FedEx invests $100M in Indian logistics giant Delhivery - Daily Crunch

Friday, July 16, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 16, 2021. A PSA: A few of us at TechCrunch took some time this week to chat about funding rounds, covering them and how startups might stand out. If that’s your sort of thing, you can check out the chat here. OK, news time! — Alex Image Credits: Joel Saget / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3 The Zomato IPO: Indian unicorn Zomato’s IPO had a good run this week, raising lots of money and generally being oversubscribed. TechCrunch also dug into what the first unicorn offering in the country might mean for other high-priced startups in the country. For more on the company’s finances, head here. Intel’s big buy? Back in the United States, news broke this week that aging chip giant Intel may dish out $30 billion for GlobalFoundries. That’s a lot of money. The deal could help make Intel a full-stack chipmaker able to make silicon for, well, just about anything. More capacity for manufacturing during a global chip shortage wouldn’t be so bad, right? What’s next for Virgin Galactic: Our own Devin Coldewey got some time with the president of Virgin Galactic to chat about the future of the company after its recent jaunt to space (or nearly space, depending on how you measure). It turns out the company expects to reuse its space plane hundreds of times. That should make for pretty attractive economics, we reckon.

Why Companies Need Data Science, Machine Learning and AI Platforms Sponsored by Dataiku Enterprise AI is at peak hype, yet AI has yet to fundamentally change most businesses. For the most part, those that have been successful have democratized the use of data throughout the organization. But how can everyone else catch up? Read More

Startups/VC Blend is no longer a startup: Banking tech unicorn Blend went public this week. It’s now worth $4 billion or so, more than its final private round. So consider the company not only no longer a startup, but also no longer a private unicorn. Blend’s software powers the mortgage option in other apps, making it a company that you may not have heard of but may have used. Halla raises $4.5M to help guess what you are going to eat: Buying groceries online is big business. Amazon is into it. It’s Instacart’s core remit. And European grocery delivery services have been raising oodles of money. Halla wants to help those companies sell more stuff by “using human behavior to steer shoppers to food items they want while also discovering new ones as they shop online.” Rivian once again delays EV deliveries: The global chip shortage — see our earlier note regarding Intel — is showing up in a host of places, including Rivian’s ramp toward commercial production of its electric vehicles. Other issues are holding the company up, but this chip shortage is a real kettle of fish for companies of all shapes and sizes. Yummy wants to build Venezuela’s superapp: Then there’s Yummy, which just raised a $4 million round. It has big aspirations: ride-hailing, delivery and more. The superapp model may have been spearheaded in Asia, but it’s going global. Yummy will need more than $4 million to build it, however. So if things go well, expect the company to raise again in short order. From our recent Early Stage event, we have something new for your enjoyment: Cleo Capital’s Sarah Kunst explains how to get ready to raise your next round. Read More Image Credits: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch

Outdoorsy co-founders detail how they expanded the sharing economy to RVs Seven years ago, ad executive Jen Young and tech entrepreneur Jeff Cavins stepped away from the careers they’d built to launch Outdoorsy, an RV rental marketplace. Last month, they announced a partnership with high-end camping company Collective Retreats and raised a $90 million Series D and $40 million in debt to speed up an already impressive rate of growth. To learn more about their approach to building a transportation company that caters to people who crave a taste of nomadic existence, Rebecca Bellan interviewed Young and Cavins for Extra Crunch. Their conversation explored the impacts of COVID-19, their business strategy and why they decided to take on $30 million in debt financing: Jeff Cavins: We like to look at macro trends as a business and I think U.S. monetary policy is going to get us all in a little bit of trouble. So we wanted to lock in a credit facility for the company at advantageous terms. (Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Big Tech Inc. FedEx pours $100M into Delhivery: First, we love the name for the Indian logistics startup. It’s rumored to be heading for an IPO this year. The deal underscores how key the Indian market is proving to be not merely for its domestic investors and founders, but also for global brands. Paytm is going public: Indian fintech giant Paytm has filed to go public. We’re including it in this section of the newsletter because, as we reported, the private company “plans to raise up to $2.2 billion in an initial public offering.” That’s a huge, huge amount of money. It’s hard to call Paytm a startup when it’s raising a few venture capital funds’ worth of capital in a single go. Tumblr’s parent company buys Pocket Casts: Automattic, famous for WordPress and the owner of what’s left of Tumblr, is buying popular podcasting service Pocket Casts. It’s not impossible to see how a publishing platform might integrate with a podcasting service, yeah? To close us off from the world of Big Tech backing money, this from Connie Loizos: Traditional VCs turn to emerging managers for deal flow and, in some cases, new partners. Read More

TechCrunch Experts: Email Marketing We interviewed Kathleen Estreich, formerly of Intercom, Box, Facebook and Scalyr, and Emily Kramer, formerly of Asana, Carta, and Astro (acquired by Slack), as part of TechCrunch Experts. We’re taking this conversation to Twitter Spaces on Tuesday, July 20, at 5 p.m. EDT. Join TechCrunch’s Danny Crichton and the MKT1 team as they dive further into the growth marketing trends they’re seeing. Read More Image Credits: Kathleen Estreich and Emily Kramer

