Technical

Four years after partnering with Apple on the launch of the Apple Card , Goldman Sachs may be eyeing the exits. The Wall Street Journal reports that Goldman is “looking for a way out” of its high-profile deal with Apple, which recently expanded to include savings accounts for Apple Card holders.  The investment banking firm is apparently in talks to offload the partnership to American Express, the WSJ report added, but so far nothing seems to be set in stone, nor is it clear if Apple would support the handoff. However, it wouldn’t be surprising if such an arrangement comes to pass. Earlier this year, Goldman CEO David Solomon said he was “ considering strategic alternatives ” for the investment firm’s consumer arm. Beyond its deal with Apple, Goldman’s consumer-facing business includes a credit card partnership with General Motors as well as GreenSky, the lending company Goldman bought for $2.2 billion in 2021 . For their part, Apple and Goldman did not immediately respond ...

Travis VanderZanden’s slow-motion departure from Bird is now complete. The scooter rental company announced in a late-Friday news dump that the executive has stepped down from his role as chairperson of Bird’s board, “ effective immediately .” Replacing VanderZanden is John Bitove, who played a role in saving Bird’s bacon this past December via its merger with Bird Canada. VanderZanden had led the micromobility company from its inception as its president and founding CEO, but that all changed last year when Bird’s declining stock price culminated in a delisting warning from the New York Stock Exchange. Soon after, VanderZanden stepped down from his role as president , handing over the title to Bird’s then-chief operating officer Shane Torchiana. Torchiana went on to assume the CEO post as well several months later. At the time, VanderZanden called the reorg a “long-planned transition.” According to Bird,  VanderZanden “decided to step down [from the board] to pursue other ve...

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. This week, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how some of the biggest companies in the world have as much — if not more — power than entire countries. Most countries, at least, have some level of democratic oversight, but that isn’t true in the same way for companies. My question, then: In a world where the policies of, say, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter become de facto standards all around the world, should we have a greater degree of say (TC+) in what those policies are? The other thing that’s kept me busy this week is fundraising. Alex talked with 11 VCs (TC+) about how hard it was for their companies to raise so far this year. Meanwhile, I talked with a number of founders who were really struggling to raise money. The truth is, the founders struggling the most have three things in common (TC+). Now let’s take a look at what happened in the world of startups this week. Notes from the securi...

An Indian court has dismissed Twitter’s lawsuit against the Indian government that sought to challenge New Delhi’s block orders on tweets and accounts. The Karnataka High Court dismissed the plea, filed last year, and also fined the Elon Musk-owned firm 5 million Indian rupees ($61,000). “Your client (Twitter) was given notices and your client did not comply. Punishment for non-compliance is 7 years imprisonment and unlimited fine. That also did not deter your client. So you have not given any reason why you delayed compliance, more than a year of delay… then all of sudden you comply and approach the Court. You are not a farmer but a billon dollar company,” a single judge bench said in scathing verdict Friday. Twitter filed the plea against the Indian government in Karnataka High Court in Bengaluru last year, before the takeover by Musk, alleging that New Delhi had abused its power by ordering it to arbitrarily and disproportionately remove several tweets from its platform. Additio...

Seoul-based e-commerce company Levit , an operator of the shopping app Alwayz , wants to make the shopping experience more entertaining and affordable. The two-year-old startup has recently raised $46 million in a Series B round of funding led by DST Global Partners with participation from new investor BOND and existing backers KB Investment, Mirae Asset Capital, Korea Investment Partners, GS Ventures, and Klim Ventures. With the latest round, Levit has raised a total of $67 million since its inception. Alwayz offers a wide range of products, from daily groceries to home appliances and apparel to cosmetics. But it deviates from typical e-commerce platforms by incorporating social features like short videos and gamification into online shopping to draw customers.  For example, users can earn rewards by playing games nurturing the pig character Don-Don-E, or receive crops in real life after successfully cultivating crops by playing a game called AI-Farm in its app. In addition, Alw...

