Daily Crunch - Insecure server exposes Byju’s students' names, phone numbers, emails and more

TechCrunch Newsletter

Wednesday, June 30, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 30, 2021. It's the last day of the quarter. It's the last day of the first half of the year. It's the halfway mark for your New Year's resolutions. The kickoff of Q3 means that we are heading into yet another earnings season. To close the second quarter, a number of companies went public including Didi and SentinelOne. The TechCrunch take is that we're seeing some interesting pricing differentials between companies from the United States compared to China. — Alex Image Credits: traffic_analyzer / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3 Robinhood fined ahead of IPO: While we count down to Robinhood's IPO filing, long expected after a strong first quarter, the company was hit with $70 million in fines and penalties today for what the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) described as "widespread and significant harm suffered by customers." Venture capital drama: TechCrunch's Natasha Mascarenhas scooped that SF-based Hinge Health booted a board member after they invested in what the company considered to be a competitor. The news is notable by itself, but also underscores how founder-friendly the market truly is today; this might not have happened back when venture capitalists held more power. Byju's leaks student data: Today's breach involves a startup called Salesken.ai, an exposed server, and Byju's user data. Byju's is an Indian edtech company, and a very highly valued one at that. Salesken provides what TechCrunch describes as "customer relationship technology," which helps explain why it might have had the other company's data. No excuse, however.

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Startups/VC Let's start our startup coverage today with three space-related stories: Virgin Orbit completes first commercial launch: Sure, SpaceX exists, but competition is a good thing and thus it's nice to hear that another company is able to put important bits of tech into orbit. Gilmour Space wants in on the same action: And the launch company has just raised a $46 million Series C to get to space next year. Gilmour's rocket is smaller than others that you might be familiar with. But, again, more competition is good. It means lower prices and better service. Remember that 3D rocket-printing company that raised $650 million Series E earlier this year? It's building out a 1,000,000 square foot factory for production. Bring on the cheap rockets. I want to go to space. Next up, the creator economy: Pietra raises $15M to help creators build product lines: Wagers are still being placed on creators making and selling their own goods, it appears. Which makes sense if you consider the creator economy as still in its nascency and thus has lots of room to grow. But while that's a popular perspective, the passion economy — call it what you will — is not all big checks and instant success. We explored the sector today on the Equity podcast with Alexis Gay joining us for the ride. But that wasn't all. Here's more from today's critical startup coverage: $5M for a LGBTQ+ neobank: While many neobanks are targeting the population at large, others are taking a more targeted approach. Such is the case with Daylight, which wants to provide banking services to the queer community. It joins startups like Fair and others in taking a slightly more niche approach to the popular fintech model. $250M for drone logistics: Remember that startup that was using drones to deliver medical supplies in Africa? It was called Zipline. And it has since expanded its goals, technology, and, today, capital base. And then there was news from Gusto that the HR-tech unicorn is breaking out pieces of its core technology so that other companies can embed payroll services and the like. While this is cool, what we really want is a Gusto S-1.

Demand Curve: 7 ad types that increase click-through rates One perennial problem inside startups: Because no one on the founding team has significant marketing experience, growth-related efforts are pro forma and generally unlikely to move the needle. Everyone wants higher click-through rates, but creating ads that “stand out” is a risky strategy, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing. This guest post by Demand Curve offers seven strategies for boosting CTR that you can clone and deploy today inside your own startup. Here’s one: If customers are talking about you online, reach out to ask if you can add a screenshot of their reviews to your advertising. Testimonials are a form of social proof that boost conversions, and they’re particularly effective when used in retargeting ads. Earlier this week, we ran another post about optimizing email marketing for early-stage startups. We’ll have more expert growth advice coming soon, so stay tuned. (Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Octavian Iolu / EyeEm / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. From tech's biggest companies, we have three stories for you today. Let's proceed in descending order of market cap, shall we? Amazon doesn't want to be regulated: And it may be worried to boot. That's our takeaway from news that the company is trying to sideline the current FTC chair. Tough, is our first read of the company's complaints and demands. Instagram wants in on paid following: Following in Big Tweet's footsteps, Instagram is "building its own version of Twitter's Super Follow with a feature that would allow online creators to publish ‘exclusive’ content to their Instagram Stories that's only available to their fans." So it would be stuff, only available for fans? How interesting. There's another service that has a similar effort. And Twitter allows for adult content. Instagram does not. Hmm. Twitter makes NFTs, because why not: Want to know when something jumps the shark? When a major social network buys in, right? Major social networks are the boomers of the technology world — extending the analogy, Oracle is a ghost that haunts your attic — meaning that they are inherently uncool. And now Twitter has NFTs. Yay, or something.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you're a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we'd like to hear about why they loved working with you. Read More Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this interview Miranda Halpern did with Kathleen Estreich and Emily Kramer, co-founders of MKT1, "MKT1: Developer marketing is what startup marketing should look like." Read More Image Credits: MKT1

