Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Indian fitness and wellbeing startup Cure.fit, which has established a market leading position in the country in four years of its existence, is ready to stretch to a new geography.

The Bangalore-headquartered startup said on Wednesday it has launched a range of its digital services — including its fitness service Cult.fit and Mind.fit, through which it offers therapy, medication, and yoga sessions — in the United States, its first market outside of India.

Global expansion has long been one of the key goals for Cure.fit, said Mukesh Bansal, co-founder and chief executive of the startup, in an interview with TechCrunch. “But we had originally planned to expand after five years of operations in India,” he said.

Coronavirus accelerated that growth, he said. Cure.fit, which previously primarily focused on delivering these sessions at its physical centres, said the pandemic and nationwide lockdown forced it to make a digital push. And that bet appears to working: It has amassed a million users since early this year.

Cure.fit, which offers a mix of free and premium services, began testing its services in beta in the U.S. last month. Bansal, a serial entrepreneur who also co-founded fashion e-commerce giant Myntra, said the startup’s app — available on iOS and Android — was downloaded more than 12,000 times in the U.S. last month.

The startup is currently offering its services in the U.S. at no charge but Bansal said it will soon introduce different premium plans for the market.

Fitness is a big industry in India, and Cult.fit has been able to disrupt traditional franchises such as Gold’s Gym and Snap Fitness with its brand power and capital, said Jayanth Kolla, chief analyst at consultancy group Convergence Catalyst.

Cure.fit’s various services, including food delivery Eat.fit, introduced and hooked millennials to healthy habits and food, said Kolla. Cure.fit is not bringing Eat.fit and any other service that requires physical presence in the market to the U.S. yet.

Though the U.S. presents a big opportunity to Cure.fit, it would be equally challenging for the Indian startup to gain inroads in the more developed and mature market.

The U.S. market is jam-packed with small gyms and other fitness-focused studios and scores of heavily-funded startups including Mirror and Peloton and established players such as Nike and Adidas have launched their own gears and subscription services.

But Cure.fit, which has raised more than $400 million, is confident that its vast catalog of digital services and proprietary technology are worthwhile for the market.

For its fitness business Cult.fit, for instance, the startup uses the phone’s camera to evaluate the movement of the participants and gives them an “energy meter” score.

“Our energy meter not only keeps users engaged throughout the entire class, it also gives them a goal to help achieve their desired level of fitness,” said Bansal.
The short-lasting videos captured by the phone camera are not stored by Cure.fit. The startup said it only keeps a log of the computed score.

Cure.fit, which has raised $400 million, offers a portion of its recorded sessions to non-paying users, while paying subscribers — a basic subscription starts at $5 a month — get to attend live sessions.

For about $50 a month, Cure.fit subscribers in India can arrange one-to-one session with trainers. A therapy session costs $10. In the U.S., the prices will eventually be higher than this, said Bansal.

The expansion to the U.S. marks the beginning of a crucial chapter for Cure.fit, which has amassed about 300,000 paying subscribers in India.

To retain its physical subscribers, the startup has in part also signed up several athletes such as cricketers AB de Villiers and Jonty Rhodes and boxer Mary Kom for guiding some classes.

While the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated its growth, the startup has also taken several cost cutting measures in recent months to stay lean. Cure.fit has eliminated about 1,400 jobs since March and shut 10% of its physical centres across India permanently.

“With ambiguity on normalcy and reopening of gyms across the country anytime soon, we have had to take necessary measures to ensure business continuity. We are ensuring that the impacted employees are taken care of and we plan to rehire them once the gyms are reopened and our business gets back on track,” said Bansal.

The startup is bullish on its physical centres across India and is hopeful that it will scale that back, he said.

Startups building tech-based platforms to help make investments continue to be in high demand, building on an expanding market of investors getting more confident to rely on technology to undercut broker fees and speed up the process. Today, one of the hopefuls in the space is announcing a growth round to capitalise on that opportunity.

