Hi Party People, it’s Kyle. I will continue to step in to write the review for the week while Greg spends time with his newborn. one weekI’m exhausted and grateful it’s over. I wish you good luck.
We cut your ears off at this point, but we have a contractual obligation to mention TechCrunch’s Early Stage 2023 event in Boston on April 20th (not really, but still). Tips and points from top experts, plus the opportunity to meet fellow founders and share your own entrepreneurial experience.
When it comes to travel, it’s never too early to start thinking about this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 in late September in San Francisco. Tickets are not yet available, but will be available soon. Sign up here to get updates.
With the call to action out of the way (whoops), here’s this week’s tech news!
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Stripes look to the exit: Mary Ann When Natasha Fintech startup Stripe has taken a 12-month deadline to go public by pursuing a direct listing or a private market deal, it wrote. The fact that the payments giant is seeking an exit route is not at all surprising since he was founded in 2010. But Stripe isn’t immune to the global recession. He recently laid off 14% of his workforce (about 1,120) and cut internal valuations multiple times. According to The Wall Street Journal, Stripe recently reportedly attempted to raise at least $2 billion in funding.
Dell is betting on the cloud. Ingrid reports that Dell is making acquisitions to bolster its offerings in its cloud services business, especially DevOps. The company will buy Cloudify, an Israeli startup that built a platform for cloud orchestration and infrastructure automation, for $100 million, sources say. The acquisition comes as DevOps startups continue to attract investor attention, with venture funding in the sector reaching $4 billion in the second quarter of 2021, according to PitchBook.
Shutterstock embraces generative AI. As part of a partnership with OpenAI, an AI startup that recently attracted billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft, Shutterstock this week announced a tool that allows customers to create images based on text prompts. Powered by OpenAI’s technology, specifically his DALL-E 2, the tool creates “license-ready” images after creation. This is important given that one of Shutterstock’s biggest competitors, Getty Images, is currently embroiled in a lawsuit against Stability AI. This is over the makers of another generative AI service called Stable Diffusion, which used images to train an AI without permission from Getty or the rights holders.
Bidet brand buys shower startup: needle There’s a scoop on Blondel’s acquisition of Nebia, which stood out when it launched with an expensive nozzle that sprays users with a fine mist while saving up to 70% of the water sprayed by a typical showerhead. I was. Co-founder Philip Winter told TechCrunch this week that his Nebia products, including those made with Moen, have reached more than 100,000 of his homes.
AI Maestro, Undisclosed: Google’s impressive new AI system can generate any genre of music given a text description. However, the company fears the risks and has no immediate plans to release it. Called MusicLM, the system has been trained on a dataset of 280,000 hours of music and has been shown to perform “captivating jazz songs with memorable sax solos and solo singers” and “basically strong ’90s Berlin techno kicks.” The songs surprisingly sound like they were composed by a human artist, though not necessarily original or musically coherent.
Musk’s Twitter never rests. Twitter owner and self-proclaimed “free speech absolutistElon Musk faces legal challenges in Germany over the platform’s failure to enforce its own rules against anti-Semitic content, including Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany, and Germany has strict laws against anti-Semitic hate speech, making the Berlin court an attractive venue for hearing such challenges. Musk has repeatedly maintained that Twitter respects all laws of the countries in which it operates, including European speech laws, but has yet to issue public comment on this particular lawsuit.
Text until drop: Walmart recently introduced a new way of shopping via chatbots. Sara After trying it out, I found the experience to leave a lot to be desired. she wrote: If conversational commerce like this is the future, it’s still a work in progress. “
Flying into the future: Flutter, Google’s open source framework for building multi-platform apps for mobile, web, and desktop, is well on its way. Frederick wrote that a recent conference highlighted the latest version of Flutter. This provides a significant graphics performance boost, allows easy embedding of Flutter code into his existing web and mobile apps, and supports new architectures such as WebAssembly and RISC-V.
Audio summary
TechCrunch has some great new podcast episodes queuing up for you to enjoy listening to (like every week, we might add more). At Equity, the crew took the mic to discuss deals this week, All Raise’s CEO resignation, what Google’s antitrust lawsuit means for startups, and how the recession has affected how companies hire. Or talked about why femtech stood out in 2022. Darrell When Becca Sebastian Siemiatkowski, co-founder and CEO of Klarna, joined us to discuss how the company will expand beyond “buy now, pay for space later” and become a neobank. TC’s crypto-focused Chain Reaction also spotlighted Mo Shaikh, co-founder and CEO of Layer 1 blockchain Aptos, which builds infrastructure for web3 apps and products.
TechCrunch+
TC+ subscribers have access to in-depth commentary, analysis and research. If not, please consider signing up. I don’t think you will regret it. Check out this week’s highlights.
Salesforce under Win: Salesforce finds itself under threat from activist investor Elliott Management. Elliott Management Announces Multi-Billion Dollar Position in CRM Leader. Ron As the company cuts costs and potentially sells unprofitable parts of the organization, it’s looking at what’s next for Salesforce.
The energy transition is a winner for investors. Tim focuses on investments in the energy transition that started last year. Companies, financial institutions, governments and end users around the world have invested $1.11 trillion in low-carbon technologies. This is just over 30% more than in 2021 and the second year in a row that growth has exceeded this number.
Increased scrutiny: Rebecca Startups should expect more scrutiny from VCs on their hiring plans, he writes. In 2021, startups surged in hiring as VC money poured in and the job market heated up. However, many have become so caught up in the talent pool that they have been forced to make significant cuts and layoffs in 2022.
