DoorDash releases in-app toolkit to promote driver safety

TechCrunch Newsletter

Wednesday, November 03, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for November 3, 2021. What a day! Despite the U.S. Federal Reserve announcing a slowdown to its bond-buying program, stocks went up again. It's heads-you-win, tails-you’re-still-in stock market lately. Economy not good enough for tightening? Stocks go up on a comfortable central-banking environment. Economy good enough for tightening? Stocks go up on good economic news. Sure. I suppose it's good news for startups looking to exit. — Alex Image Credits: DoorDash

The TechCrunch Top 3 Female founders see better fundraising numbers in 2021: After a disappointing 2020, startups founded by women are having a much better run this year, data says. TechCrunch dug into the latest information, uncovering the bad, the good and the encouraging. Everyone is going public: Alrighty, let's talk public offerings. Paytm just raised a pre-IPO round worth $1.1 billion ahead of the Indian fintech's inevitable public-market debut. AllBirds priced its IPO-above range and was met with a rave first day's trading. And in Korea, Kakao had a similarly bracing first day's trading. (And don't forget that Backblaze and Expensify are also en route to their IPOs as well.) Meet GitHub's new CEO: As GitHub CEO Nat Friedman heads for the exits to the "Chairman Emeritus" role, the code-management service's chief product officer Thomas Dohmke will take over as its new chief executive later this month. The changes at GitHub come in the wake of competitor GitLab's epic IPO.

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Startups/VC The Gopuff model goes international: As TechCrunch notes, rapid, on-demand delivery is big business around the world today, and Breadfast wants to own the model in Egypt and across Africa. The company started life as a bread delivery firm but has since branched out. And it just raised $26 million. U.S. bans NSO Group: Software made by NSO group has been used by authoritarian governments to snoop on journalists, dissidents and other folks that the powerful do not like. The U.S. Commerce Department just added NSO to its Entity List, shuttering trade with the firm in the States. Progress. Australia says facial recognition startup broke its laws: Also from the security beat is news from Down Under, namely that Clearview AI "broke national privacy laws when it covertly collected citizens' facial biometrics and incorporated them into its AI-powered identity matching service." Canada has come to a similar conclusion. Radar or lidar? A new funding round for Spartan Radar — coming in rapid succession after a preceding investment — indicates that the market has yet to determine which tech will lead the way for self-driving cars. Ethyca wants to help developers write privacy-forward software: Fresh with new funds, Ethyca is making its Fides set of tooling open source so that "developers can build privacy tools and monitoring mechanisms directly into their codebases." In the wake of the above privacy news, it feels like a pretty good day for consumers. At least directionally, I suppose. Yet more money for e-commerce rollups: The push to consolidate e-commerce brands is a global affair. We've heard about lots of the activity — and resulting mega-rounds — in both North America and Europe. Now Una Brands has raised even more capital for its APAC-focused work of a similar nature. Payhippo raises $3M for small-biz lending in Africa: A few quick notes here. First, African fintech has been on a fundraising tear lately, so we're not surprised to see more activity from the sector. Second, Payhippo's model is focused on SMB lending, which we dig. And, third, Payhippo is a great startup name. To round out our startup coverage today, an essay from Victoria Pettibone, a managing partner at Astia Fund, arguing that "VCs must do a better job of supporting Black women founders."

Female founders are making a buzzing, venture-backed comeback We are nowhere near achieving parity or representation when it comes to startup funding, but the gender gap is narrowing, according to PitchBook data. Funding for U.S.-based, female-founded startups nearly doubled in the last year: So far in 2021, women-led companies have closed 2,661 deals worth $40.4 billion. “Thus far in 2021, the backsliding has more than stopped,” report Natasha Mascarenhas and Alex Wilhelm. “Indeed, it has shot the other direction.” (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Colin Anderson Productions pty ltd / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Before we dive into general Big Tech news, please enjoy this dive into the biggest of technology news, namely growth in the cloud. You know, that remote data center where all your software actually runs. Social media disinformation is more than a Facebook affair: After some damning revelations about Kenya's president Uhuru Kenyatta, Twitter was flooded with messages of … support. Astroturfing is not a new concept, but when laid as clear as it is in this case, it's extra gross. Instagram hearts Twitter: After a long period of time in which Instagram accounts merely posted images of tweets, the Meta property – The Facebook protectorate? The Zuck protectorate? – is bringing back Twitter Card previews. Rejoice, all ye who still use the one-time photo sharing application. Cash App for teens: Kids have it good these days. I had a checkbook in my youth. And after that mostly had to carry cash. Today Square is rolling out support for teens to use Cash App, provided they have parents to watch over their activity. To round out our coverage of big technology firms, news from DoorDash: The U.S. delivery giant has built something it calls "SafeDash," a security toolkit for its delivery denizens. It's a partnership with ADP that may help keep DoorDashers safer than they are on their own.