Ayal Yogev Contributor Share on Twitter Ayal Yogev is the co-founder and CEO of Anjuna , a multi-cloud confidential computing platform. Generative AI has the potential to change everything. It can inform new products, companies, industries, and even economies. But what makes it different and better than “traditional” AI could also make it dangerous. Its unique ability to create has opened up an entirely new set of security and privacy concerns. Enterprises are suddenly having to ask themselves new questions: Do I have the rights to the training data? To the model? To the outputs? Does the system itself have rights to data that’s created in the future? How are rights to that system protected? How do I govern data privacy in a model using generative AI? The list goes on. It’s no surprise that many enterprises are treading lightly. Blatant security and privacy vulnerabilities coupled with a hesitancy to rely on existing Band-Aid solutions have pushed many to ban these too...

Fund of funds (FoF) were created to serve as a bridge for LPs to get access to managers they couldn’t back otherwise. But in an environment where funds are not seeing consistent support from their existing LPs, and there are more venture funds than ever, is their role still relevant? Fund of funds fundraising — say that five times fast! — has declined for years. To compare, traditional U.S. venture firm fundraising set a record in 2022 with $162 billion. U.S.-based VC FoF raised just $400 million in the first quarter of 2023, according to PitchBook, and $3 billion in 2022. This compares to $24.4 billion in 2021 and $33.7 billion — the fundraising peak — in 2017. It’s not surprising why many LPs have soured on the strategy, said Kyle Stanford, a senior venture analyst at PitchBook. For one, backers of these funds pay a mix of fees to both the FoF and the underlying commitments the FoF manager makes. “LPs have that double layer of fees. And that extra time it takes after [an ...

Follow me on Twitter @Jacqmelinek for breaking crypto news, memes and more. Welcome back to Chain Reaction. As if the pessimism around crypto weren’t enough, the industry is facing yet another quarter of hackers and scammers looking to make a quick buck. And to make things worse, it’s getting harder to trace and recover lost funds as well. According to a new report , only $4.9 million was recovered of the $204.3 million the industry lost to hacks, scams and rug pulls in the second quarter. The report, by web3 “super app” and antivirus solution De.Fi and data from REKT database, detailed that so far this year, the industry had recovered about $183 million, or nearly 28% of the $666.5 million lost to scams and hacks. The report also found that exploits and rug pulls accounted for $55.3 million and $47.3 million, respectively, in Q2, highlighting that risks through bad actors are “rampant in equal measure.” The TLDR? Be careful out there, because hackers are still hackin’ and sca...

Pokémon GO maker Niantic laid off 230 employees today, just one year after it laid off around 90 employees . During last year’s layoffs, Niantic cancelled four projects, including a Transformers game. Some Niantic games will meet the same fate this time around. After four months in the App Store, Niantic is shutting down NBA All-World ; the company will also cancel production on a game based on the Marvel franchise. “In the wake of the revenue surge we saw during Covid, we grew our headcount and related expenses in order to pursue growth more aggressively,” CEO John Hanke wrote in an email to employees , cross-posted to the company blog. This has been a common refrain among the hundreds of tech companies that have conducted layoffs over the last year; companies claimed they overhired during the pandemic and now need to right-size their teams. In Niantic’s case, Hanke said that revenue has returned to pre-pandemic levels, and new projects have not delivered as much revenue as they ...

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot , has taken the world by storm. Capable of writing emails, essays and more given a few short prompts, ChatGPT has become one of the fastest-growing apps in history. Beyond that, it’s begun to find a place in the enterprise, particularly with the launch of plugins that connect the chatbot to third-party apps, websites and services. Most recently, ChatGPT Plus subscribers now have access to a new feature called Browsing, which allows ChatGPT to search Bing for answers to prompts and questions. But ChatGPT isn’t always the most cooperative assistant . Getting it to output something specific requires careful fine-tuning of the prompts. A number of resources and guides for ChatGPT prompt writing have sprung up since the tool’s launch. But not all of them are especially easy to follow — or intuitive. To help folks both new to ChatGPT and looking to learn new tricks, we’ve compiled a list of the best ChatGPT prompts for different types of workflows —...

