Year: 2021

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Danny, Natasha, and Alex were on-deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit. But, if you want to hear more about Robinhood, this is not the episode for you. If you want to learn more about the consumer fintech company’s IPO filing this is the episode you want. Basically, Robinhood filed after we had wrapped taping, so we had to do a special pod for the news.

So, this is the everything-but-Robinhood episode. And here’s what’s inside of it:

• Startup and investor tensions at Bessemer and Hinge Health. Natasha has the latest.
• Didi’s IPO, and what’s going on with Chinese IPOs more generally. Also SentinelOne’s expensive and notable debut.
• And then all things Duolingo, including TechCrunch’s overview and more in-depth look.
• From the venture capital side of things, Zipline raised $250 million, Daylight raised $5 million, Articulate raised $1.5 billion, Acceleprise rebranded to Forum Ventures, and Peanut put together a micro-fund.
• We closed with Neeva, Brave, and other alternative search tools. Alex has a piece coming on the subject, once he gets around to finishing it.

A four-episode week! With only Grace handling production! She’s amazing.

General Motors is investing in domestically sourced lithium. The company said Friday it became the first investor in an Australian company’s project to extract the mineral, a critical component of electric vehicle batteries, from the Salton Sea Geothermal Field near Los Angeles. The automaker will have first rights on lithium produced by Controlled Thermal Resources’ “Hell’s Kitchen” lithium extraction project.

The Hell’s Kitchen project is expected to begin producing lithium in 2024. That output would be used in GM’s Ultium battery cells, which are being manufactured as part of a joint venture with LG Energy Solution, after undergoing validation and testing. While Tim Grewe, GM’s general director of electrification strategy and cell engineering, declined to provide specifics on how much lithium GM will likely receive, he said the company expects “it’ll be a significant amount of [GM’s] North American lithium.”

GM and other automakers will need a lot of lithium if they want to meet their electrification targets. For GM, that includes transitioning away from internal combustion engines entirely by 2035. But that wide-scale transition will also likely mean greater competition – not only for customers’ dollars, but for the source minerals that compose essential parts like batteries.

In general, lithium is produced either via hard rock mining or by extracting the mineral from brine deposits. Both methods have been criticized for their impacts on the environment. What makes CTR’s project stand out is that it will use renewable geothermal energy – produced from the Salton Sea Geothermal Field, a huge area in the Imperial Valley that’s already home to eleven geothermal power stations – to process the lithium.

In addition to being powered by renewable energy, CTR says the project uses a closed-loop direct extraction process that returns spent brine to its underground source and leaves no production tailings, a kind of waste reside from mining.

Most of the world’s lithium is sourced from a small number of countries, predominately Chile, Australia, China and Argentina. There only one lithium production site in the United States, a brine operation in Nevada owned by chemical manufacturing giant Albemarle. But there’s been an increased focus on boosting domestic production in the mineral in recent years, driven largely by two trends: the anticipated demand for the mineral, which is expected to rapidly increase due in part to the transition to battery electric vehicles; and a bipartisan focus on keeping the US competitive in emerging technologies.

According to the California Energy Commission, as much as one third of the world’s current demand for lithium could be found in the state’s lithium deposits. The CTR project is one of many aimed at extracting lithium from the Salton Sea’s vast brine fields.

Licious, a Bangalore-based startup that sells fresh meat and seafood online, has raised $192 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint beyond the South Asian market.

The new round — a Series F — was led by Singapore’s investment firm Temasek and Multiples Private Equity. The round, which brings the six-year-old Indian firm’s to-date raise to over $285 million, values the startup at more than $650 million (according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter), up from $285 million in December 2019 Series E funding.

Existing investors 3one4 Capital, Bertelsmann India Investments, Vertex Growth Fund, and Vertex Ventures also participated in the new round, and some early investors sold some of their stakes.

Licious operates an eponymous e-commerce platform where it sells meat and seafood in over a dozen Indian cities. The startup has built a supply chain network across several Indian cities to be able to procure meat and seafood, keep them fresh, and deliver within hours of the order.

In recent months, the startup says it has accelerated its growth as people increase their protein consumption in a bid to improve their immunity.

It didn’t disclose exact figures, but said the startup has seen a 500% growth in the past 12 months and delivered to more than 2 million unique customers.

“This is just the beginning in our pursuit of building an exemplary and iconic tech-led D2C (direct-to-consumer) brand,” said Vivek Gupta and Abhay Hanjura in a joint statement Friday.

