Daily Crunch - Google and Jio Platforms unveil 'extremely optimized Android' phone for Indian consumers

TechCrunch Newsletter

Thursday, June 24, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 24, 2021. There's an ocean of tech news to get through today, but up top if you care about the advertising market, head here first. Google is pushing back cookiegeddon, and the decision could impact companies from the smallest startup to, well, Google. — Alex Image Credits: Jio Platforms

The TechCrunch Top 3 Instagram's slow embrace of computers continues: After a long history of being a mobile-first, or mobile-only product, Instagram is now testing the "ability to create a Feed post on Instagram with [a] desktop browser," the company told TechCrunch. As a PC user, huzzah. BuzzFeed is going public: Digital media company BuzzFeed is going public via a SPAC at a valuation of $1.5 billion. Want to know why it's worth that much? We've got you covered. (Don't forget that BuzzFeed raised hundreds of millions of dollars while private.) How some companies are working on vaccine passports despite the controversy: TechCrunch's Ron Miller dove into the world of vaccine passports, the tech companies that are backing them and how they're handling a dicey political environment. It's a great read.

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Startups/VC Doubling down on crypto: The a16z investing house is redoubling its bet in the crypto economy with a new $2.2 billion fund. And the venture capital firm is going to do more than just write checks: It intends to take part in crypto projects and even help clear regulatory brush for the sector. It's a big commitment. Visa tries again: After Visa's deal to acquire fintech API provider Plaid died, you might have thought that the American payments giant would have thrown in the towel on big deals. Nope. Visa is dropping $2.15 billion to buy Tink, a company that TechCrunch described as "a leading fintech startup in Europe focused on open banking application programming interfaces," or APIs. Don't trip about Tripp's (virtual) trips: Tripp, a startup that wants to provide mental-health services via VR that mimic psychedelic experiences sans drugs, has just raised $11 million. If that sounds far out, understand that some startups are flat-out working with psychedelic drugs for different therapeutic approaches to mental health. So, this is the less aggressive version of the idea. Because VR is pretty neat, we dig it. The intersection of no-code, automation and humans: That's where Tonkean plays. The company's software helps ops teams at startups build automated business logic across applications, allowing data to flow between them. And it allows for humans to be in the loop, separating its offerings from what UiPath and other RPA companies offer. Oh, and Tonkean just closed a $50 million round. The online video boom powers JW Player to $100M in new capital: While not quite yet a unicorn, JW Player's nine-figure round caught TechCrunch's attention. The company sells a video platform for publishers and others, and it had a good 2020. COVID led to a boom in video watching, so the company's recent growth is not a huge surprise. And now it has a tower of new capital to fuel even more expansion.

Reform your startup's meeting culture Meetings should have a clear purpose, but at many startups, they’ve become a way to perform in front of a crowd instead of share information. Workplace politics can make the matter even more complicated: How secure do you feel declining a meeting invitation from a co-worker, or worse yet, from a manager? “Every time a recurring meeting is added to a calendar, a kitten dies,” says Chuck Phillips, co-founder of MeetWell. “Very few employees decline meetings, even when it's obvious that the meeting is going to be a doozy.” Changing your meeting culture is difficult, but given that 26% of workers plan to look for a new job when the pandemic ends, startups need to do all they can to retain talent. Here are four actionable steps that will help you boost productivity and say goodbye to poorly run, lazily planned meetings. (Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Carlo Prearo / EyeEm / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Today was a big day for Microsoft, so we'll start there, yeah? Here are TechCrunch's notes from the day's Windows 11 event: Android apps are coming to Windows: Via the Amazon store, but still. Microsoft's effort over time to make its operating system more open reached a new zenith today with the news that Windows 11 will support a host of Android apps. We want to play with it before we grade it, but the idea is super neat. We hope you like Teams: Microsoft is all-in on Teams, so much so that it's getting the Windows treatment. TechCrunch reports that "Windows 11 will have Microsoft Teams built in, in a bid to compete more directly with communication platforms like Apple's FaceTime." Honestly, Teams is way better than Skype was, so that sounds fine. It does prickle our antitrust early warning system, however. It'll be a Windows Christmas: Per Microsoft, Windows 11 should land later this year. In time for Christmas, it turns out. So if you are a gamer or a corporate drone or merely someone who prefers the Microsoft approach to computing, get hyped. The new build is coming your way, and quickly. If you can't wait, there are leaks out there. But don't install those on a computer with data you actually need. Next up, a little from Google: Google and Jio team up for a budget smartphone: The JioPhone Next, a low-cost Android smartphone, could help the next few hundred million folks in India get online with faster service if the telco and American tech giant have their way. Jio wants more mobile subscribers, and Google wants more internet users, period. Call it a match made in heaven, provided that the hardware is good. And to close out, one for the Zoomers: Ephemeral tunes? In today's TikTok world, having access to popular music is a must for social networks. So it's not a surprise to see Snap close a multiyear deal with Universal Music Group. Snapper, rejoice!

