Christine Hall, Haje Jan Kamps /
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It's happy Thursday! Everyone is going down this morning. If it helped you have a quiet day, we hope it did.

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • One rival at a time: The digital design world got a treat today when Adobe announced it was buying Figma, one of its biggest rivals, in a $20 billion deal that has both investors and Figma enthusiasts pondering what will change and if those changes will be bad, Ingrid reports. Meanwhile, Alex gives his take on the deal over in TechCrunch+ land.
  • “The Merge” is here: Talk of “The Merge” has been with us for weeks, and today it is finally here. If you don’t follow cryptocurrency, this means that Ethereum, one of crypto’s most popular blockchains, has now switched to proof-of-stake consensus, which also means it will now consume a lot less electricity, Romain writes. And for TC+, Jacquelyn tells us why it matters that Lido, Coinbase, Kraken and Binance have a majority stake of ETH.
  • There’s a fix for that: Apple is clearing a path for easy iPhone 14 integration with a setup fix. Ivan has more.

Startups and VC

Haje was at Micromobility America today. The only risk of injury has been from neck-breaking micromobility in the form of electric rollerblades. On the same day it was announced that it would be setting up a 3D printing factory for bike helmets, it was also announced that it would be setting up a 3D printing factory for other things.

Mobility startup are filling the void in the Detroit auto show that is a shell of its former self, according to Matt.

There has been a lot of work done by the team. There is a wall of news on the home page of the site.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Helu.io’s $9.8M Series A deck

Helping small- and medium-sized enterprises with their controlling, reporting and budgeting may not sound exciting, but Austrian startup Helu.io was able to raise a $9.8 million Series A in July.

Helu shared its entire winning pitch deck with us. The founders took a simple approach.

There is a problem with the CFO's pain in excel.

There is a solution to the problem of good-bye excel sheets.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Helu.io’s $9.8M Series A deck

Techcrunch+ is a membership program that helps startup teams. This is where you can sign up. You can get a 15% discount on an annual subscription.

Big Tech Inc.

Whenever we hear about Call of Duty, we think of the character from "The Office" who gave the game a shout-out. Jordan was present at the announcement of the game's next generation.

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