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There's not a lot of news this week, but we've been preparing a lot for TechCrunch Early Stage in Boston on April 25th. It's going to be a great show. There's still time to get your tickets early. -If you are in a hurry, please check the price of the bird.
This week's most interesting startup stories
Stability AI is bidding farewell to founder and CEO Emad Mostaq, who has decided to pursue his decentralized AI dream, leaving the unicorn startup without a permanent CEO. The company, known for burning through cash faster than a teenager with his first debit card, is now in the hands of interim co-CEOs Shang Shang Wong and Christian Laforte. In a dramatic exit, Mostake declared to X that his departure was all about fighting the “centralized AI” bogeyman. Because clearly the real problem with AI is not rogue robots, but who can control them.
In a heist worthy of a Hollywood conspiracy, Microsoft acquired many of Inflection AI's co-founders and staff, as well as the rights to use its technology, for a whopping $650 million. The deal, which seems to me more like a ransom payment than an M&A push, includes $620 million for the privilege of using Inflection's technology, plus Microsoft's audacious The deal includes an additional $30 million to protect Inflection from lawsuits over potential talent acquisitions. Reid Hoffman, a Microsoft board member and co-founder of Inflection, said on LinkedIn that even though the math doesn't quite match, Inflection investors will sleep well tonight and early backers will receive a 1.5x return. , and assured everyone that late backers would receive a modest 1.1x return. By the way, it is quite bold to describe a 1.5x return as a “good uptrend.” Most early stage funds will be quite dissatisfied.
They Said Your Data Was Safe: Facebook (now Meta) was caught red-handed digitally tapping into Snapchat's cookie jar. Facebook's covert operation, dubbed “Project Ghostbusters,” aimed to peer into Snapchat's encrypted traffic and decipher user behavior to gain a competitive advantage. Robinhood's new credit card: Robinhood has announced the Gold Card, a credit card packed with features that will give Apple Card users pause. With the low price of a Robinhood Gold membership (who doesn't want to pay $5 a month for the privilege of spending more money?), you can also save 3% to 5% on all products. You can get cashback. Could Nvidia become the next AWS?: Nvidia and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are part of the tech world's serendipity that stumbles on their core business like a toddler discovering a hidden cookie stash. You might become a hero. While AWS realized it could sell its storage and compute services, Nvidia realized its gaming GPUs were unexpectedly perfect for his AI workloads.
Stability AI's CEO is stepping down because “more centralized AI can't beat centralized AI.”Image credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
This week's trend: traffic troubles
The New York Stock Exchange awarded EV startup Fisker a favor, saying its stock price was “unusually low.” Fisker's financial runway appears to be more of a tightrope walk, with the stock plummeting more than 28% in one day, the Nissan deal falling through (or so the rumors suggest), and the loan having a trigger clause that says it can't repay it. was there. — paints a picture of a company teetering on the edge of a cliff. Of course, it wouldn't have mattered if the EV manufacturer lost track of millions of dollars worth of customer payments.
Can Arrival's scraps save Canoe?: Bankrupt Arrival sells its leftovers to Canoe. Canoe is another EV candidate whose survival is at stake, but the deal is less about innovation and more about Canoe trying desperately to keep its production line together with Arrival's yard sale bargains. This is the content. . Sowwy, everyone: Steve Burns, ousted founder, chairman and CEO of bankrupt EV startup Lordstown Motors, is investing in demand for the company's flagship all-electric endurance pickup truck. Settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading the family. Let your car drive itself for a month: Tesla is starting to offer all customers in the U.S. a one-month trial of its $12,000 driver-assistance system, called the Full Self-Driving Beta. Compatible hardware.
Canoo will deliver light tactical vehicles in 2022. Image credit: Canoo
This week's most interesting fundraisers
Super{set} just doubled down on its bet on boring but data-rich data and AI-driven enterprise startups, adding $90 million to its war chest. The move comes on the heels of LiveRamp's $200 million exit from marketing firm Habu. This company is different from your average venture studio. With a lean portfolio of 16 companies and a penchant for turning venture capital investment notes from an art to a science, super{set} is on a mission to design practical applications. They're not just investing in startups, as they're taking up an entire floor of the building at 140 Montgomery in San Francisco. They are buying the future of the city itself.
Fed up with cramped hotel rooms and IKEA-hating landlords, Alex Chatzieleftheriou decided to fill the gap himself. Fast forward to the pandemic-induced boom in nomadic work, and Blueground is now gobbling up competitors faster than tourists taking advantage of the free breakfast buffet. With the acquisition of companies such as Tabas and Travellers Haven, Blueground has expanded his empire and with his 15,000+ apartments in 17 countries, he has proven that there is no place like a home that can be booked for a month. Even though the proptech industry is feeling the squeeze from rising interest rates, Blueground's recent $45 million Series D funding round and large debt facility suggest that investors still want to buy a fully furnished It signals a willingness to bet big on Chatsileftheriou's vision of a world where people can live in apartments. At least temporarily.
$10 million for the microbial party: Wase has designed a compact system that processes sticky byproducts from breweries and food processors on-site and turns them into biogas. This is not your grandma's anaerobic digester. It's a bacterial feast, complete with electrified fins for the bacteria to party on, producing about 30% more methane and less residual waste. More funds for diversity: New Summit Investments is on the verge of a major leap forward in its impact investing efforts, with its latest fund aiming for a $100 million goal, and previously closing in 2022. That's far less than his $40 million fund. New battery chemistries: To extract more capacity from electric vehicle batteries, automakers are increasingly turning to silicon. Ionobell, a seed-stage startup that recently closed a $3.9 million extension round, claims its silicon material is cheaper than existing competitors.
Image credit: Lyudinka/Getty Images (modified by TechCrunch)
Other must-see TechCrunch articles…
Every week, we have a few stories that just don't fit into the categories above, but we'd like to share with you. It would be a shame if you missed it, so I'd like to introduce you to a bag containing random goods.
Well, what?: Marissa Mayer's startup Sunshine has gone from being Silicon Valley's next big thing to pioneering the groundbreaking world of contact management and photo sharing, and transforming the entire Internet into “just that.” ?” I wondered. Hey, where's the data?: Three years after the hacker's “coming soon” teaser, the personal information of 73 million of his AT&T customers has been leaked onto the internet, while AT&T plays a game of silence , the customer ended up verifying his own data breach as his dystopian DIY project. Come on, Apple: In a move that played more of a gatekeeping role than an innovation, his Apple's killing of Beeper's efforts to bring his iMessage to Android users stifles competition and puts it in the Blue Bubble Club. It became the Department of Justice's exhibit on how to keep a company exclusive. Who needs privacy anyway: His Glassdoor, a haven for anonymous company reviews, turned into a privacy nightmare by secretly adding users' real names to their profiles and making “anonymous” the most ironic word in the dictionary. It seems like it was. Welcome to Spotify University: Not content with dominating music, podcasts, and audiobooks, Spotify is turning its attention to your brain cells with its latest venture into e-learning. Apparently, we all need another reason to stay in the Spotify ecosystem.
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