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Snapchat now has more than 2 million paid subscribers

Ivan Mehta

Snapchat has on its Snapchat+ program, the company said during its latest earnings report. Snap noted that the paid plan, which costs $3.99 a month, is a part of “diversifying” its revenue pipelines. The social network first launched in June 2022 in countries like the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates. Later, it expanded the subscription service to , Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Snap was able to attract . So comparatively it has taken more time for the company to reach 2 million paid users. Snapchat+ offers users features like the ability to pin someone as their No. 1 friend; priority in replies to Snap Star, the company’s program for popular creators; and the ability see “the general direction of travel for where friends have moved recently” if they have turned on location sharing. Snapchat+ In the last quarter, the company introduced new things to the subscription, such as , . According to data from analytics company Sensor Tower, Snap’s subscription was than the legacy Twitter Blue subscription. Up until October’s end, consumers had spent a total of $6.4 million on the Twitter app. In comparison, Snap’s paid plan generated $28 million after its launch, with many folks opting for the $39.99 annual plan. While the Elon Musk-led company has launched that costs $8 per month, there are no estimates of how many people are actually paying for it. Snap registered a revenue of $1.3 billion in Q4 2022, which was marginally higher than $1.298 billion for the same period in 2021. The company noted that its annual revenue jumped 12% from $4.1 billion to $4.6 billion. It also had a 17% bump in daily active users to get to the 375 million mark. However, Snap posted a loss of $288 million in the quarter, having earned a net $23 million in 2021 for the same period. The social media platform said that the company’s revenue could decline by up to 10% year-on-year because of stiff competition from apps like TikTok. It is holding a Snap Investor Day event on February 16 to outline its plan for the future. The company has been pushing actively to achieve revenue growth. Apart from the subscription plan, the social network has also tested . What’s more, a report from Business Insider published Tuesday indicated that Snap could also .

Peacock kills its free tier option for new customers

Aisha Malik

Peacock is no longer offering its free tier to new customers, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal confirmed to TechCrunch on Tuesday. The company says it’s shifting its focus to its Premium offering and that doing so will allow the streaming service to remain competitive in the marketplace. The change was first reported by . The free tier is still available to users who are already on the plan, the spokesperson said in an email. In addition, users who cancel their paid subscriptions will automatically be downgraded to the free tier. Peacock has offered the free tier since its launch in 2020, giving users restricted access to the streaming service’s content catalogue. The tier included a limited amount of content when compared to the paid tiers. New customers will now have to choose between Peacock’s Premium or Premium Plus tiers. The ad-supported Premium tier costs $4.99 per month and includes the full content library, live sports and NBC and Bravo shows after they air on TV. The Premium Plus tier costs $9.99 per month and offers an ad-free experience, offline viewing support and a . Peacock launched around the same time as Disney+, HBO Max and Apple TV+ but was the only one to offer a free tier. Now the company’s focus is shifting. The spokesperson told TechCrunch that Peacock is now focusing on its Premium offering, noting that the paid subscription is more reflective of its brand. The move comes as Peacock recently reported its since its launch. The streaming service added 5 million paying subscribers in its , bringing the total to 20 million, up from the in the previous quarter. The boost in paid subscribers was primarily due to the  , which streamed in Spanish on Peacock Premium and Telemundo.

OpenAI releases tool to detect AI-generated text, including from ChatGPT

Kyle Wiggers

After telegraphing the move in , OpenAI has a tool that attempts to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text — like the text produced by the company’s own and models. The classifier isn’t particularly accurate — its success rate is around 26%, OpenAI notes — but OpenAI argues that it, when used in tandem with other methods, could be useful in helping prevent AI text generators from being abused. As the fervor around generative AI — particularly text-generating AI — grows, critics have called on the creators of these tools to take steps to mitigate their potentially harmful effects. Some of the U.S.’ largest school districts have ChatGPT on their networks and devices, fearing the impacts on student learning and the accuracy of the content that the tool produces. And sites including from sharing content generated by ChatGPT, saying that the AI makes it too easy for users to flood discussion threads with dubious answers. OpenAI’s classifier — aptly called OpenAI AI Text Classifier — is intriguing architecturally. It, like ChatGPT, is an AI language model trained on many, many examples of publicly available text from the web. But unlike ChatGPT, it’s fine-tuned to predict how likely it is that a piece of text was generated by AI — not just from ChatGPT, but any text-generating AI model. More specifically, OpenAI trained the OpenAI AI Text Classifier on text from 34 text-generating systems from five different organizations, including OpenAI itself. This text was paired with similar (but not exactly similar) human-written text from Wikipedia, websites extracted from links shared on Reddit and a set of “human demonstrations” collected for a previous OpenAI text-generating system. (OpenAI admits in a , however, that it might’ve inadvertently misclassified some AI-written text as human-written “given the proliferation of AI-generated content on the internet.”) The OpenAI Text Classifier won’t work on just any text, importantly. It needs a minimum of 1,000 characters, or about 150 to 250 words. It doesn’t detect plagiarism — an especially unfortunate limitation considering that text-generating AI has been shown to the text on which it was trained. And OpenAI says that it’s more likely to get things wrong on text written by children or in a language other than English, owing to its English-forward dataset. The detector hedges its answer a bit when evaluating whether a given piece of text is AI-generated. Depending on its confidence level, it’ll label text as “very unlikely” AI-generated (less than a 10% chance), “unlikely” AI-generated (between a 10% and 45% chance), “unclear if it is” AI-generated (a 45% to 90% chance), “possibly” AI-generated (a 90% to 98% chance) or “likely” AI-generated (an over 98% chance). Out of curiosity, I fed some text through the classifier to see how it might manage. While it confidently, correctly predicted that several paragraphs from a TechCrunch article about Meta’s and a snippet from an OpenAI support page weren’t AI generated, the classifier had a tougher time with article-length text from ChatGPT, ultimately failing to classify it altogether. It did, however, successfully spot ChatGPT output from a Gizmodo about — what else? — ChatGPT. According to OpenAI, the classifier incorrectly labels human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time. This mistake didn’t occur in my testing, but I chalk that up to the small sample size. OpenAI On a practical level, I found the classifier not particularly useful for evaluating shorter pieces of writing. Indeed, 1,000 characters is a difficult threshold to reach in the realm of messages, for example emails (at least the ones I get on a regular basis). And the limitations give pause — OpenAI emphasizes that the classifier can be evaded by modifying some words or clauses in generated text. That’s not to suggest the classifier is useless — far from it. But it certainly won’t stop committed fraudsters (or students, for that matter) in its current state. The question is, will other tools? Something of a cottage industry has sprung up to meet the demand for AI-generated text detectors. ChatZero, developed by a Princeton University student, uses criteria including “perplexity” (the complexity of text) and “burstiness” (the variations of sentences) to detect whether text might be AI-written. Plagiarism detector is developing its own AI-generated text detector. Beyond those, a Google search yields at least a half-dozen other apps that claim to be able to separate the AI-generated wheat from the human-generated chaff, to torture the metaphor. It’ll likely become a cat-and-mouse game. As text-generating AI improves, so will the detectors — a never-ending back-and-forth similar to that between cybercriminals and security researchers. And as OpenAI writes, while the classifiers might help in certain circumstances, they’ll never be a reliable sole piece of evidence in deciding whether text was AI-generated. That’s all to say that there’s no silver bullet to solve the problems AI-generated text poses. Quite likely, there won’t ever be.

Energy X secures $20M at $120M valuation to slash building sector emissions

Kate Park

  , — Energy X was founded in 2019 by co-CEOs Sean Park and Tom Hong. That’s when the duo pivoted from their first startup — a sustainable architecture crowdfunding platform, called Xquare. “Most building owners are not experts in building management, and they don’t know how to use it because building energy management systems (BEMS) are software-based,” Park said. In addition to the marketplace, “Energy X provides cloud-based BEMS where our AI manages, maintains and optimizes the system at all times without always having to monitor, manage or control directly,” said Park. The new round, led by Shinhan Financial Group, brings the startup’s total funding to approximately $31.5 million. The funds will help Energy X expand its marketplace and energy efficiency tech, grow its team from 86 to 200 employees this year and launch in Japan, Park said. The startup will open an office in Japan in February, Park added.

Egyptian financial services provider MNT-Halan valued at $1B in $400M funding

Tage Kene-Okafor

Egyptian fintech and e-commerce ecosystem has raised up to $400 million in equity and debt financing from local and global investors as it continues to serve underbanked and unbanked customers in the North African country. The round includes $260 million in equity financing and $140 million through two securitized bond issuances secured within the past year, investments that will now see MNT-Halan command a post-money valuation of about $1 billion. A large chunk of the equity, about $200 million, was provided by Abu Dhabi–based Chimera Investments. The investment firm invested that amount in exchange for 20% of the Egyptian digital lender and e-commerce platform, which is also in advanced stages of raising $60 million in additional capital in the coming weeks. Last week, the IFC in the company, but MNT-Halan declined to comment; it’s expected that the remaining financing will come from existing shareholders. In a statement, MNT-Halan says the investments “demonstrate continued confidence in its value proposition, management team, and superior technology.” The company also plans to expand internationally after solid growth in Egypt and progress on the swap agreement between super app Halan and Netherlands-based microlending platform MNT Investments. In 2021, Halan, operating a digital wallet that offered bill payments, e-commerce and ride-hailing as well as micro, nano and consumer loans, entered into a swap agreement with MNT Investments (a microlending platform operating in Egypt with roots dating back to 2010) to provide financing solutions to the underbanked and unbanked. The leveraged buyout deal, which was formed in 2018, saw both companies adopt a new name: MNT-Halan. Headquartered in Egypt, its digital ecosystem connects consumers, merchants and micro-enterprises with business loans, consumer finance, payments, BNPL and e-commerce offerings, all backed by Neuron, its proprietary technology. Last year, MNT-Halan from private equity firms, including Apis Growth Fund II, Development Partners International (DPI) and Lorax Capital Partners, and venture capitalists such as Middle East Venture Partners, Endeavor Catalyst and DisruptTech. At the time, it had served over 4 million and disbursed more than $1.7 billion worth of loans since inception. CEO , who founded the company with , said MNT-Halan continued where it left off and is presently Egypt’s largest lender to the unbanked: Total loans disbursed now exceed $2 billion per the company’s website (MNT-Halan issued loans north of $65 million last month). On average, businesses access $1,000 worth of loans while paying a 25% annual interest on the platform; Nakhla noted the fintech maintains a healthy nonperforming loan ratio without disclosing its figure. The two securitizations, totaling $140 million, that MNT-Halan are behind its impressive lending operations. The fintech’s wholly owned subsidiary, Tasaheel, managed to secure these funds locally via a securitization program with the Commercial International Bank (CIB), Egypt’s largest private sector bank. It can further securitize up to $250 million, the company said. In addition to CIB, participating regional and local financial institutions include Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Al Ahli Bank of Kuwait, Al Baraka Bank and National Bank of Egypt. It’s been demonstrated that lending is MNT-Halan’s primary business and main revenue generator; however, what’s interesting about the company is how it has layered a digital ecosystem of products, including e-commerce, FMCG delivery and mobile POS payments that feed its lending operations. To paint a picture: Last June, the five-year-old company , a B2B e-commerce platform that offers FMCG supplies directly to small merchants and retailers with next-day delivery. Nakhla tells me that this acquisition has allowed MNT-Halan to provide loans to these merchants or grocers, who then, in an , act as mobile agents to individual customers who frequent their shops. The company also wants to extend grocery shopping — in addition to other e-commerce stores selling electronics and personal items — to individual customers. “We’re capitalizing on our existing distribution through million-plus customers and adding services within our ecosystem,” said the chief executive. “If you need a loan for your business, we’re going to give you one; you need a loan for consumption, we’re going to give you one; you need to order groceries or buy a mobile phone on our platform, we’ll deliver it to you via our e-commerce stores. Also, we can give them the credit they can use to make all of these purchases within the ecosystem.” MNT-Halan lends to single small business owners or individuals who need lending to manage their businesses. According to the Egyptian startup, its digital ecosystem serves more than 5 million customers in Egypt, of which 3.5 million are financial clients and over 2 million are borrowers. The startup plans to launch a debit card for its customers by the end of March. Nakhla noted that due to the company’s focus on commerce and lending, it’s had to shut down its ride-hailing operations, one of Halan’s core offerings — before the merger — which mostly lagged international mobility outfits like Uber, Careem and inDriver. Meanwhile, MNT-Halan faces competition from , and across its other product offerings in Egypt. “In some sectors, we do have competition. But in the most important sector, we’re the largest, and no one is as advanced in technology or creates a fully-fledged ecosystem for the underbanked. I think this is where we differentiate ourselves from any other player in the market,” said the chief executive when asked about competing players in Egypt, while adding that the company is exploring a couple of mergers and acquisitions to consolidate its position in the country’s fintech and e-commerce space. For MNT-Halan to raise this sum in the current venture capital climate, it had to increase its revenues and open new streams, Nakhla noted in his statement. The fintech claims to have made over $300 million in revenue last year, representing a modest 3.4x multiples on its unicorn valuation which aligns with the present public market calculations as previously reported . On a related note, MNT-Halan is Egypt’s only private billion-dollar company; payments giant Fawry achieved that valuation after going public in 2019 although it’s well off the mark now. “We are thrilled to be part of Egypt’s greatest fintech success story,” said Seif Fikry, CEO of Chimera Abu Dhabi, in a statement. MNT-Halan’s upward trajectory and momentum reflect the management team’s realization of its extraordinary vision to transform a high-touch business by seamlessly infusing an unparalleled proprietary tech platform while increasing product depth for its target customer segment.”

Daily Crunch: Cell network provider Google Fi confirms customer data breach

Christine Hall

As January is coming to a close, the TechCrunch team is firing on all cylinders (do we still say that, in a time of electric cars? What is a better expression these days?), with a wall of amazing content for you to download straight into your brain. We’ve picked the cream of the crop, even as we are further confused as to why there was cream on the crops in the first place. In summary, idiomatic English continues to confound even the biggest language nerds among us. — and There are some people on the internet who don’t want to be found. That seems to be the case for the elusive, mysterious owner of Stripper Web, a 20-year-old forum for exotic dancers and sex workers. With just one week of advance notice, the , erasing the decades-long digital footprint of a community on the margins. ’s feature story tries to get to the bottom of things and is fantastic — give it a read! This January, Germany’s largest vaccine maker, BioNTech, announced that it had agreed to acquire Tunisian-born and London-headquartered AI startup InstaDeep for up to £562 million, including a performance-tied £200 million tranche investment. argues that . Not enough to keep you busy? Well, here’s another handful: / Getty Images SaaS pricing comes in three flavors: the classic sales-led model, free trials that eventually force users to make a decision, or freemium plans that hopefully deliver enough value to keep users coming back. “Given the obvious differences between these models, choosing one should be fairly straightforward,” writes Konstantin Valiotti, product director of growth at PandaDoc. “However, current market conditions do not support having just a single model.” In this TC+ article, he explains how to identify the right time to roll out a freemium plan and, equally importantly, when to. He also includes a tactical framework for developing freemium products that includes use cases for limited and unlimited usage. “Every strategy is unique and depends on the company’s idea of how it wants to proceed,” writes Valiotti. “Therefore, you should consider freemium as an extension of your strategy and see if it is right for you.” Three more from the TC+ team: Finally someone is turning tablets into something you can use other than surfing the internet or watching Netflix. has your look at that turns your tablet or phone into a workstation. Meanwhile, ponders what would happen if China-based . Would it make a difference? And what kind of limitations would it have? Now here’s five more:

Tesla records $204M loss from bitcoin in 2022

Rebecca Bellan

Tesla recorded a $204 million impairment loss in 2022 on its bitcoin holdings, according to regulatory . The loss was offset by $64 million in profits from bitcoin trading, leaving the automaker with a net loss of $140 million. during the first quarter of 2021, stating that it believed in the longevity of the cryptocurrency. At the time, the company said bitcoin was a great place to store cash and still access it immediately, all the while providing a better return on investment than more traditional central banks. In fact, after its initial purchase, Tesla promptly trimmed its position by 10%, making the automaker a quick $101 million. In March 2021, CEO Elon Musk said as payments for Tesla vehicles, causing the price of the crypto to boom. A few weeks later, , expressing concern for the amount of energy needed to mine bitcoin. The price of bitcoin then subsequently sank. Last year, as the value of bitcoin began to plunge, Tesla sold 75% of its bitcoin holdings and used the proceeds to buy traditional currency. The automaker today owns about $184 million worth of bitcoin, and may be holding out for a rebound. The crypto market has experienced a . Today, bitcoin is trading at $23,045.50, which is about 66% below the all-time high of $68,789.63. Despite losing over half its value, bitcoin has remained resilient and may experience a comeback, especially as buyers spooked by the crypto market in general gravitate toward household names and more mature ecosystems, like bitcoin or ether. Tesla disbanded its press department and could not be reached for comment.

DOJ requests Autopilot, FSD documents from Tesla

Rebecca Bellan

The U.S. Department of Justice has asked Tesla for documents related to its branded Full Self-Driving and Autopilot advanced driver-assistance systems, the automaker disclosed in a securities filing. Tesla said  it “has received requests from the DOJ for documents related to Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD features. . . . To our knowledge no government agency in any ongoing investigation has concluded that any wrongdoing occurred,” Tesla noted in the 10-K filing that was posted Monday. Tesla has been under investigation by the DOJ for at least a year, last fall, citing three people familiar with the matter. It’s unclear if the DOJ’s request for documents is connected to that investigation, which was launched in late 2021 following more than a dozen accidents involving the active use of Tesla’s Autopilot system. Tesla vehicles come standard with a driver-assistance system branded as Autopilot. For an , owners can buy “full self-driving,” or FSD — a feature that CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly promised will one day deliver full autonomous driving capabilities. Neither one of these systems are self-driving. Autopilot and FSD are advanced driver-assistance systems that automate some driving tasks and still require the driver to be ready to take over at any moment. Autopilot keeps the vehicle centered in the lane, can automatically change lanes and maintains the proper distance from other vehicles in traffic. FSD has those features and more, including an active guidance system that navigates a car from a highway on-ramp to off-ramp and can navigate interchanges and make lane changes. Musk’s claims and promises of these systems, as well as the branding, has caught the attention of regulators. The DOJ’s inquiry reflects an uptick in regulator scrutiny of Tesla. The after specific comments and efforts were made to promote the vehicle’s “self-driving” capabilities. The investigation follows a testimony from a Tesla engineer claiming that a and that . Tesla has been investigated and sued by several agencies and individuals for its claims of self-driving. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened a number of into Tesla for crashes involving Autopilot; the California Department of Motor Vehicles has accused Tesla of ; and the company for deceitful marketing. All of the attention hasn’t thwarted Musk. During Tesla’s fourth-quarter 2022 earnings call, Musk said “full self-driving is obviously getting better very rapidly.” In the past he has boasted that Tesla was close to “solving” full self-driving.

Spotify’s test of a Friends tab on mobile hints at expanded social ambitions

Sarah Perez

Spotify’s success with , designed for social sharing, may be pushing the company toward building more social experiences directly into its mobile app. The company for many months has been testing different iterations of a “friends activity” tab on its mobile app, and investors have now taken notice. During the streamer’s Q4 call earlier today, the company was asked to clarify some details about its social plans. Though Spotify CEO Daniel Ek declined to comment on the specific feature the investor asked about, he didn’t shoot down the idea of Spotify becoming a more social platform. Instead, he replied that social could become “a meaningful driver of creating an even stickier and more engaging experience” for the company. The exec was answering an investor question about Spotify’s recent tests of a “Friends tab,” which appears in the app’s bottom navigation bar for some subset of Spotify’s users. Though only an experiment at present, the test has gained many positive reviews from members of the test group. On Twitter, for example, Spotify users the company to please to the test group if they didn’t have access to the feature, or when they were removed from the test group and their Friends tab disappeared. Others have been asking Spotify when the feature would roll out more broadly. So far, Spotify has not made any public announcements about its plans to launch a Friends tab on mobile, nor has it responded to testers’ questions. The company, however, had signaled its interest in an expanded set of social features last year when it began This variation offered a dedicated place to view what music friends were streaming on the app as well as what playlists they’d recently updated. Spotify’s , but it has limited user access to that same activity on mobile devices. At the time, Spotify confirmed to TechCrunch it was in the early stages of testing the Community feature and provided no other information about its plans. Those tests have since evolved and the experience has been given its own “Friends” button in a prominent place in the app’s main navigation. According to , the Friends tab includes a “weekly picks” section at the top, in a Story-like format, followed by a feed of friends’ listening activity, much like you’d see in Spotify’s desktop experience. PUMPED about this new friends tab on Spotify Imagine if there was the ability to share songs with friends in-app… — Danny + Desatnik🇨🇦 (@datkeed) This version still may not be the final concept, nor is there any guarantee that the feature will definitely launch. On the investor call, Ek declined to comment on the Friends tab test specifically, saying the company runs a lot of experiments and “what you probably have seen is one of those experiments — and since we’re not committed to rolling that out, I don’t really have much of a sort of comment.” But he didn’t downplay the company’s interest in social overall, suggesting it remains an area of interest. “We’re committed to creating the best audio experience for consumers and creators in the world. And obviously, social could be a meaningful driver of creating an even stickier and more engaging experience,” the CEO clarified. The company, no doubt, has seen the traction its personalized year-end review called Spotify Wrapped brings to its service and wants to know if baking in more social features that are accessible year-round would have a similar impact. As the company noted during earnings, its eighth version of Wrapped broke new records, as 156 million monthly active users engaged with its content — a metric that was up 30% year-over-year. Wrapped also boosted other areas of Spotify’s business, it said. The company saw its highest-grossing merch sales for artists to date during the week Wrapped was live. And it drove a 2.7x increase in visitors to artists’ tour pages, while also growing user engagement across all regions and demographics. While Spotify’s Friends tab isn’t an introspective look at your own listening behavior, it would be another way to engage with friends in a social environment. One earlier version of the Friends tab even showed directly in the app, in addition to tracking new songs friends added to playlists and those that they had “on repeat.” hey pls put me back in the friends tab a/b test, I am begging you 🙏 — Katherine Champagne (@keccers) Spotify needs to build out its own social experiences as the youngest generation of consumers is shifting away from using traditional social networks, where they build out a friend graph, to instead spend more time on entertainment apps, like TikTok — which has proven to have powerful influence over music charts. Although Spotify hasn’t prioritized its Friend Activity features for years, it has maintained a close relationship with Meta for social integrations. Spotify users’ social graphs today continue to rely on Facebook — even though many Gen Z users a Facebook account. The companies also worked together in prior years, including in 2021 when they partnered on a mini-player that  Facebook, however, competed with Spotify on podcasts for a brief period before   to focus instead on its metaverse efforts. Social is an area where Spotify may be hesitant to rock the boat, given Meta’s competitiveness with any company that tries to build its own social graph. But it’s an area that’s ripe for development, as Apple has to build social products around music over the years. Plus, it’s clearly something many users want to see in the app and one that plays into Spotify’s overall goal of offering a personalized experience for music fans. Spotify had no further comments on the Friends tab test.

Meta starts testing ‘members-only worlds’ in Horizon Worlds

Aisha Malik

Meta is starting to test closed spaces called “members-only worlds” in Horizon Worlds, its social VR experience. The company has begun a limited alpha test to give creators the ability to grow and moderate their own communities. Meta has selected a small group of creators to build and obtain feedback about members-only worlds. In a , Meta explained that creators can hand-select members and offer them exclusive experiences. During the alpha test, each members-only world can have up to 150 world members and 25 concurrent visitors at any given time. With members-only worlds, creators can launch a dedicated space to do things like host a book club, gather a gaming group, organize a support group or just hang out with friends and family without having to worry about uninvited guests. Meta “Every community develops its own norms, etiquette, and social rules over time as it fosters a unique culture,” Meta explained in its blog post. “To enable that, we’ll provide the tools that allow the creators of members-only worlds to set the rules for their communities and maintain those rules for their closed spaces. Creators can choose whether or not to share their moderation responsibilities with other trusted group members and decide if they’ll allow members to visit the world without a creator or moderator present.” The idea of members-only worlds in Horizon Worlds is likely a welcome addition for users of the platform. It’s no secret that Horizon Worlds can sometimes create unsafe environments for users. After reports that women were    and  in Horizon Worlds, the company a “Personal Boundary” feature that creates a bubble of space with a radius of two virtual feet around each avatar. The new members-only worlds could be seen as another way for Meta to address these issues. The launch of the new test comes as Meta in Horizon Worlds in September. Personal space gives users a place where they can hang out, play minigames, or invite friends over before heading to an event. Meta said last year that Horizon Worlds will be and mobile in the future. Now the company says the VR experience will be available on these platforms “soon.” By launching Horizon Worlds on more platforms, Meta will make it a lot more accessible, as it’s currently only available on the company’s own Quest VR headsets.

GM invests $650M in lithium mining to lock down EV raw materials

Kirsten Korosec

General Motors said Tuesday it will invest $650 million into Lithium Americas as part of an agreement to develop a mine in Nevada, the latest effort by the automaker to lock down a supply chain of key components needed to produce millions of EVs. The investment in raw materials for batteries is the biggest to date, according to GM. And it’s no wonder. General Motors has a litany of all-electric sedans, SUVs, crossovers and trucks that are coming to market in the next two years, including the , Cadillac Lyriq, Chevrolet Silverado EV, Chevrolet Blazer EV and . GM said in November it expects to generate from sales of its 30 EV models in 2025, with profit margins in the low to mid-single digits. But that can’t happen if supply chain constraints prevent GM from producing the vehicles. The semiconductor chip shortage that kicked off in 2020 is an experience that every automaker is keen to avoid, especially as the industry transitions to EVs. GM and other automakers have made to bring production to the U.S. and ensure enough cells are available. GM has taken it a step further by locking up a supply of lithium, a key component in EV batteries. Lithium Americas estimates the lithium extracted and processed from the project at Thacker Pass mine can support production of up to 1 million EVs per year. Production at Thacker Pass is projected to begin in the second half of 2026. Lithium Americas expects Thacker Pass to create 1,000 jobs in construction and 500 in operations. “GM has secured all the battery material we need to build more than 1 million EVs annually in North America in 2025 and our future production will increasingly draw from domestic resources like the site in Nevada we’re developing with Lithium Americas,” said GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra. “Direct sourcing critical EV raw materials and components from suppliers in North America and free-trade-agreement countries helps make our supply chain more secure, helps us manage cell costs, and creates jobs.” The investment will be split into two tranches. The first will be released to Lithium Americas if certain conditions are met, including a pending ruling in U.S. District Court. The second amount will be made after Lithium Americas separates its U.S. and Argentina businesses, the companies said.

TechCrunch+ roundup: SaaS spending squeeze, tax time tips, freemium frameworks

Walter Thompson

If you thought egg prices were out of control, the SaaS inflation rate is outpacing the rest of the economy. In the U.S., SaaS expenses are growing 3.5x faster than market inflation. In Australia and the U.K., that rises to 5x, according to Eldar Tuvey, founder and CEO of Vertice. “If cutting SaaS costs is a top priority for your business in 2023, ,” he writes. Finding meaningful ways to save can extend your runway and even stave off layoffs: This article contains tactics and strategies for working with vendors to reduce contract length and arrange more favorable terms. “Negotiating each of the contracts that make up your SaaS stack will provide long-term savings by mitigating the effect of rising prices,” says Tuvey. Thanks for reading, Walter Thompson Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+ / Getty Images SaaS pricing comes in three flavors: the classic sales-led model, free trials that eventually force users to make a decision, or freemium plans that hopefully deliver enough value to keep them coming back. “Given the obvious differences between these models, choosing one should be fairly straightforward,” writes Konstantin Valiotti, product director of growth at PandaDoc. “However, current market conditions do not support having just a single model.” In this TC+ article, he explains how to identify the right time to roll out a freemium plan, and equally importantly, when not to. He also includes a tactical framework for developing freemium products that includes use cases for limited and unlimited usage. “Every strategy is unique and depends on the company’s idea of how it wants to proceed,” writes Valiotti. “Therefore, you should consider freemium as an extension of your strategy and see if it is right for you.” / Getty Images For SaaS startups, tax time can create a conundrum. Some states regard software-as-a-service products as, um, services, while others classify them as, er, products. “There’s also the issue of bundling on its own,” according to startup tax accountant Ardy Esmaeili. “SaaS might not be taxed, but it will be when paired with hardware.” To help founders better understand their liability, Esmaeili shares tips on how to identify a company’s physical nexus and lists multiple SaaS categories that states are likely to tax. “Engage an expert as early as you can,” he writes. “Don’t think you won’t have to worry about it yet, because waiting can have big consequences down the line.” Early-stage startups that adopt a product-led growth strategy may not need sales teams to build their customer base. Before his company was acquired by Salesforce, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said, “I think we can get away without having a sales team in any kind of traditional way, probably forever.” Today, Slack has an “expansion product team” that integrates product, data science and sales operations. According to Elena Verna, interim head of growth at Amplitude, “you’re starting to have product and sales work very closely together as a unit, like brother and sister.”

Avoiding the pitfalls of OnlyFans with Rosie Nguyen from Fanhouse

Rebecca Szkutak

Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week, and catch up with , the co-founder and CCO of , a startup that helps content creators monetize their work. Rosie talked about her initial reluctance to become an entrepreneur but how issues at other content platforms pushed her to launch Fanhouse. She also talked about intentional choices Fanhouse has made to protect its content creator customers and what it was like to raise as a founder without a traditional network. to hear more stories from founders each week. Connect with us:

Thrive Capital believed to be leading new multibillion-dollar investment in Stripe

Mary Ann Azevedo

Founded by Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison (the CEO), Stripe has raised more than $2.2 billion in funding since its 2010 inception from investors such as Allianz (via its Allianz X fund), Axa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Base Partners, GV and an investor from the founders’ home country, Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA).

Precision Neuroscience is making brain implants safer, smarter and reversible

Devin Coldewey

Brain researchers have relied on devices called microelectrode arrays for decades, but the technology behind these tools is increasingly outdated. Precision Neuroscience is building a modern alternative that’s not only an order of magnitude better, but far less invasive to put in. With a in the bank, they’re all set to embark on the complex path to market. In order to understand what’s going on in the brain, sometimes an EEG or MRI from outside it just isn’t enough — you need to really get in there. Implanted electrodes have been used for this purpose for a long time, and arrays of them in formation are used to collect information from multiple points within the cortex at the same time. But while an electrode array a couple dozen strong is invaluable in a research setting, it simply isn’t enough for something like a functional brain-computer interface. The information density is too low for the patient to, say, control a prosthetic limb or move a cursor on the screen. And you can’t just add more electrodes: because each one pierces the brain tissue and necessarily causes a small amount of damage, going from an array with 100 to an array with 1,000 will cause 10 times the damage. Precision Neuroscience aims to solve both of these problems with the one major innovation: an ultra-thin electrode array that doesn’t need to pierce the brain at all, yet can collect hundreds of times more data than traditional arrays. It’s the brainchild, so to speak, of Dr. Ben Rapoport, a neurosurgeon by trade who has spent decades working on the idea, and co-founded the company in 2021. (He previously was on the founding team at Neuralink.) “This has been his life’s work,” said Michael Mager, Precision’s CEO. “His view has always been that even for basic functionality you need high electrode density, and the tech has to be deployable in a minimally invasive way, with no damage to the brain. Our hope is to scale to tens of thousands of electrodes — and you can’t just keep penetrating more and more tissue.” The array they’ve developed is called Layer 7, a reference to the fact that the cortex itself has six layers, which the interface sits on top of. A single Layer 7 array is bit bigger than a thumbnail, but it has 1,024 microelectrodes on it, producing a density hundreds of times better than what’s in general use today. And they’re designed to be used in arrays themselves, essentially tiling across a region of the brain. Each array would provide a fast, accurate picture of the activity of the cortical regions it covers. These capabilities and specs are impressive, but it is perhaps even more important that the interface can be implanted without a craniotomy — open brain surgery. Instead, the super-thin film-based Layer 7 can be inserted through a small incision in the skull — still brain surgery, to be sure, but a much less invasive technique that may not even require general anesthesia. It would attach to an exterior control unit, but the dimensions and specs of that device would vary depending on various factors. Two cool Precision Neuroscience employees. You can see the implant on the microscope slide. Precision Neuroscience Avoiding the risk and complications of major surgery is important because the populations who stand the benefit the most from a technology like this are people with existing neural issues. “There are tens of millions of people in the U.S. alone who suffer from stroke, TBI [traumatic brain injury], degenerative diseases… but for those patients there really are no medical solutions we can offer right now beyond physical therapy,” said Mager. “There are two broad use cases,” explained chief product officer Craig Mermel. Stimulation of the brain and a two-way interface is one of them, he said, but still highly experimental. “What we’re doing that has backing from research is more on the ‘record and decode’ side, using it to read info from people with epilepsy or stroke, and translate intent into motor or speech output.” This capability has been studied and successfully demonstrated in other contexts for years, but the holdup is that the implants themselves are “still research grade,” Mermel said. “Nobody has put this into a clinical grade system that patients could potentially benefit from. That this [i.e. Layer 7] doesn’t damage the brain is going to be an incredibly important aspect of our system. Every device will have a lifespan, and you’ll have to replace it; the fact that our interface is reversible and the brain can stay intact reduces the risk to the patient.” By now most readers will be wondering how this compares with Neuralink, the brain-computer interface company funded by Elon Musk. One important difference is that Neuralink’s approach still involves a craniotomy and brain-piercing electrodes — though finer and more sensitive that the ones currently used, and implanted via robot. But Precision Neuroscience considers the company a colleague rather than a competitor. “Honestly, what we say internally is they’re different approaches that will be optimal for different situations,” said Mager. “This is not going to be a winner-take-all market. There’s room for more than one company.” One of the biggest challenges when building a medical device of any kind, to say nothing of a brain implant, is the huge task of proving both the applications and safety before you go to market. And you can’t just build the gadget — it needs to be distributed, supported, documented, etc. “It’s not just the array, but the software — the sophistication of machine learning is a must have to drive really powerful BCI. It’s a full-stack product that requires an interdisciplinary team to develop,” Mager said. “And you have to take it through the FDA regulatory process.” On that side of things the company is taking a two-pronged approach. They are first focusing on short-term and emergency use, such as during a hospitalization — when understanding what’s going on in the brain could be a life-saving technique. They hope to submit their 510K application along these lines to the FDA within the year and be ready to go when the agency gives the green light. Longer term, the plan is proving out the safety of semi-permanent implantation: the kind where someone could use the implant all day every day for a year from home or traveling. That’s a different risk profile and a more stringent approval process. Precision’s Stephanie Rider examines the Layer 7 implant. Precision Neuroscience Such relatively long time horizons are common in medicine but less so in venture-backed startups. Why ask VCs when so many are interested in companies quicker and easier to scale, like software and services? “It was a huge mistake, we should have started a software company. I talk with Craig about this all the time!” joked Mager. “But really, despite the challenges and the time, there’s a group of VC firms that is not insignificant, that is excited in investing in companies looking to have a huge impact in human health and also build a large company — not in two-three years, but 10 years.” Here Mager gave credit to Musk for helping popularize the idea that venture capital can back large, long-term efforts like SpaceX and Tesla, not just fast-scaling software companies that sell in a year or two. A rocket company may not have seemed like a likely endeavor to be backed by venture capital 10 or 15 years ago, he said, but now no one questions it. The same may prove true for neural interfaces — “and we may create some meaningful clinical good in the meantime.” The $41 million B round will enable Precision to continue working toward its FDA clearance and further develop and support the Layer 7 stack, from hardware to training and customer service. The round was led by Forepont Capital Partners. Mubadala Capital, Draper Associates, Alumni Ventures, re.Mind Capital, Steadview Capital, and B Capital Group.

Teal unwraps $8.8M to build out a telehealth platform for women — starting with cervical cancer screening

Natasha Lomas

Female-focused telehealth startup, , is popping up today to announce an $8.8 million seed round with a roster of heavy hitting investors on board — including (Serena Williams’) Serena Ventures, ( Metrodora Ventures, and (Laurene Powell Jobs’) Emerson Collective. The February 2020-founded San Francisco-based startup’s first product will be a service that supports women to collect their own sample for cervical cancer screening in the comfort of their own home. It wants to tackle the problem of women not getting screened — either because the traditional route of going to a doctor’s surgery for a pap smear (using ) is uncomfortable or inconvenient or both. Teal has developed a novel device for women to self collect a sample to mail off for lab analysis. Its websites refers to this device as a “collection wand” — and we gather there’s a sponge involved — but details of what exactly it looks like and how it will function remain under wraps as the startup is still in the process of applying for FDA clearance, per Teal’s CEO, Kara Egan. She also can’t say when exactly they’ll be able to launch a service — as that depends on its application for “de novo” FDA clearance. “We hope to be in the market soon,” is all she’ll say on that. The startup previously raised $1M in pre-seed funding, back in early 2021, which it used to refine the design of the product — working with the IDEO design agency. “What makes our product unique, I would say, is the idea that it’s designed to be very intuitive and increase confidence and the accuracy of the sample,” Egan tells TechCrunch. “And that it gets pap smear — it gets cervical cells.” After a chat with her team members, to confirm what else they can say at this point, she also offers: “This design makes it simple for a woman to collect her own sample quickly and comfortably. The device is inserted similarly to a tampon, the device contains a soft sponge tip which is rotated to collect cells. The whole collection from undressing, reading instructions, collecting, and packaging to send to the lab via the mail should take less than 5 minutes.” Another important detail she can disclose is that Teal’s collection method will allow for samples to be tested for primary HPV and Pap cytology triage — meaning the startup will be able to support follow-on triage of women who do test positive for HPV (aka, the virus that’s linked to cervical cancer). So it can provide a fuller service for cervical cancer screening care. While it’s starting with cervical cancer, the broader mission for Teal is to build out a women’s telehealth platform in the US — which will offer a range of services that traditional healthcare might be happy to hand off to a dedicated female-focused provider. So the core focus for the startup is on developing a fully attentive, female-friendly service wrapper. Egan argues there’s huge potential to create a compelling, modern telehealth service for a population that’s typically been underserved by traditional healthcare. “We know that self collect will increase adherence — without a doubt,” she says. “But there’s an opportunity here to actually create something that women are missing… So much of healthcare is an inconvenience for people — and especially for women who are working and are mothers. They just put themselves last. So we’re kind of like hey — let’s design this and fully cater it to women.” “So many things have been designed by men for women,” she adds. “Women have hated this experience [smear testing] — you run the spectrum of hate it, fear it, literally don’t go because of it and tolerate it, but there’s no one who’s like oh that felt good or that was fine… So we have this opportunity to be like, hey women, for once we’ve built something for you — and also be like let’s design an experience that brings that back into their healthcare, that makes them feel trusted. “Don’t just throw it in a plastic bag and mail it to them. Use this as an opportunity to open the door back up and say it can be better from here on out — and that’s kind of what we think about. This is such an incredible opportunity to do something so important. Truly you can eradicate cervical cancer — with screening coupled with vaccine it doesn’t have to exist. That’s a goal; that really can happen. But — simultaneously — we can actually build something that helps the key decision maker in the household stay healthy and make healthier choices and do it in a modern way.” Egan used to be a VC and she also talks up the sheer commercial opportunity in smartly addressing women’s health. “I spent my time in healthcare investing before too and I’ve never seen an entry point like this. I’ve never seen a situation where it’s all women — 25 to 65 mandated screening — a universally disliked current experience and then an experience that the doctors are also willing to say if you can do it another way for them I’m happy to,” she says. “And it’s something so big and meaningful. It’s cancer — and we can really make a dent in it.” So how did Teal land such a line-up of high profile women investors for its seed round? What tips does she have for other female founders looking for help to get a great idea off the ground? “Having more women out there as decision makers in these funds, obviously, is so helpful,” she notes. “A lot of times women’s health is considered ‘small’ — like, are you kidding?! It’s half the market… So it’s just finding people. And then just like the general advice — it takes a while. Until you find your ones. It does take time even if you have a great [network].” As she chews over the question a little more, Egan lands on another tidbit of fundraising advice for pitching traditional VC that boils down to: Remember you need to pitch a company, even if (maybe if) the cause is great… “Truthfully, the big reason I think I was very successful at it is I was a VC before. So I understand how to create the slides that tell the story from the viewpoint of an investment. And I think that especially, for things like this that can be misconstrued as like a charity effort… So the point is when it comes to investing what I was lucky about is — and why I know this opportunity is do incredible is — I was able to frame it as an investment even though it’s also something so important,” she says. “And I think, sometimes founders, when they’re really working on something so important, it can come off as more of ‘a cause’ than a company.” Commenting on Women keen to be first in line for Teal can join its waitlist to get details

Superstrata e-bike review: Rebel without a cause

Taylor Hatmaker

specimen — there’s no two ways about it. The bike’s concept, borne out in seamless 3D-printed carbon fiber, springs from an equally strange premise. We’ll get into that. Talking to , Superstrata’s bike was crafted not out of a love of cycling, the hunt for a climate-friendly urban transportation solution or any traditional justification for going to all the trouble of making an e-bike. Instead, Vu created the (and its non-electrified counterpart) as a proof-of-concept for . In that light, how the bike wound up makes perfect sense — even if buying one probably doesn’t. “Everyone thought we’re an e-bike company, but we’re not,” Vu told TechCrunch. “We’re an advanced manufacturing company.” We certainly can’t blame e-bike enthusiasts for being confused. Superstrata is deep into what Vu calls “deep tech” — basically manufacturing processes so cutting edge that they haven’t even shown up in consumer products yet. “This isn’t your typical 3D printing system — it’s built for industrial speed and scale,” Vu said. Arevo, Superstrata’s parent company, is exploring aerospace applications in the future and potentially UAVs. Superstrata and Arevo spun up the e-bike as a consumer proof-of-concept to fill the gap while they wade through the regulatory red tape that defines more complex industries. The company’s bike frames are currently printed in Vietnam, though Vu has plans for print farms in the U.S. and Europe to reduce shipping times and generally make its whole carbon fiber printing operation more efficient. TechCrunch So, carbon fiber. Carbon fiber is one frontier of climate technology, promising fuel-saving lightweight materials at the cost of a fairly energy-intensive production process. Superstrata’s silky, unibody bike frames are made out of industrial-grade 3D-printed thermoplastic carbon fiber composite rather than “thermoset” — a more common polymer process. While Vu was eager to dive into the technical advantages and the manufacturing process, at the end of the day what you need to know is: This is an e-bike and its frame is made out of very fancy 3D-printed carbon fiber. Here’s the basic pitch. The Superstrata e-bike is a carbon fiber unibody bike that’s custom printed to meet your preferences, souped up with a 250W pedal-assist motor and shipped in an array of fun prints and colors. The sleek, angular design of the bike’s frame and its conspicuous absence of a seat tube — the part of the frame that would normally flow down from where the saddle sits — is pleasantly futuristic or downright odd, depending on who you ask. While early critics raised alarms about Superstrata’s missing seat tube, which would normally connect the top tube and down tube to form a strong triangle shape to hold the rider’s weight, Vu assured us that the single, seamless piece of carbon fiber is rated up to 750 lb and is more than strong enough to hold a cyclist. Riding the Superstrata, I wasn’t concerned about the strength of the carbon fiber, though the potential for smoothing the ride with adjustments involving a seat tube are a missed opportunity. The frame is strong and the ride is stiff — and that’s just how it is. (The frame’s design is eye-catching even without the missing tube, and does bear some striking similarities to . It’s possible that Superstrata printed those frames but the company isn’t listed anywhere and they do boast a much more traditional geometry.) The missing chunk of frame turns heads, but Superstrata’s other aesthetic choices also set the bike apart visually. The company is all about customization and that applies to the paint too. My review unit was an intense purple, maybe a periwinkle. Honestly, as someone who wears all black most days, the color hurt my soul a bit but my wife found it appealing. Some of the special paint jobs you can order are very cool — including two that look like starry skies and another designed to evoke the aurora borealis — but they’ll run you an extra $1,250. That extra cost would get you most of the way to a more affordable e-bike made by competitors like or . This isn’t a bike for the wallet conscious (most of us). Superstrata really needs to remove these misleading sample images with integrated lights. But: Cool paint. Superstrata That choice and other aspects of the Superstrata feel a bit “It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost?” I’m not convinced the bike is really designed to be sold to much of anyone and that’s just a weird takeaway to have when reviewing something. Superstrata’s e-bike is obviously meant to present as a luxury product, but the experience of the ride and the deeper design doesn’t exactly give off a luxurious, cohesive vibe. At the end of the day, if you asked, What is special about this bike? the full answer is “the 3D-printed unibody carbon fiber frame.” At this price point — the e-bike starts at $3,500 — Superstrata’s base offering gives you a lot less for your money than what you’d get with a much more fully featured electric bike like the , or even its last-generation models, which float around $2,000. Those tech-forward bikes pack perks like built-in interfaces, companion apps, embedded automatic front and back lights, phone chargers and alarm systems for at or around what you’d pay for a base-price Superstrata bike. A feature that illustrates this well is the fact that Superstrata initially planned to have integrated front and back lights — many of the bikes pictured on its website still misleadingly show this — but that idea was scrapped in the finished version. The lights, the little computer for the electric motor and any bells and whistles are all aftermarket, not integrated into the bike’s design. After speaking to Vu — who was transparent to the point of admitting the whole e-bike idea was just kind of for the hell of it — it didn’t particularly feel like Superstrata was trying to actively mislead people about the headlight situation or anything else. The fact that Superstrata’s website shows a product you literally can’t buy just further demonstrates that it isn’t this company’s . The problem with that is that most people making a purchase this big would feel safer buying from a company that lives and breathes bikes — not carbon fiber. TechCrunch Back to the frame — the meat of the innovation here. The Superstrata bike is custom printed to order and that’s a huge boon for people who are on the extremes of the height spectrum, including adults under 5’2”, who apparently ordered the bike with gusto. For these folks, who are hard-pressed to find properly sized bikes elsewhere, Superstrata’s frame size options are probably genuinely a big deal. If you’ve searched high and low for a bike to fit your unusually small or large stature, Superstrata’s bikes might be a great choice. For anyone who falls in the normal-ish height spectrum, the rest of the customization process is relatively shallow. When relying on a bike for commuting or urban transportation purposes, the real customization options that matter offer utility — things like baskets, front or back racks and tire width. Building the bike, you can choose from an “urban” or “sport” configuration for the bars, yielding a casual upright ride or a more aerodynamic drop bar, road bike style. You can opt for a single speed or multiple gears, an option that most people would probably prefer but one that also adds $500. You can pick whether you’d want tires for the road or for “paths” — maybe gravel and light offroading — but there’s not much detail offered here. Superstrata , but the review unit we had packed Shimano disc brakes, Bafang powering the electric side of the bike and a grab bag of brands for the rest. After that stuff is dialed in, you can input your specific height and measurements for a custom-sized frame. On that count, we couldn’t really make a determination — my review bike was designed for someone a bit taller, though it was still rideable and okay. What else? The experience of riding the bike is fine, but nothing particularly sophisticated. The frame’s design makes for a very stiff ride, so watch out for being jolted by uneven terrain. The battery life is more than adequate for normal needs. Superstrata claims that it will last for 60 miles, but on a higher assist setting, you’re going to get significantly less than that. Still, the battery would serve you for at least 20 miles, even when drawing more power, which is more than fine for most around-the-town needs. It’s also worth mentioning here that the Superstrata e-bike doesn’t have a throttle — basically a button that gives you a burst of speed to power the bike along. A throttle is a really nice way to scoot quickly through dangerous intersections or to get your bike to maintain a higher speed and it’s tough to go back once you’ve used one. The Superstrata e-bike can go up to 20 miles per hour but you’ll have to work for it. On that note, Superstrata’s state-of-the-art frame might be carbon fiber, but the e-bike doesn’t exactly feel like a featherweight. Because the bike is so light in the front and so heavy in the back where the motor lives, it actually feels heavier than it is. It’s also more awkward to carry than a bike that’s uniformly weighted and you’re not going to want to be lugging this thing down more than a few stairs at a time. The Superstrata website claims that the e-bike weighs 24 pounds, but there’s no way this thing weighs that much less than my regular ride, a VanMoof X3 that’s a hefty but evenly weighted 45.8 pounds. Vu noted that the final version’s weight varies, but the e-bike weighs in around 38.5 to 39.6 lb, enough to pretty much obscure the weight savings of the carbon fiber. Ultimately, the Superstrata could be a solid option for someone who falls outside of normal height parameters and desperately wants an e-bike. Superstrata’s bikes might also be a good choice for someone who wants a custom-printed carbon fiber bike frame and is confident about dialing in the rest themselves, though buying the frame alone isn’t an option on the website. In either of these cases, the advanced carbon fiber technology doesn’t come cheap and neither does this bike — especially when compared to competitors building feature-rich, cohesive e-bike experiences. Superstrata should probably focus on its custom unibody carbon fiber frames and let other companies — or people — build the bikes out. And since this whole thing was an experiment anyway, that might very well be what the company plans to do.

