Year: 2020

Facebook is working to bring back the Instagram Lite app, months after it shut down the light version offering worldwide.

The social conglomerate said on Wednesday that it is testing the revamped Instagram Lite app in India, where it hopes to “gain valuable insights” about the new offering before “a global rollout” of the app later.

The new Instagram Lite app weighs less than 2MB and delivers a “fast, reliable, and responsive” experience of the social service. The Android app supports Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu, but currently lacks a several core features of Instagram including Reels, Shopping and IGTV.

Facebook quietly discontinued the previous iteration of Instagram Lite earlier this year. In July, Vishal Shah, VP of Product at Instagram, told TechCrunch that the company had identified some issues in the app and was working to resolve those. In September, a new Lite app was spotted in the wild, though Facebook did not acknowledge it.

Lite apps are especially popular in emerging markets where most users don’t have access to high-end smartphones or fast and cheap mobile internet data. Facebook Lite app, for instance, had about 40 million monthly active users in India last month, while Messenger Lite app had about 13 million, according to mobile insight firm App Annie, data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch.

Shah made the announcement about the new Instagram Lite app at Facebook Fuel for India event on Wednesday, where scores of Facebook executives including Mark Zuckerberg and Ajit Mohan outlined a number of other programs they were working on for the world’s second largest internet market.

Instagram also announced the second version of ‘Born on Instagram,’ a one-year-old program it has built for content creators to better understand and leverage ways to collaborate with one another and explore monetization opportunities.

“With the test of Instagram Lite, and the next edition of Born on Instagram, we’re aiming to democratize expression and creativity for a greater number of people in India,” said Shah.

At the event, WhatsApp India head Abhijit Bose said that the company was working to launch sachet-sized health insurance offering to users in India this month. In July, WhatsApp had unveiled that it was working to pilot credit, insurance, and pension services in India, the instant messaging app’s biggest market by users, over the next year and a half.

“WhatsApp has proactively been working on several pilots to help ensure that every adult has access to the most basic critical financial and livelihood services through their mobile device. By the end of this year, we expect that people will be able to buy affordable sachet sized health insurance through WhatsApp,” Bose said today.

Facebook, which identifies India as its biggest market by users, is also working with telecom giant Jio Platforms to help tens of millions of small businesses establish online presence and sell digitally. The American giant, which invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms this year, are collaborating to make Jio Platforms’ JioMart e-commerce service available through WhatsApp. Some new features are coming to JioMart’s WhatsApp channel in the “coming days,” Facebook and Reliance executives teased today.

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Logistics is one of the biggest challenges in e-commerce, especially for smaller merchants. Pickupp helps them compete in the on-demand economy with flexible, customizable delivery services. Based in Hong Kong, Pickupp also operates in Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan, and claims it can save clients an average of about 28% in logistic costs.

Pickupp is able to do this with an asset-light business model. Instead of operating warehouses or its own fleets, it partners with logistics companies and uses proprietary software to make delivering batches of orders more efficient.

The company, which currently serves about 10,000 e-commerce merchants, announced last month it closed an undisclosed amount in Series A funding from Vision Plus Capital, Alibaba Enterpreneurs Fund, Cyperport Macro Fund, Swire Properties New Ventures and SparkLabs Taipei.

Pickupp currently offers three kinds of door-to-door delivery services: on-demand couriers who deliver within a four hour window, same day deliveries, and one to three day deliveries. It can also customize logistics and last-minute delivery solutions for businesses.

In Singapore, Pickupp runs its own e-commerce platform. Called Shop On Pickupp, the platform enables merchants to move more of their retail operations online and has been used to digitize marketplaces like the Shilin Singapore Night Market during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before starting Pickupp, co-founder and chief executive officer Crystal Pang, a software engineer by training, was part of the team that launched Uber in Hong Kong in 2014.

“Around that time, I started looking into logistics, because I found out a lot of merchants were trying to use Uber cars to deliver other stuff, anything but people,” she said.

But unlike delivery services, merchants couldn’t bargain with Uber drivers—for example, negotiating discounted fees if they were able to wait longer for a vehicle. “That’s the gist of logistics, because everyone wants to get part of those cost savings,” Pang said. Sensing a market opportunity, Pang began using her software engineering background to think of a solution.

Pickupp was founded in December 2016 and began operating the next year. When it launched, Pickupp already had formidable rivals like Gogovan and Lalamove. But since those companies focused mainly on on-demand, point-to-point delivery, Pang saw an opportunity to tackle other parts of the supply chain.

