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Lightspeed India Partners on Tuesday announced it has closed $275 million from LPs for its third fund as the top American venture firm looks to ramp up its investments in the world’s second-largest internet market.

The new fund, its biggest for India, will enable Lightspeed India Partners to make early stage bets on more than two dozen startups in the region, said Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at the firm, in an interview with TechCrunch.

The announcement comes as the firm, which began investing in India in 2007, has made two high-profile partial exits in the past year from budget-lodging startup Oyo and edtech giant Byju’s that delivered returns of more than $900 million.

Some of its other major bets including backing business-to-business marketplace Udaan, which was valued at more than $2.75 billion last year, local social media platform ShareChat, which is in advanced stages of discussions to raise capital at more than $1 billion valuation, and SaaS startups DarwinBox, Yellow Messenger, and OkCredit.

The firm, which has six partners in the region, closed its first dedicated fund for India, of $135 million, in 2015. In 2018, it closed its second fund for the region, which was $175 million in size. But the venture firm has invested more than $750 million to date.

The Indian arm, which typically invests at early stages of a startup, continues to work with its global mothership for writing bigger checks to support some portfolio startups at later phases. (More than 80% of its investments have been committed to firms at Seed or Series A stages in India.)

“That’s one of the strongest points of differentiation we have. There are not many venture firms that have such a global presence. Our synergy with the global fund will continue,” said Mohapatra.

Lightspeed, which earlier this year closed a $4 billion fund globally, is one of the handful American venture firms that aggressively scouts for deals in India. Sequoia, its global peer, announced two venture funds, of $1.35 billion in size, last month for India and Southeast Asia. 11 of its early-stage bets have grown to become unicorns in the last 14 years in this region.

Mohapatra said the Indian startup ecosystem has matured in recent years, demonstrating high-scale growth and delivering big outcomes. It’s also seeing more exits than ever before. Earlier this month, Byju’s acquired WhiteHat Jr., an 18-month-old startup that teaches coding to children, for $300 million in an all-cash deal.

Indian startups raised more than $14.5 billion last year — a record for the local community. The coronavirus has decelerated the funding spree in India, like in any other market. Mohapatra said a fraction of the firm’s portfolio startups has been disrupted by the virus, but noted that most startups are marching forward unfazed and some have accelerated in recent months.

More to follow…

What early-stage startup founder wouldn’t love to have a crystal ball? Especially now with a pandemic wreaking economic uncertainty across industries in every corner of the world.

We don’t have mystical powers, but we do have the next best thing, and it’s available exclusively to early-stage founders exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley at Disrupt 2020. Sign up today for our interactive webinar, COVID-19’s Impact on the Startup World scheduled for August 19 at 1pm PT/ 4pm ET.

What does the future of work look like? In what ways will startups need to adapt, and how can they course-correct both during and after COVID-19? These are some of the challenging topics our expert panel will address, and they’ll take questions from the viewing audience, too.

Which brilliant minds will offer their perspective, tips and advice? None other than Nicola Corzine, executive director of the Nasdaq Entrepreneurship Center and Cameron Stanfill, a VC analyst at PitchBook. Jon Shieber, a TechCrunch writer who covers Venture Capital and Private Equity investments will moderate the conversation. It’s an interactive webinar, folks, so don’t be shy — bring your questions, comments and ideas to the table.

If you haven’t purchased a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package, go grab yours now. You’ll be able to attend this webinar and the next one, too (more on that in a minute). But here’s the most important part — you’ll showcase your tech, talent and products to thousands of Disrupt attendees from around the world. Boost your brand recognition, connect with potential customers, partners, investors, media and other influencers across the startup ecosystem. You never know who you’ll meet exhibiting in the Alley or where a chance connection might lead.

“Exhibiting in Startup Alley gave our company and technology invaluable exposure to potential customers and partners that we would not have met otherwise. A company that does 15 billion in annual sales thinks our tech is a fit for their ecosystem, and we’re excited to continue building that relationship.” — Joel Neidig, founder of SIMBA Chain.

