How many exits can one company have?, the biggest human COVID-19 vaccine trial yet gets underway and this week promises a public showdown on the question of whether tech giants are too giant. This is your Daily Crunch for July 27, 2020.

The big story: SAP is spinning out Qualtrics after acquiring it for $8B two years ago

SAP will be spinning out Qualtrics, an experience management platform that it acquired somewhat dramatically for $8 billion just days ahead of its planned IPO in 2018. SAP will retain majority ownership, but should free up Qualtrics to potentially reach an ever-larger customer base.

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Hardware Startups: Learn why the Digital Thread matters

Sponsored by Siemens Digital Industries Software

Building a hardware startup is challenging, regardless of external circumstances. There’s no respite for those leading fresh, new companies. Startups must keep an eye on the future and plan for scaling to the next stage of growth. Join the live webinar July 29 to learn more.

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The tech giants

It’s not quite a tech giant, but pharmatech company Moderna is definitely on its way after announcing that it’s begun a 30,000-person phase 3 clinical trial of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate. This is the last big hurdle before validation and production — though keep in mind that those will take quite a while still, even if this trial goes very well.

Big tech’s top leaders will defend their giant companies in D.C. Zuckerberg. Bezos. Cook. Pichai. They’ll all be there on Wednesday to face members of Congress, who want to hear more about why their companies aren’t anti-competitive, as an increasing number of lawmakers seem to have been suggesting.

Walmart Marketplace is seeing big marketplace growth thanks to Shopify tie-up. Walmart infamously acquired Amazon startup rival Jet to boost its e-commerce efforts. Jet itself didn’t really pan out, and it looks like the better move in terms of boosting its ability to compete with Amazon might be its partnership with Shopify, which has tripled the number of marketplace sellers on its platform.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Fable aims to provide accessibility testing and design-as-a-service. The startup, which has raised $1.5 million in funding, essentially offers accessibility design from top experts for companies that might be too small or don’t have the right resources to tackle it internally.

Could Stanford peer investment bypass traditional VC? Stanford puts out tons of founders who go on to do big things — so it makes sense that a new group of Stanford graduates has put together a fund for Stanford to invest in Stanford.

Tire marketplace startup Tire Agent raises $5 million. Buying new tires remains mostly an analog process, mired in confusion. This startup wants to make that better, and help people understand what they’re spending, and what they’re getting, upfront.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Are accelerators still valuable when they’re fully virtual? Natasha investigates, talking to a number of co-founders and accelerator participants about what it’s like to go through them when they’re no longer about in-person connections and demoing to a packed physical room of investors.

VCs and startups look to hardware-as-as-service for the consumer audience. Would you like to subscribe to your headphones? No? Me neither — but some people apparently would, and hardware companies are taking the idea of the enterprise device lease and making it consumer-friendly.

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

Everything else

Equity gets a special breakout episode about Qualtrics, which is going public again after almost doing it two years ago. It’s some particularly confusing M&A wrangling, but Danny, Natasha and Alex will guide you through.

• Public Relations Manager – Tech & Emerging Companies/Bay Area (4485) at Latham & Watkins (Menlo Park, CA, USA)
• Software Developer at Triblio, Inc. (Reston, VA, USA)
• Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bombora (New York, NY, USA)
• Product Innovation and Customer Success Manager at Bombora (New York, NY, USA)
• Director, Infrastructure Operations and Security at The Pew Charitable Trusts (Washington, D.C., USA)

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