Questions raised over natural gas fuel source for Elon Musk's Texas spaceport

TechCrunch Newsletter

Friday, October 08, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 8, 2021! It's Friday! We made it! If you are tired, consider how weary the Instagram team must be. Their service is having even more uptime issues this afternoon. Between that and announcing that its users are no longer allowed to sell bits of the Amazon rainforest, it's a banner week for Zuck's empire. Now, let's talk tech! – Alex Image Credits: RoschetzkyIstockPhoto / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3 Elon's mystery gas: Big plans from SpaceX regarding its largest rockets are missing a few details on where the company intends to find tens of millions of cubic feet of natural gas that it will need. Sure, Tesla is petrol-free, but SpaceX has left a few question marks in a draft programmatic environmental assessment (PEA) regarding combustible gas that have us scratching our heads. Europe's startups set to receive pre-seed boost: Early-stage founders in Europe are about to have a few new accelerators in their neighborhood, courtesy of Techstars. The accelerator collective is opening programs in Paris (again) and Stockholm, in addition to its current efforts on the continent. Per Techstars' CEO, there's far more founders in Europe today than are being served, despite record venture capital totals. Tesla to move its HQ to Texas: Ah, taxes. Tesla will move its headquarters to Austin, Texas from its traditional California home, but it won't stop investing in the West Coast state. Indeed, the company intends to boost "output at its Fremont gigafactory by 50%," TechCrunch reports. So, Texas taxes. That's what this move appears to be about.

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Startups/VC TechCrunch's Annie Njanja reports that "economic growth and the rapid expansion of digital and mobile services" in markets like Kenya and Africa as a whole could lead to a boom in insurtech products. Insurtech has proved fertile ground for founders and investors alike in North America and Europe. So, why not Africa as well? African startups have proved strong in the fintech market, so perhaps the push into insurtech is overdue. Today's Tiger round is actually news of an impending round. Namely that the investing impresario may put capital to work in Slice. Slice is an Indian company looking to bolster credit card usage in the country. Tiger may put $100 million into the company, per TechCrunch reporting. Manish Singh writes for the blog that Slice "raised around $30 million in its previous equity financing rounds and was valued at under $200 million in a round earlier this year." More soon, I reckon. (Note: Slice, the American pizza software service, is not the same thing as the above Slice. Also note that startups should come up with more distinct names!) Next up: Alpha Paw, which just raised $8 million. If you are ready to mock a pet wellness startup for raising venture capital money, I can tell that you have not been to the vet recently. If you can keep your pets healthy, you might be able to save big bucks. Alpha Paw "offers pet products for dogs and cats like food and supplements that are customized with pet breed in mind," to be specific. Given that about half my generation has more dogs than children (current score is 3-0 in my house), I fully expect Alpha Paw to raise $800 million more by December. Closing out our startup coverage today, Productfy has raised $16 million for its banking-as-a-service (BaaS) product. I have to admit that I have lost track of all the different BaaS (pronounced like the fish, if you were wondering) startups out there. They all seem able to raise capital, so there must be growth to be shared. But in time are we going to see BaaS consolidation? We're finally seeing a little movement in the hot OKR startup space, and BaaS feels even more crowded. For now, however, Productfy "aims to stand out with its mission to build DeFi for traditional finance, according to founder and CEO Duy Vo," per our own Mary Ann Azevedo.

Private equity is ready to take MSP consolidation to the next level Good news: Businesses of all stripes are digitizing their operations faster than ever before, creating huge advantages for companies that start the work now. Bad news: Many technical workers are already looking for new jobs, and companies must compete to find the right people who can build robust, secure IT environments. Managed services providers (MSPs) are filling the gap, and private equity firms are paying attention. “MSPs have all the ingredients that private equity loves,” write Mike McGill and Kevin Jolley of Cowen and Company, LLC. “A strong demand trend, low risk of obsolescence, a ‘sticky’ service that attracts long-term customers and high recurring revenues, strong cash flow margins and a relatively ‘asset-light’ business.” (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Richard Drury / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Google, YouTube to ban climate denial ads: Mountain View-based Alphabet has decided it no longer wants to profit from folks who deny climate change. To that end, the company will "no longer allow ads or monetization for content that promotes climate change denialism." Google to distribute physical hardware keys to 10,000 users under threat of Russian hacking: At some point we have to come up with a better solution to state-sponsored hacking than Google sending out security keys, but for now this counts as good news. And Pinterest is building something called havens that are "space on its platform to explore the relationship between mental health and rest." Which sounds nice, I suppose.

