Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Meta says WhatsApp Business went from 50M to 200M monthly active users in 3 years

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By Christine Hall

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Welcome to your Daily Crunch for Tuesday. I waded through over 60 stories to bring you the best of the best, so please enjoy.

Today was a big day for WhatsApp Business. It crossed 200 million monthly active users. Do you think it was the television commercial with the carrier pigeon that made the difference? Or perhaps it's the features — WhatsApp also introduced a personalized messages feature.

Sometimes it's the one who spies that gets spied on. That's what happened to LetMeSpy, a phone tracking app known for parental controls and employee monitoring, which now says it was hacked.

Speaking of parental controls, Meta is rolling out new parental control tools for Instagram and Messenger that will preemptively block unwanted DMs and tell teens when it's time to put down the phone.

Now meet Dust. It's not a startup helping you to clean better; it uses large language models on internal data to improve team productivity.

We promised you more on what's going on with Indian edtech giant Byju's, and today it was reported that one of the company's largest shareholders decided to slash Byju's valuation.

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Reduce, reuse, recycle: DePoly attracts $13.8 million in new funding to keep hard-to-recycle plastic from ending up in landfills.

Threat initiated: We reported earlier this month that Lordstown Motors was threatening to sue Foxconn. Now get the scoop on the actual lawsuit. Lordstown also filed for bankruptcy.

How to handle data: Data security startup Cyera lands a $100 million investment to help enterprises manage all of that proprietary data.

Shopper's delight: E-commerce enablement company Cart.com's valuation was boosted into unicorn territory after raising $60 million.

No "honey do" list for you: Khosla Ventures just doubled down on its investment into Honey Homes, a company that provides handyman-on-demand services for homeowners.

Red light, green light: NoTraffic raises $50 million to tackle congestion and enhance road safety. We're hoping traffic lights change for the better with this one.

Double the funding, double the fun: After raising capital 16 months ago, Redpanda is back with an even bigger round of funding as its streaming service experiences significant growth.

Let's stream: Roku and CBS Sports became besties and announced their first live sports deal. Meanwhile, you can now get Paramount+ with Showtime.

Cover girl: Kenyan fashion marketplace Shop Zetu grabs a round of pre-seed funding to add beauty and home decor items to its shopping list along with growth beyond Kenya.

Now you're speaking my language: Loora raises $9.25 million to continue developing a generative AI app that uses an audio interface to help users learn English.

Add these to your reading list:

Dexory nabs $19M to bring visibility to warehouses through analytics and autonomous robots

Snowflake-Nvidia partnership could make it easier to build generative AI applications

Twitter now allows subscribers to post 25,000-character-long tweets

CalypsoAI raises $23M to add guardrails to generative AI models

Supply chain startup Baskit supports Indonesia's middlemen

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See How Neon One increased revenue 500% with Payrix Pro

Sponsored by Payrix

Watch this on-demand webinar where Veronica Iles, Senior Consultant at Forrester interviews Nolan Martin, VP Product Management at Neon One as he highlights his experience with Payrix. Learn how to enable frictionless payments with Payrix.

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4 VCs illustrate why there's good reason to be optimistic about the machine learning startup market

Training the expansive models that power AI applications is thirsty work: Machine learning startups can charge their clients for anything from optimizing ad campaigns to generating gargantuan datasets.

Kyle Wiggers surveyed four investors to get their thoughts on whether "the hype cycle in ML is dying down or going strong," as well as to discuss technical roadblocks holding the industry back and get their advice for founders who are building in the sector:

Five more from the TC+ team:

The quest for better AI recommendation engines

As Lordstown immolates, SPAC deals that didn't go to zero feel like the exception

Gusto reaches $500M in trailing revenue, teams up with Remote to support international hires

How Greenlyte is going from zero to 1,000 metric tons of captured CO2 in a year

SignalFire's State of Talent report 2023

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code "DC" for a 15% discount on an annual subscription.

