Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Marqeta acquires fintech infrastructure startup Power Finance for $275M

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By Christine Hall and Haje Jan Kamps

Monday, January 30, 2023

Kicking off the week, we've been thoroughly enjoying Runa Sandvik's story about how U.S. police use digital data to prosecute abortions in our post-Roe-v.-Wade world. The TL;DR is that healthcare in the U.S. is a weird world, and you should use end-to-end encrypted messages if you're going to DM your friends about things that are potentially illegal.  — Christine and Haje

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Image Credits: PM Images / Getty Images

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In late 2022, ISO 27001 rolled out multiple changes. Whether you have ISO 27001 and want to learn more about the updates, or are pursuing it for the first time, this webinar is for you. On 2/1, join experts from Vanta and Insight Assurance to dig in.

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Startups and VC

"I can't explain it. It's weird," Alphonzo "Phonz" Terrell said to Amanda. After losing his job at Twitter when Elon Musk took over, the former global head of Social and Editorial didn't want to rest — he wanted to build. "Coming straight out of it, I was just like, 'Oh, it's time. It's time to build, whether we get support or not.’" Now he’s raised just short of $3 million to build a competitor to Twitter.

Speaking of alternatives to Twitter, Aisha and Taylor took to the internet to find the best Twitter alternatives worth checking out. Ultimately they conclude that there isn't, and will probably never be, a one-for-one replacement for Twitter.

Oh, and good news for gaming nerds after a lot of really silly missteps: Amanda writes how the 403-page Dungeons & Dragons game system is now licensed under Creative Commons.

And here's a handful more, because we love ya:

What do recent changes to state taxes mean for US SaaS startups?

For SaaS startups, tax time can create a conundrum.

Some states regard software-as-a-service products as, um, services, while others classify them as, er, products.

“There's also the issue of bundling on its own,” according to startup tax accountant Ardy Esmaeili. “SaaS might not be taxed, but it will be when paired with hardware.”

To help founders better understand their liability, Esmaeili shares tips on how to identify a company’s physical nexus and lists multiple SaaS categories that states are likely to tax.

“Engage an expert as early as you can,” he writes. “Don't think you won't have to worry about it yet, because waiting can have big consequences down the line.”

Three more from the TC+ team:

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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Big Tech Inc.

Manish reports that Manu Jain is the latest Xiaomi executive to leave. This might sting a bit for the company because Jain was the one who set up and scaled the smartphone maker's presence in India.

All right, now here you are, checking all the security boxes, getting your two-factor authentication set up, and along comes a hacker — albeit paid by Meta — that finds a bug, which allows someone to bypass that two-factor authentication on Facebook and Instagram. I guess it's good they caught it, but ugh! Lorenzo has more.

And we have five more for you:

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Saturday, January 28, 2023

Stripe responds to report that it seeks to raise $2B with a terse 'no comment'

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By Christine Hall and Haje Jan Kamps

Friday, January 27, 2023

Well, it's Friday again. And as the Equity pod team noted today, "You could be Wasted and not even know it." — Christine and Haje

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Image Credits: mustafaU / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • The search for more money: Mary Ann follows up on yesterday's story about Stripe setting a deadline to go public with some additional information that Stripe had reportedly tried raising additional capital at a decreased valuation. Look for more on this developing story in Mary Ann's Interchange newsletter, which comes out on Sundays. If you don't already get it in your inbox, click here.
  • No music for you: Google displayed its musical chops and now won't share it with the world, Kyle writes. The search engine giant created an artificial intelligence system that can generate music from text descriptions, but he reports that "fearing the risks, has no immediate plans to release it." Maybe if we all say something nice to them…
  • From angel to the board room: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is the newest board member of audiovisual startup Chroma, a company Stone began investing in two years ago. Sarah has more.

Startups and VC

Kano, the venture-backed U.K. startup known for its build-your-own computer kits and software for teaching coding and associated STEM skills, has accused Warner Bros. of copying one of its products and infringing on its intellectual property, Paul reports.

By any measure, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been a successful executive. He helped build Salesforce from the ground up, starting in an apartment in San Francisco in 1999 and eventually erecting Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in the city, Ron reports. He took the idea of running software in the cloud and grew it into the de facto way to deliver software at a time when most companies offered software in boxes or on-prem seat licenses. As activist investors target Salesforce, what's next for the CRM giant? (TC+)

And we have five more for you:

4 practical steps for using no-code to evolve your prototype to an MVP

Forget about dogs: No-code development tools can be a nontechnical founder’s best friend.