Scalable Capital — the Munich-based startup that has built a platform to monitor and manage investment portfolios investing in shares, trades and exchange traded funds for a flat fee of €2.99 per month — has closed a round of €50 million ($58 million) to expand its business. Scalable currently has some 30,000 customers across Germany, Austria and the UK. Using its services both directly and via bank partners, the startup says it has over $2 billion under management on its platform and the plan is to build more products for those customers, add more customers in those regions, and potentially look to more countries in Europe.

CEO Erik Podzuweit confirmed to TechCrunch that the Series D was made at a post-money valuation €400 million ($460 million).

The investment is coming from a mix of new and existing investors, including BlackRock, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and Tengelmann Ventures. It brings the total raised by the startup to €116 million ($133 million).

The last several years have seen a veritable explosion of startups — and banks, often tapping technology built by startups, as is the case with Scalable — building financial technology tools that help people bypass slow, costly, and often less transparent legacy banking services. In place of the incumbents, startups are developing apps and web-based platforms to help users make faster, cheaper and (critically) more financial transactions.

That trend has been accelerated significantly in the last few months, where people are spending a lot more time in front of screens at home as part of social distancing orders to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. Services that used to be conducted in person are shifting to being carried out online: that was already a trend before the health pandemic, of course, but now with more limited options, people are making the shift faster.

It seems that this is even the case in the world of investing apps.

Despite the wider economic downturn spurred by the global health pandemic, those who have the money to make investments are still doing so, not just to capture new opportunities that are arising, but also to move away from investments that might be less fruitful in the current climate.

It seems ironic for a startup to set out to “democratise” services for wealth management — one way that Scalable likes to describe its service — considering that wealth management is not something that the majority of people will ever have the means to need to think about, but the trend seems to play out at all levels of the economy.

And that means startups are raising money to meet that demand to disrupt traditional brokers. One of Scalable’s direct competitors, Trade Republic, announced a fundraise of $67 million just in April. Others in the same space that are also on the radar of VCs include Bux, YieldStreet (out of the US), Parallel Markets, Freetrade, Revolut and Robinhood.

“In times of Covid-19, our funding round is a powerful signal; it shows that our focused, digital business model is convincing the investors,” Podzuweit, co-founder and co-CEO of Scalable Capital, said in a statement.

To date, Scalable has built its business out as both a B2B and B2C service. For the former, it sells its tech to banks who want to offer a “robo advisor” option to its investor customers. Partners in that business include a mix of huge banks and other startups, among them Barclays, Gerd Kommer Capital, Raiffeisen Banking Group Austria, Raisin, ING Deutschland, Siemens Private Finance, the Openbank digital bank from Santander, Targobank from French Crédit Mutuel, Oskar and Baader Bank.

The B2C service, which was only launched in June, offers a service directly to investors themselves. It sounds like it has been growing very quickly in the month or so it’s been in the market. In an email exchange, Podzuweit — who co-founded the company in 2014 with Florian Prucker, Adam French (previously at Goldman Sachs) and Professor Dr. Stefan Mittnik (an academic who is the current Chair of Financial Econometrics and Director of the Center for Quantitative Risk Analysis at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich) — said that the B2C and B2B businesses are roughly at a 50/50 rate in terms of revenues at the moment.

The B2C service branded “Prime Broker” offers flat-rate trades, and Scalable says that on average users of it service are about 10 years younger than those for its wealth management service (no surprise there, since it’s likely that older people who have accrued more wealth will be the most likely targets for something aimed at “wealth management”). It underscores the opportunity for growth into new customer segments that Scalable wants to target with this funding.

Having left his previous company under unceremonious circumstances, Rayhan Rafiq-Omar, who co-founded Unmortgage, is launching his next proptech venture.

Called Free.co.uk, the startup wants to eradicate listing fees when selling your house, as well as streamlining other parts of the house selling process. Instead of charging for a listing on Rightmove, it hopes to make money in commissions if you also let the company find you a suitable mortgage.

