Thousands of Google Play users download Android banking trojan

TechCrunch Newsletter

Thursday, March 03, 2022 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, March 3, 2022. We have the latest from how the technology world is responding to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a review of the Theranos show, notes from New Zealand venture capital and more. But first, some programming notes: Our city spotlight series is back, and TechCrunch is heading to Austin. There's also a neat DeFi event coming up, and TC Sessions: Mobility will feature Nuro co-founder Jiajun Zhu, which is fun as the company is worth $8.6 billion. See you at all three! – Alex Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

The TechCrunch Top 3 Soon every company will also be a VC: The boom in venture capital activity that the world saw in 2021 did not fail to impact large companies. Indeed, data indicates that last year saw a near-record number of new corporate investors joining the startup fundraising fray. TechCrunch dug into the data and is chasing it tomorrow with a pile of notes from active corporate investors. Tech's response to Russia: I'm bringing you these notes as a group so that you can digest them in sequence. TechCrunch wrote about automakers pulling out of Russia, Spotify closing its Russian office, and how Twitter's geoblock of Russia Today in the EU is off to a less-than-perfect start. More to come, so stick close to the blog. Microsoft wants to back thousands of African startups: That the African startup scene is expanding at a rapid clip is not news. TechCrunch has been on that story for ages now. But big companies are following the wave with big efforts, including Microsoft teaming up with "accelerators and incubators across the continent," we wrote today, to "support 10,000 startups in Africa over the next five years." What's being funded in Africa? Here's a taste from earlier today.

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Startups and VC There's a lot to talk about today as always, but let's start with some non-financial fare. TechCrunch watched the Theranos show, and oh boy do we have thoughts about it. We also have notes today on the latest and greatest in VR fitness products. Both of those are from our own Amanda Silberling, who is incredible. You can follow her on Twitter here. Lido wants to help stake Ethereum: I won't get into the proof of work versus proof of stake argument here, so suffice it to say that more eth needs to get staked for the blockchain to evolve. Per our reporting, Lido "is the market leader for Ethereum liquid staking" and just raised $70 million from a16z. That's a lot of coin, frankly, but if startups are expensive these days, crypto startups are doubleplusexpensive. OSOM's phone debut delayed for new chip: From the ashes of Essentials, an effort to build a new smartphone, OSOM was born. But instead of showing its latest and greatest at the recent phone event (MWC), the startup was "convinced that pushing things back to launch a new device with the latest Qualcomm chip would be a prudent business decision." New Zealand gets new venture fund: If you are building a startup in Australia or New Zealand, you might feel somewhat distant from Silicon Valley. And that's fair. It's a long flight. But in good news, "Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta and Glen Anderson formed New Zealand's first operator-run fund, NZVC, over the last year," we write, and the fund just reached a first close worth $10 million. Consolidation in the transcription space: We love a startup deal here at TechCrunch, so we took the time to write up Verbit ("AI-powered transcription and captioning service") buying Take Note ("transcription, captioning and note-taking services"). Otter.ai is also in the market, and DeepGram fits in somewhere as well. Decipad wants to make you an Excel wizard: OK not precisely, but the startup does want to help folks do more with numbers. Given how important spreadsheets and other methods for housing and tinkering with numbers are to the global economy, no one is going to be able to say that Decipad lacks TAM. And the startup just raised $5 million for its work. And there was even more, of course: MyPlace raised nearly $6 million for a home-sharing social network, Apollo.io raised $110 million for its "sales intelligence and engagement platform," Ingrid Lunden writes, and Atomic raised a $40 million Series B for its payroll API efforts.

To achieve enterprise sales success, tailor your approach to CIOs You are more likely to close a sale if you have some insights into your prospective customer’s needs. But for enterprise startups, that presents a special problem. Unless you’re a former CIO who has a clear understanding of the decision-making process, you can only fall back on basic best practices that will usually result in a generic pitch. Ridge Ventures partner and five-time CIO Yousuf Khan wrote a column for TechCrunch+ that explores “what CIOs look for in solutions and how you can tailor your sales approach accordingly.” Founders who take a mindful approach can turn customers into assets, says Khan. “Good relationships with executive buyers can help shape your company as it grows, ultimately serving as an unofficial advisory board of the top leaders and experts within your customer base.” (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: sergeyskleznev

Big Tech Inc. Rivian partially retracts price hikes: Early reviews look good for Rivian's trucks, but announced price hikes were not well-received by the market. Now the public EV company is saying that if you ordered your vehicle before the start of March, no price hikes for you! Yet more spyware is out there, stealing your data: Sadly, the name of the Android spyware that is sucking up folks' information is called TeaBot, which is a super-cute moniker. Regardless, it's out in the market racking up downloads, which is pretty bad. Twitter expands its Birdwatch program: Can community fact-checking make Twitter a better place? The company hopes so, and is expanding its "community-based fact-checking initiative" called Birdwatch to work on just that.

