Facebook releases internal research on Instagram's mental health effects

TechCrunch Newsletter

Thursday, September 30, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for September 30, 2021. It's the last day of the third quarter! Yes, that means earnings season is coming, along with a whole bunch of venture capital data — more on that in a moment — but more importantly, how the heck is it Q4? Already? From the TechCrunch side of things, cheap tickets to our Sessions: SaaS event are going away in short order. So, snap 'em up if you are coming. I'm hosting and even doing a panel or two. See you there! – Alex Read More

The TechCrunch Top 3 Facebook spins own research: The only way to get Facebook to release data and research concerning its own platform that hasn't been filtered through its PR leviathan is to have it leak. Then Facebook may release it, but with a huge dose of its own spin. This, of course, is precisely the sort of transparency that the social giant is famous for and discussed before the Senate today. India's startup market on pace for staggering Q3: An early look into India's rapidly expanding venture capital market indicates that the country could set fresh records in Q3. The India-China rivalry that we see in so many spheres now has a startup angle as well. We have even more on India in our startup notes! Alloy raises $100M for anti-fraud work: While we often write about fintech startups that feature consumers as their customer base, not every financial technology upstart wants to sell to you or me. Alloy is an example of a B2B fintech startup, focused on automating "onboarding identity decisions" and "transaction monitoring," TechCrunch reports. The company is now worth $1.35 billion. Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Liberty Raises $1.4M+ for Electric Vehicle Charging Systems! Sponsored by Liberty Access Technologies Liberty's patented HYDRA-RX is a uniquely designed controller that can work with maximum output AC chargers for electric vans and school buses at one-tenth of the cost of a typical DC Fast Chargers. Invest on StartEngine starting at $300. Learn More

Startups/VC Before we start, TechCrunch's Brian Heater gets 47 points for this headline. As promised above, let's start our startup work with two stories from India: Ola Electric raises $200M: The Bangalore-based startup, which builds electric scooters, is part of the larger Ola empire, a huge startup in the Indian market that provides ride-hailing services in the country. Ola's Electric business is now worth $3 billion, up from $1 billion two years ago. And speaking of Indian startups now worth $3B, Tiger invests in OfBusiness: The $207 million Series F round doubles the value of OfBusiness in just two months, to a now tidy sum of $3 billion. What does the startup do? Per TechCrunch, it's a "commerce startup that sells industrial goods and provides small businesses with credit." Given how many SMBs there are in India, the startup shouldn't run out of room to grow for some time. Next up, venture capital news: BGV closes fourth fund worth $110M: Benhamou Global Ventures, better known as BGV, has a fourth fund to invest from now, and it's 60% bigger than its preceding investment vehicle. So far BGV has invested in 28 companies and expects that number to rise by more than a dozen with its new fund. Counterpart Ventures also raises $110M, but for its first fund: What do you get when you take two former corporate venture capital investors and spin them out into their own fund? The backers of Counterpart are about to find out. The pair invested in Noom and DataRobot in their prior roles. And, finally, a venture round rundown: Specialty chips are big business: That's the wager behind Speedata, which just came out of stealth and announced $70 million in financial backing. The fabless company is building what it describes as "the world's first dedicated processor for optimizing cloud-based database and analytic workloads." Given how big the data center market is, and how much demand there is for data science work, the company could be taking on a simply enormous market. Voodoo buys Beach Bum: No, that's not code or slang. That's an accurate summation of my favorite bit of M&A in some time. Per our own Romain Dillet, French mobile gaming company Voodoo is buying Israel-based Beach Bum, which "specialize[s] in tabletop and card games." You can see how the latter could feed the former with ideas and IP. As a data point about how big the casual gaming market is, Voodoo claims 300 million MAUs, per its website. Casual gaming is big. Forta raises $23M for smart contract security: As the blockchain economy (market?) grows, its security needs are expanding right along with it. And as smart contracts become an ever-more important function inside of the crypto world, their security needs are also rising. Forta, backed by a host of crypto-focused investors you have heard of, thinks that it has the solution to the matter. More capital for B2B gifting: On the back of corporate gifting startup Sendoso raising $100 million the other week, Reachdesk has raised $43 million for its own efforts in the space. Corp gifting brings together e-commerce, sales tooling and IRL objects into a neat package. And to close us off, Accel and Tiger team up to put $23M into Mexican B2B payments platform Higo. The company raised a far-smaller $3.3 million seed round just a half-year ago, making the Higo round another note on Mexico's expanding startup market, a notably smaller deal from Tiger, and also, given how close it is landing to the company's preceding investment, something of a very 2021 moment.

