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Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Databricks reaches $38B billion valuation with $1.6B Series H

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Tuesday, August 31, 2021 By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 31, 2021. Today the TechCrunch machine was busy covering the first day of Y Combinator's Demo Day event, so expect to see all sorts of coverage on the site after this hits your inbox. We'll bring you a recap in tomorrow's edition, though we do have a first taste down below.

In Disrupt news, TechCrunch is bringing an AI investor and a science-fiction author together and will have lots on deck for startups currently raising external capital. — Alex

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Image Credits: Sinovation Ventures / World Chinese Science Fiction Association

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Databricks is now worth $38B: Data and AI unicorn Databricks confirmed its previously reported financing event today, raising $1.6 billion at a $38 billion valuation. TechCrunch spoke with the company's CEO about what the money’s for, and we dug a bit more deeply into its revenue results. The late-stage market has been busy, but this Databricks round is big even by today's venture standards.
  • More African startups than ever in YC batch: As we write, Demo Day is ongoing, so most of our first-day coverage will be finished too late to include. But we got a look at the African startups in the summer batch, and there are more than ever. Given how active the African startup market is proving this year, we're not surprised.
  • Apna could be India's next unicorn: Focusing on upskilling Indian consumers, Apna could become a unicorn if a Tiger Global-led round comes to fruition. TechCrunch reports that the round could be worth $100 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion. Edtech in India remains one of the key startup narratives in recent years.
The TechCrunch Top 3 image

Image Credits: Bloomberg / Getty Images

Cutting churn with seamless data onboarding

Sponsored by Flatfile

From improper file types to bad data hygiene, Inkit came to the point where their customer support team was spending several hours a day addressing data import issues. Enter Flatfile.

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Startups/VC

Because this is the last day of August, we presume that the summer lull in funding events has come and gone. Not that we really noticed a downtick in volume, frankly, but all the same, expect things to get even crazier in the coming weeks. Here's a sampling of the rounds that we covered today:

  • $200M more to roll-up Amazon merchants: Beyond Indian edtech companies, another trend that has raised nigh-infinite funds this year is startups raising capital to buy up smaller e-commerce merchants, often with a focus on those selling on Amazon. Heroes is the latest to raise capital for the concept, with the U.K.-based startup adding a few hundred million to its accounts in a single go.
  • Whoop, the Peloton of Apple Watches, raises $200M: If you are a fitness-wearable user, you may be familiar with Whoop. The company's athlete-focused wristband has helped Whoop raise more than $400 million, now valuing the company at $3.6 billion. That's many duckets for a fitness wearable. But as Whoop has a software fee bundled into its hardware — hence our Peloton analogy — it is not simply another hardware company.
  • Synthetic coffee is coming: Maricel Saenz, the founder and CEO of Compound Foods, wants to create and sell coffee sans beans. Why? Well, climate change is making growing coffee beans harder, and the process is hard on the environment to boot. So why not just synthesize your morning java? I am willing to try this out, with the caveat that coffee is delicious so it's going to take a little convincing for me to change my routines.
  • Borzo wants to bring on-demand to more markets: Delivery service Dostavista is rebranding to Borzo, bringing its multicountry business under a single brand. The startup, per TechCrunch, was founded in 2012 and has a customer base of 2 million.
  • Former TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley company Quip raises $100M: Quip is best known as a toothbrush company, but it hit profitability last year, expanded its product line and landed nine figures in new capital. The company today offers a host of oral cleaning products as well as invisible teeth aligners.
  • To close out our startup coverage today, Peak has raised $75 million to help non-tech companies build AI apps. The Manchester, England-based Peak wants to help companies that lack in-house AI talent apply the software technique to their own businesses. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the latest investment, which the company intends to use to scale its staff and hit up new markets.

6 tips for establishing your startup's global supply chain

The barrier to entry for launching hardware startups has fallen; if you can pull off a successful crowdfunding campaign, you’re likely savvy enough to find a factory overseas that can build your widgets to spec.

But global supply chains are fragile: No one expected an off-course container ship to block the Suez Canal for six days. Due to the pandemic, importers are paying almost $18,000 for shipping containers from China today that cost $3,300 a year ago.

After spending a career spinning up supply chains on three continents, Liteboxer CEO Jeff Morin authored a guide for Extra Crunch for hardware founders.

“If you're clear-eyed about the challenges and apply some rigor and forethought to the process, the end result can be hard to match,” Morin says.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

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6 tips for establishing your startup's global supply chain image

Image Credits: Suriyapong Thongsawang / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc.

