and front porch), it’s not a massive upgrade — more of a nice-to-have. And that’s about all there is. Both cameras worked exactly as expected, and while its mobile app isn’t flashy, it never gets in my way. I do wish I could use the PiP view for any random camera combination, though. It’s worth noting that the original version 1 Wyze Cam had some that — because of hardware limitations — Wyze wasn’t able to patch. Security issues are almost inevitable, but the main issue here was that Wyze was very slow to acknowledge this. That’s something worth keeping in mind — and I think it’s a good idea to keep your IoT devices on a different network from the rest of your home anyway.

Modernizing the live music industry with Mir Hwang from GigFinesse

Rebecca Szkutak

Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Darrell and Becca are joined by co-founder and CEO . Mir talks about how his struggles to book music gigs as a teenager pushed him to launch the company that connects artists with venues for live shows. Mir also talked about how hard it was to steer the live music-focused business through the pandemic in an industry that was reticent to adopt tech to begin with. Plus, we learn about a fun venue that couldn’t be more perfect for Darrell’s future poetry residence. to hear more stories from founders each week. Connect with us:

India proposes social media firms rely on fact checking by gov’t agencies

Manish Singh

The Indian government has proposed making the Press Bureau of India and its other agencies the arbiter of truth on what information is misleading online, escalating troubles for social media firms and other internet companies in the key overseas market. The proposal by the Ministry of Electronics and IT came as part of an amendment to the nation’s IT rules. In the current draft, the ministry asks social media firms and online gaming companies to undertake due diligence on the content users “host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share” and ensure that they are not “patently false and untrue or misleading in nature.” The change (PDF) that the social media firms and gaming companies use the judgment of the Press Information Bureau, a nodal agency, of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting or other agency authorized by the Central Government for fact checking or “in respect of any business of the Central Government, by its department in which such business is transacted.” The Press Bureau of India’s fact checks have been   misleading in some instances by the . Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights group, said the Ministry of Electronics and IT continues to “flout legality by seeking to expand the IT Rules.” It was “concerning” that the proposal allows central government ministry’s to “‘fact check’ news reports on them and cause their take down, he added. The ministry proposed earlier this month that the online gaming industry establish a self-regulatory body to oversee concerns over the rise of addictiveness of their titles. On Tuesday evening, it proposed that when the ministry holds the view that the self-regulatory body has not complied with the provisions of this rule, it may direct the body to “undertake measures to rectify the non-compliance.” The new proposal may add to the growing pain for many tech giants in India, one of their key overseas markets, where they have been subjected to greater accountability, scrutiny and questionable tactics in recent years. New Delhi is entering 2023 with several more such policy changes, including a telecom law that would  . Asia Internet Coalition, an influential industry group that represents Google, Meta and Amazon, among other tech firms, expressed concerns earlier this month about the digital competition law recommended by an Indian parliamentary panel that seeks to regulate their alleged anticompetitive practices, calling the proposal “ ” in nature. The Indian panel said last month that its recommendation was systemically important to counter monopoly and warned that tech giants “must not favour its own offers over the offers of its competitors” when acting as mediators to supply and sales markets.

Disney+ releases full trailer for ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 3

Lauren Forristal

Disney+ premiered the for Season 3 of “ ” last night, giving fans a glimpse at what the bounty hunter and his tiny companion will get into this time. The season will make its exclusive debut on the streamer on March 1. The third season will take place following the events of “The Book of Boba Fett.” The newest trailer features Din Djarin (played by Pedro Pascal) and Grogu back together again, with Grogu showing off his growing power. Din Djarin is on a mission back to Mandalore where he’ll ask them for forgiveness. Fans will also notice glimpses of new characters like a ton of Mandalorians, a co-pilot droid for Djarin’s N-1, as well as various aliens like Anzellans and Kowakian monkey-lizards. “The Mandalorian” also stars Amy Sedaris, Carl Weathers, Emily Swallow, Giancarlo Esposito and Katee Sackhoff. The trailer played during halftime of the NFL Super Wild Card matchup, which had the Dallas Cowboys play against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Other “Star Wars” shows that Disney+ subscribers can look forward to this year include future episodes of “Star Wars: The Bad Batch,” “Ahsoka,” “Star Wars Jedi: Survivor” and more.

Royal Mail CEO confirms cyberattack downed UK postal service

Carly Page

Nathan Stirk/Getty Images Royal Mail CEO Simon Thompson has confirmed that a cyberattack is to blame for the at the U.K. postal giant. The admission comes almost a week after that left the British mail service unable to dispatch items to overseas destinations. “We’ve confirmed that we’ve had a cyberattack,” Thompson told a U.K. parliamentary committee on Tuesday in response to questions from lawmakers. Thompson added that while the mail service believes that no customer data was compromised in the attack, the organization is prepared for that situation to change and has already notified the U.K. data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, as a precaution. Thompson — who gave evidence to lawmakers during a session about Royal Mail’s ongoing dispute with its union workers — declined to comment on specifics of the cyberattack, claiming that discussing details of the incident would be “detrimental” to the ongoing investigation. Thompson said that the postal service continues to experience disruption to its international export services following the cyberattack. Royal Mail has yet to confirm when this disruption is likely to end — compounded by existing backlogs and delays that have arisen from strike action — but Thompson said a “workaround” should be available soon. “For export parcels and letters through our postal services… we are no longer able to provide that service,” he said. “The team have been working on workarounds so that we can get the service up and running again.” Thompson added that the Royal Mail will have “more news to share” soon. There remains plenty of unanswered questions about the Royal Mail’s cyberattack, such as the nature of the incident and who is responsible. Some media reports have claimed that Royal Mail was the target of that compromised machines used to print customs labels for parcels sent to overseas destinations. A public-facing representative for , a ransomware group accused of launching the attack on the postal service, initially denied involvement, and pointed blame to other hackers using the gang’s leaked ransomware builder software. Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at Emsisoft, from the LockBit representative seemingly admitting that LockBit affiliates were responsible for the attack. TechCrunch has yet to verify LockBit’s involvement, and Royal Mail has not been listed on the gang’s dark web leak site. When reached by email, Royal Mail spokesperson Mark Street declined to comment.

Now that it’s thoroughly spoiled, here’s Apple’s M2 MacBook Pro ‘event’ video

Brian Heater

One of two things likely happened here. Either Apple made a proper video before deciding this wasn’t enough to justify a proper “event,” or this is just how the company is going to treat smaller announcements, going forward. Given the number of Apple rumors swirling around at the moment, it also seems entirely plausible that ongoing supply chain constraints foiled plans for something larger — or, looking at how hardware announcements slowed in the past year, maybe every one becomes bigger. Whatever the cause, in addition to the standard newsroom drop, the company simultaneously dropped a sub-20-minute announcement video titled, “Meet the new MacBook Pro and Mac mini.” If you’re not a fan of reading releases, spec sheets or news reports (whom among us is?), you can watch a bunch of Apple execs and product managers discuss the announcements in a typically well-produced video. No clue what’s happening here. Apple The big news this morning is: Go ahead, watch it below. It’s Tuesday morning on a shortened holiday week here in the U.S. No one thought you were going to get any work done regardless.

HBO Max subscribers can now livestream US national soccer games

Lauren Forristal

HBO Max makes history tonight with its first-ever domestic live sporting event. Starting at 10 p.m. ET, U.S. subscribers can watch the U.S. Women’s Soccer National Team take on the New Zealand team, the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup co-host. The streamer will also air the follow-up match between the U.S. and New Zealand on January 20. Along with live coverage of the matches, HBO Max will also give subscribers pre-game and post-game coverage, as well as replays. The pre-game show begins at 9:30 p.m. ET. It’s also important to note that both HBO Max subscription tiers aren’t including any ads, a Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson told TechCrunch. Last week, the company its lineup of sports analysts, which includes National Soccer Hall of Famers Julie Foudy, DaMarcus Beasley and Shannon Boxx, along with former U.S. Men’s National Team player Kyle Martino. Soccer commentator Luke Wileman will provide play-by-play alongside Foudy. Melissa Ortiz, a former pro soccer player, will report live from Wellington, New Zealand. U.S. Soccer Federation/HBO Max As previously , the U.S. Soccer Federation and Turner Sports, a division of WarnerMedia, closed an eight-year multimedia rights agreement, making TNT and HBO Max the exclusive English-language home to more than 20 Women’s and Men’s National Team matches every year. The matches will all be simulcast on HBO Max, whereas TNT will broadcast several matches. The deal doesn’t include the Women’s World Cup matches in 2023, which will be broadcast by However, it does include World Cup qualifiers, friendlies and competitions. HBO Max will debut the U.S. Men’s National Team on January 25, when it livestreams the U.S. versus Serbia game. The team will play against Colombia on January 28, which will be broadcast by TNT. Winning streaming rights to U.S. soccer is a big deal for the company. The streamer isn’t known for sports, so a domestic live sports offering will help HBO Max better compete with , such as Paramount+, Peacock, and . HBO Max is also working on a live hockey offering, thanks to a with the National Hockey League (NHL). Last year, Turner Sports closed the deal, giving TBS and TNT the rights to broadcast regular-season games as well as Stanley Cup Playoff and Stanley Cup Final games. HBO Max subscribers in have access to live UEFA Champions League matches.