Scaling across Series A to C It’s hard to find actionable, proven advice for scaling startups. That's because only 7% of the startups that raise seed rounds are able to grow their companies enough to land a Series C investment, according to a Dealroom study. To create a framework for founders who are charting a path from $1 million to $25 million in annual revenue, Arthur Nobel, a principal at Knight Capital, conducted 47 interviews with founders and investors who’ve taken startups from Series A to C. More than an overview, the article offers approaches for navigating the challenges of T2D3 (triple, triple, double, double, double) growth, specific hiring recommendations and other strategic insights. As a bonus, the post also includes steps and visualizations you can use to create your own scaling roadmap. “The takeaway is to initially figure out in which stage your company and departments are in and only do what is required for that stage,” writes Nobel. (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Mike Powell / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. New ad products from TikTok: Expect brands to have new ways to try to snag your attention on TikTok in the future, with the company working to bring "several new and interactive ad formats, ranging from clickable stickers to ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’-type ads to 'super likes' and more" to its social service. Whee. Lordstown may sell factory to Foxconn: Lordstown may sell a former GM plant it bought in 2019 to Foxconn. Lordstown is famous for not building EV trucks, while Foxconn is well known for not building factories in the United States. So, call it a perfect pairing. Facebook brings Messenger closer to Instagram: Cross-app messaging between Facebook and Instagram is getting easier with group conversations now possible. The decision from Facebook to make Instagram worse to prop up its core app is a business decision that I suspect we'll be chattin' about for decades to come. Spotify bolsters podcasting toolkit: Music streaming service Spotify would like its users to consume more podcasts, both to improve its gross-margin profile and to give it pricing power in the future thanks to exclusive content. To that end, the company is rolling out podcasting tools including polls and Q&A functionality to its global audience. The features were previously in beta.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing TechCrunch wants to help startups find the right expert for their needs. To do this, we're building a shortlist of the top growth marketers. We've received great recommendations for growth marketers in the startup industry since we launched our survey. We're excited to read more responses as they come in! Fill out the survey here. Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

Read more stories on TechCrunch.com

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard Systems Analyst at Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group (Rockville, MD 20852, USA) Data Engineer at Brivo (Bethesda, MD, USA) Director, Systems and Networks at Berklee College of Music (Boston, MA, USA) Information Security Engineer at Berklee College of Music (Boston, MA, USA) Senior IT Systems Engineer / Technical Architect at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA 02138, USA) 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 Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Unsubscribe © 2021 Verizon Media. All rights reserved. 110 5th St, San Francisco, CA 94103

Watch Live Stream of Cincinnati Bengals vs Jacksonville Jaguars

Welcome to NFL Season 2021! It's Game Time! 

*** STREAM #1 *** STREAM #2 *** 

(Please scroll down below and double click the play button to watch the game and skip the ads.) 

Andela reaches $1.5B valuation after SoftBank leads $200M Series E

TechCrunch Newsletter

Wednesday, September 29, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for September 29, 2021. Welcome to what feels like fall on the East Coast of the United States. Yes, the seasons are changing, but the technology and startup worlds are refusing to shift from the high-velocity pace that they've held for what feels like years at this point. Someone should tell them to drink hot tea by a window looking out at trees for a few days instead of doing, well, all that follows in this letter. — Alex Image Credits: Andela

The TechCrunch Top 3 Google announces slew of search updates: Alphabet company Google is the world leader on search, but with competition starting to nip at its heels, the company is busy rolling out upgrades to its tech. Today the company announced some redesign work, better wildfire tracking and an effort to bake more context into results. All of that is welcome, but doesn't cut at the core issue of rising ad loads on prime search real estate. Direct listings are hot: Recent public-market debuts from Amplitude and Warby Parker indicate that the direct-listing route to public-market liquidity is more than open today. For unicorns perhaps uncomfortable with the traditional IPO, it's more than good news. SoftBank pours $200M into Andela: While Tiger is making the largest media waves these days, SoftBank is still busy doing deals. Today the Japanese telco and investing powerhouse announced a deal to put several hundred million dollars into Andela, a startup that connects tech talent from Africa with companies elsewhere in the world. The round fits neatly in the talent crunch narrative we've heard so much about from companies in recent quarters and greater global respect for Africa's tech scene that we're seeing in venture capital results as well.

Faster, ad-free VPN browsing with Avast Secure Browser Sponsored by Avast Secure Browser Built by the security experts at Avast, this private VPN browser blocks ads and online trackers, masks your location, and protects your digital identity so you can browse, shop, and bank safely on any website. Download Here

Startups/VC Before we get into our general startup news roundup, let's talk climate. Earlier this week TechCrunch put together a deep dive into the huge opportunities for startups working on climate-related issues, efforts that could improve the world and make piles of money. Today's news really underscores the point. Today on TechCrunch we learned about DroneSeed's $36 million round that could help with habitat restoration post-wildfire; how climate volatility helped agtech startup Semios land $100 million; and that two new funds (Investible with AUD$100 million and Energize Ventures with $330 million) are also looking at the climate-tech space. That's quite the thematic bundle. Now, the rest of it: Read AI wants to help you shut up: Are you in lots of video meetings? Do you talk too much? It can't just be me. Folks dominating conversations is enough of a problem that Read AI is building tech to help meeting attendees track their speaking time and get it under control. The company just raised $10 million to fuel its efforts. Starfish Space is building space tugs: The current space race is not just SpaceX versus whatever else billionaires can cook up. There are a host of startups building for a space-friendly future in which in-space servicing is going to really matter. Starfish just raised $7 million for its work on building space tugs. Which are like tug boats, but smaller, and in orbit. Space tugs! That rules! Tonic.ai raises $35M: Today from the enterprise beat, Tonic just raised a huge grip of cash to grow its service that helps provide engineers with synthetic data sets. What are those? Per TechCrunch, it's "production-like data" that they can use for testing without annoying regulators both inside and outside their companies. So it's like lorem ipsum, but for even bigger nerds than lorem ipsum is for, I suppose. Cocoon raises $20M, wins prize in our hearts for having a good name: Cocoon is building a platform to help employees and employers alike better understand and manage leave. Hence cocoon, aka the thing you spin yourself into when you are not at work. The name is good, the product is neat — admit it, you don't really understand your corporate leave policy! — now let's see what market appetite is for the startup. VCs want to buy shares in startups working to help workers at venture-backed startups buy shares of their own: Today TechCrunch wrote about EquityBee and its new $55 million investment. The company helps workers at venture-backed companies exercise their options, a process that can be fraught with both tax implications and high cash costs.

3 questions startups must answer before taking on their largest competitors There is no level playing field in capitalism, but it is easier than ever for a scrappy startup to go head-to-head with industry leaders. Warby Parker is reshaping consumer expectations about eyewear, just as Poshmark and thredUP made a direct run at eBay and the luxury resale market. In a world where customers are more loyal to value than branding and 18-month roadmaps are the norm, startups that develop solid competitive plans have an advantage, says Sudheesh Nair, CEO of business intelligence company ThoughtSpot. “Successful startups will inevitably draw the attention of powerful incumbents in their industry,” he writes for TechCrunch+. “They will fight you, but if you are positioned well for the challenge there has never been a better time to prevail.” (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: benjaminec / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. YouTube cracks down on vaccine misinformation: Google's video giant is now taking its ban-stick to more content than just videos casting bullshit doubt on COVID-19 vaccinations. Now it's taking on videos casting bullshit doubt on any vaccines. Good. This is going to save lives. Everyone's favorite software company General Motors has a new platform dropping in 2023: It's called Ultifi — Ult-iffy? Ulti-ee-fee? Ult-ih-fy? — and TechCrunch reports that the company expects the platform to "usher in a sweeping set of capabilities including giving drivers access to in-car subscriptions and using over-the-air updates to offer new apps and services." Let's hope. Twitch bolsters channel control after hate-raids poison its service: After nasty hate brigading hit a number of Twitch streamers, the Amazon-owned video service announced "new channel-level security features to help curb harassment on the platform." Good!

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. At Disrupt, Jordan Crook was joined by Ryan Reynolds for a conversation about marketing. You can read the recap on TechCrunch+, "How Ryan Reynolds has mastered authentic marketing." Read More Image Credits: Guy Aroch

72 hours left to save $100 on passes to TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 We're less than one month away from TC Sessions: SaaS 2021, but your chance to save $100 on the price of admission disappears in just three days. Stop procrastinating, beat the deadline and purchase your pass before the early-bird price expires on October 1. Read More

Read more stories on TechCrunch.com

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard Director, Systems and Networks at Berklee College of Music (Boston, MA, USA) Information Security Engineer at Berklee College of Music (Boston, MA, USA) Senior IT Systems Engineer / Technical Architect at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA 02138, USA) Front End Engineer at Qusecure, Inc. (Anywhere) Unix/C Software Testing Engineer at Qusecure, Inc. (Anywhere) 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 Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Unsubscribe © 2021 Verizon Media. All rights reserved. 110 5th St, San Francisco, CA 94103

Backdrop app leverages social media to help users find beautiful destinations

TechCrunch Newsletter

Tuesday, September 28, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome back to Daily Crunch for September 28, 2021. A big thanks to y’all for the response to yesterday's TechCrunch+ rebrand. It was a real treat. Next up from TechCrunch is our killer SaaS-focused event, which you can save some money on here. I am hosting, so I promise a retinue of medium-quality jokes to go along with the day's panels and chats. It's going to be a real good time! — Alex Read More

The TechCrunch Top 3 Amazon releases a metric fuckload of hardware: Including a robot, it turned out. The company also dropped a video calling device along with a fitness wearable. The company's $999 Astro robot is driving the most attention today, but the company's list of new hardware was extensive. On the heels of the Microsoft Surface event, it's important to remember that every major software company also has a hardware effort. The Rivian EV truck is good: TechCrunch's inimitable transportation guru Kirsten Korosec has notes on the 2022 Rivian R1T electric truck on the blog today, and she's largely impressed. What did she like? Terrain flexibility, acceleration speed and internal details. Not to mention that the R1T is "no delicate flower" despite its premium finishes. The huge opportunity in climate tech: Korosec dropped another major piece recently, this one focused on the "enormous challenges and abundant opportunities" for startups amid the rising climate crisis. Startups have shown a strong ability to drive software revenues. Perhaps upstart tech companies will also play a role in keeping our planet — our home! — cool in the coming years.

