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Attention all current and future pass holders to Disrupt SF 2019! Our CrunchMatch platform is up, operational and ready for you to create your profile and get down to the business of connecting with the people who can move your business to new heights.

Hold up a sec’. If you don’t already have one, stop what you’re doing and buy your pass to Disrupt SF right now.

Okay, back to networking. More than 10,000 people will attend Disrupt SF and CruntchMatch is the most efficient way for you to zero in on the connections you want to make. Whether you’re a founder looking for developers, an investor looking to fatten your portfolio, technology service providers trolling for new customers, founders looking for marketing help, CrunchMatch will make connecting so much easier.

Now’s the time to create a CrunchMatch profile listing your specific criteria, goals and interests. For example, you’ll identify your role (developer, service provider, founder, etc.) and the type of people you want to connect with at Disrupt.

CrunchMatch kicks into high, algorithmic gear to find and suggest suitable matches and, subject to your approval, proposes meeting times and sends meeting requests. You can even use it to reserve meeting spaces. How well does it work? Here’s what Michael Kocan, managing partner at Trend Discovery, says about CrunchMatch.

“I scheduled more than 35 meetings with startups that I pre-vetted using CrunchMatch, and we made a significant investment in one, who came to our attention through Startup Battlefield. It’s an extremely efficient way to vet deals.”

Last year alone, the program facilitated more than 3,000 meetings. And Yoolbox — makers of a portable wireless charger — says the connections it made through CrunchMatch helped Yoolbox increase its distribution.

Make the most of your limited time at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. CrunchMatch relieves you of the hassle and the guesswork associated with traditional conference networking. Buy your pass, go create your profile and get ready to meet the right movers and shakers for your business.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

San Francisco-based accelerator 500 Startups is expanding its executive team with the hiring of Tony Wang.

Wang is joining the early-stage firm from Color Genomics, a venture-backed developer of genetic testing kits where he had served as chief operating officer since 2014. Prior to Color, Wang was the vice president of global partnerships and development at Twitter and managing counsel for Google’s international operations.

“The venture capital world is undergoing a dramatic shift towards globalization where 500 Startups has been the leader and investing for the past decade,” Wang said in a statement. “There’s no question there are talented founders around the world, as proven by the number of unicorn companies in the 500 family.”

500 Startups, led by chief executive officer Christine Tsai, is an early investor in TalkDesk, Twilio, GitLab, Canva and several others.

Through its four-month seed program, the 500 Startups seed fund invests $150,000 in participating companies in exchange for 6% equity. Here’s a closer look at all the startups to finish 500 Startups’ latest program.

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 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Facebook buys startup building neural monitoring armband

Facebook has talked a lot about working on a non-invasive brain input device that can make things like text entry possible just by thinking.

So far, most of the company’s progress on that project appears to be taking the form of university research, but with the acquisition of CTRL-labs (which we’ve confirmed was worth between $500 million and $1 billion), Facebook appears to be moving closer to turning this idea into a commercial product.

2. Messaging app Kik shuts down as company focuses on Kin, its cryptocurrency

The company’s team will be reduced to 19 people, a reduction that will affect over 100 employees, as it focuses on converting more Kin users into buyers. Kin still faces a lawsuit from the SEC, claiming the company’s ICO was illegal.

3. Europe’s top court rules that ‘right to be forgotten’ only applies in Europe

Google and other search engines started implementing the right to be forgotten in 2014, allowing European citizens to ask search engines to delist results with sensitive personal information. Now the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that Google doesn’t have to de-reference those results on a global scale.

4. Samsung Galaxy Fold, take two

This week, the Fold finally debuts on North American store shelves, about five months later than initially planned.

5. ClimateTech is the new hot space for investors in a warming planet

Whereas CleanTech has traditionally been known in the field of energy generation, such as solar, battery and hydro, ClimateTech could perhaps be defined as data-driven products aimed at addressing the risk and exposure to the effects of climate change. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Honestbee owes almost $1 million in unpaid salary to employees, according to affidavit filed by its CEO

Honestbee, the Singapore-based grocery delivery startup that has been struggling with financial issues, owes 217 employees a total of almost USD $1 million in unpaid salary.

