A chill has descended onto the global startup market, albeit not evenly. Venture capital totals are sagging in most geographies, and falling share prices for tech companies large and small have soured sentiment on the future value of high-growth and often cash-hungry startups.

The end of the lengthy startup boom that first formed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and largely powered through until the final months of 2021 is shaking out, changing how the market views certain entities.

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Every business cycle has winners and losers, heroes and villains. Some earlier winners turned out to be losers. Tiger, the mega-crossover fund, has evolved from a market-dominating change agent in technology financing to a bag holder. SoftBank’s various Vision Fund efforts are suffering. And some crypto investments that looked to be massive wins have sputtered.

Torben Friehe, CEO of Wingback (YC W22), told TechCrunch earlier this year that many founders that he has spoken to have decided to hold off on fundraising in the current climate, adding that other founders from “across the ecosystem” are saying “that if you have to fundraise right now, you basically have to cut whatever you’d planned to raise back in January in half.”

The winners and losers scorebook isn’t that hard to draw up. But the heroes and villains ledger is a bit more difficult. But with the startup market so changed, so quickly, whiplash is setting in among the investing class. And some are pointing the finger not just at late-stage capital pools that poured too much liquidity into the startup market — some startup players are irked at accelerators, Y Combinator in particular. Let’s talk about it.

The return of fear

The latest missives from venture players are once again downturn letters. We last saw a round of these notes when COVID-19 first hit the world outside of China, leading to economic calamity and lockdowns. Investors warned startups to buckle up for bad times. But, as we now know, the bad times never came for most of them.

Instead, ironically, the pandemic became an accelerant of sorts, pushing more business toward tech companies that helped other concerns operate remotely; an accelerating digital transformation was another tailwind bolstering the tech sector, giving startups a shot in the arm.

The most recent round of warnings from venture capitalists appears more frequent than we saw in 2020, leading our own Natasha Mascarenhas to note over the weekend that “everyone is drafting their own startup Black Swan memo.” Among the various firms that sent advice to their portfolios was Y Combinator.

Y Combinator, or YC for short, is the world’s best-known accelerator. Its expanding cohort sizes, twice-yearly cadence and “standard deal” made it a trendsetting startup program; one that has sufficient heft to influence the overall direction of the early-stage market for funding upstart technology companies. And, after starting life offering “about $20,000 for 6% of a company,” YC raised its terms in 2020 to “$125,000 for 7% equity on a post-money SAFE,” along with reduced pro-rata rights “to 4% of subsequent rounds.”

That changed again in early 2022, when YC added a $375,000 note to its deal, offered on an uncapped basis but with most-favored-nation status. In essence, YC conserved its ability to collect 7% of startup equity early, with extra capital provided to its portfolio companies to put to work.

Over the last few years, YC has raised the valuation bar for its startups, from around $333,333 (6% of a company for $20,000) to $1.79 million (7% of a company for $125,000). Even more, the additional capital it now offers on an uncapped basis likely worked to cement early-stage startup expectations that their accelerator valuation was market valid.

Abhinaya Konduru, an investor at Midwest-focused venture fund M25, told TechCrunch that her firm has “been skeptical of a couple of national accelerators’ valuation practices from an investing standpoint even before the last couple of years,” adding that changes to early-stage valuations from select accelerators — she did not call any program out by name — “made it even harder to consider those companies for an investment to the point where [M25] stopped looking at them.”

Twitter announced today that it has rebranded its Twitter Media website to “Twitter Create.” The social media giant says the website is a new hub for creators to access resources, product information and tips for getting the most out of Twitter. With this new rebrand, the company says it wants to make it easier for creators to understand how they can use Twitter’s creator products and connect with other creators. As part of the the new change, the @TwitterMedia handle is now @TwitterCreate.

Creators can access resources on the website by industry, including sports, gaming, news, podcasters, writers and more. Twitter says that by breaking down resources by categories, creators will be able to easily find content that is tailored to them. The website also includes guides for creators based on their goal on Twitter, such as earning money, engaging with their audience or further developing their brand.

“Twitter has become so much more than Tweets, which is why we’ve also expanded and enhanced the products area of the site, introducing educational hubs and how-to guides to help you get the most out of all the features and products available to you,” the website reads.

The rebrand comes as Twitter has been looking to roll out new ways for creators to get the most out of the social media platform. The company recently introduced a new tool for creators called the “Creator Dashboard,” which is designed to help creators analyze how they make money on Twitter and how much they’re earning from monetization features, such as Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces. Creators can also use the dashboard to search through their payment history and see information about their upcoming payouts.

Twitter has said it plans to enhance the dashboard in the future and ensure that it becomes a place for creators to find ways to further grow their communities and analyze the money they’re making through the platform.