“How we see ourselves compared to other logistics companies is that we fulfill all these e-commerce needs. We behave like a logistics company, but we don’t need to own anything. So we perform the function of a traditional logistics company, which in this area is SF Express or Ninja Van, that lease warehouses and operate their own fleets, but Pickupp choses a lightweight asset approach to getting it done,” she said.

Pickupp positions itself more as a data and tech company, Pang added.

“You can almost imagine us as a monitoring system,” she said. Pickupp partners with sorting facilities, cross-border freight forwarders and delivery vehicles, and gives merchants visibility into where orders are along the supply chain.

Its system keeps costs down by predicting when and where available delivery people will be available, so it can match them with batches of orders. This also prevents bottlenecks during demand spikes and makes sure couriers are used at the most capacity possible, which is especially important for holidays and major shopping events like Double Eleven and Black Friday.

One of Pickupp’s advantages is that its system is designed to be flexible so it can scale into new Asian markets quickly. Pang told TechCrunch that the round will be used to add more services, and invest in machine learning, predictive analytics and understanding customer purchasing behavior. The company also plans to expand into up to five new Asian markets over the next three years.

MessageBird, the omnichannel cloud communications platform recently valued at $3 billion following a Series C round in October, has acquired London-based real-time web technologies company Pusher.

The acquisition price is $35 million, and sees Pusher co-founder and CEO Max Williams and the 25-person Pusher team join Amsterdam-headquartered MessageBird . (In 2018, Pusher told TechCrunch it had a team of 60, so there has obviously been some cost-cutting in recent years.)

The Pusher product will be kept independent for existing customers, while Pusher’s tech, with its focus on in-app notifications and a developer-friendly API and SDKs built around “push,” will help plug a gap in MessageBird’s own communication platform, which is stronger in SMS and messaging-first channels such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Line and WeChat, etc. Specifically, Pusher is said to bring features like in-app messaging, push notifications and location tracking.

“The deal opens up a host of new tools and features that will help MessageBird’s customers talk to their customers in even more ways than before,” says MessageBird.

Founded in 2011, Pusher aimed to lower the barriers for developers who want to build real-time features into their websites and apps. This was originally delivered via a general purpose real-time API and supporting cloud infrastructure, enabling app developers to more easily build things like rich push notifications, live content updates and various real-time collaboration and communication features.

However, more recently the company had begun rolling out additional offerings dedicated to specific real-time functionality. The first of those was Chatkit, an API and SDK intended to do a lot of the heavy lifting required to add chat functionality to an app or service. This has since been extended to also include charts and location tracking/maps. Pusher customers include GitHub, Mailchimp, CodeShip and The Financial Times.

Meanwhile, MessageBird was originally seen as a European or “rest of the world” competitor to U.S.-based Twilio — offering a cloud communications platform that supports voice, video and text capabilities all wrapped up in an API — but has since repositioned itself as an “Omnichannel Platform-as-a-Service” (OPaaS). The idea is to easily enable enterprises and medium and smaller-sized companies to communicate with customers on any channel of their choosing.

Out of the box, this includes support for WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, Twitter, Line, Telegram, SMS, email and voice. Customers can start online and then move their support request or query over to a more convenient channel, such as their favourite mobile messaging app, which, of course, can go with them. It’s all part of MessageBird founder and CEO Robert Vis’ big bet that the future of customer interactions is omnichannel.

Therefore the acquisition of Pusher looks like a good fit, overall. London and Amsterdam are close geographically and with similar time zones, while MessageBird is transforming into a remote-first company anyway. There is also arguably enough product overlap but also genuine gaps to make the pairing a no-brainer.

In a short call with MessageBird CEO and founder Robert Vis, he talked up Pusher’s tech and team and pressed home his belief that it is important that startups exiting find a “good home,” rather than simply being acquired and then disappearing without a trace. Likewise, if MessageBird wants to be truly omnichannel, a really good “push” API and product suite is needed. The next decision was then whether or not to acquire or build, and, in this instance, teaming up with Pusher was deemed the best way forward.

Meanwhile, Vis advised me to expect a lot more M&A in the omnichannel and messaging platform space. Not just from MessageBird as it heads toward a potential IPO, but also from competitors.

In the midst of a major second wave of coronavirus infections across Europe, an Estonian startup that’s building an on-demand network to move food and people around in cars, on scooters and on bikes across developed and emerging markets in EMEA is announcing a major round of funding.