  • TikTok wants to help match influencers and brands: That's the takeaway from our story today that TikTok's "new Creator Marketplace API lets influencer marketing companies tap into first-party data." Given how much we've read about astroturfing influencers, the concept makes sense. And TikTok wants its leading creators to make lots of money on its platform so they stick around. Expect to see more of this from other platforms in time.
  • Windows 11 launches October 5: As a Windows fan (and a macOS fan, for the record), I am somewhat hyped to try out the latest Windows build, though I worry if my CPU is sufficiently new. Regardless, the new code drops in early October, so the wait is nearly over.
  • Now you can troll your friends on Spotify with your musical tastes: Love music? Have friends that love music? And do you enjoy different music than your friends? Good news! Now you can create blended playlists with your team, so that you wind up with a playlist that pleases precisely no one.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

TechCrunch Disrupt is in less than a month, and we're excited to share that we're giving away one free ticket through the Experts survey. Check out the schedule for Disrupt, and read on to learn about the giveaway details:

  • Have you already submitted a recommendation? That's great — we're counting all previous survey submissions as an entry for the Disrupt ticket.
  • We'll also enter the next 100 survey submissions into the giveaway.
  • Do you want to submit 10 recommendations to increase your chance at winning? We love the enthusiasm, but we ask that you only submit one recommendation for each marketer that you've worked with.
  • Don't know what to say in your recommendation? Start with what traits they had, what they did to help your company, how their work affected your business and go from there!
  • We manually go through all entries, so please don't copy and paste the same response multiple times.
  • Have a question about the giveaway? Send us an email at ec_editors@techcrunch.com.
TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing image

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Monday, August 30, 2021

China sets three-hour weekly time limit for under-18 gamers

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Monday, August 30, 2021 By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 30, 2021. The startup world is gearing up for Y Combinator Demo Day this week, but the rest of tech isn't taking a pause. So we have Apple news, Telegram news, antitrust news, video game news, you name it.

But we have some TechCrunch news to start: Ryan Reynolds is coming to Disrupt to talk about his company, Maximum Effort. That's pretty hype. And we're going to be talking about software. A lot. — Alex

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Image Credits: Guy Aroch

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • China restricts youth gaming: To three hours per week! Which isn't much! For a country with a large games market like China, this is big darn news. But it's just one part of a larger regulatory push in China (including things as far afield as taking on online fan culture!) to bring its private companies more in line with the government's plans.
  • Toast's IPO looks tasty: TechCrunch took a longer look at Boston-based Toast's IPO filing today. Our takeaways? That the company has posted admirable growth since its COVID lows and has a very sturdy multipart business model. The company is doing the very active Boston startup scene proud.
  • Spotify buys Joe Rogan, Apple buys classical music? The campaign to build differentiated music streaming services in an era when music is available everywhere hotted up this week with Apple buying Primephonic. The smaller company, based in Amsterdam, will be absorbed into Apple Music.
The TechCrunch Top 3 image

Image Credits: VCG / Getty Images

Cutting churn with seamless data onboarding

Sponsored by Flatifle

From improper file types to bad data hygiene, Inkit came to the point where their customer support team was spending several hours a day addressing data import issues. Enter Flatfile.

Read More

Startups/VC

Ready for a broadside of startup news? Good. We have what you need. But first, as a sign of the times, Telegram just crossed the 1 billion download mark. That's an achievement, sure, but also goes to show that maybe consumers do care about privacy after all.

  • Casper's unfriendly ghost fails to haunt Eight Sleep: Remember when D2C mattress company Casper went public, and it went poorly? That misstep has not stopped investors from putting new capital into Eight Sleep, which makes smart mattresses. The startup just raised $86 million in a Series C round of funding that values it at nearly a half-billion dollars.
  • Prive raises $1.7M for better e-commerce subscriptions: Two ex-Uber folks are building something new to make e-commerce subscriptions, helping both retailers sell more goods and consumers get better recommendations. Win/win.
  • At long last, a personal CRM? I don't want to get your hopes up, as building a personal CRM has been a white whale in startupland for some time. But Clay, a startup that just raised $8 million, has put together what TechCrunch calls "a system designed to help you be more thoughtful with the people in your life." Please let it be good. I need help.
  • Alpaca proves that embedded fintech is still hot: TechCrunch has covered Alpaca a few times in recent years, both when it raised capital and when we were delving more deeply into the world of API-delivered startups. Today the company announced a $50 million Series B, a partnership with Plaid and support for crypto trading. Alpaca's work to provide other fintechs with embedded equities trading appears to be going well.
  • How does one become a travel influencer? I don't know. But if you become one, Thatch wants you to be able to better monetize your recommendations. If you are currently a travel influencer, this is good news. If you were hoping that influencers would lose influence in the coming years, this is not.
  • To cap us off today, Ola Electric is looking to raise between $250 million and $500 million. That's a huge chunk of change. The deal has yet to close, but our early reporting indicates that Ola's electric vehicle business is about to be more than flush. "Falcon Edge Capital is in advanced talks to lead the round, which values Ola Electric between $2.75 billion to $3.5 billion," TechCrunch reports.
  • Plus, over the weekend I wrote about why startups are going to win the battle to set the tone regarding remote work, in case you wanted to give that a read.