Bring your product, we'll handle the data Sponsored by Flatfile Most products sit in empty-states until customer data is imported. Yet getting this data from customers is a pain! Take the pain out of importing customer data with Flatfile, the data onboarding platform built for driving the lowest time-to-value. Read More

Startups/VC Before we get too deep into the day's venture capital roundup, TechCrunch took a look ahead to the third quarter's venture capital results, detailing the five questions we are most curious about. Those include what's up with venture investment in China, what Latin American tallies will tell us about the spread of startup activity in the region and more. TechCrunch's Tage Kene-Okafor dug into Backdrop, a startup that has built a "photo-sharing app that merges tech, social media and travel," asking if we really need another mobile application to help us find gorgeous places while we travel. Perhaps Instagram has real competition on the horizon? Highnote wants to take on Marqeta: The world of card issuance is a busy one — more here from TechCrunch+ — and is about to get busier. Flush with $54 million in capital, Highnote just dropped its stealth tag and showed the world what it is building, namely what we described as a way to make it "easy for any company of any size to provide virtual payment cards to their customers." Stark wants to make software more accessible: It's not just Microsoft that is busy making technology products more accessible. Stark is building tech to help lots of companies get in on the work. The company's product is now in private beta, allowing users to upload designs, which Stark will then parse to identify possible accessibility issues along with suggesting possible changes. Cool! Heydoc raises $8.3M for medical data management: Heydoc's work to build a "system for managing the medical data and admin tasks" that healthcare workers run into all the time is now flush and has designs to break out of its current market in the U.K. to other locales. Today's Tiger round is Lifebit: Another day, another huge check from Tiger. This time it's Lifebit, which works to provide access to biomedical data that could help in drug discovery. This reminds me a bit of what Cellino is up to, albeit from a different angle. See, not all startups have to build enterprise-focused software. How nice to be reminded of that! Rize raises $11.4M for embedded fintech, with a twist: Embedded banking solutions are pretty common these days. What sets Rize apart, in its view, is a method of uniting different account types under a single user profile. Synthetic accounts, in its own verbiage.

Which form of venture debt should your startup go for? Startup founders have more options than in years past when it comes to fundraising, thanks in large part to a surplus of liquidity. Besides traditional VC, crowdfunding, venture banks and venture debt funds are all viable options. In a detailed overview of venture debt options, Andy Weyer, managing director of technology at Runway Growth Capital, shares three use cases depicting how debt capital can benefit borrowers hoping to retain leverage for future rounds or access working capital. “Think of capital availability as a spectrum, from low risk and low return (venture banks) to high risk and high return (venture capital), with venture debt funds sitting somewhere in the middle,” advises Weyer. (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Olemedia / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Today in application store drama, Microsoft: The sound and fury of app marketplaces' take rates and level of openness took on a new tune today with news from Microsoft. The Redmond-based software giant's store will now allow for third-party storefronts. If this is more sea change than PR effort, we leave to your discretion. Blue Prism sells for £1.095B: The RPA market is seeing some consolidation, it appears, in the wake of the UiPath IPO. Vista is buying Blue Prism for just under 1.1 billion pounds, with an intention to unite the company with another of its own portfolio entities. Blue Prism is a public company, mind, so you should have heard of it. And, finally, Cloudflare takes on AWS: Cloudflare is best known for its content delivery work, not for providing the sort of cloud infra that Amazon's AWS is famous for selling. And yet Cloudflare intends to poke the dragon with R2, a forthcoming service from the public company that will take on Amazon's S3 storage product. Notably, R2 will delete data egress fees, perhaps putting Amazon into something akin to a pricing tight spot.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing TechCrunch wants to help startups find the right expert for their needs. To do this, we're building a shortlist of the top growth marketers. We've received great recommendations for growth marketers in the startup industry since we launched our survey. We're excited to read more responses as they come in! Fill out the survey here. Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

Read more stories on TechCrunch.com

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard Front End Engineer at Qusecure, Inc. (Anywhere) Unix/C Software Testing Engineer at Qusecure, Inc. (Anywhere) Software Engineer at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, USA) Service Desk Analyst at Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (Middletown, PA, United States) Venture Capital Investment Associate at Sidekick Partners (New York, NY, USA) 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 Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Unsubscribe © 2021 Verizon Media. All rights reserved. 110 5th St, San Francisco, CA 94103