Now that you’re all set with you Digital Startup Alley exhibitor pass, circle August 26 on your calendar for the final webinar we scheduled for exhibitors’ edification.

August 26 — Fundraising and Hiring Best Practices

Moderated by TC’s Natasha Mascarenhas, panelists Sarah Kunst (Cleo Capital) and Brett Berson (First Round Capital) discuss two essential topics for startup success. Securing funding may feel like the hardest part of growing a startup but hiring the right people ain’t no walk in the park either. You need to get a handle on both areas, and these folks can help you do just that.

Exhibitors, sign up for the August 19 webinar, COVID-19’s Impact on the Startup World. And to the rest of the early-stage startup founders out there —don’t miss your chance to be an exhibitor at Disrupt 2020 — buy a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package today.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The battle between Epic Games and Apple continues, Facebook faces criticism in India and Pinterest appoints its first Black board member. This is your Daily Crunch for August 17, 2020.

The big story: Epic Games files injunction against Apple

Epic’s legal and PR fight with Apple and its App Store policies seems to be escalating. The Fortnite-maker has filed an injunction in U.S. District Court, saying it was notified by Apple that all of its developer accounts and access to developer tools will be cut off at the end of next week.

“[Apple] told Epic that by August 28, Apple will cut off Epic’s access to all development tools necessary to create software for Apple’s platforms — including for the Unreal Engine Epic offers to third-party developers, which Apple has never claimed violated any Apple policy,” Epic’s lawyers said in their court filing.

Fortnite was removed from Apple’s App Store (and the Google Play Store) last week after Epic introduced direct payments. Apple said at the time that it would “make every effort to work with Epic to resolve these violations.”

The tech giants

Facebook faces heat in India after report on hate speech posts — The debate was sparked by a Wall Street Journal report claiming that Facebook’s top public-policy executive in India had opposed applying the company’s hate-speech rules to a member of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party.

Pinterest announces first Black board member — Pinterest has appointed Andrea Wishom, president of real estate company Skywalker Holdings and former Harpo Studios executive, to its board of directors.

Google warns users in Australia free services are at risk if it’s forced to share ad revenue with ‘big media’ — Google has fired a lobbying pot-shot at a looming change to the law in Australia that will force it to share ad revenue with local media businesses.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Deepfake video app Reface is just getting started on shapeshifting selfie culture — Reface (previously Doublicat) is an app that uses AI-powered deepfake technology to let users try on another face/form for size.

DST Global pumps $35 million into Asian e-grocer Weee! — The delightfully named startup delivers groceries, like fresh kimchi and Japanese desserts, to major cities across the U.S.

Amex acquires SoftBank-backed Kabbage after tough 2020 for the SMB lender — Amex’s acquisition will include employees, technology and financial data, but “Kabbage’s pre-existing loan portfolio is not included in the purchase agreement.”

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Founders can raise funding before launching a product — I spoke to Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson about how to pitch VCs before you’ve built a real product.

Robinhood raises $200M more at $11.2B valuation as its revenue scales — Robinhood already raised capital multiple times this year, including an initial $280 million round at an $8.3 billion valuation, and a later $320 million addition that brought its valuation to $8.6 billion.

How tech can build more resilient supply chains — Coatue’s Caryn Marooney recently made the jump into venture capital.

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

Everything else

SpaceX will attempt to break a rocket reusability record with a launch this week — SpaceX is preparing for yet another launch of Starlink satellites on Tuesday.

US Commerce Department updates rules to further limit Huawei’s chip access — The new restrictions follow a similar decree announced in May.

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.

Editor’s note: Ryan Lawler is a writer and editor based in Philadelphia. After working as a journalist for publications like TechCrunch and Gigaom, he currently leads content strategy for Samsung Next.

I don’t remember the first time I went to The Creamery, probably sometime in early 2012.

I don’t remember the last time, either, although undoubtedly it was sometime last year, on a day when I had an extra five minutes to spare before boarding the Caltrain for my morning commute.