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing TechCrunch is building a shortlist of the top growth marketers in tech. If you're a founder, we'd love to hear who you've worked with. Fill out the survey here. Here's one of the many excellent recommendations we've received: Name of marketer: Dylan Max Name of recommender: Kris Rudeegraap, Sendoso Recommendation: "Dylan Max’s creativity is what sets him apart from 99% of those that practice growth marketing. One of his first campaigns went viral on LinkedIn. We ran a special campaign where we sent real cans of Spam to the best marketers and salespeople (our target demographic), with the idea that traditional spamming has become impersonal and we’re out to change that. Those that were nominated could “spam” other marketers or salespeople in their network, leading to a viral sensation that took over LinkedIn. We got a ton of business from it and our sales team still lists it as one of the most creative ways to leverage direct mail and gifting. Today it is still LinkedIn’s most viral grassroots campaign in the B2B space. Dylan is part of a rare breed of growth marketers, excelling in many different marketing channels including SEO, paid search, conversion rate optimization (CRO) and A/B testing. Dylan also spun up our first ever ABM campaign where we leveraged hypertargeted social media ads to earn seven-figure revenue on less than $20,000 of ad spend. I love his hackiness and he needs to be on this list." Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

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Daily Crunch - AWS and Salesforce expand partnership to make cross-platform integrations easier

TechCrunch Newsletter

Wednesday, June 23, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 23, 2021. The value of leading cryptocurrencies has rebounded some in the last day or so. Congrats to the hodlrs out there. If you are a nocoiner, don't worry; stocks are also up. If you want more on the topic, the TechCrunch crew held a Twitter Space recently on the current state of crypto. Now, the news. — Alex Image Credits: sefa ozel / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3 Robotaxis are coming (slowly): Alphabet's self-driving unit, Waymo, has been busy lately, but it's not the only company in its market generating headlines. Chinese robotaxi player WeRide bagged $600 million in less than half a year, TechCrunch reports. The company is now worth $3.3 billion. Let's hope that all the capital and activity in this particular market works out when the rubber hits the road. Soon, even regular folks can get in on the autonomous action: Love the idea of self-driving cars, but don't have $100 million or more to pour into one of the industry's leading private players? Good news! You can put your $100 into Embark soon, as the self-driving truck company is going public via a SPAC. You are welcome for this PSA. Tech's cultural discussion continues: If you follow the tech industry, you've seen news about its evolving cultural discussion. From banning "politics" to public culture memos to private missives that became public, there's a lot going on at both startups and public companies alike. A new document from the edtech sector takes a rather pointed stand in the larger conversation in favor of not backing down from controversial topics, Natasha wrote for the site. It won't be the last memo we see on the matter.

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Startups The exit market for growth-focused startups is still hot: That's the lesson from recent IPO filings in the tech space. If you are an investor or startup employee, it's good news. If you are a wealthy tech company looking to buy smaller firms, the news is less good because you will probably have to pay a large premium to snag startups. Snackpass scoops up $70M: You may have seen Snackpass signs at food spots in your city. The startup focuses on pickup orders inside of restaurants rather than delivery, and, per our reporting, has seen its growth explode in recent months as people have gone back outside. It's now worth more than $400 million. PairTree raises $2.25M to make adoption easier: There are lots of tech deals with business problems. Sometimes startups build businesses to solve human problems. PairTree is one such company. Per Devin, it wants to make part of the adoption process easier with an "online matching platform where expectant mothers and hopeful adopters can find each other without the facilitation of an agency or other organization." I love it. Drata raises $25M to make security compliance easier: If you run a company, you have to deal with security compliance. Drata wants to make securing SOC 2 compliance easier. That way, your startup won't lose a deal over lack of compliance certification, a situation that might lead to you exclaiming "drata!" while smacking your own forehead. Vercel raises $102M for its next.js service: You've probably heard of next.js, a React framework for front-end development work. Vercel built it with Facebook and Google. Now the company has $102 million more in the bank thanks to a Series C that valued the company at more than $1 billion. Per TechCrunch, traffic to apps and websites on Vercel's network doubled since October of last year. That's the sort of usage growth that investors love to see.