Practice your startup pitch on TechCrunch Live with Benchmark and Cambly

Matt Burns

TechCrunch Live is back! The weekly show , and we’re excited to bring back a popular segment. Called Pitch Practice, it should be self-explanatory. Participants have a chance to practice their pitch by presenting to another founder and investor. This show’s guests are fantastic too. You want their feedback on your pitch. Our first guests are  , CEO and co-founder of Cambly, and  , a long-time investor at Benchmark and previously Greylock. They’re the perfect guests to kick off the third season of TCL, and they’re going to give three founders feedback on their pitches. TCL’s mission is still to help founders build better venture-backed businesses. But going into 2023, there’s new urgency behind this mission. TechCrunch Live started in the heady days of 2021, and now in early 2023, the startup world is experiencing new challenges. It’s harder to fundraise, sales cycles are much longer and investors (and their LPs) have different expectations. We’re looking for startup founders who have a well-rehearsed pitch for an early-stage startup. Not selected for this show? No worries; try next week. This segment is a regular feature of TechCrunch Live.

Privacy assistant Jumbo tears down its paywall

Romain Dillet

, an app that lets you control your privacy on the web, is hitting the reset button — sort of. While the company is still focused on privacy and security, users can now download and use all features for free as the premium subscription is gone. In addition to this pricing update, Jumbo’s newest version now includes free identity theft insurance for people based in the U.S. “Something we didn’t anticipate and that we’re tying to fix today is that a paid product creates an important barrier to entry,” Jumbo founder and CEO Pierre Valade told me. Valade previously founded , a popular calendar app that was acquired by Microsoft. Jumbo’s flagship feature is a dashboard that lets you control your privacy settings across various online services. You can use the app to connect to your Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram account and adjust privacy settings, such as the visibility of posts you’re tagged in. For social networks in particular, Jumbo can delete and archive old posts. For instance, you can use the app to delete tweets that are older than a certain threshold. Jumbo saves everything on your phone in a local storage area called the Vault. And Jumbo stands out from other privacy assistants as it doesn’t rely on APIs to control your online accounts. Instead, Jumbo works more or less like a web browser in the background. Everything happens on your device (which is great for privacy) and the startup isn’t limited to what’s possible with official APIs. In many ways, Jumbo exposes privacy settings to people who don’t know that these settings exist and don’t understand what they’re supposed to do. Sure, anyone can already check and delete Google Maps activities, past web searches and YouTube keywords. But Jumbo centralizes all these settings in a simple consumer app. It regularly scans your account activity and even tells you that you should probably enable two-factor authentication to improve your account’s security. At first, Jumbo that consumer subscription was the only business model that could turn Jumbo into a sustainable business without any compromise. It’s easy to understand how companies make money when there’s a paid subscription. “We reached 25,000 paid subscribers and we realized that it was quite small for a consumer subscription business,” Valade said. “And there was another issue — churn.” Every year, around 40% of Jumbo users would keep their subscription active. If you’ve run a subscription business, you know that this isn’t a bad churn rate. But it means that the company had to spend money on marketing and paid installs to compensate this churn rate. Even with paid subscriptions, Jumbo wasn’t turning a profit. Hence, today’s pivot. Going forward, Jumbo will be a free consumer app with a business offering coming later this year. This hasn’t been an easy decision. Jumbo is a smaller company today, with around 25 employees — the marketing team has been laid off. Valade told me that at some point he thought about calling it a day and selling the company to the highest bidder. “We realized that we were limiting our growth rate because we offer a paid product. The best business model on the internet is B2B software as a service,” Valade said. The startup raised some fresh funding in a $17 million round led by Index Ventures with some existing investors and several angel investors also participating. The company has reached a post-money valuation of $77 million. Jumbo Tearing down the paywall is one thing, but how will people hear about Jumbo now? Pierre Valade is adding identity theft insurance to the app, and turning this insurance product into a social feature. When you download the app, Jumbo now offers identity theft insurance for free in the U.S. with up to $25,000 in coverage through . Identity theft is a big issue in the U.S. with malicious people opening unauthorized credit cards under someone else’s name and other wrongdoings that can cost you a lot of money. Currently, identity theft insurance products are mostly paid products. For example, Norton offers for $125 per year while plans start at $15 per month. Jumbo’s new insurance product pairs well with the rest of the app as Jumbo alerts you in case of a new data breach that may contain some personal information (using data). Usually, when you’re aware of a new data breach, you don’t really know what you’re supposed to do. Every time you invite a friend or a family member to Jumbo, it increases your insurance coverage by $25,000 with a hard cap at $1,000,000. Essentially, it encourages Jumbo users to invite other people to the app. As for the business offering? “Today, we don’t really know the feature set [for businesses]. Right now, I’m really focused on demonstrating that the free product can truly grow significantly faster than before,” Valade told me. Some companies could pay for Jumbo to encourage their employees to set up two-factor authentication on their personal accounts, for instance. I asked about other business-oriented security startups like . “We sell simplicity,” he told me. “Phishing training is not really consumer friendly.” Let’s see how this B2B pivot will play out, as Jumbo is still very much a consumer app for now. But it seems like Valade feels better about his startup’s positioning now. “We were frustrated with the fact that we had to oversell the product to consumers,” he said. “You end up scaring people in order to convince them, and we were becoming uncomfortable with that.”

How to cut your SaaS spending by 30% in 2023

Eldar Tuvey

of affairs paints a concerning picture for SaaS buyers. Our data shows that the SaaS inflation rate is around than the general market inflation rate. Specifically, SaaS expenditure in the U.K. and Australia is currently growing at a rate five times higher than market inflation — and in the U.S., a substantial 3.5 times more. These would be worrying figures in any economy, but for CFOs attempting to drive growth during an economic downturn, soaring software costs should be ringing alarm bells. One of the reasons that SaaS vendors are able to increase their prices year after year is that so many obscure their pricing information. As a result, buyers lack the insight to negotiate best-in-class deals on their software contracts. Without a frame of reference on what other companies pay, many are quoted higher rates for enterprise-level software subscriptions. So much so that our data indicates that as many as 90% of companies are overpaying for their SaaS products by 20%-30%. Vendor pricing is rarely set in stone, and buyers have more purchasing power than they realize when they approach negotiations and are equipped with leverage. When your company reaches out to sales teams to inquire about SaaS solutions, there is often room to negotiate the contract. Finance and procurement teams need to be aware of the negotiation tactics that can be used to attain SaaS products at a better price and avoid the common pitfalls associated with software negotiation. If you’re looking to cut your software costs in 2023, these are the strategies that are recommended for securing SaaS contracts with long-term value. The first step in gaining negotiation leverage is to allow yourself time. Ensure that you approach a vendor to renew or take on a brand new contract far before you plan to onboard with the new product. Before anything else, you’ll need to understand your needs and comprehensively research which tools are best equipped to fulfill them. To help you on your way, put together a short list of tools and consider: This way, you can enter negotiations with the knowledge and time you need to secure the best deal. If you fail to take this time, your supplier could realize that you need a quick turnaround and respond with inflexible terms. Though there is no one-size-fits-all solution, we typically advise that the average company begins the procurement process six to eight months before contract renewal.

When to build a freemium plan and how to get it right

Konstantin Valiotti

users go through when using your product directly affects how the product is evaluated and how it is perceived. The business model you choose strongly influences the entire funnel, enabling or preventing you from engaging certain types of users. This article will examine whether the freemium model is right for your business and how it compares to two other models: free trial and sales driven. Conventional wisdom says that you should choose one model and stick with it. The following diagram shows a choice between the three typical models: Freemium, free trial and sales-led. Konstantin Valiotti Freemium models allow you to target a wide audience and retain them in your product even if users do not have a budget for the solution. The core idea is to create value for the end user and turn the resulting credibility into revenue by selling them something more advanced. The free-trial model creates a time limit and positions the product in a way that shows off its full value, but requires a decision at the end of the trial period. Users can no longer extract value from the product on a particular day and will have to judge whether the perceived value outweighs the purchase cost. The sales-led model routes all new inquiries to a sales representative. The first impression of the product and the anchors related to pricing are set in a conversation. The sales-led model introduces friction at the top of the funnel by prompting users to have a conversation, but it aims to significantly simplify the path to conversion whereas a full self-service experience would have too much friction. Given the obvious differences between these models, choosing one should be fairly straightforward. For example, you should choose the sales-oriented model if you work in a market with big deal sizes and complex products. However, current market conditions do not support having just a single model. Asana offers a free plan, a trial of the paid plan and a “Contact Sales” motion. At HubSpot, you can use the free products or talk to sales about advanced product packages. Calendly has a free plan, a trial, and a “Contact Sales” motion. The list goes on. Introducing freemium is an investment that you should evaluate in the same way as other projects. It requires (sometimes significant) engineering investment, marketing support and organizational changes in sales, finance and operations. There are three good reasons to introduce a freemium model: When you have a free trial, your newly acquired audience will have to decide if they want to pay right after the trial expires. There will be an audience that loves your product and has the budget to pay, and they will do so unless a competing offer is more attractive to them. However, there will always be many users who are either skeptical about the product itself or do not have the budget to pay. When faced with the dreaded paywall, they will go through all reasons to postpone the decision. The longer they hesitate, the less likely they will buy the solution.

What do recent changes to state taxes mean for US SaaS startups?

Ardy Esmaeili

a majority of businesses plan to fully adopt software as a service (SaaS) by 2025, and if the past is any indicator, that means state legislatures are working hard to capture revenue from this new sales stream. As with many U.S. laws and regulations, tax laws regarding SaaS and continue to evolve. Currently, some states consider SaaS to be software while others categorize it as a service. In addition, some states tax all services regardless of type, and more than 20 have a way to target SaaS. At least four states (New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington) are aggressively pursuing SaaS. There’s also the issue of bundling — on its own, SaaS might not be taxed, but it will be when paired with hardware. In the early days of a startup, there’s a tendency to think that the only tax worry would be an audit in the future, the likelihood of which is low. However, tax issues become a problem when you’re fundraising or facing due diligence for mergers and acquisitions. The party conducting due diligence will be focused on sales and use tax, as any liability could transfer to the buyer. We saw this with a new client recently — they hadn’t performed a risk assessment and the buyer identified almost $1 million dollars in tax liability. This reduced the purchase price significantly. Startups think they’ll have lots of time to get to this point, but they actually need to focus on it right away. Any negligence, if identified, could exclude a company from any statute of limitations. While no business is exempt from taxes, it’s critical for startups to understand when they’re liable for tax, and if offering a SaaS solution, how each set of local laws applies. To identify which states you’ll owe sales taxes to, first establish your nexus by determining your physical or economical presence. You can determine your physical nexus by examining which states you have employees, office, property or agents in. Are you “maintaining, occupying or using permanently or temporarily, directly or indirectly, an office, place of distribution, sales or sample room or place, warehouse, server, storage place or other place of business?” Or is there an “employee, representative, agent or salesperson working in the state under the authority of the company on a temporary or permanent basis?” An economic nexus is established for sellers “not having physical presence in the state.” In this case, the state will collect sales tax from customers and remit if the seller meets a set level of sales or number of transactions in that state. With broad definitions like these, it’s easy to see how complex taxes can become.

Peacock tops 20M subscribers in Q4 as losses widen

Lauren Forristal

Comcast-owned streaming service Peacock had its best quarterly result since its 2020 , adding five million paying subscribers in its to bring the total to 20 million, up from the in the previous quarter. In Q1 2021, Peacock had 9 million paid users. Peacock gets much of its success from its sports programming. The boost in paid subscribers was primarily due to the , which streamed in Spanish on Peacock Premium and Telemundo. The streamer also now has exclusive next-day rights to NBC and Bravo shows. “Looking ahead and based on our experience to date, we expect our subscriber cadence will follow our content launches, which will fall more heavily in the second half of ’23, and we continue to see positive trends in engagement churn and ARPU,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said during today’s earnings call. In 2023, Peacock Premium subscribers will get to watch the French Open tournament. The company is also in talks with partners to make available on the platform next year. Last month, NBC Universal to become the airline’s official streaming partner, giving customers access to Peacock shows and movies. Although Peacock nearly tripled in revenue to $2.1 billion, its loss widened again compared with the previous year. The company noted an adjusted EBITDA loss of $978 million, compared with a loss of $559 million in 2021. Comcast also reported $541 million in severance costs, including $182 million related to NBCUniversal. And while Peacock had its most impressive quarter to date, it’s still lacking when compared to its streaming competitors, like with , and Disney+ with . Paramount+ grew to in its third quarter. During the earnings call, the company reassured investors that its streaming strategy is just fine the way it is. “We like what we’re doing. We had a phenomenal year getting to 20 million paid subs from less than a year ago, and we see this coming year as the peak year,” said CFO Mike Cavanagh. “We made a decision to invest in Peacock. It’s very clear that we picked the right business model at this point given where we are,” added Jeff Shell, CEO of NBCU. “We’ve been clear from the start that we’re going to see a return on that investment.”

Where should sales sit in product-led companies?

Anna Heim

Product-led sales is a model in which the product, not traditional marketing, helps companies understand who might be their next big customer. Think of a freemium dev tools company, for instance: Instead of tracking which CTO downloaded their latest white paper, they look for organizations that already have dozens of employees engaging with their product on a daily basis.

Elon Musk is being investigated by the SEC for Tesla self-driving claims, report says

Darrell Etherington

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is facing scrutiny by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding his specific comments and efforts to promote the automaker’s claims regarding its “self-driving” capabilities, . The SEC investigation into Musk is part of its overall efforts to determine whether Tesla has run afoul of its rules in promoting its FSD and Autopilot offering. The SEC doesn’t typically comment on any ongoing investigations prior to formally filing suit, and has not commented on this case in particular. But recent revelations may explain why Musk is in their crosshairs when it comes to Tesla “self-driving” technology: Last week, testimony given by a senior engineer on the Tesla team working on its Autopilot software revealed that a video the company released in . Reporting by . Of course, the SEC’s domain isn’t safety claims, but it does take issue with public companies or company executive officers making forward-looking claims that are false or misleading. That’s apparently what they’re concerned about here — Musk has often suggested FSD would attain essentially driver-free navigation capabilities in timelines that have not ended up proving accurate. Based on what the SEC determines following its investigation, we could see lawsuits or other consequences for Musk, including limitations on his future activity as an officer of a public company if they choose to pursue enforcement of any violations they find.

Tesla engineer testifies that 2016 video promoting self-driving was faked

Rebecca Bellan

Tesla faked a 2016 video promoting its self-driving technology, according to testimony by a senior engineer reviewed by . The video, which shows a Tesla Model X driving on urban, suburban and highway streets; stopping itself at a red light; and accelerating at a green light is still on and carries the tagline: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.” CEO Elon Musk used the video as evidence that Tesla “drives itself” by relying on its many built-in sensors and self-driving software. Yet according to Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, the video was staged using 3D mapping on a predetermined route, a feature that is not available to consumers. In his July deposition, which was taken as evidence in involving former Apple engineer Walter Huang, Elluswamy said Musk wanted the Autopilot team to record “a demonstration of the system’s capabilities.” Elluswamy’s statement also confirms and provides more details on what anonymous former employees in 2021. While there appeared to be no legal ramifications for Tesla following the NYT’s investigation, an on-the-record testimony from a current employee could cause trouble for the automaker, which is already beleaguered by and surrounding its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems. (To be clear, neither system is actually self-driving. They are advanced driving-assistance systems that automate certain driving tasks, but as Tesla has made clear on its website, drivers should stay alert and keep their hands on the steering wheel when the systems are engaged.) When electric truck maker and eventually admitted to faking a video of its fuel cell–powered Nikola One semitruck prototype — Nikola had actually placed the truck on a small hill, allowing gravity, not the motor, to do its thing — state and federal investigations were launched into both Nikola and its chairman and founder, Trevor Milton. Milton was found guilty on charges of . Tesla’s fake video was created “The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system,” Elluswamy said, according to a transcript of his testimony seen by Reuters. Musk promoted the video at the time, tweeting Tesla vehicles require “no human input at all” to drive through urban streets to highways and eventually to find a parking spot. Neither Musk nor Tesla, which has disbanded its press office, responded in time to TechCrunch’s request for comment. The revelation comes at a time when Tesla is facing for multiple fatal crashes involving its Autopilot system, as well as a criminal for claims Tesla made about Autopilot. Just this week, a Tesla that had FSD engaged into a BC Ferries ramp in Canada, totaling the vehicle. Regarding the 2018 crash that killed Huang, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded in 2020 Tesla’s “ineffective monitoring of driver engagement” had contributed to the crash, which the board said was likely caused by Huang’s distraction and the limitations of the system. While Tesla does tell its drivers to pay attention to the road, there are ways drivers can fool the system to make the car believe they were paying attention, said Elluswamy. Many drivers even go so far as to buy Tesla counterweights on , which can be placed on steering wheels to mimic the weight of human hands that are otherwise engaged while the car is in movement. Even amid regulator scrutiny and reports of crashes, to customers across North America.

T-Mobile says hacker accessed personal data of 37 million customers

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

In a financial filing on Thursday, T-Mobile revealed that a hacker accessed a trove of personal data belonging to 37 million customers. The telecom giant said that the “bad actor” started stealing the data, which includes “name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number and information such as the number of lines on the account and plan features,” since November 25. In , T-Mobile said it detected the breach more than a month later, on January 5, and that within a day it had fixed the problem that the hacker was exploiting. The hackers, according to T-Mobile, didn’t breach any company system but rather abused an application programming interface, or API. “Our investigation is still ongoing, but the malicious activity appears to be fully contained at this time, and there is currently no evidence that the bad actor was able to breach or compromise our systems or our network,” the company wrote. This is the eighth time T-Mobile was hacked since 2018. The most recent incident was in 2022, when a group of hackers known as Lapsus$ , which gave them the chance to carry out so-called SIM swaps, a type of hack where hackers take over a victim’s phone number and then try to leverage that to reset and access the target’s sensitive accounts such as email or cryptocurrency wallets. T-Mobile has 110 million U.S. customers. A spokesperson for T-Mobile did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk oversaw misleading 2016 video saying Tesla drove itself

Rebecca Bellan

Musk published a on Tesla’s website on October 19, the day before the went up, that said all Tesla cars from that day forward would ship with the hardware necessary for full self-driving capability. His emails to staff that month discussed the importance of a demonstration drive to promote the system. Musk’s direct involvement in the video, and subsequent promotion of Tesla vehicles’ abilities to drive themselves, comes at a time when the executive’s reputation and trustworthiness are increasingly at stake. In addition to his Twitter distractions, Musk also promised during Tesla’s Q3 investor call that the automaker would have an “epic end of year,” yet Tesla ended up . On top of that, the . Musk is also poised to take the stand this week in a class-action lawsuit from shareholders who say his claiming that funding had been secured to take the company public — it wasn’t — caused them to lose potentially billions of dollars. The jury will determine whether Musk knowingly, and thus fraudulently, claimed secured funding when it hadn’t been. On October 11, Musk sent an email under the subject line “The Absolute Priority” letting the Autopilot team know that he had canceled his plans for the upcoming weekend to work on the video. “Just want to be absolutely clear that everyone’s top priority is achieving an amazing Autopilot demo drive,” Musk said in the email, according to Bloomberg. “Since this is a demo, it is fine to hardcode some of it, since we will backfill with production code later in an OTA update,” he wrote, referring to the use of a 3D digital map that the Model X used to follow a pre-determined route. “I will be telling the world that this is what the car *will* be able to do, not that it can do this upon receipt,” he continued. Despite that promise, the internal emails show that Musk himself asked the Autopilot team to open the video with the words: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.” Then when Musk promoted the video , he wrote: “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.” We won’t be tech snobs and say that getting a vehicle to drive semi-autonomously, even if it is a pre-determined route, wasn’t an impressive feat for an automaker in 2016. But it’s the principle of the thing, of knowing that it wasn’t actually driving itself yet saying that it was. Tesla, some argue, should have disclosed that so as to not mislead customers into thinking its tech was further along than it was. “Tesla also maybe could have mentioned that in the filming of the video, the Model X drove itself into a fence,” according to Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla who testified details about the video. Elluswamy’s deposition was taken as evidence in involving former Apple engineer Walter Huang. The lawsuit alleges that errors by Autopilot, and Huang’s misplaced trust in the capabilities of the system, caused the crash. State and federal agencies and customers have also called out Tesla for falsely promoting the capabilities its driver assistance systems, Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (which is not actually fully self-driving), even though Tesla does advise its drivers to stay alert and focused while the systems are engaged. Last July, the of falsely advertising its systems, something a handful of Tesla customers also alleged in a against the company. Additionally, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is actively investigating two crashes related to Autopilot. Tesla is also potentially facing a from the Department of Justice over its self-driving claims. Tesla has defended itself, saying that its “failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud,” according to a November motion to dismiss the complaint from customers suing for deceptive marketing. In a conversation last month, Tesla said its leg up over other automakers as it aims to solve full self-driving is that the car is “upgradeable to autonomy,” something that “no other car company can do.”

Google Fi says hackers accessed customers’ information

Carly Page

Google’s cell network provider has confirmed a data breach, likely related to the recent at T-Mobile, which allowed hackers to steal millions of customers’ information. In an email sent to customers on Monday, obtained by TechCrunch, Google said that the primary network provider for Google Fi recently informed the company that there had been suspicious activity relating to a third-party support system containing a “limited amount” of Google Fi customer data. The timing of the notice — and the fact that Google Fi uses a combination of T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular for network connectivity — suggests the breach is linked to . This breach, disclosed on January 19, allowed intruders access to a trove of personal data belonging to 37 million customers, including billing addresses, dates of birth and T-Mobile account details. The incident marked the eighth time T-Mobile has been hacked since 2018. In the case of Google Fi’s breach, Google says the hackers accessed limited customer information, including phone numbers, account status, SIM card serial numbers and information related to details about customers’ mobile service plans, such as whether they have selected unlimited SMS or international roaming. Google said that the hackers did not take customers’ personal information or payment card data, passwords, PINs or the contents of text messages or calls. While some emails told customers that there is “no action required,” at least one Google Fi customer claimed in that their disclosure said that their phone number had been briefly hijacked, known as . Google reportedly told the customer that the intruders had transferred their number for close to two hours, during which they “could have involved the use of your phone number to send and receive phone calls and text messages.” This technique is used by hackers to gain access to a victim’s other online accounts that are protected by the same, albeit hijacked phone number. TechCrunch asked Google whether it could confirm that the incident was linked to the recent T-Mobile breach but has yet to receive a response. It’s not immediately clear how many Google Fi subscribers have been affected by the breach. Google hasn’t made public how many cell subscribers it has in total. In its email to customers, the company said it is working with the as-yet-unnamed network provider to “identify and implement measures to secure the data on that third-party system and notify everyone potentially impacted.” It added that there was no access to Google’s systems or any systems overseen by Google.

Lost your crypto amid Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings? You’re probably not getting it back

Jacquelyn Melinek

access to your money when the crypto firm holding your assets filed for bankruptcy, then you’re probably out of luck getting it back. As Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings move forward for several big-name crypto companies, those who lost funds are surely hoping to get all — or at least some — of their money back. Lawyers and experts shared their thoughts with TechCrunch on what these cases could mean for creditors and what may happen to those who saw their money disappear overnight. Earlier this month, , a subsidiary of the crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group ( ), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Genesis is the latest crypto-focused entity to join the Chapter 11 bankruptcy club alongside , , , and — all of which filed mid- to late 2022. For the most recent Chapter 11 filers, Genesis to its top 50 unsecured creditors, while FTX owes its top 50 unsecured creditors . The bankruptcy filings have redacted the majority — if not all — of the identifying information for the parties involved. One of FTX’s biggest unsecured creditors is owed more than $226 million, and the company could have , according to earlier bankruptcy filings. So it’s safe to say that a lot of people are heavily invested in the outcome of these bankruptcy cases, as their funds, ranging from small amounts to millions of dollars, are involved. But it’s not certain if they’ll ever see the deposited funds again. What will happen to creditors “really depends on the mix of assets and liabilities of the company as well as the prospects of the same company exiting bankruptcy,” Jason Allegrante, chief legal and compliance officer at Fireblocks, said to TechCrunch. “If the business is otherwise healthy but has experienced a liquidity shock, for example, there is still a chance that the business can recover and generate revenue,” meaning creditors may be reunited with some of their funds. Secured creditors will have priority “if and when assets are distributed,” Joel Telpner, chief legal officer at Input Output Global and special counsel at Sullivan & Worcester, said to TechCrunch. “All other creditors stand in line after the secured creditors are first paid. If it’s a company with shareholders, then if there’s anything left, it’ll go to shareholders.”

Apple HomePod (2023) review

Brian Heater

dark night of the . A few years back, the — and, frankly, why not? We’ve smartened our phones and watches. Why shouldn’t our homes be the next step? For decades, many looked longingly at home automation. Smart blinds that opened with your alarm clock might as well have been magic — or, at the very least, the domain of those with money to burn. Suddenly, however, a new generation of the technology arrived with the promise of a (relatively) affordable entry point into home control. Smart lights, smart smoke detectors, smart locks, smart doorbells — and at the center, the smart speaker, the consummate hub and portal into this brave new world. But the best laid plans are still beholden to market forces (among others). The looming recession of the last 12 or so months hasn’t been especially kind to the smart speaker. As is now well documented, a disproportionate number of , as it stared a $10 billion annual loss in the face. We don’t have exact numbers for Google’s Nest division, though the company appeared to freeze hiring ahead of its own massive culling. None of that factors in all of the quick reversals (Microsoft Cortana) and aborted starts (Samsung Bixby) from a few years back. The cadence of hardware releases generally appears to have slowed across big corporations, owing to economic headwinds and supply chain shortages. It’s all a very strange way of setting the scene for a rare Apple reversal. Just shy of two years after , the original premium smart speaker has arisen from the ashes. But why? And why now? The official line from Apple seems to be, simply, because the people asked for it. As far as that explanation goes, I will say this: The most recent Apple iteration is a company that is, in fact, more responsive to users’ needs and desires. We’ve seen the clearest manifestation of that in the , reversing previous foot dragging by improving some features (keyboard, webcam), dropping unwanted ones (Touch Bar) and bringing back old favorites (MagSafe, SD card slot). Even so, this move is odd on the face of it. In , the company told the press that it was discontinuing the original HomePod to “[focus] our efforts on HomePod Mini.” It seemed Apple had lost faith in the notion of a premium smart speaker. And it wasn’t alone. The has been MIA for six years, and while the Echo Studio got a software upgrade last year, the device certainly hasn’t been a focus for Amazon. It seemed that, in a world of Nest Minis and Echo Dots, Apple was putting its eggs in the $99 Mini basket. Brian Heater If the as the company is calling it, had arrived in its current form after its predecessor, I doubt anyone would have blinked an eye. Nothing about the product’s presentation screams “radical departure.” In fact, the speaker looks remarkably like the model that debuted in 2018. As it is, you might need to consult a spec sheet to pick out the key differences between the two Apple devices, which are separated by roughly half a decade. The 2023 Apple HomePod is 0.2 inches shorter than its predecessor, with a height of 6.6 inches (the radius is the same, at 5.6 inches). It’s also lighter, dropping from 5.5 pounds to 5.16. That’s not an insignificant difference, and certainly if we were talking laptops, it would be a big deal. Although the HomePod is designed for one to pick it up and move it around the house, my sneaking suspicion is a great majority of users will clean off a spot on a table top or shelf and rarely — if ever — move it. After all, there’s no battery power on board. If there were, it would be a distinctly different product. As it stands, it needs a constant power source. In fact, . The 2018 model had what one might deem a technically detachable cable, but it fell firmly into the standard corporate-speak that recommended users visit a licensed Apple certified repair specialist. That also currently appears to be the standard line with regard to repairability, meaning that, in spite of the recent availability of user repair kits for the iPhone and MacBook, I wouldn’t attempt to crack it open at home if you’re worried about potentially voiding the warranty. This time, mercifully, the cord is designed to be detached by the user. In fact, it ships unconnected, in its own little box. Once connected, you can pull it off with one, firm yank. The cables maintain the same woven design you’ll find across most of the latest Apple products. Unlike the HomePod Mini, however, it ends in a standard wall plug (three-pronged here in the U.S.), rather than USB-C. My biggest issue here from a cable perspective is that it’s too short. It’s five feet long — a full foot shorter than the Mini cable. I set up two HomePods as a stereo pair, currently flanking my desktop display. The near one (right) reached just fine. The other required an extension cord. A minor complaint, but an easy potential fix for future products. The good news here is that, while Apple won’t be selling a longer version of the cable, it’s an industry-standard plug, so you’ll be able to buy a longer one to swap in. I suspect that, before long, third parties will be offering their own matching woven fabric versions that come in six-foot lengths. Brian Heater There are no other ports on the product. I’ve had a Google Home Max sitting on my desk since…well, since . It’s a fine workhorse of a smart speaker, with an auxiliary in port. It’s great for hard wiring to a PC or, in my case, a turntable. It’s not necessary, exactly, but it’s a great option to have when you want it. Beyond these small things, you’d be hard pressed to tell the old and new HomePods apart by looks alone — the white one, at least. Apple swapped the first gen’s grey color for something it calls “midnight.” In this instance, at least, the company can be forgiven for what isn’t an especially clarifying name. It’s probably too wordy to call it “mostly black, but blueish in certain lighting.” It’s a nice color, though of the two, I’m still leaning toward the white. I might have gone with a more straightforward black or dark gray, but, to my eyes at least, it’s mostly black most of the time. The best thing about the new color, however, is that it’s made from entirely recycled fabric. There isn’t the same variety you’ll find with the Mini. Nor is there anything that pops quite like that line’s orange and yellow options. That’s long been Apple’s M.O. — “fun” vibrant colors for the cheaper models and “serious” muted options for the high-end models. The latter makes sense here, as I’m sure most people are looking for something a bit more staid that fits in with its surroundings in the home. Though, again, more options are rarely a bad thing. I’ve always liked the HomePod’s design. It’s the best-looking smart speaker. As such, it’s not especially surprising Apple didn’t fix what wasn’t broken, as tempting as it might have been to truly reinvent the thing ground up after five years. The mesh fabric remains, a crisscross diamond shape also found on the Mini that the company says is optimized for sound. Certainly, it’s distinct and, one might even suggest, iconic. It’s rigid but does have a slight give when a little pressure is applied. The white color is prone to getting dirty. After sitting on my desk for a few days, the bottom has already become slightly discolored from dust. Predictably, Apple . The speaker’s cylindrical shape slowly tapers on the top and bottom. Below is a silicone pad that creates a bit of friction, while still allowing for the system to be nudged into position (a change from the 2018 model’s convex foot). There’s an internal suspension system connected to the woofer that allows the speaker to output loud, deep bass sounds without intentionally moving the rest of the speaker in the process. Up top is the familiar touch display — the most striking bit of the HomePod design language. Apple The illuminated touch surface up top has been expanded by 6x. That means the shiny touch display and its underlying lighting system effectively reach edge to edge. The glow for playback and the cloud of colors for Siri have always been a clever touch that’s nice to look at. Apple clearly wants Siri to serve as the primary interface here. It’s a smart speaker at the center of a smart home, so all of that logically tracks. There is limited touch control as well. A single tap will play or pause the music and a pair of fixed buttons turn the volume up and down. There’s little doubt in my mind that, when Apple began discussing bringing HomePod back, they explored a lot of ideas, including fundamental changes to the system. I suspect during those conversations, the notion of a more full-fledged touchscreen was raised a few times, at least. After all, in spite of their stubborn refusal to bring one to the Mac, Apple (and its suppliers) has gotten quite good at . Again, this is another one of those decisions that would have fundamentally altered the product. Suddenly your smart speaker is a smart screen — albeit one that is still a lot more speaker than screen. I still really like the Nest Hub. It’s a great little piece of hardware, whose usage has evolved for me over the years. It makes sense as a control panel for smart home functionality and a visualizer for alarm features and voice functionality like weather and sports scores. These days, I probably use it most as a companion piece for Spotify. It’s a small thing, but I really like having the album art and song information on a screen that also lets me skip and repeat tracks. It’s easy to see how similar functionality would be nice on a HomePod, though its design choices (a 360 speaker that covers most of its surface area, but for a small display on top) severely limit such things. I certainly won’t go so far as to see that Apple has created some platonic ideal speaker design, but I wholly understand why the team tasked with bringing HomePod back found it difficult — and in many respects unnecessary — to reinvent the wheel. From a pure marketing strategy standpoint, however, killing the HomePod, only to bring it back in a nearly identical form factor nearly three years later, is baffling. But we’re not here to dwell on marketing decisions. Brian Heater One nice thing about fast-forwarding three years is the HomePod has picked up some tricks from its fellow Apple products along the way. Those start with setup. The processor has been updated from the A8 (which debuted on the iPhone 6 in 2014) to the S7 (which powers the Apple Watch Series 7). Mind, Apple has since , but that chip has the same processing power as its predecessor, with the primary distinction being the accelerometer and gyroscope that enable crash detection — something that isn’t especially relevant to a smart speaker. One unfortunate product of the S7’s inclusion is that the HomePod has Wi-Fi 4 on board. The latest hardware products support Wi-Fi 6e. The iPhone 14 supports Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi 7 is set to debut in 2024. WiFi 4 debuted the year Barack Obama was elected to his first term. The 2018 HomePod 1 supported Wi-Fi 5, which debuted four years prior. If you’ve got an iOS, pairing is simple. In fact, it’s a lot like pairing an Apple Watch. Hold the device close to your new speaker, wait for confirmation and then hold the phone up so it captures the light pattern on top of the device inside a circle on your display. Pick up a second HomePod and the process of making a stereo will bring the entire setup process to around two minutes or so. Note, however, that you need an iPhone for setup, even if you expect to rely entirely on AirPlay. That’s a bit of a disappointment, but not entirely unexpected, given Apple’s general approach to hardware interoperability. Apple A note on pairing: HomePods can only be paired with their same model. It seems perfectly reasonable that you can’t make a stereo pair between, say a HomePod and HomePod mini. Listen, I get it. The hardware, tuning and size of the two devices are so dramatically different, a balanced sound is a near impossibility. The inability to pair HomePod 1 and HomePod 2, on the other hand, remains something of a mystery as I write this (more later), but Apple’s statement on the matter boils down to the idea of “giving a user the best possible experience.” Here we are, once again, at the tricky crossroads of “best experience” and user control. I would argue that the inability to pair the two product is — in itself — a less than best experience. Apple ran out of HomePod 1 stock. That means that if you have a single first-gen device and want a stereo pair, you’ll have to buy another first-gen, definitely not through Apple and likely refurbished. It’s not the end of the world, by any means, but it does put the customer in something of an awkward position. One nice feature borrowed from the Mini is handoff. This utilizes the S7 chip and ultra-wide band (UWB). You’ll need to hop into settings to enable the feature, but it’s worth it. Start a song with Apple Music on your iPhone, hold it near the HomePod and it will start playing there, accompanied by a satisfying haptic fist bump. Move the phone near the speaker again and you can transfer it back. I really like this feature. It’s a good example of how nicely if you make your own devices, software and chips. It’s also surprisingly receptive. In fact, I found myself having to disable it while the HomePods are on my desk, otherwise it will accidentally trigger when I’m using the iPhone two feet from the speakers. Apple I’m a longtime Spotify subscriber who moved over to Apple Music for the purposes of this review (shout out to ). You can use it through your Airplay-enabled device (also a good way of using a stereo pair as an entertainment system without Apple TV), but the experience just isn’t as good as it is with Apple’s software (though the company says the sound quality should be unaffected). Apple builds ecosystems. It’s worked this way for decades, and these days, any hardware maker with the necessary resources has more or less followed suit. As someone who writes about tech for a living, I think it’s important not to rely on a single company — though I understand why people do. It’s often a smoother experience. The biggest thing I miss about Spotify thus far (aside from being far more used to the UI) is the way it syncs song playback in real time across devices. It’s a great feature and losing it is a bit annoying, as I’m not great at keeping track of what was playing where. Among other things, it’s great to be able to view what’s now playing on your computer and phone screen. There were also instances where I would wait too long after playing a song on my computer, tap the top of the HomePod to pick up where I left off and have Siri instead choose something from a playlist of songs it thinks I’d like. Apple Point in favor of Apple Music after a few days back on the platform: Lossless audio, spatial audio (still a bit on the fence about its usefulness here — more below) and a few of the folks who jumped ship from the competition as fallout from the whole Joe Rogan/vaccine misinformation situation — in particular. Also, Apple Music pays artists a lot more (relatively speaking) per stream than Spotify (though still not enough, in my humble opinion). While the exterior of the product remains largely unchanged, the internals have received a significant overhaul, beyond the inclusion of a new chip. I asked Apple for a rough percentage of how much the insides have changed, but didn’t get a straight figure, beyond that the changes were “significant.” The woofer and tweeter arrays have both been updated. Interestingly the tweeter figures have dropped from seven to five. It’s worth remembering that music has always been a major driver for Apple. It was something Steve Jobs was famously passionate about, and it’s something that has remained an essential part of the company’s DNA. The original HomePod was, arguably, the first smart speaker to prioritize the speaker over the smart. That’s likely partially due to the fact that Siri wasn’t built with the smart home first, like Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. Even more pertinent, however, is that Apple is all about a premium experience, and that continues to set HomePod apart from most. Give me a sec, I’m gonna quote Apple directly here: HomePod delivers incredible audio quality, with rich, deep bass and stunning high frequencies. A custom-engineered high-excursion woofer, powerful motor that drives the diaphragm a remarkable 20mm, built-in bass-EQ mic, and beamforming array of five tweeters around the base all work together to achieve a powerful acoustic experience. The S7 chip is combined with software and system-sensing technology to offer even more advanced computational audio that maximizes the full potential of its acoustic system for a groundbreaking listening experience. “Groundbreaking” is, perhaps, a bit hyperbolic. But yeah, in spite of its relatively compact size, the HomePod 2 sounds great. It’s big, bold and dynamic. It fills a room easily and without distortion. It gets loud — like real loud. Like, I didn’t push it to the limit because I live in a New York City apartment surrounded by neighbors who (thankfully) don’t test speakers for a living. Really, in my current living situation, two HomePods is probably overkill, but I can’t argue with the value add of a stereo pair. If you made me choose a single word to describe the sound here, I would probably go with “full.” The highs are high, the lows are low, the mids are…you get the picture. This is, of course, best experienced with songs available in high bit-rates or a lossless format. This, of course, is one of the places where Apple Music shines relative to Spotify. I’ve long believed that years of listening to compressed music has made it difficult for the average listener to pick out the difference between, say, lossless and a high-bit rate. But paired with the new HomePod, digital streaming starts to sing. The separation is great, especially with a stereo pair, which lends a sense of space to the music. Drums, in particular, sound clean and clear, though the low end can overwhelm, and, if you’re like me and placed your speakers on the desktop in front of you, you can really feel elements like the kick drum. That’s sometimes nice and sometimes too much. Apple’s position favors its own in-house tuning. It’s a delicate balance, but I tend to favor more control and would love the ability to fiddle around with EQ sliders in the home app. For an out of the box experience, however, it’s hard (if not impossible) to beat HomePod. You’re up and running within seconds, and the sound is rich and full. I’ve picked up details I’ve missed in familiar songs and, listening to things like podcasts, even noted some things (like mic movement), which probably weren’t intended to be heard. The company notes that while the focus of the press material has (understandably) primarily been about music, that it’s also tuned things for the human voice. In fact, an upgrade that recently dropped via will improve the quality of voice on the system. The feature has also rolled out to the first gen HomePod, which bodes well for Apple’s continued support for the product five years after its initial release. Other features will be arriving down the road via new software, including the ability to hear and alert you when a smoke or fire alarm goes off (unfortunately, unlike , broken glass detection will not be available at launch), which is coming in the spring, and “remastering” of ambient sounds like waves and other white noise. The latter will also be available for home routines, so you can have it automatically trigger before bed. Apple I’m still not wholly sold on Spatial Audio being much more than a fun gimmick. I understand how it will eventually be important for augmented reality (that , right?), but I’ve yet to be sold on its broader import. Until now, I’ve largely thought of it as being tied to headphone head tracking, providing the user with a sense of fixed orientation for different sound elements. With the HomePod, Apple extends the concept to apply to fixed speakers. It effectively builds on stereo sound, offering more precise location and a feeling of space. The number of albums that have been mastered — or remastered — for the feature is lacking at the moment, but Apple Music curates them all into one handy spot. Contemporary pop is well represented — unsurprising, as that seems to be an ongoing focus for the company. There are some older albums in there, too. I’ve been listening to Lil Wayne, Michael Jackson and McCoy Tyner. I’d say overall, it sounds like a slightly elevated stereo separation. “Room sensing technology” is a concept that’s probably familiar if you’ve set up any of the higher-end smart speakers, but here’s a refresher, again, from Apple: With room sensing technology, HomePod recognizes sound reflections from nearby surfaces to determine if it is against a wall or freestanding, and then adapts sound in real time. Precise directional control of its beamforming array of five tweeters separates and beams direct and ambient audio, immersing listeners in crystal-clear vocals and rich instrumentation. The system has a built-in accelerometer that detects when it’s being moved. The next time you play music, it will effectively use on-board mics to detect whether that sound is being reflected back and then extrapolate its position relative to a wall. This uses the four-mic far-field array designed for trigger ‘hey Siri’ (which it does quite well, even when the music is bumping). From there, it will adjust the tuning accordingly, determining whether to incorporate those reflections into the sound. The 360-degree design means that you can also place it free-standing in the middle of a room and get good sound on all sides. Brian Heater , the HomePod 2 $50 cheaper than the first generation’s starting price (though it, too, had dropped to $299 before it went gently into that good night). That’s certainly not cheap. At $600, a stereo pair is very much an investment and one that makes the most sense if your situation ticks off the following boxes: Remember that spiel about the long, dark night a few thousand words back? I firmly stand by it. It’s a weird moment for the smart home and a strange time to be launching (or relaunching) a smart speaker. On the other hand, maybe it’s a great time. After all, neither Google nor Amazon seem to have a clear strategy at the moment — unfortunately, given that late-last-year’s arrival of Matter is set to bust things wide open, particularly when coupled with Thread (which, for the record, was available on HomePod 1). I’m not going to dive too deep into Matter. The long and short of it is it’s a protocol jointly developed by some of the industry’s biggest names, including Apple, Amazon, Google and Samsung. It effectively serves as a universal standard, meaning that companies that make smart home accessories don’t have to choose between HomeKit and the rest. You can develop for everything, everywhere, all at once. I did , centered around an interview with Jon Harros, the CSA’s (Matter’s governing organization) director of Certification and Testing Programs. He told me, “The IoT started reaching a point where it became obvious to have that reality of the billions of sensors and connected devices that we all know is possible. They all have a major slice of the pie. They’re all doing very well, but the size of the pie could grow orders of magnitude. You’re now not talking about shipping millions of products, you’re talking about shipping billions.” It’s a nice bit of harmony from vicious competitors, and it’s a boon to the end user. Many existing accessories are backward compatible and will be receiving over the air updates in the coming year or so (waiting with bated breath here for my favorite smart home accessory, the Nest Protect smoke detector). Meanwhile, plenty of new products that support the standard are already shipping. Home, the same app that lets you control HomePod, is also the central control center for connected devices. To add one, open the app, scan the product’s QR code and wait for the system to connect the two. Once everything is loaded in Home, you can start building scenes and routines, tied to things like your morning alarm or coming home from work. The HomePod also now features built-in temperature and humidity sensors (another trick borrowed from the Mini), which can be used to, say, trigger your smart air conditioner if it gets too hot or cold (I also like being able to ask Siri how warm it is in my apartment versus the outside). Apple Strategically speaking, this feels like the perfect time for the HomePod to strike back. Amazon and Google’s defenses are down, and focusing on Matter support specifically and the smart home broadly should help Apple gain some traction. Apple is always focused on that “just works” experience, and the new standards bring the connected home a heck of a lot closer to that goal. The long-rumored HomeOS continues to be long rumored, even as the company continues to drop hints as to its existence. If/when it does finally materialize, it’s a pretty safe bet the HomePod experience will be foundational. Ditching the original HomePod to the focus on the Mini was — and remains — a weird move. It’s nice to see the big speaker back and better than before — if not radically changed in the way it might have been had the company continued to issue regular updates. A permanent price drop to $299 is certainly nice, though the system still feels a bit aspirational compared to the competition — and doubly so for a stereo pair. I have quibbles with the HomePod 2: Apple Music has its shortcomings, Wi-Fi 4 is ancient and the lack of backward stereo compatibility with the first-gen sticks out like a sore thumb. But the HomePod 2 works well, looks nice and sounds great. It’s going to fit perfectly for a select cross-section of consumers. It continues to not be for everyone, and there’s a part of me that strongly suspects that wouldn’t have it any other way.

NetApp, a specialist in cloud data management, says it will lay off 8%, or around 960 people, citing economic climate

Ingrid Lunden

, one of the big players in cloud data management, today that it would lay off 8% of its staff, citing “macroeconomic challenges and the reduced spending environment” in the current market. The company is estimated to employ about 12,000 people globally, so this will work out to around 960 people impacted. NetApp said that it would begin the process this quarter and is expected to take a charge of $85 million to $95 million related to that. We have contacted the company to ask which product lines or types of jobs might be impacted. It looks like the cuts will be in multiple geographies, including EMEA and Asia-Pacific. San Jose-based NetApp is listed on Nasdaq and has a market cap of just over $14 billion. Like a lot of tech stocks, NetApp has seen its shareprice rollercoaster over the last year and overall drop in value over that time. “Companies are facing an increasingly challenging macroeconomic environment, which is driving more conservatism in IT spending. We are not immune to these challenges,” CEO George Kurian wrote in a memo to employees today. “Against this backdrop, we must be agile, deliver on our near-term commitments, while positioning ourselves for long-term success. This means sharpening our strategy to focus on the areas of our business best positioned for growth, adapting our cost structure to reflect focus and market conditions and raising the bar on our performance. Having successfully navigated similar challenges together with you before, I am confident that sharp focus on our strategy and strong execution will enable us to capture the opportunity ahead.” Indeed, NetApp is not a stranger to layoffs. In 2016, also under Kurian as CEO, the company laid off first 12%, and then a further 6%, of employees within months of each other. This time around, it is part of a bigger wave of reductions across all of tech, covering not just a number of major enterprise vendors, but those in consumer, too. Other recent layoffs have been announced at (12,000), (18,000), (500), SAP (3,000), IBM (3,900) and more. Counting this recent round at NetApp, there have been more than 76,000 layoffs in the technology sector this year alone, according to . That’s a massive and very disconcerting rate. All of 2022 had 159,684, but we’re only two months into the year. NetApp beat on both earnings and revenues, and set guidance of net revenues in the range of $1.525 billion to $1.675 billion and non-GAPP earnings of $1.25 – $1.35. Let’s see how the company performs in Q3 when it reports on February 22.

