Year: 2021

Coinbase efforts to play hardball with the Securities and Exchange Commission didn’t last too long. The cryptocurrency exchange had garnered the ire of the regulatory commission over its plans to launch a crypto lending product, with the SEC sending the company a Wells notice which indicated that the agency would sue Coinbase if they launched their crypto lending product called Lend.

Less than a couple weeks after publishing a defiant blog post titled “The SEC has told us it wants to sue us over Lend. We don’t know why.” the company quietly announced over the weekend that it will not be launching the Lend product after all.

On Friday, the company quietly added an update to its launch post for Lend, detailing in part:

As we continue our work to seek regulatory clarity for the crypto industry as a whole, we’ve made the difficult decision not to launch the USDC APY program announced below. We have also discontinued the waitlist for this program as we turn our work to what comes next.

Lend was far from an anomaly in the crypto exchange world; investors can find similar functionality in platforms like Gemini which allow users to lend their crypto holdings back to the exchange for the promise of earning interest rates that are much, much higher than traditional savings accounts offer. Coinbase planned to launch the Lend product with the functionality for users to stake the stablecoin USDC and earn (as a starting rate) 4% APY.

The SEC, which has long complained about the limited resources at its disposal, has pursued a limited set of cases against crypto products but doesn’t seem to have been quite comfortable with the fact that users were essentially forfeiting custody of their coins to Coinbase and its partners, while indicating that the Lend product did indeed involve a security. Coinbase, which has made the fact that it coordinates closely with regulatory bodies part of its brand, had been trying to take things slowly while sticking to their belief that the product wasn’t security-related.

“The SEC told us they consider Lend to involve a security, but wouldn’t say why or how they’d reached that conclusion. Rather than get discouraged, we chose to continue taking things slowly. In June, we announced our Lend program publicly and opened a waitlist but did not set a public launch date. But once again, we got no explanation from the SEC. Instead, they opened a formal investigation,” a recent Coinbase company blog post read.

The big question is what this means for the other crypto exchanges and whether this act signals the start of a more aggressive streak for SEC chief Gary Gensler’s commission in the crypto world, especially in regards to DeFi mechanics.

Apple has just released the final version of iOS 15, the next major version of the operating system for the iPhone. It is a free download and it works with the iPhone 6s or later, both generations of iPhone SE and the most recent iPod touch model. iPad users will also be able to update to iPadOS 15 and watchOS 8 today.

The biggest change of iOS 15 is a new Focus mode. In addition to “Do not disturb,” you can configure various modes — you can choose apps and people you want notifications from and change your focus depending on what you’re doing. For instance, you can create a Work mode, a Sleep mode, a Workout mode, etc.

There are many new features across the board, such as a new Weather app, updated maps in Apple Maps, an improved version of FaceTime, and more. Safari also has a brand-new look.

The new version of iOS also scans your photos for text. Called Live Text, this feature lets you highlight, copy and paste text in photos. It could be a nice accessibility feature as well; iOS is going to leverage that info for Spotlight. You can search for text in your photos directly in Spotlight and it’ll pull out relevant photos. These features are handled on-device directly.

Paid iCloud users have been upgraded to iCloud+. In addition to more storage, iCloud+ subscribers get a handful of new features. iCloud Private Relay, which is available as a beta feature, lets you browse the web with increased privacy. Hide My Email lets you create randomly generated email addresses to create new accounts around the web. iCloud email users can also switch to a personal domain name.

The update is currently rolling out and is available both over-the-air in the Settings app, and by plugging your device to your computer for a wired update. But first, back up your device. Make sure your iCloud backup is up to date by opening the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad and tapping on your account information at the top and then on your device name. Additionally, you can also plug your iOS device to your computer to do a manual backup in Finder or iTunes for Windows (or do both, really).

Don’t forget to encrypt your backup in iTunes. It is much safer if somebody hacks your computer. And encrypted backups include saved passwords and health data. This way, you don’t have to reconnect to all your online accounts.

Once this is done, you should go to the Settings app, then ‘General’ and then ‘Software Update.’ You should see ‘Update Requested…’ It will then automatically start downloading once the download is available.

