Daily Crunch: Twitter backpedals on CEO’s promise, permanently bans user who tracked his private jet

Christine Hall@christinemhall / 2:05 AM UTC+3•December 15, 2022

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Happy wednesday, and hello! I am having a virtual holiyay celebration with my fellow techies. He will be back tomorrow after he leaves on a jet plane. Let's look at the news.

The TechCrunch Top 3

• You can’t handle the jet: Elon Musk stated that he was going to protect free speech, even for the person behind Elon Jet, the Twitter account tracking his flights, but alas the account has been permanently suspended. Amanda has more.
• If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em: It used to be that Apple fought what they call “sideloading” alternative app stores on the iPhone, but in order to comply with European laws, the consumer tech giant is now reportedly looking at allowing them with iOS 17, which will come out next year, Ivan reports.
• Cash flow conundrum: Mary Ann reports on Nilus, a startup that secured $8.5 million to automate financial workflows for companies to more easily manage customer payments.

Startups and VC

You all were consuming the news today. Here is a second one. Bondaval, a London-based B2B company providing credit teams with assurance that customers will pay their bills, raised $15 million in Series A funding and has now expanded into new use cases for credit managers at large companies.

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• You look mahvelous: Bollywood star Deepika Padukone has a hit on her hands with her skincare startup, which took in $7.5 million, Manish writes.
• Taking off: Ingrid reports on another round of funding for Shield AI, which gives it a $2.3 billion valuation. The company, with its military autonomous flying tech, is a bright spot in the defense sector, which continues to attract investments.
• I need a dollar, or 1 billion of them: Visa is committing $1 billion to Africa over the next five years to target partnerships and invest in businesses tackling problems ranging from food insecurity to the underbanked, Tage writes.
• You can bet on this: Blockchain has faced its fair share of challenges this year, between crypto winter and other scandals, Mike writes, but it seems to be finding its stride in the sports betting market.

Dear Sophie: When can I register my employee for the H-1B lottery?

The image is from TechCrunch.

I would like to ask you a question, DearSophie.

We would like to sponsor an early employee's H-1B visa to stay in the U.S. and work for us.

The process works how it is supposed to.

Seeking in the area.

Dear Sophie: When can I register my employee for the H-1B lottery?

There are three more people from the team.

The membership program helps startup teams get ahead of the game. This is where you can sign up. You can get a 15% discount on an annual subscription.

Big Tech Inc.

The National Security Agency warned that the Chinese were exploiting a zero-day bug in two of the products. The vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to run malicious code on vulnerable devices. Oh yes, oh!

There is a chance that news is coming from the micro-messaging service. Musk is said to be on the short list for a talking to by the European Union. Before the social media giant announced it was shutting it down, the co-founder of the company had a good one-day run on the platform. There is more information on that that has been given byAmanda.

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