TechCrunch Experts TechCrunch is recruiting recruiters for TechCrunch Experts, an ongoing project where we ask top professionals about problems and challenges that are common in early-stage startups. If that's you or someone you know, you can let us know here. Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

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With EU ban pending, Google Play says 'do svidaniya' to Russia Today, Sputnik apps

TechCrunch Newsletter

Wednesday, March 02, 2022 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Wednesday, March 2, 2022. We have a packed newsletter for you today. We've got acquisitions, funding rounds, the end of products, and more. Also TechCrunch Live is heading to Austin, which is going to be good fun, and the Equity team figured out how to explain fintech TAM with dating apps. Now, to work! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3 Epic Games buys Bandcamp: Straight from left field, this deal took the tech world by surprise. Epic Games, best known for Fortnite and picking a – deserved, or petty, depending on your priors – fight with Apple over in-app purchases in its app store. And now it's going to own Bandcamp, a platform best known for helping musical artists sell their tunes and keep most of the money. Sure. Why not. Turns out not every company is going to grow vertically: Back when SPACs were hot, many startups looking to combine and go public were content to forecast aggressive revenue growth. Now that the data is coming in, the results are a bit less spectacular than many deals pitched. How far from reality were the projections? We have the data. Amazon's physical store push is over: You might have never visited one, and if not, too late. Amazon's physical stores that sold curated collections of goods from its e-commerce marketplace are now kaput. So, no more odd Amazon bookstores, or so-called four-star stores. Given what a minute fraction of the company's aggregate GMV we're talking about here, this is not Earth-shaking news, but does matter for the larger set of DTC startups out there considering physical retail. If Amazon can't make it work, well, can you?

SUPER PUMPED: The Battle for UBER - Now Streaming Sponsored by SHOWTIME From the creators of Billions comes the meteoric rise and fall of bad-boy Uber founder, Travis Kalanick, and the driving ambition that revolutionized the transportation industry forever. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kyle Chandler and Uma Thurman. Learn More

Startups/VC The push to fund Ukraine's war-torn nation-state with crypto is turning out to be An Actual Thing. Which is good, as the country needs the money, and it's good to see blockchain cash have a real-world impact other than enriching your rivals. TechCrunch has notes on how Ukraine is using the coin more generally and from a military perspective. Scooting along: Accel has put together a new fund to invest in India. Worth some $650 million, you might think to yourself, hot dang, how big has the Indian venture scene become in recent years? The answer? Huge. Before we get into the day's funding round revue, two more short notes. First, Tier Mobility is buying mobility company Spin from Ford. Recall that for a short period of time, it appeared the whole world might move to shared scooters as a way to get around. That didn't last, but some of the assets built during the period remain on the books of, well, companies that have other priorities. This deal didn't shock us. And, second, TechCrunch has an op-ed up today on space debris, one of my favorite pet issues. Read it here. From the funding spigot: Neobanks continue to raise: Long from the point when it appeared that there was infinite capital available and needed to fund neobanks, rounds for the fintech varietal appear to have slowed. But that hasn't stopped Australian neobank Zeller from raising AUD$100 million at an AUD$1 billion valuation. That's a Series B for the record books. TrueCircle wants to reform recycling: The world is still using single-use plastics, which means we're polluting the hell out of our only home. Even more, recycling can be more mirage than reality in many markets. So it's nice to see U.K.-based TrueCircle look to "bring data-driven AI to the recycling industry to improve recovery rates and quality." The company just closed a pre-seed round worth $5.5 million. Blockchain infra is big business: The rush to fund blockchain-focused startups – be they bitcoin-centered, or web3 more generally – is showing slim signs of slowing. Today's round from the market involves Tenderly, which just raised $40 million. Dev tools for the decentralized world is a popular startup market, with Alchemy reaching decacorn status pursuing the same general bent as Tenderly. NeuraLegion is now Bright Security: Talk about a rename. This reminds me of when I wanted to name a company I was thinking about starting "Functional Brilliance," which, thankfully, I was talked out of. The same goes for NeuraLegion, which I am sure was great on paper but is a bit trash. Bright Security is simpler, and therefore better. The company just raised $20 million to keep working on "dynamic application security testing and identifying business logic issues," TechCrunch reports. Deskless workers need comms, too: In four words, that's the pitch behind Connecteam, which just raised $120 million at a valuation of around $800 million. The push to bring software to folks who aren't sitting for a living is not new – Blink has been at it for a minute – but it is welcome. Everyone deserves to get more done with less work, so here's to code making that possible – when possible.

