iCloud News

Thursday, June 3, 2021

Daily Crunch - Canada and Australia get first look at Twitter Blue subscription service

Thursday, June 03, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 3, 2021. If you are a startup founder or early employee or investor, there's good news on the TechCrunch front today: The start of the Disrupt agenda is live! It's going to be one hell of a show for anyone interested in startups and how they grow. See you there! — Alex

Image Credits: TechCrunch

The TechCrunch Top 3

United goes Boom: News broke today that United Airlines has agreed to purchase 15 supersonic jets from Boom, a startup focused on building them. For Boom, the deal is a big happening, evidence of material market demand for its products. And, given how much planes cost in general, a huge set of bookings for the company to show to its investors that have plowed nearly a quarter billion dollars into the company, according to Crunchbase.
Twitter is Blue: No, the social media company isn't sad. Quite the opposite. Instead, Twitter's subscription service Blue is going live in two markets for a few dollars per month. It's something of a very public test of what Twitter hopes — we presume — will be a globally available subscription option for those of us who can't stop tweeting.
Women's health remains an underinvested startup niche: TechCrunch's Natasha Mascarenhas dug into the world of hormonal health for the blog today, asking why there aren't unicorns in the huge market. It's a great read.

CleanTech Companies: Seize today's infrastructure opportunity

Startups and VC

We're dividing up today's startup and venture capital news into two buckets. The first comprises early-stage rounds, and the latter investments in upstarts that are a bit more mature.

India's early-stage market accelerates: Manish Singh reports for TechCrunch that a host of Indian startups are in the process of raising money. He broke an ocean of news in his piece on the matter, not only underscoring how active the global venture market is, but just how hard it can be to keep track of all the activity.
Simplified raises $2.2M to support marketing creative: Marketers are expected to generate lots of content. Simplified is taking on Canva and that huge market need in a single go. And now it's backed by Craft Ventures.
Ganaz raises $7M to help agricultural workers get paid: Not every tech company has to cater to the tech elite or the wealthy. Ganaz is betting that its business — focused on what we described as changing "how people with little documentation and no bank account get paid and send money with a modern workforce stack" — is going to be a hit. Given how huge the agricultural sector is, its wager makes some sense.

And then, on the late-stage front:

Gong raises $250M for sales automation: Gong's rapid growth and latest funding was part of my column this morning because of how interesting they proved to be. In short, the sales automation company has roughly tripled its valuation to more than $7 billion since last August. How? By growing by more than 2x in the last year.
Realtime Robotics raises $31M for real-time robotics: Boston's startup scene is more than biotech, it should be clear by now. Realtime Robotics is one such Beantown startup that isn't building new drugs. Instead, Brian Heater reports, it's building robot software to "help companies deploy systems with limited programming, offering adaptable controls that work for multiple systems at once."
LeoLabs raises $65M to keep satellites from hitting each other: As SpaceX sends bushels of internet satellites into space, the issue of crowding in near-Earth orbit will only get stickier. LeoLabs is betting that keeping expensive space tech from hitting other space tech, or even space trash, is going to be a growth industry.

3 lessons we learned after raising $6.3M from 50 investors

Two years ago, founders of calendar-assistant platform Reclaim were looking for a “mango” seed round — a boodle of cash large enough to help them transition from the prototype phase to staffing up for a public launch.

Although the team received offers, co-founder Henry Shapiro says the few that materialized were poor options, partially because Reclaim was still pre-product.

So one summer morning, my co-founder and I sat down in his garage — where we'd been prototyping, pitching and iterating for the past year — and realized that as hard as it was, we would have to walk away entirely and do a full reset on our fundraising strategy.

In a guest post for Extra Crunch, Shapiro shares what he learned from embracing failure and offers three conclusions “every founder should consider before they decide to go out and pitch investors.”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

3 lessons we learned after raising $6.3M from 50 investors image

Image Credits: sorbetto / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc.

Big Tech was busy yet again today, with news from Waymo, Twitter and Blackstone. We also have to talk about the law.

