Plus: ChatGPT revenue heats up and Meta’s Oversight Board pulls at a Threads case
| Good afternoon, and welcome back to a new week of TechCrunch PM. We are starting off with some layoffs over at a unicorn, and we touch on some of our favorite topics like ChatGPT and Android and learning that the U.K. loves driverless cars. Enjoy! |
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| Image Credits: Andry Djumantara / Getty Images |
| SeekOut layoffs: TechCrunch learned that recruiting company SeekOut, which uses AI to find candidates, laid off 30% of its staff. This is the second set of layoffs for the company in a year. In a letter to staff, company leaders noted it was “spending roughly $2 to earn $1, and this last fiscal year, we incurred significant cash burn.” With the cost of acquiring customers high these days, it’s not a surprise that it can be difficult to keep up, even when flush with capital. Read more GPT-4o is OpenAI’s latest moneymaker: The newest ChatGPT mobile app might be a week old, but it is already setting records. Net revenue first jumped 22% on May 13 and continued to grow in the following days, according to Appfigures. On Tuesday, net revenue was up to $900,000, nearly twice that of the app’s daily average of $491,000. Read more Don’t forget about the apps: Google has a new plan to promote Android apps outside of its Play Store. That got me wondering how many apps are actually being used on the regular. Would it surprise you to know that, according to one statistic, the average millennial has 67 apps on their phone, but only regularly uses 25? Nah, me neither. To get people utilizing those apps again, Google created a series of widgets that, when tapped, would bring users to some specific task in an app. Read more |
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| A MESSAGE FROM GOLUB CAPITAL |
How software companies can preserve valuation in a “down round” environment |
| Golub Growth provides an array of flexible debt and equity solutions to fuel software companies’ growth and M&A plans—without impairing their current valuation. Explore our growth capital solutions for SaaS companies. |
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| Image Credits: Bloomberg / Gabby Jones / Getty Images |
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| Meta’s Oversight Board to hear Threads cases:Later this week, the board will begin hearing cases on Threads and make precedent-setting content moderation decisions. Read more U.K. to get driverless cars:The U.K.’s Automated Vehicles Act got the green light, and fully self-driving vehicles could be on roads within two years. Read more SoLo Funds sued by CFPB: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alleges SoLo Funds, a fintech company that enables peer-to-peer lending, used “digital dark patterns” to deceive borrowers and illegally took fees while advertising to consumers that there were no fees. Read more Rollup emerges from stealth: The Andreessen Horowitz and Thiel Capital-backed startup already proved it can get the capital. Now, after two years with heads down, the company wants to prove that its software platform can completely change how complex hardware is built. Read more Everything you need to know about ChatGPT: And perhaps some things you didn’t want to know. Read more Inside the mind of an AI device: Jolla unveiled the first version of its personal server-based AI assistant, a privacy-focused AI device called the Jolla Mind2. It is now available for preorders. Read more ChatGPT gets a new voice: After users likened one of the voices used by ChatGPT to that of actress Scarlett Johansson, the company announced it is pausing that voice, called Sky. Read more Bumble acquires Geneva:The dating app found a match with the community-building appin order to expand relationships to groups and communities. Read more Reddit inks a deal with OpenAI, and Maven wants to do away with likes:This morning on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Reddit gives ChatGPT a window into one of the internet’s more raw, conversational forums, Twitter’s co-founder backs a new social network called Maven, and cybersecurity consolidation continues. For a more in-depth look at the business of startups, listen to the end to hear this week's Pitch Deck Teardown! Listen here |
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| Image Credits: Getty Images/Patra Kongsirimongkolchai / EyeEm |
| Is Jamie Dimon retiring?: The JPMorgan Chase CEO has often joked about when his retirement day might come but is now talking succession plans, Bloomberg reports. Read more How Satya Nadella is making his mark: Fortune’s profile of the Microsoft CEO looks at his successes over the past decade and how he plans to keep the company at the forefront of the AI age. Read more Bye-bye, Cheddar Bay biscuits?: Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy Monday. The New York Times reports that the seafood chain plans “to reduce its locations as it prepares to sell most of its assets.” Read more |
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| Slack may be training its AI off your messages — and opting out is harder than you’d think: Slack is under fire for its shady policies around using customer data to train its AI. So we asked them what’s up, and the company told us that it does not “build these models in such a way that they could learn, memorize, or be able to reproduce some part of customer data.” The policy is still confusing, but we think we can explain it. Hit play and let’s chat! |
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