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TechCrunch’s top 3
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Some developers are not happy: If you haven’t had the opportunity to meet our new Europe reporter, Paul Sciers, you’re in for a treat because he knocked it out of the park today. He wrote on the Software Freedom Conservancy urging open source developers to ditch GitHub after the company’s commercial launch of Copilot. Their beef, among other things, is that there are now fees associated with using Copilot.
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He is going down: Buy now, pay later Fintech firm Klarna is reportedly raising another round of funding at a valuation far below some of its previous rounds. Mary Ann see you.
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Valuation waits for no market: alexander digs into OpenSea’s $13 billion valuation and why it doesn’t match what it sees with NFT trading volumes.
Startups and VCs
A bit of a slow day for startup news, but let’s dive in:
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another wave: Natasha and Amanda are back with the saddest list we’ve put together – all the tech layoffs.
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No head in the clouds here: Snowflake has made a name for itself in all things cloud data warehousing, and Ron writes today that Hydra is here to take an open source approach. The company, which raised $3.1 million after graduating from Y Combinator’s winter 2022 class, is building its cloud data warehouse on top of the popular open-source database Postgres.
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Extra efficiency: I highlighted Promoted.ai’s new $6 million startup extension that will contribute to the company’s long-term vision of helping e-commerce marketplaces achieve profitability. Their technology brings together all the gooey goodness of the marketplace, search, feed, ads, and promotions, under one platform.
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A bullet in the arm: Medical testing has never been more important now, and haje learned that Visby Medical had raised an additional $35 million, an extension to a $100 million Series E funding round raised earlier this year. The company is working on “the world’s first instrument-free portable PCR platform to accurately and quickly test a variety of serious infections for anyone who needs it.”
Pitch Deck Teardown: Wilco’s $7 million seed deck
Picture credits: Wilco
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Founders with a technical background would do well to consider one of the biggest takeaways from Wilco’s $7 million pitch deck: avoid the trap of focusing too much on product features, rather than his advantages, haje writing.
“The ‘how’ will be important, but may be tempted to go into more detail than is important for a pitch deck. The ‘what’ is too tactical; for this part of the story, no matter what what users need to do to get those benefits. Focusing on the “why” is why this slide is so powerful, it opens the door to deeper conversations if needed, but the groundwork is there. I wish more startups were successful!”
(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams grow. You can register here.)
Big Tech inc.
Yes, the Apple Store was down for 2 hours yesterday, but all is well with the world now. haje reported that it returned with the removal of Enjoy – the company that was in charge of delivering and configuring Apple devices – following the announcement of Enjoy’s bankruptcy, and that a card – $50 gift will be shipped with purchase of Apple TV 4K and AppleTV HD.
Anne dives into a story about the US commodities regulator, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, pursuing a civil action against Mirror Trading International Proprietary Limited, a South African bitcoin pool operator, and its CEO Cornelius Johannes Steynberg, for allegedly running a fraudulent commodity pool worth more than $1.7 billion in bitcoins.
On the other side of the pond, Natasha delivered a pair of stories related to the European Union today. One was that Amazon agreed to make it easier to cancel Prime membership, while lawmakers gave their approval to some new cryptocurrency regulations.
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Google settles down: Ivan writes that the search engine giant agreed to pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit with US developers who accused Google of abusing its power to distribute apps and charging an unfair 30% fee for app purchases and in-app purchases made through the Play Store.
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Crypto Mayhem: A company, whose application for a bitcoin cash exchange-traded fund was rejected by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, is now suing the federal entity. Jacquie explains why an expert says this approach probably won’t work.
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FTX is back: First it was rumored that FTX was looking to acquire Robinhood, which has been debunked, but now another deal for BlockFi seems to be sticking. Lucas see you.
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No EPA, no crying: Tim explains why the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent Supreme Court decision “virtually guarantees that the United States will not be competitive with China or Europe.”