And I barely remember any of the other hundreds of times I stopped in to grab a coffee, have lunch with a friend or meet a possible source during my years at TechCrunch, which conveniently had an office just over a block away.

The Creamery was not a place you went for the memories. It was located firmly at the apex of convenience and comfort — which is why, for a certain period of about five years from the early to mid-teens of the third millennium, it was the perfect place for the SF technorati to see and be seen.

It’s also why, after 12 years of operating from one global recession to another, it’s shutting its doors for good.

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I learned of The Creamery’s imminent demise through a friend, who forwarded me a connection’s Facebook post. “Hey I’ve got some sad news,” wrote John S. Boyd, CEO of Monolith Technologies. “The Creamery is closing this weekend.”

I was a little less nostalgic in sharing the news via a screenshot to Twitter.

What followed was a little surprising, though it probably shouldn’t have been. Dozens of people replied or quote-tweeted with their own condolences, memories and anecdotes of their time at the little coffee shop on the corner of Fourth and Townsend.

“Ugh! Institution,” wrote Redpoint’s Ryan Sarver.

“Got my first SF angel backer over coffee there. Sad stuff,” wrote Haven Coliving’s Ben Katz.

“Oh no where will techcrunch writers get their stories,” wrote Breather founder Julien Smith.

As a former TechCrunch writer, it was this last point that resonated with me — although like most things, the legend of The Creamery as a place to get scoops far outpaced its actual utility.

From the perspective of someone who found himself visiting The Creamery several times a week (sometimes multiple times a day), those concerns were probably overblown. That’s not to say there weren’t deals happening at the cafe’s wobbly wooden tables, but just that there really wasn’t much worth overhearing if you actually sat there and listened.

For all the outpouring of condolences that The Creamery has received since the news of its closing, I don’t recall that many people who actually loved going there. The coffee was terrible, the food was just okay and, as one Twitter user wrote, it was “chock full of VC assholes constantly.”

And yet, for a period of time, it was its own little social club, a place where you could go and reliably see at least one or two people you knew (and often a person who said they knew you but you didn’t remember).

As fintech investor and Justin Bieber music video star Sheel Mohnot notes, “Right [across] from Caltrain, it was a legendary spot – for a time most startups were in the city but investors still down south, so The Creamery was a great spot to meet VC’s, increasingly less important as VC’s moved offices to SF.”

To understand how all that changed, it’s probably worth noting that The Creamery was unpretentious at its core.

It was the type of place where Alex could order two shots of espresso over ice and no one would bat an eye or where you could find a couple of dudes drinking beers on the front patio at 8:00 a.m. The cafe had food, but it was all counter service, and if you weren’t an asshole you would bus your own table.

The food was better at the attached Iron Cactus, and there was more room to spread out, particularly if you planned to meet more than one person. If you actually wanted to have a discreet conversation, you sat at the back patio, which was frequently empty, barring the occasional lunch rush.

But you didn’t go to The Creamery for the food. You didn’t go there to have quiet conversations that couldn’t be overheard. You went for the serendipity, for the chance of running into a friend or acquaintance and catching up for five minutes before promising to schedule a longer meeting that never happened.

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COVID-19 might have killed The Creamery, but its long-term health was compromised long before the novel coronavirus came into our lives. Changing times, changing tastes and growing professionalism around the industry that made it a destination all meant The Creamery was not long for this world.

As multithousandaires became multimillionaires and billionaires, the same comfort, convenience and unpretentiousness that defined the young tech industry evolved. Many techies outgrew their T-shirts and hoodies, decided they wanted something better than terrible coffee, and were no longer constrained by having to meet at the coffee shop closest to Caltrain.

After all, most of the people they were meeting now also lived and worked in the city.

This was accelerated by growing competition as both Philz and Reveille opened cafes just a few blocks away from The Creamery, with better coffee — and in the case of Reveille, much better food. Meanwhile, the new hotspot for being seen talking to investors was the South Park Blue Bottle, which was attached to General Catalyst’s SF office and just a few steps away from VCs like Redpoint and Kleiner Perkins.