Stripper Web, a 20-year-old forum for sex workers, is shutting down. No one knows why.

Amanda Silberling

people on the internet who don’t want to be found. That seems to be the case for the elusive, mysterious owner of Stripperweb, a 20-year-old forum for exotic dancers and sex workers. With just one week of advance notice, the forum’s unknown owner announced that the website will shut down on February 1, erasing the decades-long digital footprint of a community on the margins. “This place was a digital dressing room where I could listen in on thousands of interesting, profane, disgusting, inspirational, challenging and painfully true experiences,” said a forum moderator, who uses the screen name Optimist, in an email to TechCrunch. “I didn’t feel alone and isolated anymore. This was a digital home that accepts us all, no matter [how] broke, busted, or disgusted.” The news of Stripperweb’s closure broke last week with a simple notice posted to the top of the website, which is decorated in innumerable different shades of pink. “For over 20 years, Stripperweb has been one of the best resources for exotic dancers and webcam models on the internet. We’ve made the difficult decision to close Stripperweb effective February 1st. We urge you all to check out AmberCutie’s Forum as a possible new home after we close. Thank you to everyone who has made this such an amazing community.” Longtime members and moderators acted quickly, driven by a slew of unanswered questions. Who posted the message? Why now? And why choose a seemingly random forum as a refuge? Taja Ethereal, a Stripperweb moderator who uses the screen name PhatGirlDynomite!!!, took action immediately and offered to buy the site outright. “The first offer was $12,000… I’m losing my head right now. He wouldn’t even come to the table for $12,000, to be paid out in 24 hours, in cash,” she said. “Even if this person is wealthy, why would you leave money on the table unless the site has already been purchased?” Taja Ethereal said she knows that the owner saw her offer — but she still doesn’t know who the owner is, or if the site was already sold. None of the moderators know, even those like her and Optimist who have been on the site for decades, putting in years of labor to educate newer dancers about staying safe and getting paid. Time is ticking. Some sex workers have swiftly taught themselves the Python programming language, writing scripts to scrape decades of data from Stripperweb for posterity. Others are diving deep into the earliest history of the forums, searching for clues as to who might hold the key to the most comprehensive, collaborative archive of what life is like for sex workers in the twenty-first century. A Stripperweb member named cutiecam, who has been on the forum for more than seven years, explained it succinctly: “This is a literal digital museum.” Another user, neverendingkneebruises, wrote on the forum, “I think almost every single dancer [came] across this website when they were starting, no joke… This site helped me get into the industry with standards and boundaries!” Yet even in the face of five-figure cash offers and intense sleuthing, the owner of Stripperweb and their motivations remain a mystery. stripperweb is shutting down next week?! The depth of knowledge & advice on this forum is incalculable! An immense communal & cultural loss for dancers, esp new girls looking for a solid resource to start. — marla cruz (@prolepeach) For those in the know, the cultural value of Stripperweb’s poppy, retro pages has been obvious since its infancy. Now a criminology professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, Dr. Lisa Monchalin wrote a master’s thesis about Stripperweb in 2006, analyzing conversations from the forums to investigate the motivations of professional strippers. While sex work is often assumed to be a financial last resort, the conversations on Stripperweb proved otherwise, according to Monchalin’s study. Stripperweb is an appealing source for academic research, as it provides such an unfiltered, honest look into a historically stigmatized profession. For the dancers who found each other on the forum, it’s also one of the only places they can talk openly about the challenges, victories and nuances of their daily lives. Despite the forum’s name, Stripperweb evolved to include a spectrum of different types of sex work, including camming, acting in porn clips and operating phone sex hotlines. “Losing Stripperweb is losing our communal memory,” Marla Cruz told TechCrunch. Cruz is a dancer who turned to the forums for guidance when she entered the industry in 2017. “You could mention Stripperweb in any dressing room, and dancers would chime in about their experiences on the forum, or what they learned from the forum. It was that ubiquitous, that everybody kind of knew what it was, but for some of them, it was like, ‘Stripperweb is the Holy Grail of strippers’ knowledge. It’s my Bible.’” The early lore of Stripperweb’s founding has already been lost to the detritus of the internet. But in that 17-year-old master’s thesis, Monachlin inadvertently preserved a now-forgotten relic of the early forum, which explains how and why the site was founded. The story of Stripperweb begins in 2001. Pryce, a college student who programmed websites as a side gig, heard from his dancer friends that they couldn’t find a good, central community online. “One day […] Pryce mentioned creating a better site – one that was positive, full of quality advice, and one that gave exotic dancers new tools to help them do their job better and make more money,” reads the origin story reprinted in Monchalin’s thesis. Sure enough, a user who goes simply by “Pryce” served as the admin of the forums for many years. A WHOIS domain lookup reveals that the website is owned by someone who uses the email , but that address — as well as every other Stripperweb email address — is no longer active. In a post commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Stripperweb in 2012, Pryce echoes the founding story captured in Monchalin’s thesis. “StripperWeb first opened to the public on January 4th, 2002. Things have certainly changed since then,” Pryce wrote. “I was just a college kid trying to figure out what the Internet could be used for. At the same time, a group of exotic dancers were in need of a virtual hang out to call home. After 6 months and a LOT of late nights, we had a whopping 74 members! That was incredible in those days. Fast forward 10 years, thanks to the growth of the Internet, social media, and all of you posting – we now get 30-50 new members DAILY.” Pryce wrote that a man named Wayne, “an experienced consultant with access to quality resources,” would lead a team of developers and administrators who would take over his role. Members also recall an admin named Bob managing the forums after Pryce’s departure. Pryce, Wayne and Bob did not respond to requests for comment, sent via email and Stripperweb’s direct messaging system. As the forum approaches its final days, one section of that 10-year-old post sticks out. Pryce offers thanks to someone he calls “The Other Owner,” in quotes. “Thank you so much for your support over the past 6 years. You offered to carry most of our financial burden at a critical time,” Pryce wrote. “Since then, no matter what, you have stayed true to your words and continued to help significantly. I respect the loyalty you have shown. Additionally, at times when the site needed extra funds to complete hardware upgrades or software updates, again you contributed. I thank you on behalf of the community.” That 10-year commemorative post was Pryce’s last on the forum; his profile shows that he has not logged in since 2013. Taja Ethereal said she believes that this “other owner” is still in control of the site. Optimist remembers this time on Stripperweb as “a long, strange tale.” These days, the forum is overwhelmingly dominated by conversations among actual sex workers. But according to Optimist, the forum used to have a robust, bright blue counterpart to the pastel pink pages where so many dancers have found refuge. “The site used to be twice the size it is now because there was a blue board to match the pink board,” she told TechCrunch. “The idea was that the customers had their own area, and we had our area.” Some men on “the blue side” simply exchanged tales of their experiences in clubs; others tried to arrange meetups with the dancers, who then asked Pryce to close off certain areas of the forum for privacy reasons. But Optimist says he refused. In some threads from the blue board — which still exist, mostly inactive, in the deep recesses of Stripperweb — men discuss whether or not it’s okay to track down girls from the forums at their clubs. Others debate whether getting a dancer’s number means she’s romantically interested, or if she just wants to text you to come in on a slow night. On other forums, the men compare notes about their “free” sex lives. Taja Ethereal still refers to male customers who intrude on Stripperweb conversations as “blues.” Optimist added, “[Pryce] claimed it was a stripper support site that he and his stripper girlfriend created for the community. But we had no control over it or [means of] protecting ourselves beyond using avatars and fake names.” The “pinks” and “blues” as seen on Stripperweb, documented on January 30, 2023. Stripperweb A lot changed over the years on Stripperweb. When the forum first opened in 2002, Internet Explorer held 95% of the market share for web browsers, Mark Zuckerberg was an unknown high schooler, YouTube didn’t exist and the cell phone was the Nokia 6610, which could only hold 75 text messages. The sex industry itself has changed a lot too. “There used to be a lot of money in stripping,” Optimist said. “Average girls were walking into good regional clubs and walking out with at least $1,000 per shift on average. So we had women putting their ‘vanilla’ careers aside to make two to four thousand dollars a week.” When the 2008 recession hit, the industry was sent into a tailspin. Though Cruz was not in the industry at the time, she learned about the economic impact on strip clubs from old Stripperweb forums, as well as elder dancers from work. “The site has been running since the early aughts, and what’s interesting is that if you actually look through the years, you can kind of see the ebbs and flows of engagement,” Cruz said. “You see these two really big breaks in 2008 for the recession, and then 2020 under COVID.” In the midst of the 2008 downturn, Page Six wrote of a “lap deficit” and that “Wall Street’s financial crisis has trickled down to Manhattan’s mammary meccas.” In other words, fewer big spenders could pay for lap dances. “I worked at a club where there were a handful of 40- to 50-year-old dancers who had been dancing for 20 years,” Cruz said. When COVID hit in 2020, the older dancers reflected on their past experiences with a sudden economic shift. “COVID is like this generation of strippers’ 2008. It was a big bomb that went off and decimated everything, and all the dancers were kind of like, left in this wake to fend for themselves.” As strip clubs closed down for the pandemic, some dancers took their talents online, working as livesteaming camgirls or as creators on adult clip sites. Naturally, the pandemic generated a boom in online sex work. The platform OnlyFans became a household name, bringing in . The company has only . Cruz theorized that Stripperweb’s closure could be linked to the changing state of the industry, but there are a number of possible explanations, including the increasingly suffocating legislative changes to online sex work. In 2018, former President Donald Trump signed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act ( ) into law after it received bipartisan support in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The legislation overrides Section 230, the statute that renders social platforms immune to liability for what users post — under FOSTA, social platforms can be indicted for enabling illegal sex work. Laws like FOSTA are positioned as ways to curb sex trafficking, but in practice, the policy has been shown to have . In 2020, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) proposed a study on the secondary effects of SESTA/FOSTA on sex workers. “Sex workers have reported a reduced ability to screen potential clients for safety, and negotiate for boundaries such as condom use, resulting in reports of physical and sexual violence,” the bill . “Many sex workers have turned to street-based work, which has historically involved higher rates of violence than other forms of transactional sex.” To comply with the law, many credit card processors have cracked down on adult payments, even for legal online sex work. “Liability is not just about whether or not something’s legal or illegal,” Cruz told TechCrunch. “If you’re a legal sex worker — if you do OnlyFans, or if you’re a stripper — and you have an account with Bank of America, for example, Bank of America can decide to shut down your account. You’re at high risk because you’re associated with adult services.” Cruz thinks that whoever owns Stripperweb might have chosen to shut it down due to potential liability concerns under FOSTA, but the timing seems strange, since the law has been in effect for over four years. “It could be something to do with FOSTA, like the hammer’s coming down,” said Taja Ethereal. “Every time you turn around, something’s becoming more difficult to do, like people losing their payment processors. We tried to be legit with adult payment processors — they are shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.” She added that one company she works with recently got banned from using Wells Fargo. “It seems like the noose is getting tighter and tighter.” From advice for dealing with antagonistic customers, to guidance on how to navigate changing legislation, Stripperweb has continually served as a resource for workers in the adult industry. While some community leaders try to hunt down the owner of the forum to negotiate, others have resigned to the possibility of losing the forums forever. In the final days before the February 1 deadline, some denizens of Stripperweb have worked tirelessly to preserve its 20 years of forums as an everlasting archive, writing their own programs and leveraging tools from the Internet Archive to salvage as much of their history as possible. Taja Ethereal set up two computers to run for 12 hours at a time, scraping as much data from Stripperweb as possible. She’s not the only one. “A lot of people are archiving it, and then I have other people who I have hooked up with from Twitter. They’re sending these .zip files,” she told TechCrunch. “So basically, it looks like I’m gonna end up with two hard drives filled with files.” Within days, much of the website was to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, though it’s not a complete copy of the site. Once all of the data is retrieved, another Herculean task awaits: organizing 20 years of unwieldy, retro internet forums. Many of these conversations are merely historical relics — one thread about stripper safety from the early 2000s recommends that dancers invest in a cell phone — yet some advice from the forums is timeless. “The most chilling thing about the site being destroyed instead of sold to a loving supportive group of industry women, is that for some newbie cammers and dancers, that site is the most support they’ve ever had,” Optimist said. “They literally come on to chat like we’re sisters or like elder family members.” When the site shuts down, there won’t be a central place for forum members to go. The site’s vague notice about the shutdown offers a forum operated by a sex worker named AmberCutie as an alternative, but Stripperweb users seem unenthused, because her forum focuses specifically on camming, rather than other trades like dancing. It’s not clear why the site now points people toward that particular forum, but some users say it reflects how out of touch the owner is with what the community needs. AmberCutie did not respond to a request for comment. Taja Ethereal wonders if the repository of advice on Stripperweb is exactly what led to its downfall. Dancers share tips on which clubs to avoid, what they should expect to be paid and how they know if they’re getting ripped off. She describes the website like an unofficial union. Last year, dancers at Star Garden in North Hollywood before receiving approval from the National Labor Relations Board to conduct an election to join the Actors’ Equity union. If they win their vote, they would become the first unionized strip club since 2013, when the Lusty Lady club in San Francisco closed. Taja Ethereal says she became suspicious when she and other moderators wanted to upgrade sections of Stripperweb where dancers compare notes about which clubs are safe to work at, but their requests were denied or ignored. “Why wouldn’t you want a resource so people can find out what’s a good club, what’s a bad club?” she said. “Other people have said that maybe that’s because strip club owners don’t want us talking about their clubs.” As the community prepares for Stripperweb to close, the members of the forum are looking for a place to go — Taja Ethereal started a website called , almost an homage to the forum she’s spent more than a decade moderating. As the mysterious, unknown owner lets the forum disappear, its members lament the loss of an accessible place for new sex workers to learn how to stay safe and take care of themselves. “Right now, there are women living in precarious situations who need help getting hired, getting their hustle down before they end up homeless. Girls fly into a city on a ‘Strip Trip’ and need to know what to do,” Optimist said. “They’ll look up on Wednesday and 20 years of aunties who left their best advice will be gone.”

InstaDeep’s acquisition is a classic case of an African startup gone global 

Tage Kene-Okafor

largest vaccine maker BioNTech announced that it had Tunisian-born and London-headquartered AI startup InstaDeep for up to £562 million, including a performance-tied £200 million tranche investment. InstaDeep’s deal — subject to regulatory approval and expected to close in the first half of this year — is quite intriguing, for a few reasons. First, when completed (at $682 million, adjusted in U.S. dollar terms), it’ll become the largest acquisition deal involving an African or Africa-focused startup, besting prices bargained for Sendwave, DPO Group and . Second, unlike the other high-profile acquisitions, InstaDeep isn’t a fintech. And third, although early believers who witnessed InstaDeep’s growth from a local firm to a global startup knew it had enough exit options, they didn’t think the acquisition would happen this fast, said , senior partner at AfricInvest, one of InstaDeep’s earlier investors, on a call with TechCrunch. In 2019, InstaDeep raised an $8.5 million Series A at a $30 million valuation, according to sources familiar with the round, which AfricInvest led with participation from New York–based Endeavor Catalyst and a broad range of business angels in the global AI industry. The investment was AfricInvest’s first involvement in an AI startup, a decision based on InstaDeep’s founders selling a global vision to the Pan-African private equity firm. “InstaDeep happened to be quite different from other companies in our pipeline as they were actually into deep tech versus applying technology to a certain sector, where basically, you become an operator in that sector. They were developing specific technology that could impact many sectors,” noted Jilani on InstaDeep’s pioneering tech. “And it was also interesting, especially in Africa, where such companies are quite rare. And so when we had discussions with Karim over his vision and strategy, we quickly realized that InstaDeep could transform from an African leader in AI to a global player.” InstaDeep utilizes advanced machine learning techniques, including deep reinforcement learning in applications within an enterprise environment that cuts across various industries such as biotech, transportation, electronics manufacturing and logistics. Ultimately, this helps companies optimize the decision-making process and improve efficiency. and founded the startup in Tunis in 2014 with “two laptops, $2,000, and a lot of enthusiasm,” CEO Beguir . The bootstrapped company — which didn’t receive outside capital until 2018 — depended on original , which led to the startup being discovered by specialized clients who later became partners and investors, such as DeepMind, Google and its future acquirer BioNTech. As InstaDeep’s clientele grew globally, so did its team. The company has 240 staff across Tunis, London, Lagos, Dubai, Berlin, Cape Town, Paris, Boston and San Francisco. Also, InstaDeep’s ambition to become a global company made it move its headquarters from Tunis to London, which some , thus neglecting its African roots. “InstaDeep is a global company, but in terms of origins and like the company’s early days, there’s no doubt that we’re African,” Beguir told me on the call. “One of the reasons we founded InstaDeep was to show that there was real potential and opportunity for AI in Africa. So we want people to see us as a deep tech African startup gone global, which sends a powerful message of hope for the space.” If anything, InstaDeep has proven that an African company with African talent can successfully serve clients globally while building a talent bridge corresponding to that growth. On the other side of the table are somewhat naive views that argue InstaDeep’s “Africanity.” Tunisia, due to its inhibiting government policies, is an — excluding InstaDeep, Tunisian startups raised $17 million last year, according to a report by VC firm Partech. As such, most startups have had to domicile abroad to access funding. Also, InstaDeep’s influence in building AI talent on the continent isn’t discussed enough. Last year, the upstart played a notable role in helping to organize and nurture Africa’s AI ecosystem via and , hackathons and events with thousands of AI talents and 400 researchers in attendance. Most importantly, an African startup serving clients outside the continent doesn’t make it less African; in fact, founders should be encouraged to build software and AI businesses that present better exit opportunities than e-commerce, logistics and payments, sectors that international companies only consider when expanding into a new region. Tech Safari The ripple effect of InstaDeep building global-first is that it has put the Tunisian tech ecosystem and, more broadly, the AI industry in Africa under the radar with the news of its acquisition. Yet, it’s too early to assume that because of that, it’ll suddenly open the sluice of venture capital in Tunisian tech or Africa’s AI market, which currently lags several industries as hotbeds of investments on the continent. There is potential, though, particularly with the applications of the technology in various sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing; startups like South Africa’s and have raised significant funding for this — however, patience will be required before any breathtaking activity occurs. To my question on whether InstaDeep is an outlier, Begiur expressed optimism that more success stories from Africa’s deep tech and AI community would be told sooner rather than later, especially as the venture capital market has turned red-hot for AI-based innovation. When this happens, the CEO says he hopes that founders and investors reinvest back into the space, something InstaDeep and AfricInvest intend to act on moving forward. “I believe that AI is a huge opportunity for Africa and I’ve been vocal about it. We often see AI as a technology and a competition between developed countries. In reality, AI is essential for Africa’s success in the 21st century, and the reason is that it is the transformational technology of our time; I think you’ll see so many examples these days from GPT and beyond of its disruptive potential,” Beguir, who is half-Tunisian and half-French continued. “But importantly, the barrier to entry to AI is much lower than, let’s say, technologies of the past that were classically associated with legacy companies and strong superpowers. As such, it is a great opportunity for the continent.” Last January, InstaDeep , over 12x what it raised in its previous priced round. Such was the proactive interest of new investors, including Alpha Intelligence Capital, CDIB, Google and BioNTech, its new owner with whom it started working with in 2019 and launched  the following year to deploy the latest advances in AI and ML to develop novel medicines for a range of cancers and infectious diseases. Following the investment, InstaDeep was looking to make some acquisitions to ramp up its data collection capabilities to complement its AI systems before BioNTech swooped in with the acquisition offer, virtually leaving most of the growth financing untouched. “That was crazy. Frankly, we [InstaDeep and early investors like AfricInvest] did not expect that to happen,” expressed Ben Jilani, whose firm may be sitting on a conservative 10x+ exit multiple based on independent calculations. InstaDeep exited at a higher valuation than what it commanded for its Series B, according to Beguir. According to a statement on the acquisition, BioNTech and InstaDeep have already developed multiple end-to-end AI-based applications trained on public and proprietary datasets across various scientific domains. These include projects to enhance neoantigen selection, ribological sequence optimization for BioNTech’s platforms, and the development of an Early Warning System to detect and monitor high-risk SARS-CoV-2 variants based on their ability to escape immune defenses announced last . “With BioNTech, we have developed a partnership over the years and completed many successful projects together. We see great opportunities to build the next generation of immunotherapies and become the leader in biopharma and AI. I believe this is an exciting time, and we will have more to share in coming months,” Beguir said about the acquisition without divulging new information while adding that InstaDeep will use its Series B funding and exit money to scale its teams and capabilities across Africa and globally. “It’s a continuation of what we’ve done in many ways,” he added.

Entocycle grabs $5 million for its insect breeding technology

Romain Dillet

Even if insects don’t sound appealing to you, black soldier flies could play an essential role in the food chain in the coming years. In particular, these flies’ larvae can become an important source of proteins for livestock and fish. That’s why is raising another $5 million in a Series A funding round led by , a European climate-focused VC firm. and are participating in the round as well. is also investing in Entocycle. This new French VC firm is partnering with current and former athletes to invest in tech companies. In addition to contributing money, those sports professionals help startups with team-building advice and mentorship. In that case, Antoine Dupont, Nikola Karabatic, James Haskell and Antoine Brizard are investing in Entocycle. While Entocycle has been , the team of 21 people will now try and commercialize its products. In particular, with this new injection of cash, Entocycle plans to iterate on its flagship product — the Entocycle Neo. It’s a hardware module that can be used in insect farms to monitor and collect data on the health and productivity of black soldier flies. The Entocycle Neo uses optical sensors combined with a software solution that analyzes images and accurately measures production. By automating these processes, Entocycle hopes it can increase productivity in insect farms. Using the company’s modules should lead to higher-feed conversion rates and lower mortality. Similarly, Entocycle has developed a fly cage with built-in climate control. The idea is that Entocycle can help companies in the food industries get started with black soldier fly larvae so that they can secure their supply of proteins. And this is key to understanding the appeal behind Entocycle. Switching to insect-based proteins could drive down soybean production and imports, as well as deforestation — indirectly. Larvae are a low-carbon alternative as they can be produced anywhere. Insect farms could also integrate into the waste management cycle as black solider flies gobble down food waste. Entocycle

Fairphone nabs $53M in growth capital for ‘sustainable’ consumer electronics

Natasha Lomas

Dutch social enterprise , which makes modular and — the claim is — more sustainable and ethical consumer electronics, has nabbed a chunk of funding to continue scaling a circular-economy-aligned smartphone business. The €49 million (~$53 million) “growth capital” investment — from an international consortium of impact investors, led by new shareholders Invest-NL, the ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund and existing investor Quadia via its Regenero Impact Fund — is more than the startup has raised since being founded, back in 2010. (Fairphone had previously raised $40.7 million, per — spread across nine funding rounds, drawing on a range of sources from crowdfunding to VC and debt.) Other existing Fairphone investors DALHAP, DOEN Participaties and PDENH also participated in the new raise — while a number of other investors, including PYMWYMIC and over 1,000 crowdfunders, exited at this point. While Fairphone said it’s using some of the new funding to settle some existing debt. But the headline claim for the investment is growth. The European startup is well positioned to capitalize on opportunities flowing from the bloc’s push for a green transition by encouraging a shift to circular business models, with a top-line goal for the European Union to be carbon neutral by 2050. EU regulators are also for mobile devices and other consumer elections — a future requirement which Fariphone is already fulfilling, thanks to its modular, repairable-by-design devices, putting it well ahead of the (waste-generating) industry curve. Fairphone said the new funding will be used to strengthen its brand positioning — and create further awareness around fairness and sustainability in the electronics industry. Additionally, it said it wants to accelerate integration of fair and recycled materials into its full product portfolio — saying for example that it will be extending its mining “value chain” programs in Africa & South America, and fair wage programs in Asia. It will also be funnelling funds into product development and improved customer service — including to keep pushing the envelop on . Fairphone recently launched its — which contain recycled plastic, Fairtrade gold in the supply chain and an extended battery life vs rival products. We’ve asked Fairphone for its latest sales metrics and will update this report with any response. Fairphone’s CFO, Noud Tillemans, told us the company sold around 120,000 devices last year — up from around 88,000 in 2021 and 23,000 in 2018. “This is more equity than we raised ever before in total,” he confirmed. “The €49 million is pure equity. Some of it will be used to settle existing loans. I can only share the majority is used for growth. Some initial shareholders, investing 5-10 years ago, were keen to exit.” “We are excited to support Fairphone’s growth ambitions, as a truly circular lighthouse case within the electronics industry,” added Elisabeth Storm de Grave, Principal at Fairphone’s new investor, Invest-NL, in another supporting statement. “With its unparalleled approach to creating ethical products with both people and planet in mind, Fairphone sets new standards for the entire industry. Together, we are disrupting a short-term way of thinking that the world can no longer afford, creating a sustainable and fair future for all stakeholders’” While Hanna Zwietering, of the ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund, pointed to what she couched as a “growing trend towards conscious consumer behavior” — lauding Fairphone as “a frontrunner in the sustainable electronics industry” she said has “proven it can develop high-quality modular and fair smartphones in most competitive markets”.

As NYC public schools block ChatGPT, OpenAI says it’s working on ‘mitigations’ to help spot ChatGPT-generated text

Kyle Wiggers

New York City public schools have restricted access to , the AI system that can generate text on a range of subjects and in various styles, on school networks and devices. As this morning and confirmed to TechCrunch by a New York City Department of Education spokesperson, the restriction was implemented due to concerns about “[the] negative impacts on student learning” and “the safety and accuracy” of the content that ChatGPT produces. “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch via email, adding that the restricted access came in response to requests from schools. It’s not a ban per se. The New York City public school system is using the same filter for  that it uses to block other apps and websites — for example, YouTube and Facebook — on school property. Individual schools can request to have ChatGPT unblocked, and the spokesperson said that the New York City Department of Education would “welcome” the opportunity to have a conversation with OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, about how the tool could be adapted for education. When reached for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company is developing “mitigations” to help anyone spot text generated by ChatGPT. That’s significant. While TechCrunch reported recently that OpenAI was with a watermarking technique for AI-generated text, it’s the first time OpenAI has confirmed that it’s working on tools specifically for identifying text that came from ChatGPT. “We made ChatGPT available as a research preview to learn from real-world use, which we believe is a critical part of developing and deploying capable, safe AI systems. We are constantly incorporating feedback and lessons learned,” the OpenAI spokesperson said. “We’ve always called for transparency around the use of AI-generated text. Our policies require that users be upfront with their audience when using our API and creative tools. . . We look forward to working with educators on useful solutions, and other ways to help teachers and students benefit from AI.” has an aptitude for answering questions on topics ranging from poetry to coding, but one of its biggest flaws is its ability to sometimes give that sound convincing but aren’t factually true. That led  from sharing content generated by the AI, saying that ChatGPT made it too easy for users to flood the platform with dubious answers. More recently, the International Conference on Machine Learning, one of the world’s largest AI and machine learning conferences, a prohibition on papers that include text generated by ChatGPT and other similar AI systems for fear of “unanticipated consequences.” In education, the debate has revolved largely around the cheating potential. Perform a Google search for “ChatGPT to write school papers,” and you’ll find plenty of examples of educators, journalists and students testing the waters by wielding ChatGPT to complete homework assignments and standardized essay tests. Wall Street Journal columnist Joanna Stern ChatGPT to write a passing AP English essay, while Forbes staffer Emma Whitford it to finish two college essays in 20 minutes. to The Guardian, Arizona State University professor Dan Gillmor recalled how he gave ChatGPT one of the assignments he typically gives his students and found that the AI’s essay would’ve earned “a good grade.” Plagiarism is another concern. Like other text-generating AI systems, ChatGPT — which is trained on public data, usually collected without consent — can sometimes regurgitate this information verbatim without citing any sources. That includes factual inaccuracies, as alluded to earlier, as well as biased — including racist and sexist — perspectives. OpenAI continues to introduce filters and techniques to prevent problematic text generations, but new workarounds pop up every day. Despite those limitations and issues, some educators see pedagogical potential in ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI technologies. In a recent piece for Stanford’s Graduate School of Education website, Victor Lee, associate professor of education at Stanford, noted that ChatGPT may help students “think in ways they currently do not” — for example, by helping them discover and clarify their ideas. Teachers may benefit from ChatGPT as well, he posits, by generating many examples for students of a narrative where the basic content remains the same but the style, syntax or grammar differ. “ChatGPT may [allow] students to read, reflect and revise many times without the anguish or frustration that such processes often invoke, [while] teachers can use the tool as a way of generating many examples and nonexamples of a form or genre,” Lee said in a . “Obviously, teachers are less delighted about the computer doing a lot of legwork for students. And students still need to learn to write. But in what way, and what kinds of writing? A . . . side effect of this new medicine is that it requires all of us to ask those questions and probably make some substantive changes to the overarching goals and methods of our instruction.” In any case, the New York City public schools policy, which appears to be the first of its kind in the country, will surely force the conversation at school districts elsewhere. As use of the tech grows — ChatGPT had over a million users as of December — and have begun piloting tools to detect the use of AI-generated text in student submissions. Some educators might choose to embrace them, while others, like Lee, instead encourage the use of ChatGPT as an assistive writing tool.

Why Africa had no unicorns last year despite record fundraising haul

Tage Kene-Okafor

scene was met with fanfare in 2021: Venture capital investments in the region totaled between $4 billion and $5 billion and produced five unicorns. In my piece this progress, I predicted there would be more unicorns in 2022. Those predictions proved to be way off the mark by year’s end. Data from market insights trackers and reveal that funding raised by African startups exceeded $5 billion (including undisclosed deals) in 2022 — a slight percentage increase from the figures reported in 2021 despite a global pullback in VC funding. And yet, no unicorns popped up throughout the year, compared to five in 2021. That fact may appear insignificant because, at the end of the day, private valuations don’t pass an actual test till startups go public. However, producing no unicorns despite raising more venture capital suggests it’s perhaps too early to assume African markets are mature enough to consistently pop out private billion-dollar companies like their Global South counterparts: India, Southeast Asia and Latin America. That said, 2022 was peculiar. The global economic downturn and venture capital crunch ensured that every region produced fewer billion-dollar companies than the previous year. Globally, 216 unicorns were minted in 2022, per , compared to 541 in the previous year. In , 22 companies became unicorns last year, compared to 46 in 2021. While in Latin America got their horns in 2021, that figure last year. Unlike Africa, these regions raised way less venture capital in 2022 than in 2021, so it makes sense that their unicorn numbers dropped. For example, in India, the number of unicorns dropped by more than half as . Latin America and Southeast Asia also compared to 2021, though the drop in unicorns indicates more damage. So what happened in Africa in 2022 that made it so … weird?

TBD Health is rolling out at-home sexual healthcare to all US states

Haje Jan Kamps

Reproductive rights is a hot-button topic for much of the political spectrum in the U.S. Against that backdrop. is not-so-quietly making patient-focused and inclusive sexual healthcare available and accessible to everyone in the U.S., as it raises a $4.4 million round to scale up further. “At a time when women’s rights are being challenged by our government, it was critical for us to build a sex-positive healthcare company that makes it easy for people to prioritize their health,” said Daphne Chen, co-founder and co-CEO of TBD Health in an interview with TechCrunch. “As someone who has experienced firsthand the judgment that doctors and clinicians pass when it comes to sexual health, it’s our mission to create a safe space for people to seek inclusive, trauma-aware care, as well as treatment and resources on their own terms, regardless of where they live.” The company is extending operations in the context of a huge amount of change. At one end of the scale, people are more likely to have non-traditional relationships where multiple sexual partners are a thing, and sexual safety and testing remains important. At the other extreme, a huge swathe of the U.S. has woefully lacking sex ed and access to sexual health clinics. The CDC reports that 20% of people in the U.S. have an STI, and that young people are not as good at preventing them as perhaps they ought to be. TBD Health is pushing a new line of services it refers to as digital sexual health. “We have a couple of services that are available today. One of which is our at-home STI testing, which we’re really excited about because it’s a protocol that allows you to manage your sexual health from the comfort and privacy of home,” says Chen. “What that looks like is we’re able to send you a kit that’s customized to your specific needs and your risk profile to your home, you’re able to self-collect your samples (urine, blood as well as any swab samples that might be needed), which then gets shipped to our partner lab and you get your results in just a few days. All results are reviewed by our clinical team and a customized care plan is created just for you. And we’re also really excited about the fact that your relationship with TBD doesn’t end after your test result comes back. We are creating an ongoing relationship, and we’re doing a lot of follow-up. We really believe that as your sex life changes your sexual health care needs do too. And so we want to stay on top of that and make sure that we’re able to serve you no matter where you are in your sexual health journey.” We spoke with the company , when it was just starting to gather speed with its at-home services, in addition to its in-person clinic in Las Vegas. Today, the company told TechCrunch it has raised a $4.4 million round of investment from Tusk Venture Partners, with participation from Springdale Ventures, Human Ventures, Expansion VC, Starbloom Capital, Hyphen Capital and The Community Fund. “More and more we’re seeing local sexual health clinics nationwide shuttering due to lack of funding and resources. This leaves an immense strain on those who urgently need care,” said Stephanie Estey, co-founder and co-CEO of TBD Health. “We seek to be a solution for those living in sexual health care deserts and beyond by offering a more accessible and approachable way to taking care of your sexual health.” Of course all eyes are on Roe v. Wade’s impact on delivery and access to sexual health services. “Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, it’s critical people must have accessible options to reproductive and sexual healthcare,” said Bradley Tusk, managing partner at Tusk Venture Partners in a statement provided by TBD. “We are proud to back TBD Health as they establish new standards for care through its STD testing kits, availability of emergency contraceptives with next-day shipping nationwide, and an in-person care hub in Las Vegas.” The company has invested a lot into ensuring its services are trauma-informed and radically inclusive, which means that its clinicians are able to meet complex sexual health situations with understanding and kindness. “The true differentiator of TBD is the care that comes along with the experience. All of our clinicians are trained in sex positivity, they have sensitivity training, and they are trauma-aware. And so with TBD, you are not just getting a test result. You’re getting a partner. So what does that actually look like?” Estey asks rhetorically. “That looks like counseling. That looks like making sure you have the next steps. That looks like making sure that you have resources to think about an STI result both for yourself as well as your partners. We really walk you through the entire process. That is dramatically lacking in healthcare today, which feels very transactional. TBD is all about putting the human and compassionate approach back into the experience and making sure that people feel empowered to take ownership of their sexual healthcare.” You can .

The Team Slide is the most important slide in a startup pitch deck

Haje Jan Kamps

graduates and becomes a “real” company, with hundreds of employees and the first inklings of large amounts of revenue, you could argue that a Team Slide is less important. Yes, the top leadership team still has to be good, but if the company is growing rapidly, getting new customers and delivering a good product, it’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: If the team is able to grow the company, at least they aren’t completely helpless. But in the early stages of a company, things are a little different, and that’s where a good story around a company’s team is crucial. And yet, I am surprised how often startup teams are wasting the opportunity of telling the story about their team. Spoiler alert: For early-stage companies, investors are looking for exactly three things: Five Flute was confident enough to put its Team Slide as its second slide. And it’s easy to see why: This is what an extraordinary team looks like. . The ugly truth is that if you have a good idea, chances are that there are 10 other teams working on the same idea. It’s unlikely that you are special enough to have a 100% unique idea. It’s unlikely that you are the first founders to pitch a particular idea to a group of investors. So the question morphs into this: Why should the investors back you and your team? That is the question a Team Slide has to answer. In this post, I’ll show you how.

Plugable’s new dock turns your tablet or phone into a workstation

Haje Jan Kamps

Laptops and tablets are getting better and more powerful by the day but our fingers aren’t getting any more precise, and for extended writing and work, it’s still more helpful to have a keyboard and a larger screen at hand. These types of products , but what’s new about ‘s offering is the sleek portability and build quality that makes your phone and tablet so portable in the first place. The USB-C docking station is called UDS-7IN1, and enables the users of supported devices to turn their phones and tablets into workstations. The device adds an HDMI port to connect a monitor, alongside a couple of USB 3.0 (5Gbps) ports, SD and microSD ports, an audio input/output jack, and 100W USB-C pass-through charging to keep everything powered and on charge. The stand is built of aluminum, and folds down to a pretty compact little package to take with you on your travels. Supported devices are most modern USB-C tablets, and select phones, and the device starting today.

Would Baidu’s answer to ChatGPT make a difference?

Rita Liao

Baidu, China’s top search engine provider and robotaxi developer, is apparently working on its own counterpart to ChatGPT. The news, first reported by and , sent Baidu’s stock price rising on Monday to reach its highest point since September. A spokesperson for Baidu declined to comment on the reports. But it wouldn’t be surprising that Baidu, which bills itself as the pioneer in China’s artificial intelligence field, is stepping up to build the Chinese equivalent of today’s most powerful chatbot. The question is how big a difference the tool can make, and where its limitations lie. A driving force shaping China’s tech development over the past few years is the rise of digital sovereignty, which refers to a country’s ability to control its own “ ” and can include autonomy in critical software and hardware in the AI supply chain. Episodes of U.S. export bans on China have pushed Beijing to further call for tech independence in areas ranging from semiconductors to basic research on AI. As OpenAI’s ChatGPT shows the potential to disrupt sectors from education and news to the service industry, China’s tech leaders and policymakers are likely pondering how AI can also be used to drive productivity at home. China naturally wants its homegrown ChatGPTs, not just to secure control over how data flows through such tools but also to create AI products that better understand local culture and politics. That’s where things get interesting. Like all other channels of information in China, the Baidu chatbot will no doubt be subject to local regulations and censorship rules. As we earlier, the firm’s text-to-image application, ERNIE-VilG, already rejects politically sensitive prompts. But conversational AI handles much more complex inquiries than image generators — how will Baidu walk the line between censorship confinement and leaving enough freedom and creativity to its bot? Also important to machine learning performance is the undergirding algorithms. According to The Wall Street Journal, Baidu adapted a “core breakthrough” that Google developed in 2017 and open-sourced, an algorithm that has also powered ChatGPT. Most likely, though, there are other key pieces of proprietary algorithms that Baidu has acquired or developed to form the backbone of its chatbot. Hardware plays another important role in training large-scale neural networks. U.S. chip sanctions against China are posing a threat to China’s AI industry as companies that power supercomputers and large data centers. Baidu, however, believes the chip ban has a , as we reported. In the near term, the company “already stocked enough [chips] in hand.” Lastly, the success of Baidu’s ChatGPT alternative depends in part on continuous data training through user feedback, such as giving a thumb-up or -down to the machine’s responses. In other words, the more people using it, the better the AI assistant understands how to respond to humans. Ella Zhang, founder and CEO of text-to-image startup (who previously was working on ), reckons that Chinese-language chatbots “might not see the same strong demand yet as English ones because China still enjoys relatively cheap labor.” So instead of subscribing to expensive AI software and finetuning it to carry out customer service tasks, a Chinese company might simply hire a team of human staff for affordability and convenience. Things might change in a few years, though, as China gradually loses its labor advantage in a .

Instagram’s co-founders introduce a new social app…for news reading

Sarah Perez

Can lightning strike twice? That’s apparently the question being raised today with the public introduction of the next social app built by Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. The duo have launched a new venture to explore social apps, according to a report published in , which includes the debut product , a personalized news reader. The app itself is not yet publicly available but offers a waitlist where interested users can sign up. As described, it sounds like a modern-day twist on Google Reader, a long-ago RSS newsreader app that . Except in this case, Artifact is described as a newsreader that uses machine learning to personalize the experience for the end user, while also adding social elements that allow users to discuss articles they come across with friends. (To be fair, Google Reader had a similar feature, but the app itself had to be programmed by the user who would add RSS feeds directly.) Artifact will first present a curated selection of news stories, The Verge’s article notes, but these will become more attuned to the user’s interests over time. Some of the articles will come from big-name publishers, like The New York Times, while others may be from smaller sites. Other key features will include comment controls, separate feeds for articles posted by people you follow alongside their commentary and a direct message inbox for discussing posts more privately. The concept seems as if it has some overlap with one of Twitter’s bigger use cases around discussing news. It also arrives at a time when Twitter users are considering new options after the app’s acquisition by Elon Musk, who has made changes to the app’s roadmap and policies, some longtime users in the process. But as described, Artifact doesn’t sound completely original — not only does it seem like a modern twist on a Google Reader-type experience, it would go up against various other news reading apps, both new and older, which include personalization elements, like , SmartNews and Newsbreak. It also sounds similar to and its newer which offers a combination of news reading, curated recommendations and comments. Even , launching a way for its readers and writers to chat in-app. Overseas, the model has seen success with ByteDance’s Toutiao, but a U.S. version . And of course, the new app would compete in many ways with the social giant Meta, too, which Instgram’s co-founders left back in 2018. Facebook and to a lesser extent Instagram and WhatsApp, today serve as portals where billions interact and engage with news and information, amid their updates from friends, family, groups and businesses they follow. That means no matter how polished or differentiated Artifact may become, it could still face a host of competition in the market, where consumers also already have built-in news apps available with Apple News and Google News. According to The Verge’s report, the duo believes the recent leaps made in machine-learning technology could help give Artifact an edge, however, similar to how algorithmic recommendations have played a role in elevating TikTok to become a dominant app. But while TikTok’s personalized For You feed is arguably addictive, the video app’s growth was seeded by record-breaking marketing spend on its user acquisition efforts — even reaching $1 billion per year in 2018, . A startup, even from remarkable founders, may not have the same amount of fuel to throw on the fire. And news reading in and of itself seems to be a bit of a passé market to chase in an era when younger Gen Z users are often now turning to entertainment apps like TikTok to stay informed on news and world events, too. It’s wading into a polarized news ecosystem, too, with the founders promising to make the  “subjective” and “hard” calls over the content on its network. That said, it’s difficult to count out the success of those who built Instagram, which, was one of the largest social tech acquisitions of its time and has shaped the way the world engages with social media, for better or for worse. As an early-stage product, Artifact is still being developed and is not yet monetized, but a revenue share with publishers was mentioned as a possible option. ( ?) The app’s individual success may or may not ultimately matter, though, given the founders intend on testing other new social products through their new venture, it seems. Currently, Artifact’s website is taking sign-ups from those who have U.S. (+1) phone numbers.

Big changes coming for GDPR enforcement on Big Tech in Europe?