According to industry estimates, India’s online meat market is worth over $4.4 billion and has grown by over 2.5x since the pandemic hit last year.

Licious, which competes with FreshToHome, plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand to “multiple geographies,” it said, without identifying any market. The startup is also making investments to broaden its tech and supply chain networks, it said.

The startup’s co-founders have “revolutionised the purchase of poultry, seafood and meat in the country delighting customers with their promise of quality, freshness and timely delivery,” said Sridhar Sankararaman, MD, Multiples.

Swedish gaming giant Modern Times Group (MTG) has acquired Indian startup PlaySimple for $360 million, the two firms said Friday.

MTG said it will pay 77% of the acquisition sum to Indian game developer and publisher in cash and the rest in company shares. There’s also another $150 million reward put aside if certain undisclosed performance metrics are hit, the two firms said.

Friday’s deal marks one of the largest exits in the Indian startup ecosystem. PlaySimple had raised $4 million Series A at a valuation of about $16 million from Elevation Capital and Chiratae Ventures in 2016. (The startup, which began its journey in Bangalore, raised just $4.5 million from external investors.)

And it’s clear why. The revenues of PlaySimple, which operates nine games including “Daily Themed Crossword”, “Word Trip”, “Word Jam”, and “Word Wars,” grew by 144% to $83 million last year and it was on track to hit over $60 million revenue in the first half of 2021.

“We’re very proud of the games we’ve developed over the years, and of the infrastructure and scale that we’ve achieved with our team. As we join the MTG family, we look forward to leveraging our proprietary technology across MTG’s gaming portfolio, expanding into the European market, investing in cutting-edge technology and building exciting new games,” PlaySimple co-founders and management team members — Siddhanth Jain, Suraj Nalin and Preeti Reddy — said in a joint statement.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

A great deal has changed since we last covered Nigerian fintech startup TeamApt two years ago. At the time, the company had just closed a $5.5 million Series A round from a single VC — Quantum Capital Partners, a firm owned by Zenith Bank billionaire Jim Ovia.

TeamApt has quite the story. CEO Tosin Eniolorunda started the company in 2015 after leaving Interswitch. He was going head-to-head with the billion-dollar company when TeamApt received a license to operate as a payment switch providing enterprise solutions for banks in the country.

TeamApt bootstrapped with revenue made on a per-project basis. By 2017, the company, which optimized core bank back-office operations was servicing 26 financial institutions and processing $160 million in monthly transactions without raising a dime. A year later, TeamApt began releasing direct consumer and business-facing products targeted at driving financial inclusion in the country.

Moneytor was a digital banking service for financial institutions to track transactions with web and mobile interfaces; Monnify, an enterprise software suite for small business management and AptPay, a push payment infrastructure to centralize services used on banking mobile apps. These products had varying degrees of success; however, Moniepoint, an agency banking platform launched months after the Series A, became the instant hit.

In developed markets where banking networks are sophisticated and have an extensive reach, the concept of agency banking is foreign. But in developing markets like Nigeria, it’s necessary because the bank to population ratio in Nigeria is low. According to reports, there are 4.3 branches per 100,000 people compared to the global average of 11.7 branches.

Agency banking serves as an alternative distribution strategy for traditional retail banking by using authorized personnel who acts as agents to expand the reach of the branch network. For many Nigerians, agency banking represents a financial access lifeline and one of the most viable options for accessing the financial services they need.

Moniepoint agents use mobile apps and point-of-sale terminals to offer these customers access to financial services like cash withdrawal, cash deposit, funds transfer, airtime purchase and bill payments. In less than two years, Moniepoint claims to account for 74% of agency banking transactions in Nigeria. The platform also processes about 68 million transactions worth over $3.5 billion monthly through 100,000 agents and 14 million customers. When transactions from Monnify are added, TeamApt said it processed $17.5 billion in the past 12 months.

But despite the seeming success, TeamApt is poised to add digital banking services to Moniepoint’s dominant agency banking play. “What is the reason behind this? With multiple players, was the agency banking space becoming too crowded that Moniepoint couldn’t acquire more market share?” I ask Eniolorunda.

“There’s still room for growth in the agency space. We can actually grow more and take more share as more agents continue to enter the market and consumers embracing agency networks and point-of-sale networks. So the reason we’re trying to do this is for two reasons — a mission and commercial reason,” he answered.