And for the folks who wanted the benefit of being able to have discreet conversations while also being seen among the tech elite, there was The Battery, which came to define the industry’s transition to excess.

At the same time, the idea of a one-story cafe sitting on a plot of mostly empty land seemed verboten in a city in desperate need of new housing. And building that housing across the street from the main access point to the South Bay made nothing but sense. As a result, developers had eyes on The Creamery lot as early as 2014, and plans to develop the corner of 4th & Townsend accelerated last summer.

Some have pointed out that before closing its doors, the owners were “partnering with Tishman Speyer to return to the new site.” But a Creamery with no front or back patio is no Creamery at all.

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It’s a tale as old as time: Quaint neighborhood spot loved by locals gets swallowed up and destroyed as the city changes around it.

I’m not ready to say, “Bit by bit, the bohemian culture that has been the hallmark of the City by the Bay since 1945 is disappearing. San Francisco is becoming Manhattan West,” like some people are. After all, this sentiment ignores the fact that The Creamery was founded in 2008 and was fewer than five years old when the Chronicle named it “deal central.”

But I do think there’s something to the fact that, now that the industry has no need for it, the no-frills coffee shop will be bulldozed to make way for a gleaming high-rise.

Perhaps the best take I’ve seen on its closing comes from Can Duruk, who wrote:

“Kind of emblematic of the time when the early stage VCs are frolicking in the froth, the one meatspace small business most associated with it is going under.”

I couldn’t have said it better.

It’s been 14 years since the launch of Flight Simulator X, which long seemed like it would be the final release in the long-running series. When the company announced it would re-launch the franchise just over a year ago, using a new graphics engine and satellite data from Bing Maps, it sure created a lot of hype among both old fans and those who had never played the older version but were drawn to the next-gen graphics the company showed off in its trailer. The good news is, the new Microsoft Flight Simulator was worth the wait and, starting August 18, you’ll be able to see for yourself.

Pricing starts at $59.99 for the standard version of Flight Simulator on both the Microsoft Store and Steam. If you want access to more planes and hand-crafted airports, you will need to buy either the $89.99 deluxe version or, for even more of those, the $119.99 premium version. You can find the details of which airports and planes are included in each version here.

Rest assured, though, especially if this is your first outing in Flight Simulator, with the base version you can still land at the same 36,000 airports as the others, and there are more than enough planes to keep you occupied — you’ll just miss out on a few extras (and if you really want to, you can buy upgrades to the more premium versions later).

The cheapest way to give the game a spin is to subscribe to the Xbox Game Pass for a month, because the standard edition is now part of Microsoft’s subscription program, and if you’re a new subscriber, the first month only costs $1.

I already dove pretty deeply into the beta a few weeks ago, but Microsoft provided me with an early review copy of the final release of the premium version, so it’s worth taking a second look at what you’ll get.

The first thing everybody I showed the new sim to told me was how beautiful it looks. That’s true for the scenery, which includes a mix of cities reconstructed in every detail thanks to the photogrammetry data in Bing Maps and those Microsoft partner Blackshark.ai reconstructed from the 2D maps (for more on how that works, here is our interview with Blackshark). What makes this work is not just the realistic cities and towns, but also that they feel pretty alive, with traffic zipping down highways and local streets and street lights and even the windows of houses lighting up at night.

And then there’s the weather model. Flight Simulator features the prettiest clouds you’ve ever seen in a game. Rain clouds in the distance look just like in real life. Wind acts realistically on your plane. If you fly in winter, snow covers the ground — and you can play around with all of those settings in real time without having to reload the game with every change.

But since Microsoft and Asobo Studios decided to almost build a digital twin of our planet in Flight Simulator — and because the only way to do that is to use machine learning instead of placing every object by hand — you’ll still find plenty of oddness in the world, too. I had hoped that the team would fix more of these between the beta and final release, but I haven’t seen a lot of changes here. That means you’ll find bridges that look more like dams, roads that go under water and a few misplaced buildings and trees — there are so many trees where they don’t belong.