Why Amazon should pay attention to Shein In the last year, online apparel shopping app Shein grew active daily users by 130%, reports Apptopia. Each day, thousands of new products arrive on the app’s virtual shelves. Items are rapidly designed and prototyped before Shein’s contractors put them into production in Guangzhou factories — two weeks later, those SKUs arrive in fulfillment centers around the globe. TechCrunch reporter Rita Liao examined how the company’s agile supply chain has become hot talk among e-commerce experts, but beyond a strong logistics game and data-driven product development, Shein’s close relationships with suppliers are integral to its success. She also tried to answer a question many are asking: Is Shein a Chinese company? "It's hard to pin down where Shein is from,” answered Richard Xu from Grand View Capital, a Chinese venture capital firm. “It's a company with operations and supply chains in China targeting the global market, with nearly no business in China." (Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: The Shein app

Big Tech Inc. We're taking a break from politics today, so if you wanted even more updates about how India is taking on one American tech company or another, we are sorry. A lot of other stuff happened, however, that is pretty neat: Ford is keeping scooter dreams alive: Remember when Ford bought Spin? It was a great moment for the micromobility space. Today, Spin launched its first in-house scooter. So, if you need two small wheels and a battery pack, Ford has you covered. Recall that Ford is investing heavily in electric cars and trucks as well. Amazon and Salesforce buddy up even more: The growing partnership between Amazon and Salesforce took a new step today, with the two major American tech companies announcing "a new set of integration capabilities to make it easier to share data and build applications that cross the two platforms." Amazon competes with Microsoft in the public cloud world, and Salesforce competes with Microsoft in the CRM space. So to see the pair of them hold hands is not a huge surprise. TikTok has real competition: TikTok's chief rival in China just hit the 1 billion monthly active user (MAU) mark. That's a real accomplishment, given that the world only has 8 billion or so folks in it. Kuaishou, the app in question, has only 150 million non-Chinese MAUs, for what it's worth, making it more of a giant domestic player in China than an international heavyweight. That may change, of course, if it keeps growing as it has been.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing We're reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here. Here's one of the recommendations we received: Name of marketer: Karl Hughes, draft.dev. Name of recommender: Joshua Shulman, Bitmovin.com. Recommendation: "Karl is incredibly knowledgeable in the field of content and growth marketing to a large (and equally niche) target audience of developers. He and his team at Draft.dev are some of the best at ‘developer marketing,’ which is a greatly underrated target audience." Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

Community Yo dawg, we heard you liked audio … so we put audio in your audio! Yesterday, we had a super fun Twitter Spaces chat (with a few hundred of our closest friends) about Bitcoin and crypto in general. It was led by the Equity Podcast crew, but a few of our other writers joined in on the fun. Some of it even made its way into the latest episode of Equity, so have a listen (and keep an eye out for our next live chats). Read More Image Credits: TechCrunch

TC Eventful It’s pretty simple — In a few short weeks, startup founders from around the world will join our bootcamp series TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising, happening on July 8 and 9. You'll choose from a wide range of presentations that span the fundamentals of launching and growing your business, whether you are bootstrapping or have just secured your first investment funds. Register before this Friday and get 50% off with promo code DAILYCRUNCH50.

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Daily Crunch - Transmit Security's $543M Series A is one for the record books

TechCrunch Newsletter

Tuesday, June 22, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 22, 2021. We have startup product news, funding rounds and a roster of Big Tech updates for you today. But before we get into all of that do not forget to sign up for TechCrunch Spotlight: Pittsburgh startup Pitch-Off. Also the Equity podcast crew are hosting a live taping this Thursday that should be a lot of fun. I'll be there! — Alex Image Credits: Kaer iStock / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3 Twitter starts rolling out Super Follows and ticketed Spaces: The great product push at Twitter continued today with an early rollout of its Super Follow feature. If you have 10,000 followers and tweet about once per day, you could be eligible to charge people from $2.99 to $9.99 per month for bonus tweets. The company is also rolling out ticketed Twitter Spaces, its live-audio product. Another startup taking on Google: While we await the launch of Neeva's subscription search alternative, Brave has put its own search offering into the market. You can give it a test here, if you'd like. The short gist is that it's a "nontracking search engine built on top of an independent index and touted as a privacy-safe alternative to surveillance tech products like Google search," TechCrunch wrote. The early-stage startup funding market in focus: TechCrunch dug into the world of seed and early-stage venture capital rounds that startups are raising today. After a VC tipped us off to the concept of Series As coming late and Series Bs coming early, we asked a host of other investors about the idea. What did we learn? That some startups can start raising the moment they close their last round. Wild.