Most well-known digital banks in Nigeria cater to the already banked, neglecting the unbanked or underbanked consumers that banks do not serve. Eniolorunda’s “mission reason” is to provide financial services for them via launching a digital bank. The commercial reason? “We want to be the middle ground between banks and digital approaches to actually serve the next billion Africans. The reason why we can do this is that we have demonstrated our traction in Nigeria to become the largest agency network just in the period of two years,” the CEO added. 

Judging by the transactions made on Moniepoint and since existing digital banks capture the same customers as big commercial banks, TeamApt sits on a big opportunity if it can convert a chunk of its offline users online. Of course, this strategy isn’t new in itself. It is currently being adopted by another digital bank targeted at the unbanked, Bankly. However, the good news is that should any of these platforms show significant success, other platforms might widely adopt the approach and go a long way in providing digital banking services to the unbanked.

To test out this strategy at scale, TeamApt has secured another round of investment. Two months ago, Dutch entrepreneurial development bank FMO announced its participation in TeamApt’s Series A extension round with $2 million. But while FMO is among the grand list investors in this tranche of investment, the venture round has changed to a Series B, TeamApt confirmed. 

The $200 million Pan-African fund Novastar Ventures led the round. Dubai-based Global Ventures, CDC Group, Soma Capital, and Pan-African VC firms Kepple Africa and Oui Capital participated alongside some local angel investors.

TeamApt, while continuing its switching business for enterprise, will be looking to extend its offerings directly to customers and micro-SMEs with Moniepoint. In addition, and subject to regulatory approval, both agency and digital banking platforms will exist under Moniepoint.

Brian Waswani Odhiambo, the head of West Africa at Novastar Ventures, said the VC firm backed TeamApt after seeing the speed at which its agency network became the leading operator in Nigeria. The firm, “by providing TeamApt with sufficient capital to pursue its new phase of growth,” has no doubt the company will do the same with its digital banking platform.

In the past month, TeamApt has announced to anyone who cared to listen that it’s currently in the process of closing another round. Eniolorunda confirmed this to TechCrunch that it would be a Series C round. While that is in progress, TeamApt will be making expansion plans to other African countries with strong economies in every region — Central, East, North and South. The company is also keen on performing a few acquisitions along the way to tap significant opportunities for leveraging technology and offline distribution to provide financial services to Africa’s mass market.

Neobanks have led the charge as regards venture capital funding for consumer fintech startups. But while they have collectively dominated the fintech space, they don’t operate a monolithic model.

There are five distinct models, and the one adopted by Nubank, the $30 billion behemoth, is the credit-led model. Neobanks operating this model start by offering credit via cards or on an app and subsequently offer bank accounts as a gateway to other services.

Nigerian fintech startup FairMoney operates this model. Today, it is announcing a $42 million Series B raise to diversify its offerings and expand to “become the financial hub for its users.” 

Tiger Global Management led the round. Existing investors from the company’s previous rounds, DST Partners, Flourish Ventures, Newfund, and Speedinvest, participated. The investment comes after FairMoney raised €10 million Series A two years ago and €1.2 million seed in 2018.

Founded in 2017 by Laurin Hainy, Matthieu Gendreau, and Nicolas Berthozat, FairMoney started as an online lender that provides instant loans and bill payments to customers in Nigeria.

When CEO Hainy spoke to TechCrunch in February, the company was six months into its expansion to India. One of the highlights of that discussion was FairMoney’s impressive numbers in 2020. Last year, the company disbursed a total loan volume of $93 million to over 1.3 million users who made more than 6.5 million loan applications. 

The company also made some progress on the India front, processing more than 500,000 loan applications from over 100,000 unique users.

So what has changed since then? For one, Hainy says FairMoney ticked one of the goals which was acquiring a microfinance bank license. The license allows FairMoney to operate as a financial service provider in Nigeria.

“We have received our MFB banking license which now enables us to open current accounts for our users, and we’re doing that on quite a big scale,” Hainy said to TechCrunch. “We opened accounts for our repeated and new customers, which I think is quite a unique company strategy because we don’t need to burn millions of dollars of customer acquisition cost on users like other competitors. I think all of that has enabled us to become sort of the largest digital bank in Nigeria.”