The way I look at this is that Flight Simulator is still a work in progress, and that hasn’t changed in the final release. I’m okay with that because even when there are mistakes, the cities and towns still usually look better than in any paid add-on for other flight simulators. Because a lot of this data is streamed from the Azure cloud and the team will continue to tweak its algorithms, I also expect that we’ll see fewer and fewer of these issues over time. Early on, I got hung up on this, but after a while, I realized that it doesn’t take away from enjoying the game — but it’s something to be aware of.

One area where I really hoped Microsoft would have improved the game, though, is air traffic control. This was always an area where Microsoft (and to be fair, all of its competitors) struggled. This was a problem during the alpha and beta, and it still is, which is really a shame, but what we have now just doesn’t feel very realistic.

Air traffic controllers don’t use standard phraseology (no real-life controller will ever tell you that he will contact you next when you leave his airspace, for example), don’t hand you off from tower to departure and constantly tell everybody to go around. I’m pretty sure I’ve done more go-arounds in three days with the final version of Flight Simulator than during the entire training for my pilot’s license. That feels like something that could be easily improved in the next update because, maybe even more so than the occasional graphics hiccup, it breaks the immersion for those looking for a simulator experience.

I also just wish that the controllers would call airlines by their real names. Microsoft has partnered with FlightAware to show real-life flights in the game, which depart and land on time, but somehow there are no liveries for them (except for the occasional stray United plane, which hints that we’ll see more of these over time) and only a limited set of models. Again, that’s something we’ll probably see more of in future updates.

Speaking of those flight models, Microsoft tweaked some of them a bit since the beta and, while I’ve never been in the cockpit of a 787, the single-engine Cessnas that I’ve flown still behave like I would expect them to in the sim (though I find the rudder is still pretty twitchy and needs some tweaking). I can’t vouch for the other aircraft in the game, but I expect real live pilots will find they are similarly realistic.

I still found some bugs with the flight instruments here and there and the GPS systems sometimes won’t let me activate a course, for example. I also wish the simulation of the G1000 and G3X glass cockpits would go just a little bit further. I can’t help but wonder if Microsoft and Asobo specifically held back here a bit to leave more room for add-on developers.

Performance hasn’t really changed since the beta, but I’m typically getting around 40 frames per second with the 2070 Super and i7-9700K, even when barely skimming over the roofs of cities like Barcelona or Berlin.

The only time I’ve seen real dips down into the 20s is when flying low over some of the hand-crafted airports like Frankfurt, and even then, after turning around and flying over the airport again, those numbers shot back up to the 40s.

You’ll notice that I used the words “simulator” and “game” interchangeably in this post. That’s because I think, in many ways, Flight Simulator is what you want it to be. There are plenty of game elements here, with flight training, landing challenges and bush-flying exercises. And in this age of COVID-19, there’s also something about it that just feels very relaxing when you’re flying around the planet low and slow, looking at the gorgeous scenery and forgetting about everything else for a while. I do worry, though, that most casual players will get bored after a short time.

For simmers, the new Flight Simulator is a godsend and provides a great basis for their hobby for years to come, especially given that Microsoft will continue to update it and because a lot of companies will develop all kinds of add-ons for it — and thanks to the inherent flaws in the game, there’s still room for somebody to not just build additional aircraft but also handcrafted versions of smaller airports, for example.

As I said in my preview, Flight Simulator is a technical marvel. Is it perfect? No. But I can forgive those imperfections because it does so much right.

Tesla shares surpassed $1,800 for the first time today, the latest in an eye-popping run up of the stock that has propelled the company’s valuation to more than $341 billion.

Let’s put these numbers in perspective. Tesla, an automaker that delivered 367,500 vehicles in 2019 and is aiming to exceed the 500,000-mark in 2020, is worth more than the combined market valuations of America’s Big Three automakers: GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler. Strike that, Tesla is now worth more than those companies combined by a factor of three and a half.

And while Tesla expects to deliver more than a half-million cars in 2020 — not a number to scoff at, mind, it’s material — Ford managed 2019 sales of 2.41 million in the U.S. alone. Fiat Chrysler sold 2.2 million cars in the U.S. during the same year, and GM managed 2.89 million. And Tesla is worth a multiple of their aggregate.