Natasha Lomas

Big Tech take note: In what looks like a meaningful — and long overdue — reforming step, the European Commission has committed to dial up its monitoring of how data protection authorities at the EU Member State level enforce the bloc’s flagship data protection rules — committing to regular checks on “large scale” General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) cases. Checks that could help address long standing criticism that enforcement of the GDPR is too weak and plodding to put meaningful checks on Big Tech. The EU’s executive saying it will ask all national supervisory data protection authorities to share with it a report — on a “bi-monthly” basis (presumably that’s every two months, rather than 2x per month in this context); so 6x per year — which it describes as “an overview of large-scale cross-border investigations under the GDPR”. Furthermore, the Commission stipulates these reports will need to include various key details (such as case no.; controller or processor involved; investigation type), along with a summary of the investigation scope (“including which provisions of the GDPR are at issue”); the DPAs concerned; “key procedural steps taken and dates”; and the “Investigatory or any other measures taken and dates. It has also committed, in its second upcoming report on the application of the GDPR, to provide a report of the information it’s getting back from DPAs. So the Commission will be reporting on the DPAs’ reporting. While this probably sounds exceedingly dry, it’s actually — potentially — a very big deal. The European Commission will start checking the progress of every “large-scale” GDPR case across the EU, 6 times a year. — Johnny Ryan (@johnnyryan) ❗❗The European Commission has committed to examining every large-scale GDPR case, everywhere in Europe. It will measure how long each procedural step in a case is taking, and what the relevant data protection authorities are doing to progress the case: — noyb (@NOYBeu) Thing is, major cross-border GDPR cases have . Such as complaints against Big Adtech business models and behavioral advertising, or over adtech giant , to name two. There’s also a very long-running complaint that’s which still hasn’t landed as a final decision. While Apple, Twitter and TikTok all have open GDPR cases pending decisions — in some instances years after an enquiry was opened on paper. EU privacy campaigners and legal experts have argued that — on paper — the GDPR be protecting consumers from unwanted tracking and profile. Yet they’ve also pointed out these self-same rules are being systematically flouted by tech giants that think they’re big enough to ignore the rules. The upshot is EU citizens’ rights are steamrollered under the market muscle of major tech platforms and their associated ecosystems of operators — which critics contend extends to regulatory capture of ‘friendly’ DPAs. Especially in certain Member States where there’s a concentration of big tech firms (such as Ireland). Hence the call for closer monitoring of how (or even whether) Member State level authorities are doing the job of enforcing GDPR. Just today, for example, an concludes there’s “a The issue here is simple: It’s who’s watching the watchmen, argues Dr Johnny Ryan — a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) — the rights group which complained to the European ombudsman over the Commission’s monitoring of Ireland’s implementation of the GDPR. The Commission has treaty obligations to monitor Member States’ implementation of pan-EU laws but has often seemed reluctant to wade into the fray. And it’s this reluctance to crack an eyelid over plodding DPAs the ICCL challenged via the ombudsman back in November 2021. That complaint has now led to agreement from the Commission that it will improve how it’s keeping tabs on GDPR enforcement more generally (so not just keep specials tabs on Ireland). And led to what looks to be, per the above list, a solid basis for overseeing DPAs administration of their duties — and at least putting the EU’s executive in a position to identify inconsistencies or other investigatory shenanigans. (Whether the Commission will act robustly on reports that will be confidential is another matter; but at least it won’t be able to pretend problems don’t exist — and it also knows that its watchman, the ombudsman, is on its case with eyelids open.) In a today, the ICCL lauds the development — dubbing the Commission move a Europe-wide “overhaul” of the GDPR. “The European Commission’s new commitment should transform Europe’s data and digital enforcement,” argues Ryan in a statement. “Previously, big cases lay dormant for years. Now, we should see acceleration in investigation and enforcement, and it will be clear where the European Commission needs to take swift action against Member States that fail to apply the GDPR. This heralds the beginning of true enforcement of the GDPR, and of serious European enforcement against Big Tech, “I think it makes the GDPR real,” Ryan also told TechCrunch — adding that if the Commission’s changes also apply retrospectively, i.e. to the large existing slate of Big Tech cases, that’ll be “even better”. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) typically attracts the most criticism over its approach to GDPR. Not only for how much time it may take on an enquiry but whether it even actually investigates the issue being complained about. One oft complained about tactic is for the regulator to follow up a complaint (or complaints) by opening up what it refers to an “own volition enquiry” — which allows it to set the terms of reference. And, critics contend, to narrow the scope and/or entirely avoid the crux of a complaint. Creative reframing of enquiries is the ‘straw man’ of regulatory (in)action — deflecting and rerouting the claimed scrutiny in a way that can sidestep the core issue and ensure any damage to the target business is kept to a minimum. In short, it’s a mockery of genuine oversight. A recent example is a by the DPC — some 4.5 years after a series of complaints were raised over the legal basis Facebook-owner Meta claims to run behavioral advertising across a number of its services. The Irish regulator ended up being instructed by the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) to find a series of breaches of the GDPR — some of which it alone had declined to find in its preliminary decision on the complaint back in 2021– but in one of its final decisions, against WhatsApp, the DPC was accused by the complainants of not investigating a core element of its complaint: i.e. whether WhatsApp processes users’ metadata for ad targeting (and, if so, whether it has a valid legal basis for doing that). The DPC did not investigate that issue and also ignored a follow-on instruction by the EDPB to investigate it — claiming the Board was overreaching its jurisdiction. It also said it would challenge that component of the Board’s instruction in court. So instead of robustly investigating the legality of Meta’s ad-targeting — which had been raised by complaints dating all the way back to May 2018 — the DPC simply chose not to look — doing so at the end of a very long enquiry process where it also had the opportunity to investigate and didn’t. (And that’s just one instance of scores of complaints about its ’round-the-houses’ approach to ‘enforcing’ GDPR.) Over that same set of complaints, the Irish regulator was also — by not fining it the maximum amount possible for failing to have a valid legal basis for its core behavioral ads business. The days of regulatory dither and ‘creative inaction’ by EU Member States which may feel they have a political interest in not annoying Big Tech companies headquartered on their soil may — finally — be numbered if the Commission starts to do a proper (i.e. active) job of overseeing DPAs’ GDPR enforcement. The Commission should care about this. And not just because of its core duty to uphold EU treaties — but also because the GDPR is a cornerstone of a far wider and more ambitious digital regulatory program it’s been setting out in recent years; laying out wide-ranging rules for data governance and data reuse with the aim of accelerating regional innovation in artificial intelligence. So if the GDPR is shown to not be working that risks bringing the whole carefully constructed EU digital edifice crumbling down — and at a time when the Commission is taking on a major new oversight role for larger platforms and tech giants (via the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act). Which means the EU’s executive has plenty of very good reasons to d something about the problem of failed GDPR enforcement. Far better than any superficial PR wins it may want to accrue by claiming GDPR enforcement is working just fine. Still, some question marks over this reforming step remain. As well as the question of whether the Commission’s changes to how it will monitor GDPR enforcement will apply retrospectively (or not), there’s a more basic question of when exactly this new world order will be implemented? For now, that’s not clear. EU citizens have already spent years waiting to see action on GDPR complaints — having to watch tech giants continuing to enrich themselves at the expense of their rights in the meanwhile. So there really is no time to lose for the Commission to locate a higher gear here. However when we asked it when it will be implementing the changes — and whether they will be retrospective or not — a Commission spokeswoman declined comment. There is also a question over how exactly the Commission will define “large scale” in this context — and whether or not its reporting requirements will capture all cross-border GDPR cases, or just a subset. Furthermore, there could be some wiggle room for regulators to reach non-public agreements with tech giants, i.e. as another route to cynically closing GDPR cases down (and end any reporting requirements in the process). But given all the criticism over (and attention on) lax GDPR enforcement already, DPAs surely can’t hope to try their luck with a fresh repackaging of inaction — not unless they are actually extracting meaningful reforms in an agreed resolution with a company targeted for complaints. (And, well, if they’re achieving the latter no one would need to complain!) The EU’s ombudsman reached its on the ICCL complaint in December — after a year long enquiry. In an on whether the Commission collects sufficient information to monitor Ireland’s implementation of the GDPR, Dr Emily O’Reilly wrote that “EU citizens are entitled to expect that the European Commission collects sufficient information to monitor the application of that legislation”. She went on to welcome the fact she found the Commission reportedly receiving “bi-monthly” reports from the DPC on the handling of “big tech” cases but suggested there was room for more improvement — such as maintaining a table of “pre-determined fields” containing key details and key steps taken, as the Commission has now committed it will. If it were not to apply this “specific targeted monitoring measure”, the Ombudsman concluded she “would have had serious doubts as to the adequacy of the information that the European Commission relies on”. So, again, there’s not going to be any way back from this formalized monitoring process for the Commission — a standard is being set and required. In a separate GDPR enforcement related development the Commission mentioned in its work program last year, it has also said it will be presenting a proposal to improve cooperation between data protection authorities on cross-border GDPR cases — so further changes are afoot which may help tackle delays kicked up by disputes between DPAs who fail to agreed on how to enforce against tech giants. Again, there’s no concrete timings attached to this development — beyond a pledge from the Commission to come with a proposal this year. (But it would then need the other EU institutions to weigh in and agree any changes.) Never one to waste a PR opportunity, in a joint speech this week, the EU’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, and justice commissioner, Didier Reynders, pitched the move as the Commission wanting to “further strengthen the enforcement of the GDPR”, as they spun it — writing that, working together with the EDPB, they’ve “started looking into ways to further enhance cooperation in cross-border cases”, and “will present a proposal this year to further harmonise relevant procedures for DPAs”.

Groupon cuts another 500 employees in second round of layoffs

Ivan Mehta

Groupon has laid off another 500 employees in a bid to cut costs, the company said in last week. The e-commerce company — nearly 15% of its workforce then — in August 2022. The company said this new set of layoffs will be spread across the first two quarters of this year. “On January 25, 2023, the Board of Directors of Groupon, Inc. approved the second phase of the Company’s multi-phase restructuring plan, which is part of the Company’s comprehensive cost savings plan, announced in August 2022. This second phase is expected to include an overall reduction of approximately 500 positions globally, with the majority of these reductions expected to occur by the end of the second quarter of 2023,” Groupon said in a filing. The latest round of cuts will impact almost 20% of its employee base — the company had 2,500 employees in late December. Over the last week, several employees posted about the layoff on . The company’s Chief People Officer Kristen Barbor Groupon “had to part ways with several very talented teammates in NAM, across all levels of leadership.” TechCrunch sent several emails to Groupon before publishing to get more info about the layoffs, but the company didn’t respond at the time of writing. Groupon has had several challenges over the years, from increasing competition to dwindling userbase. According to , 22.1 million people purchased at least one offer on the site in Q1 2022 — a sharp fall from 53.9 million in Q1 20214. The company said in the SEC filing that it will save millions in annual costs because of the job cuts. “The payroll actions under the second phase of the 2022 Restructuring Plan are estimated to result in approximately $70.0 million in annualized cost savings. The Company also intends to implement other non-payroll actions outlined within the 2022 Cost Savings Plan, including reducing technology, software and certain professional services costs. These actions are expected to create an additional $30.0 million in annualized cost savings,” it noted. In the last 12 months, Groupon stock has dipped more than 72%.

Hotai Motor exposed thousands of iRent customer documents

Zack Whittaker

Taiwanese automotive conglomerate Hotai Motor exposed reams of personal customer data from its car rental and carshare unit, iRent, until a security researcher found the data online last week. Even then, it took the company a week — and the intervention of the Taiwanese government — to act. Hotai Motor is one of the largest financial holdings companies in Taiwan, and also the Taiwanese distributor for Toyota. iRent is a popular auto service app, bought by Hotai in 2022, which allows customers to pay hourly to rent cars that can be found either free-floating or at a depot. iRent has over 1.1 million registered cars and 580,000 iRent users. Security researcher discovered a database containing iRent customers’ full names, cell phone numbers and email addresses, home addresses, photos of their drivers’ licenses, and partially redacted payment card details, on a Hotai-owned cloud server that was inadvertently accessible from the internet. Because the database was not password-protected, anyone on the internet could access the iRent customer data just by knowing its IP address. Sen said the exposed database also contained millions of partial credit card numbers, and at least 100,000 customer identification documents, as well as selfies, signatures, and rental vehicle details. TechCrunch reviewed a portion of the exposed data and confirmed Sen’s findings. Internet records by Shodan, a search engine for exposed devices and databases, show the database was spilling data as far back as May 2022 and contained about 4.2 terabytes of data at the time it was secured. TechCrunch sent several emails this week to Hotai Motor with details of the exposed database, but we did not receive a reply. All the while, the database was updating with new customer data in real time. On January 28, TechCrunch subsequently contacted Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs, the government department that regulates and oversees the country’s internet and telecoms, for help in disclosing the security lapse to the company. In an emailed response, Taiwan’s minister for digital affairs told TechCrunch that the exposed database had been flagged with Taiwan’s national computer emergency response team, known as TWCERT/CC. Within an hour, the exposed iRent database became inaccessible. A short time later, Hotai Motor confirmed it had secured the database. “We had blocked the outside connection to this IP immediately.” Hotai said that it would inform customers whose data was exposed. It’s not clear if anyone else, other than Sen, found the database during the nine months it was spilling data. It’s not the first time a car rental company has compromised its own customers’ data. Back in 2017, Hertz accidentally leaked the personal data of 36,000 customers. France’s national data protection authority at the time because the data was found to be easily accessible online.

Stripe’s internal valuation gets cut to $63 billion

Natasha Mascarenhas

Stripe, a richly valued payments startup, has cut its internal valuation yet again, according to sources familiar with the manner. It is now valued, internally, at $63 billion. The cut, , puts Stripe’s internal per-share price at $24.71, down 40% since peaking. The 11% cut comes after an internal valuation , which valued the company at $74 billion. The valuation change was not triggered by a new funding round, but instead a new 409A price change; 409A valuations are set by third parties, which means that they are not tied to what a venture backer or other investor thinks. It’s an IRS-regulated process that measures the value of common stock against public market comps to help set a fair market value. Companies are supposed to do a 409A at least every 12 months or when a material event might lower its valuation. In Stripe’s case, alongside other late-stage companies, the 409A valuation reviews are now getting conducted on what looks like a quarterly basis. Material events in the background range from the evergreen, and ever-tense, macroeconomic climate; and let’s not forget that Stripe’s public market comps are certainly showing signs of trouble, with Shopify, Block and PayPal all down from their 52-week highs. Internal valuation cuts offer a different signal than an investor-led markdown. In fact, many founders and industry experts see a company receiving a 409A valuation that’s lower than its private, investor-led valuation as a good thing. , that’s because a low 409A valuation allows companies to grant their employees stock options at a lower price. Companies can also use the new, lower 409A valuation as a recruiting tool, luring prospective employees with cheap options and the promise of cashing out at a higher price when the company eventually exits. Still, in Stripe’s case, a second internal valuation cut may not necessarily be being used to attract new talent. In November 2022, , impacting around 1,120 of the fintech giant’s 8,000 workers. Back in August, TechCrunch learned that Stripe laid off employees behind TaxJar, In a memo addressing Stripe’s layoffs, CEO Patrick Collison shared some of his reasoning for the personnel pullback: “We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown.” Instead, the valuation cut could help with retention of existing employees, or even adjust expectations ahead of a wishful IPO.

Stripe eyes an exit over next 12 months

Mary Ann Azevedo

Fintech startup has set a 12-month deadline for itself to go public, either through a direct listing, or pursuing a transaction on the private market, such as a fundraising event and a tender offer, according to sources familiar with the matter. The news, as first reported by the , comes as a surprise considering the rather dry public market activity in the tech world. Stripe declined to comment on the record about the deadline or current revenue. The payments giant was founded in 2010, so the fact that it’s exploring avenues for exit is not entirely surprising. Most recently publicly valued at $95 billion, Stripe has not been immune to the global downturn, however. In November, it 14% of its staff, or around 1,120 people. And the company has slashed its internal valuation more than once over the past year. Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that Stripe had to $63 billion. That 11% cut came after an internal valuation prior, which valued the company at $74 billion. According to the Journal, Stripe has hired Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan to help it evaluate which course of action makes the most sense for the company. Founded by Irish brothers John and his brother Patrick Collison (the CEO), Stripe last raised venture capital in March of 2021 — that gave it that lofty $95 billion valuation. That financing included backing from two major insurance players. Allianz, via its Allianz X fund, and Axa participated in the round, along with Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Sequoia Capital and an investor from the founders’ home country, Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA). Stripe reportedly notched gross revenues of $12 billion and was EBITDA profitable in 2021, according to . The company’s products, in its own words, power payments for online and in-person retailers, subscriptions businesses, software platforms and marketplaces, “and everything in between.” Late-stage tech companies have largely avoided debuting onto the public market over the past year due to general volatility hammering stocks. Has Stripe missed its window to have gone public, or is it kicking off a trend to be followed by other behemoths in the space? Guess that’s what it’s trying to figure out.

What’s Stripe’s deal?

Mary Ann Azevedo

The big news in fintech this week revolved around payments giant . On January 26, my co-host and overall amazingly talented reporter Natasha Mascarenhas and I teamed up to write about how Stripe had for itself to go public, either through a direct listing or by pursuing a transaction on the private market, such as a fundraising event and a tender offer, according to sources familiar with the matter. The news, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal, came as a surprise considering the rather dry public market activity in the tech world. Later that day, it also came to light that Stripe had about raising more capital — at least $2 billion — at a valuation of $55 billion to $60 billion. This is especially newsworthy considering that Stripe last raised at a $95 billion valuation in March of 2021. Now, down rounds are hardly shocking in today’s environment. But for some reason, when you’re talking about a company that had achieved the highest-ever valuation for a privately held startup, it sits differently. Even more intriguing, The Wall Street Journal reported that Stripe would not use the money toward operating expenses but rather to cover a large annual tax bill associated with employee stock units. It is not clear if any discussions are ongoing, and Stripe declined to comment on the matter when asked. The fact that the company might raise money to pay off a tax bill raised eyebrows internally here at TechCrunch. That is not typical, and it certainly doesn’t seem like it’s an ideal way to spend investors’ cash. Ken Smythe, founder and CEO of Next Round Capital Partners — a capital markets and VC secondaries firm — validated our impressions. In a phone interview on January 27, he told me that it is “highly unusual for investors to be excited about a new round that is primarily going to pay unpaid taxes.” Instead, Smythe said, they generally get more pumped about funding expansions into new markets or products or other growth initiatives. But generally speaking, he believes that a fundraise is a more likely outcome for Stripe than an IPO, the company can pull it off. “It makes sense that Stripe would try to raise money privately at a $55 billion to $60 billion, a -30% drop from their $95 billion round in 2021,” he told me. “In contrast to public fintech stocks, which have suffered -65% to -80% drops over the last 12 to 18 months (PayPal, Square, Ayden), a private raise at $60 billion would be a big win. That’s still a very healthy multiple of 20x+ revenue multiple in an environment where many fintech names are trading in the single digits.” Going public, Smythe said, will likely remain challenging for most companies until late 2023 or 2024 — Stripe included. “It’s highly unlikely that an IPO for Stripe is anywhere near on the horizon, given the weakness of broader fintech gains and the unpredictability and volatility of Stripe’s revenues,” he added. Indeed, as a historically transactional-payments business, Stripe appears to be exploring ways to generate meaningful — and predictable — revenue. For example, Amazon announced on January 23 that it plans to “significantly expand” its use of Stripe. Reported : “Under the new agreement, Stripe will become a strategic for Amazon in the U.S., Europe and Canada, processing a significant portion of Amazon’s total payments volume. Stripe will be used across Amazon’s business units, including Prime, Audible, Kindle, Amazon Pay, Buy With Prime and more.” Also, I recently wrote about how new fintech startup Mayfair as part of its mission to offer businesses a higher yield on their cash. I know we’re all wondering what’s going on with the company as it appears to be struggling to keep its footing in an increasingly crowded fintech space. Will it raise or go public? What is Stripe really valued at now? I, for one, can’t wait to find out. SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty Images One-click checkout startup laid off more people last week. And according to , CEO Maju Kuruvilla “told an all-hands meeting … that ‘quite a few’ of Bolt’s recent moves, including partnerships, new products, and acquisitions, had not worked out.” Also according to The Information, about 50 employees were affected by the latest round of layoffs. Overall, the company has cut its headcount by more than half since last May. When asked, a company spokesperson told me only that Bolt is “focused on the long-term success” of its business and its customers. She added: “We truly believe we will power the next generation of growth for independent retailers. As we concentrate on strengthening our core products, we regretfully had to make the difficult decision to restructure our teams and part ways with some of our talented employees. We’re extremely grateful for everyone’s contributions.” TechCrunch reported on Bolt’s previous layoffs . Next Round Capital Partners’ Ken Smythe is not at all surprised by the latest layoff news, telling me that Bolt has struggled to get its core product “to achieve any real traction with customers.” “Revenue continues to be very weak — in the $30 million to $40 million range, and it was expected to be much higher at this point,” Smythe said. “A lot of customer acquisition they have talked about has not come to fruition. They overhired, raised $1B at an extreme valuation ($11B valuation at 300x+ multiple), which they used to hire but a product never materialized. Now they’re burning that cash. The reality is they haven’t delivered — hence the layoffs.” CEO Maju Kuruvilla / Bolt Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, U.S. Bank, PNC, Truist and Capital One are collaborating on a product that, according to The , “will allow shoppers to pay at merchants’ online checkout with a wallet that will be linked to their debit and credit cards.” Early Warning Services, which is owned by a consortium of the seven banks, will operate the yet-to-be-named digital wallet, which reports is expected to launch in the second half of the year. The wallet will operate separately from the EWS-run peer-to-peer payments platform , according to the Journal. The move seems to be an effort on the part of the banks to compete with the likes of PayPal and Apple. But is it too little too late? J.D. Power sent me a that showed that according to its data, “mobile wallet usage among Americans continues to grow in stores, but the percentage of customers that still say it is easier to use a physical credit/debit card than a mobile wallet is on the rise.” ICYMI: On January 19, Bloomberg reported that had “ ,” a move that impacted over 1,100 workers. Those employees were reportedly invited to apply for other roles in the bank. For those of us who suck at carrying cash, it’s good to know that digital tipping is a growing space. Christine Hall recently wrote about to grow its digital tipping platform. And last week, startup announced its with aimed at helping hospitality and service industry clients “accelerate the adoption of digital tipping.” Via email, eTip said: “With eTip, guests of hotels, cruise lines, casinos, and resorts can now tip staff by simply scanning or tapping a QR code, allowing hospitality and service employees to receive digital tips in real time.” released X1+, which it described as a “premium smart credit card” focused on travel. Features include complimentary lounge access for flight delays, enhanced travel rewards and “smart” baggage protection. CEO Deepak Rao also told me via email that X1 has raised $16 million in venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank, which will be used toward “growing new product lines and having cash reserve for growth in purchase volume and outstanding balances.” That financing follows the company’s Fintech-turned-HR outfit revealed that it in 2022. That’s up 417.5% from $57 million in ARR achieved at the end of 2021. The massive jump in ARR is impressive by normal standards but particularly so considering the challenging macroenvironment that startups everywhere faced last year. The company’s co-founder and CEO Alex Bouaziz also confirmed the company’s valuation of $12 billion, which we reported on in May at the time of Deel’s $50 million raise. The executive also told TechCrunch that Deel is profitable, having been EBITDA positive since September. Former Salesforce executive Craig Nile has to, in the company’s own words, “lead the company’s continuing push into enterprises.” , which describes itself as “the operating system for the new era of payments,” also announced it has landed construction software giant Procore, fintech Splitwise and expense management company TripActions as new customers. Ex-Plaid product marketing lead has launched , a payment processing platform that aims to provide e-commerce businesses “with a simple API to enable fast, secure, and cost-effective processing of bank payments that eliminates redundant entities in the payment processing flow, giving businesses significant cost savings and increasing profitability,” the company told me via email. More on this . Reports Manish Singh: “India’s central bank has directed to stop all outward remittance transactions in a blow to the bank and many of its fintech partners that offer services allowing users to invest in foreign services.” More . From : “Mexican buy now, pay later (BNPL) fintech has appointed Fausto Ibarra as its new chief product officer (CPO) to lead the firm’s long-term vision for its financial product offerings. Ibarra brings over two decades of experience to the role, most recently serving as Stripe’s head of product for Latin America. Prior to that, he also held various senior roles at tech giants including Meta, Google and Microsoft.” Via email, Kueski told me that the company recently hit its 10-year anniversary of financial service operations, with almost 10 million loans issued since its inception to 1.7 million users across its products, Kueski Pay and Kueski Cash, totaling more than $1.4 billion in loan transactions. and have in an effort “to enable brands to go headless.” Via email, the companies told me: “Brands will now be able to give PayPal’s 430 million active users the ability to check out wherever they are — beyond brands’ traditional e-commerce sites — using PayPal’s full line of payment options: PayPal, Venmo, PayPal Pay Later solutions, and credit and debit cards. This news creates the largest global cross-merchant network effect for e-commerce … Brands will now have control of the checkout experience and payment options they offer shoppers on third-party digital channels (such as social media, blogs, digital interfaces and QR codes). Currently, brands either have to take shoppers away from the content they’re engaging with to complete a purchase, or they’re limited to the payment options selected by the channel.” Some news out of Puerto Rico: — which claims to be the first bank in Puerto Rico granted a digital asset custody license by the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions (OCIF) — announced the launch of its cross-border, foreign currency payments facility. Via email, FV told me: “The new service will facilitate commerce, allowing US and international customers to make timely, seamless, and secure cross-border transactions, without the need for multiple currency conversions or exorbitant fees.” More . In this week’s episode of TechCrunch’s fabulous Found podcast, and were joined by , the co-founder and CEO of . Sebastian talks about what led him to found the startup and how it has navigated multiple market cycles since. He also dives into how Klarna has grown in different categories and which have been more successful than others. Plus, he talks about why he’s been so transparent about the company’s valuation and status amid 2022’s market turmoil. Check it out . And while we’re on the topic of Klarna . . . From : “ has taken a leaf out of Spotify’s playbook with the launch of Money Story, a personal summary of 2022 that provides consumers with useful insights into their spending habits. Money Story uses the animated ‘story’ format popularised by social media, to provide users with spending insights that they can convert into financial goals for 2023. The package visualises spending patterns and presents animated quiz questions that prompt users to reflect on where they think they spent their money in 2022.” Speaking of BNPL, in last week’s Exchange newsletter, the brilliant Anna Heim writes in a story cleverly titled ‘ ’: “Buy now, pay later is an alluring option for consumers, perhaps even more so in a recession. But with rising debt and inflation, perhaps the focus should be on companies that help protect borrowers from digging themselves into a hole.” Reports : “ , a Matchstick Ventures-backed digital accounting startup, announced it emerged from stealth to democratize the market for accounting services. Bean’s SaaS enabled marketplace matches a network of elite accountants (only 4% of applicants get access) with CFOs and companies. A 2022 graduate of TechStars LA, Matchstick Ventures, Far Out Ventures and Acadian Ventures invested $1.7 million joined by angel investors and founders Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert.” Restive Ventures released its 2023 State of Fintech . Inman : “Comparing himself to Henry Ford and Elon Musk, CEO Vishal Garg says he’s reconfigured ‘s assembly line to crank out mortgages in a single day.” In a , the company — which is rumored to still be struggling quite a bit — claims that its customers “will be able to go online, get pre-approved, lock their rate and get a mortgage Commitment Letter from Better, all within 24 hours.” has left his role as COO and CFO of real estate tech company and is now CEO of , a venture-backed ADU builder. According to his LinkedIn profile, Roberts will continue to strategically advise Orchard. According to , vacation rental management platform laid off 1,300 employees, or 17% of its workforce, last Tuesday, “a dramatic step aimed at stabilizing the faltering Portland company.” “We need to reduce our costs and continue to focus on becoming a profitable company,” new CEO Rob Greyber wrote in a note to staff Tuesday, which Vacasa then filed with federal securities regulators. . Interestingly, the company tells us that one of its backers is former Bank of America CEO and chairman Hugh McColl Jr. . Madrid-based The startup also announced the availability of its product. Investors include and , with participation from , as well as 45+ angel investors, including founders and executives from Ramp, Stripe, OpenAI, Plaid, and Square. Sandbar says it identifies risks and “provides more effective models to accurately identify suspicious behavior across payment products and services.” According to a spokesperson: “With stronger AML systems, Sandbar is helping to mitigate false positives and to address large-scale fraud, money laundering, sanctions, and illicit funding for human trafficking, wars, and crimes.” Whew, I’ll be honest, that was exhausting to put together (but fun!). Thank you for hanging in there with me ’til the end. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and stay tuned for lots more fintech news next week. xoxo, Mary Ann

Backed by Tiger Global, Mayfair emerges from stealth to offer businesses a higher yield on their cash

Mary Ann Azevedo

,” said Chopra, Factored Quality Mayfair

Netflix founder Reed Hastings steps down as co-CEO

Taylor Hatmaker

Netflix founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings announced Thursday that he would step down after more than two decades at the company. While news of his departure comes as a shock, Hastings noted that Netflix has planned its next era of leadership “for many years” in the which was shared on the company’s blog. In , who has long led content efforts at the company, as co-CEO alongside Hastings. At the time, Netflix characterized the change as formalizing the way that the company was already operating. Netflix will maintain the co-CEO structure in Hastings’ absence, promoting COO Greg Peters to the tandem role with Sarandos. “It was a baptism by fire, given COVID and recent challenges within our business,” Hastings said of Sarandos and Peters taking the reins. “But they’ve both managed incredibly well, ensuring Netflix continues to improve and developing a clear path to reaccelerate our revenue and earnings growth. So the board and I believe it’s the right time to complete my succession.” Hastings will stay involved with the company as executive chairman of the board, following a precedent shared by other prominent major tech company founders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. The news came shortly before Netflix reported its fourth-quarter earnings. The company beat expectations in Q4, adding 7.7 million subscribers — well over the 4.5 million it anticipated. The company brought in $7.85 billion during the final quarter of 2022, extending its recent trend of slowing revenue growth. Netflix credited the popularity of content it released in Q4 for the huge subscriber boost, including the “Addams Family” reboot “Wednesday,” the stand-alone “Knives Out” sequel “Glass Onion” and the royals documentary “Harry & Meghan.” Like most of tech, Netflix’s stock price has fallen well short of previous pandemic highs over the last year, but the company did recover from its midyear lows of $180 a share, trading at $315 before its Q4 report hit late Thursday. The company introduced an and Thursday’s report offered the first real glimpse into how that new product might shift the company’s fortunes now that streaming’s early . In the report, Netflix called the launch of its lower-cost ad-supported tier a success for Q4 but noted that it had “much more still to do” around the new product. At CES earlier this month, a Netflix ad executive noted the range of advertisers that the company , describing that as a boon for consumers who are eager to offset their monthly costs with a Hulu-like ad-supported subscription.  

DCG’s crypto-lending subsidiary Genesis files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Jacquelyn Melinek

Genesis Global Trading, a subsidiary of the crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group ( ), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) court late Thursday night. Genesis Global Holdco and two of its lending business subsidiaries, Genesis Global Capital and Genesis Asia Pacific, filed voluntary petitions under the bankruptcy code for SDNY, its press release . “Genesis’s other subsidiaries involved in the derivatives and spot trading and custody businesses and Genesis Global Trading are not included in the filing and continue client trading operations,” it added. Genesis stated it has over $150 million in cash, which it plans to use as liquidity to support its ongoing operations and facilitate its restructuring process. As part of its filing, Genesis plans to consider a “dual track process” for sale, capital raise or equitization transaction that would potentially allow the business to “emerge under new ownership,” the release said. The filing followed a series of attempts from Genesis to stay afloat. The firm struggled to raise capital for its lending unit, cut 30% of its staff in early January and took a financial hit from major catastrophic crypto events last year like the collapse of crypto hedge fund and the decline of . Genesis had a trading and lending relationship with both Three Arrows Capital and Alameda, FTX’s sister company, DCG’s CEO Barry Silbert shared in a from January 10. “While we have made significant progress refining our business plans to remedy liquidity issues caused by the recent extraordinary challenges in our industry, including the default of Three Arrows Capital and the bankruptcy of FTX, an in-court restructuring presents the most effective avenue through which to preserve assets and create the best possible outcome for all Genesis stakeholders,” Derar Islim, interim CEO of Genesis, said in a statement on Thursday. In mid-November 2022, Genesis halted withdrawals and new loan originations and later that month the firm warned of a possible bankruptcy filing as creditors looked for alternative options to prevent it. Around that time, a Genesis spokesperson “We have no plans to file bankruptcy imminently.” The spokespersson added, “Our goal is to resolve the current situation consensually without the need for any bankruptcy filing. Genesis continues to have constructive conversations with creditors.” Aside from Genesis, DCG is the parent company of digital currency asset manager Grayscale, media company CoinDesk, mining and staking company Foundry, digital asset exchange and wallet Luno and API-centric platform TradeBlock. Silbert said in the mid-January letter that Genesis is a “separate and distinct operating subsidiary” from DCG. On January 12, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Genesis and cryptocurrency exchange, wallet and custodian Gemini for the through Gemini Earn crypto asset lending program. The prosecutors said Genesis and Gemini raised billions of dollars’ worth of crypto assets from hundreds of thousands of investors. “In November 2022, Genesis announced that it would not allow its Gemini Earn investors to withdraw their crypto assets because Genesis lacked sufficient liquid assets to meet withdrawal requests following volatility in the crypto asset market,” the SEC release stated. “At the time, Genesis held approximately $900 million in investor assets from 340,000 Gemini Earn investors. Gemini terminated the Gemini Earn program earlier this month. As of today, the Gemini Earn retail investors have still not been able to withdraw their crypto assets.”

Elon Musk’s Twitter hit with Holocaust denial hate speech lawsuit in Germany

Natasha Lomas

Twitter owner and self-proclaimed “ ” Elon Musk is facing a legal challenge in Germany over how the platform handles antisemitic hate speech. The , which was filed yesterday in the Berlin regional court by HateAid, a group that campaigns against hate speech, and the European Union of Jewish Students Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany — which has strict laws prohibiting “[A]lthough Twitter prohibits antisemitic hostilities in its Rules and Policies, the platform leaves a lot of such content online. Even if the platform is alerted about it by users,” the litigants argue. “Current studies prove that 84% of posts containing antisemitic hate speech were not reviewed by social media platforms, as shown in a study by the . Which means that Twitter knows Jews are being publicly attacked on the platform every day and that antisemitism is becoming a normality in our society. And that the platform’s response is by no means adequate.” Since the Tesla CEO , he has drastically reduced Twitter’s headcount, including in core safety functions like content moderation — also slashing staff in regional offices around Europe, including in Germany. Plus he’s entirely reinstated scores of accounts that had previously been banned for breaking Twitter’s rules — creating conditions that look ideal for hate speech to flourish unchecked. Over Musk’s roughly three-month run as Twitter CEO, there have been anecdotal reports — and some — suggesting an increase in hate on the platform. Many former users have blamed a rise in hate and abuse for abandoning the platform since he took over. Notably the lawsuit is focused on examples of hate speech that have been posted to Twitter over the past three months since Musk was in charge, per , which reported on the litigation earlier. So it looks like an interesting legal test for Musk as the lawsuit applies an external lens to how the platform is enforcing antihate speech policies in an era of erratic (and drastic) operational reconfiguration under the new owner’s watch. While the billionaire libertarian generally tries to deflect criticism that he’s steering Twitter into toxic waters — via a mix of , fishing for boosterism, targeted attacks on critics and ongoing self-aggrandizement (of what he couches as a quasi-neo-enlightenment effort to be a handmaiden to the future of human civilization, by “freeing the bird,” as he couches his Twitter speech “reforms”) — he did admit to an early surge in hate on the platform back in November. At the time, he tweeted a chart to illustrate a claim that Twitter engineers had succeeded in reducing hate speech impressions to a third less than “pre-spike levels” (as he christened the sudden uptick in hate seen in the period directly after his takeover of Twitter). Although he also suggested that spike was only linked to a small number of accounts, rather than to any wider reduction in the efficacy of content moderation since he took over and set about ripping up the existing rulebook. Hate speech impressions down by 1/3 from pre-spike levels. Congrats to Twitter team! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) While Musk seems to enjoy cultivating an impression that he’s a “free speech absolutist,” the truth, as ever with the space cowboy, looks far less binary. For example, at Twitter he has taken a series of apparently unilateral and arbitrary decisions on whether to censor (or not) certain posts and/or accounts — including, initially, unbanning Kanye West (aka Ye) and then rebanning him for tweeting an image of a swastika (a Nazi emblem) with a Star of David (a symbol of Judaism). Or unbanning the account of former U.S. president Donald Trump, who was suspended after the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters — but steadfastly refusing to reinstate InfoWars’ hate preacher, Alex Jones, as Musk appears to object to Jones’ infamous conspiracy falsehood that children who died in the Sandy Hook school shooting were actors. Other decisions taken by Musk around Twitter content moderation appear to be driven purely by self-interest — such as banning an account that tweeted the location of his private jet (which he dubbed “assassination coordinates”). Last year he also suspended a number of journalists who reported on the episode as he argued their reporting had the same implications for his personal safety — before reversing course in the face of a storm of . Yet when not banning journalists, Musk has literally invited a number of hand-picked hacks in to sift through internal documents — and publish what he’s dubbed the — in what looks like a naked (but very tedious) bid to shape the narrative about how the platform’s former leadership handled content moderation and related issues, like inbound from state agencies making requests for tweet takedowns and so on; and throw fuel on conservative conspiracy theories that claim systematic shadowbanning and/or downranking of their content versus liberal views. (Whereas actual conducted by Twitter, pre-Musk, looking at its algorithmic amplification of political tweets found, on the contrary, its AIs actually give more uplift to right wing views, concluding: “In 6 out of 7 countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left.” But who cares about non-cherry-picked data right?) On abuse and hate, Musk is also quite capable of dishing it out himself on Twitter — using his tactic of megaphoning trolling and mockery of vulnerable groups (or “wokism”) to toss red meat to his right-wing base at the expense of people who are at a disproportionate risk of being abused, such as trans and nonbinary people whose pronouns he’s deliberately mocked. Musk has also stooped to tweeting and/or amplifying that have led to abusive pile-ons by his followers — such as the one that forced Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to flee his own home. So hypocrisy about personal safety risks? Very much. Even a casual observer of Musk-Twitter would surely conclude there’s a lack of consistency to the Chief Twit’s decision-making — which, if this arbitrariness filters through into patchy and partial enforcement of platform policies, spells bad news for the trust and safety of Twitter users (and RIP for any concept of “conversational health” on the platform). Whether Musk’s inconsistencies will also lead to a court order in Germany requiring Twitter to take down illegal hate speech, via this HateAid-EUJS lawsuit, remains to be seen. “Twitter’s actions are based solely on its own, intransparent rules, relying on the fact that users have no chance to appeal — for example, when it comes to the non-deletion of incitements to hatred,” argues Josephine Ballon, head of legal for HateAid, in a statement. “There has been no single case where a social network was prosecuted for this by the authorities. This is why civil society has to get involved, looking for ways to demand the removal of such content. We as an NGO act as representative for the affected communities which are subject to hostility and incitements of hatred on a daily basis. Thus we can build pressure on the platforms in the long term.” Interestingly, it does not appear that the lawsuit is being brought under Germany’s long-standing hate speech takedown law — aka — which, at least on paper, gives regulators the power to sanction platforms up to tens of millions of dollars if they fail to swiftly remove illegal content that’s reported to them. But, as Ballon notes, there have not been any NetzDG prosecutions related to content takedown breaches (although messaging app Telegram was fined a small amount for breaches related to not having proper reporting channels or legal representation in place). One local lawyer we spoke to, who is not directly involved in the HateAid-EUJS case, suggested there’s been something of a tacit arrangement between federal authorities and the social media firm that Germany won’t enforce NetzDG on the content moderation issue — also with an eye on incoming EU digital regulation as the Digital Services Act, which starts to apply later this year for larger platforms, harmonizes governance and content reporting rules across the bloc under a single, pan-EU framework that should replace the older German hate speech regulation regime. For their part, the litigants in this hate speech case against Twitter say they want to get legal clarity on whether individuals (and advocacy groups) can sue in court for the removal of “punishable, antisemitic and inciting content” — such as Holocaust denial — even when they are not personally insulted or threatened by the content. In an FAQ on a detailing their arguments, they explain [emphasis theirs]: Whether we can demand this is to be decided by the court. To date it is unclear to what extent Twitter users, on the basis of Twitter’s Rules and Policies, are entitled to demand the deletion of such content in cases where they are not themselves affected. — to remove antisemitic posts and make sure that Jews can feel safe on the platform. If they are successful, they say their hope is it will become easier for users to assert their rights to the deletion of illegal content “ Twitter was contacted for a response to the lawsuit — but since Musk took over the platform has abandoned having a routine external comms function and has yet to respond to any of TechCrunch’s requests for comment. (But we still asked.) It’s worth noting that, pre-Musk, Twitter wasn’t earning overwhelming plaudits for success in tackling illegal hate speech either. Back in November, the most recent — a voluntary agreement that Twitter and a number of other social media platforms have been signed up to for years — found that, prior to Musk’s takeover, Twitter was performing relatively poorly versus other signatories when it came to quickly responding to reports of illegal hate speech, with the Commission reporting that it removed just 45.4% of such content within 24 hours (versus an aggregate removal rate of 63.6%). While, over the monitored period of March 28 to May 13, Twitter received the second largest number of reports of illegal hate speech (Facebook got the most) — reporting just under 1,100 reports. So it appeared to be both hosting a relatively large amount of illegal hate speech (versus peer platforms) and trailing its rivals in how quickly it deleted toxic stuff. So it will certainly be interesting to see the state of those metrics when (or if) Musk-owned Twitter reports a fresh batch of data to the Commission later this year.

Meta dodged a €4BN privacy fine over unlawful ads, argues GDPR complainant

Natasha Lomas

A announced earlier this month in the European Union — for running behavioral ads on Facebook and Instagram in the region without a valid legal basis — was several billion dollars smaller than it should have been, and orders of magnitude too tiny to be a deterrent for others going big on breaking the bloc’s privacy laws, according to the not-for-profit which filed the original complaint over Facebook’s ‘forced consent’ back in . This week the privacy rights group, , has to the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) to raise fresh hell — arguing that the Irish regulator which issued the final decision on its complaint against Meta’s ads failed to follow the Board’s instructions to investigate the financial benefits it accrued off of the unlawful data processing. It argues the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has failed to implement the EDPB’s from December — which instructed the regulator to both find the legal basis Meta had claimed for running behavioral ads unlawful significantly increase the size of the fine the DPC had proposed in its earlier . In the final decision which the DPC issued earlier this month, the DPC declined to act on the Board’s direction to ascertain an estimate of the financial benefit Meta gained from targeting EU users with behavioral ads in breach of EU data protection law. And while the Irish regulator did top-up the level of fine on Meta to €390 million — versus the €28 million to €36 million it had originally proposed for transparency failures — the revised fine neither reflects the seriousness of the systematic breach of European users’ fundamental rights, per noyb — nor does it implement the Board’s requirement that the DPC determine the unlawful financial benefits accrued by Meta from running ads that break EU privacy law. noyb notes that, per EDPB guidelines on calculation of fines (and the text of the final decision put out by the DPC incorporating the Board’s binding decisions), the Irish regulator needed to ensure any fines “counterbalanc[e] the gains from the infringement” and also “impose a fine that exceeds that [unlawfully obtained] amount”. “ noyb’s letter lays out how it has estimated the total revenue Meta generated, over the 4.5+ year infringement period, on users in the European Economic Area (EEA) — a figure it puts at circa €72.5 billion. It says it’s arrived at this estimate by looking at the publicly listed company’s financial reports (and adjusting revenue figures to only reflect users in the EEA, not the European continent as a whole) — querying why the DPC’s far more numerous staff couldn’t have done the same. “While ‘behavioural advertisement’ does not make up all the revenue of Meta’s overall advertising, it is clear that in any realistic scenario, the revenue from ‘behavioural advertisement’ in the EU overshot the maximum [possible, under GDPR] fine of €4.36BN,” noyb also argues. In a statement, its honorary chairman, Max Schrems, adds: “By not even checking publicly available information, the DPC gifted €3.97BN to Meta.” “It took us an hour and a spread sheet to make the calculation,” he went on. “I am sure the Irish taxpayers would not mind having that extra cash, if a DPC employee would have just opened a search engine and done some research. noyb’s letter also questions why the DPC apparently failed to use its statutory powers under the regulation to ask the data controller for any information required for the performance of its tasks — which could have provided it with a precise route to estimate how wealthy Meta got by unlawfully processing Europeans’ data. “Given that SAs [supervisory authorities] can only fine based on the revenue of the last year, and the Irish DPC has taken more than 4.5 years to issue a final decision, Meta has made substantial revenue from violating the law, even if the maximum fine of 4% of the annual turnover is applied,” noyb goes on. “The estimated revenue from advertisements in the EEA of €72,53BN, would only be reduced to €68,17BN if the full 4% would be applied. This clearly makes even a maximum fine of 4% not even remotely ‘effective, proportionate and dissuasive’ in comparison to the unlawful revenue made by Meta IE [Ireland]. “Nevertheless the EDPB and the DPC are bound by Articles 83(1), (2)(k) and (5) GDPR at the same time, meaning that the maximum fine of 4% may not be overstepped but must also be used fully to comply with the conflicting requirements of the GDPR.” So — tl;dr — even the maximum possible financial penalty under GDPR would not have been remotely dissuasive to Meta in financial terms — given how much money it was minting by trampling all over European users’ privacy. Yet, the kicker is, noyb’s letter presents a neatly calculated and — frankly — damning assessment of high profile enforcement flaws in the GDPR. Flaws that enable Big Tech to play the system by forum shopping for ‘friendly’ regulators who can find endless ways to chew the cud around complaints and spin claims of protocol and procedure into a full blown dance of dalliance and delay, and whose convenient decisions can, at the last, be relied upon to help minimize any damage — in a cynical mockery of due process that’s turned the EU’s flagship data protection framework into a paper tiger where Big Tech’s users’ rights are concerned. noyb is calling on the EDPB to take “immediate action” against the DPC — to ensure its binding decision “is fully implemented in [or, well, by] Ireland”. “Given the clear evidence that Meta IE [Ireland] has profited from the violation of Article 6(1) GDPR in vast excess of the maximum fine of 4% under Article 83(5) GDPR and the Irish DPC’s clear breach of the binding decision in this respect, we urge the EDPB and its members to take immediate action against the Irish DPC to ensure that the EDPB decision is fully implemented in Ireland,” it urges. However this (meta – ha!) complaint by noyb — about the outcome of its 2018 complaint about Meta’s ads — most likely lands at the end of the road as far as regulators are concerned. Next stop: ? noyb’s call joins a pile of complaints (and legal actions) targeting the Irish regulator’s failure to rigorously enforce the GDPR against The DPC was contacted for comment on noyb’s complaint to the EDPB — but it declined to offer a response. We also reached out to the EDPB. A spokeswoman for the Board told us it “takes note” of noyb’s letter — but declined further comment at this time. It remains to be seen what action — if any — the steering body will take. Its powers are limited in this context since its competence to intervene in the GDPR enforcement process relates to any objections raised to a lead supervisor’s draft decision (as happened in the Meta ads case). After a final decision is issued the Board does not carry out a full re-evaluation of a case. So the chance of it being able to do much more here looks slim. EU law enshrines the independence of Member States’ data protection regulators so the Board essentially has to work with whatever it’s given in a draft decision (and/or any objections raised by other DPAs). Which is why the DPC also sees mileage in challenging the portion of the Board’s binding decision that instructed it to further investigate Meta’s data processing — as it argues that’s jurisdictional overreach. This structure effectively means a lead DPA can do considerable work to shape GDPR outcomes that impact users all over the bloc — by, for starters, minimizing what they investigate and then, even if they do open a probe, by narrowly scoping these enquiries and limiting what they factor into their preliminary decisions. In the case of Meta, the DPC did not provide any data on the estimated financial benefit it amassed from its unlawful behavioral ads. Which — once again — looks terribly convenient for the tech giant. While there’s not much Internet users can do about such a gaping enforcement gap — aside from hoping litigation funders step in and spin up more class-action style lawsuits to sue for damages on these major breaches — EU lawmakers themselves should be very concerned. Concerned that a flagship piece of the EU’s digital rulebook — one that’s now also a key component at the heart of an expanding tapestry of regulations the bloc has been building up in recent years around , to try to foster trust and get more data flowing in the innovation — is proving to be such a jelly in the face of systematic law breaking. Rules that can’t protect or correct aren’t going to impress anyone over the long run. And that means the paper tiger may yet have some teeth: If the GDPR enforcement failures keep stacking up, the sour taste that leaves for EU citizens tired of watching their rights trampled might risk toppling people’s trust in the whole carefully constructed ‘European project’.

Tesla delivers 405,278 vehicles in Q4, missing Wall Street expectations

Rebecca Bellan

Tesla Monday that 405,278 vehicles were delivered in the fourth quarter of 2022. While the automaker hit a record number of deliveries, it came in shy of Wall Street’s expectations of around 420,000 to 425,000 units delivered. The electric vehicle company also reported total production of 439,701 vehicles in the fourth quarter. This brings Tesla’s total annual deliveries to 1.31 million and total production in 2022 to 1.37 million. While Tesla had an impressive 40% growth in deliveries, the company also missed its own guidance for the year, which in production and deliveries for the year. The automaker needed to sell 495,760 vehicles in Q4 to have achieved that guidance. Tesla’s Q4 deliveries are up from the sold in the third quarter. The automaker’s last-minute discounts might have given Tesla a boost toward the end of the quarter. Partially in response to the Inflation Reduction Act’s EV tax credits, which would provide Tesla buyers with rebates of up to $7,500, Tesla slashed and off the price of Model 3 and Model Ys delivered in the U.S. in December. Tesla also provided discounts in Mexico and China last quarter, and it’s not yet clear how those drops in prices would have affected the automaker’s margins. Tesla’s production and delivery report does not disclose numbers by region, but Tesla has said production at its two new factories, Austin and Berlin, have ramped in recent months. The company has also pumped up production at its Fremont factory and in Shanghai, which bounced back from production delays due to COVID-19 control measures. that the now lack of COVID-19 control measures in China will also affect Tesla sales in the event of widespread illness. Many are also worried about CEO Elon Musk’s antics on and distraction by his overhaul of Twitter. The company’s share price, which has sunk nearly 54% over the last six months, plummeted another 12.46% to $107.83 Tuesday, signaling that even record deliveries won’t make up for Tesla’s current investor woes. In the past, Tesla’s release of delivery numbers has caused jumps in the automaker’s shares.