Bolt, which covers 200 cities in 40 countries with its delivery and transportation services, has raised €150 million ($182 million at current rates) in an equity round that CEO and co-founder Markus Villig said in an interview will be used to double down on geographic expansion and to help it become the biggest provider of electric scooters in Europe.

Bolt currently has some 50 million customers using its services, and Villig has built the business around two main areas to differentiate it from the Ubers of the world: strong capital efficiency (or “frugality” as he describes it) and putting a heavy emphasis on services for emerging markets, alongside launches in cities like London and Paris and, soon, Berlin.

“This round was the first time we raised with most of the previous round still in the bank, despite the pressures of Covid” he said. “This shows the frugality of the company. Due to lockdowns, we were not as aggressive as we would have liked to be, so financially we are now in a very good position for 2021.”

The round is being led by D1 Capital Partners with participation also from Darsana Capital Partners. D1 has this year been a huge player in growth rounds for some of the very biggest startups: it has made investments in eyewear giant Warby Parker, gaming engine maker Unity, car sales portal Cazoo, and fintech TransferWise, collectively with valuations into the multiple billions of dollars.

On that note, Villig wouldn’t disclose what Bolt’s valuation is but said that it was closer to the multiples of 1.5x on GMV, a la the recently listed DoorDash, than it is closer to “others” in the transport space that are seeing valuations closer to 0.5x.

He also confirmed to me that Bolt is doing about €2 billion in GMV currently annually, which would give it a valuation, by his hinted calculations of €3.5 billion ($4.3 billion). No comment from Villig on my number crunching, but he also didn’t dispute it.

For some context, in May of this year Bolt was valued at $1.9 billion after raising just over $100 million. At the time, it said it had 30 million users, so it’s added 20 million in about six months.

The company’s rise has been an interesting counterpoint to the likes of Uber, which built its business with early, aggressive — and as it turned out, very costly — growth into multiple markets and product areas, a number of which it has more recently been divesting (see also here, here and here for other examples).

Founded originally as Taxify and slowly growing the business just around ride-hailing for a number of years in less-scrutinized emerging markets, the company rebranded in 2019 as it kicked its strategy into a higher gear, with launches in cities like London and a move into micromobility, primarily around electric scooters. Its current list of biggest markets reflects that mix: Villig said they were the UK, France, South Africa and Nigeria.

Not all of that has been smooth, with too-aggressive moves, such as a failed initial launch in London — scuppered when regulators quickly responded to its attempt at exploiting a loophole to get a license — quickly burning the company (and possibly teaching Villig a lesson he’s tried to remember going forward).

Even with the shift, Villig said that his aim is to keep the company operating on the same frugal ethos when it comes to considering new investments and how to grow. He noted that in this year that has seen so many job losses, in particular in businesses that have seen massive drops in uses, Bolt has not laid off anyone.

It’s interesting, indeed, to see how and which companies choose to “zig” while others “zag” at the moment. The food delivery business is a case in point. We are seeing a number of consolidations underway, with Uber acquiring Postmates, and Just Eat Takeaway (itself a big merger) acquiring Grubhub. Alongside that there have also been a number of closures of smaller players that found it too costly to try to scale.

“What most people have not realized is that the food part is what we are most optimistic about,” Villig said. “Currently we are adding restaurants by the day. There are cost synergies on a lot of fronts, including the supply side, where drivers can serve passengers and food. But also today we have had to decline some drivers for car-based services because they don’t have the right licenses, but now we can offer them to carry goods on bikes, which doesn’t require that license at all. We can offer something to drivers that we weren’t able to do. And what that means is no need to spend money on finding drivers.”

He said Bolt was “lucky” to get into food, even as late as 2019 since restaurants that were already interested were augmented by a new wave of them in the wake of the health pandemic and forced closures and reduced diners overall in venues. “They were all keen to get additional income and were eager to try out new platforms,” he said.

That willingness to find the way ahead even in what looks like a murky or hard market is what has brought investors around this time. Villig said they were already talking to a lot of them, and so it made sense to close the round to prepare for 2021.

“We are excited to partner with Bolt as they continue to build a market-leading mobility platform across Europe and Africa,” said Dan Sundheim, founder of D1 Capital, in a statement. “The team has executed incredibly well during a challenging year and continues to provide millions of users with safety, flexibility and great value. We are optimistic about the growth opportunity ahead for Bolt after the COVID-19 pandemic and look forward to supporting the team as they invest in innovation over the coming years.”