7. Hear about investing in African tech at Disrupt SF with Marième Diop, Wale Ayeni and Sheel Mohnot

We’ll be hosting a Q&A session with Orange Digital Ventures’ Marième Diop, International Finance Organization‘s Wale Ayeni and 500 Startups’ Sheel Mohnot, three Africa-based investors who bring plenty of experience screening startups across its top tech hubs.

Investors are betting on gaming platforms as an area of consumer tech with plenty of room left to grow.

Today, Manticore Games, a stealth gaming startup announced that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding from Benchmark Capital, Correlation Ventures, BITKRAFT Esports Ventures, M Ventures, Arrive, Sapphire Sport, Tuesday Capital, and SV Angel. The gaming startup has now disclosed that they’re raised at least $45 million in financing, all before they’ve shipped a product.

They are announcing the name and some limited details of what it is that they’re building.

Their upcoming product is called CORE and it’s a way for gamers to build new, custom experiences. Users can build and monetize experiences that they create on the platform and it appears that they won’t need much of a technical background to be order to do so.

“The traditional game development pipeline is very rigid and very complex,” CEO Frederic Descamps told TechCrunch in an interview. “We’re really focused on bringing a new generation of game-makers to game-making.”

The startup is still in stealth so there’s a good deal about CORE that they say they’re not ready to talk about quite yet. It’s built on the Unreal Engine and doesn’t appear to be a game engine in itself and Manticore’s founders are comparing it more to a Twitch or YouTube in terms of how users will engage with creators’ game content, there’s all a good deal up in the air. They haven’t given a timeline for launch, but it sounds like something will be available soon.

In press materials, the company calls itself a “collaborative social ecosystem that supports a wide variety of shared online experiences.”

Manticore appears to be injecting itself into an arena that’s mostly represented by massively popular online games with “creator modes” like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft. Moving to the platform side before establishing a strong base via a popular title is obviously risky. The company declined to comment on whether they would be launching the platform alongside some of its own first-party experiences.

Descamps and his co-founder Jordan Maynard previously ran a game studio called “A Bit Lucky” that was acquired by Zynga in 2012. The co-founders both stayed on as executives at Zynga until launching Manticore.

WeWork’s co-founder and chief executive officer Adam Neumann is expected to step down, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. WeWork’s vice chairman Sebastian Gunningham, as well as the company’s president & chief operating officer Artie Minson will serve as interim co-CEOs, The New York Times reports.

The eclectic executive has faced increasing pressure to relinquish his throne after another report from the WSJ highlighted his drug use and desires to become Israel’s prime minister, among other strange behaviors.

We’ve reached out to WeWork for comment.

SoftBank, the Japanese investor that has funneled billions into the star co-working business, is said to have encouraged — rather, enforced — Neumann’s reported transition out of the CEO role ahead of the company’s anticipated initial public offering. Per the WSJ, moving to the chairman seat would “allow [Neumann] to stay at the company he built into one of the country’s most valuable startups, but inject fresh leadership to pursue an IPO that would bring We the cash it needs to keep up its torrid growth.”

WeWork revealed its unusual IPO prospectus last month after raising more than $8 billion in equity and debt funding. The New York-based company had been valued at a whopping $47 billion, thanks largely to SoftBank’s repeated investments, despite financials that show losses of nearly $1 billion in the six months ending June 30.

Wall Street investors were skeptical of the eye-popping valuation, leading to reports WeWork would seek a valuation of below $20 billion, a magnificent defeat for one of the most valuable private companies in the world.

This story is updating.

Kapwing is a laymen’s Adobe Creative Suite built for what people actually do on the internet: make memes and remix media. Need to resize a video? Add text or subtitles to a video? Trim or crop or loop or frame or rotate or soundtrack or… Then you need Kapwing. The free web and mobile too is built for everyone, not just designers.

In a year since coming out of steal with 100,000 users, Kapwing has grown 10X. Now it wants to go pro, building out its $20/month collaboration tools for social media managers and scrappy creative teams. But it won’t forget its roots with teens, so it’s dropped its pay-$6-to-remove-watermarks tier while keeping its core features free.

Eager to capitalize on the meme and mobile content business, CRV has just led an $11 million Series A round for Kapwing. It’s joined by follow-on cash from Village Global, Sinai, and Shasta Ventures plus new investors Jane VC, Harry Stebbings, Vector, and the Xoogler Syndicate.