You can now hail Waymo taxis in Google Maps: Vertical integration, baby! It's a jam if you are a platform company that makes self-driving cars, operates a taxi service, and also publishes what I presume is the most popular mapping software in the world.
In related news: Waymo, bring self-driving taxis to Providence, Rhode Island, you cowards!
In related apologies: Waymo is not made up of cowards, but merely businesspeople who should invest more of their testing budget in Providence, Rhode Island.
Twitter wants to hear you talk: Twitter is bringing its Spaces product more front-and-center in its mobile experience. Sure, all you use Twitter for today is tweets, but Big Tweet will soon want to send your newsletters, host your chats, and, well, distribute your Fleets as well.
A court case draws limits around a controversial American hacking law: Per TechCrunch, the U.S. Supreme Court "ruled that a police officer who searched a license plate database for an acquaintance in exchange for cash did not violate U.S. hacking laws" in a "landmark ruling [that] concludes a long-running case that clarifies the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA."
In terms of legal news and tech, it's nice to have some good news.
And, finally, Blackstone is buying IDG: While your humble TechCrunchers are somewhat sensitive to the idea of private equity buying media properties, the Blackstone-IDG deal is yet another example of the trend.
The deal means that titles like "CIO, Computerworld, InfoWorld, Macworld, Network World, PCWorld, and Tech Hive" are changing hands, along with IDC itself.

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard

See more jobs on CrunchBoard

Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month.

View this email online in your browser

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Daily Crunch - Spotify's new 'Only You' feature expands on personalization investment

Wednesday, June 02, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 2, 2021. It's a good day in the tech world because former unicorn Spotify is out with new features about you. Yes, the company is taking its yearly listening review to a midyear format and packing its app with even more personalized mixes. My playlists are why I won't leave Spotify until the heat death of the universe, so I suppose it makes sense that the service is doubling down on its personalization feature set.

And yes, I do listen to a lot of Taylor Swift in the morning. — Alex

Image Credits: Malte Mueller / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3

Stack Overflow sells for $1.8B: Well-known developer community and hub of copy-pastable coding snippets for software engineers of all skill levels Stack Overflow is selling itself to Prosus for nearly $2 billion. What's Prosus? It's part of Naspers, a South African investing group that you may have heard of. Naspers is perhaps best known for owning a large stake in Tencent.
Guild Education raises $150M: The company, focused on providing what TechCrunch described as "employer-sponsored learning opportunities" for employees, is now worth $3.75 billion after its latest funding round. For the burgeoning edtech startup market, the round is big news. There's still lots of capital for tech companies tackling the various sides of the education market.
The great technology company liquidity run continues: As well-known tech startups like Marqeta look to list, other companies are jumping on the bandwagon. TechCrunch reported this morning that fintech firm Yieldstreet may go public via a SPAC, and data-centered unicorn Confluent is also going public.

Wondering about the no-code movement?

Startups and VC

The week's busy startup fundraising cycle continued today with a host of companies from the very earliest stages to the most mature unicorns raising capital. What follows is a selection of the day's hottest deals. We're starting in the world of wheels:

Faction raises $4.3M for three-wheeled delivery vehicles: That are driverless, we should add. Daily Crunch is certain that, simply given the sheer amount of capital that has gone into the various projects of this sort, it will eventually work. Perhaps Faction will be the company to get it right.
FlixMobility raises $650M for its low-cost bus service: If you are American, you may have not heard of FlixMobility, which operates FlixBus and FlixTrain, low-cost transport services in Europe. The company is also working to expand in the U.S. For reference, the new Flix round is a Series G.
Tier options $60M for e-scooter network: Electric scooter shares are not dead, it turns out. Sure, Bird's SPAC demonstrates how difficult the economics proved for the model in some markets, but Tier now has access to a "highly scalable asset-backed debt facility," in the words of its CFO, to keep growing. The company also has some neat battery tech aboard its portfolio.

Now, today's other rounds of note tackling a more diverse set of industries:

Stemma raises $4.8M for managed Amundsen: What's Amundsen? Per Ron, it's a "data catalogue project that [Lyft built] to manage its massive data requirements." And now there's a startup offering it as a service. This reminds me of BuildBuddy to a degree, in which a startup takes on a BigCo tool, helping others access and leverage it.
$131M in total capital for Jeeves: It's $31 million in equity funding and $100 million in debt access, which we presume is a revolving facility of sorts because Jeeves is building a multinational expense management platform. You know, for companies that have employees everywhere. Like every single early-stage startup we talk to these days.
Divido raises money because apparently we still need more buy now, pay later (BNPL) services: Divido has put together a fresh $30 million round to bring its BNPL service to more markets, TechCrunch reports. The startup BNPL market has been hot because the companies in it have been doing well. But at some point we hit saturation, right? Right?

With $1.6B Depop purchase, Etsy asks, 'How do you do, fellow kids?'