Earlier this year we wrote that the “ the $100 million venture round is going extinct .” Often our predictions wind up sideways. This time we were on the right track. According to new data from PitchBook , the U.S. venture market is continuing to endure lackluster velocity for nine-figure investments into private companies, colloquially referred to as “mega-rounds.” The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. In the first half of 2023, PitchBook counted just 108 mega-rounds in the United States. If we presumed that this rate will hold throughout the year, we’re looking at just over 200 nine-figure deals in the U.S. in 2023. That’s a dramatic decline from prior levels. Starting in Q4 2020 through Q3 2022, there were more than 100 mega-rounds recorded per quarter. In 2021, the average was more than 200 per quarter. To see perhaps 200 this year implies that the number of late-stage startup...

OpenAI is expanding overseas. To London, specifically. Today, the Microsoft-backed AI startup announced that it plans to open an office in London, its first international outpost. When OpenAI’s London location opens its doors, it’ll focus on advancing “research and engineering capabilities” while balancing collaborating with “local communities and policymakers,” according to CEO Sam Altman. “We see this expansion as an opportunity to attract world-class talent and drive innovation in AGI development and policy,” Altman, who reportedly had floated Poland and France as alternatives for the office, said in a canned statement. “We’re excited about what the future holds and to see the contributions our London office will make towards building and deploying safe AI.” London is a conspicuous choice for OpenAI, which hasn’t expanded beyond its San Francisco headquarters since its founding in 2015. The city is the longtime home base of DeepMind, Google’s largest AI research division, and a...

In wake of Twitch’s seemingly unattainable Partner Plus program , which grants a 70/30 subscription revenue split on the first annual $100,000 that qualifying Partners make, jaded streamers are claiming that they’ll move to the streaming rival Kick .  The new livestreaming platform offers streamers a 95/5 subscription revenue split — a fraction of Twitch’s standard 50% cut, which it takes from both Affiliates and Partners. Though it isn’t uncommon for new social platforms to use bait and switch tactics to attract new users, many streamers are already flocking to Kick. It’s possible that Kick will change its revenue split as it grows, or move the goalposts to qualify for monetization, but the site has already signed prominent streamers.   Major Twitch creators have been swayed into joining Kick, including Félix “xQc” Lengyel, who signed a $100 million non-exclusive deal with the platform last week. Days later, Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa also announced that she’s...

German startup Airmo is taking aim at climate change, with plans to launch a twelve-satellite constellation to monitor greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across the planet. To fuel its ambitions, the company announced today that it closed €5.2 million ($5.7 million) in pre-seed funding, which includes €1.5 million from venture investors and a €3.7 million contract with the European Space Agency (ESA). Airmo, founded in 2022, says it will use the funding to launch its first satellite equipped with spectrometer and light detection and ranging (lidar) technology to detect and measure GHGs in real-time. The company says its “micro-lidar” solution, combined with the spectrometer, improves the accuracy of its measurements by correcting for atmospheric winds and aerosols. Airmo cofounder Harriet von Kügelgen told TechCrunch that the company plans to launch its first satellite at the end of 2024, though she declined to name the launch provider. Airmo’s revenue will be generated from companies ...

Paris Heymann Contributor Share on Twitter Paris Heymann is a partner at Index Ventures , where he invests primarily in B2B SaaS and data. More posts by this contributor Acquisition, retention, expansion: Why SaaS founders must understand GDR and NDR Metrics that matter: 3 KPIs to track on the path to profitability At Index Ventures, we view the emergence of vertical SaaS (vSaaS) — cloud-based software tailor-made for specific industries — as part of a broader trend of end users increasingly demanding superior technology products. Consumers want solutions-oriented software made specifically to solve their exact business problems. In an environment where we are inundated with software, narrow and specific is well-positioned versus broad and generalized. The concept is not new: Even the largest horizontal tech companies verticalize their sales organizations and product features when they have enough scale within each vertical for that to be a sensible approach. ...