How Amazon EC2 grew from a notion into a foundational element of cloud computing

In August 2006, AWS activated its EC2 cloud-based virtual computer, a milestone in the cloud infrastructure giant’s development.

“You really can't overstate what Amazon was able to accomplish,” writes enterprise reporter Ron Miller.

In the 15 years since, EC2 has enabled clients of any size to test and run their own applications on AWS’ virtual machines.

To learn more about a fundamental technological shift that “would help fuel a whole generation of startups,” Ron interviewed EC2 VP Dave Brown, who built and led the Amazon EC2 front-end team.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

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How Amazon EC2 grew from a notion into a foundational element of cloud computing image

Image Credits: Ron Miller/TechCrunch

Big Tech Inc.

  • ByteDance buys VR hardware startup: Sure, Facebook is a leader in the VR hardware game, but it's hardly the only player. TikTok parent company ByteDance is looking to take Facebook on by buying Pico, which had raised a $37 million round earlier this year. It's not clear how this news intersects with gaming restrictions in China, but now we should have national champions duking it out in the VR market.
  • Instagram wants to know your birthday: If you aren't into giving Facebook products more of your data, bad news today from Instagram. It will prompt users to share their birthday and only allow so many deferrals. Why? TechCrunch reports that the change is to help "personalize your experience" on the service. Which means ads.
  • Ideanomics buys Via Motors: Ideanomics, a public mobility company, is spending $450 million in stock to buy Via Motors, an EV company. Shares of Ideanomics are up just over 5% today on the news.
  • It turns out that most Big Tech employees aren't opposed to antitrust enforcement, even though the ideas being bandied about the halls of Congress could make life harder for the megacorps that currently constitute the top end of the technology industry.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Are you all caught up on last week's coverage of growth marketing? If not, read it here.

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.

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Image Credits: Guy Kawasaki / Unsplash under a license.

Community

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Join Danny Crichton on Twitter Spaces tomorrow, Tuesday, August 31st at 1 p.m. PDT/4 p.m. EDT as he talks with Azeem Azhar about his upcoming book, "The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society," which will be released on September 7, 2021.

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Friday, August 27, 2021

In latest tech crackdown, China plans severe algorithm restrictions

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Friday, August 27, 2021 By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Friday, August 27, 2021. What a week! In the last 24 hours we've had big news from around the world, including China's latest regulatory push, Apple making modest concessions regarding the App Store and, of course, startup news aplenty.

Oh, and Canva CEO Melanie Perkins is coming to Disrupt. — Alex

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Image Credits: Canva

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • China to crack down on algorithms: The push to more closely regulate and control China's domestic technology market continued Friday with a government body announcing a draft set of rules for algorithms. The new rules come as China seeks to limit corporate data collection and more. Irony, of course, is dead.
  • Corporations can't get enough startup equity: That's our takeaway from digging into the recent, record results from the corporate venture capital (CVC) world. CVCs are taking part in more, bigger startup funding rounds. We dug into the why and the how of the latest data.
  • Apple makes smallest App Store concession: Per a settlement today, TechCrunch reports that Apple will now allow apps to "share information on how to pay for purchases outside of their iOS app or the App Store." Apple called the change a clarification, which was interesting. Apple's grip on the App Store is still tight, but we may be seeing indicators that its hold is slipping modestly.
The TechCrunch Top 3 image

Image Credits: George / Getty Images

Why Businesses Should Buy, Not Build, Embedded Analytics

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Discover the benefits of buying an embedded analytics solution for your product, rather than building it yourself. Ramp up faster, with a better user experience and scalability. Learn more.

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Startups/VC

Up top, let's talk about a16z, the venture capital conglomerate. Sure, it has crypto funds and main funds and other funds aplenty. But today the group announced a $400 million capital pool just for seed deals. The fund size indicates that a16z is either expecting to pay lots for seed equity or that it is going to make a host of bets. We'll see.