News broke today that Etsy will buy used fashion marketplace Depop in a transaction that values the U.K.-based startup at $1.625 billion.

Depop showed 100% year-over-year growth to reach $70 million in revenue last year, but it’s still worth asking whether Etsy paid a premium to expand its reach into the hearts, minds and wallets of Gen Z and young millennial consumers.

To frame the deal’s overall value in a larger context, let’s look at revenue multiples for rivals Poshmark and ThredUp. If large e-commerce players are willing to splash out for youth-approved marketplaces, there’s a good reason why.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

With $1.6B Depop purchase, Etsy asks, 'How do you do, fellow kids?' image

Image Credits: Getty Images

Big Tech Inc.

Big Tech was super busy today, Spotify aside. Today we're talking Amazon, Apple, Facebook, GitLab and Huawei:

Welcome to 2021, Amazon: The American e-commerce giant is doing away with cannabis testing of its employees. Our first reaction to this news was that Amazon was drug testing its employees?
Apple thinks highly of itself: Apple has a study out saying that it facilitated more than a half-trillion dollars in commerce last year. We are sure that Apple really put itself to the test in coming up with the number.
Facebook does two things that don't suck: Today Facebook opened up its Messenger API to all companies, which is good. And Big Blue put together a research API. Both are good things from Zuck's empire. Which is nice to say for once.
GitLab buys UnReview: GitLab is north of $100 million in revenue and is slated for an eventual IPO, so it's big enough to warrant inclusion in this section. Regardless, the GitHub competitor has bought a startup that "helps software teams recommend the best reviewers for when developers want to check in their latest code" using machine learning. Honestly, that sounds cool.
Huawei's new OS loves Android: TechCrunch has lots of details on HarmonyOS, the new operating system from Huawei. It turns out that it uses some Android code. All hail Google, we suppose.

Community

Tomorrow (Thursday) at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT, we'll be chatting on Twitter Spaces about the future of e-commerce with Accel's Ethan Choi, who wrote this piece for Extra Crunch recently. Joining him will be our very own Danny Crichton, Shogun CEO Finbarr Taylor and Shopify's VP of Product and GM of Platform, Brandon Chu. Keep an eye on our tweets for details and come have a listen (and bring your thoughts and questions!).

TC Eventful

Are you a founder trying to get your startup off the ground? If so, TC Early Stage: Marketing & Fundraising is here to help! During this two-day bootcamp, leading experts will guide you through marketplace positioning to growth marketing and content development. Get an additional 10% off early-bird pricing if you register before this Friday with promo code DAILYCRUNCH — Register Now!

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard

See more jobs on CrunchBoard

Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month.

View this email online in your browser

Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Daily Crunch - Wefox CEO says $650M Series C was 'much more than we wanted to raise initially'

Tuesday, June 01, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello, and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 1, 2021. We're back from a long weekend here in the United States, which means that the blog has been humming all day. Today's tech and startup news had a fun mix of the old going new (7-Eleven adding EV charging points), and new going old (check out this new diaper startup), but mostly we had funding rounds. Lots of them. So let's get to work! — Alex

Image Credits: Andrea_Hill / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3

European tech is hot: EU-based insurtech startup Wefox announced a $650 million round today. The huge round will surely help burnish Europe's Q2 venture capital results, while also underscoring how the neoinsurance provider boom that we've seen in America is hardly a domestic affair. Expect more investment and startup activity in this space during the rest of 2021.
Hadoop is not: Cloudera and Hortonworks were once hot startups. They both went public. And then they struggled. So they teamed up in a $5.2 billion merger. And then they struggled. And now their combined entity is being taken off the public markets by a pair of private equity companies for $5.3 billion, a modest premium on their pre-deal value. Thus concludes Hadoop's startup run.
The IPO boom continues: But while The Artist Formerly Known As Hortonworks takes its leave, many companies are looking to join the public markets. Sprinklr, for example. The New York-based customer experience startup is looking to list on the back of modest revenue gains and possibly improving profitability.

Embedded Analytics Demo | AI Driven. Cloud First.

