Daily Crunch: Bangalore-based, SME-focused neobank Open raises $100M Series C
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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 12, 2021. So far Q4 is cracking good fun. We've got IPO filings aplenty and, as you will see below, more startup
Gillmor Gang: Wooo Wooo
No matter how much I rationalize the new iPhone, I always feel like I'm not fooling anyone. Do I need it? No. Do I want it? Probably. Do I have a plan for how to justify it to my family without triggering a new round of upgrades? There's where my sales pitch becomes the script I need to de
GreenForges digs deep to farm underground
Vertical farms usually look up. Aerofarms, Plenty, Gotham Greens — these companies are trying to revolutionize agriculture by looking toward the sky, with tall warehouses full of growing equipment extending upward. But Philippe Labrie is looking down. Labrie is the CEO and founder of the pre-seed
How my company is winning the war for engineering talent
The engineering talent war is real. It has been for some time — but with a pandemic that pushed businesses in all industries to focus on e-commerce and virtual products and services, demand for skilled engineers skyrocketed.
In June, more than 365,000 tech jobs in the U.S. were vacant, with softw
FourFront nabs funding to build an interconnected network of fictional TikTok stars
Every popular social media platform has opened up a new type of storytelling to a new generation of users, but TikTok’s impact has perhaps been the swiftest as the short-form video platform’s user base has quickly swelled past 1 billion users and transformed how social media stars are m
How Mixpanel got its startup groove back by focusing on its core product
The startup myth goes something like this: You launch a startup in your dorm room, get into Y Combinator, find product-market fit, experience hockey-stick growth, raise some funding and expand the platform. Somehow your revenue hurtles toward $100 million and the company valuation flies to $1 billi
Twitter will now let you remove followers without blocking them
After testing last month, Twitter is rolling out a feature to all web users that will let them remove followers without blocking them. This safety feature can be helpful if you want to avoid the repercussions of blocking someone — if a blocked user navigates to your profile after you block th
Waze is rolling out a new 'Drive with Headspace' experience to make commutes less stressful
Waze announced today it’s partnering with meditation app Headspace to roll out a new “Drive with Headspace” experience aimed at making commutes less stressful. The navigation app maker says the new integration is meant to help drivers learn how to “find more joy and meaning on t
Doist redesigns Twist, the Slack alternative focused on async work
Doist, the company behind Todoist and Twist, has revamped its internal communication product Twist. When I first covered Twist, I said it was like Slack without the annoying distractions. With today's redesign, the company is doubling down on that idea. The result is an opinionated tool for int
Apple Fitness+ UX teardown: 3 key takeaways on how not to interrupt the user journey
The home-workout sector is hot right now. Amazon recently announced Halo Fitness, Peloton have rereleased their treadmills after some controversy, and Apple released Fitness+ late into 2020.
On paper, there's never been a better time to work out at home. But are these subscriptions actually any
Watch Blue Origin launch 4-person crew, including William Shatner, to space live
Barely three months after Blue Origin successfully sent its first crewed rocket to orbit, it’s poised for another launch on Wednesday, October 13. This time, instead of Blue’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos headlining the flight, the company will be sending 90-year old William Shatner, wh
Coinbase is launching its own NFT platform to take on OpenSea
Coinbase is readying the launch of an NFT marketplace that wl compete with existing major players in the space, like OpenSea, debuting a user waitlist for the desktop product that it hopes to launch by the end of the year.
Coinbase has limited detas to share on its upcoming platform, but notes in a
Airbyte launches a hosted version of its integration platform
Airbyte, the well-funded open source data integration startup, always made it easy for data teams to set up their ELT (extract, load and transform) pipelines, but until now, that meant self-hosting and managing the service, with all the complications that come with that. Today, the company announce
Astra completes investigation into August launch failure, aims for next attempt in October
Rocket launch startup Astra provided more details into its rather remarkable mission failure in August, during which the small launch vehicle hovered and drifted in the air before managing a brief vertical ascension. Even as it recounted the debacle, the company is ready to try again, opening the l