TechCrunch Experts If you have a software consultant that you think other startup founders should know about, fill out the survey here. Read one of the testimonials we've received below! Consultant: ManagedKube Recommended by: Garland Kan, consultant Testimonial: "[They have] a deep understanding of cloud technology and how to use that in combination with open source software to get us an infrastructure that is scalable but easy to understand and maintain. They were literally trying to make themselves obsolete!" We're continuing to add content to our growth marketing vertical. Check out this article on TechCrunch+ from Jonathan Martinez: "5 common growth marketing mistakes startups make."  If there's a growth marketer you think we should know about, let us know. Read More Image Credits: Jeffrey Coolidge / Getty Images

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India's Rebel Foods scores $1.4B valuation after raising $175M Series F

TechCrunch Newsletter

Thursday, October 07, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 7, 2021! Sure, we're excited about software here at TechCrunch, but we also keep at least one eye on the sky at all times. Which is why our upcoming Sessions: Space event is going to be out of this world. Sorry. – Alex Read More Image Credits: TechCrunch

The TechCrunch Top 3 Global startups raise record sums. Again. Another quarter, another set of record funding totals for global startups. New data from CB Insights indicates that upstart companies around the world managed to just beat the records that they set in Q2 of this year. All told, 2021 is going to be a barn-burning year of venture capital investment that we may never beat in our lifetimes. Microsoft buys OKR software startup Ally: TechCrunch has long tracked the OKR software market as crowded and incredibly busy when it comes to raising capital and posting big ARR growth numbers. Today, Microsoft shook up the startup niche by buying one of its better-funded competitors. Now what? Developers are building tools to get around the Apple tax: While global regulators figure out what to do with app marketplace payment lock-in, startups are getting to work. Paddle is building what TechCrunch describes as a "new in-app purchasing (IAP) system aimed at iOS developers that's designed to be a drop-in replacement for Apple's own IAP." Good!

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Startups/VC I am here for robot tire changing: I don't know how to change a tire, as I am a useless man-child who types for a living. But even among folks who know how, the rote task isn't likely popular. Enter robots! RoboTire wants to bring robotic tire changing to the car service world and has raised a $7.5 million Series A round to fund its aspirations. You can no longer pay real money to buy fake stock in real companies: A day after Visionrare announced a marketplace where you could buy NFTs of fake shares of real startups, that appears to be over. Sadly. It was great for headlines. We're holding you to this deadline, Cruise: Well-funded self-driving car company Cruise intends to have tens of thousands of self-driving cars on the roads by 2030. If the company misses this deadline, I have decided that all its execs have to bike to work for the next decade. (Sticking to the theme of my personal incompetence, driving is hard and I do not like doing it.) Startup with video game name that doesn't deal in video games raises money: If you have ever heard of the game Chrono Trigger, you are excused from wondering if Chronosphere is a gaming company. It is not. It is, instead, a data observability company. And it has put together a $200 million round, which should be more than enough capital to take on Monte Carlo and other players in its niche. Instacart buys FoodStorm: Grocery delivery behemoth Instacart announced this morning that it has purchased FoodStorm, what TechCrunch describes as "a SaaS order management system (OMS) that powers end-to-end order-ahead and catering for grocery retailers." Terms were not shared, and because both companies are private, that doesn't tell us too much. Microservices meshing is macro business: Our own Ron Miller has a story out today looking at Solo.io, which provides software that helps customers "mesh" microservices together. I know what that means only from a very high perspective. What matters to both of us is that the company is now a unicorn, putting up some early points in Q4 for the larger Boston startup scene. Slackify in all the things: That's what Cord wants to do, put Slack-like features into any application. It offers its service via an API — naturally — and just banked $17.5 million for its project. Nigerian American company raises for cross-border African payments: The growing African e-commerce market is creating demand for new products, a trend that Klasha hopes to ride with its service that helps consumers pay across national borders on the continent. And to round out our startup coverage today, ghost kitchens are not merely a trend in the United States. They are also taking off in India. Evidence of that fact? Rebel Foods just raised at a unicorn valuation on the back of its own dark kitchen work in the country. It seems that good startup ideas are reaching international ubiquity faster than ever. Image Credits: Dhiraj Singh / Bloomberg / Getty Images

