Daily Crunch: With EU ban pending, Google Play says ‘do svidaniya’ to Russia Today, Sputnik apps

Alex Wilhelm@alex / 6:09 PM EST•March 2, 2022

Every day at 3 p.m., you'll get a rundown of the biggest and most important stories from TechCrunch. You can subscribe here.

On Wednesday, March 2, 2022. There is a packed newsletter for you today. We have acquisitions, funding rounds, the end of products, and more. The Equity team figured out how to explain to people how to use dating apps. Now, to work!

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Epic Games buys Bandcamp: Straight from left field, this deal took the tech world by surprise. Epic Games, best known for Fortnite and picking a – deserved, or petty, depending on your priors – fight with Apple over in-app purchases in its app store. And now it’s going to own Bandcamp, a platform best known for helping musical artists sell their tunes and keep most of the money. Sure. Why not.
• Turns out not every company is going to grow vertically: Back when SPACs were hot, many startups looking to combine and go public were content to forecast aggressive revenue growth. Now that the data is coming in, the results are a bit less spectacular than many deals pitched. How far from reality were the projections? We have the data.
• Amazon’s physical store push is over: You might have never visited one, and if not, too late. Amazon’s physical stores that sold curated collections of goods from its e-commerce marketplace are now kaput. So, no more odd Amazon bookstores, or so-called four-star stores. Given what a minute fraction of the company’s aggregate GMV we’re talking about here, this is not Earth-shaking news, but does matter for the larger set of DTC startups out there considering physical retail. If Amazon can’t make it work, well, can you?

Startups/VC

The push to fund Ukraine's war-torn nation-state withcryptocurrencies is turning out to be an actual thing. It is good that the country needs the money, and it is also good to see the impact of the ledger on the real world. There are notes on how Ukraine is using the coin more generally and from a military perspective.

A new fund has been put together by Accel to invest in India. How big has the Indian venture scene become in the last few years? The answer? Huge.

There are two more short notes before we get into the funding round. Tier Mobility is buying Spin from Ford. For a short period of time, it appeared the world might move to shared scooters as a way to get around. Some of the assets built during the period remain on the books of companies that have other priorities. We didn't think this deal would shock us.

One of my favorite pet issues is space debris. You can read it here.

The funding came from the spigot.

• Neobanks continue to raise: Long from the point when it appeared that there was infinite capital available and needed to fund neobanks, rounds for the fintech varietal appear to have slowed. But that hasn’t stopped Australian neobank Zeller from raising AUD$100 million at an AUD$1 billion valuation. That’s a Series B for the record books.
• TrueCircle wants to reform recycling: The world is still using single-use plastics, which means we’re polluting the hell out of our only home. Even more, recycling can be more mirage than reality in many markets. So it’s nice to see U.K.-based TrueCircle look to “bring data-driven AI to the recycling industry to improve recovery rates and quality.” The company just closed a pre-seed round worth $5.5 million.
• Blockchain infra is big business: The rush to fund blockchain-focused startups – be they bitcoin-centered, or web3 more generally – is showing slim signs of slowing. Today’s round from the market involves Tenderly, which just raised $40 million. Dev tools for the decentralized world is a popular startup market, with Alchemy reaching decacorn status pursuing the same general bent as Tenderly.
• NeuraLegion is now Bright Security: Talk about a rename. This reminds me of when I wanted to name a company I was thinking about starting “Functional Brilliance,” which, thankfully, I was talked out of. The same goes for NeuraLegion, which I am sure was great on paper but is a bit trash. Bright Security is simpler, and therefore better. The company just raised $20 million to keep working on “dynamic application security testing and identifying business logic issues,” TechCrunch reports.
• Deskless workers need comms, too: In four words, that’s the pitch behind Connecteam, which just raised $120 million at a valuation of around $800 million. The push to bring software to folks who aren’t sitting for a living is not new – Blink has been at it for a minute – but it is welcome. Everyone deserves to get more done with less work, so here’s to code making that possible – when possible.

As war escalates in Europe, it’s ‘shields up’ for the cybersecurity industry

The photo is from EyeEm.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned against the potential for state-sponsored cyber attacks after Russia invaded Ukraine.

It advised that every organization must be prepared to respond to disruptive cyber activity.