Why the gains?

There doesn’t appear to be any fundamental reason why Tesla’s shares rose more than 11.2% today to close at $1,835.64. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives apparently had a positive call today about Tesla, according to MarketWatch, but that’s only worth so much. Surely not a few dozen billion dollars.

The story here is valuation momentum at the well-known EV company that started this spring and has accelerated since Tesla recently announced plans for a 5 for 1 stock split.

Like a tiny snowball that has turned into an avalanche, the change is proving stunning. Consider where Tesla was two years ago. CEO Elon Musk had just tweeted that he had “funding secured” and was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share.

Musk would later backtrack and Tesla would remain public. But the tweets and leaked emails that followed got the attention of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which later accused Musk of securities fraud. The parties reached a settlement without admitting wrongdoing. Under the settlement, Tesla agreed to add two independent directors and Musk would step down as chairman for three years.

The shares bopped along — spiking and then dropping, as volatile stocks are want to do. Tesla shares reached a 52-week low of $211 in August 2019. The stock has risen around 770% since.

Valuing Tesla

It’s a running finance joke that whenever a company’s share price does something odd and inexplicable that the move was certainly based on the changing present value of its future cash flows. Such is the case today, when Tesla shares jumped sharply sans material news.

Surely the move was based on the changing present value of its future cash flows.

Jokes aside, Tesla shares are not comically overbought, measured using any normal financial metric you prefer. On a price/sales basis, for example, Tesla is trading at a multiple of around 13.7x its revenue, according to YCharts data. GM? A 0.38x revenue multiple. Toyota is worth much more than GM in price/sales terms, managing a 0.77x multiple, or about double.

But that’s a single-digit percentage of the revenue multiple that Tesla commands. Toyota’s price/book ratio of 0.98x. Tesla’s is 34.6x, again leaning on YCharts data.

It may be the case that Tesla is set to race past its rivals, secure the top position in the electric car market, run the EV show for a decade and shower its shareholders in dividends and buybacks. That’s how its stock priced today, at least. If it falls short of that investor expectation, expect some pullback at some point. And perhaps some more days when it just adds 10% for no reason.

You know, when the present value of its future cash flows appreciate by a tenth, sans news.

For fun, this is what Kirsten and Alex looked like today, trying to uncover why Tesla shares rallied:

Washington-based Datasembly aims to take the guesswork out of the pricing for consumer goods.

The company founded by Ben Reich and Dan Gallagher initially started as a project the two men developed after working at a retail analytics firm in the DC area.

What they observed while trying to collect information on pricing for goods and services for large consumer brands and national retailers was that there were so many things in the data collection that were flat out wrong, according to Reich.

“Companies are making multi-million dollar decisions on data that is incomplete… They’re trying to track the competition and understand their own place in the market,” said Reich. But without the proper tools, they just can’t, he said.

The problem becomes even more acute as retailers move to address consumers’ shifting tastes with regional, local, and hyperlocal specificity, Reich said. Datasembly boasts that its software can provide real-time data on availability and pricing to its customers anywhere in the country.

Datasembly solves the problem by scraping data on a massive scale, Reich said. The company, which went through the 500 Startups accelerator and had previously raised a small seed round had just closed on a $10.3 million series A round led by Craft Ventures with participation from Valor Siren Ventures.

The company counts three of the nation’s largest consumer packaged goods brands and two of the top five regional and national retailers among its customers already, according to a statement.

With the new money, Datasembly plans to expand its sales and marketing and product development efforts. As a result of the round, David Sacks, the founding COO of PayPal, founder of the messaging service Yammer, and co-founder fo Craft Ventures, will take a seat on the Datasembly board.

“For the last 20 years, retail industry data sets have remained largely unchanged. Now, Datasembly is leveraging technology to transform what companies can see, share, and do in a way that wasn’t practical or even possible before,” said Sacks, co-founder and general partner of Craft Ventures, in a statement. “Ben and the Datasembly team are changing the industry’s expectations of what’s possible when it comes to competitive pricing information. I can’t imagine a retail or CPG brand that wouldn’t want to take advantage of this data.”