Quite the claim but behind it are figures to back it up. Of the company’s current 3.5 million registered users, 1.3 million are unique bank account holders. The company says it is projecting to disburse $300 million worth of loans to them this year. How will it finance that? By raising bonds. FairMoney’s loan book is grown by its capital markets activity and has convinced some investment banks to invest a substantial amount in its unlisted bond. 

The credit-led neobank offers loans to individuals from ₦1,500 (~$3) to ₦500,000 (~$1,000) ranging from days to six months. Small business loans have become a prominent service most digital banks have begun to offer in Nigeria’s retail sector, and FairMoney sees an opportunity there. Hainy states that from now on, the company will start servicing loans to registered SMEs in Nigeria. In the works also is the issuance of cards. However, unlike the credit cards operated by Nubank, FairMoney is shipping debit cards, the more prevalent one in the Nigerian market.

“The ambition is that by the end of the year, the customer has the full-fledged banking experience from P2P transfers and lending to debit cards and current accounts. In addition to that, we are working on a number of additional services from savings products, stock trading, and crypto-trading products potentially depending on where regulation is heading,” Hainy added. 

But while most African companies, after completing a Series B raise, think about expansion, it’s a different case for FairMoney. Hainy calls this a ‘focus round’ and says FairMoney wants to consolidate its position in Nigeria and India; therefore, it is not considering any expansion to other markets.

“We feel that with India and Nigeria, we have tons of work to do and tons of problems to solve. We are doubling down on the Nigerian opportunity, which is building out more banking services and becoming one of the commercial banks in the country. And then India by building a large credit book there,” the CEO combined.

African fintech startups have attracted a lot of capital this year and they continue to do so. So far, the continent has seen three nine-figure raises, all from fintech companies Flutterwave, TymeBank and Chipper Cash. There’s also one reportedly in the works from OPay.

Nigerian fintechs are leading the crop as exciting startups keep coming from the country week in week out, gaining access to capital at an astonishing rate.

It is not news that while local investors are cutting checks at pre-seed and seed levels, and sometimes Series A, international investors control the continent’s latter stages. TymeBank cited U.K. and Philippines venture capital firms as investors. For Chipper Cash, it was SVB Capital, Ribbit, and Bezos Expeditions, while Avenir Growth Capital and Tiger Global invested in Flutterwave.

In FairMoney, Tiger Global has made a return to the continent. Per public knowledge, it is the first time the U.S. hedge fund is investing in two African startups in a year. “We are excited to partner with FairMoney as they build a better financial hub for customers in Nigeria and India,” Scott Shleifer, partner at Tiger Global, said in a statement. “We were impressed by the team and the strong growth to date and look forward to supporting FairMoney as they continue to scale.”

Hainy calls the investment a great industry signaling for the continent. He believes Tiger Global decided to back FairMoney because the company has been able to scale tremendously and shown that it can operate banking and lending while running a profitable business when most of its counterparts are not.

“I think what most people have been discussing is the question of sustainability. How long can digital banks operate as financial service providers while making losses? So I think that’s another great signal for the market that we’ve actually managed to do that in a profitable manner, providing upside for our shareholders and also showing our clients that they can actually bank on us in the future,” Hainy added.

And to achieve its goal to become a financial hub for its customers’ banking needs, the CEO said the company is embarking on a hiring spree for top talent. “We are hiring worldwide, and there are 150 open positions out there right now that we’re trying to fill with strong talent to help us build the financial app for Nigerians.”

Two billionaires are neck and neck in the final sprint to the Kármán line, but Richard Branson may clinch it with a July 11 flight on a Virgin Galactic spacecraft, narrowly beating out Jeff Bezos’s planned July 20 trip aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard capsule. Whoever wins, the real lesson here is that with enough money, you truly can do anything.

The news came today in the form of an announcement from Virgin Galactic stating that the launch window for its next test flight opens at 6 AM Pacific time on July 11, and that the mission will be the first to carry a full crew: two pilots, three specialists, and one billionaire. (Blue Origin had its own announcement, of which below.)

Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci will pilot the VSS Unity spacecraft; Chief Astronaut instructor Beth Moses will oversee the flight; Lead Operations Engineer Colin Bennett will monitor cabin equipment and procedures; Vice President of Government Affairs and Research Operations Sirisha Bandla will be handling a University of Florida microgravity experiment; and lastly, Sir Richard Branson “will evaluate the private astronaut experience.” In other words, he’s the first plain old passenger.