After a proxy fight victory, it's time for Box to make some bold moves The last few years included a delayed IPO filing and a proxy battle with a major shareholder, but events are now unfolding nicely for Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie. Enterprise reporter Ron Miller says this is “a pivotal moment for the cloud content management company,” so he interviewed Levie to learn more about his plans, particularly in light of the company’s recent revenue growth. For balance, Ron also spoke to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis. “The next year is pivotal for Box," he said. "It has to prove that it was right to win the proxy fight. To do that, it has to evolve the Box platform and grow steadily but surely and continue to carve out a niche for itself in the market." (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Bloomberg / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Will someone please cry for the billionaires? Please. Anyone? U.S. Department of Justice to ensure federal contractors disclose cyber issues: If you sell goods or services to the U.S. government and are hacked or breached, you had best fess up. Or, literally, else. Twitter puts capital into Facemoji: I laughed when Snap bought Bitmoji and wound up looking real dumb. Perhaps this deal also makes sense. Whoknowsmoji.

TechCrunch Experts 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. If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this interview from Anna Heim with Adam DuVander, "Why generic marketing approaches don't work on software developers." Read More Image Credits: Joaquin Corbalan / Getty Images

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Newest Jobs from Crunchboard Scientific Computing Lead at Woodwell Climate Reearch Center (Falmouth, MA, USA) DevOps Engineer (Python, Perl, Bash) - On-site, Ann Arbor, MI at FreightVerify (Ann Arbor, MI, United States) Lead Web Developer at Graveflex (Chicago, IL 60605, USA) Manager Technology at Common Impact (Brooklyn, NY, USA) CHELCO seeks an Information Technology Project Engineer at Choctawhatchee Electric Cooperative (CHELCO) (DeFuniak Springs, FL, USA) See more jobs on CrunchBoard Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month.

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Leaker releases huge cache of Twitch data, promises more to come

TechCrunch Newsletter

Wednesday, October 06, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 6, 2021. We have an absolutely packed newsletter for you today. So no jokes up top from us, just a note that we've put out the agenda for TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS, and it's looking mighty fine. – Alex Read More

The TechCrunch Top 3 Google boosts African investment: U.S. technology giant Google is investing $1 billion into the African continent to help hasten its digital transformation, including $50 million into local startups. African startup investment has been scaling in recent quarters, making Google's news unsurprising, if welcome when we consider the uneven reality of global venture funding. Opportunities abound in Latin America's burgeoning startup market: TechCrunch dug into where investors see gaps in the funding market for startups in Latin America today, discovering that while more upstart tech companies in the region are raising funds, there are still ample blind spots where intrepid investors can find deals. Twitch hacked: Amazon's Twitch video streaming service was hacked, it confirmed today. Payout details, source code — the hack was more than a simple release of user data. It's a pretty terrible moment for Twitch, its parent company and its vast user base. Change your passwords everyone, and then get a password manager. Image Credits: NurPhoto / Getty Images

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Startups/VC There is a veritable flood of startup stories on the blog today, so we're ditching our usual format and proceeding in a few discrete blocks of news. Enjoy! What do people think startups do with money that they raise? They spend it, in case you were curious, which leads to incredibly negative cash flow results at growing companies. That's the goal — to invest raised funds in the name of revenue expansion. Which is what The Athletic has been doing with its venture funds. Here's a host of early-stage rounds from startups we think are neat: BeeHero has raised $19 million in new capital to "find more uses for its one-of-a-kind collection of data collected from thousands of active honeybee hives." Calgary-based CostCertified raised $8.4 million to help "contractors send a shoppable interactive estimate to homeowners so that they can choose their selections during a project." Teen-focused neobank Copper Banking has closed $13.3 million across several rounds, TechCrunch reports. Matter put together $7 million in new funding to build a better reading application, which we are very curious about. Normative's emissions accounting service raised €10 million from U.S. and European climate funds. Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures put $260 million into Indian cryptocurrency trading house CoinSwitch Kuber, which is now worth $1.9 billion. Cloud migration and management tool Logicworks is homing in on $100 million in revenue. Our own Frederic Lardinois reports that Databricks has purchased German startup 8080 Labs. If you are not clear on why this matters, Lardinois writes that the startup in question is "behind bamboolib, a popular GUI for the Python-based Pandas data analysis and manipulation tool." (Go public Databricks; stop putting off the inevitable!)