 

Pinterest has appointed Andrea Wishom, President of trampoline company Skywalker Holdings and former Harpo Studios executive, to its board of directors. The appointment makes her Pinterest’s first Black board member and third female board member.

Pinterest added its first female board member in 2016, when it appointed Michelle Wilson, a former Amazon executive. Wilson was also the company’s first outside board member.

“I’ve spent my entire career inspired to take on challenges both creatively and culturally,” Wishom said in a statement. “I’m particularly interested in Pinterest’s expansion into content and media. I’m equally interested in Ben’s vision of having a new type of conversation between employees and the board itself. Part of meeting this moment is looking outside the expected and bringing different perspectives to the table. There are real challenges to address, and that responsibility is not lost on me. I’m committed to listening and sharing my perspective and providing guidance as Pinterest continues to make positive strides forward.”

Wishom’s appointment came following months of meetings with candidates, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said in a statement. He said Wishom stood out for several reasons.

“She’s an expert in creating positive and inspirational content for global audiences, and a passionate advocate for building a company culture of respect, integrity, inclusion and support — areas in which we must innovate and improve,” Silbermann said. “Andrea has spent her career outside of Silicon Valley and has a vision for reimagining the board/employee relationship.”

This announcement comes a couple of days after Pinterest employees staged a virtual walkout to demand systemic change as it relates to gender and racial discrimination. The walkout was a direct response to former Pinterest employees speaking out against gender and racial discrimination. Last week, former Pinterest COO Françoise Brougher sued the company, alleging gender discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination. Prior to that, Aerica Shimizu Banks and Ifeoma Ozoma also accused Pinterest of discrimination.

“These are not isolated cases,” workers wrote in a petition. “Instead, they are representative of an organizational culture that hurts all Pinterest workers, and keeps us from achieving our mission of bringing everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. We recognize that Pinterest has been a leader in diversity and inclusive hiring, with the diversity goals for new hires. It’s become clear that this is not enough, and that the diversity goals need to apply from the top down, not just the bottom up. Not only will diverse and inclusive leadership prevent discrimination and harassment among workers, it will help us build a product that is relevant on a global scale.”

Employees are demanding full transparency about promotion levels and retention, total compensation package transparency, the people within two layers of reporting to the CEO to be at least 25% women and 8% underrepresented employees, and a commitment to a diversity goal for the third layer reporting to the CEO.

Lana, a new startup based in Madrid, is looking to be the next big thing in Latin American fintech.

Founded by a serial entrepreneur Pablo Muniz, whose last business was backed by one of Spain’s largest financial services institutions, BBVA; Lana is looking to be the all-in-one financial services provider for Latin America’s gig economy workers.

Muniz’s last company, Denizen, was designed to provide expats in foreign and domestic markets with the financial services they would need as they began their new lives in a different country. While the target customer for Lana may not be the same middle to upper-middle-class international traveler that he had previously hoped to serve, the challenges gig economy workers face in Latin America are much the same.

Muniz actually had two revelations from his work at Denizen. The first — he would never try to launch a fintech company in conjunction with a big bank. And the second was that fintechs or neobanks that focus on a very niche segment will be successful — so long as they can find the right niche.

The biggest niche that Muniz saw that was underserved was actually in the gig economy space in Latin America. “I knew several people who worked at gig economy companies and I knew that their businesses were booming and the industry was growing,” he said. “[But] I was concerned about the inequalities.”

Workers in gig economy marketplaces in Latin America often don’t have bank accounts and are paid through the apps on which they list their services in siloed wallets that are exclusive to that particular app. What Lana is hoping to do is become the wallet of wallets for all of the different companies on which laborers list their services. Frequently, drivers will work for Uber or Cabify and deliver food for Rappi. Those workers have wallets for each service.