Apple unveils M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, featuring new Neural Engine and more

Kyle Wiggers

Apple this morning powered by the latest generation of its in-house, custom-designed PC chipsets. The chipsets — the M2 Pro and M2 Max — feature a more powerful CPU and GPU, up to 96 GB of unified memory and what Apple claims is “industry-leading” power efficiency. Apple Built using a second-generation 5-nanometer process technology, the M2 Pro consists of 40 billion transistors — nearly 20% more than M1 Pro and double the amount in M2 — 200 GB of unified memory bandwidth (twice that of M2) and up to 32 GB of low-latency unified memory. The 10- or 12-core CPU has up to eight high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores, resulting in multithreaded CPU performance that’s reportedly up to 20% faster than the 10-core CPU in M1 Pro, and can be configured with up to 19 GPU cores — three more than the M1 Pro — with a larger L2 cache. Apple claims that compiling in Xcode is up to 2.5x faster using the M2 Pro than on the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro, while graphics speeds are up to 30% faster than the M1 Pro. Apple The M2 Max, the more powerful of the two chipsets, has 67 billion transistors — 10 billion more than M1 Max and more than 3x that of M2 — and 400 GB of unified memory bandwidth, which supports up to 96 GB of fast unified memory. Otherwise, it has the same 12-core CPU as M2 Pro, paired with a larger L2 cache and a GPU packing up to 38 cores. Graphics speeds climb up to 30% faster than M1 Max, Apple says. And in terms of battery life, the company claims the M2 Max can deliver up to 22 hours — the longest battery life ever in a Mac. Both the M2 Pro and M2 Max include Apple’s next-generation Secure Enclave, a hardware-based key manager that’s isolated from the main processor to provide an extra layer of security, and Apple’s latest 16-core Neural Engine, capable of 15.8 trillion operations per second and up to 40% faster than the previous generation. The Neural Engine accelerates machine learning tasks such as video analysis, voice recognition, image processing and more, including enhancing camera image quality. But the chipsets differ on the media processing side. The M2 Pro has a media engine, including hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC and ProRes video encode and decode, while the M2 Max features two video encode engines and two ProRes engines, bringing up to 2x faster video encoding than M2 Pro, according to Apple.

Beaconstac lands $25M investment for its QR code management platform

Kyle Wiggers

QR code tech, which exploded during the pandemic as businesses searched for hygienic alternatives to physical touchpoints, continues to grow in popularity, particularly across sectors such as restaurants and outlet retail. to Insider Intelligence, more than 99.5 million smartphone users will scan a QR code by 2025, up from 83.4 million in 2022. There’s a potential downside — some argue QR codes the need to hire employees who collect payments and service customers — but it seems clear that the tech, for better or worse, isn’t going anywhere. That’s benefited startups like , which works with companies including United Airlines, Amazon and Deloitte, to create end-customer QR code experiences. In a sign of just how rosy business has been, Beaconstac today announced that it closed a $25 million Series A funding round led by Telescope Partners with participation from Accel. Co-founder and CEO Sharat Potharaju says that the new capital will be put toward expanding the startup’s team and product R&D. Beaconstac “We’ve seen tremendous growth since the beginning of the pandemic because our QR code technology offers businesses an efficient, user-friendly solution for creating contactless experiences,” Potharaju told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We see more businesses continuing to adopt this technology because it streamlines the customer experience. The pandemic has only amplified the existing need to connect the physical and digital worlds better.” Potharaju co-founded Beaconstac in 2019 alongside Ravi Maddimsetty. Potharaju is an investment banker by trade, having held posts at Merrill Lynch and Fieldstone Private Capital Group. Maddimsetty, a software engineer, was an IT associate at Morgan Stanley and contributed to open source Linux projects, including the desktop environment. With Beaconstac, Potharaju and Maddimsetty sought to ride the QR code adoption wave, building a platform that allows businesses to create, manage and track QR codes across different physical touchpoints. Using Beaconstac, companies can modify aspects of branded QR codes including the shape, captions and background colors to match their design languages. Beaconstac also lets companies create QR codes that track engagement, like a customer’s location at the time of a scan. While not a feature every patron is likely to be comfortable with, Potharaju argues that it’s helping companies acquire first-party data at a time when more platforms ( ) are becoming averse to tracking. (Whether you agree with Potharaju depends which side of the privacy debate you fall on, of course.) “Beaconstac’s platform does not collect any personally identifiable information when a QR code is scanned — we are compliant with GDPR regulations around security and privacy,” Potharaju said. “Consumers can always request data deletion under GDPR rules.” While Beaconstac competes with vendors, including Flowcode and Bit.ly, the company claims to have over 20,000 customers — double the figure from last year. Potharaju declined to share revenue figures, but said that Beaconstac — which has offces in the U.S. and India — plans to double its 75-person workforce sometime this year. “In 2019, my co-founder and I were asking the question, ‘Our phones are great at getting us online, but why aren’t they better at connecting us with the physical world?,'” Potharaju said. “Beaconstac [is] helping companies … build digital cohorts based on interactions in the physical world.”

Apple’s M2 Mac Mini arrives January 24, starting at $599

Brian Heater

Apple just dropped a refresh to the Mac Mini. The new version of the compact desktop arrives with a choice of last year’s M2 chip, or the freshly arrived . The system received a , with the arrival of the first M1 chip. In his review, Matt called the system a “no-compromise, low-cost Mac.” Apple Apple says the new model compares thusly to its predecessor: The system — full name “Mac Mini with M2” — features an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU, coupled with up to 24 GB of RAM 8 TB of storage. A fully specked-out M2 Pro system will run just over $4,099, without the display. Even so, it’s clear the company is positioning this as the low-cost alternative to its high-end Mac Studio desktop (which still sports the M1 Max or Ultra and starts at $2,000). In any case, it’s been a while since Apple offered up this many desktop options. Likely the company will continue to push the Studio for “serious” pros — particularly if/when the M2 models arrive later in the year. In the meanwhile, however, this thing seems plenty capable on the video front, with the ability to “simultaneously play up to two streams of 8K ProRes 422 video at 30 fps, or up to 12 streams of 4K ProRes 422 video at 30 fps.” Apple You get four Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports, with support for an 8K display. There are also two USB-A ports, plus an HDMI, Ethernet and a headphone jack. The system also supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. “With incredible capabilities and a wide array of connectivity in its compact design, Mac mini is used in so many places, in so many different ways. Today, we’re excited to take it even further with M2 and M2 Pro,” SVP Greg Joswiak says in a release. “Bringing even more performance and a lower starting price, Mac mini with M2 is a tremendous value.” The new Mac Mini starts at $599 ($100 less than its predecessor) and is available to pre-order today. Shipping starts in a week, on January 24.

DeepL takes aim at Grammarly with the launch of Write, to clean up your prose

Ingrid Lunden

On the heels of raising a , DeepL is taking the wraps off a new language product, the first extension for a startup that made its name from its popular AI-based translation tools. is a new tool that fixes your writing — catching grammar and punctuation mistakes, offering suggestions for clarity and more creative phrasing and (soon) giving you the option to change your tone. Write is based on the same neural network that powers DeepL’s translator, and significantly, it is another step ahead in how artificial intelligence technologies, specifically those in natural language processing, are being used to alter how humans are communicating with each other, a big theme at the moment. The functionality of Write may sound a little familiar to you. That’s because DeepL’s new service is going head to head with a popular product already on the market: Grammarly is currently leaned on by more than 30 million daily active users and some 50,000 businesses and teams. If you don’t use Grammarly, chances are that you at least know about it — its YouTube ads are (in)famously ubiquitous. And at last count, despite much nay-saying from VCs about the pitfalls of features versus platforms, Grammarly, as of 2021, saw a huge spike in its valuation, from to a . DeepL’s mantra is to embrace competition and use it as a motivator to do things better. In its primary (and before today, sole) product, the company has long competed against two of the biggest tech companies in the world, Microsoft and Google, which both offer real-time translators for individuals and as a service used by third parties. (And that’s before considering the myriad other options out there for real-time translation.) “We are always in race mode,” CEO and founder Jarek Kutylowski said of its flagship translation service. “We are accustomed to big adversaries, and part of our culture is to push forward through that.” Indeed, for many, DeepL’s neural network-based translator , capturing certain nuances and meanings that rivals have missed. That approach, it seems, is now the template for how DeepL will tackle new product frontiers, starting first with Write. Launching initially in English and German and as a monolinguistic tool (you put in English writing and get English results), the plan is to see how Write is used across these two languages first, both to improve them and to figure out how to develop Write, whether that means new features or new languages. As with its basic translation tools, you can use Write free without needing to register (as you do with Grammarly to use its free tools). Options, it seems, are at the crux of the service: In addition to snagging basic grammatical and punctuation errors, the focus will be on generating choices for users covering style, tone, phrasing and diction, rather than re-writing everything that’s entered into Write. In doing that, you might ask if Write is showing its limitations, or if its creators are making a conscious choice of where AI can help people do their best work. That’s a debate that definitely has opened up with the release of OpenAI’s GPT service, which takes a basic brief and writes everything for you based on that. My initial test-drive of Write was a mixed bag, and reveals that there is still room for learning and improvement. Write, ironcially, wasn’t very good (yet?) at guessing what I meant below when I wrote “right” instead of “write.” under a license. But it did a good enough job of fixing my misuse of good. under a license. Of all the directions that an AI-based translation startup could choose to go for its next product, Kutylowski told me that DeepL decided to work on Write because of patterns that it started to notice in how its translation product was being used (or misused, as the case is here). “People were misusing the translator to write texts in first in a different language from English, and then plugging them back into English assuming that they cold get the AI to write a better original version,” he said. The team decided to build Write to essentially improve that and cut out the translation middle step, which was skewing the results anyway. The “AI writing companion,” as Kutylowski describes it, is aimed both at native speakers but perhaps even more at people who write passably if slightly awkwardly in a second language and are hoping to give their words that extra native shine. “The idea is we could help a student improve a grade by one,” in a manner of speaking, he added. The next level of development, he said, will be to focus on the elusive qualities of tone, “not content but phrasing, creative input,” he said — but critically doing so while continuing to anchor that content in a person’s own words and ideas, not those generated by the AI from scratch.