Musk stands to lose billions in trial over ‘funding secured’ tweet

Rebecca Bellan

The question of whether Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a fraud or is just too careless with his words took center stage in a San Francisco court room Wednesday. Under the microscope was Musk’s notorious 2018 tweet that stated funding was “secured” to take Tesla private at a potential value of  . In a class-action lawsuit that’s already two days underway, Tesla shareholders who traded the company’s stock in the days after Musk’s tweet are suing the executive for billions of dollars in damages. The outcome of the trial will hinge on the language and intent of that tweet. The plaintiffs argue it led ordinary investors to lose money, and Musk’s lawyers argue the tweet was simultaneously true (he really intend to take Tesla private) and a slip of the hand (“funding secured” was the wrong word choice). The jury will need to decide if: 1) Musk knowingly tweeted false information to affect Tesla’s share price; 2) The tweets artificially inflated Tesla’s share price by playing up the status of funding for the deal; and 3) If so, by how much. Glen Littleton, a Tesla investor and lead plaintiff on the case, said Wednesday he took Musk at his word and, fearing financial ruin, ended up liquidating somewhere between 90% to 95% of his positions. “I couldn’t afford to stay in,” Littleton told jurors. His lawyers argued he lost $3.5 million as a result. Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) If Musk loses the case, he’ll likely be forced to part with a good chunk of money. However, if the jury finds that Musk knowingly tweeted fraudulent information, the CEO’s already shaky reputation could be at risk. Shareholders have lost confidence in the star executive ever since he bought Twitter and proceeded to scream even more loudly into the platform’s void. Some investors even say the , which include to pay for Twitter business, might be part of the reason the company’s stock price dropped 65% in 2022. Musk’s lawyers seem to have cottoned on to this reputational damage. They bid to have the trial transferred to Texas, which has been Tesla’s headquarters since 2021, arguing that Musk couldn’t get a fair trial in San Francisco due to the jury pool’s probable biases against Musk after the executive took over Twitter and more than 3,750 employees. U.S. District Court Judge Edward Chen rejected the bid, siding with the shareholder’s lawyers who basically said Musk made his bed and can now lie in it. In the 10-day period after the tweet (August 7 to 17), Tesla’s share price shifted about $14 billion. A few days later, Musk backpedaled somewhat in a that explained why he wanted to take Tesla private. In the post, Musk said that based on several meetings with the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund, he truly believed a deal was secured and all that was needed was to get the process moving — hence the ill-fated tweet. Turns out funding was not secured, and in the days following the tweet, the Saudis backed out. Musk then accused the governor of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund of throwing him “under the bus.” Meanwhile, that September, the Saudi fund did to launch the Air. The whole debacle resulted in . Musk and Tesla settled that case without admitting wrongdoing, and they were fined a collective $40 million. Musk was forced to step down as chair of Tesla’s board, and the executive agreed to be less hasty with any Tesla-related tweets that could affect the public markets. (Although ) Last April, Judge Chen ruled that Musk’s tweets were “false and misleading” and that Musk “recklessly made the statements with knowledge as to their falsity.” That could be good news for the plaintiffs as they try to convince the jury whether the statements affected Tesla’s share price, but this is a jury trial and therefore the outcome isn’t solely dependent on Chen. The jury will also have to determine if they think Musk acted knowingly and the amount of any damages. Musk’s lawyers argued Wednesday that the executive sincerely intended to take Tesla private and that he made a “split-second decision” to tweet that he was considering doing so. He tweeted “funding secured” because he’d just read a news article revealing that Saudi Arabia was investing heavily in the company. “He decided in that rushed moment, imperfect or not, that disclosure was a better course,” Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, told jurors in his opening argument in San Francisco federal court. “He didn’t want there to be a leak.” Spiro said the messages on Twitter didn’t affect the market, and in fact, when details of the plan were revealed in a meeting following the tweet, Tesla’s stock increased. Nicholas Porritt, the lawyer representing Tesla’s shareholders, said the tweet and other messages from Musk and Tesla were “lies” that caused ordinary investors to lose millions of dollars.

Spotify’s third-party billing option has now reached over 140 global markets

Sarah Perez

In its fourth-quarter earnings, Spotify announced today its User Choice Billing program has now expanded to more than 140 markets worldwide, allowing the streaming music service to reduce the commissions it pays to Google over Play Store purchases associated with its Android app. The User Choice Billing pilot program gives Android users the option to pay an app developer directly. It had been last spring, with Spotify planned as an initial tester. But neither company had shared an update on the program’s progress until this past November when they announced Spotify would then begin to roll out its tests in select markets. At the time, Spotify said the program would become available in only a few markets to start and would roll later out to others in the “coming weeks.” It did not share which markets would see the third-party billing option or when it expected the choice to reach its global Android app user base. Today, the company confirmed it’s made solid progress on the program’s deployment. As part of its announcement, where the company also with 205 million paid subscribers, it that its November deployment of User Choice Billing had then become available to users in “10+ markets.” Over the past several months, Spotify said it’s expanded the option to now more than 140 markets around the world. However, Spotify has not yet published a detailed list of countries where the program is offered but told TechCrunch it anticipates implementing the option in “every market” where it offers Spotify Premium today and where Google Play Billing is available. Currently, Spotify Premium subscribers can be found , according to the company’s website. Spotify It’s not surprising that Google picked Spotify as a debut tester of its new billing offering, given the streaming music service has long been a fierce app store critic, sharing its complaints over the required commissions with and If an outspoken voice like Spotify could be placated by a reduced commission on in-app purchases, Google hopes it could mitigate concerns over its alleged abuses of market power now being investigated. In March, Google introduced the third-party billing option to Android app developers, as looming threats of antitrust litigation and increased regulation grew nearer. Already, the tech giant had been forced to support , with the passing of a new law, and , including Fortnite’s Epic Games, over antitrust issues. However, the User Choice Billing option didn’t offer much in the way of savings for app developers, as Google only the required commissions on app purchases and in-app payments by 4%. This past November, Google said it was to new markets, including the U.S., Brazil and South Africa, and invited other developers to participate. Dating app Bumble then joined Spotify as one of the early adopters. Developers who participate in the program have to follow Google sets, which detail how to implement the feature in their apps. These guidelines currently require developers to display an information screen and a separate billing choice screen. The information screen only has to be shown to each user the first time they initiate a purchase, but the billing choice screen must be shown before every purchase. While the general terms offer a on the commissions paid to Google when third-party billing is used, Spotify wouldn’t comment on its confidential deal with Google, only noting it meets the company’s “standards of fairness.” It’s unclear if the streamer has been offered more favorable terms as an early tester. Spotify’s agreement with Google could potentially provide a boost in subscription revenues at a time when the streamer is facing an increased push from investors to increase its margins and make the service profitable. As Spotify chased investments in areas like adtech, podcasts, audiobooks and more over prior years, its losses widened last year, leading its market cap to decline .  In a note published to Spotify’s website this month, as the company The company’s solid progress on user growth in the fourth quarter saw its earlier this morning. In addition to its 205 million paid subscribers, up 14% year-over-year, it also announced total users were up 20% year-over-year to 489 million. Revenue came in at €3.17 billion, just , but Spotify’s loss per share was €1.40 ($1.52), larger than the expected loss of €1.27.

Sentra raises $30M to provide a security layer for data in the cloud

Kyle Wiggers

The move to the cloud, accelerated by the pandemic, continues unabated. By 2025, Gartner that more than 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021. The motivation is convenience partly — cloud platforms can be accessed from anywhere, ideal for the remote or hybrid workforce. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. The cloud also widens exposure to the threat of data breaches. There’s real anxiety. to a recent Statista survey, data loss and leakage in the public cloud are among companies’ top concerns where it concerns their tech stack. Meanwhile, a whopping 93% of organizations are about human error causing the accidental exposure of their public cloud data. One of the startups attempting to tackle the cloud’s security challenges is , which finds data in the cloud, classifies it according to sensitivity and then offers remediation plans for data security teams. Underlining the enthusiasm for cloud security, Sentra today closed a $30 million Series A round led by Standard Investments with participation from Munich Re Ventures, Moore Strategic Ventures, Xerox Ventures, INT3, Bessemer Venture Partners and Zeev Ventures — bringing its total raised to $53 million. CEO and co-founder Yoav Regev says that the new cash will be put toward product development and expanding Sentra’s footprint beyond the U.S., where it’s headquartered. “The promises of flexibility make the cloud one of the most amazing technological advancements in recent memory. However, this flexibility means that organizations can easily lose control and visibility of their most sensitive information,” Regev told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Our solution solves this problem by ensuring that organizations prioritize the protection of this sensitive information while keeping up with business demand and the speed of data in the cloud.” After connecting to an organization’s cloud environments, Sentra’s software attempts to find all sensitive data — including personally identifiable information and passwords — and understand who has access to it and how it’s being used. Leveraging algorithms as well as contextual data like access patterns and metadata, Sentra automatically detects when data’s duplicated, changed or moved across regions or networks and kicks off remediation steps if necessary. Security teams get data access graphs that show who has access to what data and how, exactly, that access was granted. By default, Sentra also attempts to label data assets containing proprietary data, including customer data, HR data and intellectual property. When it detects assets with a weak security posture (e.g. misconfigurations and compliance violations), Sentra can optionally send alerts or apply built-in data security policies. “When an organization doesn’t know where its sensitive data is kept and how well that data is protected, it can be easy to imagine any scenario in which the system is breached. As a result, they try to protect any and all data, without paying attention to the level of importance,” Regev said. “ Sentra — which was co-founded by Regev, Asaf Kochan, Ron Reiter and Yair Cohen, all former members of the Israel Defense Forces’ elite intelligence unit — mainly targets cloud-native, medium- to large-sized organizations that have a large amount of data, ranging in the multiple petabytes. Regev didn’t say how many customers the company currently has, nor volunteer revenue figures. But he said that Sentra plans to expand its 40-person workforce by “a couple dozen” by the end of the year, indicating some optimism around growth. Sentra’s challenge will be competing with startups that offer a similar array of services. , like Sentra, provides a layer of data protection wherever the data lives, including governance and access controls. There’s also , which recently raised $37 million for its platform that assesses cloud data and then provides real-time monitoring, and , which monitors for data leakages in the cloud and attempts to fix them. But Regev isn’t worried. At least not at present. “Since our inception, we have prioritized operational efficiency and have remained focused on growing in a healthy, methodical way that allows us to meet the needs of current customers, as well as our prospects,” Regev said. “Meanwhile, the ever-accelerating shift of data centers to the cloud means that solutions like ours will continue to be in high demand even in the face of an economic downturn or slowdown in tech. Even in times like these, protecting organizational data will remain a top priority for business leaders and their customers.”

Check Twitter in paradise with Iridium’s new ‘executive’ satellite hotspot

Brian Heater

Everyone’s talking about unplugging these days — climbing a mountain, trekking through the forest, finding your way to a truly secluded beach. Central to that concept is turning off notifications, uninstalling work apps or even — if you’re feeling especially brave — leaving the phone at home for a week or two. But is paradise truly paradise if you can’t check your work email the entire time? Who’s to say, really? Iridium — the satellite service that with Qualcomm for SOS messaging on Android — today announced the Go Exec, a new mobile hotspot designed to bring the internet with you basically anywhere. There are, of course, plenty of folks who could benefit from such always-on connectivity — first responders, sailors and pilots come to mind — but as the name suggests, the company is also appealing to the real heroes: corporate executives. I suppose there’s an argument that some people at the head of organizations simply can’t afford to unplug for a full week — at the very least, it’s useful to have some connection to the outside world, in case of emergency. The system is an update to 2014’s Iridium Go. It’s more compact and lighter, while providing faster speeds than its predecessor, with up to 22 Kbps up and 88 Kbps second down. Not blazing fast speeds here by any means, but we’re talking about bringing internet access to places where there is none. The system can stream up to two voice calls at once, and has a mic and speaker built-in to double as a speakerphone. “Compact” is also a bit relative for this space. The device measures 8 x 8 x 1 inches and weighs 4.6 pounds. On second thought, it might be a bit much to take up that mountain with you. “Cheaper,” too, is relative. Currently resellers are offering the product at $1,500-$2,000. The on-board battery offers up to six hours of voice/data usage or 24 hours of standby time. Iridium says the following apps “pair well” with the device: WhatsApp, Viber, Line, Signal, Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Twitter, Opera, Venmo and Google Home. Iridium also has a custom email client designed for use with the product, along with an API for app developers. In addition, Iridium is offering an external antenna specifically designed for remote locales.

TrueBiz aims to help financial services providers onboard business customers faster, avoid fraud

Mary Ann Azevedo

TrueBiz co-founders Danny Hakimian (l) and Max Morlocke (r).  TrueBiz

Put a (smart) ring on it: Movano on why its health wearable will put women first

Natasha Lomas

heads at CES with an ouroboros-esque smart ring designed for women. In the crowded field of fitness wearables, where the mainstream heavy hitter of the Apple Watch heads up a very long tail of typically less pricey and/or more specialist activity tracking bracelets and bands all keen to claim their own patch of data-generating skin, it’s no small irony that differentiation at this point in the market’s run means designing a product to ‘target’ around half the population — as my colleague, TC’s hardware editor Brian Heater, dryly observed of Movano’s pitch for a smart ring called “Evie” . But what does a wearable made for women actually mean in terms of utility and design? TechCrunch talked to Movano Health’s CEO and director, John Mastrototaro, to get the inside track on the forthcoming smart ring and delve into its wider roadmap as it works on building a medical devices company whose starting point is simply putting women first. Movano is kicking things off, pre-commercial launch, by applying for FDA clearances for two of the metrics the smart ring will track out of the box: Heart rate, and SPO2 (aka blood oxygen level) — and it says it wants the ring to launch with those two regulatory check-marks in place — but with plenty more on the ‘to-do’ slate. Including — down the line — a goal of adding (non-invasive) blood glucose monitoring into the mix. (Its novel sensing tech remains at a prototype stage for now but Mastrototaro flashed us a look at an integrated RF chip and a wrist-mounted prototype it’s currently testing for this purpose.) As regards the first iteration of the ‘smart ring for women’ — which will track over a dozen metrics and offer female-focused features like menstrual cycle and mood tracking and support for menopausal symptoms, as well as more regular wearable stuff like activity tracking — Mastrototaro said he’s hoping they’ll be able to launch it in the U.S. around the middle of this year. The target customers will be women in their 30s and up. While the ring’s price-point will be “well under” $300 (and — refreshingly — there’s no subscription). And that pricing already looks competitive compared to the — which is currently the main rival for finger-based wearables in the U.S. Movano’s also made some other smart choices to go with a paired down price-tag — including an open design that won’t pinch fingers if they swell a bit; a portable charging case to keep the ring safe and juiced up on the go; and the big strategic decision to apply for regulatory clearances which means the ring can be marketed (differentiated) as a medical device where most others can’t. Which is certainly one way to stand out in a noisy consumer crowd. Mastrototaro brings a long career in medical device development already, having worked at a number of companies doing clinical research and R&D on sensing technologies — including at Medtronic, where he led the team that developed the first continuous glucose monitor (CGM) sensor for diabetes management. That’s notable because a lot of startups have been tapping up CGM tech for commercialization in recent years — with the aim of repurposing a medical grade technology for a more general consumer fitness and/or wellness/health use-case. (Including, in the case of India’s Ultrahuman, to enhance its ability to ‘decode’ the user’s metabolic health.) Movano is approaching the same goal — of encouraging more people to watch their blood sugar to help them optimize lifestyle choices and improve their overall health outcomes — but it’s planning to layer that (future) functionality atop a medical devices company foundation, rather than coming at it from a pure ‘wellness’ or ‘fitness’ consumer tech pitch as most of these startups are. Which may lend more credibility to any push it makes here. Additionally, as noted above, it wants to offer a major twist on the technology side too, as it’s working on developing a non-invasive radio frequency sensor for tracking blood glucose changes. If it can pull that off it could skate right past the CGM niche and have a shot at opening up a powerful capability to a general consumer who otherwise wouldn’t bother with this kind of health tracking — exactly because it requires sticking sensing filaments (or needles) into actual flesh. Whereas if Movano’s smart hardware can give you a peek at blood sugar highs and lows via (painless) high frequency radio that implies potential for major, transformative health effects at scale. (Notably to be working on adding non-invasive blood glucose tracking to the Apple Watch, although it’s yet to bring such a tech to market for its general consumer. But the attention on such a feature underscores how much this concept is prized.) As well as FDA-cleared metrics (assuming Movano does indeed obtain these clearances) lending credibility to hardware that will — in the first instance — be marketed to highly discerning consumers (i.e. women), the company dressing itself as a medical device maker is smart positioning as it sets the business up to be able to sell hardware into b2b markets too. Per Mastrototaro, the goal here is to get to a position where, for example, its smart ring could be reimbursable by insurance payers as a preventative health device — so the aim from the start is to scale beyond a direct-to-consumer hardware business. With demand for healthcare systems continuing to increase, both in the U.S. and beyond, it looks like another smart bet. Certainly it’s not a stretch to imagine overstretched health services may well (also) end up being keen on consumer-friendly medical grade devices — devices they can offer their patients for home monitoring, on so-called ‘virtual wards’, as a cheaper way to free up hospital beds for people who need closer care. This  is what Movano is positioning its wearable business for. And, before you ask, it does have men on its roadmap. Mastrototaro says the end-game is to be — simply — a maker of devices for everyone. But its first task, as it eyes the myriad players ranged on the wearables field — some high gloss, others rather more ragtag — is to find a way to elbow in. And what better way to do that than remember the roughly half of the population most device makers consider a mere afterthought. It ain’t rocket science guys. It’s a great question. I mean, first off, our goal as a company is to empower and inspire women to take more active control of their health and to live a happier, healthier, more well balanced life. And the way we’re going to go about doing that is by monitoring a comprehensive set of health metrics: Heart rate, heart rate variability, SPO2, respiration rate, temperature, steps, activity, calories, burned, sleep, sleep stages, and of course, menstrual cycle tracking as well — as well as a couple of other things related to menopause and help in tracking any kinds of symptoms they may have, both through their menstrual cycle as well as when they age and get into the menopause period of life. One of the things that we found when we started to look at the existing wearables that are on the market today is two things: One, none of them are medical devices — and I’ll talk in a moment about why being a medical device company is really important to us and, we think, important to consumers — and then secondly, that women seem to have been underserved in the wearables market. Most wearables look like they were initially designed for men. They’re kind of thick, bulky, and typically came in male-looking colors — and then subsequently, they’ll change up things a little bit and say, you know, here you go, ladies, here’s the female version. We spoke to over 1,000 women and asked them what was important to them as they age and related to their health. And we found that, although they want to use wearable products like this, often they don’t [use them] or they only use [them] a part of the time because of some of the shortcomings with the existing devices where they don’t really focus on women’s needs. And so we really focus on what [women] want to see in a health wearable. And one of the things that was very important to them was the accuracy of the data that we provide, as well as helping them understand their body through their cycle, and how every aspect of their health may be affected by that, and also helping them as they age into menopause. There’s been a survey done that said 92% of women feel unprepared for menopause. And, as we know, 100% of women are going to go through that stage of life. And so we also want to provide resources and help to women as they age — with more than just the health metrics but distilling it down into what it all means to them and their health. Certainly the hardware does provide that utility. And yes, by monitoring their temperature, through the course of the month, as well as their heart rate, we can track and predict when, say, the period is about to start. So that’s certainly one aspect of what we’re doing. But in addition to that, a lot of what we’re going to be doing is asking women about how they feel, and what are their goals for their health — because everyone’s unique, and how people go about getting their activity is unique. Not everyone does 10,000 steps a day… Some people may prefer to swim or they may prefer to cycle. Whatever the case may be. We want to make sure that we’re collecting that data about their activity, and about the calories burned, so they understand that — and also do a lot with correlations. One thing that’s very important to us is to correlate how one thing may affect another. For example, if a woman experiences headaches at a certain time of the month or she starts to have her first hot flash related to menopause, we want to help explain how maybe activity levels — and the intensity of activity — how much they sleep etc could affect the likelihood of those events. Or things that they could do to try to either reduce the frequency or reduce the severity of events when they occur. So a lot of it has to do with tracking metrics directly. But we also take into account individualized communication between the app and the user. A little bit of both. We are contracting with female medical experts. For example, we’re working with a female doctor who is an expert in women’s sleep. We’re working with a female doctor who’s an expert in menopause. We’re working with female doctors in different disciplines along a woman’s health journey. And so as a woman may be experiencing one of the symptoms or stages of their life, we can provide some expert support, through canned messaging about, here’s why it’s happening, here’s why it’s nothing that you should be concerned about. It’s part of the ageing process. And here’s some tips about how you can manage through this. But as well as doing that initially, you’re right — over time, we’ll be building up a database of all of this for many, many 1,000s of women, that we can mine and leverage that data to help us understand little tricks that may have worked better for one population versus another. The other thing that we will provide through our app experience is community. Many women have told us that they like to share with one another. And so we will also offer the ability for women to peer-to-peer, communicate and say ‘Hey, I’m having a problem with this. Has anyone experienced that before and any insights you can provide me?’. And then we’ll allow women to speak with one another, to also share. Because this is something that some women told us was important to them. Yeah, that’s a great question. And actually, the three things you just mentioned are the most important pillars for us with the product. So let me start with first about the ring, the design of the ring — even the charging of the ring. Because we did think about women as we did this. So the ring… you can see it’s an open design. That was important to us, because it has a little bit of give. It has a little bit of play in it. And so if your finger happens to swell at a certain time of day, or the month or whatever, it has a little bit of give to it. When we were at CES and many media folks came by… several were wearing an Oura ring as an example. And they wore our ring. And they really liked the way it felt on their finger. And they like the way it looked on their finger. And so there was a lot that went into even the design of the ring itself. The second thing that was very interesting to [us was] the charging case. The charging case looks like a little compact device. And you slip the ring into it to charge. You can see it’s [in the case] flashing lights now, it’s charging. And so women love the portability of this in that you can slip it in your purse, take it with you on a trip. This charging case will charge the ring 10 times. The ring needs to be charged every three to four days. So if you’re going away for a trip or a couple of weeks, it’s kind of like your AirPods type device. You can just carry this little charger unit with you wherever you go. It will recharge the ring every three to four days when it needs to be recharged. Then this charger obviously can be recharged periodically, by plugging it in an outlet. But in between that time you’ve got the portability — and so a lot of women love that because many of the chargers with wearables you’d have to be plugged in to a power supply in order to recharge the device. And we don’t have that. So those were a couple things related to the hardware that was important [to us]. You asked about the app experience.This app is designed specifically for women. We’ve made it to be much more approachable — with kind of a dashboard with key information for each day. It allows women to do a dive into their body. There’s basically a “my body” primary screen that they can follow through. And we’re trying to have a very holistic and unobtrusive approach to goal setting where they can pick a few goals that they want to achieve. And we can help track that for them. We really are looking at ‘mind body’ with this as well. We will be monitoring mood — and how they’re feeling as well… There’s a strong relationship between how you’re feeling inside and how your body is actually operating. And so that’s very important to us, as well. And then, lastly, a lot of consumers of wearables today they look at all these trend graphs the current apps provide, and they’re like, is this good or bad? I don’t know what this all means. And so part of what we’re trying to do is distill all that down into insights and help really provide peace of mind to women, and help them understand the general state of their health. And every now and then give them little pearls of wisdom or insight that they can use to take a more active control of their lifestyle. I’ve talked about the trusted resources of these expert advisors from the medical community, as well as peer to peer community. And so that is the other element of our app experience that we want to provide. So if a woman experiences her very first hot flash with menopause, and we have a very simple way where they can hit little buttons on the screen to denote that they’ve experienced a certain event, we can then feed them information. For example, say hey we understand you’ve just had your first hot flash, here’s why it’s happening, this is normal, it happens to every woman as part of ageing. Here’s exactly why it happened. And here’s a couple of tricks that you could potentially try that may allow you to manage through this or maybe experience fewer events with less severity. So that’s… what we’re trying to do with three core elements: Focusing the hardware on women, focusing the app and the insights specifically on women and women’s needs. And then, lastly, the community — being a trusted resource. If you go online and look for a solution to a particular problem, there’s thousands of commentaries out there, and much of it is the opposite of one another. It’s like what am I supposed to really do? We want to provide a full, comprehensive, trusted resource for women. You know it’s very interesting because, historically, we’ve not had continuous monitoring of all these metrics that we could then correlate to events that occur. It’s going to be very exciting to look at these things… I’m a 30 year medical device veteran so I’ll give you a little bit of a medical device example. A lot of people have a problem with their heart called atrial fibrillation… when your heart starts to flutter. It’s actually the atria of your heart, that’s the flutter in your heartbeat, goes a little bit crazy. It’s more rapid and not so rhythmic. And one of the things that we can do, just as an example, with that condition is because we’re tracking all their health metrics throughout the day — obviously we’d see in the heart rate when this occurs — but what’s most important to me is many people have this, it just comes and goes periodically. And one of the things that I’m very interested in, and I’m using this as an example but you can think of more, is to track what was happening with their health metrics (or their activity, or their sleep, or other metrics) and then try to correlate it to the initiation of one of these events happening in their life. So that we can help them over time to say, hey, you know what, we’ve noticed that typically, if you have a couple of days where you weren’t very active and you didn’t sleep well, that’s typically when you then have one of these events occur. And so I think we’re going to learn about what are some of the things that caused — not caused but let’s say have some impact on an event occurring or not. And maybe it is, in some ways, the cause. We can look at the data that happened previous to the event, and try to then help folks over time understand — that, you know, you should avoid really strenuous activity at nighttime that prevents you from sleeping well, and then you have this event in the morning as an example. And so I think there’s going to be a lot of learnings like that — both individualized for a given person, as well as population based — that we’ll be able to better understand that will help folks over time. And I fully believe that we’ll find that hey, you know, on nights when you don’t sleep well, and you didn’t get out much or do this [activity] you’re more prone to having a hot flash. Or if your activity’s too strenuous that’s not good, either… So I’m really excited about what the data can show us over time because no one knows. When we went through our process of research, we basically met with 1,000 women between the ages of the young 30s to 70s. So, yeah, we weren’t focused so much on the teens and 20s in what we did. It was really the 30s. So I’d say the latter half of childbearing years and onward is our focus was initially. We did a full pricing study with women. We were initially thinking about launching this as a pure subscription model. But we spoke to women and the majority said, you know what, I’ve got subscription fatigue; just let me buy the thing and be done with it. We know that the Oura ring today, which is the primary ring product on the market at this moment, currently sells for $350 to $550, depending on the color of the ring. And in fact, in some ways, I feel women were penalized most — because the ring color that’s most designed specifically for women is rose gold and the rose gold ring is $550. Plus there’s a $6 a month subscription on top of that. So when we looked at what consumers were saying, and our own pricing conjoint analysis, we decided that every ring every color, every size, would be sold at under $300 US to each women. That doesn’t mean $299 — [it’ll be] well under $300 for the ring. So, on the one hand, we’re going after a medical device claim — and we’re about to be filing, soon this year, for FDA clearance for heart rate and SPO2, because we ran our pivotal FDA trial for that and we’re very excited about the results; we got phenomenal accuracy; our accuracy, and the trial was even better than the hospital grade pulse oximeter, so that was great news for us — so, on the one hand, we’re a medical device, and yet we’re going to provide it to consumers at a lower cost than the non-medical device. And part of the reason for doing that is because we want to try to reach more broadly with this technology and get it in the hands of the people who need it the most, to help them with their health. [But also] because we’re a medical device company we also have a huge opportunity in the pure healthcare space. Business to business. Major pharmaceutical companies have come to us. Major medical device companies. Integrated healthcare networks have come to us — because they’re looking for a medical device solution that they can use as part of their offering. Big Pharma, for example, they want to use a product like this in clinical trials and post-market surveillance of people on a particular drug where they’re looking to see some of the general metrics associated with their wellness. So we provide them a comprehensive vital signs monitor, and that’s very important. There’s companies that make home oxygenators for people who have pulmonary related problems, COPD, heart failure and COVID-related issues. They’re looking for something to monitor their oxygen levels at home when they’re on an oxygenator. They’ve come to us because we’ve got SPO2 oxygen monitoring that’ll be FDA cleared as part of our solution. So there’s a number of opportunities in the pure healthcare space. And because of that, we can also seek reimbursement for this over time. And so I hope at some point that there’s people who really need this and, in the US, the payers to cover their constituents that are in their plans. They know who are the high risk populations in the plan — I fully expect that they’ll be putting rings on their fingers, just to even have access to the data to understand the state of their health. But also, I think, to offer discounts on their premiums. As well as even get it on their fingers for free, at some level. And so being a medical device, it allows us those opportunities to seek reimbursement, and certainly partner with health plans and other healthcare related entities. And that’s bearing out today. We’ve got data evaluations going on, in the first quarter of this year, that have been initiated with a major pharmaceutical company, a major medical device company, and an integrated healthcare network organization, who are piloting and using our ring in the first quarter of this year, with the goal of assessing how they can incorporate this into their offering. The first two metrics we will be seeking FDA clearance for [are] heart rate, and SPO2. They are the first of many — I will also talk about respiration rate, we’ll talk about glucose, blood pressure, if you want. And there’s several other metrics we haven’t talked about yet, that we are doing research on at the moment — But for the first two, it’s heart rate, and SPO2. Any pulse oximeter also has an FDA clearance for heart rate and SPO2. So it’s a 510K application for that. There is actually a very detailed guidance document from the FDA for devices that are going to measure oxygen, the type of clinical trial that they need to conduct, the level of accuracy that they want to see from the device, the range of oxygen levels that they want the product evaluated over to verify that it’s accurate across a broad range of oxygen. And so that’s all predetermined. We worked with a hospital in the US, UCSF — University California, San Francisco — where they do a number of these studies. And when they do the study, the participants are wearing our ring, they’re wearing a finger clip, hospital grade system, and then they’re doing monitoring of the subjects — what’s called their arterial blood gas, which is the gold standard or the most accurate measure of oxygen level. That’s what we get compared to: This arterial blood gas measurement. We had an accuracy of 2.1% error on average — and the FDA requirement is you need within 4%. So we were well within the FDA guidance of accuracy. And one of the important things as a side note to that is we have to evaluate it over a wide range of skin tones for people — from fair skinned to very dark skinned people — and we were accurate independent of their skin tone which was a really important outcome for us. And actually, it is more accurate in people of color than a lot of what’s been written recently about how the pulse oximeter and similar stuff worked for people of color. So that was a really great outcome for us as well. So, for the FDA to get clearance, you have to file this as a 510K. We will be doing it sometime this first part of the year — where not only do you need the clinical evidence, which is the really most important piece, but you need all this other information for the FDA — hundreds of documents, and tasks and reports, etc — as part of the 510K filing. So we’re working on putting the entire package together, right now. Once we file it, I expect to obtain clearance within three to four months. The last couple of 510Ks I did with a prior company, which was also post-COVID starting, one took 90 days and one took 108 days — so I’m hopeful that in three to four months we could get a clearance from the time that we file. We could launch the product as a wellness device if we’re ready to go before the clearance. But, at this point, it looks like the timing of the clearance and when we’re ready to launch is going to come together quite nicely — and we’ll launch it as a medical device at that point. It is. And I’m glad you’ve raised the question. It’s another one of the advantages of being a medical device company. So, obviously, the FDA has a lot of regulations around medical devices and the privacy of people’s personal health information and HIPAA guidelines and standards for assuring that the data is secure. And so because we’re a medical device company, we have to do that by design. As it relates to the Roe versus Wade decision in the US, women can rest assured that their data will not be shared with anyone unless they give us the authorization to do so — if they want to share a summary report of their data with their doctor because they’re going in for their annual visit, we can do that. But we will only do it with their authorization. And the FDA mandates that we have to protect the privacy of women’s data. And so I think women will trust it, because we’re a medical device company. And because we have to do it by design. It’s part of the FDA clearance process. Today, there’s new regulations now related to cybersecurity assessment of your file database. You have to have that. That’s part of our FDA filing, when we put this in. We have to have our cybersecurity policy and testing that’s been done by a third party to show that we’ve done penetration testing and are doing what is up to industry standards to assure that we’re protecting people’s personal health information. And so we believe, because we’re a medical device company and because we have to do that as part of being a medical device company and a medical entity, that women can trust that their data is secure with us. I believe when that happens we won’t be the first people they go after. They’re gonna go after the doctor or the office that’s directly treating them or that did whatever procedure may be that they may have conducted, or who prescribed the medication and the pills that they may have taken… They’re going to go after them first. And we would probably be third or fourth in line. But look, if we’re legally obligated to do something, this is something where our attorneys would get involved at that point. And we’d have to make an assessment of what we have to do versus not. But we wouldn’t be the first folks they go after, quite frankly. It would be others before they get to us. But it is something that we have talked about. And something that is very important to us. We have added many women in our leadership roles in a number of ways, both in terms of our strategy, of how to develop the product, in terms of our marketing to women, and gathering and research from women. Even our board of directors has two women — of the four external [directors], one who’s got a 30 year career in digital health and was at WebMD. She actually led the development of the symptom checker at WebMD… So we’ve got some experts, both related to female health, as well as even in the legal space to help us with exactly how we would address these issues. So I would say that it’s much more top of mind for us, because we are female-focused and because we are a medical device company. It would if you did that. The only challenge there, of course, as you know, as we spent a lot of time earlier talking about the data and tracking longitudinally what’s happening over time and by looking at population-level correlations we can help understand how to improve everyone’s health and learn what may effect what — the cause and effect. And so it would prohibit us from being able to do that. And, quite frankly, it would also prohibit us from improving the product. As we collect data over time, we’re able to look at the data were collecting and understand better what we can do to improve upon it. So you’re right, that would be one way to literally not have the data that they were going to ask for — but then you don’t see it perform. When we get it [user data], we do de-identify it for the purposes that we use. And so maybe there’s a firewall related to [certain types of requests for data]. And we certainly look at those types of opportunities to see what we can do to give women peace of mind. But I can tell you, at least at this juncture in the conversations we’ve had with women, the fact that we’re a medical device company, the fact that we have privacy standards and protocols, and all the rest, has been very important to them, and seems to give them peace of mind to know that their data will be protected. No, no, no, we can’t do that with what we’re collecting. That is not part of what we can do. We can’t personally identify anyone and target them with the data that we’re collecting. We can only use the de-identified data for our purposes of developing algorithms and whatnot. And so we can’t — we won’t and can’t — do any targeted advertising or those types of things. With any woman that is not how a medical device company would operate. That has not always been the case with consumer entities but as a med device company, we would be in violation of many regulations if we did that. I would say that one of the most important reasons why we want to have access to the data — especially longitudinal data in the cloud — is to really track trends in a woman’s health over time. We want to understand if their health is improving, stable, getting a little worse. For example, if a woman starts to exercise more actively, and we’re monitoring that, we may find that a resting heart rate starts to go down. We can actually correlate that lowering of the resting heart rate to maybe a reduction in their risk of getting Type Two diabetes or high blood pressure, as an example. And so we want to point those things out to women. You know, a lot of women, they exercise because they believe that it helps them burn calories and keeps their weight down. But guess what, we’re likely going to show women that if they are exercising appropriately, they’re actually sleeping better on nights following days of exercise. And as they exercise more, their resting heart rate goes down, their risk of high blood pressure goes down, their risk of diabetes goes down, their heart rate variability goes up, which means their body’s in a better metabolic state. And so we can point out from their own data, how their health may be improving, or worsening. And if a woman starts to maybe have a mental health related issue or mood related issue, because we’re seeing changes in her activity, or sleep patterns, or a resting heart rate, we may just simply ask a woman how they’re feeling. How are they doing? We want to correlate their mental wellness, as well, to the data that we’re seeing — and even try to detect when there might be something going on in that capacity. And so really having access to this data, and looking at it over time, allows us to have a better experience for each women who’s using the platform. We’re looking around mid year-ish timeframe [to launch the ring in the US]. We’ve started to have more marketing materials go out. We’ve sent out a couple of newsletters — we had a recent one focused on women talking about women’s sleep — so we’re starting to get some marketing materials out into the space to understand the level of interest. In the US, there are so many women who have written us and told us a little bit of their life story and told us about how they’re very thankful that someone’s finally developing something for specifically for them. They’ve worn Apple watches and other products. Apple Watch is phenomenal, it does everything. But that’s also its curse, because the fact that it does everything, you gotta recharge it every day. And, actually, all of our core baseline metrics, we monitor at night when you’re sleeping. Because you’re in the same state night after night after night. So we can compare apples to apples, when we look at longitudinal trends. [Whereas] an Apple Watch is typically bedside — being charged every night. And many women have told us they can’t wear the Apple Watch to bed, it just gets in the way on their wrist. We’ve also heard from a lot of women who said they like wearing their Apple Watch sometimes, and they’ll have that, but they would still buy a ring for their health related data — and use the Apple Watch for all the other stuff. So it’s interesting. [A lot of women also told us] they really like something that is very unobtrusive and something that looks good on their finger. Over time, we may change the look of it a little bit — but we want it to be something that’s appealing to a woman where she likes wearing it as if it’s a piece of jewelry, never mind that it’s providing all this health related information at the same time. That’s important to them. Well, our goal with this product is eventually we will serve everyone. But we felt like where other products seem to make the initial design for men — and women were an afterthought — in our case, we’re going to make men the afterthought and focus on women up front and really make the product for them. Now there will be men who wear this product for sure. They won’t probably use the menstrual cycle tracking feature. But certainly the other [features] are all applicable and the app will fulfil the needs of a man — but it is truly designed with a woman in mind based upon the input that we received from over 1,000 women. We’ve had a lot of conversations about that. Certainly, in my medical device experience and background at Medtronic — a very large med device company — we launched products all over the globe. And in this case, we do want to get beyond the US. To be quite frank, there’s certain markets that are English speaking, where it’s easier for us to launch a product that we have almost exactly as it is. When you get into Europe, now with the new medical device directives, there as a med device you’ve got to translate into 24 languages, no matter what countries you want to launch in. And there’s a lot of new challenges for certain medical device companies. So, for us, we’ve got to assess the challenges of getting into those markets — or whether or not we launched it as a medical device in certain markets. We could always launch it as a ‘medical grade’ device or a wellness device. Yet it really is the medical side — we do have that opportunity to do that. So those are some of the things we’ll have to explore. But yeah, over time, we see we see this as a product where there’s a global need, quite frankly. Everywhere the rates of diabetes and high blood pressure and other chronic conditions have been rising year after year. And, and I mean, we have a very grand mission of playing a small part in helping level that off and help bring it down over time by really helping people take more active control over their health and understand subtle changes they can make to avoid getting — or certainly delaying — getting diabetes and high blood pressure and other chronic conditions that develop as one ages. So we’re really excited about that opportunity. There’s a real need. And we think we can we can play a role in helping women to lead a healthier and more well balanced life — and then later on do the same for everyone. We have our own proprietary technology that we’re developing to use radio frequency [RF] to monitor blood pressure and glucose non-invasively. I spent most of my career developing the first continuous glucose monitoring system that was cleared by the FDA for people with diabetes back in 1999. I actually led the team that developed [that]. And I led the integration of that with an insulin pump and all these other things for people with diabetes. But we now have this one little chip on this board — the chip is four millimeters by 6.7 millimeters — we could even put it in a ring if we wanted. But right now we’re using it in [a wrist-mounted prototype] band. We’re evaluating this RF. We’ve already run some clinical trials with bigger pieces of the system in the past — where it was much larger — but we developed our own integrated circuit chip. And we’re about to start our next round of blood pressure and glucose studies using that chip. And then, beyond what we’re doing for that, there are three or four other female-related metrics that we’re not talking about at this point. But that we’re really interested in making the measurement of that will also help provide a more comprehensive look at at a woman’s health. So [we’re] very excited about our pipeline with other measures. And so — over the course of the next three to five years — I would hope to have somewhere between five and 10 different metrics or diagnoses that are all FDA cleared as part of the one device. Another one we have mentioned are sleep disorders. So naturally, because overnight, we can monitor your heart rate, your oxygen levels, your breathing rate, etc — if you have a particular sleep disturbance, we may be able to diagnose that and we’ll be doing clinical trials this year to look at the accuracy of our device at detecting some of the sleep disorders. As I said, I led the first minimally invasive CGM to get cleared in ’99. And I was in the space for about 25 years working on that. And so I saw a lot of companies come to us with different optical and other non-invasive techniques to try to measure glucose. It is not easy. That is an absolute. The RF technology we’re using — and we’ve got asset protection on all of this as well — it is up at these really high frequencies and we are able to see, and we show this on the bench and we’ve seen it in some people with Type One diabetes, where we’re tracking the changes in their glucose levels [when] say they eat food or take their insulin — and, to be perfectly frank, in some people we get really nice tracking and others we don’t at this point. We’ve used different systems before. They’re noisier. You have to have temperature control — like fans blowing on it to keep it cool. So this will be the first studies coming up where we have it all on this one chip. And by integrating it all together in one chip, we know already that we have higher fidelity signals. And then the question is can we get the data accurate enough? The other thing I would say is that when the first CGM came out, their average errors were in the 20-plus percent range. And over 15 years, the sensors have gotten like below 10% average errors. And so they’ve improved over time. And they’re used primarily in people with Type One diabetes on insulin. Or maybe some people with Type Two who are also on insulin and intensively managed. We’re really focused on people with pre-diabetes, or Type Two diabetes on oral medications, to really help them understand how their lifestyle affects their glucose levels. And so I’m really looking for the ability to monitor trends in glucose levels over time. For example, if we see a big excursion at one time of the day, maybe after a particular meal, we want to inform them of, hey, you know, not sure what you ate today at lunch, but try to avoid that particular thing, right, it’s not so great for your glucose. Or help them try to understand how if they get a little bit of activity through the day, when they eat some of their meals, they have much better glucose control than if they don’t, and how important even just getting out for a 10 or 15 minute walk could be to do this. So we’re thinking about those types of applications. Because these people aren’t on insulin. Even if you told them they had a high blood sugar they don’t know what to do with it — what it means to them. It’s not like they’re going to take another dose of their medication… So we want to be more informative — to help them understand how they can make very subtle changes in their lifestyle, whether it’s in the food they eat, or it’s a little bit about their activity, that can have a dramatic effect on keeping their blood sugar’s more normalized over time. And that’s that’s where we really want to go with this. We’ll leave the CGMs, like I developed and the other ones related to Type One and insulin using people, where they need the numbers day in and day out and moment in and moment out. Because they may be dosing insulin or consuming something to correct the glucose level that they have. But for Type Two diabetes or prediabetes, which is the lion’s share of the market — you know, 90-plus percent of people are in those categories — that’s where we want to focus our energies to start. We could either do it on the ring — the chip is small enough that it can fit in the ring. Most of our studies today, though, are done on the wrist. In fact, you can see I’m holding this [wrist-mounted prototype] device — so we would put this on the wrist. And we would use this for blood pressure and glucose monitoring. That’s where we’re going to start. And we will be using this in clinical trials shortly. This device, not only does it make the RF measurement… but it also has multiple optical sensors for the heart rate, SPO2, it’s got temperature sensing. Everything’s in this device. Yeah, that’s correct. You know, it’s like, certain big diagnostic systems in the hospitals monitor multiple analytes and measures? Well, we will be monitoring multiple measures with our device over time. With this [smart ring] right now, today, it’s going to have heart rate and SPO2. In the future we’ll turn on — well, respiration rates we’re monitoring but we won’t be filing for that one right out the gate. But that’s next. As well as then sleep disturbances. So the ring itself, in the first embodiment, can do four or five of the measures that we want to make. But then once we include the RF chip, and some of the others that we’ve got — actually, there’s another couple of chips in here that we’re not using yet for some of the other metrics I can’t talk about yet — but we’re able to collect data for those as well. So it’s very exciting. Because, over time, we feel like we can provide a real comprehensive view of one’s vital signs and their overall health with one device that they’re wearing in a very unobtrusive way.

Netflix says it’s open to adding free streaming ‘FAST’ channels to grow its ads business

Lauren Forristal

Netflix reported its Q4 2022 financial results yesterday, topping 230 million global subscribers, up from , thanks to the addition of 7.7 million subs. During the earnings call, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the company is “keeping an eye” on a free ad-supported TV (FAST) option, a move that are considering as more consumers shift to FAST services. “We’re open to all these different models that are out there right now, but we’ve got a lot on our plate this year, both with the paid sharing and with our launch of advertising and continuing to this slate of content that we’re trying to drive to our members. So, we are keeping an eye on that segment for sure,” Sarandos said. While a Netflix FAST channel offering probably won’t happen anytime soon, Sarandos isn’t dismissing the possibility that there’ll be one in the future. When and if Netflix goes through with a FAST option, the move will most likely boost its ad business significantly. According to , the FAST industry will reach 216 million monthly active users in 2023, driving $4.1 billion in ad revenue. Netflix is known to be slow to follow industry trends. It took many years for former co-CEO Reed Hastings, who just he would step down, even to launching a . is the third-oldest streaming service next to Netflix and Amazon Prime Video (formerly ) and has offered an for over a decade. Netflix is counting on its ad business to be a big source of income. Overall, it estimates in revenue for Q1 2023. However, it’s looking like Netflix’s “ ” plan isn’t paying off as much as it anticipated, according to a recent report. Despite being satisfied with the growth of its ads business, which Netflix President of Worldwide Advertising Jeremi Gorman during an interview at Variety’s Entertainment Summit at  , Kantar data shows that Netflix “Basic with Ads” now accounts for 12% of its subscriber base. Although Netflix intended for the new tier to entice new subscribers, it appears only a few current customers traded down to the $3 plan. In the letter to shareholders yesterday, Netflix wrote that the launch of its ad-supported tier was successful; however, the company admitted it had “much more still to do.” It’s likely that more subscribers will consider the cheaper tier when the company adds all its content to the plan. As of now, 85% to 95% of Netflix’s content is available. The company is currently with studios. Also, the ad tier is not available in every region. “Basic with Ads” is only available in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Canada and Mexico. The company has no immediate plans to expand, but it has future plans to target larger ad markets. Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann said in yesterday’s earnings call, “We wouldn’t get into a business like this if we didn’t believe it could be bigger than at least 10% of our revenue and hopefully much more over time in that mix as we grow.” Overall, the company admits that “2022 was a tough year,” Netflix wrote in its letter to shareholders. The streaming giant had in 2022, losing more than a million global subscribers. In Q4, the company reported $7.85 billion in revenue, adding to its recent trend of slowing revenue growth. For comparison, the company brought in $7.93 billion in Q3 2022 and $7.97 billion in Q2. “We believe we have a clear path to reaccelerate our revenue growth: continuing to improve all aspects of Netflix, launching paid sharing and building our ads offering,” the company added in yesterday’s letter. This year and beyond are shaping up to be a pivotal time for Netflix. The company is set to launch its and in 2023.  

