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The TechCrunch Top 3
Some developers are not happy: If you haven’t had a chance to meet our new Europe reporter, Paul Sawers, you are in for a treat because he knocked it out of the park today. He wrote about the Software Freedom Conservancy urging open source developers to ditch GitHub following the company’s commercial launch of Copilot. Their beef, among other things, is that there is now a fee associated with using Copilot.
It’s going down: Buy now, pay later fintech company Klarna is reportedly raising a fresh round of funding at a valuation far below some of its previous rounds. Mary Ann has more.
Valuation waits for no market: Alex digs into OpenSea’s $13 billion valuation and why that is not in line with what he is seeing with NFT trading volumes.
Startups and VC
It was a slow day for startup news.
Another wave: Natasha and Amanda are back with the saddest list we put together — all the tech layoffs.
No head in the clouds here: Snowflake made a name for itself in all things cloud data warehousing, and Ron writes today that Hydra is here to take an open source approach. The company, which raised $3.1 million after graduating from Y Combinator’s winter 2022 class, is building its cloud data warehouse on top of the popular open source Postgres database.
Extra efficiency: I highlighted Promoted.ai’s new $6 million seed extension that will go toward the company’s long-term vision of helping e-commerce marketplaces achieve profitability. Their technology brings all that gooey marketplace goodness, the search, feed, ads and promotions, together under one platform.
A shot in the arm: Medical testing has never been so important now, and Haje got word that Visby Medical brought in another $35 million, an extension to a $100 million Series E round raised earlier this year. The company is working on “the world’s first instrument-free handheld PCR platform to accurately and rapidly test for a variety of serious infections to anyone who needs it.”
Pitch Deck Teardown: Wilco’s $7 million seed deck
The image is titled "Waco."
The window is open in a new way.
If you have a technical background, you should avoid the trap of focusing too much on the features of a product, rather than its benefits.
There is a risk of getting into more detail than what is important for a pitch deck. For this part of the story, it doesn't matter what users do to get these benefits. The slide is so powerful because it focuses on the why and opens the door to more in-depth conversations. I would like to see more startup get this right.
Pitch Deck Teardown: Wilco’s $7 million seed deck
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Big Tech Inc.
The Apple Store was down for 2 hours yesterday but is back up and running. The removal of Enjoy, the company that was in charge of delivery and setup of Apple devices, came back on after Enjoy filed for bankruptcy.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is pursuing a civil charge against a South African company for running a fraudulent commodity pool worth more than $1 billion.
Natasha delivered a couple of stories related to the European Union. Amazon has agreed to make it easier for people to cancel their Prime memberships, while lawmakers gave their approval to some new regulations related to cryptocurrencies.
Google is settling: Ivan writes that the search engine giant agreed to pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit with U.S. developers who accused Google of abusing its power of app distribution and charging an unfair fee of 30% for app purchases and in-app purchases made through the Play Store.
Crypto chaos: One firm, whose application for a bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund was rejected by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, is now suing the federal entity. Jacquie reports on why one expert says that approach isn’t likely to work.
FTX is at it again: First, it was rumored that FTX was looking to acquire Robinhood, which was debunked, but now another deal for BlockFi looks to be sticking. Lucas has more.
No EPA, no cry: Tim dives into why the Supreme Court’s recent Environmental Protection Agency ruling “all but ensures the U.S. won’t be competitive with China or Europe.”
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to strip federal abortion rights in the U.S., many people are questioning how the apps they use every day might suddenly be turned against the...Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) has filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in New York, according to a report in Bloomberg. The mega fund, founded by Credit Suisse traders Zhu Su and Kyle Dav...Samsung announced yesterday that it is bridging its hardware and software for a better gaming experience, bringing the Samsung Gaming Hub to its 2022 lineup of smart TVs and monitors. Game streamin...Elon Musk hasn’t tweeted in 10 days, but his Twitter account is once again news because time is a flat circle. This is why we must now scrunch our faces, cock our heads to one side and strain...This news comes out just over a month after the venture capital giant warned founders to expect a longer economic recovery.
June brought another wave of layoffs in tech, with cuts impacting roughly the same number of employees as May: 16,000 employees, according to tracker layoffs.fyi. Another layoff aggregator from Tru...Grayscale Investments responded to the SEC’s rejection of its application for a bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund by filing a lawsuit against the agency. But not everyone is convinced that it...Reddit announced Friday that it’s acquiring MeaningCloud, a natural language processing company, for an undisclosed amount. The MeaningCloud team has joined Reddit and will support machine le...Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX is taking advantage of rampant instability in the crypto lending market to assert itself while propping up major institutions. The company’s U.S.-based arm has a...Which song will save you from Vecna? In partnership with Netflix, Spotify has launched a personalized “Stranger Things” playlist dedicated to Season 4 Volume 2, which premieres this Friday, July 1....With a $24 billion budget and dozens of active, high-profile missions, it’s not surprising that NASA is the most visible of the dozens of government space agencies in the world. But ChinaR...Future COVID-19 vaccine boosters won’t have to go through a traditional, lengthy clinical trial process to attain emergency use authorization in the U.S., according to a report in Reuters. An...I remember the dread I felt as a startup worker during downturns when I read about mass layoffs at tech firms that had previously been considered ascendant.
The web3 faithful will note that the NFT market goes up and down, and as it is down today, it will go up again. That may be true, and it may even be correct soon. Today, however, it is not true.In a sign of the times, Swedish buy now, pay later giant Klarna is reportedly close to inking a new round of funding that would slash its valuation to $6.5 billion — about 1/7 of what the com...The United States still has a shot at turning things around, but it’s a long one.
Macmillan, one of the largest book publishers in the U.S., said it has been hit by a cyberattack that forced it to shut down its IT systems. Macmillan spokesperson Erin Coffey told TechCrunch that...