  • Rivian files to go public: In case you were looking for yet another EV company to add to your personal investments, good news! Rivian has filed privately to go public! Frankly, we’re excited by this deal; Lordstown this is not. The company recently closed $2.5 billion in external capital, bringing it to more than $10 billion in total. We want to know what all that funding has bought the firm in terms of results.
  • Forbes is also going public: Via a SPAC, we should note, but yes, Forbes the media-and-magazine company is taking advantage of the boom in blank-check combinations to take itself public. We dug into its deck to see what the company has coming up and how heavily COVID-19 impacted its results.
  • Toast is also going public, but your humble servant failed to get a post up on the matter by the time it was newsletter o'clock. More to come on TechCrunch.com.
  • Payroll API startup Zeal raises Series A: The embedded fintech space is busy, and competitive, which makes what Zeal is building rather interesting. Is there a big enough market for just a payroll API product? A few years ago I would have quibbled, but if the OKR startup world has taught me anything, it's to not underestimate how much demand there is in the world for software.
  • Sitenna wants to help telcos place 5G antennas: Coming in the next batch of Y Combinator-backed startups, Sitenna is looking for a piece of the capital wave that will push 5G mobile connectivity into our lives. The startup is neat, so read the post, but also keep in mind that demo day for YC is next week, so we're heading into a very heavy news cycle over the next few days.
  • Sastrify raises $7M: Based in Cologne, Sastrify wants to help companies buy and manage their SaaS spend. Why does the world need this? Well, now that all software is a subscription fee, not overpaying and generally knowing what one is paying for is a big deal. And big deals plus some founder work equals a startup. Notably, Sastrify is already cash-flow-positive despite its youth.

The pre-pitch: 7 ways to build relationships with VCs

Many founders must overcome a few emotional hurdles before they’re comfortable pitching a potential investor face-to-face.

To alleviate that pressure, Unicorn Capital founder Evan Fisher recommends that entrepreneurs use pre-pitch meetings to build and strengthen relationships before asking for a check:

This is the ‘we actually aren't looking for money; we just want to be friends for now’ pitch that gets you on an investor's radar so that when it's time to raise your next round, they'll be far more likely to answer the phone because they actually know who you are.

Pre-pitches are good for more than curing the jitters: These conversations help founders get a better sense of how VCs think and sometimes lead to serendipitous outcomes.

“Investors are opportunists by necessity,” says Fisher, “so if they like the cut of your business's jib, you never know — the FOMO might start kicking hard.”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

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The pre-pitch: 7 ways to build relationships with VCs image

Image Credits: Getty Images under a Andrii Yalanskyi license.

Big Tech Inc.

  • Peloton's bad week: What happens when you have a lackluster earnings report — by Wall Street's standards — and then get "subpoenaed by both the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security"? Well, your share price goes down, and you hope that Monday will wind up much better than how Friday went.
  • Tesla wants to sell power: This is a fun one. Per an application, the world learned that Tesla wants to sell power in Texas under the rubric of being a retail electric provider, meaning that it may "purchase wholesale electricity from power generators and sell it to customers," per TechCrunch.
  • Twitter tried to bring back the old times: By having its service stutter and go down for folks today. Remember the good old times, when Twitter broke all the time? Personally, I miss the Fail Whale. Twitter, we reckon, does not.
  • To close us out, Venky Adivi from Canonical has some thoughts on open source software and the U.S. government. Spoiler: The news is mostly good.

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.

Read one of the testimonials we've received below!

Marketer: Natalia Bandach, Hypertry

Recommended by: Jean-Noel Saunier, Growth Hacking Course

Testimonial: "Natalia is someone with an out-of-the-box approach to growth drivers and experimentation, full of creative solutions and many ideas that she quickly tests through experimentation. Rather than focusing on one area, she tries to verify what makes the most sense to a business and designs experiments that are crucial not only [in the short term] but also [in the long run]. She is an ethical growth manager, likes to know that the business brings real value, and is ready to pivot in every direction, [which] she does fast — however, with a focus on the team’s well-being, professional growth and always avoiding burnout."

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing image

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

Community

Image Credits: Diversion Books

Join Danny Crichton on Twitter Spaces on Tuesday, August 31st at 1 p.m. PDT/4 p.m. EDT as he talks with Azeem Azhar about his upcoming book, "The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society," which will be released on September 7, 2021.

Read More

Read more stories on TechCrunch.com

Newest Jobs from Crunchboard

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