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Microsoft launches Loop, an open source, real-time collaboration tool

TechCrunch Newsletter

Tuesday, November 02, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for November 2, 2021. Today has been a fun one, namely because your humble TechCrunch was in the news. Not for reasons that we're stoked about, but the larger China-world digital decoupling is real, and we got caught in it. Let's talk about it. — Alex Image Credits: Microsoft

The TechCrunch Top 3 Yahoo leaves China: TechCrunch parent company Yahoo is leaving the Chinese market, pulling what was left of its services lineup from the market. TechCrunch, and its sister publication Engadget, are no longer accessible in the country. The news comes after Epic Games announced the end of its project to bring Fortnite to the Chinese market, and Microsoft decided that it was also time for LinkedIn to leave the country. Bird is going public: Well-known scooter unicorn Bird's planned merger with a blank-check company has been approved and should consummate later this week. Public-market investors responded by selling stock in Bird's SPAC partner, a somewhat embarrassing result. Precisely how much capital will be raised is not clear. For more on Bird's changing economics, TechCrunch has your back. Microsoft goes metaverse: Amidst a wave of news items today — see our Big Tech section for more — Microsoft announced that its Teams product is heading to the metaverse. But unlike what Facebook Meta has planned, Microsoft's "Mesh for Teams" service will power "shared experiences in virtual reality, augmented reality and elsewhere, with Teams and its built-in productivity tools," TechCrunch reports.

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Startups/VC Not into NFTs? How about PE? The acronym soup that is the modern finance world may have your head spinning. But don't worry, startups are here to help. Aqua, for example, wants to help mom-and-pop investors gain exposure to private equity investments. Which, as you may know, tend to require more advanced net worths. As Natasha Mascarenhas points out, however, interest in alternative investing products has risen, which could provide a nice boost to what Aqua has on offer. Backblaze sets IPO price range: Amidst a wave of unicorn IPOs, the Backblaze public offering is notable for its modest size. That's not a diss. It's good to see smaller tech companies go public. If Backblaze trades well, it could help more companies pull the trigger. We hope. App monitoring is big business: That's the lesson from Lumigo's $29 million Series A that TechCrunch wrote about today. The company's product is also expanding from serverless platforms (DynamoDB, S3 and others) to now also include containers and virtual machines as well. Tim Draper backs startup that wants your piss: Yep, no shit. Well-known investor Tim Draper has led a Series A round worth $6 million into Vivoo. TechCrunch writes that the "personalized nutrition and lifestyle startup sells subscription-based at-home urine test kits that work in conjunction with an app." I for one do not need an app to tell me that I need to drink more water. I already know. But perhaps more of us could use a reminder. Firefox updated its mobile browser to limit clutter, if you are the type of person who doesn't merely use default mobile software. To close out our startup news, Nuro has raised a $600 million round from Google and Tiger Global for its autonomous delivery vehicles.

What Netflix's move into gaming means for developers Some analysts predict that Netflix will spend as much as $19 billion on original and acquired content in 2025, but that figure leaves out a new frontier for the global media platform: gaming. Netflix hired a lead for its gaming division in July and purchased Night School Studio in September, giving it access to more developers. “It makes one wonder how Netflix's plans will influence game developers and studios around the world,” says Sendbird CEO John S. Kim. “More importantly, how will developers respond to Netflix's entry into the space?” (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Sam Wasson / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. It's a Microsoft day, so here's the rest of our coverage from the company's event: Microsoft announces new tools to modernize supply chain and manufacturing Microsoft's new Azure OpenAI Service brings GPT-3 to (a few) more developers Microsoft brings JavaScript to Excel Microsoft Azure wants to make working with data on its platform easier Microsoft Azure expands its hybrid and multi-cloud reach Azure gets a Chaos Studio And, Microsoft is building a product called Loop that we feel shares more than a little heritage with Google's long-dead, if yet-beloved Wave service. Frankly I cannot wait to play with it. From elsewhere in Big Tech-land: Netflix's gaming ambitions continue: Just as Spotify wants to be a serious player in podcasting, Netflix really does appear to think that games are part of its future. The company's titles are coming to all Android-using members starting this week. Enjoy. Roblox's outage Not Good: Not only did Roblox suffer a multiday outage, but the public gaming company's downtime provided a boost to rival games. Because just as shooters shoot, gamers game, and if your platform goes down, Steam is just a few clicks away. Zoom is looking to cash in on the advertising boom, fueled in part by rising tech wealth, with an ad-supported version of its video chat service.

