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On April 21, 2022, we celebrate a shiny new show from our team: Chain Reaction. A: Why is the show so loud? A: Because it is unchanging.
We don't get to write the puns on the site because of this.
Come as you are, as I want you to be. Mobility is hosting a pitch competition as well as a Waymo boss coming to Mobility. Get your applications in! You can get your tickets for the event in October.
Christine and Haje, may your day be as smooth as a slightly aggressive elevator jazz.
The TechCrunch Top 3
It’s ‘Elon Musk Time’ all the time now: Captain’s Log, Day 421: The crew is getting restless with nothing to do but talk about the latest on what Elon Musk plans for Twitter. Today, Alex reads a new SEC filing so you don’t have to. It outlines Musk’s proposal to purchase all outstanding shares of the social media giant and where he is getting the money to do it. At the same time, we learn how much Musk has in his private holdings — at least how much he is willing to part with. In non-Twitter news, it looks like Musk has no shortage of money-making opportunities: Rebecca reports on The Boring Company raising $675 million for Loop projects, which is his project to build underground highways to alleviate traffic congestion, his prediction that the Optimus robot Tesla is building will one day be worth more than the company’s full self-driving business, and that Tesla aims to mass-produce robotaxis. Whew!
No need to commute to work. Swap homes instead: Andreessen Horowitz led a funding round into Kindred, a startup founded by some Opendoor alums who wanted to travel while working remotely but didn’t want just anyone using their homes while they were away. What’s interesting about Kindred’s approach is that it is “a give and get policy,” where members pay an annual $300 fee to allow someone to stay in their home while they are in another.
Now we know what William Hockey has been doing: The Plaid co-founder stepped down in 2019 and founded a bank, Column. Surprising for a fintech founder, where many were unbundling bank services over the years, and yet not surprising as now many are rebundling them. In Column’s case, Hockey says the bank’s direct connection to the Fed means that “developers can use Column to build apps that pull and push money to any bank account, for example, or maintain FDIC-insured checking and savings accounts” without having to go through another entity to access federal deposit insurance.
Startups and VC
Tofino Capital closed the first $10 million of a fund that aims to invest in markets where investment dollars fall under $5 per capita. Can't say I've heard anyone approach it that way, but it certainly focuses the attention, and I hope they show an outsized return. That will probably make other VC shops wake up and increase their investment to above that dollar amount, but that's half of what makes this interesting!
Carta is the go-to platform for startup ownership management, it is easy to use and transparent. I'm curious to see how Liquifi will evolve, it wants to do the same thing for web3 and companies.
In rhyme, let's climb into some prime-time news today.
Aim to tame the shame: Sexual health, mental wellness, weight management and fertility are all taboo topics to some – and Singapore-based Ordinary Folk is adding a layer of telehealth to shed the taboos. It also raised $5 million to go harder, better, faster, stronger.
Causing an injury to the mystery of the credit history: Cash-rich but credit-history poor, immigrants are often met with a shrug in their adoptive countries. Fintech Pillar raises $17 million to fix that.
This drone picks a bone when an unknown enters the wrong zone: By sacrificing its own rotors and snaring its enemies in a net, this super-cool kamikaze drone takes down other drones.
A clever sleuth found the truth about a problem with Bluetooth: It turns out that Cue Health’s COVID-19 tester has a security flaw that means it’s possible to flip a negative result to a positive, or vice-versa. Mind you, it’s kinda hard to see what the big dealeo is; it is easy enough to cheat pretty much all at-home tests from positive to negative with a deliriously no-code hack: Don’t stick the swab up your schnoz.
A mighty fine headline wins a shrine in this newsletter of mine: Sometimes all it takes to get a feature spot in the Daily Crunch is making me laugh — and Lauren earned a spot with the headline for her story about Netflix’s subscriber numbers.
How to pitch me: 6 investors discuss what they’re looking for in April 2022
The market is not growing as fast as it used to.
Teams that successfully close a funding round will have a shorter runway. Partnering with an investor who knows the business well enough to add value is more important than it was a year ago.
