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The TechCrunch Top 3 Epic Games buys Bandcamp: Straight from left field, this deal took the tech world by surprise. Epic Games, best known for Fortnite and picking a â deserved, or petty, depending on your priors â fight with Apple over in-app purchases in its app store. And now itâs going to own Bandcamp, a platform best known for helping musical artists sell their tunes and keep most of the money. Sure. Why not. Turns out not every company is going to grow vertically: Back when SPACs were hot, many startups looking to combine and go public were content to forecast aggressive revenue growth. Now that the data is coming in, the results are a bit less spectacular than many deals pitched. How far from reality were the projections? We have the data. Amazonâs physical store push is over: You might have never visited one, and if not, too late. Amazonâs physical stores that sold curated collections of goods from its e-commerce marketplace are now kaput. So, no more odd Amazon bookstores, or so-called four-star stores. Given what a minute fraction of the companyâs aggregate GMV weâre talking about here, this is not Earth-shaking news, but does matter for the larger set of DTC startups out there considering physical retail. If Amazon canât make it work, well, can you? |
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Startups/VC The push to fund Ukraineâs war-torn nation-state with crypto is turning out to be An Actual Thing. Which is good, as the country needs the money, and itâs good to see blockchain cash have a real-world impact other than enriching your rivals. TechCrunch has notes on how Ukraine is using the coin more generally and from a military perspective. Scooting along: Accel has put together a new fund to invest in India. Worth some $650 million, you might think to yourself, hot dang, how big has the Indian venture scene become in recent years? The answer? Huge. Before we get into the dayâs funding round revue, two more short notes. First, Tier Mobility is buying mobility company Spin from Ford. Recall that for a short period of time, it appeared the whole world might move to shared scooters as a way to get around. That didnât last, but some of the assets built during the period remain on the books of, well, companies that have other priorities. This deal didnât shock us. And, second, TechCrunch has an op-ed up today on space debris, one of my favorite pet issues. Read it here. From the funding spigot: Neobanks continue to raise: Long from the point when it appeared that there was infinite capital available and needed to fund neobanks, rounds for the fintech varietal appear to have slowed. But that hasnât stopped Australian neobank Zeller from raising AUD$100 million at an AUD$1 billion valuation. Thatâs a Series B for the record books. TrueCircle wants to reform recycling: The world is still using single-use plastics, which means weâre polluting the hell out of our only home. Even more, recycling can be more mirage than reality in many markets. So itâs nice to see U.K.-based TrueCircle look to âbring data-driven AI to the recycling industry to improve recovery rates and quality.â The company just closed a pre-seed round worth $5.5 million. Blockchain infra is big business: The rush to fund blockchain-focused startups â be they bitcoin-centered, or web3 more generally â is showing slim signs of slowing. Todayâs round from the market involves Tenderly, which just raised $40 million. Dev tools for the decentralized world is a popular startup market, with Alchemy reaching decacorn status pursuing the same general bent as Tenderly. NeuraLegion is now Bright Security: Talk about a rename. This reminds me of when I wanted to name a company I was thinking about starting âFunctional Brilliance,â which, thankfully, I was talked out of. The same goes for NeuraLegion, which I am sure was great on paper but is a bit trash. Bright Security is simpler, and therefore better. The company just raised $20 million to keep working on âdynamic application security testing and identifying business logic issues,â TechCrunch reports. Deskless workers need comms, too: In four words, thatâs the pitch behind Connecteam, which just raised $120 million at a valuation of around $800 million. The push to bring software to folks who arenât sitting for a living is not new â Blink has been at it for a minute â but it is welcome. Everyone deserves to get more done with less work, so hereâs to code making that possible â when possible. |
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| The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a notice after Russia invaded Ukraine warning against the potential for state-sponsored cyber attacks: “Every organization â large and small â must be prepared to respond to disruptive cyber activity,” it advised. Blanket warnings are hard to act on, but now that virtually all information is stored remotely and employees are widely distributed, CISA’s “shields up” advisory has special urgency. How should companies assess and protect their external attack surface? We’ve got answers. (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More |
| | Image Credits: Rosley Majid / EyeEm / Getty Images |
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Big Tech Inc. Appleâs next event is March 8: Mark your calendars and cancel your meetings. TechCrunch, of course, will be covering it to the nth degree. Facebook shutters social network for college kids: This is news to me, but Facebook built a social network for college kids called Campus. Which is ironic as thatâs where the company started. But, hey, what can you do? Perhaps it will reopen in the metaverse. Ford to cleave itself into two pieces: The ICE part of Ford and the electric half of the company are going to sit in different spheres as the U.S. company figures out its future. At this point, you can likely guess which group will get more investment over the next 10 years. EU clamps down on Russian state media: Another way in which Russiaâs invasion of Ukraine is backfiring is in the drastic, rapid shuttering of access to the nationâs governmental propaganda outlets. The EU is busy banning them, and the impacts are rippling outward in the market. Netflix buys gaming company behind titles predicated on its IP: What do you do when global growth at your streaming business slows? Get into games, apparently. The Netflix push to become a player in the gaming world took a new turn today, with the U.S. tech and media giant buying Next Games, a Finnish company that made games based on owned titles. |
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TechCrunch Experts TechCrunch is recruiting recruiters for TechCrunch Experts, an ongoing project where we ask top professionals about problems and challenges that are common in early-stage startups. If thatâs you or someone you know, you can let us know here. |
| | Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images |
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