Amberflo wants to transform SaaS pricing with metered usage

Ron Miller

Over the years, software pricing has shifted from rigid seat licenses for on-prem legacy software to subscriptions with tiered pricing, as software shifted to the cloud in the early part of this century. The latter helped transform the way we think about pricing and revenue. founder and CEO Puneet Gupta thinks there is a better way to think about software pricing, not based on seats or subscription tiers, but actual usage. That requires a pricing infrastructure to meter all of the different interactions with the product. Gupta started Amberflo to build that tooling to put granular metered pricing within reach of any company. Today, the company announced a couple of milestones. For starters, it has raised a total of $20 million, including a previously unannounced $5 million seed round and a new $15 million Series A. In addition, the company is making the Amberflo platform generally available today. Gupta saw the metering idea in action when he worked at AWS from 2011-2014, and the idea stuck with him that it was an approach that many companies could benefit from. “I had a chance to build these services [when I was at AWS], and I saw this internal shared services thing called metering. Whenever we built a service, we had to connect to the metering stack. That’s where I became aware, and for me, it was an eye opener,” he told TechCrunch. In 2020, Gupta started Amberflo to build a metering stack as a service that any customer could tap into. He thinks it should be particularly attractive for product-led growth (PLG) companies. “If you are one of those PLG companies, we are providing you with a cloud native, next-generation platform that gives you the tools to be effective within that. And then specifically, the tool allows you to launch your own usage-based pricing model,” he said. While we are used to seeing companies meter software to understand things like application performance, page loads or software anomalies, this is specifically designed to measure resource usage. With this kind of metering, companies can then track usage at a granular level down to every transaction, API call or resource used. Gupta thinks this could transform the way we think about pricing because it gives you the data on which to base your pricing in a very precise way with documentation to back it up. It also gives you the information on exactly how many people are using the software, something that he says you don’t typically see in subscription pricing because there’s little motivation to know the usage once you sell a certain number of licenses. “In the subscription world, nobody tracks usage. Companies are actually disincentivized to track usage. If I’ve signed you up for 100 users, and you paid me for the 100 users upfront for the first 12 months, why would I track it and tell you that only 36 people have been using it for the first three months into the product? I’m not going to do that,” he said. He says usage pricing also gives companies a way to continue working with customers who might otherwise churn. As Gupta points out, in the subscription world there is the binary of choice of being subscribed or unsubscribing, whereas with usage-based pricing, the customer could dial back usage instead of giving up the product altogether, and he sees that as a big advantage, especially in times like these where CIOs are looking for non-essential products to cut. The startup currently has a dozen employees, but plans to quadruple in size in the next year with the new funding helping to fuel that growth. As he adds employees to the company, he is trying to build a diverse workplace, but admits it’s challenging. “It is something we think about, and we pay attention to, but to be honest with you, we don’t have that kind of leverage and luxury right now to sort of institutionalize it as a matter of process,” he said. He added that the company is bringing in its first recruiter this week, which could help, and one of its investors, Norwest Venture Partners, has talked to him about building diversity as a core value, and he plans to take it seriously as the company grows. The $5 million seed was led by Homebrew, while the $15 million Series A was led by Norwest Venture Partners. Operator Collective also participated.

DoorDash expands Starbucks partnership with plans to reach all US states by March

Sarah Perez

Starbucks will become available for delivery via DoorDash across all 50 U.S. states by March, in an expansion of a partnership with the delivery service announced last year. In September, Starbucks and DoorDash first a partnership that would allow customers to order Starbucks items for delivery from their local stores using the DoorDash app. The companies initially tested delivery in select cities, including Atlanta, Sacramento and Houston. Later, the pilot expanded to other cities, including Seattle, Portland and New York. Today, DoorDash announced the Starbucks delivery service will now arrive in more markets, including Northern California, Texas, Georgia, Florida and others ahead of the nationwide launch. The move signals Starbucks is finding traction with delivery orders, as DoorDash is not its first delivery partner. Ahead of the DoorDash partnership, Starbucks leveraged Uber Eats for delivery services. The companies began working together in 2018 with a Miami pilot before . By partnering with another delivery provider, the coffee chain is making its products accessible to a wider audience, as not everyone prefers to use Uber Eats as their main delivery app. It could also help the chain find a way to survive a shift to remote work, which reduced the in-person orders from commuters. “As customer behaviors evolve, we continue to innovate the Starbucks Experience to connect with them through meaningful and valuable digital experiences,” said Brooke O’Berry, Starbucks senior vice president of digital experiences, in a . “Our partnership with DoorDash allows us to provide our customers with another convenient way to enjoy Starbucks wherever they are. Delivery continues to be a significant growth opportunity for Starbucks, and we’re excited to reach more customers by partnering with DoorDash, a company known for their best-in-class service,” O’Berry added. To order Starbucks for delivery, customers won’t use the Starbucks app itself as they would for a mobile pick-up order. Instead, they’ll use the DoorDash app on iOS or Android, just as if they were ordering from a local restaurant. The app will allow customers to customize their drinks just as they would at Starbucks itself, including being able to choose the amount of syrup, type of milk and espresso roasts. Starbucks says around 95% of its core menu items will be available through DoorDash. Of course, ordering yourself a coffee for delivery may not make sense because of the delivery and service fees involved, in addition to the tip. But for customers with a DoorDash membership, the delivery fees are waived. Plus, the service could be a more useful way to handle group orders, like those for staff in a workplace, instead of sending out a person to pick up the coffee orders. “Our partnership with Starbucks connects even more neighborhoods across the United States with their favorite beverages and bites,” said Sanjay Kotte, head of strategic partnerships at DoorDash, in an announcement. “When you combine the quality of Starbucks handcrafted beverages and food with the logistics power and geographic scale of DoorDash, the result is extraordinary for coffee lovers nationwide,” Kotte said. In recent months, DoorDash has been working to develop its platform to become more than just a way to order meals from local restaurants. Though a wound down last summer, the company has since launched new features, like a way for for drop-off at UPS, FedEx or USPS locations. It also introduced a way to combine orders, or ” by allowing customers to order food and alcohol from different locations on one order. However, like other tech companies, DoorDash has been hit by the economic downturn, resulting in in November as a cost-cutting measure. The company said it had not been “as rigorous as we should have been” in managing its team growth. DoorDash, similar to many e-commerce players, had grown significantly during the pandemic as customers stayed home and ordered in. But those trends reversed as lockdowns ended and restaurants opened back up for business. Still, the market for food delivery remained ripe, even after the pandemic impacts lessened. Last year, for example, to offer restaurant delivery through Grubhub+ to Prime customers. This year, however, customers are cutting expenses, including ordering food delivery. The Wall Street Journal orders on apps like DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub were down 5% year-over-year in October and November — the slowest two-month growth since the pandemic. DoorDash’s stock popped on the news of the Starbucks partnership expansion, and is now up 2% in today’s trading.

AI21 Labs intros an AI writing assistant that cites its sources

Kyle Wiggers

, the AI that can write poems, emails, spreadsheet formulas and more, has attracted a lot of negative publicity lately. from sharing content generated by ChatGPT, saying that the AI made it too easy for users to flood the site with spammy answers. Then, New York City public schools prohibited students and teachers from ChatGPT on school-owned devices over fears of cheating and misinformation. That’s perhaps why , an Israeli startup developing text-generating AI systems along the lines of ChatGPT, tried a different tack with its newly released assistive writing tool, Wordtune Spices. A part of AI21’s expanding suite of generative AI, Wordtune Spices doesn’t compose emails and essays like ChatGPT. Instead, it suggests options that change the voice and style of already written sentences, also offering up statistics from web-based sources to “strengthen arguments.” “We see new amazing AI capabilities introduced on a weekly basis — [AI systems] that generate images, audio and text in a convincing human-seeming manner,” Ori Goshen, the co-CEO and co-founder of AI21 Labs, told TechCrunch via email. “With all the excitement, for these systems to become useful, they need to be robust, reliable and explainable.” To that end, Wordtune Spices cites its work for each tidbit of information it profers, providing users with links back to the original sources. That’s one better than ChatGPT, which doesn’t always — or correctly — name sources, and even sometimes points to sources that . AI21 says it developed “grounding and attribution” algorithms to search for relevant sources to base Wordtune Spices’ responses on and present the source links alongside info. The tool can help write a thesis statement and main ideas, including explanations and counterarguments, as well as provide analogies and creative expressions like jokes and quotes. AI21 Labs Users can choose from different cues (e.g. “legal,” “health care”) to prompt Wordtune Spices to suggest rewrites appropriate for particular professional documents. But Goshen says that Spices was designed to address a wide array of use cases, from writing essays and working on blog posts to drafting financial reports. “Spices isn’t a tool that generates a full essay with one click, because we don’t think this helps create strong writers,” Goshen said. “Instead, we equip the user with a toolbox of language and storytelling tools for them to craft their text to perfection by making decisions on their own from a host of possibilities.” But how well does Wordtune Spices work in practice, and is it better than the other AI-powered assistive writing tools out there? Writer is among those tools — it employs an AI engine that evaluates key metrics such as plagiarism, sentence complexity, formality and active voice usage. Grammarly offers style and tone suggestions. So does Ginger, ProWritingAid and Slick Write. This reporter wasn’t able to test Spices prior to its release due to technical issues on AI21’s end. But from a brief demo video, the rewriting feature appeared to work well enough, minus the occasional grammatical error. To follow the sentence “It’s no secret that artificial intelligence tools have become one of the latest trends in content writing, blogging and copywriting as a whole,” Spices suggested “Some people, like content writers, may be scared of AI, but it can help you create high-quality content with a minimum of effort [sic].” Spices cited an article from The New York Times in suggesting the sentence, but Goshen admits that there might be cases where the tool “[misses] information that should have been validated.” He also stressed that, while there are filters and “other measures” in place to try to prevent Spices from outputting toxic or biased text — a problem for text-generating tools like ChatGPT — the model might “make mistakes” all the same. “We have been working on smart filters and other measures … We also tried to preemptively block any trolling attempts in that regard,” Goshen added. “That being said, Spices isn’t bulletproof, especially because it’s hard to train a [system] to make sensitive decisions that sometimes even humans struggle with.” Goshen says that AI21 plans to put “a lot of focus” on moderation and “make it more robust” as Spices evolves. But for AI-curious writers holding out for the perfect system, Spices probably isn’t it — even if it works roughly as advertised.