The crypto space has matured so much in so little time, but even amid a blockbuster year, it’s still facing down the existential risk of aggressive regulation from U.S. agencies.

All the while, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has been tirelessly building out a major crypto arm dedicated to ensuring that the firm will be an institutional powerhouse in the world of cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance and broader “Web3” technologies for years to come. Its early network of investments power much of the crypto world’s earliest success stories, but the firm has bigger ambitions yet. The firm’s efforts here are co-led by General Partner Katie Haun — who was once a federal prosecutor tackling fraud and cyber crime alongside top government agencies.

We’re excited to have Haun join us at TechCrunch Disrupt this year (September 21-23), where we’ll be asking her about all things crypto regulation and what the firm hopes to accomplish with its new, massive $2.2 billion crypto fund. Beyond the firm’s aggressive fund sizes and rapid deal-making in the crypto space, the firm’s partners — including Haun — have been among the most vocal about the potentially transformative nature of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

This has gotten more attention in 2021 when currencies have surged, fallen and surged again, minting more and more crypto millionaires while sucking in retail investors clamoring to get a piece of the hot space. It’s also been a year where the crypto space’s diversity has emerged with decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) gaining attention, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) catching global attention and decentralized finance (DeFi) threatening to upend financial institutions.

Haun serves on the boards of Coinbase and OpenSea. Coinbase went public this year and delivered one of the firm’s biggest payouts ever, while OpenSea is the dominant platform in the ever-shifting and ever-surging world of NFTs. Both companies are facing controversies on their quest toward crypto greatness. This month, Coinbase detailed that the SEC plans to sue it over the company’s upcoming lending feature. Meanwhile, OpenSea is grappling with the resignation of a highly visible executive who was discovered to be abusing company information to trade NFTs.

It’s a controversial space with plenty of money to be had, and Andreesen Horowitz has made a lot of it.

We look forward to chatting with Haun, alongside a whole host of amazing speakers at Disrupt, including Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, actor-entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds and U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The show is coming up fast. Get your ticket now for less than $100 before the price increases tonight — and we’ll see you soon.

Six-year-old Bangalore-based fintech Razorpay, which was valued at $3 billion in a financing round in April this year, has courted one more high-profile investor: Salesforce Ventures.

Razorpay said on Monday it has received a “strategic investment” from the the venture arm of the American enterprise giant. The investment will help the startup “further strengthen its presence in the business banking space,” it said.

The two firms didn’t disclose the size of the investment, but Sequoia Capital India-backed startup said the deal will “make an impactful contribution to the industry and drive adoption and financial growth for underserved small businesses in the next twelve months.”

Razorpay accepts, processes and disburses money online for small businesses and enterprises — essentially everything Stripe does in the U.S. and several other developed markets. But the Indian startup’s offering goes much further than that: In recent years, Razorpay has launched a neobanking platform to issue corporate credit cards (more at the bottom of the article), and it also offers businesses working capital.

With the global giant Stripe still nowhere in the Indian picture, Razorpay has grown to become the market leader.

“At Razorpay, we want to make further strides on the idea of investing in India’s digital future and building an intelligent payment and banking infrastructure for the new- world. We are delighted to associate with Salesforce Ventures and Salesforce more broadly in India,” said Harshil Mathur, co-founder and chief executive of the fintech startup.

“I am certain that this investment, along with support from our existing investors will help build an ecosystem for a hassle-free, easy-to-integrate payments and banking experience. We also hope to expand, build new products and deliver this experience to businesses in South East Asian countries too.”

Monday’s deal is Salesforce Ventures’ second investment in India. The firm led a $15 million Series C financing round in Hyderabad-headquartered Darwinbox earlier this year.

“The journey towards a ‘less-cash’ economy has been accelerated with the pandemic. The rapid growth in digital payments over the last year has opened doors for technology innovation and Razorpay has been emerging as the company of choice for a lot of e-commerce businesses,” said Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairperson and chief executive of Salesforce India, in a statement.

“We are excited to support Razorpay in their journey to revolutionize digital finance not only in India, but globally as well,” she added.