Startups and VC

The last 24 hours have brought a steady deluge of startup rounds. We can't fit them all in the newsletter. But here are some of our favorites all the same:

Molecule.one raises $4.6M for computational chemistry: Former TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participant Molecule.one wants to "bring theoretical drug molecules to reality," we reported, creating workflows to help labs figure out how to make exotic molecules from known materials and methods.
project44 raises $202M for supply chain APIs: project44 uses APIs to provide "connective tissue" between the myriad players in the supply chain world. The company is now worth $1.2 billion, a rapid-fire doubling of its prior valuation. That's thanks to money from Goldman Sachs and rapid growth. TechCrunch reports that the company has "crossed $50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), which is up 100% year over year."
Redacted raises $60M for proactive cybersecurity: Most cybersecurity software feels defensive. Redacted, fresh out of stealth, wants to flip that narrative and, instead, "proactively [go] after the hackers to recover data loss and disrupt their activities." There are probably fun legal questions at play here, but it's a nice mental image at least.
Truebill raises $45M for its personal finance app: Early in life Truebill was a neat way to cancel subscriptions. But like all consumer fintech products in 2021, it has become a broad service that offers a host of features and capabilities. Savings? Sure. Credit information? Why not. You get the idea.
Belvo raises $43M for fintech APIs: Since Belvo first took part in Y Combinator, we've been pretty positive about the company's chances. Building a sort of Plaid for the Latin American market, it seemed like a pretty darn good bet. And today's news that the company has put together a fresh $43 million in funding somewhat backs up our early read.

4 proven approaches to CX strategy that make customers feel loved

People have been working to optimize customer experiences (CX) since we began selling things to each other.

A famous San Francisco bakery has an exhaust fan at street level; each morning, its neighbors awake to the scent of orange-cinnamon morning buns wafting down the block. Similarly, savvy hair stylists know to greet returning customers by asking if they want a repeat or something new.

Online, CX may encompass anything from recommending the right shoes to AI that knows when to send a frustrated traveler an upgrade for a delayed flight.

In light of Qualtrics’ spinout and IPO and Sprinklr’s recent S-1, Rebecca Liu-Doyle, principal at Insight Partners, describes four key attributes shared by “companies that have upped their CX game.”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

4 proven approaches to CX strategy that make customers feel loved image

Image Credits: mucahiddin / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc.

Big Tech news on the blog was somewhat light today thanks to the pace of startup happenings. But we still found time to discuss how Twitter is making room for more ads on its service. But don't worry — unless you use its Fleets service, you probably won't see them.

While Daily Crunch has been positive concerning Twitter's general product work of late, this is one update that we'd be happy to skip.

Then from Line, news that the messaging app best known for its market share in certain Asian markets is now a bank. Basically. TechCrunch wrote that the well-known tech company "launched a digital banking platform in Indonesia today" that will include "deposit accounts, microcredit products, and remittance and payment services."

It's a joke in tech that every messaging app is really a dating service. That's so old-fashioned. Now every app is simply a service that exists somewhere on the evolutionary continuum of becoming — slowly or quickly — a horizontal fintech offering.

Community

Another IPO, but will it be a successful public offering? Tell us what you think will happen with Sprinklr.

You've probably heard about our upcoming field trip to Pittsburgh, which even the mayor is excited about. Have friends building companies in the Steel City? Ask them to sign up to pitch during the event.

And while you're clicking around, come visit us on Discord.

TC Eventful

You're invited to tomorrow's Extra Crunch Live event, where Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra and Madrona investor S. Somasegar will break down how Coda managed to rise above the noise in the collaborative software space and raise $140 million in funding. You'll even get your chance to show off your pitching skills during the pitch-off. Grab your seat tomorrow at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT by registering here!

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard

See more jobs on CrunchBoard

Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month.

View this email online in your browser

iCloud News

Thursday, June 3, 2021

Daily Crunch - Canada and Australia get first look at Twitter Blue subscription service

The TechCrunch Top 3

CleanTech Companies: Seize today's infrastructure opportunity

Sponsored by CohnReznick

Startups and VC

3 lessons we learned after raising $6.3M from 50 investors

Big Tech Inc.

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Daily Crunch - Spotify's new 'Only You' feature expands on personalization investment

The TechCrunch Top 3

Wondering about the no-code movement?

Sponsored by Formstack

Startups and VC

With $1.6B Depop purchase, Etsy asks, 'How do you do, fellow kids?'

Big Tech Inc.

Community

TC Eventful

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard

Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Daily Crunch - Wefox CEO says $650M Series C was 'much more than we wanted to raise initially'

The TechCrunch Top 3

Embedded Analytics Demo | AI Driven. Cloud First.

Sponsored by Sisense

Startups and VC

4 proven approaches to CX strategy that make customers feel loved

Big Tech Inc.

Community

TC Eventful

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard