Monday, February 12, 2024

Dating and the almighty dollar, er, credit score

TechCrunch Newsletter
TechCrunch PM Logo

By Christine Hall

Monday, February 12, 2024

Good afternoon and welcome back to TechCrunch PM, your source for startup, venture capital and Big Tech news of the day. For your reading pleasure, we bring you a dating app that is quite exclusive, quite a bit of electric vehicle news — even one on fire — some new venture capital funds and how to have an awesome go-to-market pitch slide.

 — Christine

 image

Image Credits: Neon Money Club

TechCrunch PM Top 3

Excellent credit = a chance to Score: If you thought your partner was only in it for the money, you might be right. And especially if you found them on Score, a "pop-up" dating app for people with good to excellent credit. Money is traditionally what couples fight about often, however, this is quite the strategy.

This car was on fire: A Waymo robotaxi was vandalized and burned in San Francisco in what people later said was in protest of autonomous vehicles.

Fewer companies want robots: The number of industrial robot orders dropped nearly one-third last year, according to a new study. To be fair, sales had been falling for much of the year, especially after two years of record activity. However, it's cause for concern among robotics manufacturers about the state of the industry.

TechCrunch PM Top 3 image

Image Credits: Kirsten Korosec

More top reads

New funds alert: Homebrew is raising a $50 million fund, while over in Switzerland, Wingman Ventures has a new name and is targeting $120 million for its latest fund.

More car talk: In addition to the Waymo car fire discussed above, we have an item on the U.S. government's view that Lucid isn't doing enough to fix its windshield defroster problem and that Jeep's parent company is the latest to adopt Tesla's electric vehicle charging standard. Speaking of autonomous cars, Cruise named its first chief safety officer, a role we can all agree was probably a bit late in coming.

A new revenue stream for developers: More than half of the apps being developed specifically for the Apple Vision Pro are paid downloads, which means developers can get paid without having to keep up with a subscription model.

Keeping tabs on space junk: The movie "Wall-E" wasn't just a clever idea. Thankfully, LeoLabs is keeping a close eye on all of the space junk out there — and has new capital, to boot. 

What’s new at Spotify: Spotify for Podcasters added a new integration with Riverside, which gives podcasters a way to record and edit their audio and video podcasts with Riverside inside the Spotify for Podcasters web product. It also sunsets some legacy podcasting tools.

What have large language models done for you lately?: For Motif Analytics, a lot. Now buoyed by new funding, the company is leveraging LLMs to tell growth teams what their metrics are actually saying.

Pulling at Threads: Last week, social media site Threads said it would not actively recommend political content; however, the company today announced it would test a new trends feature called "topics," where such content could potentially surface anyway. 

Going to market? That particular slide better be awesome: Investors want to give you capital, however, they won't if you don't understand your customer or how you plan to grow.

More top reads image

Image Credits: Malte Mueller / Getty Images

On the pods

Today's Equity brings a mix of technology, politics and AI stories. This week is another big week of quarterly earnings from the likes of HubSpot, Instacart, Monday.com and Cisco, which should give us some insight on the state of software and hardware sales in 2023. Alex also took a look at crypto prices, more about the Waymo car fire, a mega venture round and AI work in Silicon Valley. Listen here.

On the pods image

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Read more stories on TechCrunch.com

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard

See more jobs on CrunchBoard

Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $349 per month.

Facebook Twitter Youtube Instagram Flipboard

View this email online in your browser

Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Unsubscribe

© 2024 Yahoo. All rights reserved. 110 5th St, San Francisco, CA 94103

What it takes to raise a seed round today

TechCrunch Newsletter
TechCrunch AM logo

By Alex Wilhelm

Monday, February 12, 2024

Good morning, and welcome to TechCrunch AM for February 12, 2024. Today, we're taking a look at a massive nine-figure venture capital round, a notable startup deal, a VC firm that is bringing its founders to Silicon Valley for AI meetings, and the latest chat bot hallucinations.

Alex

Make your money rise and grind with Betterment

Sponsored by Betterment LLC

Betterment is the investing and savings app that makes your money hustle. With automated technology and tax-smart tools, Betterment puts your money to work and your mind at ease. Investing involves risk. Performance not guaranteed.

Learn More

TechCrunch Top 3

  1. Nine-figures for bug bounties: The business of helping companies find bugs and other security issues with their software is big. The market's so large, in fact, that Bugcrowd just raised $102 million to help root out bugs at its customers, which include the likes of OpenAI. General Catalyst led the investment that will see Bugcrowd able to go on the offensive, including making acquisitions if it decides to.
  2. Notion buys Skiff: Well-funded documents-and-notes startup Notion has purchased Skiff, which offers end-to-end encrypted file storage, docs, calendar events, and email. Notion has expanded its own product remit and recently launched a calendar feature last month based off a separate acquisition, so the startup seems to be taking advantage of a somewhat depressed price market to make acquisitions.
  3. VCs shift stance on guns: In this week's Deal Dive, Rebecca Szkutak takes a look at biometric "smart" gun startup Biofire's recent fundraise. She writes that many venture capitalists were historically unable to invest in firearms startups due to vice clauses and the like, but institutional investors are now increasingly open to investing in companies like Biofire.
TechCrunch Top 3 image

Image Credits: Getty Images

Don't miss these

Ilara Health raises $4M: Kenya-based health tech startup Ilara Health helps private clinics access key operational items like diagnostic devices and pharmaceuticals, and it just raised $4.2 million to grow in its home market. Annie Njanja reports that the pre-Series A round will also be used to broaden access to healthcare via "a B2B health and occupational service that will enable uninsured workers access care at its network of partner clinics for a fixed monthly fee."

AI field trip: Sequoia's break-out venture fund Peak XV Partners focused on the Indian market is bringing a host of its founders to Silicon Valley this week for AI meetings. This tells us two things: venture firms are not done trying to add value even when the market has returned much of their pricing power over startup rounds; and Silicon Valley really is the AI central hub today.

Chatbots are replacing your drunk uncle: Chatbots from Microsoft and Google were dinged for coming up with creative notes for users regarding the recent Super Bowl game. The chatbots each reported scores before they game had already happened. What's even funnier is that they didn't agree on who had won would win. Go Chiefs.

The state of seed funding: Tim De Chant dug into the current state of the seed capital market, discussing the matter with Talia Goldberg, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners; Pae Wu, a general partner at SOSV; and Maren Bannon, a partner at January Ventures. The biggest takeaway? "The bar is higher now. Investors are starting to ask diligence questions that in 2021 would have been Series A kind of questions," Wu told TechCrunch+.

AI and elections: More than five dozen elections will occur this year, which puts a massive focus on new AI technology around the world. I suppose that no matter what happens, we'll learn a lot in the coming months. Let's hope that most of it is useful so that we can do better the next time around.

Don't miss these image

Image Credits: Ilara Health

Before you go

Finally, a perfectly safe AI model: Meet Goody-2, an AI model that is supposedly so squeaky clean that it won't answer anything at all. That will solve the hallucination, training data attribution, and other issues around dangerous answers that many existing AI models suffer from. Now we just need an AI model called Shoes that we can meld with Goody-2 for a great joke model.

Before you go image

Image Credits: Brain

Read more stories on TechCrunch.com

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard

See more jobs on CrunchBoard

Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $349 per month.

Facebook Twitter Youtube Instagram Flipboard

View this email online in your browser

Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Unsubscribe

© 2024 Yahoo. All rights reserved. 110 5th St, San Francisco, CA 94103

Latest News About Gadgets – TechCrunch

Latest News About Social Media – TechCrunch

Epic Gardening Tips and Advices