As war escalates in Europe, it's 'shields up' for the cybersecurity industry The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a notice after Russia invaded Ukraine warning against the potential for state-sponsored cyber attacks: “Every organization — large and small — must be prepared to respond to disruptive cyber activity,” it advised. Blanket warnings are hard to act on, but now that virtually all information is stored remotely and employees are widely distributed, CISA’s “shields up” advisory has special urgency. How should companies assess and protect their external attack surface? We’ve got answers. (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Rosley Majid / EyeEm / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Apple's next event is March 8: Mark your calendars and cancel your meetings. TechCrunch, of course, will be covering it to the nth degree. Facebook shutters social network for college kids: This is news to me, but Facebook built a social network for college kids called Campus. Which is ironic as that's where the company started. But, hey, what can you do? Perhaps it will reopen in the metaverse. Ford to cleave itself into two pieces: The ICE part of Ford and the electric half of the company are going to sit in different spheres as the U.S. company figures out its future. At this point, you can likely guess which group will get more investment over the next 10 years. EU clamps down on Russian state media: Another way in which Russia's invasion of Ukraine is backfiring is in the drastic, rapid shuttering of access to the nation's governmental propaganda outlets. The EU is busy banning them, and the impacts are rippling outward in the market. Netflix buys gaming company behind titles predicated on its IP: What do you do when global growth at your streaming business slows? Get into games, apparently. The Netflix push to become a player in the gaming world took a new turn today, with the U.S. tech and media giant buying Next Games, a Finnish company that made games based on owned titles.

TechCrunch Experts TechCrunch is recruiting recruiters for TechCrunch Experts, an ongoing project where we ask top professionals about problems and challenges that are common in early-stage startups. If that's you or someone you know, you can let us know here. Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

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Drone service Wing completes 200K commercial deliveries, partners with supermarket chain

TechCrunch Newsletter

Tuesday, March 01, 2022 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Tuesday, March 1, 2022. Akin to how it takes nation-states a little time to get sanctions up and running, tech companies don't roll out responses to geopolitical changes in a moment. But today we have notes on what tech companies are doing in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Before we get into the news, however, our Sessions: Mobility event is going to flat-our rock. See you there! – Alex Image Credits: Wing

The TechCrunch Top 3 Hackers leak Nvidia data: After a cyberattack, Nvidia confirmed to TechCrunch that hackers are leaking its data. What was taken? "Sensitive data from its networks, including employee credentials and proprietary company information," we write. Attacks of this nature are not rare, but they are potentially damaging. Alphabet's drone-delivery company reaches milestone: A little under the radar, but Alphabet's Wing division has been busy flying deliveries to customers with drones at an increasingly rapid pace. Wing just announced that it reached 200,000 commercial deliveries, about half a year after it reached 100,000. With much of the flights taking place in Australia, it's not a shock that Wing also said today that it is linking up what Aussie chain Coles. Tech limits Russian government's reach: The war in Ukraine is far from over, but the ability of the Russian state to push its own narrative is rapidly fading. YouTube is blocking Russia Today, Facebook and Instagram are limiting the reach of Russian state-linked media, and the Meta property famous for filtered images is releasing encrypted DMs in both Ukraine and Russia.