Prospective house buyers can also use Free.co.uk as a mortgage broker, with the free listings and accompanying user journey acting as a funnel for third party mortgage commissions.

“I’ve been thinking about this for three years now, but was running Unmortgage. So on leaving Unmortgage, I knew this is what was next,” Rafiq-Omar tells me. “Even thinking of selling your home is painful; there’s just so much friction. And the thought of spending all that money is debilitating”.

To remedy this, Free.co.uk removes “the BS and the fees,” according to its founder, and promises to enable you to get your home listed “in just 5 minutes, from your phone [and] for free”.

Targeting do-it-yourself house sellers, Free.co.uk has online real estate agencies, such as Purplebricks, in its sights rather than offline agencies that charge for and specialise in handholding for sellers that require it. Presuming there are enough of these types of sellers — likely those that have already gone through the house selling process at least once before — that feels like a quite smart strategy, essentially picking off the most profitable portion of an online estate agent’s customerbase.

Explains Rafiq-Omar: “We aren’t competing with high street agents – they exist to hold people’s hands, which many people feel they need to sell their home. [But] for those who know their home, it’s value and the local area better than any ‘local property expert,’ Free.co.uk gives them a new choice to be in control. Purplebricks is the main/only competition”.

Meanwhile, with the U.K. treasury announcing a stamp duty tax cut to help stipulate the housing market amidst the coronavirus crisis — saving buyers up to £15,000 — Free.co.uk has brought its launch forward by a month.

“We’ve worked really hard to put simple tech in the palm of your hand: listing a home, scheduling viewings, getting a mortgage. All of these are now so simple, you’ll wonder why no-one did this before,” adds the Free.co.uk founder.

Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten has decided not to renew its contract with WeWork when it expires next month, according to a report in the Japan Times. Rakuten had leased about 700 desks in Tokyo, but is now planning to move employees from its fintech division into its own new offices.

Both WeWork and Rakuten declined to comment to TechCrunch.

Tokyo is also the headquarters of WeWork’s biggest investor SoftBank, which took ownership of the coworking startup last October as part of a bailout deal after concerns about WeWork’s financial stability and the behavior of co-founder and former chief executive officer Adam Neumann led to the postponement of its IPO.

Due in part to its close relationship with SoftBank, WeWork has a high number of clients in Japan, but the Japan Times reports that the COVID-19 pandemic caused occupancy to drop by about 60%.

Despite its troubles, SoftBank Group chief operating officer Marcelo Claure, who took over as WeWork’s chairman after Neumann’s resignation, told the Financial Times earlier this month that the company is on target to reach operating profitability by the end of next year, thanks in part to aggressive cost-cutting measures.

He also said that even though revenues were flat during the second quarter because many tenants terminated their leases or stopped paying rent, some companies have leased WeWork spaces to serve as satellite offices close to where their employees live as they continue to work from home.

AB Tasty has raised a new $40 million funding round led by Credit Mutuel Innovation with existing investors Korelya Capital, Omnes, Partech and XAnge also participating. Overall the startup has raised $64 million.

The startup is focused on improving user experience on e-commerce platforms, travel portals, fashion websites and more. It lets you customize the message and the feature set of your application depending on the person you’re interacting with.

AB Tasty started the fundraising process at the end of last year and managed to close this funding round around the end of April. “We were supposed to close the round by the end of March and then coronavirus hit, which delayed the closing a bit,” co-founder and CEO Alix de Sagazan told me. But it seems like lockdowns didn’t derail the startup.

At first, AB Tasty was a web analytics agency. In 2013, the company started working on a software-as-a-service product with a simple testing product — hence the name AB Tasty. But it evolved beyond that with a recommendation engine.

Integrating AB Tasty on your website works pretty much like integrating Google Analytics. You insert a single line of JavaScript code on every page of your site. It lets you learn a ton of information about your visitors and sort them into buckets — for European users, they’d have to give their consent in the GDPR module. You can separate engaged users from casual wanderers, you can identify customers who have been on your site for a while, etc.