WhatsApp slapped for processing data without a lawful basis under EU’s GDPR

Natasha Lomas

Another bill has come in for Meta for failing to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — but this one’s a tiddler! Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp has been fined €5.5 million (just under $6 million) by the tech giant’s lead data protection regulator in the region for failing to have a lawful basis for certain types of personal data processing. Back in December, Meta’s chief regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), was given orders to issue a final decision on this complaint (which dates back to May 2018) — via a binding decision from the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) — along with two other complaints, against Facebook and Instagram. Those two final decision emerged from the DPC , when it announced a total of €310 million in penalties and gave Meta three months to find a valid legal basis for that ads processing. But while the latter pair of GDPR decisions tackled Meta’s lack of a valid legal basis for processing user data to run behavioral advertising (aka, its core business model), with the Ireland appears to have skirted the ads processing legality issue entirely — since its inquiry has focused on the legal basis Meta claimed for “service improvements” and “security.” Here Meta had (similarly) sought to rely on a claim of contractual necessity — but Ireland has now found (via EDPB order) that it can’t. The DPC has given WhatsApp six months to mend its ways for these purposes of data processing. This means it will need to find a way to lawfully process the data (perhaps by asking users if they consent to such purposes and not processing their data if they don’t). But the regulator has simply declined to act on a parallel EDPB instruction telling the DPC to investigate whether WhatsApp processes user (meta)data for ads. And this has led to fresh cries, by the original complainant, of yet another stitch-up by the Irish regulator. In a , noyb, the privacy rights not-for-profit behind the pulls no punches — arguing that Ireland is essentially giving the EDPB the finger at this point. “We are astonished how the DPC simply ignores the core of the case after a 4.5 year procedure. The DPC also clearly ignores the binding decision of the EDPB. It seems the DPC finally cuts loose all ties with EU partner authorities and with the requirements of EU and Irish law,” said its honorary chairman, Max Schrems, in a typically pithy and punchy statement. While messaging content on WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted — which means, assuming you trust Meta’s implementation of the Signal protocol, that this information should be protected from its prying eyes — the social media giant can still glean insights on users by tracking their WhatsApp metadata (i.e., who’s talking to who, how often). The company can also connect the dots and users to accounts and public (or otherwise non-E2EE) digital activity across other services it owns (and, potentially, third-party services it’s seeded with tracking technologies)… So, basically, Meta’s data-gathering net is long (and wide). That means there are certainly questions to be asked about how it might be processing WhatsApp users’ data for marketing purposes — and what legal basis it’s relying on for any such processing. WhatsApp users may remember the major controversy that kicked off — when the platform announced an update to its T&Cs that it said users had to accept in order to carry on using the service. It wasn’t clear exactly what was changing in the updated terms. But, whatever was going on, Meta sure wasn’t giving WhatsApp users a free choice over the matter! And while regulatory attention on that issue led to what appeared to be a bit of a climbdown by Meta, which stopped sending aggressive pop-ups demanding EU users agree (or leave), the whole episode led to widespread confusion about what exactly it was doing with WhatsApp user data (and how it was doing it, legally speaking). The episode also sparked some , which led, , to the European Commission giving the company a month to fix the confusing T&Cs and “clearly inform” consumers about its business model. None of the confusion and mistrust around WhatsApp’s T&Cs was helped by a on syncing user data with Facebook — when the platform flipped a founder pledge never to cross those streams. In short, it’s a mess — and a mess that Europe’s regulators can’t claim to have cleaned up. Yet despite all the ongoing confusion and privacy concerns, the DPC appears spectacularly uninterested in taking a proper look at how WhatsApp may be processing user data for ads. “The DPC has now limited the 4.5 year procedure to the minor issues of the legal basis for using data for security purposes and for service improvement,” writes noyb, accusing the regulator of essentially ignoring this major component of its complaint. “The DPC thereby ignores the major issues of sharing WhatsApp data with Meta’s other companies (Facebook and Instagram) for advertisement as well as other purposes.” The DPC’s announcing its final decision almost entirely avoids making mention of behavioral advertising — until the finale, when the phrase does crop up. But only because it quotes the EDPB’s instruction to it — to conduct a fresh investigation of “WhatsApp IE’s [Ireland’s] processing operations in its service in order to determine if it processes special categories of personal data (Article 9 GDPR), processes data for the purposes of behavioural advertising, for marketing purposes, as well as for the provision of metrics to third parties and the exchange of data with affiliated companies for the purposes of service improvements, and in order to determine if it complies with the relevant obligations under the GDPR.” So the opportunity was there for Ireland to grasp the nettle on WhatsApp users’ behalf and follow the data streams to draw a clear picture of what Meta’s ownership of the E2EE messaging platform really means for users’ privacy. (And, remember, Meta’s behavioral ad targeting empire currently lacks a lawful basis for ads processing on Facebook and Instagram in the EU.) But instead of getting on with investigating WhatsApp’s data processing, the Irish regulator has opted to instruct its lawyers to challenge the EDPB’s binding decision and seek to get it annulled in court. Meta has now responded to the DPC decision — sending us this statement, attributed to a WhatsApp spokesperson, in which it confirms it will appeal:  has led the industry on private messaging by providing end-to-end encryption and layers of privacy that protect people. We strongly believe that the way the service operates is both technically and legally compliant. We rely upon contractual necessity for service improvement and security purposes because we believe helping keep people safe and offering an innovative product is a fundamental responsibility in operating our service. We disagree with the decision and we intend to appeal.

Brazilian online grocery deliverer Diferente secures $3M to increase customers’ access to healthier food

Christine Hall

When you live very far away from a grocery store, we’re talking like an hour and may include catching several buses or a rideshare, it can be difficult to make the weekly trip in. Enter , which touts itself as “the largest subscription foodtech for fresh organic produce in Brazil.” Former James Delivery founder Eduardo Petrelli teamed up with Saulo Marti and Paulo Monçores to launch Diferente in early 2022 with a mission of making healthy foods accessible and to cut down on the 30% of the imperfect produce typically thrown away by grocery stores. To do this, the company sources directly from organic farmers and is able to offer prices that are 40% lower than what you would find in the grocery store. Customers choose weekly or bi-monthly delivery slots and Diferente’s proprietary algorithm predicts the ideal basket of fruits, vegetables and leaves, with customers being able to customize the amounts. The algorithm takes into account their preferences and the availability, seasonality and recurrence of the item and tailors future boxes accordingly. There is also some intelligence built in for the farmers to help plan their crops based on what’s popular with customers. “Brazilians are extremely price sensitive when they buy groceries, so if you charge anything more than the normal price, they are going to buy in the offline module,” Petrelli told TechCrunch. He noted that Diferente is able to gain traction with a low cost of customer acquisition because moe than 80% of Brazilian families cook at home versus the United States, where that is just less than 40%. “Clients here like very fresh foods and need them on a weekly basis,” Petrelli added. “That’s part of why we think that we have the unique business model for Latin America.” However, the company isn’t taking the instant delivery approach that competitors like are doing. Instead, it is focusing on Brazil’s density and recognizing that families are more spread outside of the big cities, which enables Diferente to go after other kinds of customers that will order larger carts on a weekly basis. That approach seems to be working. Petrelli said Diferente, operating in 12 cities within the State of São Paulo, is already profitable per order. In addition, co-founder Saulo Marti said in the past 10 months, average order volume increased from 13.8% to 17.2%, and customers on average are ordering two boxes per month at a rate of $15 per box. Not only do those figures point to good margins and good retention, but the ability for Diferente to expand in a more efficient way, Petrelli said. Since launching in 2022, the company has grown seven times in revenue and is starting off 2023 with a “positive contribution margin,” as Petrelli expects to end 2024 with more than $30 million in revenue. It has also “rescued” 300,000 kilograms of food already. Last year, the company raised $4.4 million in seed funding and is adding $3 million more in a round led by Caravela Capital that also included Collaborative Fund and two new funds, South Ventures and Valor Siren Ventures. This gives Diferente $7.4 million in total funding since it was founded. The new funding will help the company get its app launched, enter new categories and SKUs and get its second phase of artificial intelligence-powered customization underway this year. It will do some hiring to add 20% to 30% more employees this year to work with the current roster of 75 people. Diferente also has plans to expand its delivery radius. Petrelli estimates there are 50 million potential customers within the company’s current operating area. Meanwhile, the company is offering an average of 50 stock keeping units (SKU) and has up to 170 SKUs available, depending on seasonality, Marti added. “Sixty-two percent of our customers are middle class and they aren’t being targeted for buying online as much as the higher class, so that is a unique opportunity for us to go to cities where no one is going,” Petrelli said. “We already forecasted 36 cities that we can go around São Paulo, and we are now just planning how many we’re going to acquire.”

Elon takes the stand, Akio Toyoda hands over the CEO keys and layoffs come for Waymo

Rebecca Bellan

Akio Toyoda at a press conference in 2021. Getty Images/Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg Perhaps the biggest automotive story of the week was surprise announcement that he is stepping out of the CEO driver seat at Toyota and handing the keys to , who most recently led the automaker’s luxury brand Lexus. Akio Toyoda isn’t leaving Toyota altogether. He will now become chairman of the board, replacing , who held the position since 2013. The company has said the change to management was triggered by Uchiyamada’s resignation. Toyoda and Sato during a livestreamed Toyota event and a few nuggets stood out to me. One was Toyoda commenting on his 13 years as CEO, an era when the company suffered due to the global financial crisis, earthquake and a worldwide recall: I believe that in times of crisis, two paths appear before us. One is a path toward short-term success or a quick victory. The other is a path that leads back to the essential qualities and philosophies that gave us strength. I chose the latter. And Sato on the future: I love making cars. For that reason, I want to be a president who continues to make cars. I would like to show what kind of company Toyota should be through our cars. That’s what I want to do. Cars that are fun to drive and cars that support mobility. And cars in the future will evolve into the concept of mobility itself. Amid such, I hope to preserve the essential value of the car and propose new forms of mobility. , an administrative app for drivers, ($5 million) from LLoyds Banking Group Plc. The four-year-old company is also backed by Jaguar Land Rover’s venture arm. , an India-based battery tech startup, raised $40 million in a Series B round of equity and debt co-led by Amara Raja Batteries and Petronas Ventures. Incred Financial Services, Unity Small Finance Bank, Oxyzo Financial Services and Western Capital Advisors also participated. , a company that developed an in-car payments and commerce platform based on a vehicle’s location, raised $9.25 million in a Series A funding round led by strategic investor Reynolds and Reynolds Company, with additional funding from Poppe + Potthoff Capital GmbH and Pegasus Tech Ventures. is expected to begin interviewing lead underwriters for a in 2023. Also missed this one last week. Waymo was named the of , which will be held in Phoenix this year. “There’s no bigger stage for our 24/7 ride-hailing service than transporting people from all over the globe to and from the airport and around downtown for the many exciting activities surrounding the Big Game,” Waymo’s chief product officer Saswat Panigrahi said in a statement. named as its CFO. , who served as interim CFO, will continue in his role as senior vice president of finance and chief accounting officer.

Bitcoin-based app Strike expands in Philippines to grow cross-border payment solutions

Jacquelyn Melinek

Strike, a Bitcoin-based payment network and financial app, is expanding to the Philippines to grow cross-border payments and remittance markets. “The Philippines is one of the biggest remitting markets in the world, especially from the United States,” Jack Mallers, CEO of Strike, said to TechCrunch. In 2021, about $12.7 billion in cash remittances was sent from U.S.-based Filipinos to the Philippines, according to Statista . “As far as the technology we build, it’s one of the lowest-hanging fruits — international payments are a huge pain and always have been. There’s been incremental innovation from SWIFT and Western Union, but it’s still incredibly difficult.” Even across Western countries, traditional cross-border money transfers services are slower as bank transfers can take multiple days for funds to move from one account to another. Strike uses instantaneous, low-cost micropayments through the , a layer-2 payment protocol on top of Bitcoin, which allows millions to billions of transactions per second to transpire across the platform. The app’s platform also allows users to transfer U.S. dollars to local fiat currencies, like the Philippine peso, for less than 1 cent per transaction through the network, Mallers noted. “None of our users have to touch Bitcoin,” Mallers said. The app uses Bitcoin to transfer money from one user’s account to another, regardless of its price. “The aspiration of the business is to hide Bitcoin under the hood” so users could benefit from its payment network, he added. For example, if a customer wants to take $5 and send it to a country like the Philippines, the Bitcoin is converted over the Lightning Network and reconverted into the local currency “in the order of seconds to minutes as opposed to days or weeks,” Mallers said. Aside from the Philippines, Strike plans on expanding further in the Latin American and African regions as well due to the “extreme amount of demand,” Mallers shared. “We’re seeing partners pop up all over the world.” Now, Strike is gaining demand and partners seeking out integrations from everywhere between the U.K. and throughout Europe all the way to “20 new countries we’ll potentially add in February in Africa,” Mallers added. Earlier this month, Strike with payments provider Fiserv, the parent company of (the fancy white digital register at many small businesses today), to expand its services. Last year, it raised $80 million in a Series B round to drive its efforts to grow payment solutions for merchants, marketplaces and financial institutions, the company . Strike also in August 2022 to launch a rewards card that pairs with its application. In general, the company’s partnerships and announcement point to its focus on growing the remittance market through its application and other alternative avenues, like Clover. “The goal is to make cross-border payments and global payments cheaper and faster,” Mallers said. “But also more accessible. There’s huge value here for financial inclusion.” Some Strike users will send amounts as little as 10 cents to their families, Mallers shared. But through a traditional financial system, the fees would outweigh the benefits, he added. “We can process a 10-cent payment…and you don’t have to log into Chase for an international wire transfer.” Going forward, there are opportunities to improve the existing remittance markets while also unlocking new markets, he added. “You’ll start to see a renaissance of tools really closing that big delta gap and you’ll start seeing more financial institutions like Square and CashApp take advantage of this.” Over the next decade, Mallers thinks remittance networks and applications like Lightning and Strike will expand opportunities from the 2 billion to 3 billion people that are “generally included in the global international payments system” to all 8 billion. “That’ll be like a renaissance moment,” Mallers said. “It’s a really huge deal.”

Linktree adds new monetization options, including a ‘Buy Me a Gift’ feature

Aisha Malik

Linktree, the popular link-in-bio startup, is continuing to build more tools to help creators make money on its platform. The company today that it’s introducing three new monetization features designed to help users turn their Linktree into a stronger earnings channel. First, Linktree is launching a new “Buy Me a Gift” button that is somewhat similar to its Tip Jar feature. Buy Me a Gift is a new way for fans to say thank you to their favorite creators in a simple way. Creators can pick from five emoji gift options that represent what a fan’s gift means to them. The emojis you can choose from include the coffee emoji, taco emoji, cake emoji, beer emoji or present emoji. Then, they can set a price and connect their PayPal or Square account to get paid. Linktree says it won’t charge any transaction fees for a limited time. Once a user has added their Buy Me a Gift link to their Linktree, they can share a URL to bring people directly to it. You can head to your Linktree on desktop, hover over your Buy Me a Gift link and select the share icon to get a short link that drives donation traffic straight to your Linktree. Linktree Linktree is also partnering with to make it easy for creators, educators, trainers, entertainers and more to sell things like audiobooks, videos, images, software, memberships, exclusive events, courses and more. To get started, users need to create a SendOwl account. From there, you can display up to 10 digital products as a browsable carousel. Customers can tap the “Shop Now” button to browse all of the creator’s SendOwl products, or they can tap “Buy Now” to be taken directly to the checkout flow for the product they’ve chosen. In both cases, the checkout is hosted on SendOwl. After the checkout process is complete, SendOwl automatically sends the customer a secure link to retrieve their digital goods. In addition, Linktree is partnering with Bonfire to make it easier for users to sell custom merchandise by adding a Bonfire storefront to their Linktree. Users who want to add their Bonfire storefront can do so by heading to their Linktree admin, tapping the “+ Add link” button, and then selecting the “View all” button and finding Bonfire under the “Make and Collect Money” section. Linktree The new features are the latest ways that Linktree is looking to help creators on its platform earn money. The company recently began beta testing that let creators build payments links — locks — around content and other items that otherwise might not cost anything to use, or might not even be chargeable on the originating platform, but might represent something valuable to a creators’ fans and followers. According to Linktree, use cases for this feature include music, videos, playlists, interest boards, charges to join messaging groups, workout plans, recipes, documents, photos, writing and consultations. Last year, Linktree was in a Series C round of funding. Following the raise, Linktree said it’s been focused on introducing new revenue streams and creating additional value for creators and brands. The company says it has 1.5 billion unique visitors a month.

Cleary raises $4.5M to reinvent the intranet

Frederic Lardinois

When you hear the word “intranet,” chances are your mind is conjuring up images of badly designed internal communications platforms from the early aughts: a place for your internal communications team to post announcements you’re not going to read. To some degree, that hasn’t changed, but employee expectations have — and so has the work environment, especially as the pandemic has made work-from-home and hybrid work the default at many companies. And that, in turn, has made being able to communicate with employees, who increasingly feel disconnected from their jobs, even more important. San Francisco-based is part of a new cohort of startups that aim to revitalize the intranet. The company today announced that it has raised a $4.5 million seed funding round led by Moonshots Capital. Liberty City Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Seachange Fund and Quiet Capital also participated in this round, which follows the company’s initial $3 million pre-seed round. Cleary The company’s founders, Thomas Kunjappu and Ryan O’Donnell, previously ran Twitter’s internal people tools team (and left long before a certain billionaire acquired the company). In doing so, the founders realized that while companies like Twitter were able to build these bespoke tools for their employees, there were no comparable services on the market for all of the smaller companies that weren’t able to dedicate entire development teams to internal tools. Yet at the same time, a lot of these larger companies kept re-inventing the same tools for their employees. “There was a point when Ryan and I were just looking for inspiration for improving the products that we were building and engaging with [at Twitter],” Kunjappu said. “We looked at what else was available. If you’re an employee at Google, if you’re an employee at Uber, if you’re an employee at Dropbox — and the list goes on — there is this bespoke internal tooling ecosystem that is built for the employee base and there’s maybe 80% overlap between them. But there’s nothing quite like that in the market.” He also noted that it used to be the standard for most companies to hire internal comms teams once they hit about 500 employees. That number has dropped significantly since the start of the pandemic. “With COVID, what’s happening is that the same challenges around communications, culture, productivity are coming down market to a much smaller company. A company with 50 home offices starts to see the same challenges as a 500-person company in two locations,” he said. The idea behind Cleary then is to offer a full-stack employee experience platform. As businesses try to bring their SaaS spending under control, that may turn out to be a smart approach. Cleary combines a communications platform, wikis, tools for helping businesses recognize their employees (at least virtually), an employee directory with org charts, a search tool that brings together a company’s knowledge base from across various third-party tools and a Q&A service for live events. It integrates with HR tools like Workday and ADP, communications services like Gmail, Google Calendar and Slack, as well as authentication services from Okta, Microsoft and Google. Cleary With that, businesses can use the platform to build anything from on-boarding experiences to hosting live events. But what’s maybe most important to HR teams right now is using a service like Cleary to help them scale their culture. That has always been difficult, but it’s increasingly more so. As Kunjappu also noted, one of the areas the team is focused on now is building personalized experiences for every employee. A newly onboarded employee in IT has different needs from an experienced sales manager, after all. Cleary believes that it can help businesses tailor their employee experience offerings to these individual needs — and reach them where they are, be that in email, Slack or Teams. “Our whole strategy is — yes, we are focused on communications and culture and productivity — but how it all comes together is with this personalized employee journey,” he explained. That’s where the company is investing a lot of its engineering resources right now, but it is also starting to build out its go-to-market teams. “The tailwinds of the COVID pandemic continue to shift workplace expectations among knowledge workers, and companies that provide essential tools for remote work will thrive in the years to come,” said Kelly Perdew, general partner at Moonshots Capital. “In addition to a superior product, Cleary has extraordinary leadership from founders with deep domain expertise, and that’s what ultimately leads to success and why we are so excited to partner with Thomas and Ryan.”  

Warner Bros. Discovery reaches deals with Roku and Tubi to license 2,000 hours of content, including ‘Westworld’

Aisha Malik

Warners Bros. Discovery has reached deals with and Tubi to license 2,000 hours of movies and TV shows, the companies announced on Tuesday. The deal will bring Warner Bros.-branded free, ad-supported channels to the two streaming services. The channels will feature many popular titles, including HBO’s “Westworld,” which was recently . The FAST channels will also include “The Bachelor,” “Cake Boss,” “Say Yes to the Dress,” “F-Boy Island,” “Raised by Wolves,” “Legendary,” “The Nevers,” “Finding Magic Mike,” “Head of the Class,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” “My Cat from Hell,” “Breaking Amish,” “Caribbean Life,” “Paranormal Lockdown,” “Murder Chose Me,” “Mysteries at the Museum,” “A Wedding Story, “How It’s Made” and “My Five Wives.” The deals mark a turn for Warner Bros. Discovery, which used to keep its movies and TV shows for HBO Max. Now, the company is licensing its content to third parties. “As FAST continues to explode in popularity amongst cord-cutters, we’re seeing content players increasingly shift their focus towards capturing this audience, by bringing some of their best stuff to FAST,” said Rob Holmes, the VP of Programming at Roku Channel, in a statement. “The rapid expansion of premium content on FAST is a win for both the viewer and content owner, as well as advertisers looking to reach these audiences through well-known programming. Roku says the channels will arrive in spring 2023 and that the deal will bring in hundreds of TV series and movies from Warner Bros. Discovery’s portfolio, including HBO, HBO Max, Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network, TLC, Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Bros. Television and more. Tubi says it will add to the platform 14 WB-branded FAST channels totaling more than 2,000 hours, starting on February 1, organized by genre. “Warner Bros. Discovery has a catalogue that TV lovers can’t get enough of and Tubi is proudly making many of these recent hits from Warner Bros. Discovery available to new audiences this month,” said Adam Lewinson, the chief content officer at Tubi, in a statement. The news comes as Warner Bros. Discovery . HBO, HBO Max and Discovery+ ended the third quarter with a combined net add of 2.8 million global subscribers, bringing the total to 94.9 million, up from  in Q2. Wall Street had anticipated a net add of subscribers. Analysts were bullish on revenue and expected  , Warner Bros. Discovery sorely missed expectations and reported a total of $9.82 billion. The company will release its Q4 2022 earnings report next month.

Select Star closes $15M round to add context to disparate data

Kyle Wiggers

, a startup providing data discovery, lineage and governance tools to mostly enterprise organizations, today announced that it raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from “The explosion of data and apps makes it challenging to ensure good data governance while allowing data teams to leverage all the appropriate data in a self-service fashion,” ed the company’s internet of things data platform for real-time messaging, and — while there — noticed an unfortunate pattern. According to Kim, many of Akamai’s enterprise clients were running into issues understanding and using all their data as they moved to cloud database infrastructures, usually because t By “context,” Kim means an aggregate view of how data’s flowing and being used within and between services, apps and tools — which is exactly what Select Star provides. The platform analyzes metadata and logs from Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Databricks, Tableau, Looker and other popular platforms, and then attempts to automatically tag and distill events down into bullet points. Select Star also  Select Star “We automatically generate customers’ data model, data lineage, documentation, detect personally identifiable information and more, so there’s minimal work required on the setup and you can get insights right away,” Kim said. “Our column-level lineage models give a deep understanding of end-to-end data flows, which helps data teams to avoid data models and dashboards from breaking.” This sort of context, Kim avers, can help enterprises become more data-driven — particularly those that work with multiple, large, disparate data sets on a regular basis. For example, a business might want to look at sales data, marketing data and product usage data together to get a complete profile of a customer. Gathering and normalizing all that info might present a challenge not only from a technical perspective, but because different departments and people might interpret the data in different ways. To Kim’s point, for one reason or another, few companies consider themselves truly data-driven despite their best efforts. In a 2021 NewVantage survey, only 30% having a well-articulated data strategy. A separate recent from Accenture found that only 33% of businesses trust “their data enough to use it effectively and derive value from it.” And in a 2019 conducted by Arm Treasure Data, 47% of respondents indicated that their company’s data was “siloed and difficult to access.” “Having an automated data discovery platform like Select Star can act as the single source of truth that everyone can refer to,” Kim said. “This helps eliminate any confusion, fosters trust in data and encourages more analytics work to be done effectively.” I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the other startups tackling this same problem, in some cases from noticeably different angles. comes to mind — it’s building data catalogs, or collections of metadata, data management and search tools designed to help users find the data they need within an organization. There’s also , and , which similarly offer data search and data lineage-tracking tools, as well as data observability firms such as and . Kim expressed confidence that Select Star can compete — and is competing — exceptionally well, though, pointing to a customer base that includes Square parent company Block, Pitney Bowes, Fivetran, Opendoor and Handshake. She declined to comment on revenue metrics, but said that the plan is to double Select Star’s 20-person workforce by the end of the year, suggesting some optimism about the future.

Orbital Sidekick raises $10M to bring hyperspectral imaging to oil and gas pipeline monitoring

Aria Alamalhodaei

Historically, oil and gas companies have monitored pipeline leaks using inefficient, expensive methods: workers equipped with handheld optical gas imaging cameras, for example. Or, as CEO Dan Katz put it in a recent interview with TechCrunch, “a young pilot sticking their head out the window of a crop-duster.” “There’s really no persistent, objective, high-accuracy monitoring service that’s available to operators today,” he said. So he and Orbital Sidekick co-founder Tushar Prabhakar set out to create one. Their startup’s solution is a data analytics product that generates intelligence using a constellation of satellites equipped with hyperspectral sensors — and it’s caught the energy industry’s attention. Today, Orbital Sidekick announced the close of a $10 million investment led by Energy Innovation Capital, with additional participation from major North American energy companies Williams and ONEOK. The University of Minnesota’s Endowment and existing investors 11.2 Capital, Syndicate 708 and the CIA’s strategic investment arm In-Q-Tel also participated. The new capital is a major boon as the startup seeks to launch its first space-based commercial analytics product and as it gears up to launch its first two commercial satellites in April, aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-7 rideshare mission. Orbital Sidekick is also planning to launch two satellites, which it calls Global Hyperspectral Observation Satellite (GHOSt), each aboard Transporter-8 and Transporter-9. That means if all goes to plan, the company will have a six-satellite GHOSt constellation in orbit before winter this year. Orbital Sidekick was founded by Katz and Prabhakar in 2016. Keeping true to the mythos of Silicon Valley, the two founded the company in Katz’s garage in San Francisco. The pair had met while working for Space Systems/Loral, a legacy space company that was acquired by Maxar in 2012. Katz has an academic background in physics and astrophysics, while Prabhakar has experience working for some energy tech companies; combined, the two realized there could be real demand for hyperspectral imagery in energy and other sectors. The company sent its first tech demo to space in 2018 — a breadbox-sized hyperspectral camera that spent a year-and-half bolted outside the International Space Station. That was followed by a 30-kilogram tech demo satellite called Aurora, which launched in June 2021. (The GHOSt satellites are 100 kilograms each.) Alongside this, the company has been generating revenue through aerial programs, which use the hyperspectral system on an aircraft that flies at an altitude of about 1,000 feet. But the company quickly realized that aerial was not a scalable solution. “There are millions of miles of pipeline across the world,” Katz said. “To try to do that with aircraft is just not feasible, or scalable, from a margin standpoint.” Hyperspectral lets companies “see” the chemical fingerprint of different substances, like gas, by collecting and measuring hundreds of wavelength bands. For pipelines in particular, hyperspectral information can help identify leaks even if the pipeline is buried underground, as is the case with the vast majority. Compared to competitors, Katz said Orbital Sidekick provides higher resolution, at eight meters per pixel, by collecting more than 500 spectral channels. But the “big differentiator,” he said, is the company’s in-house analytics and intelligence platform. That product is called SIGMA, or Spectral Intelligence Global Monitoring Application. Orbital Sidekick is also developing solutions for defense customers. Notably, the company won a $16 million STRATFI, or Strategic Funding Increase, contract from the U.S. Air Force that matched dollar-for-dollar its $16 million Series A. For defense customers, hyperspectral imagery could be used to detect chemical weapons, or used with other imaging sensors to provide warfighters with a more complete picture of a battlefield. “Sixteen million dollars in non-diluted capital really just helped accelerate our constellation plans,” Katz said. Looking ahead, Orbital Sidekick is planning to expand within the energy sector, monitoring not just oil and gas pipelines but oil wells or off-shore oil facilities. Katz said the company is interested in exploring how customers can use Orbital Sidekick’s data and tech to verify carbon credits under a carbon credit marketplace. The startup also has plans in place to expand the GHOSt constellation to at least 14 satellites, to provide, Katz said, a hyperspectral “atlas of the world.”

Report: Stripe tried to raise more funding at a $55B-$60B valuation

Mary Ann Azevedo

“ Raising more capital at a $55 billion to $60 billion valuation would certainly be characterized as a down round but Stripe would hardly be the first large fintech to do so. Fellow European and BNPL behemoth Klarna last year , an 85% drop compared to the it was valued at in June of 2021.    

India central bank orders SBM local unit to stop outward remittance transactions

Manish Singh

India’s central bank has directed SBM Bank India to stop all outward remittance transactions in a blow to the bank and many of its fintech partners that offer services allowing users to invest in foreign services. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said in a brief statement Monday that it has ordered SBM Bank India to stop all transactions under Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) till further orders. LRS is a set of guidelines by the RBI that enable Indian residents to remit capital overseas. “Certain material supervisory concerns” at the bank prompted the central bank to reach the decision, RBI said. SBM Bank India is one of the most fintech-friendly startups and has tie ups with dozens of young firms. A number of startups — including INDMoney, Vested and NiYO Global, according to descriptions on their websites — have tieups with the bank to offer their customers a number of features, including forex transactions and the ability to purchase foreign stocks. Some of these startups are already working to partner with an alternative bank, according to a source familiar with the matter. SBM Bank India was in talks late last year to at a pre-money valuation of about $200 million, TechCrunch reported earlier.

Remote work revolution helps Deel reach $295M in ARR

Mary Ann Azevedo

reached $295 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by the end of 2022, the company’s co-founder and CEO Alex Bouaziz today. In today, Deel also said it is offering a new basic product, Deel HR, for free for any business with fewer than 200 people. It also unveiled a Deel Engage, a set of HR Slack plugins designed “to help distributed teams build stronger culture, improve employee engagement, and measure adoption with powerful metrics.” The startup also announced the expansion of its global payroll offering by building what it described as its “first in-house payroll engine,” starting with the U.S. The expansion aims to help companies hire globally without opening legal entities and consolidating payroll, among other things, Deel said. Over the past year, the global HR space has heated up. In October, for example, Rippling , stating it was specifically competing with companies like Deel.

Being the steady hand in market uncertainty with Sebastian Siemiatkowski from Klarna

Rebecca Szkutak

Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. In this week’s episode and are joined by , the co-founder and CEO of . Sebastian talks about what led him to found the startup and how it has navigated multiple market cycles since. He also dives into how Klarna has grown in different categories and which have been more successful than others. Plus, he talks about why he’s been so transparent about the company’s valuation and status amid 2022’s market turmoil. to hear more stories from founders each week. Connect with us:

Protect me from what I want

Anna Heim

I thought that tougher economic times would create immediate headwinds for the buy now, pay later trend. I was wrong. “BNPL is a form of credit that allows a consumer to split a retail transaction into smaller, interest-free installments and repay over time,” and it is “in the midst of rapid growth,” a September stated. More recently, the Financial Times that “demand for BNPL boomed during the pandemic and has continued to grow, according to data from U.K. open banking fintech Snoop.” This isn’t just a Gen Z trend, the FT added: Demand “has surged among all age groups in the U.K., including older people, who find themselves squeezed by the cost of living crisis and in need of short-term credit.”

Method raises $16M to power loan repayment, balance transfers and more across fintech apps

Kyle Wiggers

, a startup that aims to make it easier for fintech developers to embed repayment, balance transfers and bill pay automation into their apps, today announced that it closed a $16 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Truist Ventures, Y Combinator (Method’s a Y Combinator graduate), Abstract Ventures, SV Angel and others. Co-founder Mit Shah says that the new cash will be put toward product development and growing the company’s headcount from eight people to 28 by the end of the year. Method launched in 2021 after two of the company’s co-founders, Jose Bethancourt and Marco del Carmen, experienced firsthand the difficulties of embedding debt repayment into their previous company, GradJoy. (TechCrunch previously GradJoy, which sought to help students better manage their loan repayment plans through an app-based system.) Integrating student loans into the GradJoy app turned out to be a patchwork of brittle, insecure screen-scraping APIs, physical check mailing and compliance hurdles, according to Shah. “Jose and Marco realized that there was an opportunity to provide developers with an embeddable API to add debt repayment to their apps and services,” Shah told TechCrunch in an email interview. “In May 2021, we started Method to provide developers with a turnkey infrastructure.” Shah points out that there’s no standard, technically easy way to access all of a person’s financial liabilities — their student loans, credit cards, mortgages and so on — and push money to those liabilities. Due to the lack of standardization, newer-age fintechs have resorted to using screen scrapers and login credential-based methods to aggregate and access the data, he says. But there’s a downside to those approaches. It can take a long time to onboard new financial institutions, and the lack of a direct connection makes it impossible to perform actions, like paying loans, on users’ behalves. Method “The industry has been chasing ‘open finance’ by developing solutions around user credentials and working indirectly with financial institutions,” Shah said. “We go straight to the source to enable read and write access for all of a consumer’s liabilities.” Method works by leveraging consumer credit access protections enacted into law as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. Tapping into identity verification data from credit bureaus (e.g. Equifax) and wireless carriers (e.g. T-Mobile) and combining it with real-time data from financial institutions’ core banking systems, Method can collate a person’s liabilities across more than 60,000 institutions in the U.S. and kick off tasks such as balance transfers, payoffs, bill pay and more. “Method’s data API allows our customers — consumer-facing businesses — to retrieve all of a user’s existing liabilities using just their phone number. The liability accounts, once connected, are instantly writable and payable,” Shah explained. “ Method handles a lot of sensitive data, which might give some end-customers pause. But Shah said the company’s privacy policy is written to allay consumer advocates’ fears, specifying that Method collects only “minimum user information” and doesn’t sell user data to third parties. In another step to establish trust, the startup’s planning to launch a portal where users will be able to log in with Method to manage the data they share with other apps and services. Method claims it has 35 customers and more than 75,000 users, with annual recurring revenue sitting at around $2.25 million. While the startup competes with big names like Plaid, MX, Spinwheel and Dwolla, Shah sees Method holding its own, particularly as the platform rolls out new features in the next few months including real-time credit card transactions, instant balance transfers and enhanced live data points for liabilities. “Currently, new-age fintechs don’t have access to [sophisticated] infrastructure and traditional finance institutions have manual processes set up to retrieve real-time data on consumer credit lines or make payments towards them via checks,” Shah said. “We provide fintechs the ability to innovate faster and compete with larger banks with our turnkey real time data and payment operations. Traditional institutions can onboard users faster and see large savings on manual back end processes … We’ve seen demand for our product from all areas of traditional finance and new-age fintechs in the lending, debt consolidation and personal finance management space.” To date, Method has raised $18.5 million in venture capital.

B2B sales closing and financing platform Vartana raises $12M

Kyle Wiggers

The industry is facing budget constraints and reductions in headcount as a result of the pandemic and the broader slowdown in tech. Companies have tightened up their budgets for SaaS purchases, looking to keep cash on hand while growing more efficiently. That’s why Kush Kella and Ahmed Sharif founded (which my colleague Mary Ann recently). While working together at fleet management company Motive, Kella and Sharif say they dealt with the pains and problems caused by broken SaaS contract management and rigid payment infrastructure. After years watching deals falls through due to a lack of payment flexibility, they left Motive to build Vartana, aiming to equip companies with a managed platform that helps sales reps close deals. “Vartana is a win-win for sellers and buyers of SaaS services and hardware products,” Kella told TechCrunch in an email interview. “It gives vendors new tools to close contracts and generate cash with prepaid deals while offering buyers various payment options and a simplified purchasing experience, ensuring buyers are able to purchase the best technology available to grow their business.” Vartana today announced that it raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Mayfield with participation from Xerox Ventures, Flex Capital and Audacious Ventures, bringing its total raised to $19 million. Vartana also secured a $50 million line of credit from i80 Group, which Kella says will ensure financed deals can be managed through Vartana’s new capital marketplace. “With the launch of apital marketplace, no longer holds buyer debt in their books, ensuring a balance sheet-light business,” Kella said. “We’re focused on lean, effective growth. We’ve found strong success in the SaaS industry and we’re doubling down.” Vartana’s platform, which Kella refers to as a “sales closing” platform, is designed to be used by sellers of business-to-business software, hardware and hardware paired with SaaS software. Vartana helps to manage tasks like contract tracking, payment terms and signature capture, accepting a range of different payment options (e.g., pay in full, deferred payment) and installment plans. Sellers can send multiple quotes at one time and give buyers the flexibility to select which payment style works for them. Once payment has been selected, the buyer can e-sign the agreement from the web or mobile, finalizing the deal. Vartana On the capital marketplace side, Vartana-developed algorithms normalize data, rate each buyer and extend debt financing offers. The platform matches buyer loan requests to a network of banks and lenders, allowing buyers to request funds and receive quotes in real time. “When deals are financed, either traditionally through a bank or via the Vartana platform, sellers get paid on day one,” Kella said. “New non-dilutive cash flow is acquired for the entirety of a deal, sometimes up to five years of future cash, and buyers don’t have to pay upfront, meaning they get to keep cash in their bank account and pay a monthly fee, ensuring they stay nimble and can invest cash in the areas of their business that need it most.” Kella sees Vartana — which works with “dozens” of sales departments at companies like Verkada, Samsara and Motive and with over 10,000 buyers, he claims — as competing with startups, including , Cashflow and . Ratio has been particularly successful as of late, bagging $411 million in equity and credit last September. But he doesn’t see them as direct competitors, pointing out that Vartana’s model hinges on delivering financing to buyers and targeting late-stage tech companies. On the subject, Vartana recently launched a closing platform that enables sales reps to “market” financing and deferred payments to any buyer. “This is particularly important in a world where cash is king and companies are looking for ways to keep cash on hand,” Kella explained. “Providing self-serve financing as an option to all buyers helps buyers keep hold of cash and pay for products over time while sellers get access to full contract value on day one.” Kella didn’t answer a question about Vartana’s revenue. But he said that financing volume grew 600% year over year while the company’s headcount grew 4x. The plan is to increase the size of the workforce further from 40 employees to 85 by the end of 2023. Patrick Salyer, a Mayfield partner and a Vartana investor, added via email: “In business-to-business enterprise software, time kills all deals. This is especially true in the deal closing process, where there is a shocking amount of offline back and forth between vendor, buyer and financing teams that takes weeks and causes deals to push to the next quarter or die all together. Vartana’s business-to-business enterprise sales closing and financing platform brings this to an end with a fully digital checkout platform with integrated proposals, signatures, payments and self service financing, improving conversion, sales cycles, order values and managing cashflow, obviously critical for the current economy.”

Reimbursement and spend management platform PayEm secures $220M in equity and debt

Kyle Wiggers

When Itamar Jobani, a software developer by trade, was working for a healthcare company, he dreaded doing expense reports every month using his employer’s preferred reimbursement tool. Jobani looked for an alternative but didn’t end up finding one — and so he built it himself. , as it came to be known, launched in 2019 — Jobani partnered with fellow developer Omer Rimoch to get the idea off the ground. Creating a spend and procurement platform from scratch might’ve been a big risk, but it appears to have paid off for Jobani, who claims that PayEm now has “hundreds” of customers and fast-growing revenue (up 550% over the last year). To set the stage for further growth, PayEm has closed a $20 million Series A equity round and taken out a $200 million credit line, the company announced today. Viola Credit, Mitsubishi Financial Group, Collaborative Fund, Pitango First, NFX, LocalGlobe and Glilot+ are among those who contributed the $220 million in funds, which Jobani says will be put toward expanding PayEm’s card operations, serving larger customers and improving the employee experience within the core digital product. Why the decision to raise debt versus equity? Jobani says that it came down to a matter of timing — and flexibility. PayEm opted for warehouse lending, where its lender set up a facility that PayEm can access and use to seed its own loan origination. As more customers borrow from PayEm, both PayEm and the lender profit off the lending. Warehouse lending is relatively common in fintech. Buy now, pay later startup Afterpay had five warehouse facilities at the end of 2022. “In order to continue and support the expansion of our customers, we are using a credit facility … to finance our customers’ short-term payments,” Jobani told TechCrunch via email. “A credit warehouse facility is a tool perfectly structured to support our customers’ payments activity and provide them with monthly payment terms in order for them to keep their businesses flowing as our business continues to grow. The size of this credit raising reflects the growing volume of monthly transactions on the PayEm platform.” PayEm PayEm offers procurement tools and workflows for expense approval automation, accounts payable automation, purchase order creation, expense reimbursement and credit card management. Its “record-to-report” platform captures employee spending requests, involving relevant stakeholders for approval based on the data collected and providing budgeting capabilities for budget overseers. “[With PayEm,] CEOs and CFOs get complete control and visibility into real-time spend at the subsidiary, department and even employee level to ensure 360-degree efficiency,” Jobani said. “Meanwhile, VPs of procurement get everything from request to reconciliation, all in one place, and employees get real-time visibility and control over every aspect of budget spend. PayEm makes it easy to request funds, file reimbursements and issue employee-specific corporate cards — all while keeping spend and budget under control.” Of course, PayEm isn’t the only vendor offering this — and it’s no wonder, given how lucrative the space is. to Verified Market Research, the total spend management software market was valued at $1.08 billion in 2019 and could reach $3.97 billion by 2027. Startup Airbase — which early last year on a corporate card pilot — is valued at $600 million. , which automates accounts payables for small- and medium-sized businesses, recently secured $270 million. There’s also publicly traded Bill.com, Brex ( ), Ramp ( ) and Zip ( ). But Jobani points to PayEm’s continued expansion as evidence that it’s beating back the competition successfully. The platform now creates bills and sends payments to over 200 territories and 130 currencies, and in the past year, its customer base has grown by close to 300%. PayEm’s workforce — which is spread across offices in San Francisco, New York and Tel Aviv — is also expanding, now standing at around 100 full-time employees. Recent additions to the C-suite include chief revenue officer Steve Sovik, previously the CRO of Tipalti, and VP of product Gilad Bonjack, formerly at HiBob and Lightsticks. “With the current macroeconomic conditions, it’s never been more important for companies to have an efficient and clear lens into their financial health. We’re pleased to be that single source of truth for them as they may weather turbulent times, navigate supply chain issues and simply need to do more with less,” Jobani added. “While the software-as-a-service industry is impacted by the overall mood, what we are seeing is that our product value is increasing during times like this, helping to visualize spend, reduce costs and make the entire procure-to-pay process easy and transparent.”

Bling Capital-backed Coverdash unveils its embedded, digital insurance for small businesses

Christine Hall

, providing small businesses, e-commerce merchants and gig-economy workers with insurance, launched its product in all 50 states after closing over $2.5 million in seed capital. The round was led by Bling Capital, with participation from investors, including AXIS Digital Ventures, Tokio Marine Future Fund (in affiliation with World Innovation Lab), Expansion VC and Cameron Ventures. A group of strategic angel investors also participated, including Greg Hendrick, CEO of Vantage Risk; Garrett Koehn, president of CRC Insurance; and Steve Shenfeld, president of MidOcean Partners. The New York City-based insurtech was started by Ralph Betesh, David Vainer and Avery Rubin in 2022 to help smaller businesses source coverage in seconds and to provide an embedded technology so that partners working with businesses, like online marketplaces and service providers, can plug in Coverdash’s end-to-end insurance experience with a single line of code. The company secured 35 of these partners pre-launch, Betesh told TechCrunch. Betesh, who started his career in insurance investment banking, said that large insurance carriers want those equally large policies to show top line growth to investors, so they often focus on big companies, and have done so for years now. However, he saw a dynamic shift in the last two or three years of big carriers looking at smaller businesses “as a way to pick up fragmented premiums without necessarily having to go head to head with each other,” Betesh said. This is where many startups were successful in developing some , and also attracting venture capital dollars. Coverdash’s insurance policy dashboard. Coverdash Betesh himself began to look at what the process was for small businesses to get insurance and found, in his words, “a lot of clunkiness” and “murky” processes with no transparency. In addition, customers weren’t able to purchase policies without speaking to a human being. “It just wasn’t the purchase experience that I would have expected,” Betesh added. “We felt like this wasn’t in alignment with small business expectations in the U.S., specifically tech-enabled small businesses.” So the team set out to build a product that would make insurance accessible to small businesses of all shapes and sizes and one that was seamless and simple. It works with over a dozen carriers to offer policies including liability, property, workers’ compensation and cyber. Here’s how it works: Customers come to the Coverdash site, and they can get a quote, bind policies together, pay for them and manage them in a matter of seconds. Betesh said there’s no redirection of the customer to a payment portal, a carrier portal or to speak to an agent, everything can be done through Coverdash. Though the company is offering policies in a direct-to-consumer format, Betesh said the Coverdash’s future scale and revenue will likely come from policies sold through those partners that will embed its technology into their websites. Meanwhile, the new funding will be used for go-to-market initiatives, product and technology development and hiring. “The development and adoption of commercial insurance APIs within the insurtech industry has reached a tipping point, enabling innovative companies with the opportunity to drive true growth and transformation,” said Ben Ling, founder and general partner at Bling Capital, in a written statement. “We view Coverdash as the future of business insurance and embedded distribution.”

Zenfi takes in new funding to bring Mexicans some financial peace

Christine Hall

Luis Rubén Chávez, founder and CEO of , says consumer finance in Mexico and across Latin America “is basically broken.” “Achieving basic financial health in Mexico for around 50 to 60 million people is really hard,” he told TechCrunch. “Two out of three Mexicans have a subprime credit score with basically no tools to improve.” Financial technology has exploded in Mexico and Latin America over the last couple of years, driven by startups and , in part because founders like Chávez, whose background is in consumer financing, think there has to be an easier way to help people get financing without charging over a 100% annual percentage rate on credit card and personal costs. To put that in perspective, an . So seven years ago, Chávez started building the free super app Zenfi, a financial health platform that he describes as “if Credit Karma, SoFi, Marcus and Copilot Money had a kid, it would be us.” A top feature of the platform is what he touts as the lowest interest rate in Mexico, an average of 19% APR. Zenfi also offers free credit tracking and integrates with open banking. It also plugs into the country’s tax system so that users can access tax returns and filing tools. One of the newest features is a personal finance manager. App users answer some questions, input their financial data sources and get long-term personal financial planning, Chávez said. Seven years after creating Zenfi, the company has more than 3 million users, many who use the platform to consolidate and pay off their debt from another bank, he added. It has distributed over $100 million in loans, has a 3.4% default rate and $10 million in annual recurring revenue generated from interest rates, small fees associated with credit score checks and commissions from the investment products. Not only has the company been able to show profitability with that business model, but it also achieved that having previously raised less than $3 million. Having reached profitability is how Chávez said the company is able to take a new round of funding, this time $8.5 million in new capital led via Magma Partners. Cometa, Redwood Ventures, Polígono, Conny & Co. and an AngelList syndicate led by Peter Livingston participated as well. Chávez intends to deploy the new funds into dozens of features in the pipeline, including debit and credit products. He is also eyeing three countries in Latin America where he feels Zenfi’s business model will do well. In addition, Chávez will hire more people to add to Zenfi’s 60-person team. “Right now, we have the biggest fintech lending licenses and personal loan company in Mexico and a benchmark for volume and portfolio quality,” he added. “We are trying to make a dent in the Mexican financial system and want to go from $100 million in loans to $2 billion, so we will build the internal capabilities around the team and infrastructure.”

