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Today is Friday. We are going to spend some quality time with a headset and a collection of amazing podcasts, and here is our recap of this week's episodes. Juneteenth is Monday and we're taking it off. If you are outside the U.S., this article from the New York Times is a good introduction.
If some of the jokes in this newsletter make even less sense than usual, it might be because Haje is running on three-and-a-quarter brain cells.
The TechCrunch Top 3
- Getting to Mars with fewer people: Not sure if it is a coincidence, but commenters to our story from yesterday felt the group of SpaceX employees, that circulated an open letter challenging Elon Musk’s Twitter behavior, should be fired. Today, Darrell brings us news that this may have indeed happened for some of that employee group. He reports that other employees did not appreciate being inundated with unsolicited offers to join the group and took their own action with corporate. See here for more on Musk’s plan for Twitter.
- Integrating into Alibaba: Cainiao, the logistics service operated by Alibaba, made its debut in Pakistan to support Daraz, an e-commerce company there that Alibaba bought in 2018. Rita reports that it’s likely Cainiao will now follow Alibaba as it expands its footprint around the globe.
- Some fresh perspective for VC: We got double a treat from Dominic-Madori today. She interviewed a number of Black Gen Z VCs who successfully broke into an industry that had traditionally not included them. You can read her interview with Fearless Fund’s Arian Simone here or under today’s TC+ section.
Startups and VC
According to Mary Ann, Brex is no longer suited to meet the needs of smaller customers in today's startup world.
Immutab has a half billion dollar fund to increase web3 gaming adoption. Over the last couple of months, we've really found our stride, so keep an eye out for more in the future. You can start with our web3 tag on the site and work your way through some of our previous stuff as well.
The best of the others.
- A roundup of the robot revolution: If you are into robots, definitely subscribe to Brian’s Actuator newsletter. This week’s issue, “Funding the robot revolution,” is particularly good, if you ask us, but he’s consistently a great source for keeping a finger on the robotic pulse. Do robots even have pulses? Answers on a postcard or tweet, pls.
- Reddit? I barely know it: Social news giant Reddit is buying machine learning platform Spell, reports Taylor, presumably to improve its spam hunting and recommendation algos.
- More bank, less banking: For LatAm’s small businesses, Mono aims to be the “first bankingless bank,” reports Christine.
- That’s a lot of cheddar, you guys: Rohlik bags $231 million even in a market that appears to be a little bored of food delivery startups, Ingrid reports.
- That’s it! No crypto for you! Thai crypto exchange Huobi announced it is closing in July, writes Rita.
- Investor? I barely know or: (These puns don’t even make sense! Don’t worry, we’ll send him back to bed as soon as this newsletter is done.) We did enjoy this guest column from Tory Reiss, where he explains how he turned their investors into a great source of customer feedback.
Fearless Fund’s Arian Simone on why a downturn is business as usual for minority founders
The image is from the fearless fund.
Black women are more likely to fall into a funding gap when they need capital than other women.
According to Dominic- Madori Davis, less than five Black women raised money past the Series A stage, and one of them was Rhianna.
In order to level the playing field for minority women working in tech and consumer packaged goods,entrepreneur Arian Simone co-founded Fearless Fund in 2019.
Despite the chill in the markets, the fund has supported 31 companies so far.
Simone said that companies that are venture backed have seen horror stories. The current macroeconomic climate doesn't scare them.
Fearless Fund’s Arian Simone on why a downturn is business as usual for minority founders
Techcrunch+ is a membership program that helps startup teams. You can join here.
Big Tech Inc.
Privacy is a good thing, so it's nice to seeWhatsApp come out with a new feature that lets you hide your profile photo, bio and "last seen" status from people you don't want to see The opt-in is called "My contacts except..." and it allows you to list those people.
We are going to read a pair of stories by the same author. In the first one, we learn that the founder of Wikileaks will be returning to the US. The home secretary of the U.K. granted the request to extradite the man after several attempts by the U.S. She dives into the region's data reform study, one of those being replacing cookie pop-ups with browser related opt-out. She says that there is a lot of uniquely British red tape to contend with for your digital operations.
Don't forget to read these as well.
- Snap, uh, snaps to it with new paid tier: If you like being the first to test out or know about new app features, Snap’s got something for you, Ivan writes.
- Blocked: Carly reports that popular proxy service company Rsocks, known to be run by Russian cybercriminals, had its website seized by the U.S. government.
- Shopping with remotes: Roku and Walmart claim they are the first streaming and retail partnership to enable shoppable ads while streaming your favorite shows, Lauren reported.
- Well, that prediction came true: Manish writes about TikTok moving all of its U.S. data to Oracle servers after, you guessed it, some new claims surfaced that user data was being accessed from China.
- Good news for parents of young children: The FDA has cleared the COVID-19 vaccine for children as young as 6 months, Darrell reported.