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Monday, June 26, 2023

In Canada, Netflix just removed its cheapest ad-free plan

TechCrunch Newsletter
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The Daily Crunch logo

By Christine Hall

Monday, June 26, 2023

Today, it seemed like a good day to announce the acquisition of another company. Meanwhile, Netflix decided it didn't want to be "basic" in Canada, and French VC firm Frst may have forgotten all its vowels but now has $80 million toward its new seed fund. Let's dive into your Daily Crunch for Monday.

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Several enterprise companies were feeling all M&A-y Monday and announced not just acquisitions, but also big spender-type acquisitions. First, Databricks will pay $1.3 billion to acquire MosaicML, an OpenAI competitor building a platform for organizations to train large language models and deploy generative AI tools based on them. Ingrid considers it a steal — find out why.

Next, as we see more organizations blending SaaS in private and public clouds, IBM made a big acquisition here and will acquire Apptio for $4.6 billion in cash. The company built a platform to track how and where data lives in hybrid environments and how it's being used. Read more.

And finally, ThoughtSpot is shelling out $200 million in cash and stock to acquire business intelligence startup Mode Analytics in a move that ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair says will "bolster ThoughtSpot's generative AI apps while doubling the company's customer base and growing its annual recurring revenue to more than $150 million." Read more.

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In today's car talk, Aston Martin taps Lucid to help develop electric vehicles that it aims to get on the market by 2025. Also, we have your look at the 2024 Silverado EV WT that has an impressive 450-mile range.

AI told you there were more acquisitions: Ramp exclusively told TechCrunch about its acquisition of customer support startup Cohere.io.

Everything has a + on it nowadays: Learn more about Meta's new VR subscription "Meta Quest+" and how much you'll have to pay for it.

Duty free: Tax-free shopping while traveling is where it's at, and utu raised $35 million to help travelers do that better.

If a picture paints a thousand words: SnapCalorie raised $2 million to continue developing AI that estimates how many calories a plate of food has from photos.

Speaking of pictures: Read what Adobe's new indemnity clause says as the company tries to ease enterprise fears about AI-generated art.

Delivery by Amazon: Small shops can now become delivery partners with Amazon.

What happens if you don't have a developer?: BentoML scores $9 million in new funding to expedite an app that helps customers build AI services sans a skilled developer.

Hacking away: This Russian hacking device is on track to make $80 million worth of sales, while hacktivists were busy in Fort Worth, Texas, trying to steal government files.

GDPR you ready for this?: A civil liberties group in Ireland is giving its government the what-for over a proposed law change that would "muzzle" Big Tech critics.

Don't forget about these:

YouTube reportedly experimenting with online games

TreasurySpring raises $29M to expand its investment platform aimed at businesses with excess cash

Schwank's Portable Infrared Grill will massively elevate your cook-out game

Lynk connects Palau's off-grid islands with satellite texting

Anduril's teeing up to take larger defense market share with latest acquisition

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Don't wait to identify your startup's ideal customer personas

Most early-stage startups don't have a dedicated full-time CMO, and that’s OK.

However, it’s still someone’s responsibility to capture user data, which is why growth expert Jonathan Martinez shared a guide with TC+ for developing ideal customer profiles (ICPs).

“By identifying your ideal customer personas first, you will find product-market fit faster and identify the right customers to sell to,” he writes.

Four more from the TC+ team:

Coinbase execs: As global crypto policy grows, US has urgent need for legislation

Q2 failed to bring a funding reprieve for web3 startups and unicorns

There are signs that it will be a hot secondaries summer

Designers hated Figma's collaborative design tool at first, but grew to love it

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code "DC" for a 15% discount on an annual subscription.

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Get your TechCrunch fix IRL. Join us at Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco this September to immerse yourself in all things startup. From headline interviews to intimate roundtables to a jam-packed startup expo floor, there's something for everyone at Disrupt. Save up to $600 when you buy your pass now through August 11, and save 15% on top of that with promo code DC.

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