CloseFactor raises $15.2M to automate repetitive sales processes

Kyle Wiggers

Several years ago, co-founders Leena Joshi, Ben Cheung and Erik Buchanan experienced frustration with the amount of manual work they were putting into collecting information about sales and marketing accounts. The tools in the market were focused solely on the collection of information, they say, instead of curating what was actually relevant, actionable and up to date. Cheung and Buchanan — drawing on their AI and machine learning expertise — saw the potential to boost sales and marketing productivity by applying AI algorithms to workflows. Their work, together with Joshi’s, spawned , a platform that aims to harvest actionable information about companies from disparate sources. “Built to harness the vast potential in automating manual research by employing machine learning techniques at scale, CloseFactor helps business-to-business sales and marketing teams identify the right target accounts to go after — including the right people at those accounts — so go-to-market teams have the blueprint to execute their strategy and hit their goals,” Joshi said. “Our goal is to become the go-to-marketing operating system for revenue teams.” Prior to co-launching CloseFactor in 2019, Joshi, Cheung and Buchanan had long been in the business of building business-to-business technologies. Joshi spent several years in senior roles at VMware, Splunk and Redis Labs, while Cheung sold his first startup, virtual assistant platform Genee, to Microsoft for an undisclosed amount. Buchanan also held a role at Microsoft before joining Google and then moving to LinkedIn as head of machine learning for LinkedIn Talent Solutions. CloseFactor identifies different accounts by analyzing attributes across closed won deals (deals in the final stage of the sales cycle), sales strategies and CloseFactor’s own data to identify an ideal customer profile and how many accounts fit that definition. On top of that, CloseFactor segments accounts by those readiest to buy by curating insights, including hiring trends and new projects or initiatives a target business is undergoing. CloseFactor also gives a bird’s-eye view of all accounts, stack-ranked by those readiest to buy. “CloseFactor automates account research, giving you a deep dive into every one of your accounts — including current or future projects and initiatives, as well as the decision-makers and influencers you should be reaching out to,” Joshi said. “With CloseFactor, you can now engage the right buyers with the right message at the right time. No existing tools provide this type of automation or visibility at scale.” CloseFactor, whose customers include LaunchDarkly, Chronosphere, Sourcegraph and Zuora, competes both with intent data providers and contact databases like ZoomInfo. But the platform’s momentum evidently has investors impressed. Vertex Ventures led a $15.2 million Series A round in CloseFactor, with participation from Sequoia, bringing the startup’s total raised to $20.5 million. Joshi said that the recent infusion will be put toward scaling up CloseFactor’s product development efforts and creating a go-to-market team, as well as building several new workflow integrations. “We’ve already grown 5,411% since our first revenue quarter and plan to continue to focus on solving problems for our customers,” she said. “The biggest competitor we face in deals today is the status quo. The way revenue teams define their ideal customer profile and target market is broken, leading to massive inefficiencies in their sales and marketing execution.” Palo Alto, California-based CloseFactor currently has 20 employees and plans to hire this year.

Cumul.io, a low-code embedded analytics platform for SaaS companies, raises $10.8M

Paul Sawers

, the company behind a low-code business intelligence (BI) analytics platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, has raised €10 million ($10.8 million) in a Series A round of funding. Founded out of Belgium in 2015, Cumul.io works in a similar space to well-established BI incumbents such as Tableau and Looker, but sets itself apart with a focus on bringing embedded analytics to SaaS applications specifically. Embedded analytics, for the uninitiated, is where companies offer data reporting and visualizations directly inside their software, rather than having to use a separate, standalone BI application — this brings convenience and simplicity to growing companies that would rather focus their resources on their core competencies. “More and more users of SaaS products or software platforms expect insights and data to be made available directly inside their core apps, as a native component,” Cumul.io CEO and co-founder Karel Callens explained to TechCrunch. “SaaS companies are looking for solutions that can be rolled out and marketed quickly, are easy to use and can be scaled and adapted with minimal effort to keep costs low.” With Cumul.io, its customers — which include venture-backed SaaS scale-ups — can integrate white-labeled analytics and dashboards into their software by connecting just about any data source, drag-and-drop specific features to customize their dashboards and then copy-paste a snippet of code into their application to serve thousands of end-users. Cumul.io in action. : Cumul.io While Cumul.io is certainly comparable to the likes of Looker and Tableau in terms of the sphere in which it operates, Callens reckons its most direct competitor is actually engineering teams that might have a general aversion to third-party embedded analytics providers, choosing to stitch their own solution together instead. “Many product and engineering teams still have the misconception that using an embedded analytics vendor will limit their flexibility, compared to building it out on their own,” Callens added. “There’s still a lot of education involved on how powerful and flexible low-code tools nowadays can be.” Prior to now, Cumul.io had raised around €3.1 million ($3.4 million) in funding, and with its fresh cash injection the company said that it plans to bolster its headcount across its offices in Leuven and Genk in Belgium, as well as its New York hub. Indeed, the company said that more than a third of its revenue already emanates from the North American market. Cumul.io’s Series A round was led by France-based early-stage VC firm , with participation from Axeleo Capital, LRM and SmartFin.

US tech giants say Indian panel’s recommended competition act ‘absolutist and regressive’

Manish Singh

An influential industry group that represents Google, Meta and Amazon, among other tech firms, has expressed concerns about the digital competition law recommended by an Indian parliamentary panel that seeks to regulate their alleged anticompetitive practices, calling the proposal “absolutist and regressive” in nature in the latest escalation of tension between U.S. tech giants and New Delhi. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance recommended last month that the government enact a digital competition act to regulate anticompetitive business practices by Big Tech companies on its platforms, prohibiting them from preferentially promoting their in-house brands or not supporting third-party systems. The competition act, the panel said, “will be a boon not only for our country and its nascent startup economy but also for the entire world.” Industry group Asia Internet Coalition said in a statement that the proposed digital competition law may hurt digital innovation in India and could impact the investments by businesses in India and have “disproportionate costs” to consumers in the South Asian market. “The report put forward by the committee is prescriptive, absolutist and regressive in nature,” it added. The Indian panel said last month that its recommendation was systemically important to counter monopoly and warned that tech giants “must not favour its own offers over the offers of its competitors” when acting as mediators to supply and sales markets. The parliamentary panel’s recommendation cites the EU’s proposed Digital Markets Act and the U.S.’s American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Market Act. The industry group AIC said that both AICOA and OAMA have “failed to attain bipartisan support due to substantive disagreements and concerns for unintended consequences on consumers, growth, and innovation. In sum, there is no consensus that a DMA-style ex ante legislation is the way forward for addressing potential competition concerns in the digital space,” it said in the statement. India is the world’s second largest internet market and has in the past decade attracted more than $75 billion in investment from firms including Google, Meta and Amazon, and investment shops Sequoia, Lightspeed, SoftBank and Tiger Global. New Delhi has enforced and proposed a number of policy changes in the past three years to bring more accountability and fairness in how the tech firms operate in the country in moves that have rattled many U.S. giants. New Delhi is entering 2023 with several more such policy changes, including a telecom law that would . “We urge the government to first observe whether these overseas regulatory developments bring about benefits that outweigh costs. Specifically, it is important to note that the government has recently proposed two significant bills, i.e the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill and the Competition Amendment Bill (CAB), both of which seek to protect consumers, preserve competition and promote tech innovation, with a special focus on digital markets,” said Asia Internet Coalition. “Accordingly, it is critical to first understand the effects of these two bills on the digital ecosystem before introducing any new legislative proposals.” Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said last month that India was going through an important period of time as it drafts several key regulations and asserted that it .

Google is piloting its own ‘soundbox’ in India for merchants to get audio-based payment alerts