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Twiga Foods lands $50M Series C to grow its B2B food supply platform

TechCrunch Newsletter

Monday, November 01, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for November 1, 2021. TechCrunch hopes that you had a lovely Halloween, if you celebrate. Yes, your humble scribe had some leftover candy for breakfast. No, he doesn't feel well. That it's finally November means that our two-day space-themed event is now next month (more here)! — Alex Read More

The TechCrunch Top 3 Nubank files to go public: Brazilian neobank Nubank has filed to go public, and TechCrunch has first notes out concerning its economics. Our read of its filing left us impressed at its low-cost customer acquisition, ability to drive long-term revenue from its customers and the fact that its sales and marketing spend is minimal compared to its aggregate revenues. More to come on the intricacies of its business model. Epic pulls Fortnite from China: The China-world decoupling takes on many forms. One way to view it is through a rising inability for non-Chinese companies to bring their products to the country's shores. LinkedIn is out. And now Epic Games is ending its work to make a Fortnite version for China, despite having Tencent as a key shareholder. Chromebook sales crash: News that global PC sales fell 2% in the third quarter might sound like bad news, but computer sales are still above their pre-pandemic levels, Ron Miller reports. But of the PC varieties out there, it appears that Google's own Chromebook effort is taking the most stick. It dropped from 18% market share to just 9%. Good news for Windows, we reckon.

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Startups/VC Before we get into our regular run of startup news, let's talk satellites. News that gigantic private company SpaceX's Starlink has formed an Indian subsidiary was not a surprise. But that it came the same day that Amazon's Project Kuiper wants to put two prototype satellites into orbit by the end of next year caught our eye. We're seeing American companies continue to push ahead on space tech despite a more national-level space rivalry forming between China and the United States. OctoML raises $85M: The work of building and deploying machine learning (ML) models is big business. Startups Mage and Spice AI are working in similar areas of technology. Or more simply, in time there will be ample tooling to help companies of all sizes — and, we presume, levels of technical know-how — to get busy with ML at scale without having to fight tooth and nail to hire a full-stack, in-house data science team. Zendesk v. Twilio? Everyone wants to own customer data. Last year Twilio announced a multibillion dollar deal to buy Segment, allowing it to scoot into the customer data world (more here). And more recently Zendesk announced that it was dropping even more billions of dollars for SurveyMonkey, which will help it also better understand customers. They are not yet competing directly, but as we see tech companies get busy buying rivals, it's going to be a recurring theme that two giants that previously played somewhat separately are now a bit closer to one another. $550M for hard venture bets: Any yahoo can stick $50 million into a growth-stage software startup that is cruising toward an IPO. Just make sure that its various SaaS ratios are in good shape and write the check. Walden Catalyst just put together a huge fund to invest in harder technology solutions to perhaps more intractable problems. The result should be higher returns on home runs. (TechCrunch also covered a new fund from White Star over the weekend.) Mosaic raises $44M for its construction tech: By working to automate certain parts of the residential construction process, Mosaic wants to lower the cost of such projects. Given that many nations around the world are enjoying related housing crises, anything to get more homes built sounds like a win to us. When I Work wants to help you tell others when you work: Shift-based work has often been organized, managed and crisis-controlled via text messages and phone calls. Stonehenge-era tech, in other words. When I Work wants to bring modern messaging to shift-based workers, allowing them to better swap, miss and snag work as they need to. It also just raised $200 million. Finally from our startup-related notes, Twiga raised $50M to scale its food logistics work in both Kenya and surrounding nations. As our own Tage Kene-Okafor notes, Africans spend more of their household income on food than folks living on other continents. It wants to shake up that dynamic and bring lower-cost foods to more, by our read. Image Credits: Twiga Foods

When should your B2C startup enter a new market? Many entrepreneurs say fortune favors the brave, but French microbiologist Louis Pasteur got it right: Fortune favors the prepared mind. Bold is good, but smart is better, especially when it comes to expanding the range of a B2C startup. Introducing yourself to customers (not to mention regulators) in a foreign market comes with a lot of known unknowns. “It may be that through luck or ingenuity, your business has thrived in your home country with minimal marketing spend, but there is absolutely no guarantee this will happen abroad,” says Jim Mann, director of acquisitions at Thrasio, a consumer goods company. (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: PM Images / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Our own Natasha Lomas has a great look into how major American technology companies worked to limit the power of European privacy laws. You won't believe that a lot of wealthy companies worked hard out of sight to ensure that regulation fit their own requirements versus those of consumers! Snap is working with NBCUniversal to bring more audio to its platform: Given how clearly TikTok has shown that it is able to profit from the hybrid of tunes and video, this news is not a surprise. Pinterest wants you to shop live: Ever felt like you weren't doing enough online shopping? Good news, if so, because Pinterest is building its own video service to help you spend more money while sitting down. Tesla opens charging network to other car companies' vehicles: If you live in the Netherlands, a handful of Tesla charging stations will work be open to "non-Tesla electric vehicles for the first time." Let this spread, please god.

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