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Gap year student secures last open seat for Blue Origin's first human spaceflight - Daily Crunch

 

Thursday, July 15, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 15, 2021. Good news from the TechCrunch front: The agenda is out for our big Disrupt conference coming this September. It’s going to be flat-out amazing, frankly, so take a peek. Also, the latest EC-1 just dropped. So if you want to get the inside scoop on CockroachDB, well, we have just the compendium for you. — Alex Read More

The TechCrunch Top 3 Revolut is now worth $33B: U.K.-based neobank Revolut has put together an $800 million round that values the company at $33 billion. The company’s fresh valuation is a multiple of what it was worth in early 2020. Why is it worth so much today? TechCrunch did a little exploring on the matter. Valve is making gaming hardware: Yes, the folks behind the Steam gaming store are getting into the hand-held gaming market. Their device, the Steam Deck, will cost $399 and will contain “a quad-core Zen 2 CPU, coupled with AMD RDNA 2 graphics and 16 GB of RAM,” per our own Brian Heater. If you want more storage, get ready to shell out up to $649 for the hand-held computer. Autonomous vehicle unicorn Aurora is going public: As TechCrunch previously scooped, autonomous vehicle unicorn Aurora is going public via a SPAC. The company expects to sport a $13 billion valuation when it begins to trade. Recall that Aurora previously absorbed Uber’s self-driving vehicle unit at a roughly $10 billion valuation.

The first IT Superhero Awards! Sponsored by Connection 2021 was the year our IT folk saved the day, every day; but have we really thanked them for their heroics? Now we can. Connection needs you to nominate your favorite IT Superheroes. All nominations must be in by Aug. 10th. Read More

Startups/VC The venture capital market has been on fire lately, leading to rapid-fire deal-making and more rounds than journalists can dream of covering. But if you are still in the market to raise capital, then you might want to listen to Norwest’s Lisa Wu, who has a few tips that might prove useful. Chief among them? Think like a VC when you head out to raise. AmEx dips its toes into financial planning: Today news broke that credit giant American Express invested in BodesWell last year via its venture arm. Now the credit card company has “launched a pilot of its first self-service digital financial planning tool” in conjunction with the startup. Talk about an early customer for BodesWell. Prefab construction tries again: That’s the word from a new $20 million round for Abodu — what we presume is a portmanteau of “abode” and “you.” Sure, prefab construction unicorn Katerra is kaput, but Abodu is taking a consumer-focused spin on the model. Norwest led the round, with participation from Initialized Capital. Lightyear raises $13.1M for online network procurement: From the geekier side of tech today was news from Lightyear, a startup that its CEO says is the “the first tool for buying your telecom infrastructure on the web.” Ron Miller notes that everything is heading online, so why not network buying? $20M for financial data extraction: Daloopa has closed an eight-figure Series A led by Credit Suisse Asset Management’s NEXT Investors to help financial types avoid “repetitive data extraction in order to gather insights for analysis and forecasts,” TechCrunch reports. The deal stood out to us given its obvious corporate venture capital (CVC) angle; CVCs have been more active than ever in recent quarters.

The CockroachDB EC-1 Ants and camels are famously resilient animals, but when it was time to select a name for a startup that offers open-source, cloud-based distributed database architecture, you can imagine why “Cockroach Labs” was the final candidate. Database technology is fundamental infrastructure, which partially explains why it’s so resistant to innovation: Oracle Database was released in 1979, and MySQL didn’t reach the market until 1995. Since hitting the market, CockroachDB has become “a next-generation, $2-billion-valued database contender,” writes enterprise reporter Bob Reselman, who interviewed the company’s founders to write a four-part series: Part 1: Origin story: From the creation of the popular open-source image editor GIMP to some of Google’s most well-known infrastructure products. Part 2: Technical design: Analyzes the key differentiation that CockroachDB offers, particularly its focus on geography and data storage. Part 3: Developer relations and business: How CockroachDB engages with developers while pivoting to the cloud at a key inflection point. Part 4: Competitive landscape and future: A look at the fierce competition, and what possible exit routes might look like. (Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Nigel Sussman

Big Tech Inc. Apple hearts fintech: News this week that Apple is considering jumping into the buy now, pay later sector rocked the share price of Affirm and Afterpay. But what about startups in the space? TechCrunch did a little noodling on the question. Xiaomi snags Apple’s No. 2 handset mark: Apple’s handset shipments grew in the second quarter, but a huge 83% gain at Xiaomi put the Chinese hardware company above Cupertino and its iPhone line, per Canalys data. Samsung remains the world’s largest smartphone company by unit volume. Be jealous of this 18-year-old: After the winning bidder for a space flight on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin sold for $28 million to someone who couldn’t be bothered to make the first flight, an 18-year-old “high school graduate bound for the University of Utrecht” will go instead. Oliver Daemen, enjoy the trip, we’re jealous. (Yes, Daemen’s parents are rich.)

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. If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this guest column on Extra Crunch by Mark Spera, “5 advanced-ish SEO tactics in 2021.” Read More Image Credits: PM Images / Getty Images

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