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Daily Crunch - Language-learning app Duolingo translates strong revenues into IPO filing

TechCrunch Newsletter

Tuesday, June 29, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 29, 2021. Have you ever wanted to ditch civilization and move to the woods, but still be able to work? We have good news if that's you. Below you'll find lots more, including Facebook's latest product offering and how one startup wants to save bees. Enjoy! — Alex Image Credits: Duolingo

The TechCrunch Top 3 Duolingo is going public! Well-known edtech unicorn Duolingo is going public. TechCrunch has an overview of the IPO and a deeper dive into the company's business health. Based on traffic to our coverage on the matter since last night, ya'll are really into learning languages. Also make sure to check out the Duolingo EC-1. Facebook launches newsletters: Say hello to Bulletin, Facebook's new newsletter service. Competing with Substack, Twitter's Revu and other services, Facebook signed up a Boomer-friendly list of initial authors including Malcolm Gladwell. The social giant has a history of testing in-house versions of products that are successful externally. We'll have to wait and see if Bulletin manages to survive on its own merit. SpaceX plans to spend billions on Starlink: According to Elon Musk, SpaceX is losing money on early Starlink connector kits. Starlink is the space company's low-orbit satellite network that could bring about global internet connectivity. Per TechCrunch reporting of Musk's comments, "SpaceX's overall investment in the project could be between $5 billion-$10 billion initially and as much as $30 billion over time." For the sake of freelancers everywhere, let's hope the tech shakes out to match the investment.

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Startups/VC Up top today in our roundup of recent startup news is Beeflow. We're putting it at the top of the list because (1) It's about bees and (2) It's called Beeflow. What's not to love? Per Jordan Crook, the startup may have an answer to the decimation of the global bee population. And it might make money to boot. Now, the rest of the news: Europe's early-stage market is on fire: That's the takeaway from a recent TechCrunch dig into the continent's venture capital trade. So is Latin America's and the United States'. In brief, the regional startup zones of the world are becoming increasingly blurred thanks to Zoom deal-making; what was once true in one place may now be the case in every hub. Zomato to drop $100M on Grofer: The Indian tech scene is busy these days, with Manish Singh reporting that IPO-headed food-delivery giant Zomato intends to invest $100 million in online grocer Grofer. Grofer would become a unicorn in the transaction. SentinelOne could be worth $10 billion in its IPO: That's the latest on the SentinelOne public debut, which we've looked at here and dug into the pricing of here. The cybersecurity company's IPO could help kick off a hot third quarter for IPOs more generally, especially at the prices at which it is set to debut. $10M to teach soft skills with VR: That's the latest on Virti, which wants to turn "a lot of subjectively assessed skills into more objective and measurable" outputs. VR is cool, and soft skills matter. Let's see what their union can bring. Please, no “Black Mirror” jokes. Givingli raises $3M for greeting card tech: Not every venture capital round is large. Some are small enough to fit into an envelope. That's the case with Givingli's latest round, which should give the digital card and gifting app more room to build out its service. And I would be remiss to not mention that I covered venture capital rounds this morning from co-op and Arrows, along with news regarding Acceleprise's rebrand.

How VCs can get the most out of co-investing alongside LPs In a recent private equity survey, 80% of respondents said their co-investments with people outside traditional VC firms outperformed their PE fund investments. Alternative investors are highly motivated, and because they’re seeking higher returns than are generally available in public markets, they are less daunted by risk. In return, they benefit from less expensive fee structures and develop close ties with VCs, enlarging the talent pool as they build investment skills. These relationships have direct benefits for VCs as well, such as more flexibility with diversification and consolidated decision-making power. “With the right deal structure, deal selection and deal investigation, co-investors can significantly increase their returns,” says C5 Capital Managing Partner William Kilmer, who wrote an Extra Crunch post for VCs considering an alternative path. (Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Diana Ilieva / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Turning from the smaller upstarts to the megagiants, it's been a good week to be a Big Tech company. Facebook crossed the $1 trillion market cap threshold, though it dipped back under the magic number this afternoon. Here's what else is going on from the Bigs: Shopify cuts its cut to 0%: Shopify will charge zero for developers' first million in revenue that they make on its application marketplace. The move fits into a larger trend of app stores lowering their cuts as Apple fights tooth and nail to avoid doing the same with its own application emporium. The Shopify news is probably more aimed at e-commerce rival Amazon than Apple, but the move still gently undercuts Cupertino's argument that it deserves around a third of all commerce that happens on iOS. AI developers are coming: News out today from Microsoft's GitHub product is notable, with the sub-org announcing an AI-powered tool that "suggests code as you type." GitHub teamed up with OpenAI to build the tool. For beginners, the coding service could prove to be super freaking neat.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you're a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we'd like to hear about why they loved working with you. Read More Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this interview Extra Crunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon did with Scott Tong, "The pandemic showed why product and brand design need to sit together." Read More Image Credits: Dimitri Otis / Getty Images

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