Ivan Mehta

Soundboxes — hardware used by merchants that emits sounds every time a mobile payment is made — have taken off in India, where point of sale activity can get busy and voice alerts from the soundbox help alert multitasking shopkeepers and assistants to a transaction going through. Now, to keep pushing ahead to build out its own payments business in the world’s second-largest internet market, Google is getting in on the act. The internet giant, which is currently one of the mobile transaction leaders in India with Google Pay, is piloting a soundbox of its own in the country to alert sellers of confirmations for UPI payments — a mobile payment standard developed and now ubiquitous in India for instant payments and transfers between banks, or two mobile users, or a customer and a merchant. With UPI payments, providers typically do not take any cut on UPI transactions, so soundboxes have emerged not just as a convenience for merchants, but as a monetizing tool for payments providers, too. Sources tell us that Google has started distributing its white-labeled speakers — branded Soundpod by Google Pay — in a few markets across North India, including New Delhi, working initially with a limited group of shopkeepers. Google’s soundboxes come with a QR code on the front — linked to the business owner’s bank-registered phone number — which can be used to make any UPI-based payment. These Soundpods are being built by , TechCrunch has learned. The hardware features a built-in speaker that announces payment confirmations in different languages. Like its competitors’ soundboxes, Google’s device also includes a small LCD panel that shows the payment amount, battery and network status and manual controls. The soundbox is accompanied by a QR code of a merchant linked with their Google Pay for business account. Users can use any UPI-based app to make a payment by scanning the code. Typically, these soundboxes don’t support NFC payment as tap-and-pay is not a popular method for transactions in India. Plus, a lot of low-end smartphones don’t have integrated NFC hardware. People familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that Google is distributing the speakers to select merchants without any additional cost. In some instances, Google Pay representatives have given merchants a time frame of some days to receive and set up the speakers at their registered location. Google’s move into this piece of hardware is somewhat overdue. The search giant has been slogging it out in India’s crowded payments landscape for some time now, and while a soundbox may sound novel to people outside of India, in the country it has quickly become tablestakes in the mobile payments game. Google Pay competes directly with ,  and — all of which have already launched their own branded soundboxes with support for multiple languages. A Paytm soundbox with a built-in speaker to give voice alerts about payment confirmations. Paytm That Google has had no presence on the soundbox front speaks (no pun intended) to how it has struggled to build fast enough to keep up with its rivals, and arguably to meet consumer demands in a timely way, too. Roadside sellers, small merchants and hawkers have started using payment soundboxes to get audio confirmation of customer payments. And while the Google Pay for Business app already has an audio notification function, and Google also lets a business add an agent number so the agent can receive a confirmation on their phone, these features might not be helpful for a shop with multiple attendants and a loud environment, or where the cashier is not using a smartphone or tablet to facilitate transactions. In this scenario, a device that “announces” payments loudly can be useful. Soundboxes also serve other roles to promote more and faster transactions for merchants. They typically support different languages — critical for a multilingual country like India — offer multi-day battery life and a quick daily transaction summary. A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story, but during a Google India event in December when we asked Sharath Bulusu, the director of product management for Google Pay at Google, about the development, he did not deny the effort and replied that the company piloted “all sorts of things.” “If the person doesn’t have a smartphone, and they’re running a small business, the chances [are] that they will actually pay for a speaker product,” he said. “You can look up publicly available prices that Paytm has been using… I think the chances are low. So, that is not the way to solve it,” he said when asked whether Google targets the soundbox merchants who don’t have smartphones. “But do we want to solve for that user? Yes,” he added. Fintech startups take a low upfront fee and a monthly rental from merchants using their soundbox solutions. However, they also sometimes give the device away for free to many sellers to get them onboard. Paytm charges an average rental of $1.53 (125 Indian rupees) per month, while PhonePe charges $0.60 (49 Indian rupees) per month. The charges are relative to the merchant size and promotional schemes offered by agents. According to from the UPI-umbrella organization National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI transactions have seen significant growth, reaching 7.82 billion in December with a value of $157 billion. This represents a nearly 100% increase in transaction volume and a 55% increase in transaction value compared to December 2021. But despite this growth, companies facilitating UPI payments do not have a direct means of monetizing these transactions as they do not require merchants to pay a merchant discount rate or a small transaction fee. Fintech companies have to change this model. Last week, the government announced to promote UPI transactions and its indigenous RuPay cards. However, the companies still have no direct avenue to generate revenues from UPI transactions. As UPI has so far been a no-fee payments network, fintech players in this market offering compatible apps have to rely on other sources of revenue, such as lending and speaker rentals. In 2021, Google Pay started monetizing its service through user data, it in India. Paytm was the first in the race to introduce soundboxes, which it did in 2020. That early mover status has been to its advantage so far: It is now a leader in the soundbox category, with the company claiming to have to date. Earlier this month, the Indian payment company claimed it had distributed 1 million soundboxes each in its last two quarters. Last September, Paytm said that its soundbox devices in FY 2022. A note from brokerage firm CSLA published last November noted that soundbox . Both Walmart-owned PhonePe and BharatPe launched their soundboxes last year. Last November, PhonePe said it deployed across the country. In addition to soundboxes, companies such as Google and Paytm provide businesses with QR code stickers and banners for easy UPI payments. However, there has been intense competition in the UPI market, as companies aim to reach the masses for small-ticket transactions, even without direct revenue generation. This is because the large user base can later be converted to customers for other products and services. Per the National Payments Corporation of India, PhonePe and Google Pay nearly 85% of the total U1PI market in terms of transactions and own more than 81% of the total UPI transaction volume. The government had planned to limit their market domination and provide other participants an opportunity to gain some share by setting a threshold of 30% of total UPI transactions per month. However, this rule was recently . Many merchants are eager to adopt the soundboxes once they understand their features, but some choose to return them once companies begin charging a rental fee. That points also to the issue of transparency and whether providers are being clear with customers over how fees are charged. “I do not want it once I understood that the device is charging me over a hundred rupees a month just for speaking out payment updates,” said a chemist shop owner using a Paytm soundbox until last month. Companies including PhonePe have in response to this behavior. Google’s model of how it will differentiate the game to retain merchants is yet to be revealed.

Apple brings M2 Pro and Max chips to the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros

Brian Heater

There’s no big Apple event today (well, not in any , at least), but the company’s got quite a bit of news to share this morning. In addition to the new Mac Mini, a pair of new MacBook Pros just dropped, sporting souped-up M2 chips. The 14- and 16-inch versions of the company’s high-end laptops now ship with a choice of the . The sports an M2 Pro option (in addition to the default M2), but the new Pros are the first — and thus far only — system to get the M2 Max chip. The , meanwhile, stays put with the regular old M2 chip. The company says the top line system is “up to 6x faster” than the last generation of Intel systems (if you’re able to remember back that far). Apple Apple offers up the following speed comparisons: “MacBook Pro with Apple silicon has been a game changer, empowering pros to push the limits of their workflows while on the go and do things they never thought possible on a laptop,” Greg Joswiak says in a release. “Today the MacBook Pro gets even better. With faster performance, enhanced connectivity, and the longest battery life ever in a Mac, along with the best display in a laptop, there’s simply nothing else like it.” Apple The new 14-inch model starts at $2,000. Fully specking out with the 12-core core CPU/38-core GPU M2 Max, 96 GB of RAM and 8 TB of storage will run you $6,300 (no one said it was going to be cheap). The 16-inch, meanwhile, starts at $2,500. If you opt for the M2 Max, 96 GB of RAM and 8 TB of storage, you’ll get it at a cool $6,500. The battery life is now rated at 22 hours, which the company calls “the longest…ever in a Mac.” The screen is a Liquid Retina XDR, and new HDMI port can now support an 8K display up to 60Hz, or a 4K display up to 240Hz. There are three Thunderbolt 4 ports, along with MagSafe 3, a headphone jack and (sigh of relief) an SD Card slot I really could have used toting the new Air around CES the other week. Apple On the sustainability tip, a bunch of the material on-board is made of 100% recycled materials, including, “aluminum in the enclosure, rare earth elements in all magnets, tin in the solder of the main logic board, and gold in the plating of multiple printed circuit boards.” They also contain 35% more recycled plastic than their predecessors. Both models are available for preorder today and are set to start shipping in exactly a week, on January 24.

DoorDash can now return your packages for you

Aisha Malik

DoorDash is offering that lets users request a delivery person to pick up their prepaid package from their home and drop it off at a UPS, FedEx or USPS location. The company began as part of a small beta test and is now officially rolling it out. For a fee of $5 for standard users or $3 for DashPass members, users can get up to five packages picked up and dropped off in the same order. To get started, you need to select the Packages hub on the top of the DoorDash homepage and select the carrier that corresponds to the package you’re returning. Or, you can type “package” into your search bar. Then, you need to get your packages ready and attach a prepaid shipping label to them. If you have a shipping QR code, you can send the QR code directly to your delivery person in the DoorDash app. Your delivery person will send you a confirmation photo after dropping off your package at the designated store. DoorDash During the beta testing, DoorDash said it wanted to help users avoid the tedious task of taking a package to a post office in order to fulfill a return. The company noted that although returns are common, they can be time consuming, which is why it wanted to create a way to simplify the return process by leveraging its current local logistics infrastructure. DoorDash also said delivery people on its app are always looking for new ways to earn through the platform and that this new feature will give them an additional option to do so. DoorDash says it plans to continue to explore new ways to offer more convenience for its users while giving its delivery people additional chances to earn money on its platform. DoorDash isn’t the only delivery company that has worked to offer such a service. Back in 2015, Uber offered a  for customers to send return packages to post offices. The feature was called “Returns” and was powered by UberRush, which   in 2018. Similarly, a former on-demand shipping startup called Shyp offered a service that picked up packages and delivered them to their destination. The company   in 2018 after struggling to find a scalable model beyond its launching point in San Francisco.

Royal Mail warns of severe disruption after ‘cyber incident’

Carly Page

U.K. postal service Royal Mail has said it’s experiencing “severe service disruption” following a cyber incident. In a published Wednesday, Royal Mail said it was unable to dispatch export items, including letters and parcels to overseas destinations, as a result of the cyberattack. It added that international parcels that had already been dispatched “may be subject to delays.” “We have asked customers temporarily to stop submitting any export items into the network while we work hard to resolve the issue,” Royal Mail said. “Our import operations continue to perform a full service with some minor delays. Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this disruption and we will update customers as soon as we have more information.” Further details, such as the nature of the incident and who was responsible, remain unclear, and Royal Mail has yet to respond to TechCrunch’s questions. The company added in its statement that it is working with unnamed external experts to investigate the incident and has alerted the relevant authorities. A spokesperson for the National Cyber Security Center told TechCrunch it was aware of the incident and is working with Royal Mail to “fully understand the impact.” Royal Mail ships to 231 countries and territories worldwide. Royal Mail sent more than 150 million parcels overseas in the past year, according to . News of the incident comes as Royal Mail workers are holding a series of strikes in the U.K. in an effort for higher pay and better working conditions. It also comes weeks after the British postal service experienced a data breach that exposed the information of customers to other users, as reported by .