More info to come

Apple has just released iOS 13.1. This updated brings everything new in iOS 13 in case you haven’t updated yet, as well as many bug fixes. I would recommend updating to iOS 13.1 to get a more stable phone.

But that’s not all. iPadOS and tvOS are finally making the jump to version 13 with iPadOS 13.1 and tvOS 13.1 also available today.

The update is currently rolling out and is available in the Settings app on your device. iOS 13.1 is compatible with the iPhone 6s or later, the iPhone SE or the 7th-generation iPod touch. iPadOS is compatible with any iPad, iPad mini and iPad Pro that was released in 2014 or later. tvOS 13.1 is compatible with any Apple TV that can run tvOS 12.

It’s also worth noting that today’s release of iPadOS and tvOS marks the launch of Apple Arcade on the iPad and Apple TV. For a $4.99 monthly subscription fee, you can access dozens of games across your Apple devices. You can also pair a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One controller with your Apple devices to play those games.

But first, backup 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 into your computer to do a manual backup in iTunes (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 as soon as possible to get in the queue. Navigate to ‘Settings,’ then ‘General’ and then ‘Software Update.’ Then you should see ‘Update Requested…’ It will then automatically start downloading once the download is available.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new in iOS 13. This year, in addition to dark mode, it feels like every single app has been improved with some quality-of-life updates. The Photos app features a brand new gallery view with autoplaying live photos and videos, smart curation and a more immersive design.

This version has a big emphasis on privacy as well, thanks to a new signup option called “Sign in with Apple” and a bunch of privacy popups for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi consent, and background location tracking. Apple Maps now features an impressive Google Street View-like feature called Look Around. It’s only available in a handful of cities, but I recommend… looking around, as everything is in 3D.

Many apps have been updated, such as Reminders with a brand new version, Messages with the ability to set a profile picture shared with your contacts, Mail with better text formatting options, Health with menstrual cycle tracking, Files with desktop-like features, Safari with a new website settings menu, etc.

So you thought there were 800 million Windows 10 Devices that will get Microsoft’s most recent out-of-band emergency patch? Think again. As the company announced on Twitter today, Windows 10 now runs on over 900M devices.

That’s a bit of bad timing, but current security issues aside, the momentum for Windows 10 clearly remains steady. Last September, Microsoft said Windows 10 was running on 700 million devices and by March of this year, that number had gone up to 800 million. That number includes standard Windows 10 desktops and laptops, as well as the Xbox and niche devices like the Surface Hub and Microsoft’s HoloLens.

As Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of its ‘Modern Life, Search and Devices’ group, also noted, the company added more Windows 10 devices in the last twelve months than ever before.

Come January 2020, Windows 7 is hitting the end of its (supported) life, which is likely pushing at least some users to move over to a more modern (and supported) operating system.

While those numbers for Windows 10 are clearly ticking up, Microsoft itself famously thought that Windows 10 would get to 1 billion devices by the middle of 2018. At this rate, Windows 10 will likely hit 1 billion sometime in 2020.

Running a sex tech company is hard, so it’s worth calling out when companies overcome the many barriers to running one. Cute Little Fuckers, a gender-inclusive sex toy company, just launched a $13,500 campaign on Kickstarter.

“This is the first one that has been approved for a while,” Kickstarter Senior Outreach Lead of Design & Technology Beau Ambur told TechCrunch. “A large part of that was because of the type of project and the values it’s representing — specifically the inclusivity and sex-positive aspects are what we felt fit really well with our values.”

Sex toys are oftentimes geared toward cisgender and heteronormative people. Cute Little Fuckers aims to do away with that and instead focuses on sex toys that are gender-inclusive. That means these toys are for everyone, including folks who are transgender, queer, intersex, non-binary, genderqueer, cisgender, male, female and more.

“I am gender fluid and do a lot of sex-positive and queer activism,” CLF founder Step Tranovich told TechCrunch. “I felt like there weren’t a lot of toys that felt gender-inclusive. As someone who spends a lot of time helping people feel more sexually expressive, a lot of toys felt very stiff or foreboding.”

