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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch on December 10th, 2021! Yes, it’s finally Friday, which means we’re about a week away from breaking the news so we can all go into nerd hibernation for two weeks. Not that your humble servant is counting down. Still, today we have a really solid mix of tech news with businesses big and small. Work! –Alex
The TechCrunch Top 3
- Better.com CEO gets the (partial) boat: It’s rare for a tech manager to go viral. Mark Zuckerberg has done it thanks to some of his stilted attempts to connect with regulars. But most tech folks just aren’t pop culture figures. Until, of course, they are. Such is the case with the Better.com CEO, who went viral – everywhere, including TikTok – for callously firing a bunch of his employees via Zoom. Anyway, it turns out he’s not a nice person for the rest of the time either and is now retiring from his company.
- Europe’s tech boom will continue: The Exchange crew spent a good part this Friday analyzing the latest Atomic dealroom report on the European startup scene. Our conclusion was that although 2021 was a very good year for EU startups, the best could still be ahead of us in terms of the calendar.
- Hungry? Quickly just do it: Okay, it turns out that converting the startup name “Flink” into a verb is a bit of a hassle, but since the German grocery delivery company took in three quarters of a billion dollars at one time – its valuation increased to $ 2.85 billion – it seems It is to be expected that the Berlin company wants to achieve verb status at least in its home market.
Startups / VC
The 2021 IPO cycle is drawing to a close, only Samsara’s debut is still ahead of us. So What should we think of HashiCorps and Nubank’s pair of public offers that landed this week?? That the market remains more than attractive enough for both OSS and fintech to defend unicorn ratings.
- HURR would like to repeat the Rent the Runway model: Rent the Runway’s IPO showed that the innovative company was struggling to cover its own operating expenses. It has since stumbled as a public company. But that doesn’t stop HURR, a UK partner of the US fashion rental giant. However, as TechCrunch noted in a bulletin on the company’s recent $ 5.4 million seed round, it includes some changes and additions to the business model that could prove material.
- Wisdom sounds pretty neat: Wisdom is a startup that, according to TechCrunch reports, has “developed a social audio app that focuses on uncovering ‘life advice’ and expanding access to mentoring”. It sounds a bit like the Equity podcast, and by that we mean the exact opposite. Jokes aside, Wisdom just raised another $ 2 million. It declined to share user counts and instead offered the community-adjusted EBITDA of audio startup metrics that “mentors shared approximately 600,000 minutes of audio on its platform.” Cool?
- Startup raised from Tiger, doubled its rating, didn’t even need the money: I think we could recycle that teaser line in this newsletter daily and really couldn’t miss it. Still, today’s Tiger Round is Nuvocargo, a Latin American logistics startup focused on facilitating cross-border trade. Its new $ 20.5 million round more than doubled its valuation to $ 180 million from $ 70 million earlier this year. “The company says it still had most of that cash in the bank when Tiger approached it,” notes TechCrunch.
- Everyone builds dark stores: The dark store model for building fast delivery stores is more than just a European project. Tiggy, a Canadian startup, has just raised $ 6.35 million for its work.
- Breakout Ventures manages to fund two: That is the word of our own Connie Loizos. Breakout’s Fund II is a $ 112.5 million vehicle that, oddly enough, contains money from the Thiel Foundation. Thiel money recycling in technology has seemed strange to us since we realized that it was him Funding a political candidate engaged in attacking tech companies.
- And if you want to have some fun Here’s a fast-paced equity episode starring Natasha and Mary Ann.
3 disruptive trends that will shape marketing in 2022
Credit: Adam Drobiec / EyeEm (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
The rules of the game of growth marketing have changed significantly since the beginning of the pandemic.
Consumers welcome Apple’s iOS 14.5 privacy changes, regulators show greater interest in browser cookies, and The Great Resignation are just a few X-factors, but there are many others.
“What worked yesterday may not work today and probably won’t work tomorrow,” wrote Jonathan Metrick, Chief Growth Officer at Sagard & Portage Ventures, and Simon Lejeune, User Acquisition Lead at Wealthsimple.
- Less data, more privacy, and the return of growth hacking.
- TikTok, influencers and the dominance of native creatives.
- The big resignation and the Gettysburg for growing talent.
(TechCrunch + is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams move forward. Here you can sign up.)
Big Tech Inc.
- Jumia reports solid Black Friday data: While Jumia’s profits left pretty much to be desired, the company announced that the Black Friday cycle saw GMV rise by 30%. It’s good. Enough to really shake up its economic performance? We’ll see in the numbers for the fourth quarter of 2021. Still, it’s a nice little data point on the growth of e-commerce in Africa.
- Coinbase Ventures supports the router protocol: There are layer-one chains in crypto, like Ethereum. And there are layer two chains, like polygons, that sit on top of the Ethereum layer one chain. The router protocol, on the other hand, is a “cross-chain infrastructure” [built] to facilitate communication across Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchain solutions. “Why not just build better Layer One chains? I am honestly not sure.
- There’s a new zero-day vuln: Here is some bad news for your Friday, namely that many popular web services are “allegedly vulnerable to a zero-day exploit affecting a popular Java logging library.” Great!
- Spain wants more tech entrepreneurs: TechCrunch reports that a bill related to startups is advancing in the country in the hope of “cutting red tape and removing bureaucratic barriers to starting and investing in startups” in the country.
TechCrunch experts
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