“I truly believe that space belongs to all of us,” the billionaire founder and private funder of the space tourism company said in the company’s press release. “After more than 16 years of research, engineering, and testing, Virgin Galactic stands at the vanguard of a new commercial space industry, which is set to open space to humankind and change the world for good. It’s one thing to have a dream of making space more accessible to all; it’s another for an incredible team to collectively turn that dream into reality. As part of a remarkable crew of mission specialists, I’m honoured to help validate the journey our future astronauts will undertake and ensure we deliver the unique customer experience people expect from Virgin.”

The mission will, like others in the Virgin Galactic style, involve being flown by traditional means to what is normally considered a high altitude, after which the rocket-powered VSS Unity will detach from the plane and zoom up to above 80 kilometers, generally (though not universally) considered the edge of space. Branson will have gone through all the same training that future Virgin Galactic space tourists will go through, and will of course wear the same special blue suit.

If all goes according to plan, Branson will beat Bezos to space by a little more than a week, and probably win a long-running bet.

Bezos, for his part, will be going up July 11 (again, delays notwithstanding) on in a more traditional launch vehicle, Blue Origin’s New Shepard, accompanied by his brother and a lucky ticket-holder — lucky and rich, that is, since the ticket ended up selling at auction for $28 million to an as yet unannounced party.

The company did however today announce that the fourth passenger on the first crewed flight will be Wally Funk, the first graduate of NASA’s Mercury 13 program that trained women astronauts in 1961 — but the mission was cancelled and Funk never went to space. After 50 years of waiting, it seems she’ll finally get her chance.

Twitter is considering changes to the way it contextualizes misleading tweets that the company doesn’t believe are dangerous enough to be removed from the platform outright.

The company announced the test in a tweet Thursday with an image of the new misinformation labels. Within the limited test, those labels will appear with color-coded backgrounds now, making them much more visible in the feed while also giving users a way to quickly parse the information from visual cues. Some users will begin to see the change this week.

Tweets that Twitter deems “misleading” will get a red background with a short explanation and a notice that users can’t reply to, like or share the content. Yellow labels will appear on content that isn’t as actively misleading. In both cases, Twitter has made it more clear that you can click the labels to find verified information about the topic at hand (in this case, the pandemic).

“People who come across the new labels as a part of this limited test should expect a more communicative impact from the labels themselves both through copy, symbols and colors used to distill clear context about not only the label, but the information or content they are engaging with,” a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Twitter found that even tiny shifts in design could impact how people interacted with labeled tweets. In a test the company ran with a pink variation of the label, users clicked through to the authoritative information that Twitter provided more but they also quote-tweeted the content itself more, furthering its spread. Twitter says that it tested many variations on the written copy, colors and symbols that made their way into the new misinformation labels.

The changes come after a long public feedback period that convinced the company that misinformation labels needed to stand out better in a sea of tweets. Facebook’s own misinformation labels have also faced criticism for blending in too easily and failing to create much friction for potentially dangerous information on the platform.

Twitter first created content labels as a way to flag “manipulated media” — photos and videos altered to deliberately mislead people, like the doctored deepfake of Nancy Pelosi that went viral back in 2019. Last May, Twitter expanded its use of labels to address the wave of Covid-19 misinformation that swept over social media early in the pandemic.

A month ago, the company rolled out new labels specific to vaccine misinformation and introduced a strike-based system into its rules. The idea is for Twitter to build a toolkit it can use to respond in a proportional way to misinformation depending on the potential for real-world harm.

“… We know that even within the space of our policies, not all misleading claims are equally harmful,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “For example, telling someone to drink bleach in order to cure COVID is a more immediate and severe harm than sharing a viral image of a shark swimming on a flooded highway and claiming that’s footage from a hurricane. (That’s a real thing that happens every hurricane season.)”

Labels are just one of the content moderation options that Twitter developed over the course of the last couple of years, along with warnings that require a click-through and pop-up messages designed to subtly steer people away from impulsively sharing inflammatory tweets.

When Twitter decides not to remove content outright, it turns to an a la carte menu of potential content enforcement options:

• Apply a label and/or warning message to the Tweet
• Show a warning to people before they share or like the Tweet;
• Reduce the visibility of the Tweet on Twitter and/or prevent it from being recommended;
• Turn off likes, replies, and Retweets; and/or
• Provide a link to additional explanations or clarifications, such as in a curated landing page or relevant Twitter policies.