Step Tranovich, founder and creator at Cute Little Fuckers

The idea is to serve people of all gender identities, including those who may be going through gender transitions, have gender dysphoria or simply have more complex relationships with certain parts of their body.

Cute Little Fuckers started with sketches of about 60 different monsters of varying shapes and forms, Tranovich said. From there, they took those sketches to about 100 different people to see what resonated most. Tranovich said they found four monsters kept coming up, which are the four characters they landed on.

[gallery ids="1885310,1885311,1885312"]

Each monster has its own name, pronouns and likes. They live out their lives in the Cute Little Fuckers webcomic series. The toys are silicone, vibrate at five different speeds and are USB rechargeable and waterproof.

Cute Little Fuckers has produced and shipped its first batch of toys, but is looking to raise additional funding on Kickstarter to bring its second character to life.

Kickstarter does not have an explicit ban on sex toys, but does review products that fall within that category on a case by case basis. Tranovich first approached Kickstarter in January, saying they were starting to work on the project and wanted to put it on Kickstarter.

“It was a process,” Tranovich said. “In general, it was positive and it wasn’t easy. It was positive and not easy because there was a lot of support from the individuals at Kickstarter and it was a bit of a feat to turn that individual support into the company actually taking a stance.”

In Tranovich’s opinion, what got the project through the door was the social impact focus of it.

“That was the thing that had Kickstarter considering this in the first place and be willing to deal with me through the whole process,” Tranovich said. “The specific gender-inclusive nature and the fact that we have a webcomic series focused on spreading gender-inclusive information. That’s why they were willing to have the conversation.”

The goal is to start shipping its second batch before Feb. 14, 2020. Already, there are manufacturers lined up, Tranovich said, so it’s mostly a matter of getting the fund to pay them.

“We’re excited to have the project on Kickstarter and very much looking forward to the launch,” Ambur said. “At the end of the day, we want to give our creators as much freedom as possible.”

Learn how to build a sex tech startup of your very own at Disrupt SF Oct 2-4. A panel of investors and founders will discuss the opportunities — and challenges — of building a successful sex tech startup, and how to capitalize on a market that’s projected to be worth more than $123 billion by 2026. Get your tickets now. 

MegaBots is bankrupt. The Bay Area-based fighting robot startup noted in a video that “this is the end of MegaBots in its current form,” marking the occasion by selling the 15-ton Eagle Prime ‘bot on eBay. Bids started at $1, but as of this writing, a few dozen bidders have pushed it up past $50,000.

“The robot is functional, it’s just being auctioned off as the company is bankrupt,” the listing reads. What follows is actually a pretty fascinating FAQ breaking down both the idiosyncrasies of this particular robot and care instructions. Stuff like,

[I]t doesn’t handle dirt that well. It runs great on hard surfaces, but when it’s on softer dirt, the treads tend to dig down into the dirt, instead of scrub across the top. It goes forward and backward no problem through softer terrain, but really only pivots well on paved surfaces. 75% of people will ask “are you taking this to burning man?” and you will have to explain this to them. Seriously it’s the most common question we get.

MegaBots notes that around $2.5 million went into creating the robot (much of which was through crowdfunding), which could make the price a relative steal. Though the winning bidder will be required to pay for shipping, which will likely range from $4,000 for those on the West Coast to $17,000 on the East Coast.

Surely there’s a way to monetize your brand-newish giant fighting robot. MegaBots says it was able to get around $7,000 for an “at home” show. The price goes up from there.

As for what happened to the company itself, the story is probably what you’ve guessed from following MegaBots’ story over the past several years. The company was able to drum up interest among the crowdfunding crowd with its flashy fighting robots. Ultimately, however, that didn’t translate into profitably.

“We’re out of money again,” co-founder Matt Oehrlein says in the video. “I’ve not been able to make this profitable. We took out a loan about [three] years ago and we’re not able to pay the interest payments on it, anymore. So we’re selling the assets of the company to pay back the bank as much as possible, before we file the final bankruptcy paperwork.”

Oehrlein hedges his bets a bit with regard to the future of the company, but the asset sales and future bankruptcy filings don’t sound particularly promising. Co-founder Gui Cavalcanti, meanwhile, has gone on to lead soft robotics company Breeze Automation, which debuted onstage at TC Sessions: Robotics back in April.