Daily Crunch: Identity-as-a-service platform Okta says it ‘contained’ network breach in January

Alex Wilhelm, Christine Hall / 6:30 PM EDT•March 22, 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 Tuesday, March 22, 2022, you will be able to see Daily Crunch. We're bringing in a few other people to help with the newsletter. The Big Tech and Startups sections were written by Christine Hall. This week, Haje Jan Kamps will be rotating. You can give them a follow.

If you want to know more about air mobility and urban planning at our upcoming event, hit the link. Now, to work!

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Okta leaks, stock dips: Okta, a former startup and present-day public company, confirmed a January breach today “after hackers posted screenshots overnight apparently showing access to the company’s internal systems,” TechCrunch reports. The company’s stock initially fell sharply in the wake of the disclosure, but recovered during the day’s trading.
• Forge shows IPO market not dead: Forge helps investors in private companies sell shares in startups to others. So, it’s a bit ironic that the company went public today in a SPAC combination. But the offering wound up being a smashing success, with the newly public company spiking around 60% as we write this newsletter. That’s among the best debuts we’ve seen in some time — and could help other private companies look toward an exit of their own.
• Muni empowers LatAm women to make money shopping: Muni is a play to make online commerce more common in places where ordering goods digitally is not the norm. By working with community leaders who can earn a wage for their work, users can place group orders that are then delivered collectively and distributed on a last-mile basis from there. The company just closed a $20 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Startups and VC

Let's start with a smile. Have you been on the internet too much? Do you want to be a cat? If so, you might want to look at this nifty tool that can turn you into an animal. I intend to use the fun little tool in my next job. A big thanks to the person who helped keep the website weird.

We have some news about the startup market. The company raised $180 million at a valuation of $2.1 billion. Thanks to the fact that the valuation of the company doubled in around a half year, the round sticks out from the rest. Capitolis raised $110 million at a $1.6 billion valuation. Our own Ingrid Lunden reports that the U.S. and Israeli company works with large financial institutions.

We have been covering more agricultural technology companies lately, which we sort into a bucket labeled "agtech." So let's harvest a few of our latest headlines from that crop. A robot scans crop fields for health indicators and potential issues. At least as cute as a robot. A number of individuals started an agtech publication that they turned into a fund, instead of raising a fund out the gate. It is a very interesting yarn.

• Unicorn Cityblock Health names CEO: It’s not often that a startup worth $6 billion changes CEO before an IPO, so when Cityblock Health moved co-founder Toyin Ajayi into the top executive role, we took notice. The company has raised $900 million to date for its work as a primary healthcare provider with a focus on in-home and virtual care. Our podcast Found dug into the story.
• Harness moves more deeply into open source dev tools: With more and more startups building with an open source stance, it’s not a huge shock that Harness – which is working to build “a more complete modern tooling platform for developers,” Ron Miller reports – bought ChaosNative, which builds open source developer tools. This is not the company’s first open source-focused acquisition, TechCrunch reports.
• Today in good startup names: Eko, which is working to bring “applied AI into the stethoscope space,” is well-named. After all, echocardiograms listen to heart echoes, making its name, well, apt. The startup’s digital stethoscope tool has yet to get U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance to use its software clinically, but with $30 million in new capital, it has the funds to see that effort across the line, we reckon.
• Rokid shows it’s still around and ready to go global: We had not heard much from Chinese augmented reality company Rokid since 2018, but its new cash infusion of a $160 million Series C round is proving the company is ready to take on more of the enterprise side of the world. Be watching for more on its smart glasses and headsets for field workers.
• Firefly Aerospace headed for SPAC?: A recent filing with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission suggests the rocket startup has plans to go public via a special purpose acquisition company. This might be some good news for the company, which saw its largest shareholder, Ukrainian Max Polyakov, forced to sell his shares over national security concerns.

Be an entrepreneur who leads with transparency

A tech company is not like starting a small business: no one expects a business to show 3% month-over-month growth.

Tech entrepreneurs are under pressure to build a team, regularly ship new products, and quickly capture revenue so they can provide a return to their investors. They let ethics fall by the wayside sometimes.

The mindset of faking it till you make it is a useful motivational tool, but it is not a basis for a sustainable business strategy.

The founder of a company I invested in secretly kept two sets of books: one with correct historical financials, and another with numbers inflated more than 10 times actuals. Sales and product performance had fallen short. His solution was to present the inflated financials to investors.

