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The TechCrunch Top 3 Itâs âElon Musk Timeâ all the time now: Captainâs 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 donât have to. It outlines Muskâs 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 companyâs 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 didnât want just anyone using their homes while they were away. Whatâs interesting about Kindredâs approach is that it is âa give and get policy,â 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 Columnâs case, Hockey says the bankâs direct connection to the Fed means that âdevelopers can use Column to build apps that pull and push money to any bank account, for example, or maintain FDIC-insured checking and savings accountsâ without having to go through another entity to access federal deposit insurance. |
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Startups and VC Iâm an absolute sucker for VC firms with unusual investment theses, and Tofino Capital has a truly rare example of that: The firm just closed the first $10 million of a fund that aims to invest in markets where investment dollars fall under $5 per capita. Canât say Iâve heard anyone approach it that way, and it certainly focuses the attention â very cool, and I hope they show an outsized return. Of course, thatâll probably make other VC shops wake up and increase the investment to above that dollar amount, but thatâs half of what makes this interesting! Carta is the go-to ownership management platform for startups, simplifying and making transparent the sometimes complex ownership structures of startups. Pretty curious to see how Liquifi is going to evolve â it aims to do the same for web3 and companies issuing blockchain tokens. Letâs climb into some prime-time news grime â today, in rhyme! Aim to tame the shame: Sexual health, mental wellness, weight management and fertility are all taboo topics to some â 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 Healthâs COVID-19 tester has a security flaw that means itâs possible to flip a negative result to a positive, or vice-versa. Mind you, itâs 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: Donât 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 Netflixâs subscriber numbers. |
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| The VC market is slowing down. Teams that successfully close a funding round will find themselves with a shorter runway than they planned on. And partnering with an investor who understands the business well enough to add value is more critical than it was a year ago. A founderâs pitch is the first step on that journey, so weâre running a series of interviews with active investors to learn more about what theyâre 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+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More |
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Big Tech Inc. Amazon breaks out the serverless offerings: Among the product launches at the AWS Summit going on is the expansion of Amazonâs serverless offerings, which include being able to scale up or down quicker. What this means is customers donât have to worry about managing data capacity or the high costs associated â the company says âthis new system can save users up to 90% of their database cost when compared to the cost of provisioning for pre-capacity.â When was the last time you saved 90% on anything? HBOâs streaming service gives us some good news: Sorry Netflix, HBO Max and HBO saw subscriber numbers go up in the first quarter. Though itâs 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 Ingridâs intro to this story, âFrom the department of Tit for Tat,â 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. |
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