Despite challenges, Netflix says its ad tier is doing well

Sarah Perez

In November, Netflix its long-anticipated ad-supported tier, which offers customers in select markets, including the U.S., the ability to offset the cost of a Netflix subscription by allowing their viewing to be interrupted with ad breaks. At the in Las Vegas, Netflix President of Worldwide Advertising, Jeremi Gorman, offered some initial insight into how the product has been performing as well as the streamer’s future plans. During an interview at Variety’s Entertainment Summit at , the exec said the company has been happy with the debut selection of advertisers and their diversity. “It’s really across the board,” said Gorman, of the variety of brands participating. “We’re seeing CPG companies, luxury companies, automotive companies…[and] retail. We’re seeing a broad swath.” This is also good for the consumer experience, she noted, as it means viewers won’t be bored by one car ad after another. “There’s a wide variety of advertising types, and I think we’ll continue to see that,” Gorman predicted. The interview also touched on some of the early complaints and concerns about Netflix’s foray into ads. Among them is the key pushback the company has been receiving over its high ad prices, asking for what one industry exec dubbed “Super Bowl .” Gorman, however, justified the pricing but admitted the market will ultimately dictate what sort of pricing Netflix will be able to get. “From a supply-demand perspective, the premium CPMs are reflective of two things: one is that we just couldn’t take that many advertisers. We certainly didn’t want to disappoint anybody. Then secondarily, the premium content environment in which the ads run I think warrants a high CPM.” Whether Netflix constitutes a “premium environment” is up for debate, of course. But Netflix seems to be adjusting its expectations. “I think we’re certainly humble enough to very much understand we’re top of market, and in addition to that, the market will more or less dictate to us what are reasonable CPMs,” Gorman said. Another concern about Netflix’s ad-supported service has to do with which content can include ads. As the streamer wasn’t set up as an ad-supported service to begin with, many of its content deals didn’t include AVOD rights (advertising video on demand). That means Netflix has limited ad inventory, and couldn’t even run ads against some of its own “Netflix Originals” if the deals didn’t include the proper rights. Gorman addressed this as well, saying Netflix was actively working on the licensing issues. “That’s progressing, as we speak, day by day. We’re renegotiating deals we made a long time ago,” she said, adding that the “vast majority” of content that people watch regularly is available in the ad-tier surface. In the meantime, Netflix has about 85% to 95% of its content available on the ad tier, Gorman said. Then there’s the real concern that, from a business perspective, offering a lower-cost tier has the potential to cannibalize Netflix’s existing subscriptions as customers drop to cheaper tiers at a quicker rate that’s not offset by growth in the ads tier. Gorman, though, downplayed those concerns, saying Netflix customers historically have remained on the plan they’re currently on. The exec, unfortunately, couldn’t speak to the uptake of the ads-supported product, as Netflix is poised to announce earnings, but said “we’re pleased with the growth we’re seeing.” At present, Netflix’s ad tier is available in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Canada and Mexico. The company has no immediate plans to expand, but longer-term would aim to target any larger ad market. In addition to ads, subscribers on the Basic with Ads plan have to deal with lower video quality (720p HD) and are limited to streaming from one device. They also can’t download content to their devices for offline viewing. Going forward, Netflix aims to do a bit more than just running typical ads, including things like dynamic insertion of ads near moments that are relevant to marketers, single-show sponsorships, and more. It will also later allow marketers to target ads by age and gender.

Deconstructing ‘The Twitter Files’

Devin Coldewey

which the so-called Twitter Files have been released is incongruous with the mundanity of their content. Even so, as the circus folds up the big top and the barkers return to their Substacks, it is worth a thorough retrospective to put these breathlessly delivered, revelation-flavored products in context. That few large news outlets have opted to report much of the information in these threads has been attributed to complaisance, partisanship, complicity with government interference or various species of corruption. The banal truth is that, if other newsrooms are anything like our own, they read each as a matter of diligence, and simply found nothing new or interesting to report, or what little there was contaminated by the dubious circumstances of their presentation. What’s important to understand at the outset — and what the authors make clear from the start — is that no one involved in the selection and analysis of the internal communications appears to have any familiarity with (let alone expertise in) how social media and tech platforms are moderated or run. This is not said in order to poison the well — it matters because this lack of familiarity is in great part the reason these stories were published to begin with, and it explains the editorial slant they are given. In each Twitter Files thread, we see unfounded assumptions, insinuations and personal interpretations given equal weight as facts, more or less establishing these as opinion pieces rather than factual reporting. That alone will have spiked a great deal of coverage, as however salacious the theory, little of what is actually provided satisfies editorial standards in many a newsroom. It must also be obvious by now that this ostensible act of transparency was conducted with a definite goal: to discredit the previous moderation and management teams, and advance a narrative of systematic anti-conservative activity at Twitter. This has resulted, both deliberately and by neglect of basic best practices, in harassment and targeting of individuals. Plainly this is all orchestrated by Elon Musk, whose spite is equally plain in the wake of his botched purchase of the platform — an event that has been catastrophic to his wealth and reputation. But catastrophe loves company, and he seems insistent that all receive a portion of his ruin. That said, given the natural curiosity of our readership on these matters, I thought it may be of interest to catalogue the claims in one place, as well as what rendered most of them unreportable, despite occasionally containing notable information. The inaugural thread unambiguously and repeatedly shows working moderators grappling honestly with difficult decisions. It also shows the inbox of a content moderation response team: not a dark and secret back channel but an official means for governments (the U.S. and others), individuals, companies, law enforcement and anyone else with special insight or purpose to communicate with the company’s dedicated department. There are no surreptitious “connected actors,” this is essentially customer service. The assertion that there were “more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left” is completely unsupported. The question of First Amendment violations is a massive red herring, aided by Musk, who publicly aired his misinterpretation of it in the replies. As the thread notes, “there’s no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story.” Government requests, as documented and discussed publicly for years, are routine. Private requests, like the Biden campaign flagging non-consensually shared nude images of Hunter Biden as violations of Twitter’s terms of service, are routine. Here as in other threads, the source documents themselves may well be of interest, but are not reliable as presented and do not demonstrate the claims stated. And it must be recorded here how slapdash the redaction and presentation of the information was, giving a sense of carelessness and overhaste to these supposedly momentous reports. The second thread is an exercise in fear, uncertainty and doubt that depicts the tools of a functioning social media moderation team as those of a secret speech-controlling elite. Flags and moderation functions are not public by design, as some of the information is proprietary to Twitter, personally identifiable to the account, or the type of thing to be taken advantage of by malicious actors, who would redline behavior if they knew exactly how the system worked. By the definition applied here, much of what goes on in company is “secret.” Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Sony, Amazon — any company that maintains and monitors large numbers of users and communications has a “secret” system like this. It was nice to peek behind the curtain, which was in that context; I would have done the same if one of those other companies’ non-public moderation practices had been exposed. But in keeping with the intended narrative, the thread only shows examples of moderation actions that affect a handful of conservative fringe accounts. We can’t know if and how these tools were used in other circumstances, such as putting a left-leaning account on a “trends blacklist,” because that data is withheld — “secret,” as Weiss would no doubt put it. It would be irresponsible to draw conclusions based on such purposefully manipulated data. The thread also does a bit of prestidigitation in the matter of “shadow banning,” which Twitter publicly denies doing according to its own, also public definition. Weiss redefines the term as something Twitter do (industry-standard moderation practices) and concludes that the company has lied retroactively. The disingenuous presentation discourages coverage. The deliberations of a social media moderation team put in the unprecedented situation of deciding whether and how to suspend a sitting president’s account (and how to adjust policies going forward) are interesting in a fundamental way; however, the way this information is presented is again too suspect for any reporter to trust and report. With no access to the original chat logs, it is impossible to say whether the conversations here are accurately represented or, as is far more likely given how the narrative in which they are couched, selectively shown (though in fairness, the process by which these logs were given to the authors is not entirely in their control). What little we are privy to is not particularly notable. The “interaction” with federal agencies is also given a FUD treatment. As noted above, law enforcement and governments are of necessity in constant contact with every social media company — indeed, with all of tech and much of commerce and industry in general. It really is part of their job, and yes, there are agents and specialists designated for social media and tech duty, just as there are some detailed to shipping, manufacturing, finance, etc. Whatever one’s opinion on this practice (and let me just say, I am no bootlicker myself), it surely isn’t news. The attempt to transmute these “interactions” into “intimidation” or “obligation” is not successful. A presidential election following several marked by attempts (successful or not) at interference by foreign adversaries is of natural interest to the FBI, among other authorities, and a weekly check-in seems the bare minimum to keep each other informed of potential influence campaigns, trends in cybersecurity, relevant intelligence and so on. Let us not forget that Twitter amounts to essential communications infrastructure for every government agency at this point; monitoring it is an important but quite ordinary matter. It would be far more surprising and worth investigating if this contact exist. The discussion documented here is only partial, but it seems to show, as before, the team grappling with evolving circumstances and figuring out in real time how the company should respond. In one quoted chat message, former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth puts it quite clearly: “Policy is one part of the system of how Twitter works… we ran into the world changing faster than we were able to either adapt the product or the policy.” As a private company running its own fast-moving social platform, obviously Twitter changes its policies regularly, and also makes exceptions to them at its discretion; in fact had made them before in favor of Trump. This was a notable exception, of course, but also the result of extensive internal discussion — which acknowledges both the ad hoc nature of the actions and policies, and their gravity as well. It seems strange for this thread to say no discussion was had when one is clearly shown here and in the next thread. (Perhaps it’s a matter of opinion what “expressing concern” looks like.) All of this was also widely, discussed and reported by pretty much everyone in the world at the time. Again, reading the actual discussions of dozens of people throughout the company — not “a handful” as it is characterized — in an unprecedented situation is , but difficult to report on given the lack of context and editorialized presentation. These internal debates are more or less what anyone would expect, and hope, of a company trying to figure out how to handle this. The chat logs do offer a note of specificity long after the fact, but the (by this point obligatory) attempt to cast it as an elite group making directed choices to “influence the public discourse and democracy” is again unsupported, and also contradictory with the notion, elsewhere advanced, that this group was being controlled by the FBI and other government agencies. “The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.” It may be new to some, but as noted above, this is quite an ordinary and well-documented practice: for law enforcement, and political parties, and government agencies, and private companies, etc., to call content or accounts to the attention of a platform’s moderation team. It has been done for a long time, and in fact much of it is publicly declared by major tech companies in their , which list government requests and orders, what they pertained to and how many resulted in some kind of action, or provoked a challenge or request for a warrant. Notably the thread actually shows this kind of pushback happening. This type of form email can be found in every platform’s moderation team inbox. Incidentally, the description of so prosaic a greeting as “Hello Twitter Contacts, FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts…” as having a “master-canine quality” is a real puzzler. I’m genuinely unsure who is meant to be the master and who the canine. There is of course room for debate on how much the government (among other entities) can or should request, legally, procedurally and ethically speaking. As is the revolving door of high-level corporate and lobbyist positions and government officials. Fortunately for us, just such a debate has been ongoing for two decades. It surely must have bemused many reporters in this space that a topic discussed so widely and for so long is being treated as new or controversial. Even if anyone at any newsroom thought it was worth re-(re-)litigating the laptop story, which was discussed at the time, the way information is presented in this thread is dangerously disingenuous. The sleight of hand occurs in drawing connections between things with no actual connection — conspiracy theory “logic.” For instance, two facts: One, the FBI was aware of the laptop, and had collected it; two, the FBI sent some documents to Twitter just before the NY Post published its story. These are presented as if clearly linked. But as the other threads made clear, these FBI document drops were quite a regular occurrence, as often as weekly (in fact later threads complain information was shared frequently). And there is no evidence the FBI considered the laptop a specific “hack-and-leak” threat, let alone expressed that to parties like Twitter (the general be-on-lookout months earlier is weak tea). Not only is the significance of either fact unsupported individually, but they are connected in the thread in an unsupported way. This type of suggestive free association occurs repeatedly. And magically, an elaborate “influence operation” uniting the FBI, IC, a think tank, and a few other villains is assembled, like a corkboard with pins and yarn criss-crossing it. (Never mind that subsequent threads show they could barely organize a cross-agency conference call.) Under even the slightest scrutiny this vast conspiracy evaporates, and what is left is clearly a loose collection of people talking about potential cyberthreats in a tense election season. Few newsrooms would approve of presenting such feats of conjecture as fact, if any reporter even considered using such flimflam as the basis of their own article. This claim is actually true — or was. We clocked the roll-up of this U.S. influence operation , but this was still a thread that we read with interest. Every government performs propaganda operations here and there, with various degrees of success and secrecy (both low in this case); it’s table stakes in intelligence. We see networks of fake accounts , though understandably the ones that are given the most press are foreign operations intending to influence U.S. discourse; these grew so numerous that Facebook started and we left off covering all but the most notable, since they were clearly rationing them for positive news cycles. In this case, an ask was made to give a number of officially military-associated propaganda accounts slightly privileged status (immunity from spam reports, for instance). Twitter agreed, but later the military removed the association disclosure from the accounts, rendering them “covert,” though possibly the word overstates the case. This angered Twitter, but either they felt they could not renege on their deal with the Pentagon, or, given how small and ineffective these accounts clearly were, decided it didn’t really matter much one way or the other. (In retrospect, given the bad PR, they probably wish they had hammered it. But hindsight is 20/20, as most of the Twitter Files demonstrate.) To observe a U.S. operation to influence discourse abroad is interesting, and it does (and did) prompt legitimate questions of how closely tech companies should work with the Defense Department and intelligence community. Ultimately we felt that peeling back this layer of the onion was laudable but further coverage on our part was superfluous. Here we see the government’s haphazard approach to communicating with tech, with multiple agencies and cross-agency task forces overdoing it in various ways (primarily too much email). The number of accounts being flagged by law enforcement and government was already high and rising; Twitter complained and worked hard to triage and prioritize as government requests competed with press, user flags and others for limited moderation attention. It can’t be that surprising that the government would be overzealous in its efforts to tamp down on misinformation after years of asserting and soliciting opinions on how it might affect elections. Thousands of reports sounds like a lot, but count the number of police departments, state elections authorities, federal task forces and so on, then imagine each of them finding a handful of problematic accounts or tweets each day. They add up quite quickly; it’s a big (and troubled) country, and there’s only one Twitter. Other platforms were experiencing similar overloads and government communications. That these requests were channeled through two primary channels, the FBI San Francisco office and the Foreign Influence Task Force, for flagging domestic and international issues respectively, is presented as ominous but feels simply practical. The alternative, hundreds of sources independently contacting Twitter, is infeasible. Even if we were to credit some of the accusations, it’s hard to draw conclusions because the context (beyond even “the year 2020”) is exceptional. The period before and after the 2020 election was and other social media issues. Meanwhile every government agency even tangentially related to elections was likewise overwhelmed and working overtime. It’s not clear what is meant to be shown beyond an admittedly bloated bureaucracy in action. The words used above — rig, censor, discredit, suppress — are strong. But they are not accurate, and the author, apparently a professional quibbler, applies a sort of malicious hindsight to a handful of borderline cases. The allegation here is that Twitter’s moderation team chose to use CDC recommendations as the basis for its COVID-related misinformation policy. This is neither new nor controversial, and not really even a sensible complaint. It is the role of that agency to study, justify, document, and promulgate best practices in health emergencies. What other authority should Twitter have sought for such a policy? None is suggested. Indeed no realistic alternative exists. It was a public health and misinformation emergency and clear lines needed to be drawn — fast, and rooted in some kind of authority — in order that moderation could occur at all. Twitter used the CDC in its capacity as expert agency in drawing some of those lines. It is stated in the thread categorically that “information that challenged that view… was subject to moderation, and even suppression.” Sure, sometimes. And sometimes things that should have been removed weren’t. Moderation is messy and 2020 was messiness epitomized. Mistakes were inevitable, ; it’s trivial to go back and find a few among the decisions in their millions. It’s also pointless and subjective, and feels a bit spiteful. All the thread offers is a “what if” the bar for debate had been moved an arbitrary amount in the direction the author prefers. But it conflates that notion with the idea that, because the bar was not placed correctly in his opinion (one of his quibbles is with masks, it seems germane to note here), that open debate was “censored.” We have seen censorship and this is not it. This thread was, like the earlier one, interesting in that the documents quoted show exactly the kind of improvised, scattershot approach expected by a disorganized government in response to the growing disinfo and state-sponsored digital influence ecosystem. Twitter gave them the same inch they gave everyone else — a line to the moderation team — but the feds took a mile, and then weren’t sure what to do with it. The result was more noise and less signal, until Twitter had to tell them to get their act together and decide on a few reliable points of contact (our scary “funnels” from earlier) and documentation methods. It’s always grimly entertaining to see the government flail like this, but such logistical squabbles don’t seem worth reporting. Keep in mind this was also in the spring and summer of 2020, when all hell was breaking loose in pretty much every way. As for the repeated assertion that Twitter was paid off by the feds, those are statutorily required consultation fees the FBI (Mike Masnick’s reluctant reality checks on this and other contentions have been invaluable). One note on the “narrative” side: The thread notes an “astonishing variety of requests” for account suspensions from officials. But only one is actually cited: Democratic Senator Adam Schiff’s office “asks Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry.” The request (denied) is, if you read it, actually flagging “many” accounts harassing a staffer (whose name is imperfectly redacted) and pushing QAnon conspiracy theories. Of the two named, one was already being suspended and the other was shortly after for other reasons. The choice and framing of this single example is telling. I would have liked to hear more of this “astonishing variety.” In this first place, this all happened a long time ago, and is mostly just internal emails about some news cycles where politicians were saying Twitter hadn’t done enough to prevent Russian election interference. It’s not really clear what story all these snippets are meant to tell. Second, I remember writing about this back in 2018, and the thread is pretty misleading. Although the thread quotes estimates of accounts found from two to a couple dozen, their investigation as summarized puts the number . He also says these searches were “based on the same data that later inspired panic headlines,” for instance . But that’s not true. Facebook was reporting impressions from 80,000 posts placed by suspected Russian disinformation accounts. Twitter was looking independently for such activity in its own data. Conflating them isn’t just wrong, it’s misleading and kind of weird. Again, it’s not really clear what’s being claimed here, and really important context and events are excluded from the account. Last, and least supported, was the big claim that Twitter “let the ‘USIC’ into its moderation process.” As noted above many times, government entities were already in the process, making requests on a regular basis as they have for a long time and on every platform. The change flagged here is that “any user identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber operations against targets associated with U.S. or other elections” can’t buy ads. Considering the fallout from Twitter and Facebook taking money from accounts later linked to state-sponsored propaganda, this seems… smart. Open to abuse by the government, sure, but it’s hardly unique in that respect. This thread seems to concern a “misleading” label on a single tweet by one guy who claimed “there’s no science justification for #vax proof if a person has prior infection.” Scott Gottlieb, formerly FDA head and now on the Pfizer board, flagged the tweet to a third party (another of those funnels), who flagged it to Twitter, which evaluated it and labeled it. A second tweet sent the same way was not actioned. Neither the scale nor the nature of these events are notable. It must also be mentioned that this thread is authored by Alex Berenson, whom The Atlantic gave the dubious distinction of being Berenson, losing no time in joining the other authors in this golden opportunity to plug a freshly minted newsletter, says he too is a target: “Gottlieb’s action was part of a larger conspiracy that included the Biden White House and Andrew Slavitt, working publicly and privately to pressure Twitter until it had no choice but to ban me. I will have more to say about my own case and will be suing the White House, Slavitt, Gottlieb, and Pfizer shortly.” This, I think, speaks for itself. Further installments in the series may appear (indeed one , on “The Russiagate Lies,” while I was editing this piece), and like the above they will be covered on their merits. But let the above also serve as a counterweight to allegations that the press was predisposed to dismiss the Twitter Files outright. Though skepticism is a necessary characteristic of the trade, new information like that forming the core of these threads is always welcomed. But the promise of the project has largely been squandered by the way that new information has been selectively and purposefully presented. Furthermore, the delta between the claims and the evidence for those claims has only widened as Musk has ventured increasingly far afield for willing participants. In the past such sensitive data dumps have been collaborated on by multiple outlets and legal experts, who examine, redact, investigate and ultimately publish the files themselves. Many journalists, including those of us at TechCrunch, would have valued the opportunity to pore over the data to see how it confirms, contradicts or expands any of the claims above or stories already reported. Until that happens, honest skepticism and concern over amplifying misinformation or a billionaire’s vendetta take precedence over repeating the unsupported and, frankly, increasingly outlandish theories given the Musk seal of approval. But even his imprimatur is fleeting. In a tweet promoting Berenson’s thread, Elon Musk wrote: “Some conspiracies are actually true.” TechCrunch / Twitter And some aren’t. He deleted the tweet soon after.

Musk said he could have funded a Tesla buyout with SpaceX shares

Rebecca Bellan

Elon Musk testified Monday that he was not only certain he’d have the backing from Saudi financiers to take Tesla private in 2018, but also that he could have sold enough shares of his rocket company SpaceX to fund a buyout. Musk defended himself as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the CEO for allegedly defrauding investors by tweeting on August 7, 2018 that he to take Tesla private at $420 per share and that “ .” Tesla’s stock price surged after Musk’s tweets and later dropped when it became clear the buyout wouldn’t happen. Investors say they lost millions as a result of Musk’s tweets. While Musk does in damages if he loses the case, what’s really at stake for the world’s richest man is his reputation for being truthful and for looking after his investors. In a San Francisco federal court, Musk doubled down on his belief that he had a verbal confirmation from the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) to take Tesla private. Musk testified that the fund “backpedaled” on its commitment. He also acknowledged that no takeover price had been discussed with representatives of the PIF. Even without the PIF money, he “felt funding was secured” with SpaceX stock alone. Musk nodded toward to buy Twitter, and said he would have considered doing the same thing to make the deal to take Tesla private go through. The plaintiff’s lawyers countered that since Musk’s deposition from last year didn’t include any reference to selling SpaceX stock, today’s inclusion of that point was constructed in hindsight. Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, also pointed to Musk’s ability to raise “more money than anyone in history,” according to Musk, which would have also backed the executive’s claims that funding was secured. A jury of nine will decide whether the CEO artificially inflated the company’s share price with his tweets about the buyout, and if so, by how much. U.S. Judge Edward Chen ruled last year that Musk’s post was untruthful and reckless, which might affect the jury’s opinion. Musk and his attorney also argued that he wasn’t trying to defraud investors, but actually wanted to bring some of them along. Tesla’s hardcore base of retail investors — like the plaintiffs in this case — is important to the company. But the SEC doesn’t allow retail investors to invest in private companies. “So the concerns would be if Musk took this company private, could the person who owns two shares of Tesla and has a low-paying job remain an investor? Because the company’s got a very loyal retail investor fan base of people who buy Tesla’s products and believe in Musk,” Josh White, an assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University and former financial economist for the SEC, told TechCrunch. During the trial on Monday, Musk provided details about certain special purpose vehicles that are available to SpaceX investors — SpaceX being a private company — that Musk supposedly wanted to replicate with his take-private deal with Tesla. “Musk was trying to say they could invest in a sort of special purpose vehicle which would perhaps allow retail investors to come together in something that looks like a fund, then that fund actually invests in a private Tesla,” said White. White noted that these types of vehicles aren’t always good for investors because it leaves them with less liquidity. Regardless, the plaintiff’s lawyers demonstrated through exhibits from Goldman Sachs and other investors that there were limitations on keeping retail investors involved in a private Tesla. While on the stand, Musk also framed his tweets about an incomplete deal as an attempt to include shareholders in his considerations to take the company private. He said he was concerned the Financial Times knew about the Saudi’s potential investment in Tesla and Tesla’s take-private deal, and would leak the info before Musk himself got the chance to tell shareholders. The , which lead to a combined $40 million settlement from him and Tesla, and a requirement that a Tesla lawyer review Tesla-related tweets in advance, something Musk tried to appeal later. The SEC alleged that Musk had rounded the buyout offer to $420 per share from $419 as a reference to weed culture, which the agency said Musk’s girlfriend would find funny. Musk denied this, and said it was a coincidence that $420 is also a reference to Weed Day, which is on April 20. “It was chosen because it was a 20% premium over the stock price,” said Musk. “The $420 price was not a joke.” Musk also testified briefly last Friday, telling jurors he didn’t believe his tweets affected Tesla stock. “Just because I tweet something does not mean people believe it or will act accordingly,” Musk said.

Grazzy wants to stop letting people use ‘no cash’ as an excuse to avoid tipping

Christine Hall

Carrying cash used to be a thing, but now with credit cards, and more recently digital wallets, having more than a couple of dollars in your physical wallet is hard to come by. Unfortunately, that also leaves many of us ill prepared to show gratitude, especially when traveling, to give a cash tip to the people cleaning our rooms or bringing your car around. Austin-based wants to change that through its instant pay and tax compliance platform where people can leave tips for frontline workers that employees can access on the same day. It also provides a recruitment and retention tool for service-based employers, like hotels, bars, restaurants and salons, while also giving employees financial wellness tools. Russell Lemmer, Grazzy’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch he was one of those travelers who experiences great services at hotels but uses his phone for everything and rarely carries cash. “While staying in Las Vegas, I left my bags with the valet, and wanted to tip, but couldn’t,” Lemmer recalls. “I heard the valet tell his colleagues that ‘this is seven in a row.’ I felt ashamed and started to think about a solution.” Russell Lemmer, founder and CEO of Grazzy Grazzy In surveying others, Lemmer found that he was not alone: A majority of people he talked to were also heavy phone wallet users who were once in a position of not being able to tip because they didn’t have cash. He started working on Grazzy in September 2021, and what resulted is an app that takes a “business-to-business approach to Venmo,” and a seamless way to show gratitude to someone they don’t know personally, he said. Lemmer also wanted to help employers reduce hourly worker turnover, which he said is a in the U.S., by providing a way for employees to earn and save more. He’s not alone: As the global pandemic exasperated the already tough conditions for frontline workers, other startups brought in technology to solve certain aspects. For example, to connect those who never sit at desks, to handle HR and for customer experience. Here’s how Grazzy works: Guests can instantly tip staff using a property-branded QR code, and the Grazzy Direct feature allows staff to access their tips instantly. Grazzy makes money from the processing fees. The platform also monitors and tracks the money so that businesses can be tax compliant while also seeing the wage increases and the effect on their employees. Lemmer says Grazzy reduces the wait that often happens with tips coming through credit card transactions and the need to regularly tip out or cut weekly paychecks. In addition, by offering an alternative to traditional cash, Lemmer sees digital tips increasing an employee’s earnings by 20% on average. Grazzy started working with its first large hotel customer last July and that has now grown to about a dozen. It is still in its early stage and started bringing in revenue in the last month, Lemmer said. Today the company announced $4.25 million in seed funding led by Next Coast Ventures and Tuesday Capital. This brings its total funding to date to $6.8 million. Lemmer intends to deploy the new capital into accelerating customer growth across additional hotel brands, operating groups, restaurant groups and salons and into technology development so that Grazzy integrates with major operating systems. In the meantime, he has a three-year plan in the works that involves going after hotel operating groups that manage hundreds of properties and building out additional financial wellness features for workers. “We want to start to layer in better ways to save and spend,” Lemmer said. “We feel that is the next step after helping them make more money and access more of it on the same day. Long-term, they stay in these jobs a little bit longer, and it is a recruiting tool for the employers.”

BMW iVentures continues its love affair with EVs, backing this Bulgarian startup’s $13M A round

Mike Butcher

Electric vehicle charging management systems are usually end-to-end solutions for managing EV charging operations, billing, energy, drivers and even fleets. This means EV charging service providers can optimize the monetization of their operations. A number of players have proliferated over the last few years. from Israel has raised $23.1 million in VC funding to date and was recently selected by Shell to run its charging and smart energy management platform. from the Netherlands has pulled in €11 million. Then there’s (raised $20.4 million) out of Canada, (€50 million) out of Denmark and ($13.5 million) out of the U.K. Meanwhile, originally hailing from Sofia, Bulgaria, but now with operations across Europe, is , a startup which until now hasn’t popped up on the VC funding radar with its own EV charging management platform. That changes today with the news that Ampeco has raised a Series A round of $13 million led by BMW iVentures, taking its total raised to date to $16 million. The startup plans to use the cash to drive further into North America, as well as growing product. The Series A round also included Bulgaria’s LauncHub Ventures (which last year a €70 million fund, substantial for the South Eastern Europe region) and Cavalry Ventures (out of Berlin) as well as a handful of angel investors. It’s worth remembering that BMW iVentures has form in this area, backing a number of earlier players. It was an early investor in ChargePoint (now on the NYSE) and Chargemaster (acquired by BP). Ampeco executive team. Ampeco Ampeco offers a solution to EV charging providers that covers the public sector, private business fleets and residential. The idea is that its platform lets customers manage chargers at scale and then pick and choose / mix and match from hardware partners, rather than being locked-in to one hardware provider. It also works with smart meters, building management systems and renewable energy sources. In a statement Orlin Radev, CEO, Ampeco said: “There is an incredible opportunity for EV charging providers to build and scale a profitable business using innovative technologies.” Four years after launching, Ampeco says it has pulled in 120 customers in 45 markets, reached 62,000 charging points and doubled in size to over 80 people. Baris Guzel, partner, BMW iVentures, added: “As EV sales are proliferating, access to EV charging infrastructure becomes more critical than ever. Ampeco’s hardware-agnostic and comprehensive software solution enables clients to launch and grow their own EV charging networks quickly.”

Waymo lays off staff as Alphabet announces 12,000 job cuts

Rebecca Bellan

Waymo, the self-driving technology unit under Alphabet, quietly laid off workers Monday, according to and several posts on LinkedIn and Blind. The cuts at the autonomous vehicle company follow a late last week. Waymo denied claims that it was closing down Via, saying it remains fully committed to bringing its freight trucking solution to scale over time. A spokesperson did say Waymo was pulling back slightly on its fully autonomous deployment for freight trucking. Waymo will continue to develop its “Driver” in a way that’s applicable across business lines, which includes freeway capabilities that can be applied to both ride-hailing and trucking, the spokesperson said. Reading news about company layoffs isn’t at all surprising in 2023 . Most companies, including Alphabet, find themselves course-correcting after hiring for a than we find ourselves in today. Last week, Alphabet cut 6% of its global workforce, or around 12,000 people, including, we’re now learning, part of Waymo’s team. , Google’s in-house incubator, was also significantly affected by the layoffs. The cuts at Waymo, however, might go deeper than the surface-level economic issues that are affecting virtually every technology company. After , many investors and OEMs have become more bearish on the future of autonomous vehicles — at least in the near term. The problem of self-driving is consistently a hard and expensive one to solve. Autonomous trucking competitor in order to streamline operations and keep the company in business. As part of its restructuring, TuSimple decided to scale back freight expansion, particularly as it involves unprofitable trucking lanes. Waymo currently runs several robotaxi programs in California and Arizona, and recently reached the milestone of opening to members of the public. If Waymo is indeed cutting or scaling back its trucking program, it will be able to redirect resources to robotaxi efforts so it can better compete with Cruise, the General Motors subsidiary that is neck-and-neck with Waymo in terms of technological progress. Waymo, with its 2,500 employees, has the largest headcount of Alphabet’s side projects. The unit doesn’t generate nearly enough revenue to cover its massive losses, which include the costs of developing proprietary hardware like lidar, machine learning models to train the “drivers” and cloud computing to analyze data captured by vehicles. Not to mention the costs of dealing with massive headaches like . Waymo doesn’t have a dedicated line on Alphabet’s balance sheet, but the parent company’s last year show a 27% drop in profits compared to 2021. The biggest loss-makers for the company were Google Cloud and “other bets,” under which Waymo falls. Other bets, which also includes the Wing drone delivery project, lost $1.6 billion, which is up from $1.29 billion lost the year prior. Activist investor TCI recently called on CEO Sundar Pichai to curb spending, pointing to Ford and Volkswagen’s decision to dead their own self-driving projects, which resulted in the shutdown of Argo AI. Waymo’s main revenue stream today comes from its robotaxi services in California and Arizona. In November, Waymo began and in , but the company has been working with paying customers in Chandler, Arizona for a few years. Waymo’s current and future pilots with trucking partners, like , and , are likely not yet bringing in any revenue, but the company wouldn’t confirm or deny this speculation.

Bluedot’s debit card for EV owners offers cheaper charging, cash back

Rebecca Bellan

Electric vehicles accounted for of all new cars sold in the U.S. in 2022, an increase from 3.1% the year before, and that number will continue to grow over the coming years. While it’s still a young industry, the ecosystem surrounding EVs — from EV charging and installation to insurance products and parking — is shaping up to be one that’s disconnected and somewhat complicated. So say the founders of , a banking and rewards platform for EV owners that aims to enhance the after-sales experience. Here’s how it works: Individual owners or fleet managers sign up for Bluedot’s debit card, which they’ll use for all auto-related purchases, but predominantly for EV charging. Bluedot is currently offering customers a flat fee of $0.30 per kilowatt hour of charging with participating EV charging stations, and 20% cash back on charges with nonparticipating charging networks. Customers find stations and pay directly for charges with partner charging companies on Bluedot’s app, saving them the need to download multiple apps. Bluedot users also get 5% cash back on all automotive expenses, plus another 2% cash back for all other expenses. In addition, the company provides users with rewards in nearby shopping and dining locations. So while waiting for their car to charge, a customer can walk over to the local Starbucks for a coffee and get 10% cash back on that purchase, or do some shopping at Whole Foods and score another 15% cash back, for example. The startup, which will join Y Combinator’s winter 2023 cohort and recently closed a $2 million pre-seed, is initially focusing on charging stations, in part because it’s an industry that’s about to blow up with federal and state funding. , which President Joe Biden signed into law in August 2022, gives all states access to over $1.5 billion in funding to facilitate EV charging projects. That might end up looking like a big push to install infrastructure without much cohesion. Bluedot’s app aggregates nearby EV charging stations and offers rewards for charging.  Bluedot Bluedot wouldn’t say which charging companies it works with to offer its flat fee, but the startup said customers could initiate charging through the Bluedot app at around 60% of all charging stations across the U.S. To grow its partner network, Bluedot is targeting smaller and newer charging companies that might not have the resources to create their own app and payments platform. “New EV charging companies are seeking solutions like ours to increase visibility and accessibility for drivers, optimize payment processes, and improve utilization rate of charging stations,” Selinay Filiz Parlak, Bluedot’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told TechCrunch. “Bluedot is working on integrating financial technology to help these companies make their charging stations more viable and accessible to drivers.” “Currently, utilization in most of the charging station networks ranges from 5% to 8%. Bluedot aims to raise this rate above 15%. We began with small charging station companies, but our goal is to bring all brands together with financial technology for users,” continued Parlak. Bluedot’s main customers today are individual drivers who found the startup through partnerships with auto dealers and ride-share companies. Parlak says Bluedot’s next target is fleets to help them manage expenses and charging processes and get better deals. “For example, one of our partners is a leasing company that rents cars out to a bunch of delivery drivers who are managed by a fleet manager,” said Parlak. “They want to offer a larger charging station ecosystem, which is easier to bill and then reimburse, which we offer. And they also want to get better deals around electrification.” Bluedot is also manually pulling data for customers on their charging habits, how much they spend, how much power they use, their top charging locations, the amount of carbon dioxide emissions they’ve prevented by using an EV, and so on. In the future, the company wants to automate that task to make it smarter and more scalable. During YC, Bluedot wants to focus on growth and product development. “Our goal is to establish partnerships and make deals leading up to demo day,” Ferhat Babacan, Bluedot’s CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch. “Specifically, we aim to secure partnerships in the areas of auto dealership, charging networks, and auto-related expenses. Additionally, we plan to initiate pilot tests for the Bluedot Fleet Card.”

Honda is setting up a dedicated EV division

Darrell Etherington

Honda is establishing a division dedicated to the development of electric vehicles and other electrical products including storage and generation, the company said on Tuesday (via ). The Japanese automaker somewhat lags the rest of the market when it comes to EVs to date. Last year, to electrify its lineup, including the intent to launch 30 fully electric vehicles by 2030, and a goal of ramping to a production volume of more than 2 million EVs per year by the same time. Honda also earmarked $40 billion for electrification over the course of the next decade — across its automotive division, but also including development of other electrified products, including robots, personal transport options and space-based technology. At CES earlier this month,  and showed off their first prototype vehicle. The plan is to start preorders for the first Afeela cars in 2025, with shipments beginning in 2026 in North America. The new dedicated electrification division at Honda will start as of April 1, and will bring together resources within the company that are currently spread out across various parts of its internal organizational structure. Honda also said that it intends to market mid- to large-sized EVs in North America and China, with small- to mid-size cars making up most of its offerings rest-of-world.

Tesla reports $24.3B revenue in the fourth quarter, beating Street estimates

Rebecca Bellan

Tesla just beat Wall Street revenue estimates for the fourth quarter of 2022. The company closed out Q4 with $24.3 billion in revenue, a 37% increase from the same quarter last year and a 13% bump quarter-over-quarter. Analysts had expected the company to earn around $24.2 billion, according to . The electric vehicle maker had $1.4 billion in free cash flow at the end of Q4, which is down from the $3.3 billion the company had in the bank at the end of the third quarter. Tesla’s stock saw a 3.2% spike to $149 per share immediately after earnings dropped and continued to rise to $151.52 in after-hours trading. Investors today were on the lookout for gross margins after and offered on its vehicles. While Tesla as a whole closed the quarter with a 16% operating margin, automotive gross margins came in at 25.9%, which is the lowest figure in the last five quarters. Margins in the first quarter of 2023 might look worse, says Eric Schiffer, the CEO of private equity firm Patriarch Organization. “The outlook will still depend on the recent moves of Q1, which suggest some compression in demand,” Schiffer told TechCrunch, referring to January’s price cuts. Tesla acknowledged that short-term automotive margins will be impacted by the decrease in prices and the general inflationary environment, but the company’s management is more focused on its operating margin. “As other areas of the business become more important, and particularly the energy business which is growing faster than the vehicle business, we’re heavily focused on operating leverage here and improving the efficiency of our overheads,” said Zachary Kirkhorn, Tesla’s chief financial officer, during Wednesday’s earnings call. CEO Elon Musk wanted to put concerns around demand to bed during the call, saying that after the company brought down prices, January saw the strongest demand ever in Tesla’s history. In fact, he said, demand exceeds production. Earlier this month, Tesla reported vehicle deliveries of 405,278 in the fourth quarter. While those were record deliveries, the automaker still for the third quarter in a row. Similarly, Tesla’s 1.3 million vehicle deliveries in 2022 was also a record for the automaker, but that number misses Tesla’s own guidance of achieving 50% growth YoY and getting to 1.4 million deliveries. Regardless, Tesla still intends to grow production as quickly as possible “in alignment with the 50% CAGR target we began guiding to in early 2021,” and reach 1.8 million cars in 2023. During Wednesday’s earnings call, Musk said Tesla has the potential to reach 2 million cars this year but is being cautious given market uncertainty. The company acknowledged that average sales prices have “generally been on a downward trajectory for many years,” and that Tesla aims to prioritize “affordability” so that it can grow into a company that sells multiple millions of cars annually. “Price really matters,” said Musk. “The vast number of people that want to buy a Tesla car, can’t afford it. And so these price changes really make a difference for the average consumer.” Musk went on to say that Tesla is working on cost control measures like factory efficiencies, which will manifest this year in the ramp of production at the new gigafactories in Berlin and Austin, better control of the supply chain and even design changes, specifically to the powertrain. Tesla also announced earlier this week into its Nevada gigafactory to build a battery cell facility and a Semi truck factory. In terms of battery cells, the company’s long-term goal is to get “well in excess of 1000 gigawatt hours of cells produced internally,” said Musk, noting that the company would also rely on third-party battery cell producers like Panasonic to keep costs down and efficiency up. Musk also nodded to Tesla’s plan to make a 4680 cell that will have low-cost and high-energy density. The EV tax incentives for vehicles produced in the U.S. and with battery components sourced from U.S. or free trade agreement countries might also help Tesla bring its prices down, said Kirkhorn. “We also want to use these incentives to improve affordability as we think about what the price points are on our products going forward,” said Kirkhorn. Bringing costs of the vehicles down will also be a necessity for the automaker as it, along with everyone else, faces macroeconomic pressures, a looming recession and increasing competition from other automakers. “Tesla is not immune [to] the recession, and I still expect to see more recession-driven market pain,” said Schiffer. Tesla said it remains focused on “autonomy, electrification and energy solutions.” The company’s energy storage arm finished out 2022 with the “highest level” of deployments ever. Energy storage deployments increased 152% from Q4 in 2021 to 2.5 GWh, for a total 2022 deployment of 6.5 GWh. Tesla said demand for its storage products “remains in excess of [its] ability to supply.” The company said it is ramping up production at its 40 GWh Megapack factory in Lathrop, California, to address demand. Tesla’s solar deployments also increased 18% YoY in Q4 to 100 MW, with a total 348 MW of solar deployed in 2022. When it comes to Full Self-Driving (FSD), Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system, Tesla said it had sold its beta version of the software to roughly 400,000 customers, bringing in revenue recognition of $324 million as part of the company’s automotive sales. One investor asked Musk if his constant stream of consciousness on Twitter might cause the Tesla brand to lose popularity and cause division among customers, thus impacting demand. Musk brushed this concern aside, pulling up his Twitter account to demonstrate his 127 million followers, which “suggests that I’m, you know, reasonably popular.” “Twitter’s actually an incredibly powerful tool for driving demand for Tesla,” said Musk. “The net value of Twitter, apart from a few people complaining, is gigantic. Obviously.” Musk also addressed the long-delayed Cybertruck, a vehicle he said he will definitely be driving once it comes off the assembly lines. The CEO confirmed that start of production for the truck will likely still happen this summer, but SOP is slow, he said. Volume production is when things really get going, and that is scheduled for next year. Tesla said it has begun installation on the production equipment for the Cybertruck in Texas and has built all of its beta vehicles, with more coming in the next month. The company will share more details about its upcoming plans across the board at its investor day on March 1.