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

Be an entrepreneur who leads with transparency

Big Tech Inc.

• Nvidia wants to help guide your self-driving car: Nvidia is showing off the fruits of its DeepMap acquisition with the new Drive Map feature that combines survey mapping with crowdsourced mapping data from vehicles using its platform.
• Twitter wants EU to think of the bigger tech picture: After two years in development, Twitter has kicked off its Open Internet Alliance, a policy advocacy lobby group aimed at prodding lawmakers to look at the internet not through the lens of tech giants, but as a broad ecosystem that doesn’t need such harsh digital regulations. Kind of ironic because in the U.S., Twitter is one of those tech giants, but it’s all in the name of kicking off an “open conversation and press for regulation that fosters diversity and innovation on the internet,” as was told to TechCrunch.
• Twitch allowing users to appeal account bans: The company updated its appeals and reporting processes, with one of the bigger changes being a new portal where users can appeal and monitor the progress of an impending account suspension. Over the past two years, Twitch tells TechCrunch it quadrupled its moderating, but also wanted to make good on a wrong decision.
• Microsoft’s AI translations just got better: Microsoft updated its translation services, aka Z-Code, which means users now have a one-stop shop — you can now directly translate between 10 languages, for example, English to Bulgarian, without the need for multiple systems. This isn’t the only place where Z-Code is being used by Microsoft, but it is the first time the approach is being used for a translation service.
• Shopify has entered link-in-bio territory: Linkpop is Shopify’s approach to the link-in-bio craze, enabling creators to launch storefronts and sell directly from their Linkpop page, while consumers can purchase without leaving the app they were using. It’s the company’s goal to have Linkpop users create a Shopify storefront. (Link-in-bio has gained traction, so much so that Linktree raised $110 million to keep developing new features.)

Quantum tech may be having its moment at long last. Consider that earlier this month, one of the few “pure play” quantum tech companies in the world, Rigetti Computing, went public by m...We’re now in the era of “value-add venture capital,” where investors need to show founders that they will do more for them than merely cut a check. Unstoppable Domains, a popular blockchain naming system provider, is putting together a funding round at a valuation of $1 billion, three people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The startu...If you ever wanted to make a GIF from your iOS camera while using the Twitter app, today’s your lucky day. Twitter announced that now, we can do just that. When you compose a new tweet on iOS...Yuga Labs, maker of the multimillion dollar monkey JPEGs that plenty of NFT skeptics love to hate, just raised a $450 million round from Andreessen Horowitz at a $4 billion valuation, the company a...U.S. securities regulators on Tuesday said they have authority to subpoena Tesla CEO Elon Musk about his tweets and urged a federal judge not to let the executive get away with tweeting with abando...In a blog post today titled “Moving Forward, With Gratitude,” Kickstarter CEO Aziz Hasan announced that he is stepping down from his leadership role at the crowdfunding platform. After ...Katie Haun, who co-led Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm before announcing her departure this past December, is ready to take the wraps off her new organization, which she’s calling Haun...In a formalization of an earlier Twitter-led push to try to exert influence over fast-forming European digital regulations, the social media firm has used its Twitter Spaces platform to host the of...The stethoscope has come a long way from its humble beginnings in the 19th century. The regular acoustic type is still used every day, but it’s been joined by a panoply of digital options that can ...Twitch is updating its appeals and reporting processes, following through on product updates the company promised late last year. The biggest change is the introduction of a new portal where users ...Despite the rapid growth and countless benefits of SaaS, there are significant challenges associated with managing and protecting SaaS data. Firefly Aerospace’s roller coaster ride could soon send the rocket startup to the public market via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, a recent filing with the FCC suggests....Nvidia has launched a new mapping platform that will provide the autonomous vehicle industry with ground truth mapping coverage of over 300,000 miles of roadway in North America, Europe and Asia by...Nvidia has added two electric vehicle makers to its portfolio of automotive companies adopting its Drive Hyperion platform, a compute and sensor toolkit that powers automated driving capabilities i...Microsoft today announced an update to its translation services that, thanks to new machine learning techniques, promises significantly improved translations between a large number of language pair...Chinese startup Rokid has been through a few stages of transformation over its eight years of existence, and it’s recently raised some new funding to stay afloat. The Temasek-backed company s...Harness, the developer-focused startup from Jyoti Bansal, has been working hard to build a more complete modern tooling platform for developers while taking a distinct shift into open source more r...