You might not know yet of XYZ Venture Capital, a four-year-old, Bay Area-based seed-stage venture firm, but many veterans of Palantir are surely aware of it. XYZ says it has already backed 22 startups whose founders came out of the data analysis company, including most notably, Anduril, Lucky Palmer’s defense tech startup. In fact, the founder of XYZ, Ross Fubini, says his firm wrote Anduril its first check.

It all dates back to a key introduction. Fubini is a Carnegie Mellon grad who cofounded an enterprise company, CubeTree, that a dozen years later, sold to SuccessFactors, which was itself acquired by SAP the next year, in 2011.

Then, like a lot of founders, he started writing checks.

First, Fubini linked up with Mitch Kapor, another software mogul turned investor and a friend of Fubini who bought him into his venture firm and taught him the ropes. During his one year spent with the outfit, Fubini says, he wrote seed checks into the digital care company Omada Health, the optimization platform Optimizely (acquired this fall), and LendUp, the payday loan company that was split into two businesses back in 2018.

From Kapor Capital, it was onto Canaan Partners as a venture partner and, just three years later, to Village Global, the early-stage venture firm that was founded in 2017 with the backing of prominent founders like Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman. (Fubini helped cofound the outfit with a handful of others.) At the same time, Fubini began raising his own pool of capital under the brand XYZ Ventures, eventually launching a $70 million fund.

Now he’s turning the enterprise into a bigger organization.

For starters, this year, XYZ closed its second fund with $80 million in capital commitments from what Fubini says is predominately institutional investors, and it has been investing actively. Fubini says the firm has already written checks to 30 different startups that range in size from $500,000 to $4 million in exchange for 12% to 20% ownership in the startups.

He also brought aboard a partner: Chauncey Kerr Hamilton, who spent more than five years as a partner operations manager with First Round and was looking for a new challenge when a mutual friend introduced her to Fubini. “I kept hearing about Ross from founders and other investors and we met for coffee, then we kept meeting week after week,” she says of their earlier conversations.

Hamilton says she realized over their time together that “we’re kindred spirits.” But she has also pushed Fubini to be more public for the sake of XYZ’s portfolio companies.

As a former projects editor at Wired before leaping into VC, she half-kiddingly refers to the “mystique” of XYZ Ventures, but she also wondered if it might be easier for founders to discuss their lead investor if they could point to more than Fubini’s LinkedIn page.

Certainly, it makes sense as XYZ widens its aperture beyond Palantir, which was itself known for keeping a low profile over the years and where Fubini’s relationship began when he introduced Palantir’s first business hire to its first engineer. The first, a personal friend, is today Palantir’s chief operating officer, Shyam Sankar; the second, Akash (“Aki”) Jain, a former colleague of Fubini, is now the company’s president.

“It’s the highest value thing I’ve done,” Fubini says of bringing the two together, which led to an early and lasting advisor role to the company, where he helped develop senior talent and work through challenges (and received advisor shares in return).

Indeed, he has since become a first-call for some who spin out of the company. In addition to Anduril —  cofounded by former Palantir execs Matt Grimm, Trae Stephens, and Brian Schimpf — XYZ has more recently backed the Oakland, Ca.-based residential solar lending platform Mosaic (cofounder Bijan Moallemi, a former finance exec at Palantir). It also wrote the first check for Saltbox, an Atlanta-based startup that’s building co-working units for founders needing warehouse space. Saltbox’s founder, Tyler Scriven, previously spent more than seven years as a chief of staff at Palantir.

Fubini and Hamilton stress that while a meaningful portion of XYZ’s capital has flowed into the “Palantir diaspora,” the company has other areas of interest, too, mostly enterprise related. XYZ is very focused, for example, on fintech, betting on Bond Technologies, a company that helps brands and banks integrate their offerings. It has insure-tech investments, like the brokerage Newfront Insurance. And it is focused on security and counts among its portfolio companies, a now highly valued outfit that poorly handled a sexual harassment situation but seems to have survived it.

XYZ even made a direct-to-consumer bet recently, though Fubini and Hamilton aren’t talking about it just yet.

Mostly, they say, they’re focused on “trends we believe are exploding,” says Hamilton. Think video, she says. Think fintech infrastructure, she adds. “For fintech that’s building a new bank, we think three companies will replace the crappy software” that supports them, says Fubini.

As for how they wins deals against VCs when it comes to founders to whom they aren’t already connected in some way, Fubini says it’s not so complicated. Being “bizarrely honest” has proved helpful, he says. But also, he says, “If you’re good, and you work goddamn hard, you start seeing more stuff.”

