Startups/VC Before the news deluge, a few notes. First, Anna Heim wrote something lovely about first-time founders and how market fetishization of serial founders could be leading to new entrepreneurs not getting their due. Given that a number of recent unicorns were founded by new builders instead of those going around the block for the second, third or 10th time, she may be onto something. And after dodging drops in startup investment, the Chinese venture capital market could be facing new stress. Perhaps this time, really, we'll see the declines that many anticipated. And now, the newsroll: - Cherry Ventures lands $340M: The German venture capital firm with an interest in early-stage tech has new capital for its third fund. It also invests in blockchain tech, Mike Butcher reports. With prior funds, the group put capital into Flink and SellerX, among other startups.
- How the Crypto.com hack went down: It turns out it was a 2FA compromise that caused the heavily advertised cryptocurrency firm to lose customer funds and temporarily halt withdrawals. This sort of hack might seem, well, standard at this point in time, but it's still not? It's still very bad? And perhaps even surprising given that bitcoin was first discussed back in 2008. I wonder what Matt Damon thinks.
- Sexual health is a growth industry: That's our lesson from our writeup of TBD Health, which provides " a fresh new approach with at-home [STI] testing made available for vagina-havers." It reminds me of Juna, which means that the at-home STI testing market has a neat competitive landscape to track.
- Remember no-code? It's everywhere again. When TechCrunch covered the Softr round the other day, we asked internally what had happened to all the no-code rounds. Well, here they are. Today it's Prophecy raising $25 million for its "low-code data engineering platform."
- Shazam for your thoughts: Startup Weavit wants to "offer people a different way to quickly capture their thoughts in a note-taking tool with the press of a button, which are then matched to other content in a broader knowledge base" TechCrunch writes. Does the world need another note-taking tool? Apparently, the answer is yes. I kid, my brain is a colander with extra-large holes; I need all the help I can get.
- CodeSee does what it says on the tin: There's a startup in the market called CodeSee. What does it do? Help you see your code. Hell yeah obvious startup names. In this case, code visualization is the name of the game. Why does that matter? As Ron Miller explains, it helps folks see how code fits together. Given that my C++ never compiled I am not one to talk, but this does seem like a pretty neat idea.
- Green Labs raises $140M: Perhaps we need to hire a few agtech reporters. The space really does seem to be heating up. (Just like the planet! Heyo!) The company has now raised a total of $170 million for its digital services for the farming world, including, we write, "an app that aggregates reliable data using AI, giving more than 500,000 farmers insight into crop lifecycle." Farming is hard, so 1.5 cheers for food growers getting new tools.
And to close us out, quantum computing. Very much akin to self-driving cars, quantum computing has always felt a little not quite yet. And yet, Terra Quantum, a Swiss company, is now offering quantum as a service in the market. Yes, you can access early quantum systems. I suppose our real question is when mainstreamization will occur. Terra, we bet, would answer that with a "soon." |