After that, you can act on those segments to send personalized messages. For instance, you could give a discount to users who have a loyalty card using dynamic widgets.

More recently, AB Tasty has been trying to make it easier to roll out new features and customize an app for a specific audience. It lets you hide features behind flags and trigger them depending on multiple conditions. For instance, you could progressively roll out a new feature to 10% of your user base, then 20% of your user base, etc. You could also hide features that aren’t available in some countries.

Overall, AB Tasty is trying to increase your average basket size, upsell your customers with other products, make customers come back more often and generate more revenue.

Originally from France, AB Tasty now has teams in many different countries, such as Germany, the U.K., Spain, Singapore and the U.S. “I moved to New York in September 2018. It’s been nearly two years and we’ve had tremendous growth since I arrived in the U.S.,” Alix de Sagazan said.

Revenue in the U.S. has jumped by 480% over the past two years and 60% of the company’s revenue now comes from outside of France. The company has around 900 clients, such as Le Bon Coin, LVMH, L’Oréal, Carrefour, Leclerc, Oui.SNCF, Sephora, Disneyland Paris, etc.

Tech firms around the world are in an overdrive to help battle the coronavirus pandemic. Research showed that 6.5% of COVID-19 patients can suddenly progress to serious illness, and among them the mortality rate can be as high as 49%. Therefore one of the key tasks for health authorities is to identify and treat patients who may develop severe or fatal syndromes early on.

That’s what has been underway at a research team jointly established by Tencent AI Lab and a group of Chinese public health scientists headed by Zhong Nanshan, the country’s senior medical advisor on COVID-19, since its inception in February.

This week, the team unveiled a deep learning-based model that can predict the risk of coronavirus patients developing critical illness. The details were published in Nature Communications, recounting how the the lab devised the model based on a cohort of 1590 patients from 575 medical centers in China, with further validation from 1393 patients.

The joint lab made the predictor available online, allowing clinical staff around the world to calculate patients’ probability of developing critical illness within 5, 10, and 30 days using ten clinical variables. While its immediate focus is on COVID-19, the lab’s long-term mission, in its own words, is to “utilize big data and AI for the screening, prevention and control, and warning of outbreaks, respiratory diseases and thoracic diseases.”

Other Chinese tech giants have been taking up similar projects to contain the deadly virus. Using machine and deep learning, Alibaba built a tool for institutions to forecast the spread of COVID-19 with an alleged 90% accuracy rate. Baidu open-sourced an algorithm for viral structural analysis, claiming the process is 120 times faster than the traditional method.

Tencent AI Lab is the tech behemoth’s effort to stay afloat in a race to develop cutting-edge technology alongside money-making businesses such as video games and social networks. Launched in 2016, the research arm works on computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning through a team of 70 research scientists and 300 engineers.

The lab competes with its local counterparts like Alibaba’s Damo Academy and Baidu Research to hunt down the world’s best AI minds. Often that means hiring a well-established scientist to attract young talents. In recent years, Baidu suffered from the departure of Andrew Ng and Lu Qi, and Tencent AI Lab, too, lost its leading figure Zhang Tong last year.

Waymo and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles have inked a deal to develop and test autonomous cargo vans and other light commercial vehicles designed to shuttle goods. The agreement is an expansion of a partnership that kicked off four years ago with a focus on self-driving Pacifica hybrid minivans meant to transport people.

The deal is the latest example of Waymo’s efforts to build out the delivery arm of its autonomous vehicle technology business. The two companies said the initial plan is to integrate Waymo’s self-driving stack — the suite of software and hardware that allows the vehicle to operate without a human behind the wheel —into FCA’s Ram ProMaster vans. These self-driving cargo vans will be used by Waymo Via, the company’s trucking and local delivery service.

However, it appears that the terms of the deal could extend far beyond Waymo Via. It’s possible that FCA could supply other transport companies with the self-driving vans (equipped with Waymo tech) through a licensing deal.