Lana wants to unify all of those disparate wallets into a single account that would operate like a payment account. These accounts can be opened at local merchant shops and, once opened, workers will have access to a debit card that they can use at other locations.

The Lana service also has a bill pay feature that it’s rolling out to users, in the first evolution of the product into a marketplace for financial services that would appeal to gig workers, Muniz said.

“We want to become that account in which they receive funds,” he said. “We are still iterating the value proposition to gig economy companies.”

Working with companies like Cabify, and other, undisclosed companies, Lana has plans to roll out in Mexico, Chile, Peru, and eventually Colombia and Argentina.

Eventually, Lana hopes to move beyond basic banking services like deposits and payments and into credit services. Already hundreds of customers are using the company’s service, through the distribution partnership with Cabify, which ran the initial pilot to determine the viability of the company’s offering.

“The idea of creating Lana was initially tested as an internal project at Cabify,” Muniz wrote in an email. “Soon Cabify and some potential investors saw that Lana could have a greater impact as an independent company, being able to serve gig economy workers from any industry and decided to start over a new entrepreneurial project.”

Through those connections with Cabify, Lana was able to bring in other investors like the Silicon Valley-based investment firm Base 10.

“One of the things we’ve been interested in is in inclusion generally and in fintech specifically,” said Adeyemi Ajao, the firm’s co-founder. “We had gotten very close to investing in a couple of fintech companies in Latin America and that is because the opportunity is huge. There are several million people going from unbanked to banked in the region.”

Along with a few other investors Base 10 put in $12.5 million to finance the Lana as it looks to expand. It’s a market that has few real competitors. Nubank, Latin America’s biggest fintech company, is offering credit services across the continent, but most of their end users already have an established financial history.

“Most of their end users are not unbanked,” said Ajao. “With Lana it is truly gig workers… They can start by being a wallet of wallets and then give customers products that help them finance their cars or their scooters.”

The ultimate idea is to get workers paid faster and provide a window into their financial history that can give them more opportunities at other gig economy companies, said Ajao. “The vision would be that someone can pug in their financial information for services. If they’re working for Rappi and have never been an Uber driver and they want to be an Uber driver, Lana can use their financial history with Rappi to offer a loan on a car,” he said.

That financial history is completely inaccessible to a traditional bank, and those established financial services don’t care about the history built in wallets that they can’t control or track. “Today if you’ve been a gig worker and you go to a bank, that’s worth nothing,” said Ajao.

After taking a stand against Apple’s hefty cut of the money developers make through the App Store, Fortnite maker Epic Games shows no signs of backing down. The company filed an injunction against Apple in the U.S. District Court for California’s Northern District on Monday after it received a letter notifying Epic that its developer accounts and access to developer tools would be cut off at the end of next week.

In the injunction, Epic accuses Apple of “retaliation” and reasserts its mission to disrupt what it views as Apple’s monopoly over its mobile software market. The company cites concerns that Apple’s actions against its developer access will damage its business beyond Fortnite, particularly its work on Unreal Engine, the prominent game engine it licenses to third party software makers.

“[Apple] told Epic that by August 28, Apple will cut off Epic’s access to all development tools necessary to create software for Apple’s platforms—including for the Unreal Engine Epic offers to third-party developers, which Apple has never claimed violated any Apple policy,” the injunction states.

“Not content simply to remove Fortnite from the App Store, Apple is attacking Epic’s entire business in unrelated areas. Epic is likely to succeed on the merits of its claims, but without an injunction, Epic will be irreparably harmed long before final judgment comes.”

Epic ran afoul of both Apple and Google’s policies last week when it added a discounted direct payment option into its apps, essentially creating a workaround for Fortnite players to make purchases in the game without an intermediary. Knowing that Apple would act quickly to pull Fortnite from the Apple Store for violating its rules, Epic had a PR campaign against the tech giant prepared, launching an antitrust suit and a Fortnite-themed spoof on Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial shortly after the news broke.

When reached by TechCrunch, Apple did not provide additional comment on the latest development, pointing us back to its prior statement. The full text of Epic’s injunction to block Apple’s actions is available here.