It is hard to act on blanket warnings, but now that employees are widely distributed, the advisory has special importance.

How should companies protect their attack surface? We have answers.

Techcrunch+ helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.

As war escalates in Europe, it’s ‘shields up’ for the cybersecurity industry

Big Tech Inc.

• Apple’s next event is March 8: Mark your calendars and cancel your meetings. TechCrunch, of course, will be covering it to the nth degree.
• Facebook shutters social network for college kids: This is news to me, but Facebook built a social network for college kids called Campus. Which is ironic as that’s where the company started. But, hey, what can you do? Perhaps it will reopen in the metaverse.
• Ford to cleave itself into two pieces: The ICE part of Ford and the electric half of the company are going to sit in different spheres as the U.S. company figures out its future. At this point, you can likely guess which group will get more investment over the next 10 years.
• EU clamps down on Russian state media: Another way in which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is backfiring is in the drastic, rapid shuttering of access to the nation’s governmental propaganda outlets. The EU is busy banning them, and the impacts are rippling outward in the market.
• Netflix buys gaming company behind titles predicated on its IP: What do you do when global growth at your streaming business slows? Get into games, apparently. The Netflix push to become a player in the gaming world took a new turn today, with the U.S. tech and media giant buying Next Games, a Finnish company that made games based on owned titles.

TechCrunch Experts

SEAN GLADWELL was credited with the image.

Recruiters are being sought for the project where we ask top professionals about problems and challenges that are common in early-stage startups. You can let us know if that is you or someone you know.

Snowflake helps customers store and manage oodles of data in the cloud without cloud vendor lock-in. Streamlit is a startup that developed a popular open source project for building data-based apps...With the Polestar 2 in production, Polestars 3 / 4 on the horizon and the Precept concept slated to become the Polestar 5 in 2024, Polestar the company has just unveiled its latest electrified visi...Ford Motor Company is increasing its electric vehicle investment to $50 billion through 2026, up from the previous $30 billion by 2025. CEO Jim Farley announced the news on Wednesday after the auto...Amazon’s physical retail business is suffering a major blow as the company today confirmed to Reuters it will close 68 brick-and-mortar retail stores across the U.S. and U.K. This includes it...It’s a juxtaposition of sorts to think the cybersecurity industry is vulnerable to cyberattack, but for many nation state groups, this is their first port of call. Today’s sustainability crisis in space is the result of 60 years of exploration and utilization that have largely ignored the environmental consequences of space activities. Tier Mobility, the Berlin-based micromobility operator that has been steadily taking over Europe, is making a sweeping entry into North America by acquiring Spin from automaker Ford. Tier will acqu...My goal is to co-found a fintech startup while on an F-1 OPT. I heard that I could to qualify for STEM OPT given the expanded list of STEM fields. Can I continue working at my startup on STEM OPT?Facebook attempted a return to its roots as a college-focused social network with the fall 2020 launch of Campus, a private section within Facebook that was only open to those with an @.edu email a...Zeller, the Australian neobank for SMBs, has raised a $100 million AUD Series B (about $72.7 million USD), doubling its valuation to more than $1 billion AUD (about $727 million USD). The funding w...UK-based TrueCircle, a computer vision startup founded just last year, has nabbed $5.5 million in pre-seed funding in a bid to bring data-driven AI to the recycling industry to improve recovery rat...Happy Bandcamp Wednesday. Fortnite-maker Epic Games is treating itself to an entire Bandcamp. The music download site announced the acquisition in a blog post today, adding that it will continue to...Let’s get three truths out of the way. 1. Drugs are a sensitive topic. 2. In a lot of the world, many drugs that can be used recreationally — including psychedelics — are illegal....Invites just went out for Apple’s next big event, scheduled for 10 AM PT (1 PM ET) on March 8. It will be an online event broadcasting from Apple Park. Anybody will be able to watch it from Apple’s...Last May, Walmart announced its acquisition of the virtual clothing try-on startup Zeekit, which leveraged a combination of real-time image processing, computer vision, deep learning and other AI t...The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is home to many of the most important modern open source projects, including Kubernetes. Today, the CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee announced...Ukraine’s official Twitter account has been sharing cryptocurrency wallet addresses for the past few days to raise funds during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As I previously reported, it seems l...