The companies said the partnership actually covers FCA’s entire portfolio of vehicles. The agreement between FCA and Waymo also extends to future affiliates, according to those familiar with the partnership. This point matters because FCA and French automaker Groupe PSA are in the process of merging into a newly formed corporation called Stellantis. If the 50-50 merger closes as expected in the first quarter of next year, the agreement would theoretically include all the brands that fall under Stellantis.

As broad as the Waymo-FCA agreement might be, the automaker has sought out other partners in the autonomous vehicle industry in varying capacities. FCA’s approach to rapid advancement of autonomous vehicle technology is to focus on vehicle-side needs while establishing smart and strategic collaborations that promote a culture of innovation, safety and know-how, the automaker previously told TechCrunch.

Last year, FCA and autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora announced a partnership that was also focused on light commercial vehicles. FCA said it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Aurora, an agreement that has since run its course, a spokesperson said. The two companies are still working on custom-built Pacifica hybrids, which Aurora is using in its testing, but they are not co-developing autonomous commercial vans.

“Over the last eighteen months, Aurora and FCA have collaborated closely in the specification, design, and development of custom-built Pacificas into which we’ve integrated the Aurora Driver,” Aurora said in an emailed statement. “Aurora looks forward to deploying our self-driving solution on FCA’s passenger and commercial vehicles.”

FCA is also supplying self-driving vehicle startup Voyage with purpose-built Pacifica Hybrids that have been developed for integration of automated technology. These vehicles come with customizations such as redundant braking and steering that are necessary to safely deploy driverless vehicles.

Waymo is best known for developing, testing and now launching an on-demand ride-hailing business using self-driving passenger vehicles, namely the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans. A spokesperson said reiterated that ride-hailing is still its most important business.

While Waymo has publicly talked about its ambitions for self-driving trucks, local delivery vans and even personal car ownership, the ramp up of its Waymo One robotaxi service in Arizona has largely overshadowed those plans.

Waymo first integrated its self-driving system into Class 8 trucks and began testing them in Arizona in August 2017. Those tests stopped sometime later that year. The company didn’t bring back its truck testing to Arizona until May 2019.

Those early Arizona tests were aimed at gathering initial information about driving trucks in the region, while the new round of truck testing marked a more advanced stage in the program’s development, Waymo said at the time.

Waymo’s trucking program has had a higher profile since June 2019 when the company brought on 13 robotics experts, a group that includes Anki’s co-founder and former CEO Boris Sofman, to lead engineering in the autonomous trucking division.

Emily Kramer joined the Silicon Valley company Carta to build up the company’s brand. Now, the company’s former VP of marketing is looking to shine a light on Carta for another reason: in a new lawsuit against Carta, which makes equity management software, Kramer accuses the eight-year-old outfit of gender discrimination, retaliation, wrongful termination, and of violating the California Equal Pay Act.

Carta said no to an interview request today, saying through a spokesperson that it isn’t commenting because the suit is a “pending legal matter.”  But we spoke earlier this afternoon with Kramer, who has separately outlined her side of the story in detail in a Medium post, where she accuses the company of both unfair labor practices and of being disingenuous in its stated “commitment to transparency and equality in equity.”

The equality piece is certainly the bigger of the two issues, by Kramer’s own telling. She says she learned that she was underpaid when, in the summer of  2018, roughly six months after she joined Carta, it partnered with the women-led investment collective #ANGELS to produce a report that highlighted ownership of venture-backed companies’ equity by gender.

The suspicion driving the report  — and later proved out by its findings — is that as with salary, where women continue to earn less than their male peers, they are also given less equity ownership in the startups for which they work. Kramer, who says she spearheaded the effort, posted the report, which included internal analysis that showed that Carta too, was allocating less equity to women than men.

In response, says the report, 40% of the women at Carta received an equity fix, compared to 32% of the men.”

As it happens, it was through this same report that Kramer, the only female executive at Carta at the time, says she discovered she was herself underpaid by $50,000 relative to her peers, and that her original equity grant was one-third of the same amount of shares paid to comparable employees, who she says were all men.

