After buying Twitter, will Musk bite back at Apple's in-app purchase fees?

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Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Wednesday, and weâre excited to bring you another round of our esteemed Daily Crunch newsletter. Thereâs a wide variety of morsels, nuggets, and other bite-sized delights, so letâs go! â Christine and Haje

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

The TechCrunch Top 3

99 Twitter problems, and Apple might have one: Itâs no secret that Elon Musk thinks Appleâs 30% IAP (âinventor assistance programâ to those of us not up on tech lingo) transaction charge to developers is âa lot.â But as Darrell writes, âMusk has little stake in this fightâ â that is, until Friday when he becomes Twitterâs new ownerÂ and âhis zealous troll armyâ becomes further enabled. Rhymes with pillow: Zillow made another dent in its workforce. Jagmeet writes that the online real estate marketplace wants to âshift focus toward technology-related positions,â so it reduced its employee headcount by another 300 employees. The company already let go of about 2,000 people last November. On a clear day, you can see forever: Frederic reports on LatticeFlowâs latest funding round, $12 million, that it will use to eliminate computer vision blind spots.

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Startups and VC

Asset management firm Stone Ridge has launched a startup accelerator, Wolf, that will be dedicated to growing Bitcoin-focused applications. The program will bring four cohorts per year, each consisting of about eight to 12 teams, or about 30 to 50 founders, to New York City from around the world for eight weeks at a time to focus on building on the Bitcoin-centric Lightning Network and Taro protocol, Kelly Brewster, CEO of Wolf, told Jacquelyn.

Today, for a series of climate-related conversations organized by the global venture firm SOSV, Connie interviewed famed investor Chris Sacca. In their chat, Sacca dismissed questions around whether efforts like carbon capture can work at scale. (âThe naysayers kind of fuel me, actually.â) He also said â naturally â that he has âno doubt we will have multiple companies worth trillions of dollars that emerge from our portfolio.â It wound up being a fairly wide-ranging conversation.

Moar? Moar!

Notch for nothing: Ingrid wonders if itâs time to say goodbye to the notch? OTI raises $55 million for technology to remove screen obstructions. Square peg, Southeast Asiaâshaped hole: Square Peg Capital closes $550 million fund for Southeast Asia, Australia and Israel, Catherine reports. Startup launches earbuds like itâs Nothing: Brian â no doubt bored of the Daily Crunch teamâs terrible Nothing puns by now â reports that Nothingâs third device is a pair of pared-down earbuds. In the haystack, looking for aâ¦: Ivan reports that Needl wants to become the search engine for your accounts. A beast of a valuation: Amanda wonders if content creator MrBeast is actually worth $1.5 billion.

Investors are sitting on mountains of cash: Where will it be deployed?

No matter what’s happening in the public markets, bees make honey and venture capitalists raise money: It’s just what they do.

But since the “extreme valuation recalibration” in the public markets, VCs are amassing more and more dry powder, write Jeremy Abelson and Jacob Sonnenberg of Irving Investors.

More frustrating news for founders: Investor fundraising “is on pace to finish the year at $172 billion,” but capital deployment is way down.

“Dollars are flowing and will continue to flow, but it will be more capital to fewer companies,” they write. Now that âtraditional SaaS has become too expensive and secondarily saturated,â sectors like web3, life sciences and agtech will attract more investors, they predict.

Three more from the TC+ team:

Stretch, drink some water, then hit these items to survive due diligence: A prep checklist for startups about to undergo technical due diligence, by Matt Van Itallie. Nutanix! Get yer Nutanix! Whoâs most likely to buy Nutanix?, by Ron and Alex. I promise you two things, you promise me two, too: Make 4 promises to hire better staff for your startup team, by Haje.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code âDCâ for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

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Big Tech Inc.

Kirsten has some late-breaking news that Fordâs and VWâs autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI will be shut down and parts of it will be absorbed by the two companies. This story is still developing, so keep going back to it for more, particularly a comment from the companies in question.

Who doesnât like a good fraction yelled at them? Duolingo certainly does not. Natasha M writes that Duolingoâs owl will now shout all the fractions you want at you as part of its new math app that is now public after spending some months in beta.

And we have five more for you:

Spy game: Zack tells us a true story about a stalkerware network that includes TheTruthSpy, and how they spied on us and then leaked a bunch of our data it collected. Good times! Drone on: As someone who had a drone interrupt the enjoyment of an Alabama beach, we share Devinâs view that maybe drones in cities are a bad idea. Think of the birds. Implicated: The U.S. Department of Justice has charged a Ukrainian national with allegedly being part of the Raccoon Infostealer malware operation, Carly reports. Getting testy: Manish writes that Singaporeâs central bank proposed a test for retail investors to take before they are able to trade cryptocurrency. Weâve got a ticket to ride: Chinese robotaxi operator WeRide and car maker Hyundai are coming together to fuel self-driving cars with hydrogen in China, Rita reports.