The Indian startup, which became a unicorn a year ago, said it has witnessed a 40-45% month-on-month growth in recent months. The startup is currently in the market to raise a new financing round and is negotiating a considerably larger valuation bump over the current value, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Google Meet will soon make it easier for you to see all of your co-workers or friends properly on video calls. The web version of the app can detect when someone is underexposed due to bad lighting. Meet will then increase the brightness so it’s easier to see your cohorts and perhaps make your feed clearer if you have a terrible webcam.

The low-light mode hit the Google Meet iOS and Android mobile apps last year. It uses AI to examine light levels and tweak the brightness. There’s no admin control for the feature, though users will be able to switch it off — Google says having it enabled might slow down your device.

The feature is coming to all Workspace and G Suite basic and business users. Google is rolling it out to Rapid Release domains starting today and Scheduled Release domains on October 4th. The rollout will take up to 15 days in both cases, so by mid-October, bad webcam feeds could be a thing of the past on Meet calls.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

September arrived in the blink of an eye, and October 27 — TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 to be precise — is hot on its heels. Now’s the time to gather your team and strategize how you’ll cover the day-long event to make as many connections and discover as many opportunities as possible.

Step 1: Take advantage of the early-bird group discount. When you buy passes for four or more people, you pay just $45 each — that’s $30 off each pass. Sweet!

Don’t dilly-dally or shillyshally. The early-bird price expires on October 1 at 11:59 pm (PT).

Your pass may be discounted, but you’ll get the full TC Session experience — all the speakers, demos, networking and breakout sessions. Plus, video-on-demand means you can catch up on anything you miss later, when it fits your schedule.

Check out the event agenda or read more about just some of the many people and companies coming to TC Sessions: SaaS. Note: We’re adding new speakers and presentations to the event agenda every week, and you can sign up here for updates.

As a team, you can cover more ground. Tune in to a main stage panel discussion while one colleague dives into a breakout session and another sets up a 1:1 product demo or taps CrunchMatch to connect with potential investors. You might go faster alone, but you’ll go further together.

You can bet the industry’s top experts will be in the virtual house covering both the benefits and challenges of SaaS: the Next Generation. Here are just two examples.

SaaS Security, Today and Tomorrow: Enterprises face a constant stream of threats, from nation states to cybercriminals and corporate insiders. After a year where billions worked from home and the cloud reigned supreme, startups and corporations alike can’t afford to stay off the security pulse. Edna Conway, vice president, chief security & risk officer, Azure, Microsoft and Olivia Rose CISO, VP of IT & security, Amplitude discuss what SaaS startups need to know about security now, and in the future.

How Startups are Turning Data into Software Gold: The era of big data is behind us. Today’s leading SaaS startups are working with data instead of merely fighting to help customers collect information. Jenn Knight (AgentSync), Barr Moses (Monte Carlo) and Dan Wright (DataRobot), leaders of three data-focused startups, will discuss how today’s SaaS companies leverage data to build new companies, attack new problems and, of course, scale like mad.

TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 takes place on October 27. Don’t wait — the early-bird price on the group discount offer expires October 1 at 11:59 pm (PT).

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: SaaS 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Small businesses in the U.S. now have a new way to source home and lifestyle goods from new manufacturers. Bzaar, a business-to-business cross-border marketplace, is connecting retailers with over 50 export-ready manufacturers in India.

The U.S.-based company announced Monday that it raised $4 million in seed funding, led by Canaan Partners, and including angel investors Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, PhonePe founders Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari, Addition founder Lee Fixel and Helion Ventures co-founder Ashish Gupta.

Nishant Verman and Prasanth Nair co-founded Bzaar in 2020 and consider their company to be like a “fair without borders,” Verman put it. Prior to founding Bzaar, Verman was at Bangalore-based Flipkart until it was acquired by Walmart in 2018. He then was at Canaan Partners in the U.S.

“We think the next 10 years of global trade will be different from the last 100 years,” he added. “That’s why we think this business needs to exist.”

Traditionally, small U.S. buyers did not have feet on the ground in manufacturing hubs, like China, to manage shipments of goods in the same way that large retailers did. Then Alibaba came along in the late 1990s and began acting as a gatekeeper for cross-border purchases, Verman said. U.S. goods imports from China totaled $451.7 billion in 2019, while U.S. goods imports from India in 2019 were $87.4 billion.