Indeed, at the crux of her suit against Carta is that equity grant. While on the heels of the report, the company bumped up her pay by $50,000 and provided her nearly 300,000 more stock options in addition to the 150,000 options she was originally provided, it declined to backdate or accelerate the options to account for the previous six months of her tenure.

That might not seem like such a big deal. But given Carta’s ever-soaring valuation — it was marked at half a billion dollars when Kramer joined the company and it was more recently assigned a $3 billion valuation by its investors — that’s tantamount to a “significant” amount money, Kramer tells us. And she wasn’t about to leave it on the table.

The disparity wasn’t a complete shock to Kramer, who’d previously worked in marketing at Ticketfly, Asana, and Astro Technology (acquired by Slack) . According to her lawsuit, filed by attorney Sharon Vinick, Kramer emailed Carta’s founder and CEO, Henry Ward, when she was initially offered the job, noting that the equity offered was “lower than my expectations.”

According to Kramer, Ward told her that any more equity would be “unfair,” as compensation at her level was uniform for all employees. He also said Carta planned a company-wide review of its salaries and stock options later in the year, and that if it revealed that she was being underpaid, her compensation would be adjusted.

Clearly, Ward and Kramer have different views on whether or not that ultimately happened.

In our call with Kramer, she said still believes in the company’s mission to make equity more understandable for its users and that “therefore I believe it’s a solid product.”

She declined to say whether she has exercised any of her shares, but she said that Carta gives its employees a longer window to do this than many other startups. (How much time is is based in part on their tenure with the company, she’d added.)

Kramer also said that she hopes the company can “live up to”  how it markets itself externally, as an ally of women who are paid less for the same amount of work.

Kramer says her experience inside of Carta — which still has an exclusively male board of directors —  was not of a company that values women as much as men. She alleges that not only was she the only woman who reported directly to Ward during her tenure,  but that two other VP-level execs who joined at roughly the same that she did were promoted to C-level positions despite having “less, and less relevant” work experience in their respective fields whereas her efforts to be promoted went nowhere. (Asked if there were other VP-level male colleagues who were also not promoted during the same period, Vinick said that no one at the time had a comparable role to Kramer, who grew to oversee 27 other people.)

Kramer adds that she stopped being included in meetings where a marketing head would normally be included, fundraising meetings among them, and believes that her efforts to remedy what she perceived as a “sexist culture” within the male-dominated company were at the root of all of these developments.

Eventually, Kramer says, she felt she was forced to resign after a meeting with Ward turned heated and he said Kramer was in violation of the company’s “no asshole policy.” When she wrote him two days later to resign, he wrote back within eight minutes, accepting her resignation and suggesting that both might learn from their experience working together.

Vincik, Kramer’s attorney, tells us Carta is being sued for emotional, punitive, and economic distress and says that now that her law firm has filed the suit, Carta will be served officially with the complaint within another week or two, at which point the discovery process can begin.

Carta does not ask its employees to sign arbitration clauses in their employment agreements, so unless it settles with Kramer or a judge finds some reason to dismiss the case, which seems unlikely, it could eventually head to trial.

Carta has raised more than $600 million from investors to date, including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Ventures, and Goldman Sachs.

In April, as it was sealing it up its newest round of funding, it also conducted its first major layoff, parting ways with 161 employees. At the time, Business Insider spoke with eight former employees and one investor who described Carta as a “quickly changing company with huge vision but little focus, where hiring and hypergrowth” had become its core priorities.

Twitter announced Tuesday that many accounts spreading the pervasive right-wing conspiracy theory known as QAnon would no longer be welcome on its platform.

In a series of tweets, the company explained that it would make a “strong enforcement action” against QAnon content on the platform, removing related topics from its trending pages and algorithmic recommendations, blocking any associated URLs and permanently suspending any accounts tweeting about QAnon that have previously been suspended, coordinate harassment against individuals or amplify identical content across multiple accounts.