India’s gig economy drivers face bust in the country’s digital boom

Jagmeet Singh

Uber driver in New Delhi, had her account suddenly disabled one evening while she was en route to pick up a rider in a southern part of the capital city. “I was reaching the destination, but it took some time due to heavy traffic. The ride eventually got canceled. But after that, my account was blocked,” she recalled. Kohli, who has been for nearly four years and covers a distance of 112-124 miles daily, received a message saying her account had been blocked due to “an excessive number of fraudulent trips.” Kohli claimed that she had not taken any such fraudulent trips but pointed out the blocking happened to occur just days after participating in the country’s first women-driver strike in the capital in December. She was one of the prominent faces during the hours-long protest. As the sole earner in her family and a single parent of two daughters, Kohli said she often avoids taking leaves because it significantly impacts her household budget. Kohli’s account was restored, unlike some of her co-protesters who remained blocked on the platform for some days. They believed it was due to their recent protest, though Uber denied this and put the blame on their service. “There is no truth to it. No driver IDs were blocked related to the protest,” an Uber spokesperson said. Many , like Kohli, frequently experience deactivation of their accounts on platforms, often for simply speaking out about issues. However, the platforms tend to evade accountability for these actions. Account blockings and platform delistings are not limited to India, as drivers in the U.S. and Europe also face similar actions regularly. Nonetheless, gig workers in who work with platforms such as cab-hailing companies Ola and Uber, as well as food and grocery delivery apps such as Swiggy, Zomato and Zepto and service platforms including Urban Company, have many pain points that are either unique to or quite significant in the South Asian nation, which aims to become a by 2025. The problems are chiefly related to declining income, increasing variable expenses and lack of welfare schemes and social security. As the country is becoming more digital and has attracted global tech companies and startups, gig workers’ pain is growing in severity — and so are their protests. TechCrunch has spoken with several workers associated with cab aggregators and food delivery platforms, spokespersons of their local unions and researchers closely looking at their lives to understand their concerns better. The beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, followed by nationwide lockdowns and restrictions, helped internet-based platforms grow their businesses in India — just like in many parts of the world. But that growth also made jobs of gig workers in the country more challenging: They saw a decline in payouts and increased competition with the surge of new workers joining these platforms after being made redundant from salaried roles. Per the details shared by the (IFAT), which has amassed more than 35,000 members across the country since early 2020, food and grocery delivery platform workers earn an average of between $0.18-$0.24 per order. This declined between 43-57% from the $0.42 they were getting until the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies have also increased their delivery area radius from 2.4 miles to 12.4 miles, the workers’ union said, which could mean drivers take longer journeys, and thus fewer trips in a working day. Cab drivers on SoftBank-backed Ola and Uber get the equivalent of between $6 and $10 daily. This comes after deducting the commission cab aggregators take for each ride they offer drivers. IFAT said the aggregator cut previously was 20%, though it increased to 25-30% following the initial pandemic phase. Although payments to cab drivers have stayed the same in the last couple of years, the increased commission rate has reduced their net earnings, the union said. On the other hand, delivery workers who deliver food and groceries get anywhere between $4 and $6 per day. They used to earn between $6 and $10 daily until the beginning of the pandemic, IFAT’s data shows. A Swiggy spokesperson refuted the claims of seeing a decline in payments and said the earnings of its delivery workers increased by 22% in 2022 compared to when the pandemic started in 2020. The spokesperson said the earnings comprise three components: per-order pay, surge pay and incentive pay. The startup also shares 100% of tips given by consumers to its delivery workers, the spokesperson said. The company, however, did not share any exact earning details to justify its claims. Platforms claim they offer flexibility to log in and out to their workers. “Statistically, 95% of Swiggy’s delivery executives who do a shift of 8-9 hours, hit their delivery targets and earn their weekly incentives,” the Swiggy spokesperson said. However, Shaik Salauddin, national general secretary of IFAT, told TechCrunch that workers with food and grocery delivery and cab aggregator platforms work at least 12-14 hours a day to generate the average income. He worked as a cab driver until September last year. On top of seeing the dip in their earnings, workers need to pay more for the fuel their vehicles require to enable these services, as the country has in the last couple of years. The price of compressed natural gas (CNG), which fuels most cabs in the country, has also a whopping 86%, from $0.52 in December 2020 to $0.97 last month. Worker unions have been demanding that platforms limit the radius within which they get their customers — for both deliveries and cab bookings — as workers sometimes travel miles to reach their customer destination. This incurs unnecessary fuel consumption and time. But no significant move has been seen from the platforms’ side. Gig work platforms try to their models to push workers and convince them to do their jobs rigorously, Salauddin said. However, as the workers become more experienced and see no significant incentives coming out of that platform-driven stimulus, they start getting frustrated. Swiggy, Ola and Uber app screenshots (from left to right) showing gamifications on their platforms encouraging workers to continue to work hard. IFAT Platforms used to have managers and team leaders in place to reduce the frustration of their workers and listen to their problems. But to avoid the costs of keeping active last-mile support, most platforms have switched to automated or remote ways to readdress worker issues, according to workers’ unions. “A zone manager is now replaced with a remote operation control person,” said Rikta Krishnaswamy, Delhi-NCR coordinator of the . She said that most platforms provide a web-based form or redirect workers to a call center executive who has no power or information to solve any reported issues. “Whenever a worker faces a challenge, it’s very hard for them to get recourse from anywhere. Most of these big platforms are geared toward alleviating customers’ grievances,” said Aayush Rathi, research and programs lead at the Centre for Internet and Society. Platforms claim they have multiple channels to communicate with their workers. The Swiggy spokesperson said it has fleet managers as the primary contact for workers to raise their concerns and feedback and sourcing and onboarding centers as the first point of contact for workers joining the platform and act as channels to direct queries and concerns to the startup through its representative. The spokesperson also said that it hosts delivery executive townhalls at a hyperlocal level, as well as offers in-app comments on the partner app and 24×7 Swiggy hotline support. Nonetheless, several workers still find it challenging to convey their demands. Platform companies call gig workers “partners,” but to get maximum business from these so-called partners, platforms use performance-based ratings and algorithms. Workers take some time to . But even when they get them, most workers find no solution to make things easier and continue to live under the pressure that platforms put through ratings and algorithms. “I don’t see an option to move away from this business as what else we can do. What will I do with my car that is still on installments? I couldn’t give it to someone to drive,” said Kohli. In addition to the ratings and algorithms, workers need to fulfill specific targets in their service — whether they are into food or grocery deliveries or are running cabs. Examples can be fulfilling tens of deliveries or completing tens of trips in a single day. The imposition of excessively high targets, combined with gamification and penalties, can sometimes lead to dangerous situations and accidents, resulting in deaths in some cases. This is a growing concern, particularly among delivery workers — including those enabling quick deliveries — who operate two-wheeled vehicles on public roads and feel pressure to meet their grocery and food delivery targets. “We’ve seen terrible accidents, including loss of lives of workers, just because they don’t want to get a bad customer rating,” said Krishnaswamy. In a few cases, the mental pressure build-up due to tainted working conditions forces workers to commit suicide. According to the data recorded by TGPWU, at least 10 cases of Ola and Uber drivers committing suicide have emerged in Telangana, which is home to offices of big tech companies, including Google and Microsoft. Additionally, Indian media outlets have reported that some delivery workers across the country have been while delivering food and grocery orders. Platforms claim to offer insurance and support to their workers, though unions including AIGWU, IFAT and TGPWU claim these are of little to no use. Companies only respond to issues and help drivers avail support including insurance once they appear in some media reports, one of the delivery workers, who did not want to be named, alleged. The process of claiming insurance for gig workers can be so cumbersome and time-consuming that many workers ultimately choose not to pursue it. Research firm Fairwork India recently , including Ola, Uber, Dunzo and Amazon Flex, for their poor conditions for gig workers. Of the 12 platforms it studied, the firm awarded the first point to Big Basket, Flipkart, Swiggy, Urban Company and Zomato under its “Fair Conditions” criteria “for simplifying their insurance claims processes and for having operational emergency helplines on the platform interface.” Others are found not to have such fair conditions. The five platforms that were found to have “Fair Conditions” for work were also noted to have other key aspects, including giving fair pay and having fair management. Fairwork India 2022 ratings suggest some of the ongoing issues with gig platforms. Fairwork India Balaji Parthasarathy, IIIT Bangalore professor and lead investigator for the Fairwork project in India, told TechCrunch that no platform from the 12 they studied was willing to talk to or acknowledge the need to speak with a worker collective. Union leaders at IFAT and AIGWU have also echoed Parthasarathy’s words and said that most platforms do not communicate with them to understand workers’ problems. In March last year, Uber a Driver Advisory Council in India to mimic the model of a traditional union. The company claims the Council has 48 drivers from six cities and aims to “facilitate a two-way dialogue between Uber and drivers.” The Council has a third-party review board led by the Bengaluru-based think tank Aapti Institute. It has convened three times since its inception and taken up issues on earnings, product enhancements and social security, among others, the company spokesperson said. “Uber has always met with driver partners to listen to their feedback about their experience with Uber and ensure we take that into account when making product changes and formulating policies. During COVID, we engaged with the driver community specifically to ask them how best to disburse emergency relief funds,” the spokesperson said when asked whether the company has ever communicated with existing driver associations such as IFAT and AIGWU to understand driver concerns better. The Swiggy spokesperson said it engaged with all the delivery workers “directly and consistently through multiple channels.” “At Swiggy, we like to keep our communication and engagement open to address our delivery executives’ concerns,” the spokesperson said when asked about the startup’s communication with driver associations. Unlike Uber and Swiggy, a Zomato spokesperson has said that it had engaged with IFAT and AIGWU. Issues with gig workers in India manifest when we look at women workers who need to pay onboarding fees again when they come back after maternity leave or regularly suffer due to the lack of public toilets in the country. Most of these women workers are single parents and sole earners in their families. Earlier this month, a female Uber driver in New Delhi was by some local gangsters while taking a passenger early in the morning. The attackers broke a glass bottle and used the shards to cut the woman’s neck, causing her to receive seven stitches. “I was not in a condition to call anyone at the time, but I was on duty when the incident happened,” she said. She added that Uber did not check for her well-being hours after the attack, and the police took 25 minutes to reach the spot. Local drivers nearby came to her aid and called the ambulance. When reached for a comment on the matter, the Uber spokesperson said the company was in touch with the driver. “What this driver went through is horrifying. We are in touch with the driver and wish her a speedy and full recovery. Her injury-related medical expenses will be covered under Uber’s on-trip insurance provided through a third-party insurance partner. We stand ready to support law enforcement authorities in their investigation,” the spokesperson said. “Platforms do nothing for our issues,” said Sheetal Kashyap, a woman Uber driver who participated in the Delhi protest in December along with Kohli. She told TechCrunch that before sitting down in the capital, the women drivers’ group tried reaching out to the company by visiting its offices in Gurugram. Instead of being granted a meeting with the management, the group was met with bouncers at the office who were unable to offer assistance, according to the driver’s account. The drivers also attempted to convey concerns of women drivers to the state government. However, they did not receive any response, which ended up kicking off their protest, which has not yet seen any fruitful results. Kashyap said that women drivers in the state drive 16 hours a day to earn enough to pay for monthly installments of their cabs and meet their family expenses. The cabs in Delhi to help riders in an emergency since a driver reportedly raped a passenger in 2015. Once pressed, cab companies claim that the button initiates alerts to the state transport department and law enforcement agencies. Some reports suggested that most cabs . Nevertheless, the option is explicitly given to riders and is not meant to be used by drivers. Uber has, however, offered an in-app emergency button for drivers to let them connect with local authorities if they need assistance. Kashyap said the state government takes money, which in her case is around $85, from drivers for the panic button each time it passes their vehicle’s fitness. Frustrated workers often choose to raise their concerns through strikes and sit-downs. In a recent incident, thousands of delivery workers associated with SoftBank and Goldman Sachs-invested Swiggy in South India Kerala’s capital Kochi that lasted 44 days. The workers demanded changes such as an increase in their payments, the addition of late-night payment surges and the appointment of zonal managers. The sit-down, which was originally aimed to be “indefinite,” Swiggy’s service in some parts of the state. The food delivery company, though, fixed that disruption by bringing workers from a third party. This has become a general practice among food delivery platforms to deploy third-party workers to avoid outages if their motorists strike. Swiggy also to seek police protection of its office premises, employees and third-party workers. Eventually, the startup convinced the workers protesting to call it off — without accepting their demand or giving any confirmation in writing. The Swiggy spokesperson said that in Kochi, the weekly payout of its delivery workers increased close to 20% in the last 12 months and remained the industry-best. The startup “initiated positive dialogues to convey these details and assuage their concerns about the payouts and earning opportunities,” the spokesperson said, adding that its top-two delivery executives were from Kerala in 2022. This was not the first time that workers conducted a strike against these platforms. In fact, some Swiggy workers made a in the southernmost Indian state of Tamil Nadu’s capital Chennai last year, which also resulted in a disruption in its service. But it was called off shortly after — without seeing any changes from the startup side. Similar strikes from Swiggy workers happened around the same issues in cities including Hyderabad, Kolkata and Noida as well, but workers resumed work after a few days — with hope to see some action on their demands over time. Swiggy workers protested against their declining wages in Kolkata last year. NurPhoto / Contributor In addition to Swiggy, Zomato and grocery startup Blinkit, which last year, have seen their workers for similar issues. The workers raising their problems through these protests have not yet received any firm resolutions. According to Krishnaswamy of AIGWU, there is a strike every 15 days in the Delhi-NCR region. However, it seems that the platforms are not greatly affected by these protests. “Unless you can sustain yourself for a week, you should not strike. A strike is like the last resort,” Krishnaswamy said. Salauddin of IFAT said that workers go on strike when they feel pain. It’s the moment when workers listen to nothing and want their demands to be immediately addressed, he said. Instead of getting significant pressure to address concerns or fulfill demands, platforms often ban accounts of workers going on strike to limit their protests. Google-backed Dunzo was last year seen delivery workers to suspend their accounts permanently if they were found participating in or supporting any strikes. Swiggy also apparently against its delivery workers protesting in a strike in December. Unions, finding that strikes alone have not produced the desired outcomes, are now exploring alternative methods and reserving strikes as a last resort. “These small struggles, these sporadic struggles, I am not at all belittling them. They are a crucial stepping stone to building an organization. And they’re a very, very crucial stepping stone for workers to understand how mighty the odds are stacked against them,” Krishnaswamy said. Some protests did help workers to bring their issues into the limelight in the recent past. One such example is those associated with Urban Company in 2021. In that case, women workers to slash its commission rate and increase their service charges after protesting on the streets. However, Urban Company later in December 2021 . Krishnaswamy said one of those workers included a pregnant woman who faced fabricated criminal and civil injunctions due to raising her voice. The startup quietly withdrew the case in April last year because they knew it did not have any teeth in the matter, she said. In another case, some cab drivers in 2021 protested against Ola for and selling some of them. Ola initially directed more than 30,000 drivers to park their leased cars in its parking spaces following the first lockdown was announced in March 2020, founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal at the time. However, according to the affected drivers, the startup did not return the cars when the lockdown restrictions eased in the country. Drivers deposited a refundable security deposit between $255-$376 to get the car on lease and were required to pay some monthly rent. But that all went in vain as drivers said the startup did not return that money after trickily getting back their leased vehicles. Marketing material shared by IFAT shows drivers were promised to earn up to $303 a month and get ownership of their leased cars in four years. Ola lease vehicles were promised to give better earnings. IFAT Ola initially convinced drivers to get leased vehicles by telling them they would be offered better business options, said Moeiz Syed, one of the affected drivers in Hyderabad, who lost the deposit of nearly $1,200 for three leased cabs. He also lost over $72 in Ola Money, which was to be transferred to his account during the lockdown. Due to initial protests and some impacted drivers taking the matter to court, Ola did pay a partial amount in some cases. Syed, though, alleged that he did not get anything from the startup to date since he had raised some concerns with Ola earlier and participated in protests. Ola also blocked his account and made it inaccessible. That made it impossible for him to get evidence of getting those cars on lease as the details were available only on the app, he said. Syed, who was earlier paying six drivers to drive his cabs, had to move his house from Hyderabad to a nearby village and sell the gold jewelry of his wife to survive. He finally started working as a driver for a local goods carrier at a monthly wage of $121-$145. Ola did not respond to a request for comment on the matter. Gig work has been in the country for over a decade, and most platforms have raised billions of dollars from global investors in the last few years. Nonetheless, it was only in 2020 that New Delhi defined gig workers and platform workers as a part of its (PDF). It is, however, yet to be operationalized and is not in force in most Indian states. Gig worker unions and researchers also call the code vague and not the ultimate move to protect the social security of gig workers. In 2020, India’s transport ministry also (PDF) the existing motor vehicle law to include the businesses and practices of platform aggregators in the country. The new rules are, though, yet to be considered by most Indian states. The labor ministry did not respond to a request for comment. Regulatory uncertainty has a negative impact on the operations of gig platforms in India. Last year, companies such as Ola, Uber and Rapido have faced on their services due to perceived violations of state rules. As a result, for continuing to operate during the ban. The ban was by the Karnataka High Court. Currently, Rapido’s services are . Parthasarathy of the Fairwork project said there is complete silence on key issues such as fair wages and willingness or ability to bargain collectively. “Better regulation is absolutely critical,” he said. “I don’t think platforms are going to necessarily pay attention to any voluntary code.” In September 2021, the Indian government launched the (e-labor in English) portal to build a comprehensive database of unorganized workers, including those who are a part of gig platforms, such as cab aggregators Uber and Ola and food and grocery delivery apps Swiggy, Dunzo and Zomato, among others. But its complicated registration process and complex requirements have restricted various gig workers from signing up on the portal, workers’ unions including IFAT . The portal also does not support multiple Indian languages. It is limited to Hindi and English, though the country has several gig workers speaking local languages, and its constitution . The eShram portal is available to gig workers in India. Screenshot / TechCrunch The government’s data shared in the lower house of the country’s parliament in July (PDF) that 717,686 gig workers had been registered on the e-Shram portal as of January 2022. The number is significantly lower than the 6.8 million gig and platform workers by the country’s federal think tank NITI Aayog in June. The think tank also predicted that these workers will hit 23.5 million by 2030. The NITI Aayog’s (PDF) itself, though, does not give a clear picture of India’s gig economy, according to researchers and worker unions. In an article last year in response to the think tank’s report, researchers Asiya Islam and Damni Kain underlined that it carries unsubstantiated claims that gig and platform economy work has improved employment opportunities for women and people with disabilities. The report also does not hold the government accountable for developing public facilities to help create workforce participation and instead shifts the responsibility of enabling skill development and jobs from the state to private corporations, the researchers said. “There’s this model that’s being constantly thrown at us and being proposed by the government, which is about platformizing everything like that, specifically use the term ‘platformization.’ That’s becoming a catchphrase, a popular term, where all responsibility is being abdicated by the government in favor of the platform’s doing everything,” Islam, who is a lecturer in work and employment relations at the University of Leeds, told TechCrunch. In 2021, IFAT filed a writ petition with the country’s Supreme Court against the Indian government and platforms including Ola, Uber and Zomato, seeking to treat gig workers as employees based on the nature of their work and get them social security benefits. “The aggregators and government should be held responsible for contributing toward the schemes that are being introduced, and a proposal can be worked out on how this can be done,” said Gayatri Singh, a senior advocate involved with IFAT on the petition. The petition has yet to be listed for hearing in the apex court. Gig workers’ problems are not exclusive to India, as these workers in the U.S. and Europe have raised several concerns yet to be addressed. And in most countries, like the U.S.. there are no unions to speak of to represent gig workers’ interests. Nonetheless, the scale of consumption in the South Asian nation, which is the world’s second-biggest internet market, makes it different and more complex. “There is a crisis of overproduction,” said Krishnaswamy of AIGWU. In 2020, a judge in California that cab companies Uber and Lyft must classify their drivers as employees, not self-employed. A similar judgment from the U.K.’s Supreme Court in 2021. India has yet to see such rulings to favor its growing number of gig workers. Fairwork’s Parthasarathy said that it is not appropriate to compare India with other markets directly as the law around the gig economy is gray around the globe. “What drives people to work on platforms here is different from what drives people to work on platforms there [in affluent countries], and legal structures etc., are quite different,” he said. Islam of Leeds University stated India’s large informal economy complicates the scenario. The country’s informal sector about 80% of its total labor force and produces 50% of its gross domestic product. “If you’re talking about the U.K., we end up comparing gig workers with workers who are in the formal economy because that’s the dominant alternative form of employment, whereas in India, that’s not necessarily the case. In India, most people are employed in the informal economy,” Islam said. Currently, India lacks adequate measures to support its unemployed population, which often leads people to turn to delivery platforms and ride-hailing services to make ends meet when they lose their jobs or are struggling in their current employment. “Why do our state governments not actually announce an unemployment allowance? If they do so, 90% of the workforce for these hyperlocal delivery companies will just quit and sit at home to wait out and get a better opportunity,” Krishnaswamy said. For the past few years, India has also seen religious hatred and bigotry impacting gig workers. Last year, a Muslim Uber driver in Hyderabad named Syed Lateefuddin reportedly , in which he was assaulted and his car was pelted with stones. The driver did not receive any response from Uber’s emergency services after several attempts and eventually called the police, TGPWU said. Uber driver Syed Lateefuddin’s car was allegedly attacked with stones in Hyderabad last year. IFAT Similar bigotry issues on Ola, Swiggy and Zomato as well. In some cases, customers made bigoted requests. The incidents were by a couple of of opposition parties, though the Indian government did not direct queries in any of these cases. Most companies also did not respond to the workers’ demands following the incidents to ensure redressal. However, Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal, in one case in 2019, publicly responded to the issue and said that they were not “sorry” to lose business if it came in the way of their values. “We are proud of the idea of India – and the diversity of our esteemed customers and partners,” he in a tweet. When asked about its take on the communal hatred and bigotry on its platform, the Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch that it condemned any form of discrimination on its platform as it violates its community guidelines meant to maintain safety standards for riders and drivers. “We have created multiple touch points for drivers to reach us in case they face a problem. Through our in-app emergency button, they can connect with the local law enforcement directly in case of an emergency. They also have the option to connect to an Uber support agent through a dedicated 24×7 phone support to share their concern,” the spokesperson said. The Swiggy spokesperson also said that there was no place for discrimination on its platform. “The assignment of orders is entirely automated and does not make alterations based on the religion or community of the delivery executive and deter their earning opportunities,” the spokesperson said, adding that the startup barred customers from its platform who defy its anti-discriminatory policy that is displayed on the app and covers its customers, delivery workers and restaurant partners. “Discrimination based on religion, caste, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, sex, marital status, gender identity, age or any other metric is deemed unlawful under applicable laws. Any credible proof of such discrimination, including any refusal to provide or receive goods or services based on the above metrics, shall render the user liable to lose access to the platform immediately,” the spokesperson said. Although workers associated with various significant platforms have raised concerns due to their ongoing behavior, some new platforms are showing some care to their workers. One such platform is EV ride-hailing startup BluSmart, backed by BP Ventures, which pays its drivers on a weekly basis. Some drivers who moved from Ola and Uber told TechCrunch that they have found significantly less pressure when they started working with BluSmart. However, the Gurugram-headquartered startup does have target-based incentives and requires drivers to work regularly 10-14 hours a day, with up to two hours of break, to generate maximum earnings. Drivers are allowed to take one day off per week and one emergency leave per month, on any day of their choosing. BluSmart CBO Tushar Garg told TechCrunch that the drivers have the liberty to get as many leaves as they may wish to take if informed in advance. They also choose on Fridays how much and when they want to drive for the coming week, he said. BluSmart pays its drivers on a weekly basis. BluSmart Unlike cab aggregators such as Ola or Uber, BluSmart operates its own fleet of EVs, which drivers must take from designated hubs each day. This model may not be suitable for those who have their own commercial cabs. “What we would do with our cab if we get on a platform like BluSmart?” Kashyap said. Even Cargo is another example of operating differently for workers, but it is not a gig worker platform. The New Delhi-based social enterprise works as a women-only, last-mile e-commerce logistics provider. It allows workers to come to its hub in the morning, where they can access the washroom — before beginning their work. “A lot of that kind of work infrastructure is completely missing from the platforms because they don’t consider themselves employees and therefore don’t actually provide anything to workers. That’s something that’s actually quite crucial to getting people who’ve been otherwise marginalized in the labor market, including women. This is what gives them the opportunity to enter the labor market,” Islam of Leeds University said while talking about Even Cargo. Workers’ unions remain skeptical about new platforms bringing any key differences. “You have to realize that these companies are answerable only to their shareholders, their shareholders only care about super profits, and super profits come out of super-exploitation,” Krishnaswamy of AIGWU said.

Tesla’s energy storage arm caps 2022 with ‘highest level’ of deployments ever

Harri Weber

The growth keeps coming for Tesla’s energy storage business. On Wednesday, the automaker said its home and utility-scale battery deployments (GWh) during its fiscal 2022, calling it “by far the highest level of deployments we have achieved.” That’s up from about 4 GWh in 2021. For context, the average American home consumes — just over 0.01 GWh — per year, according to the U.S. Energy Department. In the fourth quarter alone, Tesla said energy storage deployments reached 2.5 GWh — up from 2.1 GWh in Q3. Tesla’s energy storage business includes its home batteries and its much larger . Tesla also updated investors on its solar business, saying deployments totaled 348 megawatts in 2022. In the final quarter of the year, the automaker’s solar deployments fell just short of recent highs, hitting 100 MW in Q4. cap a supremely for Tesla. In July, the automaker’s solar energy arm announced its “strongest” quarter in four years, with 106 megawatts deployed in . Tesla said something similar about its energy storage business , declaring in October that it recorded “by far the highest level [of growth it has] ever achieved,” with home and utility-scale battery deployments rocketing 62% year over year. Tesla also dipped its toes in the Texas market with an . Yet, Tesla reportedly put during this timeframe, and one of its at a California power storage site in September, state utility PG&E said. Tesla also missed some Wall Street analysts’ expectations in recent quarters — falling short on and . Earlier on Wednesday, Tesla’s stock price was trading at .

Lyft adds wait-time fees, nearly seven years after Uber

Darrell Etherington

Lyft has introduced wait-time fees — in other words, charges incurred if a Lyft driver has to wait for you upon pickup. The rideshare platform hasn’t had these previously, despite its main competitor Uber having them since 2016. Lyft’s wait-time fees kick in two minutes after on-time arrival for standard rides and five minutes after for Black and Black XL, and are charged on a per-minute basis. Wait-time fees also don’t apply to early arrivals for pickups — until the driver is waiting after the originally scheduled pickup time. They also don’t apply to a number of specific ride types, including Shared, Access, Assisted and Car Seat rides. And you also don’t pay wait-time fees if the ride ends up being canceled (you just pay the cancelation fee if it’s on your end). This is hardly a surprising change from Lyft, and it introduced more consistency for drivers who are operating across both platforms. But it is Lyft giving up on one of the remaining differentiators between it and its competition on the rider side.

Meta’s New Year kicks off with $410M+ in fresh EU privacy fines

Natasha Lomas

Meta is kicking off the New Year with more privacy fines and corrective orders hitting its business in Europe. The latest swathe of enforcement relates to a number of EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) complaints over the legal basis it claims to run behavioral ads. The Facebook owner’s lead data protection watchdog in the region, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), announced today that it’s adopted final decisions on two of these long-running enquiries — against Meta-owned social networking site, Facebook, and social photo-sharing service, Instagram. The DPC’s reveals financial penalties of €210 million (~$223 million) for Facebook and €180 million (~$191 milliion) for Instagram — and confirms the European Data Protection Board (EDPB)’s binding decision on these complaints that contractual necessity is not an appropriate basis for processing personal data for behavioral ads. These new sanctions add to a pile of privacy fines for Meta in Europe last year — including a penalty for a Facebook data-scraping breach; for an Instagram violation of children’s privacy; for several historical Facebook data breaches; and a penalty over Facebook cookie consent violations — making for a total of €747 million in (publicly disclosed) EU data protection and privacy fines handed down to the adtech giant in 2022. But now, in the first few days of 2023, Meta has landed financial penalties worth more than half last year’s regional total — and more sanctions could be coming shortly. Corrective measures are also being applied, per the DPC’s PR — with Meta being ordered to bring its processing into compliance with the GDPR within three months. This means it can no longer rely on a claim of contractual necessity to run behavioral ads — and will instead have to ask users for their consent. (And cannot profile and target users who do refuse its surveillance ads.) Commenting in a statement, Max Schrems, the founder of the European privacy rights group ( ) that filed the original GDPR complaints, said: “This is a huge blow to Meta’s profits in the EU. People now need to be asked if they want their data to be used for ads or not. They must have a ‘yes or no’ option and can change their mind at any time. The decision also ensures a level playing field with other advertisers that also need to get opt-in consent.” Given how central Meta’s tracking and targeting ad model remains to its business, the tech giant is extremely likely to appeal the decisions — and if it does that it could open up fresh delays while legal arguments against the now-ordered enforcement play out in the courts. So there could still be years of wrangling ahead before Meta submits to correction via EU privacy law. The DPC’s final decisions on these inquiries also still have not been published, so full details on differences of views between data protection authorities — and other interesting tidbits, such as on how the size of the fines have been determined — remain tbc. But in a press release announcing the two final decisions, the DPC offers its own spin on the regulatory disagreements — writing: On the question as to whether Meta Ireland had acted in contravention of its transparency obligations, the CSAs [concerned supervisory authorities] agreed with the DPC’s decisions, albeit that they considered the fines proposed by the DPC should be increased. Ten of the 47 CSAs raised objections in relation to other elements of the draft decisions (one of which was subsequently withdrawn in the case of the draft decision relating to the Instagram service). In particular, this subset of CSAs took the view that Meta Ireland should not be permitted to rely on the contract legal basis on the grounds that the delivery of personalised advertising (as part of the broader suite of personalised services offered as part of the Facebook and Instagram services) could not be said to be necessary to perform the core elements of what was said to be a much more limited form of contract. The DPC disagreed, reflecting its view that the Facebook and Instagram services include, and indeed appear to be premised on, the provision of a personalised service that includes personalised or behavioural advertising. In effect, these are personalised services that also feature personalised advertising. In the view of the DPC, this reality is central to the bargain struck between users and their chosen service provider, and forms part of the contract concluded at the point at which users accept the Terms of Service. The DPC’s PR also confirms the EDPB found an additional breach by Meta of the GDPR fairness principle (i.e., in addition to the transparency breach the DPC found which the Board upheld) — hence it being directed to (further) increase the level of fines imposed. A third decision against Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp (also over this legal basis issue) remains on the DPCs desk — but is slated to arrive in a week or so. (We’re told by the regulator this is owing to a short delay in the DPC receiving the binding decision on that complaint from the EDPB.) noyb says it’s expecting a fine for WhatsApp in that parallel procedure to be announced in mid January. Meta has published a with a response to the decisions in which it claims its choice of legal basis for processing people’s data for ads “respects GDPR.” It also says it plans to appeal the decisions — both on substance and the level of fines imposed. “Facebook and Instagram are inherently personalised, and we believe that providing each user with their own unique experience – including the ads they see – is a necessary and essential part of that service,” Meta writes, echoing the DPC’s view that it’s ‘all or nothing’ when it comes to ad-supported ‘personalized’ services. “To date, we have relied on a legal basis called ‘Contractual Necessity’ to show people behavioural advertisements based on their activities on our platforms, subject to their safety and privacy settings. It would be highly unusual for a social media service not to be tailored to the individual user,” it also argues — without mentioning that prior to switching to a claim of contractual necessity in 2018, ahead of the GDPR coming into application, it had relied upon a claim of user consent for ads processing. Meta’s blog post also claims the DPC’s decisions do not prevent personalised advertising on its platform; and do not mandate the use of consent for ads-based processing Similar businesses use a selection of legal bases to process data and we are assessing a variety of options that will allow us to continue offering a fully personalised service to our users.” This clutch of Meta-focused complaints dates back to , when the GDPR came into application across the European Union — after the European privacy rights campaign group, noyb, targeted the tech giant’s use of so-called “forced consent” (aka, pushing sign-up terms on users that mean they either ‘agree’ to their data being processed for behavioral ads or they can’t use the service). The Irish regulator’s draft decision on the complaints leaked back in — and, in contrast to the EDPB’s binding decision, the DPC did not object to Meta’s reliance on contractual necessity for running behavioral ads. Although it did find violations of the GDPR’s transparency requirements, saying users were unlikely to have understood they were signing up to a Facebook ad contract when they clicked agree on its terms of service. Hence the DPC originally proposed The DPC’s press release frames the outcome rather differently — as a difference of legal interpretations — with the regulator writing that the EDPB “took a different view on the ‘legal basis’ question”; and adding: It will be interesting to see whether Meta’s lawyers seek to make hay with the DPC’s (now publicly) stated view that Facebook and Instagram are “premised on, the provision of a personalised service that includes personalised or behavioural advertising” — and its (convenient-for-Meta) conflation of personalised services and personalised advertising via an expressed stance that such a conjoined pairing is “central to the bargain struck between users and their chosen service provider, and forms part of the contract concluded at the point at which users accept the Terms of Service”, as it puts it — as the tech giant seeks to overturn this GDPR decision against the legal basis it’s relied upon to run behavioral ads in the EU since 2018. Curiously, the DPC’s view on this (and Meta’s!) ignores the existence of other forms of (non-privacy) violating ads which Meta could use to monetize its service — such as contextual ads. Its PR is also silent on the question of whether Meta will be ordered to delete all the data it’s been illegally processing since 2018. But litigation funders are unlikely to ignore the opportunity to scale . There’s further drama unfolding around the DPC’s announcement today, too: Schrems has to complain that the DPC told noyb it will not be sent the final decision until Meta has had a chance to redact the document … “Never seen something like that in 10 years of litigation,” he added. “F*cking crazy.” ..this really means is that the DPC and Meta control the media narrative of what the decision says or does not say as we can't read or publish it. We all know that the EDPB f*cked the DPC another time in this case and won it, but by withholding the details of the case.. — Max Schrems 🇪🇺 (@maxschrems) (Reminder: noyb filed a complaint of criminal corruption against the DPC — accusing the regulator of corruption and “procedural blackmail” in relation to attempts to shut down the public release of documents related to GDPR complaints so this issue was already more than fraught.) In a of its own, noyb’s Schrems further hits out at what he described as the DPC’s “very diabolic public relations game” — writing: “Getting overturned by the EDPB is a major blow for the DPC, no[w] they seem to at least try to gain the public perception of this case. In 10 years of litigation I have never seen a decision only being served to one party but not the other. The DPC plays a very diabolic public relations game. By not allowing noyb or the public to read the decision, it tries to shape the narrative of the decision jointly with Meta. It seems the cooperation between Meta and the Irish regulator is well and alive — despite being overruled by the EDPB.” This action appears to have been instigated because the Board’s binding decision also directs the DPC to conduct what the Irish regulator couches as “a fresh investigation that would span all of Facebook and Instagram’s data processing operations and would examine special categories of personal data that may or may not be processed in the context of those operations.” Such an investigation — were it to actually take place — could really drive a stake through the heart of Meta’s privacy-sucking business model in the EU, where  the tech giant’s consent-less tracking and profiling of citizens is in breach of the bloc’s legal framework on data protection. So it’s certainly interesting that the DPC is keen to avoid having to open a wide-ranging investigation of on the EDPB’s instruction. Its PR states that the decisions it’s announced today “naturally do not include reference to fresh investigations of all Facebook and Instagram data processing operations that were directed by the EDPB in its binding decisions” — with the regulator explaining its objection thusly: The EDPB does not have a general supervision role akin to national courts in respect of national independent authorities and it is not open to the EDPB to instruct and direct an authority to engage in open-ended and speculative investigation. The direction is then problematic in jurisdictional terms, and does not appear consistent with the structure of the cooperation and consistency arrangements laid down by the GDPR. To the extent that the direction may involve an overreach on the part of the EDPB, the DPC considers it appropriate that it would bring an action for annulment before the Court of Justice of the EU in order to seek the setting aside of the EDPB’s directions. It remains to be seen what the EU’s General Court will make of the DPC’s complaint. However a legal challenge by WhatsApp to an earlier EDPB binding decision on a separate GDPR inquiry — which also substantially dialled up the level of enforcement it would have faced from an earlier DPC draft decision — was ruled inadmissible by the court .

YouTube confirms a test of a new hub for free, ad-supported streaming channels

Lauren Forristal

YouTube is officially running a test that allows select viewers in the U.S. to watch free ad-supported (FAST) channels via a dedicated hub on the video platform. Users that have access to the experiment will find FAST linear channels in the . In a shared statement to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson said, “YouTube is the only place where viewers can find everything they want, and we’re always looking for new ways to provide viewers a central destination to more easily find, watch, and share the content that matters most to them. We are currently running a small experiment that allows viewers to watch free ad-supported linear channels alongside the wide variety of content we offer on the platform.” The company is reportedly talking with various entertainment companies about featuring their titles in the new hub, according to , which first broke the news. YouTube is apparently testing with various content suppliers, such as A+E Networks, Cinedigm Corp., Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and FilmRise, WSJ wrote. The hub could launch later this year. YouTube declined to comment to TechCrunch on the launch date and which media partners it has chosen to test with. This experiment is part of the company’s goal to give viewers all their favorite content in one destination, like content from creators as well as traditional movies and TV shows, sports and more. The FAST hub will put YouTube in better competition with Roku, Pluto TV and Tubi, among other players in the space. Whenever YouTube rolls out its FAST channels hub, it will likely do extremely well as it is already a top streaming service worldwide. The company in November that it surpassed 80 million global subscribers across YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. Back in March 2022, YouTube free, ad-supported TV shows, giving U.S. viewers access to more than 4,000 titles. The new offering was an expansion of its free, ad-supported movies, which includes more than 1,500 movies from partners like Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Lionsgate, FilmRise and more. Users get up to 100 new titles each week. More recently, YouTube rolled out a feature, which allows viewers to subscribe to 30+ streaming services, including Paramount+, Showtime, Shudder, Starz, AMC+ and more. YouTube became the winner of the package last month, which will be available as an add-on to YouTube TV and through YouTube Primetime Channels.

What each streaming service has up its sleeve in 2023

Lauren Forristal

Major streaming services have upped their game in 2022 with the launch of ad-supported tiers, new live sports deals, hugely successful original series and more. As the streaming wars continue to heat up, media companies have no choice but to raise the stakes. From the HBO Max/Discovery+ merged streaming service to Netflix’s password-sharing offering, here’s what SVOD (subscription video-on-demand) have planned for next year and beyond. Earlier this year, Discovery  WarnerMedia to form Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), becoming one of the biggest media companies in the United States. As TechCrunch has reported many times, are combining in 2023. , WBD will launch a that pairs  and with Discovery+’s content library of unscripted shows, documentaries and more. In total, subscribers will have access to nearly 200,000 hours of programming and over 100 brands, such as , TBS, TNT, TruTV, Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, Food Network, TLC, HGTV, ID, Animal Planet and many others. The streaming service will be called just “Max,” and will make its debut in the U.S. before launching in Latin America and then in Europe in 2024. While there will be an ad-free and ad-supported option, its ad-free offering will likely cost more than what subscribers pay now for HBO Max’s premium plan, which is . “Max,” or whatever the company decides to call it, will be a major contender in the streaming wars. HBO, and with a combined total of 94.9 million global subscribers. WBD is also busy planning a free ad-supported streaming (FAST) service to keep up with competitors in the FAST market, including Peacock, Pluto TV, Tubi and Amazon Freevee, among others. , the company pulled from HBO Max that will soon move to third-party streaming services. This includes “ ,” “The Nevers,” “Raised by Wolves,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” “Love Life,” “Made for Love,” “Minx,” “Finding Magic Mike,” “Head of the Class,” “FBOY Island,” “Legendary,” “Gordita Chronicles” and “The Garcias.” We predict that once WBD launches its FAST offering, it will offer these titles. had an eventful 2022. The company its $6.99/month ad-supported tier, giving consumers the ability to save a few bucks on their streaming habits. The move validates a common trend in the industry right now — ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) is in. In 2023, Netflix’s “Basic with Ads” plan is to have 7.5 million domestic subscribers, according to J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth. Netflix’s subscriber base also rebounded in Q3 2022 after increasing by , bringing the total to 223.09 million. The company previously experienced  , losing a total of  . As far as we know, the streamer has three notable projects in the works for 2023 and beyond. In early 2023, Netflix will launch an “ ” feature to monetize . The feature will prompt account members to pay an extra fee to add a for people sharing the streaming service. The company has already launched a “ ” feature, which lets a member on an existing account transfer their profile to a brand-new account and a “ ” feature, which allows account owners to remotely log out of devices they don’t want to be signed in to the account. Also coming to the streaming service next year is a , with to be the first to test the offering for his upcoming comedy special. Live content could help the streamer attract new subs. Unfortunately, Netflix is not planning to launch a . During the UBS Global TMT Conference, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos , “We’ve not seen a profit path to renting big sports.” Beyond next year, the company is continuing its investment into gaming. At , Netflix VP of Gaming Mike Verdu that a cloud gaming offering is on the horizon. This is a smart move for Netflix as the global cloud gaming market had in revenue in 2021. Similarly, there’s a possibility that Netflix will get into since it’s looking to hire a game director who’ll be in charge of launching a AAA PC game. Netflix’s mobile gaming library continues to expand. Entering 2023, Netflix will have launched so far. Looking back on 2022, experienced a lot of major changes, including the launch of its as well as the unexpected return of as CEO. The “Disney+ Basic” plan is $7.99/month and was in order to give Disney+ more subscribers. The company wants to reach 230-260 million Disney+ subscribers by 2024. In the fourth quarter of 2022, Disney+ reported  in total. However, there is one with the ad launch: Disney+ Basic is unavailable on Roku devices. TechCrunch estimates that Disney and Roku will reach an agreement to change that sometime in late 2023 — but that’s just a guess. Alongside Disney+’s new subscription plan, the streamer introduced changes to the Disney Bundle as well as a to its ad-free plan. In November 2022, Bob Chapek stepped down as CEO of Disney and was replaced by Bob Iger, the former CEO, who had only vacated the spot in 2021. Hopefully, Iger can help the company achieve profitability by its fiscal 2024. In Q4 2022, when Chapek was still CEO, Disney’s direct-to-consumer division lost $1.5 billion in revenue. In 2023, Disney+ is planning an international expansion to 30 additional countries, which would bring the total to  . Over the summer, the streamer launched . Also, beginning next year, Disney+ will be the exclusive international home for new “ ” episodes. One significant feature coming to the streaming service is an for Disney+ subscribers. The online shop, which is currently in the testing phase, offers users merchandise from Disney-owned brands, such as Star Wars, Marvel, Disney Animation Studios and Pixar. The company is also reportedly exploring the idea of a membership program similar to Amazon Prime. There are no official launch dates for either feature. Not much happened for the Disney-owned streaming service this year, apart from annoying and to rival Peacock. The streamer did however reach a milestone of  . Hulu is also beginning 2023 with 47.2 million subscribers. If you’ve been following the Disney/Comcast spectacle, then you know that Disney is to buy Comcast’s stake in Hulu by the end of 2024. Comcast owns 33%, whereas Disney owns 66%. However, when Chapek was still CEO, he alluded in a that Disney could buy the rights sooner than that — perhaps in 2023. This depends on if Comcast “is willing to have discussions that would bring that to fruition earlier,” Chapek said. Whenever Disney ends up buying Comcast’s stake in Hulu — either by 2023 or 2024 — the company may be planning on merging Hulu with Disney+ and ESPN+. “You know the term soft bundle and hard bundle, right? Soft bundle is, hey, buy all three services for the low price of X. The hard bundle is when things become seamless and without friction. Right now, if you want to go from Hulu to ESPN+ to Disney+, you have to go out of one app to another app. In the future, we may have less friction,” Chapek told Variety. If Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ were to live inside one platform, many subscribers who already have the Disney Bundle would be overjoyed. While it most likely won’t be a full integration like HBO Max and Discovery+, it will still be an amalgamation of epic proportions. Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ have a combined total of 235.7 million subscribers. had a successful 2022, becoming the exclusive home of the NFL’s “ ,” which had its first game watched by , and its “ ” spinoff was the most-watched series with  “ ” is confirmed for a second season. It’s fair to say that Amazon is heavily investing in content and will continue doing so for the next few years. For instance, the streaming service keeps putting money toward live sports. In 2023, the company will be the home of an , the first Black Friday game for the league. Amazon may also take a gamble with theatrical movies, . The publication wrote that Amazon might begin spending more than $1 billion a year to produce 12 to 15 films that will premiere in theaters before they make their debut on the streaming service. This would be a notable yet expensive gamble for the company, as it has yet to invest this much into original movies. The streamer has various original series in the pipeline, including the greenlit limited series “ ,” a “ ” live-action series and even at least one “ ” title that will have “Man of Steel” actor Henry Cavill as the lead. Speaking of DC actors, Amazon is in the process of closing a deal with Warner Bros. to develop animated DC series for Prime Video. At the Content London conference, the Chairman of Warner Bros. Television Group, Channing Dungey, , “We are in the process of closing a big deal with Amazon that’s going to feature some of our DC branded content in animation.” For HBO Max to share IP, especially DC content, is extremely notable and will likely boost subscription growth for Prime Video. As more SVOD streaming services shift to AVOD, we wouldn’t be surprised if Prime Video considers launching a cheaper ad-supported tier. It’s possible that such an offering would pay off big for Amazon. It’s estimated that Netflix will see $600 million in advertising sales in 2023 alone. The move makes sense for Amazon as it already has an ad-supported service, . Amazon Prime Video is also testing an ad format called , which the company announced in May. announced its first foray into live sports this year. We suspect Apple TV+ will keep up with the trend in 2023. In March 2022, Apple TV+ closed its first live sports deal with , bringing fans “ ” games as well as a live show “MLB Big Inning.” The company is launching its subscription service for Major League Soccer fans, “ ” in February 2023. Like Amazon, rival Apple TV+ would benefit greatly from an ad-supported tier. Apple TV+ recently increased its subscription price to . is ending 2022 with , which was mainly driven by the new partnership with which has a reported 16 million subscribers, as well as offering its premium subscription on and . More recently, Paramount+ a record number of subscriber sign-ups in November when it premiered its latest hit series “Tulsa King,” starring Sylvester Stallone. Looking ahead, Paramount+ plans to reach 100 million subs by 2024 and increase streaming content spending to $6 billion, up from $2 billion in 2022. It also has plans to , which includes by 2025. With the release of high-budget films like “Top Gun: Maverick” and Paramount+ continuing to rely on popular IP, the streamer will likely achieve substantial subscriber growth in 2023. Plus, Paramount+ recently launched an , giving subscribers access to more content. That being said, a merger between Paramount+ and Showtime is likely imminent. During Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Technology Conference, CEO of Paramount Global, Bob Bakish, that talks of a merger had taken place internally. While a decision hasn’t been made yet, integrating Showtime into Paramount+ would be the best move for the company. A price increase is also in the future plans for Paramount+. During the company’s third-quarter earnings call, Paramount Global Executive Vice President and CFO, Naveen Chopra, that “opportunities to increase price on Paramount+” is to be expected. Peacock had a big win in 2022 as it doubled its number of paid subscribers to 18 million this year alone. This was mainly thanks to NBC and Bravo next-day episodes that it earlier this year. Peacock was also the Spanish-language streaming home for all games. In terms of other content coming to the streaming service in 2023, Peacock will premiere the “John Wick” prequel series, “The Continental,” as well as original series like “Poker Face,” starring “Russian Doll” star Natasha Lyonne. The streamer also recently announced its first original adult animation series, “ ,” which will feature “Beavis and Butt-Head” creator Mike Judge and “Silicon Valley” actor Zach Woods. Beginning in 2023, Peacock will be the exclusive streaming partner of , marking a notable deal that will broaden its service to more subscribers. While things are looking up for Peacock next year, some non-paying subscribers might be very disappointed in the next 12 months or later. NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell that “at some point” the company wants to convert Xfinity users to paid subscribers of Peacock. This means customers of Comcast’s Xfinity cable and internet services might not be able to get the streaming service as a free perk anymore. However, this move would make sense for Peacock since 30 million monthly active users can access the streaming service at no additional cost.

Japan’s Terra Drone gets $14M lift from Saudi investors

Kate Park

Netflix gets livestreaming rights to SAG Awards in 2024

Lauren Forristal

Netflix will continue its foray into livestreaming with a with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards. Beginning in 2024, the award ceremony will be broadcast live on the streamer, becoming the first major film and television awards show to air on Netflix. As part of the new deal, Netflix will stream this year’s 29th annual SAG awards on Netflix’s YouTube channel. The award show will premiere online on February 26 at 8 p.m. ET. “The SAG Awards are beloved by the creative community and viewers alike, and now even more fans around the world will be able to celebrate these talented actors,” Netflix Head of Global TV Bela Bajaria said in a statement. “As we begin to explore livestreaming on Netflix, we look forward to partnering with SAG-AFTRA to elevate and expand this special ceremony as a global live event in 2024 and the years to come.” It was only a matter of time before the SAG Awards moved to a streaming service. Since 1998, the ceremony has broadcast on TBS and TNT. However, SAG in May 2022 that it would no longer broadcast on the networks. Moving to a streamer is a smart move for the award show and gives viewers a more affordable way to watch than cable. Notably, the 28 annual SAG awards only had , a substantial decrease from in 2020 and 2.7 million in 2019. However, even though Netflix has the largest subscriber base among its rivals, with , the streaming giant hasn’t tested its livestreaming capability yet, which it only just last year. The company is set to test its first-ever livestreaming event early when it streams the live comedy special starring . “We are thrilled to embark on this exciting new partnership with Netflix and we look forward to expanding the global audience for our show,” SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland added. “As the only televised awards program exclusively honoring the performances of actors, whose work is admired by millions of fans, the SAG Awards are a unique and cherished part of the entertainment universe.”

Madrid selects Dott, Lime and Tier for scooter licenses

Romain Dillet

Madrid for scooter-sharing services in the city. The city council has chosen three operators for the next three years — , and . This trio of companies will sound familiar as these companies also won tender processes in several European cities in recent years. Madrid even says that it drew inspiration from 17 European cities, and Paris and London in particular. Dott, Lime and Tier also operate in Paris, but the Mayor has decided that Parisians whether they want to ban shared scooters. It’s a different story for Madrid as Dott, Lime and Tier now have some clarity until 2026. The operators will be able to roll out 6,000 scooters in total — 2,000 scooters for each company. There can be some adjustments down the road. If there is more demand than expected, the city of Madrid can decide to increase the cap so that companies can roll out more vehicles — there will be an evaluation every four months. Similarly, the city can grant license extensions after the licenses expire in 2026. If you live in Madrid or recently traveled to the city, you may have already seen scooters spread around the city. The city of Madrid had already authorized free-floating scooters back in 2019. And it’s been a mixed bag. While the city has decided to renew the licenses for another three years, it is adding some requirements. In 2019, Madrid originally decided to create a 10,000 hard cap for the total number of scooters in the city. But there wasn’t any limit on the number of operators. Overall, 18 companies obtained an operating license from the City Council, leading to unnecessary fragmentation. Many scooter companies already withdrew from Madrid. Starting in May, there will only be three different scooter companies. Riders won’t be able to park their scooters wherever they want. The city will allocate some specific parking spaces for scooters in the city center. Thanks to the onboard GPS module, users won’t be able to end their ride if they haven’t parked their scooter properly. Scooter companies can also require a photo when you end your ride. Outside of the city center, riders should park their scooter in a moped, bike or scooter parking space. If you are more than 50 meters away from a dedicated space, you can lock your scooter and end your ride. According to the city council, there has already been some improvements when it comes to fines due to improper parking. But things should definitely look better in May. The three operators promised that they will remove an incorrectly parked scooter within one hour.

Lightyear stops production on €250,000 solar-powered EV

Rebecca Bellan

Solar-powered electric vehicle maker Lightyear said it’s halting production on its flagship Lightyear 0, its premium EV with a sticker price of €250,000. Despite only starting production on the vehicle three months ago, Lightyear is restructuring to focus on building a more affordable model, the Lightyear 2 for around €40,000, reports . The news comes as many electric vehicle makers push back production and delivery dates due to a range of macroeconomic factors like   and rising costs of materials due to inflation. At the same time, with hanging over consumers like a dark cloud and EV startups struggling to get vehicles off the assembly line, throwing money into an extremely expensive model just doesn’t make good business sense. The Lightyear 0 was always intended as a technology demonstrator to be produced in limited quantities. In a press release, Lightyear said it has had to overcome “many challenges” in order to make its vehicles a reality. The company didn’t specify what challenges, but said in order to safeguard its vision, the Lightyear 0 needed to die so the Lightyear 2 could thrive. “We are now redirecting all our energy towards building Lightyear 2 in order to make it available to clients on schedule,” said Lightyear’s CEO and co-founder Lex Hoefsloot in a statement. Lightyear opened the waitlist for Lightyear 2, a five-seater hatchback with a promised range of 500 miles per charge, earlier this month at CES. The company hasn’t shared many details on the car, but already the Lightyear 2 has over 40,000 reservations from individual buyers and about 20,000 preorders from fleet owners like international leasing and car-sharing companies LeasePlan, MyWheels, Arval and Athlon, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. The Lightyear 2 is scheduled to start production in mass-market volumes at the end of 2025. It’s not clear if the company intends to push up that production date now that it won’t be building the Lightyear 0, for which it has already presold 150 units. Earlier this month, a Lightyear spokesperson told TechCrunch the first Lightyear 0 has been produced and shown to the company’s first customer. The company said it had been building one car per week since November and expected to ramp up weekly production later this year. Lightyear did not respond in time to TechCrunch to comment on production date of the 2s or whether it will make good on its 0 sales. However, Lightyear did say in a press release that it submitted a request to “the court to open suspension of payment proceedings in relation to Atlas Technologies B.V., our operating company responsible for the production of the Lightyear 0.” The company didn’t stipulate to which court it submitted a suspension request, but according to the companies can request to have their debts frozen for 18 months, giving them time to reorganize. Lightyear will likely try to raise more money to stay afloat. The company raised as it prepared to start production on Lightyear 0, but Hoefsloot noted that the company hopes to “conclude some key investments in the coming weeks in order to scale up” the car for a wider audience.