Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the startup world. Register here to receive it in your inbox every Friday.
There’s not much news from me this week, but I’ve been doing a ton of prep for TechCrunch Early Stage taking place in Boston on April 25th. It will be a fantastic show, and you still have time to purchase tickets at early-bird prices, if you’re quick.
Most interesting startup stories of the week
Stability AI bids farewell to its founder and CEO, Emad Mostaque, who has decided to pursue the dream of decentralized AI, leaving the unicorn startup without a permanent CEO. The company, known for spending money faster than a teenager on their first debit card, is now in the hands of interim co-CEOs Shan Shan Wong and Christian Laforte. Mostaque, in a dramatic outing, took to rogue robots, but in the ability to control them.
Microsoft orchestrated a heist worthy of a Hollywood plot, snatching the co-founders and much of the staff of Inflection AI, as well as the rights to use their technology, for a whopping $650 million. The deal, which to me sounds more like a ransom payment than an M&A transaction, includes $620 million for the privilege of using Inflection’s technology and another $30 million to ensure that Inflection does not continue Microsoft’s talent audacity. Microsoft board member and Inflection co-founder Reid Hoffman took to LinkedIn to assure everyone that Inflection investors would sleep well tonight as early backers get a return of 1.5x and the later a modest 1.1x, although the math doesn’t quite add up. It’s actually quite bold to describe a 1.5x return as “good upside potential”: most start-up funds would be quite unhappy.
- They said your data would be safe: Facebook (now Meta) was caught red-handed with its digital hands in Snapchat’s cookie jar. Dubbed “Project Ghostbusters,” Facebook’s covert operation aimed to spy on Snapchat’s encrypted traffic, seeking to decode user behavior and gain a competitive advantage.
- Robinhood’s new credit card: Robinhood has revealed its Gold Card, a credit card so feature-rich that it might just make Apple Card users think for a hot second. For the low price of being a Robinhood Gold member (because who doesn’t want to pay $5 a month for the privilege of spending more money?), you too can earn 3-5% cash back on everything .
- Could Nvidia be the next AWS? Nvidia and Amazon Web Services (AWS) might just be the accidental heroes of the tech world, stumbling upon their core businesses like a child finding a hidden stash of cookies. AWS discovered it could sell its internal storage and compute services, while Nvidia discovered its gaming GPUs were surprisingly ideal for AI workloads.
Stability AI CEO resigns because you’re “not going to beat centralized AI with more centralized AI.” Image credits: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
Trend of the week: Transportation issues
The New York Stock Exchange gave the nod to EV startup Fisker, citing its “abnormally low” stock prices. It appears that Fisker’s financial trail is more of a tightrope, with shares plummeting more than 28% in a single day, a botched deal with Nissan (or so the rumor suggests), and a repayment clause triggered in their loans which they cannot afford. – painting a portrait of a business on the edge of a cliff. Of course, it wouldn’t have helped that the electric vehicle maker lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments.
- Can the remains of Arrival save Canoo? : Bankrupt Arrival is selling its remains to Canoo, another electric vehicle hopeful on the brink of viability, in a deal that is less about innovation and more about Canoo desperately trying to cobble together a production line with Arrive’s garage sale bargains.
- Sowwy, friends: Steve Burns, the ousted founder, chairman and CEO of bankrupt electric vehicle startup Lordstown Motors, has reached a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading investors about demand for the pickup truck The company’s flagship all-electric endurance.
- Let the car drive alone for a month: Tesla is about to start offering every customer in the United States a one-month trial of its $12,000 driver assistance system, which it calls Full Self-Driving Beta, provided they they have a car with compatible equipment.
Canoo delivers a light tactical vehicle in 2022. Image credits: Canoo
The most interesting fundraisers this week
Super{set} is doubling down on boring but plentiful data and AI-driven startups, after adding $90 million to its war chest. The move follows his $200 million exit from marketing firm Habu to LiveRamp. The company is not your average venture capital studio. With a small portfolio of 16 companies and a penchant for turning venture capital investment memos from art to science, super{set} is on a mission to design practical applications. With their new digs on an entire floor of the 140 New Montgomery building in San Francisco, they’re not just investing in startups; they embrace the future of the city itself.
Tired of cramped hotel rooms and landlords with an aversion to IKEA, Alex Chatzieleftheriou decided to fill the void himself. Fast forward through a pandemic-induced nomad work boom, and Blueground is now gobbling up the competition faster than a tourist with a free breakfast buffet. With the acquisition of companies like Tabas and Travelers Haven, Blueground has expanded its empire to include more than 15,000 apartments in 17 countries, proving that there’s nothing better than a house you can reserve for a month . Although the proptech sector is feeling the pressure from rising interest rates, Blueground’s recent $45 million Series D funding round and a sizable debt facility suggest investors are still willing to bet big about Chatzieleftheriou’s vision of a world where everyone can live in a fully furnished apartment. at least temporarily.
- 10 million dollars for the germ party: Wase designed a compact system that processes grimy byproducts from breweries and food processors on-site and turns them into biogas. This isn’t your grandmother’s anaerobic digester; it’s a microbial rave, complete with electrically charged fins for bacteria to party on, producing about 30 percent more methane and leaving behind less residual waste.
- More money for diversity: New Summit Investments is set to take a big step forward in its impact investing journey, aiming for a $100 million target for its latest fund, eclipsing its previous $40 million fund closed in 2022.
- New battery chemistry: In their quest to increase the capacity of electric vehicle batteries, automakers are increasingly turning to silicon. Seed-stage startup Ionobell, which recently closed a $3.9 million expansion round, says its silicon material will be cheaper than that of established competition.
Image credits: Lyudinka/Getty Images (edited by TechCrunch)
Other must-read TechCrunch stories…
Every week there are always a few stories I want to share with you that somehow don’t fit into the above categories. It would be a shame if you missed them, so here’s a bag of random goodies for you:
- Uh, what? : Marissa Mayer’s startup Sunshine went from being Silicon Valley’s next big thing to pioneering the revolutionary world of… contact management and photo sharing, leaving the Internet collectively scratching its head and wondering, “C ‘is that ?
- Dude, where is your data? : Three years after a hacker’s “coming soon” teaser, 73 million AT&T customers’ personal data is leaking onto the Internet, and while AT&T plays the silent game, customers need to check their own data leaks as a dystopian DIY project.
- Come on, Apple: In a move less about innovation and more about being a gatekeeper, Apple’s withdrawal from Beeper’s quest to bring iMessage to Android users is now a DOJ exhibit on how to stifle competition and maintain the exclusivity of the blue bubble club.
- Who Needs Privacy Anyway: Glassdoor, the haven for anonymous business reviews, appears to have turned itself into a privacy nightmare by sneakily adding users’ real names to their profiles, making “anonymous” the most ironic word in their dictionary .
- Welcome to Spotify University: Spotify, not content with dominating your music, podcasts and audiobooks, is now taking an interest in your brain cells with its latest venture into online learning, because apparently we all need another reason to never leave the Spotify ecosystem.
techcrunch