Just six month after raising its first bit of outside funding, ClickUp has closed $100 million in new funding and has reached a $1 billion valuation, a report in Bloomberg first reported.

The company has seen plenty of growth in the past several months to justify that new unicorn status, including doubling the amount of users to 2 million. In a press release the company also detailed it had grown revenue nine times over since the beginning of the year.

This latest $100 million round was led by Canadian firm Georgian with participation from Craft Ventures which led the startup’s $35 million Series A back in June. The high valuation showcases just how eager investors are to find winners in the productivity software space which has seen massive customer gains as an industry this year, partially as a result of shifting corporate attitudes towards working from home.

ClickUp is aiming to further capitalize as it scales its team and product. The company of 200 has doubled in size since its last raise and is hoping to double again in the next several months, CEO Zeb Evans tells TechCrunch.

ClickUp sells productivity software but their main sell has been tying several products in that space into a single platform, aiming to reduce the number of tools their customers use. The team has recently begun integrating tools like email into their platform so that users can complete workflows inside the product.

“It’s not just like a value play of of using one app instead of three or four, it’s an efficiency play by saving so much time and frustration from having all the other different solutions,” Evans tells TechCrunch.

Even as the company continues scaling the product through weekly updates to the company’s apps including a newly revamped iOS app which launched today (Android launches tomorrow), the team is looking towards how they can build for the long-term.

As to how long this cash will last them, Evans isn’t making any promises. “I think this will keep us going for a while, though to be honest with you I would’ve said the same thing with the Series A,” Evans says.

Fintech startup Revolut is tweaking its subscription plans with a new mid-tier offering called Revolut — it costs £2.99 per month. Like N26 Smart and Monzo Plus, the new plan is a pandemic-proof package that doesn’t focus as much on travel.

For the past couple of years, challenger banks and alternatives to traditional bank accounts have been packaging additional services into paid plans. Essentially, those fintech startups are slowly becoming freemium software-as-a-service companies.

The majority of users don’t subscribe to paid plans. But a small portion is willing to pay a fixed monthly fee to access advanced features, get an insurance package and pay less in variable fees.

Revolut already has two paid plans — Premium and Metal. Premium increases limites on free ATM withdrawals and foreign exchange. You also get an overseas medical insurance, delayed baggage and flight insurance and winter sports coverage. You can also access advanced features, such as disposable virtual cards and Revolut Junior accounts

With a Metal plan, your insurance package is a bit more thorough with purchase protection and car hire excess. You get a tiny bit of cashback on purchases (0.1% in Europe, 1% outside of Europe capped at the monthly subscription price) and higher limits across various products.

Another big selling point has been card designs. With the Metal plan, as the name suggests, you get a metal card. It’s not that useful but some people like it. Premium subscribers can also choose between premium card designs.

Revolut Premium costs £6.99 per month and Revolut Metal costs £12.99 per month (or €7.99 and €13.99 respectively in Europe). You pay a bit less if you pay upfront for a year.

So what is Revolut Plus? It costs £2.99 per month, which makes it a lot more affordable than Revolut Premium. The main selling point is purchase protection provided by Qover. All paid plans now get purchase protection with different limits on damaged or stolen goods (up to £1,000, £2,500 and £10,000 depending on your plan). You can get a refund on purchases up to 90 days after buying eligible products. If you book a ticket and your event is cancelled, you could also get a refund.

In addition to a new card design, Revolut Plus subscribers can also use virtual cards. You can also create junior accounts with the new mid-tier plan.

As you can see, there’s no overseas travel insurance. You also don’t get unlimited free currency exchange (other than spread). Revolut Plus is focused on people who mostly use their Revolut account in their home country.

Revolut is also tweaking other plans so it’s going to be important to check the terms and conditions before you renew your paid plan. The new Plus plan is available today in the U.K. and will be rolled out next week in the European Economic Area.

When Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, formerly of Pinterest’s policy team, alleged racial and gender discrimination at Pinterest in June, the hope was for Pinterest to make them whole and address its culture of alleged discrimination, Ozoma told TechCrunch. But that’s not what happened.

Just two months later, former Pinterest COO Françoise Brougher sued Pinterest, alleging gender discrimination, which yesterday resulted in a $22.5 million settlement. As part of the settlement, Pinterest will pay $20 million to Brougher and her attorneys, the company wrote in a filing.

“It’s about as plain a case of disparate treatment and discrimination as you can come up with,” Ozoma said.