A founder's pitch is the first step on the journey, so we are interviewing active investors to learn more about what they are looking for and how they prefer to be approached.
Christine Tsai, CEO and founding partner, 500 Global
Marjorie Radlo-Zandi, angel, Launchpad Venture Group, Branch Venture Group
Clelia Warburg Peters, managing partner, Era Ventures
Anarghya Vardhana, partner, Maveron LLC
Frederic Huynen, partner, and Wijnand Bekker, associate, HPE Growth
Techcrunch+ helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.
How to pitch me: 6 investors discuss what they’re looking for in April 2022
Big Tech Inc.
Amazon breaks out the serverless offerings: Among the product launches at the AWS Summit going on is the expansion of Amazon’s serverless offerings, which include being able to scale up or down quicker. What this means is customers don’t have to worry about managing data capacity or the high costs associated — the company says “this new system can save users up to 90% of their database cost when compared to the cost of provisioning for pre-capacity.” When was the last time you saved 90% on anything?
HBO’s streaming service gives us some good news: Sorry Netflix, HBO Max and HBO saw subscriber numbers go up in the first quarter. Though it’s not mentioned, I think it was the L.A. Lakers show that helped. Meanwhile, CNN did not have a good day.
Russia sanctions Vice President Kamala Harris, Mark Zuckerberg, others: I enjoyed Ingrid’s intro to this story, “From the department of Tit for Tat,” Harris, Zuckerberg and a list of other high-profile U.S. figures are now barred from entering Russia, indefinitely it seems. Such a shame, we heard it was lovely there in the springtime.
Luke Hutchison didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do as a graduate of West Point – only that he wanted to serve his country, graduating as he did two years after the 9/11 attack in New York. Cer...Amazon launched Thursday a $1 billion fund focused on logistics, the supply chain and customer fulfillment with focus — at least in this first batch of investments — on wearable technology that imp...Months after cutting half its staff, edtech startup Flockjay has landed on a new vision for how to disrupt tech sales: start from the inside, out. The startup is building Flockjay Elevate, a platfo...After an era of open affection for Silicon Valley followed by an era of relative quiet, former President Barack Obama is tearing into tech. The former president spoke Thursday at an event co-hosted...Snap released its first quarter financial results for 2022 today, affirming that it’s growing faster than its fellow U.S.-based competitors Facebook (now Meta) and Twitter. Meta reported its ...When Helbiz chose its name, did it know that its business would eventually so aptly resemble its moniker? That’s an easy jab to make, but one that feels fitting after reading through Helbiz’s fourt...In the world of crypto, where vast amounts of investment are pouring into young and scrappy teams building uncharted technology, it’s increasingly the VC firms who are investing heavily in re...Accessibility features in games are becoming far more common these days, led by some particularly forward-thinking developers, but it’s still nowhere near common enough. Fortunately Quake is ...Apple retail workers at the Cumberland Mall store in Atlanta, Georgia became the first group of U.S. Apple store workers to reach a crucial step in the formal unionization process: filing for a uni...When the Vietnam-based outfit behind the crypto game Axie Infinity was hacked last month — hackers stole upward of $625 million in Ethereum from its blockchain, with the FBI now pointing fing...Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is now facing “internal scrutiny” at the company after pressuring U.K. tabloid the Daily Mail to kill a story about her former boyfriend, Ac...Volkswagen Group, one of the world’s largest automakers with nearly 9 million vehicles sold last year, ratcheted up an already ambitious strategy in 2021. The target: to transform the company...Digital creation platform Picsart has launched an integration with Google Drive via the Google Workspace Marketplace. The new integration enables users to edit Google Drive images in Picsart’...TechCrunch Startup Battlefield is expanding. The tech ecosystem has grown exponentially in size and possibility since the early days of Startup Battlefield and it’s time that we grow along with it....At its AWS Summit San Francisco, Amazon’s cloud computing arm today announced a number of product launches, including two focused on its serverless portfolio. The first of these is the GA lau...The firm invests in the manufacturing, transportation and logistics sectors, which, they say “represent over half our country’s GDP and have not been tech-enabled.”