Bzaar screenshot. Image Credits: Bzaar

Small buyers could buy home and lifestyle goods, but it was typically through the same sellers, and there was not often a unique selection, nor were goods available handmade or using organic materials, he added.

With Bzaar, small buyers can purchase over 10,000 wholesale goods on its marketplace from other countries like India and Southeast Asia. The company guarantees products arrive within two weeks and manage all of the packaging logistics and buyer protection.

Verman and Nair launched the marketplace in April and had thousands users in three continents purchasing from the platform within six months. Meanwhile, products on Bzaar are up to 50% cheaper than domestic U.S. platforms, while SKU selection is growing doubling every month, Verman said.

The new funding will enable the company to invest in marketing to get in front of buyers and invest on its technology to advance its cataloging feature so that goods pass through customs seamlessly. Wanting to provide new features for its small business customers, Verman also intends to create a credit feature to enable buyers to pay in installments or up to 90 days later.

“We feel this is a once-in-a-lifetime shift in how global trade works,” he added. “You need the right team in place to do this because the problem is quite complex to take products from a small town in Vietnam to Nashville. With our infrastructure in place, the good news is there are already shops and buyers, and we are stitching them together to give buyers a seamless experience.”

Applications networking company F5 has announced it’s acquiring Threat Stack, a Boston-based cloud security and compliance startup, for $68 million.

The deal, which comes months after F5 bought multi-cloud management startup Volterra for $500 million, sees the 25-year-old company looking to bolster its cloud security portfolio as applications become a growing focus for cybercriminals. Businesses lose more than $100 billion a year to attacks targeting digital experiences, F5 says and these experiences are increasingly powered by applications distributed across multiple environments and interconnected through APIs.

Threat Stack, which was founded in November 2012 and has since amassed more than $70 million across six funding rounds including a $45 million Series C round led by F-Prime Capital Partners and Eight Roads Ventures, specializes in cloud security for applications and provides customers with real-time threat detection for cloud infrastructure and workloads. Unlike many cloud security tools that kick in after an intrusion, Threat Stack takes a more proactive approach, alerting organizations to all known vulnerabilities and providing a report on the holes that need to be plugged.

The startup’s intrusion detection platform, the Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform, works across cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and containerized environments, and is perhaps best known for its Slack integration that alerts DevOps teams to security concerns in real-time. Threat Stack has a number of big-name customers, according to its website, including Glassdoor, Ping Identity and Proofpoint.

F5 says that integrating its application and API protection solutions with Threat Stack’s cloud security capabilities and expertise will enhance visibility across application infrastructure and workloads, making it easier for customers to adopt consistent security in any cloud.

“Applications are the backbone of today’s modern businesses, and protecting them is mission-critical for our customers,” said Haiyan Song, EVP of Security at F5. “Threat Stack brings technology and talent that will strengthen F5’s security capabilities and further our adaptive applications vision with broader cloud observability and actionable security insights for customers.”

The acquisition, which is expected to close in F5’s first-quarter fiscal year 2022, is subject to closing conditions.

Picking up where we left off Friday, let’s spend some more time in the GitLab IPO filing.

It’s going to be an IPO week, mind; Toast and Freshworks are set to price Tuesday after the close of trading and begin to float on Wednesday. Expect final notes on the value of each and reports on how they trade when they do. The Exchange will also try to get on calls with the CEOs. But because it is Disrupt week, things are going to be a little chaotic.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

But that’s tomorrow. This morning, we’re digging back into developer toolkit GitLab and its impending IPO. Let’s start with a dive into the venture capital players that are going to make out in its public offering. And for the sake of having fun on a Monday, we’ll look back at the GitHub-Microsoft deal. The former CTO of GitHub dropped some interesting data on the company’s historical results that we can use to back into what the deal would be worth today if it happened.

From there, we have some extrapolation to do. And we’ll close with an examination of GitLab’s quarterly data to see if a more narrow view of the company’s operating results tells us anything useful. Let’s have some fun!