Vitruvian’s Trainer+ is an all-in-one home gym that actually lives up to its promises

Darrell Etherington

The connected home gym gear craze probably experienced its zenith during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with indicators like Peloton’s fortunes pointing to waning interest as people get back to using their gym memberships. But the category still has plenty of potential, especially if the gear in question can combine smarts with other key value propositions, including a small footprint that can fit into anyone’s home. offers that and more, nailing the tricky proposition of offering a comprehensive weight-training experience at home while keeping things small and simple. The Vitruvian Trainer+ is not cheap. At $2,990, it’s around the cost of six years of gym membership at the average rate paid in the U.S. per month, and that doesn’t include the Vitruvian All Access recurring subscription fee for access to advanced workout features, including guided sessions, which is a hefty $39 per month after the first 12 months, which are included free with the purchase of the machine. That the recurring sub is itself more expensive than the average American pays for their monthly gym membership is a very steep hill to climb, and clearly Vitruvian knows it since they don’t make it very easy to find that pricing on their website — even in the FAQ question that specifically asks how much the membership costs. You can opt to pay for a subscription that lasts the lifetime of your machine for a one-time fee of $990, which is definitely a better deal if you actually are using the machine consistently and plan to continue. Finally, you can always opt not to use the subscription features, which still gives you a very capable piece of workout hardware as long as you’re good at charting your own workout path. Speaking of the hardware, it’s actually easy to see why even with a base price of nearly $3K, Vitruvian needs to also ask a hefty recurring fee from its users: The Trainer+ is a fantastic piece of kit that no doubt incurred high development and production costs. What you get is a compact but solid platform with two clips that connect to external accessories — including various handles, a barbell and ropes — to an active resistance mechanism contained within. The platform itself is easy to tuck under a couch or table and measures just around 46 by 20 inches and weighs only 80 lb. Considering the range of workouts the Trainer+ offers, and the fact that it can provide anywhere up to 440 lb of resistance, the fact that it comes in such a relatively small package is incredibly impressive. The Trainer+ is super easy to set up and pair with your smartphone using a QR code on the machine itself, and the quick clipping system it uses to connect to handles and other accessories is incredibly smart and useful for rapidly switching between different items during a structured workout. Resistance is controlled by the app, and every time you start a workout, the machine requires three setup reps to establish your proper range of motion before you get into doing the exercises with actual weight. Once you do get into an actual exercise, there are three possible modes for each, including one that adds 1 kg (2.2 lb) with each clean rep, one that decreases weight over time, and a sustained mode where weight stays the same. Vitruvian On the surface, there’s not much to the Trainer+’s design: The flashiest thing about it is the customizable LED lighting that also offers some helpful visual cues about whether you’re completing reps properly or not. Otherwise, it looks like an overgrown Wii Balance board if you’re old enough to remember what that is, or basically just an elevated stand. The Trainer+’s top surface is made from a carbon-fiber composite, which is fine to use on its own with training shoes, but you can also opt to get the additional soft, tacky mat that is included in either the Entry or Pro level accessory kit (I received the $500 Pro kit in my sample package). As mentioned, the Trainer+ is around 80 lb, and it comes in one solid preassembled piece. Setup is therefore a breeze compared to just about any other home gym equipment, but you probably should get another person to help you move it, say, up and down stairs. For moving it around your space, there are wheels on the underside that come in contact with the ground when you tip one end up, making it easy to slide across floors for storing under a couch or desk. The key to Trainer+’s versatility is its two recessed “Quick Connection System” receptors, which are themselves permanently connected to retractable cables that tie into the device’s programmable active resistance system. The quick connectors allow the included handles and ankle straps to easily snap in, and they release via a simple collar push mechanism that won’t come loose in use but that is dead simple to change out between exercises. This replaces a much more cumbersome carabiner system on the Trainer+’s predecessor, and it’s a fantastic, intuitive upgrade. Another area where Trainer+’s overall cost of ownership creeps higher still is with the various attachments on offer. There’s a “Basic” kit that adds a long bar, a tricep rope, “premium” handles, the aforementioned workout mat and safety cables. Then the “Pro” kit that I tested the Trainer+ with includes all that, along with a short bar, a belt, and even a bench. You can accomplish a lot with the Trainer+ without any of these things, but the truth is that the experience is greatly enhanced by adding them in — especially the bench and bar — and you can’t buy them piecemeal. The Trainer+ works with a dedicated Vitruvian companion app, which connects to your machine via Bluetooth. The good thing about the expensive All-Access membership is that it’s tied to the machine, not the individual — meaning anyone in your household (or even visitors) can create their own profile in the app on their own phone and pair with your machine to access all training options and guided workouts. The app itself is great, offering multiweek programs you can follow, trainer-led classes, and a wide range of individual exercises that you can assemble into your own custom workouts if you’re a subscriber, too. I used the app’s guided video on my gym Apple TV via AirPlay and that worked flawlessly as well. Vitruvian The Trainer+ is probably going to feel different from other workouts you’ve tried if you haven’t used an active resistance machine in the past: It’s different from all-in-one cable and weight-based equipment, or free weights. To Vitruvian’s credit, though, the learning curve is not at all steep, and it only takes a couple of sessions before using the Trainer+ feels like second nature. Vitruvian’s app provides everything you need to use the Trainer+ to max effectiveness, too, whether you’re just starting out or you’re experienced with personal fitness and looking for something to fit into or supplement your existing routine. It’s basically as guided or as self-directed as you want, and anywhere in between. The Trainer+ is also great at making real-time adjustments to your workout based on your strength and performance level. There’s a strength assessment that the app will ask you to do initially to establish your baseline suggested weights for all the various workouts, and you can jump back into that at any point to change that calibration, which is useful to do every few weeks as you progress with your training. In a month of testing, with near daily use, the Trainer+ had been incredibly consistent. Once you’re done with a workout, you can just let the handles or attachments drop and the cables retract, without having to worry about damaging the durable carbon composite material of the hardware itself. The clips come in and out easily, and the platform is easy to wipe down with simple soap and water when needed. The connection is rock solid and remembers your phone so long as you toggle that option in the app, and the Trainer+ automatically sleeps so you can leave it plugged in all the time if you want. One issue I found with the machine: The power cable seems to sit rather lightly in the socket on the machine, and until I learned how to steer well clear of it, it was relatively easy to cut power to the Trainer+ just by even lightly brushing the cord itself. That hasn’t been an issue since identifying it as a problem and avoiding any contact with the cord, and it’s possible this was included intentionally as a kind of safety backup, but I’d appreciate a more snug fit between cable and machine. There’s no question that the Trainer+ is a fantastic piece of home workout hardware, with a smart, useful app that’s at once far more approachable than something like Peloton, but also much more flexible for people who take working out very seriously and want to be able to customize their experience to match. The real sticking point with Vitruvian’s offering, however, is the price: With the Pro kit, which I do recommend, you’re already at $3,500, and that’s before you start adding in the ongoing cost of the app subscription. That could pay for a fair amount of gym membership, along with some personal training thrown in. With the Trainer+, however, you get a number of things that are basically impossible to get anywhere else, including a solution that’s so portable it not only works in just about any home or condo setting, but can also easily pack into the car for a road trip — or fit into your #vanlife if that’s what you’re into. It’s much more versatile in this regard versus other similar active resistance products like the Tonal, too. If you place a premium on flexibility with almost zero sacrifices versus a full set of free weights or a much more cumbersome home tower or complete gym, then the Trainer+ is easy to recommend. It’s clearly well-engineered and designed, with a focus on delivering value to actual athletes and fitness buffs who can be notoriously hard to please, and yet it’s also a great place for people to start out their home exercise journeys — so long as they want to commit to the upfront cost that comes with it.

DeepL, the AI-based language translator, raises over $100M at a $1B+ valuation

Ingrid Lunden

Artificial intelligence startups, and (thanks to GPT and OpenAI) specifically those helping humans communicate with each other, are commanding a lot of interest from investors, and today the latest of these is announcing a big round of funding. , a startup that provides instant translation-as-a-service both to businesses and to individuals — competing with Google, Bing and other online tools — has confirmed a fundraise at a €1 billion valuation (just over $1 billion at today’s rates). Cologne, Germany-based DeepL is not disclosing the full amount that it’s raised — it doesn’t want to focus on this aspect, CEO and founder Jaroslaw Kutylowski said in an interview — but as we were working on this story we heard a range of figures. At one end, an investor that was pitched on the funding told TechCrunch that DeepL was aiming to raise $125 million. At the other end, a with a rumor about the funding from back in November said the amount was around $100 million. The funding closed earlier this month. The startup is also not confirming or disclosing other financials, but the investor source said that the $1 billion valuation was based on a 20x multiple of DeepL’s annual run rate, which was at $50 million at the end of last year. In the current fundraising climate, this is a pretty bullish multiple, but it speaks to the company’s growth, which the investor noted is currently at 100%, and the fact that DeepL’s breaking even and close to being profitable. What is more definitive is the list of investors: DeepL said that new backer IVP was leading the round, with Bessemer Venture Partners, Atomico and WiL also participating. Previous backers in the company also include Benchmark and btov. DeepL primarily provides translation as a service to businesses rather than individuals, and its forte up to now has been working primarily with smaller and medium organizations. Some of those have the potential for a lot of scale: DeepL powers translation on Mastodon, for example. This is a route that the startup is planning to continue, but the plan is to use the funding to expand that scope both to cover larger enterprises and to build out new services, such as a Grammarly-style monolingual (same-language) writing improver that is in closed beta now and will be launching soon. It will also continue to invest in R&D. As we have previously noted, the company’s model was originally trained on a database of over a billion translations and queries, plus a method of double-checking translations by searching for similar snippets on the web. This is then housed on a supercomputer that both provides translations but continues to learn and improve as well. Right now, Kutylowski says that around 60-70% of the company’s staff are engineers, and they are focused on building more tech on a range of timescales from short-term with commercial focus, to medium and longer-term “moonshots” and breakthroughs in language modeling for its own sake. Despite the pressure on deep learning these days — investors want returns and commercial end points — the latter of these, the moonshots, remain a priority for the company — something DeepL has been able to retain because it’s been growing its core translation services (sold on a “pro” tier and also offered in more limited formats as a “free” tier). DeepL is indeed in a fortunate position. A lot of startups have been struggling to raise rounds, and those that have say that there’s been a lot of pressure on valuations as a result of that, but Kutylowski said that the rising tide for AI-based language services has helped DeepL on this front. “What I liked about 2022 was the rise of AI in everyone’s perception,” he said, adding that AI has “more or less become like a typical tool” rather than a novelty. “From our perspective that’s great, allowing us to make an entry into more markets and making usage of our tools more commonplace. It feels like we’ve moved on from, ‘Do I trust AI?'” The company has long competed with the likes of Google and Microsoft on the translation front — with the smaller upstart often to these Goliaths. Notably, neither of these are investors, and Kutylowski very much declined to comment on whether either of them, or any other big tech company like Amazon (itself very big on AI and with obvious use cases for strong translation tools) had ever approached it for investment, partnerships or acquisitions. Now DeepL might potentially have another kind of competitor on the horizon in the form of OpenAI, which is spinning out a number of very high-profile AI-powered tools and changing the public conversation on how they are used, for better or worse. And which itself is in the market for a fundraise — $10 billion at a whopping $29 billion valuation led by Microsoft. It’s not clear how and if OpenAI might build its own translation services, or whether it could team up with a third party. Kutylowski said that for now there are “no concrete plans” on how or if DeepL would ever work with OpenAI, and what form that could take, but he noted that the language models that DeepL uses are similar to those OpenAI uses, and that the two companies have a number of customers in common. “They want to intermingle them together,” he said. In the meantime, DeepL’s plan is to continue improving the services it already provides. “We are always in race mode on the translation side of things,” Kutylowski said. “We are accustomed to big adversaries, and part of our culture is to push forward through that.”

Komunal raises $8.5M to digitize Indonesia’s rural banks

Catherine Shu

is reaching out to Indonesia’s rural customers by going where they are. The fintech partners with more than 220 banks in tier 2 and tier 3 cities spread through 19 provinces. Founded in 2019, the startup announced today it has raised $8.5 million in funding led by East Ventures Growth Fund, with participation from AlphaTrio Sustainable Technology Fund, Skystar Capital, Sovereign’s Capital, Ozora and Gobi Partners. Komunal digitizes rural banks, called BPRs (Bank Perkreditan Rakyat) through its DepositoBPR platform, which lets users make deposits and apply for loans digitally without needing to visit their bank’s physical location. In addition to DepositoPR, Komunal also has a peer-to-peer lending platform that connects MSMEs with lenders. The startup says that in 2022, its platform channeled IDR 3.6 billion, or about $230 million USD, in deposits and loans to BPRs and MSMEs, representing a 350% year-over-year growth from $50 million in 2021. It expects transaction volume to reach more than $500 million USD by this year, and has recorded positive EBITDA since October 2022. Komunal’s team. Komunal Komunal was founded three years ago as an SME financing platform based in Surabaya, East Java. CEO Hendry Lieviant told TechCrunch that the startup initially benefited from little competition because most lending fintechs were based in Jakarta, but then they realized that lack of data and Indonesian SME culture might limit its scalability. Another opportunity presented itself in the form of Indonesia’s 1,500 BPRs. “They have strong local connectivity, but their recent performance has been lukewarm, unable to catch up with digitalization,” said Lieviant. “Combined they only made up about 2% of the Indonesian banking market although they have much bigger potential.” Customers access banks through the DepositoBPR app. From there, they are able to choose their rural bank and deposit product, create a virtual account and transfer money directly into it. Lieviant said they can also get government-guaranteed deposits with higher interest rates. Komunal’s new funding will be used to market DepositoBPR and build its core banking system for rural banks. The company also announced it has appointed Dr. Peter Jacobs, a former executive director of Bank Indonesia, as its commissioner, and will continue to hire for senior positions.  

Luxury fashion meets blockchain on Syky, the Seven Seven Six-backed web3 platform

Christine Hall

Alice Delahunt believes the future of fashion is in web3 and created Syky (pronounced “psy-key”) to put the wheels in motion. She launched the company in November after a career in marketing at luxury fashion houses, serving in roles including chief digital and content officer at Ralph Lauren and digital and social marketing director at Burberry. In 2017, Delahunt was at Ralph Lauren and had her first look at the blockchain, but it wasn’t until years later while working to pioneer some digital wardrobe projects with companies, like Snap, Bitmoji and Roblox, that she had an opportunity to see that web3 was going to be “more than a niche community” for luxury fashion. Alice Delahunt, founder and CEO of Syky “It felt like there was potential for virtual fashion and digital fashion to really take off,” she told TechCrunch. “I believe that the luxury fashion houses of tomorrow are being built today.” That’s when Delahunt left Ralph Lauren and started developing Syky, which she said will serve as an incubator, marketplace and social community for the next generation of fashion designers and consumers. As my colleague, Dominic-Madori Davis recently noted, “ ,” especially when it comes to taking the industry in a new direction or helping it become more sustainable. This is much of Delahunt’s focus. Her company’s name was inspired by the mythological Greek goddess of soul, Psyche, who she said personified “how designers use fashion to express the intangible parts of ourselves and themselves.” “Designers inspire us to dream through fashion,” Delahunt added. “And those dreams come from the innermost parts of our psyche, so it was important for me for the name to reflect that.” The company is kicking off the community part of its platform by releasing its first NFT, called The Keystone, of which 987 will be available on January 20. Fifty Keystones will be reserved for and granted to aspiring designers, Delahunt said. The Keystone is a membership pass that provides exclusive access to Syky’s membership space, where they can network and collaborate with other creators and be able to attend digital and in-person fashion events. Keystone holders will also be the first to hear about designer collection drops, company alpha and beta feature releases and partner projects. In addition, they will receive periodic insights and reports on fashion and technology. Syky is still very much in its early stages, but is buoyed by a $9.5 million Series A investment, led by Seven Seven Six, which also included Brevan Howard Digital, Leadout Capital, First Light Capital Group and Polygon Ventures. The investment marks Seven Seven Six’s foray into web3 fashion, and Alexis Ohanian told TechCrunch via email that the attraction to Syky came from his obsession with the intersection of technology and culture. “Creating and growing Reddit gave me a front-row seat to the power of culture creation through technology, even if it’s internet culture, and fashion is one more core element to that,” Ohanian added. Meanwhile, Delahunt intends to deploy the new capital into building up the Syky team, incubating the designers into the community and on product and technology development. She plans for the future marketplace to be a revenue driver for the company. It will be a place for emerging designers and unestablished designers to sell and trade their collections with consumers. It will also be a place where designers and consumers can curate spaces to showcase their fashion passions. Delahunt was secretive about some of the next steps of the company, which includes an announcement for designers in February, and another part of the platform launching in the second quarter of this year. “We’re going to build the luxury space environment in the digital world and then in the physical world,” Delahunt added.

Wyze launches its new $34 pan and tilt security camera

Frederic Lardinois

It’s only been a few days since CES closed its doors, but there are still plenty of new gadgets to be had. Some companies, after all, would rather not launch their products into the noise that is the world’s largest consumer electronics show. Seattle-based is one of these. The company made its name by launching an back in 2017, and while it has since expanded well beyond that (think air purifiers, gun safes and vacuums), its camera offerings remain core to its identity (and, most likely, revenue). Indeed, Wyze’s founders recently promised that in the coming year, the company would go back to its basics and make 2023 the year of the camera. Today, it is kicking this off with the launch of its indoor/outdoor . The new camera features a completely new design, which also now allows the waterproof wired camera to tilt a full 180 degrees, on top of its 360-degree panning ability. Wyze The previous version only had a 93-degree vertical range, but otherwise, the two cameras feature comparable specs. These include Wyze’s HD sensor with color night vision, which works surprisingly well, as well as the ability to track objects and people once the camera detects motion, 24/7 recording on a microSD card and two-way audio. Since it’s a bit more flexible, the new version is also easier to mount inverted on a wall or ceiling. One nifty feature — though not new — is that you can set the camera to continuously monitor a room in a constant pattern by setting four waypoints. Wyze sent me a review unit earlier this month and on top of these basic specs, maybe the most important update here is that the new camera is very quiet. Wyze says it reduced the motor noise by half — and that’s quite notable. And since the camera can now fully tilt down, the company also introduced a new privacy mode that points the camera down and eliminates its field of view. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it’s also quite small, though it feels heavier than you expect and is generally well built. Wyze Like its other modern cameras, the new system also supports Wyze’s subscription for automatically detecting and tagging events (this starts at $2/month/camera but even without paying, you get 14 days of free cloud storage). In my experience, this works quite well (I mostly use it to detect people and packages at our front door). I haven’t used it outside yet, but Wyze promises the camera is waterproof, up to IP65 specs. The company recommends you use its $14 outdoor power adapter, though. The last version of its panning camera cost $44 (plus about $6 flat-rate shipping) on Wyze.com and about $50 at third-party vendors with free shipping. The new version will cost $34 (plus shipping) when you order direct from Wyze. That’ll likely mean it’ll set you back $40 on Amazon, for example. Given Wyze’s flat-rate shipping, you’re usually better off buying direct when ordering more than one unit (assuming you don’t mind the slower shipping). There are cheaper options from the likes of TP-Link brand Kasa, for example, though Wyze may have many of these competitors beat in terms of its software smarts. Wyze We would be remiss not to note that Wyze Cam Pan v2 was one of the cameras that that the company took a long time to acknowledge publicly and only finished patching last year (except for the Wyze Cam v1, which it couldn’t patch because of its hardware limitations). A hacker would’ve needed access to the camera’s random ID number through your local network to exploit this vulnerability. Security flaws are almost inevitable (and we’ve seen with security cameras over the years), but Wyze’s mistake here was to not talk about this one for years. I’d like to think that Wyze has learned from this and has since strengthened its approach to security (and its app supports two-factor authentication), but it’s something worth keeping in mind.