In most scenarios, the company will opt for all of the above.

“While there is no single answer to addressing the unique challenges presented by the range of types of misinformation, we believe investing in a multi-prong approach will allow us to be nimble and shift with the constantly changing dynamic of the public conversation,” the spokesperson said.

Edtech startup Microverse has tapped new venture funding in its quest to help train students across the globe to code through its online school which requires zero upfront cost, instead relying on an income-share agreement which kicks in when students find a job.

The startup tells TechCrunch it has closed a $12.5 million Series A led by Northzone with additional participation from General Catalyst, All Iron Ventures and a host of angel investors. We last covered the company after it had closed a bout of seed funding from General Catalysts and Y Combinator; this latest round brings the startup’s total funding to just under $16 million.

The company’s vision has seen added pandemic era traction as larger tech companies have embraced remote work that spans geographic boundaries and time zones. Microverse has now brought English-speaking students from over 188 countries through its program.

Since we last chatted, CEO Ariel Camus says the startup has landed some 300 early graduates in positions at tech companies including Microsoft, VMWare and Huawei. The company says its has above a 95% employment rate for its students within six months of graduation so far, pushing past one of the bigger issues that income-share agreement-based schools have had stateside — getting graduates employed.

Microverse does have notably less generous terms than counterparts like Lambda School when it comes to when students begin loan repayment, the terms of both are actually quite different, as noted in my previous article.

While Lambda School’s ISA terms require students to pay 17% of their monthly salary for 24 months once they begin earning above $50,000 annually — up to a maximum of $30,000, Microverse requires that graduates pay 15% of their salary once they begin making more than just $1,000 per month, though there is no cap on time, so students continue payments until they have repaid $15,000 in full. In both startups’ cases, students only repay if they are employed in a field related to what they studied, but with Microverse, ISAs never expire, so if you ever enter a job adjacent to your area of study, you are on the hook for repayments. Lambda School’s ISA taps out after five years of deferred repayments.

The startup has made efforts to streamline their online program since launch to ensure that students are being set up to succeed in the full-time, 10-month program. Part of Microverse’s efforts have included condensing lesson segments into shorter time frames to ensure students aren’t starting the program unless they have enough free time to commit. Camus says the startup is receiving thousands of applications per month, of which only a fraction are accepted in an effort to ensure that the small startup isn’t overcommitting itself early on. The startup estimates it will usher 1,000 students through its program this year.

The startup has big plans for the future, including working more closely with tech companies to ensure that students have easier access to job placement once they graduate.

“We have data now that the day we launch a partner program — which we haven’t done yet but we will eventually — it opens up the market by 5X,” Camus tells TechCrunch. “To get 10,000 students per year in a world where 90% of the world’s population doesn’t have access to higher education — it’s not going to be that hard, to be honest, I’m not too worried.”

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 1, 2021. It’s Robinood IPO day! That’s the headline, really. This afternoon the American consumer fintech company filed to go public in what will prove to be an early contender for the third-quarter’s most important IPO. We also have a metric ton of other startup news for you. And don’t forget that the next TechCrunch event is next week! Let’s go! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Robinhood is going public: In our first look at the company’s IPO filing we observed a quickly growing consumer fintech company that made money in 2020. The company swung to a loss in the first quarter of 2021, but as TechCrunch reported, that loss is largely immaterial. Robinhood closed out Q1 2021 on an annual run rate of more than $2 billion. Hot dang.
• Apple’s software rollout continues: After dropping public betas for iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 yesterday, Apple released the public beta version of macOS 12.0 Monterey. You can download it now, if you are a brave soul who wants to do some testing. For the rest of us, yes that’s the sound of a required corporate update in our future.
• Articulate raises $1.5B in Series A: After bootstrapping for ages, corporate edtech company Articulate raised a $1.5 billion Series A round on a $3.75 billion valuation. The outsized, putatively early-staged round was the leading story of the day until Robinhood arrived and kicked it into third.

Startups/VC

Looping back to a few topics that TechCrunch has been covering extensively in recent weeks, there’s fresh news from Karat, a neobank aimed at the creator economy. Everyone wants to make money off creators starting to make money, it seems. And from the global startup market, TechCrunch has fresh notes on the future of European IPOs for those of you into such things.