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Startups Everyone and their favorite pup raised money today, so we're breaking our startup coverage into two chunks. The first is focused on product news. The second on funding rounds. Let's go: Airbank is building a small and midsized fintech service to help aggregate all of a company's bank accounts and financial data. Read the story here. Racial Inequity Drawdown is a framework that aims to "address racial inequity in startup investing and in the broader world," TechCrunch reports. Squad launched a new mobile app that connects groups of friends through time-gated audio messages. You have 24 hours to hear what your friends said now that Squad has completed its focus-shift to more intimate collections of friends from interest groups. Turning to the money world, there are more rounds than we can get to today. But here's a selection of favorites: Mollie raises $800 million for its payment-integration service: Dutch startup Mollie is now worth $6.5 billion after raising nearly $1 billion in a single round. The startup "provides a way for businesses to integrate payments into sites, documents and other services by way of an API," TechCrunch wrote. Its new round and valuation implies that there's room yet in the payments space for more mega-unicorns. Still. Speaking of fintech, Australian startup Zeller just raised AUD$50 million at a AUD$400 million valuation. It provides POS and card services for SMBs. Lidar-focused Quanergy Systems is going public: Via a SPAC, of course. You can peruse its investor deck if you want all the gritty projections. What matters here is that the SPAC boom is not done, even if it appears to be slowing. And we're hearing from Series-B-level founders that SPACs are already hitting them up. Expect more and weirder SPAC deals over time. Oyster is now a half-unicorn: That's what we learned when the startup focused on supporting employees outside of a company's home country raised a $50 million Series B that valued it at nearly $500 million. Vantage raises $4M to help folks manage their AWS spend: All that growth that Amazon's AWS cloud service has managed in recent years was built on rising customer spend. And some AWS customers want to spend less. And Vantage is going to help. G2 raises $157 million to help companies choose software: Software is such a huge category that even niches can support a host of competitors. But all that spend means lots of companies making choices about what software to leverage. G2 wants to help. And it is now a unicorn after its investors poured nine-figures of capital into its coffers at a valuation of more than $1 billion. Transmit raises $543 million in a Series A to help kill passwords: The company is now worth $2.2 billion, with plans to use its new money to "expand its reach and investing in key global areas to grow the organization." Any move to kill passwords is TechCrunch-approved.

How much to pay yourself as a SaaS founder Anna Heim interviewed SaaS entrepreneurs and investors to find out how much early-stage founders should pay themselves. Startups run by CEOs who take home a small salary tend to do better over the long run, but there are other points to consider, such as geography, marital status, and frankly, what quality of life you desire. Waterly founder Chris Sosnowski raised his own pay to $14/hour last year; at his prior job, his salary topped $100,000. "We had saved money up for over a year before we cut out my pay," he told Anna. "I can live my life without entertainment … so that's what we did for 2020." How much are you willing to sacrifice? (Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: AlenaPaulus / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Another day, another slew of headlines discussing the latest tech and government scrap. Today we learned that the U.S. government may review Amazon's plan to buy a huge movie studio. There was also more from India today, with news breaking that the country is digging into Google over its smart TV market. On the same theme, the EU is now investigating Google's adtech software from an antitrust perspective. In related news, the push to unionize Amazon employees is not stopping in its home market.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing Today we're featuring one of the recommendations that was submitted to our survey. Stay tuned throughout the week as we highlight more responses! Name of Marketer: Ladder Recommendation: "They really get what I need. By testing different messaging on different personas, we discover what works and what doesn’t to better understand our users and prospects. This is gold for a company at our stage. Showing those results to our investors blew their minds." Submit your own recommendation here. Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

Community Natasha Mascarenhas wondered out loud "what makes a great investor?" We asked you for your thoughts, and a lot of you have weighed in. Still time to vote and share your two cents. Speaking of sharing, we put out our last call for startups to be included in our Pittsburgh Spotlight Pitch-Off. If you know of a great startup in the Pittsburgh ecosystem, share this far and wide and encourage folks to submit their company. While you're at it, make sure you're registered to attend on June 29th! Read More

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