Max Q: Anomalous

Aria Alamalhodaei

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Last week wasn’t the most successful for spaceflight missions. We’ll get into that a bit more below. In this issue: After Virgin Orbit’s launch failure last Monday, during which the mission experienced an  that prevented the rocket from reaching orbit, I went back over the company’s financials — and things aren’t looking good. For Virgin Orbit, this year has likely been completely turned on its head. The company was aiming for three launches this year, but everything will remain grounded until the cause of the anomaly has been identified and resolved. It’s unclear how long that will take, but likely at least three months. Add this delay to Virgin’s dwindling cash reserves and you have a foundation that’s suddenly much shakier than before. Virgin Orbit/Greg Robinson Launch startup  first orbital launch attempt ended in failure last Tuesday after all nine engines on the RS1 rocket’s first stage shut down simultaneously. The rocket subsequently hit the launch pad and was destroyed on impact. ABL President Dan Piemont told TechCrunch that while the investigation into the failure is still in its early stages, “The simultaneity of the shutdown is a strong piece of evidence but it will take more time for the team to narrow down contributing factors and a root cause.” “The Flight 2 vehicle is fully assembled and ready to begin it’s flight campaign, so we’re champing at the bit to get going on that as soon as the Flight 1 investigation is complete,” Piemont said. ABL Space RS1 rocket

If your CEO isn’t pitching to VCs, you’ll never raise money

Haje Jan Kamps

as a consultant, I am approached by companies that have a plan in place for their fundraising that doesn’t involve the CEO or a member of the founding team running point on the fundraising process. From one perspective, I can understand that: VC fundraising does, from the outside, look a lot like sales, and if you have a good salesperson, why not let them do what they do best? The issue is that while salespeople are great at sales, the VC fundraising process is very different than landing a customer. You’re trying to find an alignment between the company and a long-term partner who will have a significant amount of input into the future of your startup. And if there are discrepancies between the sales process and the deeper due diligence into the company (and there will be, because the sales team has a different long-term perspective on what success looks like), that can make the whole deal fall apart. There are several really good reasons why, at the earliest stages of fundraising, the founding team should be running the fundraising process. In this article, I break it down and explain why it’s an awful idea to let anyone but the CEO do the fundraising.

The Edit LDN raises seed round to serve sneakerheads around the world

Catherine Shu

Before founding , Moses Rashid frequented sneaker festivals and exhibitions to buy limited-edition shoes. But Rashid, who describes himself as a “huge sneakerhead,” was often disappointed by the shopping experience. “I found it crazy that I was dropping $850 on a pair of sneakers but I wouldn’t even get a bag to bring them home in!” he said. He started The Edit LDN out of his home two years ago to give other sneakerheads the kind of premium experience they’d expect from luxury brands like Louis Vuitton or Dior. Now Rashid says The Edit LDN’s revenue is growing 525% year-over-year, hitting $12 million in 2022. The London-based platform, which carries sneakers, streetwear and collectibles from pre-vetted resellers, announced today it has raised $4.8 million in seed funding. The round will be used to expand into the United States and the MENA region, and was led by Regah Ventures, with participation from sports players like New York Giants captain Xavier McKinney, the Philadelphia 76ers’ P.J. Tucker and Premier League club Nottingham Forest’s Jesse Lingard. Rashid compares The Edit LDN to designer clothing and bag platform because both work with premium resellers, and have an audience of shoppers who are willing to spend a lot of money on fashion. The Edit LDN’s services include same-day shipping in the United Kingdom, which it plans to expand to five more countries this year, and a personal shopping team that helps customers find sneakers, put together outfits and preorder items. Rashid said that The Edit LDN is able to source hard-to-find items, like Off-White X Air Jordan 1 High Chicagos signed by designer Virgil Abloh and Louis Vuitton Air Force 1s, which it got access to three months before they were released. The Edit LDN founder Moses Rashid. The Edit LDN In 2022, The Edit LDN sold 20,000 pairs of sneakers and had 3,500 active sellers, who usually have more than 50 units for sale at a time and are able to get early access to products, Rashid said. The Edit LDN’s key demographic is aged 18 to 40 and split evenly between male and female. Customers buy up to five times a month, with an average order value of $425 per transaction. The startup’s goal is to double revenues in 2023 and grow to over $100 million over the next three years, with a partial exit proposed for 2026. To enable The Edit LDN to scale, and resellers to sell faster, the platform has a proprietary tech stack, including a feature that automatically applies margins to products. When resellers use The Edit LDN’s selling app, it suggests prices based on historical sales data and market tracking through AI algorithms. It also performs attribution tracking to increase sales, and suggests products a reseller should carry. The performance of resellers is tracked, including sales, shipping time and fulfillment levels, and depending on how they are doing, they can unlock new benefits like lower seller rates, free storage and fulfillment and access to The Edit LDN’s concession stores in high-end department stores. As with other high-value collectibles, an important part of selling premium sneakers is authentication. The Edit LDN’s in-house authentication team uses techniques like visual inspection, material and packaging checks, smell and UV/blacklight. Rashid said they can authenticate a product every one to three minutes. The platform’s competitors include and , other designer sneaker and streetwear marketplaces that have raised venture capital funding. “The battleground for customers is providing a premium retail environment, user experience, product curation, speed and service,” said Rashid. He added that resellers are able to make a 10% to 20% higher payout per product on The Edit LDN than other platforms, because it gives them administrative support, storage and fulfillment options and marketing through its personal shopping service. The Edit LDN’s plans include expanding its product range and working with more retailers for physical locations. It currently has concessions in Galeries Lafayette, Harvey Nichols and Harrods. In terms of geographical expansion, the U.S. was picked because items can be sent there from the U.K. in 24 hours for a $30 shipping fee. Rashid said the platform has gained traction among celebrity clients there and about 15% of its revenue now comes from the U.S. despite little marketing. MENA is its target for expansion because it has emerging markets that are growing quickly. The Edit LDN will launch next month in Galeries Lafayette in Doha and Harvey Nichols in Riyadh.

India to spend $320 million to promote homegrown payments network

Manish Singh

India will spend nearly $320 million to promote cards on RuPay and for low-value UPI transactions, the latest in a series of moves by New Delhi to fuel the growth of its homegrown payments network. New Delhi approved a plan Wednesday to spend $318.4 million for the promotion of RuPay debit cards and low-value person-to-merchant transactions on UPI during the period of current financial year ending in March 2023. The Narendra Modi-led government’s move is an attempt to assuage the concerns of banks that have questioned the financial viability of the UPI network. UPI, a six-year-old payments network built by a coalition of banks, has become the most popular way Indians transact online today. The payments service fetches money directly from banks, removing the reliance on any intermediary. But it operates on zero merchant discount rate, tiny fees on transactions that is one of the main sources of income for banks and card companies. “Various stakeholder in the digital payments systems and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) expressed concerns regarding potential adverse impact of the zero MDR regime on the growth of the digital payments ecosystem. Further, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) requested, among other things, for incentivisation of BHIM-UPI and RuPay Debit Card transactions to create a cost- effective value proposition for ecosystem stakeholders, increase merchant acceptance footprints and faster migration from cash payments to digital payments,” New Delhi said. A fintech executive, who requested anonymity speaking on government matters, argued that the z RuPay is India’s homegrown card network, which is promoted by the National Payments Corporation of India, a special body of RBI that also oversees UPI payments. The central bank, which has pushed international giants Visa, Mastercard and American Express to store Indian data locally in the country, has made a series of attempts to expand the reach of RuPay in the South Asian market. RuPay is the only payments network . But even as RuPay has made significant progress in making inroads with debit cards, credit cards on its network are struggling. Several banks, including HDFC, have shown little interest in issuing RuPay credit cards because it is eroding their profit-making ability, according to two people familiar with the matter. Tata Neu’s RuPay credit card, issued by HDFC, doesn’t support linking to UPI, for instance.

Virgin Orbit’s botched launch highlights shaky financial future

Aria Alamalhodaei

Virgin Orbit’s much-hyped launch from Cornwall, U.K. on Monday ended in failure, with the company announcing that the mission experienced an that prevented the rocket from reaching orbit. The “Start Me Up” mission attracted much attention; not only was it the company’s sixth launch, it was also billed as the first-ever space flight from the United Kingdom and the first-ever orbital launch attempt from the new Spaceport Cornwall, in southeast England. (Other U.K.-based rocket companies, like and , are racing to be the first to conduct a vertical rocket launch from U.K. soil.) But the anomaly may prove to be a very costly mistake for the company, which has been on shaky financial ground since going public in 2021. The first miscalculation occurred shortly after the company completed its merger with special purpose acquisition company NextGen Acquisition Corp. II at the end of 2021. Virgin Orbit only garnered $228 million in gross proceeds from the merger, falling far short of the projected $483 million from the transaction. That shortfall was followed by dwindling cash reserves. In the company’s most recent quarterly earnings report, it said that as of September 30 it had $71 million cash on hand. The company then received a $25 million injection from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and $20 million from Virgin Investments Ltd. But even with these additional funds, it’s unclear if the company has enough financial runway without needing to seek additional capital. The company’s previous financial projections have also raised eyebrows. While it’s not unusual for earnings presentations to contain fanciful forecasts, some of those issued by Virgin Orbit have stretched even the most ambitious imaginations. In 2021, the company estimated it would hit $2.1 billion in revenue by 2026. Given that each LauncherOne costs on average of around $12 million, that would mean the vehicle would need to fly a whopping 175 times per year. Keep in mind that SpaceX, far and away the world’s leading launch provider, just hit a record 61 annual launches last year. Virgin Orbit was essentially saying that it would be three times as successful, measured by launch cadence, than SpaceX in just five years. This is not to say that Virgin Orbit has not had its successes. Indeed, out of the six launch attempts so far, four have been successful. That’s not a rate at which to scoff. But as is becoming more and more clear, at some point, all launch companies have to start making revenue. Otherwise it’s just burned cash, and not much to show for it.