Now, the day’s rounds:

• Nowports raises $16M to automate Latin American freight: Supply chain software startups are big business, and Nowports wants in on the boom. The startup’s latest round was led by Mouro Capital, with Nowports now backed by around $24 million in capital to date.
• Codat raises $40M to build the Plaid for companies: APIs are popular. Fintech APIs are super popular. And fintech APIs that connect individuals’ money to other companies are Plaid. Codat wants to build Plaid, but for SMB financial data. And Tiger is now backing it.
• Mercado Bitcoin raises $200M for its bitcoin market: In the wake of the Coinbase direct listing, and seemingly strong crypto trading volumes in the second quarter, it’s not a huge surprise to see fintech companies that facilitate consumer bitcoin purchases attract attention. Seeing Brazil’s Mercado raise such a huge check, then, is not a huge surprise.
• Good news for hungry Europeans: If you want groceries, and want them now, “Rohlik, a Czech startup that has built an online grocery ordering and delivery business selling grocery fare,” TechCrunch reports, has just raised €100 million in a round that values the company at €1 billion.
• Ghost raises $100M for crash prevention: How much money can self-driving car tech collect? At least nine-figures more we’ve learned thanks to the new Ghost round. Ghost is also the name of a web content CMS. This is not that. Instead, this Ghost is working on what TechCrunch called “universal collision avoidance technology” for autonomous driving systems.

To guard against data loss and misuse, the cybersecurity conversation must evolve

Locking down data centers and networks against intruders is just one aspect of an organization’s security responsibilities; cloud services, collaboration tools and APIs extend security perimeters even farther. What’s more, the systems created to prevent the misuse and mishandling of sensitive data often depend heavily on someone’s better angels.

According to Sid Trivedi, a partner at Foundation Capital, and seven-time CIO Mark Settle, IT managers need to replace existing DLP frameworks with a new one that centers on DMP — data misuse protection.

These solutions “will provide data assets with more sophisticated self-defense mechanisms instead of relying on the surveillance of traditional security perimeters,” and many startups are already competing in this space.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

We revisited some themes we’ve seen before in our startup section. The same goes for our look at Big Tech. On the government-and-tech side of things:

• India doesn’t appreciate Big Tech companies, part 47: Manish Singh reports that “India’s central bank has identified Big Tech’s push into financial services as a challenge for banks in the South Asian market, saying the growing presence of these firms have prompted concerns about creation of an uneven playing field.” Recall that India is also irked at Twitter and has various other beefs with different tech companies.
• Paris fines Airbnb: Sticking to the government theme, Airbnb got hit with an €8 million fine today, a fee worth 0.14% of the company’s $6.6 billion in cash it held at the end of the first quarter, per its latest earnings report. The Daily Crunch would like to congratulate the City of Light on its auspicious regulatory victory.
• Lastly, from Pinterest, something that stood out while going back through the day’s news: A prohibition of weight-loss advertising. Lots of folks struggle with eating disorders, body image and related issues. So Pinterest is doing away with one type of advertisement that might harm those folks. With decisions like this we don’t want to be overly kind to the company in question as we don’t know how much money it is leaving on the table, but the move could hint at more active social media regulation of owned platforms in the future. At least when it comes to ads.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here.

Read one of the recommendations we’ve received below!

Name of marketer: Amy Konefal

Name of recommender: Dan Reardon, formerly of vudu.com

Recommendation:  “Amy drove scale for us as we grew to a half-billion-dollar company. She identified and exploited efficiencies and built out a rich portfolio of channels.”

Community

The Pittsburgh City Spotlight was a huge success! Thank you to everyone who attended, as well as the over 80 companies that submitted to participate in our pitch-off. In case you missed the event, you can check out the interview with Pittsburgh’s Mayor, our chat with CMU’s President and the latest on Duolingo from their director of Engineering.

Cool things happening in your city? Drop us a tweet about where you’d like to see us spotlight next.

TC Eventful

We’re rolling into the long holiday weekend here in the States, and in true American style, we’re offering a Fourth of July sale on tickets to not just one but all FOUR TechCrunch events in 2021: TechCrunch Early Stage (July 8-9), TC Disrupt (Sept 21-23), TC Sessions: SaaS (October 27) and TC Sessions: Space (December 14-15).

Our 4th of July ticket sale kicks into gear starting today through July 6 where you can get two tickets for the price of one on any of these TechCrunch events coming soon to a virtual platform near you. You can find all of our events and lock in your two-for-one tickets at techcrunch.com/events.