Getting the details right in your pitch deck For the Pitch Deck Teardown at TechCrunch Disrupt, Managing Editor Danny Crichton reviewed two decks, “one consumer and one enterprise,” with three VCs: Maren Bannon, co-founder and managing partner, January Ventures Vanessa Larco, partner, NEA Ben Ling, founder and general partner, Bling Capital Only the most exceptional pitch decks will receive more than a few minutes of attention, so Danny selected four slides “that provoked our panelists to show how VCs can have radically different views on the same material.” (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: PM Images / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Today in our big technology section we're starting with an automotive competition and then digging into a raft of policy-focused stories that are shaping the global technology market. GM intends to double revenue, take Tesla market share: By 2030, U.S. automotive company General Motors wants to double its revenues and "and take over the market share of EVs," TechCrunch reports. Naturally, Tesla will have something to say about the latter goal, but it's nice to see the North American EV market get more competitive. To do that, the company plans electric trucks, crossovers: Popular ICE vehicles from GM will make an electric transition, with the company planning electric trucks and crossovers, it said during an event that detailed its future EV plans. And now, PolicyCrunch: The U.K. rolls out new regulations for protecting youths on video apps: U.K. regulator Ofcom has new rules out "intended to protect users under 18 from harmful content such as hate speech and videos/ads likely to incite violence against protected groups." The new guidelines will impact services like TikTok, Twitch and Snapchat. U.S.-based companies may have to disclose ransomware payments in future: It's always risky to cover newly proposed laws, but they provide direction regarding future regulation. In this case, a newly proposed law would "compel businesses in the U.S. to disclose any ransomware payments within 48 hours of the transaction." Which makes sense? Frankly? Now we just need something similar for data breaches. European Parliament backs ban on biometric mass surveillance: Worried that facial recognition is going to take over the world and that you will never be able to travel without being under scrutiny? Well, good news if you live in Europe, where there is a new call for lawmakers to "pass a permanent ban on the automated recognition of individuals in public spaces," except in the case of those suspected of crimes.

TechCrunch Experts: Software Consulting and Growth Marketing We recently added another vertical to the Experts project! If you have a software consultant that you think other startup founders should know about, fill out the survey here. Read one of the testimonials we've received below! Consultant: Appetiser Apps  Recommended by: Andre Eikmeier, founder of Good Empire Testimonial: "They had a good reputation globally and had produced some good products. We also liked their flexible model — we were able to use our CTO to lead a team of six devs from the Appetiser team, with occasional UX/UI, product management and project management as needed; it was properly collaborative, not a blackbox agency arrangement. So we were able to build capability in-house at the same time, rather than dependency. [Working with them] allowed us to get a first iteration of product to market from scratch in three months. We were able to build iOS and Android versions simultaneously." We're continuing to add content to our growth marketing vertical. Check out this article on TechCrunch+ from Danny Crichton: "As Apple messes with attribution, what does growth marketing look like in 2021?"  If there's a growth marketer you think we should know about, let us know. Read More Image Credits: NurPhoto / Getty Images

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Newest Jobs from Crunchboard CHELCO seeks an Information Technology Project Engineer at Choctawhatchee Electric Cooperative (CHELCO) (DeFuniak Springs, FL, USA) Manager, Product Development - Digital CRM (Marketing Cloud) at CarMax (Dallas, TX, USA) Salesforce Solution Architect (Remote) at CarMax (Dallas, TX, USA) Director of Product Marketing at Quorum (Washington D.C., DC, USA) Sr. Manager, Product Engineering at CarMax (Dallas, TX, USA) See more jobs on CrunchBoard Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month.

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