Building a minimum viable product once required engineering and design ability. Now, bootstrapping founders can iterate without developers to keep costs and extend their runway.

“Instead of getting caught up trying to design the perfect and complete MVP release all at once, try to deliver value as quickly as possible and continuously improve your prototype,” advises Katherine Kostereva, CEO and managing partner of Creatio.

She shares four tactics for transforming prototypes into usable products via no-code:

  • Embrace an everyday delivery approach
  • Proper scoping and decomposition
  • Carefully manage and decouple dependencies
  • Invest in continuous deployment automation

Three more from the TC+ team:

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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Big Tech Inc.

Apparently, "AI that can generate art, text and more is in for a reckoning," Kyle writes today. He's been following a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI that "accuses them of violating copyright law by allowing Copilot, a code-generating AI system trained on billions of lines of public code, to regurgitate licensed code snippets without providing credit." Kyle lays it all out for you and even notes that cases like these against generative AI are just the beginning.

If you've been enjoying HBO's new zombie thriller "The Last of Us," you’ll be able to enjoy it a little longer. The show got picked up for a second season after delighting over 22 million viewers, Lauren writes.

Here's your Friday five:

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Friday, January 27, 2023

Berlin-based design platform Kittl raises $11.6M Series A to take on Adobe and Canva

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By Christine Hall and Haje Jan Kamps

Thursday, January 26, 2023

Did you know you can buy 3D printed key caps to replace, say, your escape key with a cat? Today, that's our delightful little morsel of whimsy, courtesy of Frederic's review of a new keyboard (scroll all the way to the bottom for a photo of the adorable little kitteh). — Christine and Haje

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Image Credits: Kittl

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: Mike writes that Kittl is carving out a piece of the graphics world dominated by giants like Canva and Adobe, raising $11.6 million in Series A capital for its design platform that it says "easily turns ideas into graphic products" without the tough learning curve of other platforms.
  • This startup is turning up the heat: European smart thermostat startup Tado was planning to go public, but instead went after another round of funding, gathering up $46.9 million as it pursues profitability. Paul has more.
  • "It's always crypto winter being a Black founder": That's how Iddris Sandu, Spatial Labs' founder, described going after funding for his web3 company. The infrastructure and hardware company picked up $10 million in seed funding to create products and shopping experiences using augmented reality, Dominic-Madori writes.

Startups and VC

Fintech startup Stripe has set a 12-month deadline for itself to go public, either through a direct listing or by pursuing a transaction on the private market, such as a fundraising event and a tender offer, according to sources familiar with the matter. The news comes as a surprise considering the rather dry public market activity in the tech world, Mary Ann and Natasha M report.

There was a brief, beautiful moment for a few months in 2021 when it felt like robotic investments might be immune to broader market forces. We all fundamentally and implicitly understood this to not be the case, but it was a nice moment nevertheless, Brian muses. Now, however, it's becoming clearer that the thing we thought was happening with robotic investments is definitely happening.

Another handful of tech-newsy goodness:

Teach yourself growth marketing: How to perform growth experimentation through A/B testing

Despite the myth, sharks don’t need to keep swimming to keep breathing. Early-stage startups, on the other hand, are not so fortunate.

If driving growth is a priority, companies must run an ongoing series of A/B tests that can help refine marketing messages and make their product pipelines more relevant to customers’ needs.

In part three of a five-article series on growth marketing fundamentals, Jonathan Martinez explains how to properly manage A/B tests, identify statistical significance when reviewing data, and prioritize experiments that maximize reach and impact.

Three more from the TC+ team:

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!

Read More

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Big Tech Inc.

In a census of its own making, GitHub says it has 100 million active users, Paul reports. This is a substantial jump from the 3 million it had 10 years ago and even a healthy increase from just three months ago when Microsoft, which acquired the company five years ago, announced GitHub had over 90 million users.

Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe got together to seize Hive's ransomware infrastructure, including leak sites and decryption keys, Carly reports. She writes that Hive is "one of the most prolific ransomware operations," focusing mainly on healthcare and public health entities, claiming responsibility for breaches at Illinois-based Memorial Health System in August 2021 and most recently targeting Tata Power, a top power-generation company in India, in October.

And we have four more for you:

Read more stories on TechCrunch.com

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