Twitter says the enforcement will go into effect this week and that the company would continue to provide transparency and additional context as it makes related platform policy choices going forward. According to a Twitter spokesperson, the company believes its action will affect 150,000 accounts and more than 7,000 QAnon-related accounts have already been removed for breaking the rules around platform manipulation, evading a ban and spam.

QAnon emerged in the Trump era and the conspiracy’s adherents generally fervently support the president, making frequent appearances at his rallies and other pro-Trump events. QAnon’s supporters believe that President Trump is waging a hidden battle against a secretive elite known as the Deep State. In their eyes, that secret battle produces many, many clues that they claim are encoded in messages sprinkled across anonymous online accounts and hinted at by the president himself.

QAnon is best known for its connection to Pizzagate, a baseless conspiracy that accused Hillary Clinton of running a sex trafficking ring out of a Washington D.C. pizza place. The conspiracy inspired an armed believer to show up to the pizza shop, where he fired a rifle inside the restaurant, though no one was injured.

While the conspiracy theory is elaborate, odd, and mostly incoherent, it’s been popping up in other mainstream places. Last week, Ed Mullins, the head of one of New York City’s most prominent police unions, spoke live on Fox News with a mug featuring the QAnon logo within clear view of the camera. In Oregon, a QAnon supporter won her primary to become the state’s Republican nominee for the Senate.

Apple says it’s going fully carbon neutral by 2030, Spotify adds video to its podcast strategy and the U.S. charges two alleged Chinese spies in what it describes as a global hacking campaign. Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 21, 2020.

The big story: Apple commits to carbon neutrality

Apple announced today that it plans to make its entire business — including its supply chain and resulting products — carbon neutral by 2030. This strategy includes reducing emissions from the production process, removing carbon from the atmosphere and working with renewable energy suppliers.

In addition to its climate change-focused announcement, Apple said it’s launching an Impact Accelerator that invests in minority-owned businesses.

“Systemic racism and climate change are not separate issues, and they will not abide separate solutions,” VP Lisa Jackson said in a statement. “We have a generational opportunity to help build a greener and more just economy, one where we develop whole new industries in the pursuit of giving the next generation a planet worth calling home.”

The tech giants

Spotify launches video podcasts worldwide, starting with select creators — Spotify says its users will be able to seamlessly move between the video version and the audio of a podcast.

Netflix tests new low-cost subscription plan in India — The new Mobile+ plan costs 349 Indian rupees ($4.70) per month.

Instagram is testing a ‘Personal Fundraiser’ feature — Instagram says all fundraisers will be first vetted to ensure they meet the existing guidelines and rules.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Gett raises $100M more to double down on its B2B on-demand ride business — The company says its B2B business has been growing in the midst of the global health pandemic.

Robinhood, the stock trading app, postpones UK launch ‘indefinitely’ — “As a company, we are refocusing our efforts on strengthening our core business in the US,” a spokesperson said.

Diaspora Ventures wants to invest in French founders with a global mindset — Founders Ilan Abehassera and Carlos Diaz grew up in France but have been in the U.S. for more than a decade.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

The future of work is human — Human Ventures CEO (and former TechCrunch CEO) Heather Hartnett says her firm is calling for entrepreneurs who are building companies that reimagine the way we work.

Edtech startups flirt with unicorn-style growth — How will a boost in later-stage funding affect the edtech landscape?

All B2B startups are in the payments business — BlueSnap’s Jeff Coppolo argues that whether they know it yet or not, B2B tech platforms are becoming payments companies.

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

Everything else

US charges two Chinese spies for a global hacking campaign that targeted COVID-19 research — The 11-count indictment alleges that Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi stole terabytes of data from high-tech companies around the world.

NBCU’s Peacock streaming service hits 1.5M app downloads in first 6 days — That’s 25% more than the 1.2 million installs Quibi saw during the same period post-launch in the U.S., but only 12% of the 13 million downloads Disney+ generated within its first six days, according to Sensor Tower.

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.