On a call with TechCrunch today, Ozoma and Banks described a double standard in their experiences compared to Brougher’s. While Brougher received a $20 million payout, Ozoma and Banks received less than one year’s worth of severance.

“This follows the time-honored tradition in America where Black women come forward, blazing a trail, revealing injustice and white women coming in and reaping all the benefits of that,” Banks told TechCrunch.

Earlier this month, a group of shareholders filed a lawsuit against Pinterest executives, including CEO Ben Silbermann, alleging they enabled a culture of discrimination. The complaint goes on to allege that culture of discrimination has harmed Pinterest’s reputation and led to financial harm.

For Ozoma and Banks, however, they say they’ve exhausted all of their legal options and will not pursue a lawsuit. Banks said it is important to keep in mind the fact that Brougher, a former COO, had far more resources to pursue litigation.

“So we, like in many, many, many other cases, Black women put ourselves on the line, shared absolutely everything that happened to us, then laid the groundwork for someone else to swoop in and collect ‘progress,'” Ozoma said. “No progress has been made here because no rights have been made with people who harm has been done to.”

As a part of the settlement, both Pinterest and Brougher will commit $2.5 million toward “advancing women and underrepresented communities” in the tech industry.

“Francoise welcomes the meaningful steps Pinterest has taken to improve its workplace environment and is encouraged that Pinterest is committed to building a culture that allows all employees to feel included and supported,” Pinterest and Brougher said in a joint statement detailing the settlement.

Ozoma took issue with Pinterest and Brougher donating $2.5 million to charity. She said, “it smells rotten,” noting that she herself is an individual and not a charity.

TechCrunch reached out to Pinterest regarding Ozoma and Banks’ recent statements. Pinterest declined to comment, saying the company doesn’t comment on legal matters. In June, however, Pinterest said in a statement to TechCrunch:

We took these issues seriously and conducted a thorough investigation when they were raised, and we’re confident both employees were treated fairly. We want each and every one of our employees at Pinterest to feel welcomed, valued, and respected. As we outlined in our statement on June 2nd, we’re committed to advancing our work in inclusion and diversity by taking action at our company and on our platform. In areas where we, as a company, fall short, we must and will do better.

Pinterest employees staged a walkout in August shortly after Brougher filed her suit. In addition to the walkout, a petition circulated throughout the company demanding systemic change. The change they sought entailed full transparency about promotion levels and retention, total compensation package transparency and for the people within two layers of reporting to the CEO to be at least 25% women and 8% underrepresented employees.

Periscope is shutting down, Samsung has plans for more foldable devices and Airbnb sets new diversity goals. This is your Daily Crunch for December 15, 2020.

The big story: Goodbye, Periscope

It’s official: Twitter -owned live-streaming app Periscope is shutting down by March of next year.

That’s not hugely surprising, both because Jane Manchun Wong spotted some app code suggesting that a shutdown could be coming and also because … when was the last time you thought about Periscope?

In an open letter, Periscope said that its current operations are “unsustainable,” and that “leaving it in its current state isn’t doing right by the current and former Periscope community or by Twitter.”

The tech giants

2021 holds even more Samsung foldables — Whether that means an additional device or something more meaningful remains to be seen.

AWS introduces new Chaos Engineering as a Service offering — Chaos engineering tools help simulate worst-case scenarios. (Also, “chaos engineer” is the best job title imaginable.)

Airbnb sets new diversity goals — By the end of 2025, Airbnb is aiming for 20% of its U.S. workforce to consist of underrepresented minorities.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Social stock trading services Public raises $65M Series C — The startup says it has expanded its userbase by 10x this year.

Financial aid-focused Frank expands into helping students take online classes — The company is helping students deploy their financial aid money to open digital slots at more than 100 colleges.

Parsec raises $25M from a16z to power remote work and cloud gaming — Parsec started out by helping gamers access their gaming PCs from other devices, but it was a natural transition to other use cases.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Inside Zoox’s six-year ride from prototype to product — Unlike its rivals, Zoox is developing the self-driving software stack, the on-demand ridesharing app and the vehicle itself.

2020 was a disaster, but the pandemic put security in the spotlight — Many of the security headaches exposed by the pandemic will linger into the new year.

Startup valuations have recovered from summer lows — New data shows that down rounds are dying out.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Among Us launches on the Nintendo Switch — Among Us just launched on the Switch after becoming a surprise hit during the pandemic.

Bandcamp Fridays will continue through next May — On the first Friday of every month, the service has waved its fees, letting artists and labels reap the benefits.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.