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Startups/VC TechCrunch has been tracking growth in the number of startups in the market selling their wares via API for some time now. The boom in API-first startups fits neatly into the evolution of software pricing away from traditional SaaS methodology toward a more on-demand model. Anyway, I wrote a bit about a new index of API-led startups that GGV is putting together. As a teaser, it includes links to around 84 trillion API startups, in case you wanted a look at the segment. Jolla looks to cut ties with Russia: It's tough to build an operating system if you are not a major tech platform company. Hell, Microsoft taught us with Windows Phone that even if you are a platform company, it's hard. So when Jolla, which is building a “mobile Linux-based alternative to Google's Android," decides to cut ties with Russia, where it has users, it's an Actually Material Choice. Uppbeat raises $6.15M to make sure your video has music: Lots of video is made and uploaded to the internet every day. And if you want to make money from it, you will often want to avoid music, as including tunes can get your duckets took. So, Uppbeat has built a service that provides free music for folks to use in their clips. And it has grown to 500,000 users, which I thought was notable. Commsor wants to scale community beyond capitalism: I normally rewrite headlines in this newsletter for length and to make small jokes, but Natasha Mascarenhas' headline is perfect so I've left it unchanged. Commsor has built what she describes as "an operating system to help other startups manage their communities." So does every startup need a community? Nope, it turns out. Zero Systems wants to automate professional services: I like the idea behind Zero Systems. Ron Miller describes its goal as bringing automation to "professional services like law firms," which makes good sense. The real value at a law firm is not its ability to say, handle humdrum paperwork. It's in having legal minds at the ready. So, why not automate the other stuff? The startup just closed a $12 million Series A. Figma is bringing whiteboarding to iPad: Figma is worth $10 billion, recall. Instacart loses head of payments to startup: Instacart, worth eleventy-nine quadrillion dollars after raising lots of money during the pandemic, is an IPO candidate this year or next. So to see it shed some staff along the way is not a huge surprise, though the company likely won't be happy to lose someone from its fintech team. Regardless, Forage – which is building payments tech for governments – is likely stoked at the recent poaching. OpsLevel raises $15M for microservices management: I kinda know what a microservice is. It's a small discrete unit of application that you string together into a larger system, right? I think so. Anyway, if you have a lot of them, I reckon it would be hard to get them all in order? That's kinda the idea behind microservices management, which is what OpsLevel does. And it just raised capital to keep at it. And there was so much more: Satellite startup Vu is about to put tech into orbit, Veev just raised $400 million for pre-fab homes, Nayya raised $55 million to provide recommendations for healthcare and other benefits, Subspace raised to make blockchains less carbon-intensive, and Starship Technologies – a very good name, I would add – raised $42 million for a fleet of terrestrial robots. I retract my naming praise!

10 investors discuss the no-code and low-code landscape in Q1 2022 When we published our last low-code/no-code investor survey in August 2020, the former president had decided to ban TikTok, Epic was filing antitrust cases against Apple and Google, and movie theaters around the U.S. were shuttering to slow the spread of the then-novel coronavirus. Seems like a long time ago. Since then, many of the key trends and themes we surfaced have come to pass: Airtable clinched an $11 billion valuation in December 2021 after raising a $735 million Series F with help from Salesforce Ventures and Michael Dell's MSD Capital. Not to be outdone, Microsoft's Power Fx low-code programming language now connects hundreds of apps. A year and a half ago, many companies were starting to get comfortable with no-code and low-code software. Today, "it's transforming entire categories of enterprise software," says Navin Chaddha, managing director at VC firm Mayfield. To learn more about how the space has evolved in the last year and a half "and when they expect their investments to start paying off," Karan Bhasin interviewed: Sri Pangulur, partner, and Paul Lee, partner, Tribe Capital Ganesh Bell, managing director, Insight Partners Renato Valente, general partner, Iporanga Ventures Mo Islam, partner, Threshold Ventures Tommi Uhari, founding partner, Karma Ventures Navin Chaddha, managing director, Mayfield Alex Nichols, vice-president, and Laela Sturdy, general partner, CapitalG Raviraj Jain, partner, Lightspeed Ventures (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: malerapaso / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Oh god please stop making Marvel movies: I know that everyone else cares about this, so I am including it here. News is out today that "Disney+ will now house the Marvel live-action shows that were previously available on Netflix." This blows my mind somewhat, as I had no idea there were also live-action Marvel shows in addition to all the movies? How much Marvel can we take before we get intravenous content poisoning? How Adobe's diversity chief uses data to build a more equitable workplace: Another Ron Miller piece from today, this time diving into how companies can make real progress on diversifying their workplaces. Miller has been aces on this particular beat in recent quarters.

TechCrunch Experts TechCrunch is recruiting recruiters for TechCrunch Experts, an ongoing project where we ask top professionals about problems and challenges that are common in early-stage startups. If that's you or someone you know, you can let us know here. Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

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