GitLab’s rich list

As a private company, GitLab raised huge sums of capital — more than $400 million, per Crunchbase data. The capital came in increasingly large chunks from the company’s seed rounds back in 2015 through its late 2019 Series E.

Khosla Ventures led the company’s early rounds before GV, Goldman Sachs and ICONIQ Capital took the baton.

Unsurprisingly, those names are the ones we can spy on in the company’s major shareholder list. From the GitLab S-1 filing, what follows are share counts and percentage ownership stakes for the company’s investors that own more than 5% of its stock:

• August Capital: 14,931,200 Class B shares, or 11.1% of that equity class
• GV: 8,888,776 Class B shares, or 6.6% of that equity class
• ICONIQ: 15,472,204 Class B shares, or 11.6% of that equity class
• ICONIQ: 1,150,784 Class A shares, or 100% of that equity class (to be diluted in IPO)
• Khosla: 19,028,320 Class B shares, or 14.1% of that equity class

Given that GitLab was valued at $6 billion earlier this year in a secondary transaction, the percentages above convert to huge sums. August Capital, for example, at that price point, is set to reap north of $600 million. That’s bigger than the entire fund from which it snagged ownership, the firm’s $450 million Fund VII.

Just like that, they came back.

The Inspiration4 crew made a triumphant splashdown on Saturday evening off the east coast of Florida, marking the close of the first completely private, all-civilian space mission. SpaceX’s Go Searcher recovery ship hauled the Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed Resilience, a little less than an hour after splashdown. The crew was then ferried via helicopter to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where they received standard medical checks.

The successful completion of the mission is a major triumph for Elon Musk and SpaceX (and, more peripherally, NASA, which funded the development of the tech), who conducted the entirety of the mission. It’s also perhaps our clearest signal that a new dawn of space travel is officially here.

Benji Reed, SpaceX’s senior director for human-spaceflight programs, told reporters that the company is seeing an increased number of inquiries from potential customers for private missions. The company could fly “three, four, five, six times a year at least,” he said.

Of course, mission commander Jared Isaacman is not the first billionaire to go to space. This summer, both Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos conducted their own orbital joy-rides in vehicles developed by their respective companies, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. But those trips were significantly shorter – Bezos and his three crewmates went to space and back in under fifteen minutes, essentially traveling in a long parabolic arc.

In contrast, the Inspiration4 crew spent three days orbiting Earth at an altitude that went as high as 590 kilometers – that’s higher than the International Space Station, meaning they were the most ‘outer’ of all the people in space. Over the course of their mission, they travelled around the Earth an average of fifteen times per day.

While in orbit, the crew conducted a handful of science experiments, mostly capturing data on themselves with the aim of furthering our understanding of the effects of spaceflight on the human body. The crew also spent some time in the large glass domed window, which SpaceX calls the “cupola,” snapping pictures of space.

View from Dragon’s cupola pic.twitter.com/Z2qwKZR2lK

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 16, 2021

Other than Isaacman, who made his fortune from his payment processing company Shift4 payments, the crew included physician assistant and childhood cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux; geoscientist Sian Proctor; and Lockheed Martin engineer Chris Sembroski. Among the other firsts for the crew, Arceneaux is the youngest American to go to space and the first person with a prosthesis to go to space; Proctor is the first Black woman to pilot a space mission.

The historic mission was paid for entirely by Isaacman, though both he and SpaceX are staying mum on how much it cost in total. Instead, the mission was being framed as a $200 million fundraiser for St. Jude Research Hospital, to which Isaacman donated $100 million and Musk donated $50 million. The fundraiser received an additional $60.2 million in public donations.

This is the second time the Resilience spacecraft has safely carried humans to and from space. The first mission, Crew-1, carried four astronauts (three from NASA, one from the Japanese space agency) to the ISS and returned them back to Earth in May. SpaceX will be conducting another handful of crewed missions over the next six months, including another mission to the ISS on behalf of NASA and the European Space Agency, as well as the private AX-1 mission on behalf of Axiom Space.

“Thanks so much SpaceX, that was a heck of a ride for us,” Isaacman said moments after the capsule landed. “We’re just getting started.”

Watch a full stream of the splashdown here: