To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST,Happy V-Day! What happens when you poll crypto traders well-nigh whether liking crypto was an “attractive feature”? Well, 4 out of 5 think that’s hella sexy, and 70% said they’d be increasingly likely to go on a stage with them if they were into the old ’chains. Our bet is that there may be some confirmation bias in there, considering if you were to wave your Ledger wallet at Christine or Haje on a first date, that’d moreover be the last date. Still, Jacquelyn’s well-timed Valentine’s reporting based on a Binance poll is good news for those among you who like to alimony things immutable.
Want a self-ruling Disrupt pass? That can be serried for folks who segregate to volunteer at our Early Stage event!
Today, we bring you a unconfined typesetting recommendation from our very own Dominic-Midori: Long out of print since its original publishing in the 1980s, Black Women Writers at Work is a vital contribution to Black literature in the 20th century, and it’s supremely good news that it’s misogynist again. The typesetting features unslanted interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis De Veaux and many more, highlighting the practices and hair-trigger linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after.
The TechCrunch Top 3
- Bye bye, Yammer: There wasn’t much yammering going on here, but Microsoft confirmed that it is getting rid of Yammer to go all-in on Viva Engage, Paul writes. Viva and Yammer senior vice president Murali Sitaram explains: “Over the last several months we’ve heard your feedback that having two apps surfacing similar experiences and the same services and content has introduced ravages and made it challenging to momentum adoption and create clarity for end users.”
- Take a deposit, leave a deposit: Andreessen Horowitz led a $4.5 million seed round into ModernFi, which is developing a marketplace that helps banks that need deposits to make loans find what they are looking for, while banks with too many deposits can offload them. Christine has more.
- Hello, it’s increasingly funding calling: In PhonePe’s quest to raise $1 billion, an investor group that included Tiger Global and Ribbit Wanted invested flipside $100 million into “India’s most valuable fintech startup,” which is valued at $12 billion, Manish writes.
Startups and VC
It’s unchangingly nice to have a lot of wanted to invest, but managing a large new fund can be plane increasingly worthwhile right now given that many later-stage companies that put off fundraising last year will likely be in the market come hell or upper water in 2023, Connie reports. Buyout firm Bain Wanted just sealed its second growth Tech Opportunities fund with $2.4 billion, up from the $1.3 billion that the outfit put to work through the first vehicle of its type in 2019.
Turning a unconfined idea into a viable startup takes patience, perseverance and increasingly than a little luck. But when an idea originates in a lab — whether it’s AI, biotech, robotics or flipside deep tech research project — things quickly wilt tougher and much increasingly expensive. Pae Wu, unstipulated partner at SOSV and CTO at IndieBio, will join us onstage at TechCrunch Early Stage on April 20 in Boston. Don’t miss it — get your tickets today!
And we have five increasingly for you:
- A tough pill to swallow: Swallowing this pill-shaped sensor could help you stave invasive procedures, Brian reports.
- I see what you did there: Lauren reports that video is fueling the newest group of dating app startups.
- HireSpot: Kyle reports that YC-backed startup Crew aims to build the “HubSpot for recruiting” and recruited $2.45 million worth of funding so far.
- Letting the AI do your crafting: Writer deploys home-cooked large language models to power up enterprise copy, Devin reports.
- Just gonna stand there and watch me: Connie reports that Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty and a newer startup, FIT:MATCH, team up to sell better-fitting lingerie.
10 years of fintech failures: 5 innovations that didn’t live up to the hype
The tech industry (and the media that covers it) thrives on hype cycles.
Sometimes, relentless cheerleading can withstand fruit: Clunky personal digital assistants from the 1990s evolved into sleek smartphones a decade later.
And other times, what seemed like a revolutionary idea turns out to be someone trying to jump-start a fad. (Remember the Google barge, Juicero, and iSmell?)
Looking when over the last decade, TC freelancer Grant Easterbrook recaps five trends that flopped and the underpinning factors that prevented them from waffly fintech “in the way the founders originally intended.”
