We're listening to a brand-new show on May 23, 2022. We talked to the writers about the stories they were most excited about. Darrell and Taylor are talking about aliens on the first episode.
The TechCrunch Top 3
- Hey, you, get into my car: Automotive marketplace newcomer Sylndr is parking itself in a prime spot in the Egyptian used-car market with a $12.6 million pre-seed round, a big one for the region, to try to make some sense of an unorganized and outdated industry where buyers are distrustful of sellers. Sylndr’s approach is to offer both a “certified pre-owned” option — they buy the cars and get them in working condition — and financing in hopes of putting the brakes on some of that mistrust.
- Is it a nerd? Is it insane? No, it’s super-Solana: If you’ll forgive the utterly dodgy Superman reference, Rita explores whether StepN, the latest crypto gaming craze, makes any sense.
- High returns: Cryptocurrency has never been one for stability — heck, even the stablecoins aren’t proving to be stable — but for those die-hard investors looking for high-yield savings, Pebble wants to be your provider. Buoyed by a new infusion of $6.2 million in seed funding, the startup offers 5% annual percentage yield on all cash deposits through the use of stablecoins. Is everyone checking their bank APY right now?
Startups and VC
In a world where a lot of industrial robots have limited computing powers, it makes sense to put them in the cloud. Brian reports on an interesting development from the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence research lab.
It's pretty depressing that there are so many layoffs happening in startup land, but you can read all of the sad news in one post.
As we tighten our belts, we need to start talking to bankers and buyers to make sure we have options if the guillotine strikes.
There are some good news.
- The pear tree is fruiting: Connie reports that Silicon valley VC firm Pear is raising a $410 million fund; this is a huge step up from its previous $50 million, $75 million, and $160 million funds.
- Moving from A to B in Uno, Dos, Tres: Christine reports how Argentina-based startup ClicOh raises $25 million to bring Amazon-level logistics to e-commerce businesses in LatAm.
- Twinkle, twinkle, little pedal: We didn’t know how much bike pedals needed lights in them until we saw it in action. It just makes so much sense…
- From routing to routing: Amit Jain, who previously led Uber’s APAC business and was a partner at Sequoia, is working on a crypto payments platform, raising money from Uber’s CEO, Manish reports.
Cisco’s latest results indicate a reckoning may soon be at hand
The image was uploaded by Bloomberg.
Is the networking leader not doing well?
Ron Miller and Alex Wilhelm looked over the company's recently released quarterly results and found that revenue was flat, with future earnings predicted to fall well short of expectations.
Chuck Robbins told analysts last week that the company was feeling the effects of global supply chain issues and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but it wasn't clear whether healthy software revenues could compensate for its sinking hardware business.
Even when the supply chain issues are solved, it will take 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884
Cisco’s latest results indicate a reckoning may soon be at hand
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Big Tech Inc.
There is some M&A news about a company taking an interest in another company. Ron and Alex weren't the first to hear about it, but they spent a lot of time thinking about why Broadcom might be interested in VMware.
Today's mobility news is brought to you by the letter H, the letter B, and the word C. The company says it will put $10 billion into electric and self-drive vehicles by the year 2025. About half of that will go into the car maker's new EV factory in Georgia. Boeing's team is cheering as its Starliner is docked with the International Space Station after many delays and even some nail-biting events after lift-off.
There is some positive news for premium streaming subscriptions that might be making Netflix jealous, as late-night funnyman Conan O'Brien's Team Coco is now part of SiriusXM.
This is now.
- Where were you when “The Great Fintech Battle” was fought?: You might remember in one of last week’s Daily Crunches we discussed Plaid and Stripe going head-to-head on some new tools. Alex and Mary Ann dig a little deeper into this fintech battle, where consumers might be declared the winner.
- Taking away toxic text: Microsoft developed some news tools that aim to find and fix flaws in the way artificial intelligence models take in large amounts of data to create large language models that often end up with hate speech and other harmful language.
- Epic Games fought the law and won, for now: Epic Games temporarily won on behalf of its internet music company holding, Bandcamp, to let the app run its existing payment system on Android. This is a similar antitrust legal battle against the tech giants that Epic Games is fighting itself.
- Data disasters: The U.K. fined Clearview AI £7.5 million and told them to delete information of U.K. residents after it was found the U.S.-based company, which has a database of over 20 billion facial images, was grabbing them and using them without permission in a breach of local privacy laws. Stateside, Mark Zuckerberg is finding himself in some hot water. The Facebook founder is part of new litigation brought by the District of Columbia, alleging he was personally involved in the failures that led to the whole Cambridge Analytica–Facebook data-misuse debacle.
- Well that takes the cake: Wedding planning app Zola confirmed that hackers gained entry into user accounts, which gave them access to credit card numbers, which the hackers used to buy gift cards.