Last October, the company began rolling out “Twitter for Professionals” for businesses and creators. The new profile setting gives users additional tools to distinguish their profile, quickly promote content through ads and capitalize on Twitter’s future e-commerce efforts. Also in October, Twitter launched a new creator program for Spaces called the Twitter Spaces Spark Program. The program is a three-month accelerator that aims to reward successful Spaces on Twitter with financial, technical and marketing support.

With the launch of these new features and resources, Twitter is looking to support creators on its platform and compete with the monetization opportunities offered by other digital giants, including TikTok and Instagram.

DuckDuckGo, the self-styled “Internet privacy company” — which, for years, has built a brand around a claim of non-tracking web search and, more recently, launched its own ‘private’ browser with built-in tracker blocking — has found itself in hot water after a researcher found hidden limits on its tracking protection that create a carve out for certain advertising data requests by its search syndication partner, Microsoft.

Late yesterday, the researcher in question, Zach Edwards, tweeted the findings of his audit — saying he had found DDG’s mobile browsers do not block advertising requests made by Microsoft scripts on non-Microsoft web properties. (NB: This is a separate matter to what happens if you actually click on an ad when using DDG — as its privacy policy clearly discloses all privacy bets are off at that point.)

Edwards tested browser data flows on a Facebook-owned site, Workplace.com, and found that while DDG informed users it had blocked Google and Facebook trackers, it did not prevent Microsoft from receiving data flows linked to their browsing on the non-Microsoft website…

Edwards had some Twitter back and forth with DDG’s founder and CEO Gabe Weinberg, who initially appeared to be attempting to play down the finding by emphasizing all the stuff he said DDG’s browser does block (e.g. third party tracking cookies, including those from Microsoft).

Weinberg was also especially keen to make it clear the data flows issue is not related to DuckDuckGo search.

However the limitation on DDG’s browser’s tracker blocking does amount to an exemption from protection against certain advertising data transfers to Microsoft subsidiaries (Bing, LinkedIn) — which could be used for cross-site tracking of web users for ad targeting purposes. Or, in other words, to undermine DDG browser users’ privacy.

In Twitter back and forth, Weinberg confirmed Edwards’ audit was correct — ‘fessing up to a contactual agreement that he said limited DDG’s ability to block trackers in this scenario by writing that DDG’s “search syndication agreement” with Microsoft, which owns and operates the Bing search engine and index, “prevents us from stopping Microsoft-owned scripts from loading”.

He added that DDG was “working to change that”.

Asked via Twitter whether DDG’s contract included a clause that prevents it from publicly complaining about the limitations imposed upon it by Microsoft, a tech giant with a growing adtech business, Weinberg told us: “Our syndication contract has broad confidentiality requirements, and the specific requirement documents themselves are additionally explicitly marked confidential.”

Discussing his findings and DDG’s response with TechCrunch, Edwards described himself as “pretty shocked” by Weinberg’s public response to his audit — and for having what he summed up as “no public solutions for the problems created through the secret partnership between DuckDuckgo and Microsoft”.

The issue has blow up on Hacker News over the day — where Weinberg (aka yegg) has been doing more firefighting in the comments, reiterating that DDG’s hands are tied by its contract with Microsoft and further claiming it has continued to press for changes to “this limited restriction”.

“This is just about non-DuckDuckGo and non-Microsoft sites in our browsers, where our search syndication agreement currently prevents us from stopping Microsoft-owned scripts from loading, though we can still apply our browser’s protections post-load (like 3rd party cookie blocking and others mentioned above, and do). We’ve also been tirelessly working behind the scenes to change this limited restriction,” Weinberg wrote on the site.

“I also understand this is confusing because it is a search syndication contract that is preventing us from doing a non-search thing. That’s because our product is a bundle of multiple privacy protections, and this is a distribution requirement imposed on us as part of the search syndication agreement. Our syndication agreement also has broad confidentially provisions and the requirement documents themselves are explicitly marked confidential,” he added.

While DDG’s browser clearly does not block all scripts — and no tracker blocker is going to be 100% effective as tracking techniques are ever evolving — this carve out for Microsoft scripts looks different on merit of it being a specific exemption attached to a contractual agreement that’s linked to a commercial deal which allows DDG to use Microsoft’s search index in its core product — none of which was (seemingly) public knowledge prior to Edwards’ audit.

In further public remarks on the issue, Weinberg implied that DDG is trying to balance a goal of giving browser users a very easy tracker blocker experience (i.e. to maximize accessibility), with beefing up protections that might further enhance user privacy but with a potential cost to the experience (e.g. broken webpages).

However the lack of a disclosure by DDG to browser users of the Microsoft-related restriction to its protections is particularly concerning — especially in light of the stark contrast with its privacy-focused marketing which tells users they will “escape website tracking” (which clearly isn’t happening in the specific Microsoft-related instances identified by Edwards). So DDG risks misleading users and undermining its own reputation as a pro-privacy business.

In a more recent response posted in response to Hacker News comments, Weinberg appears to have accepted the need for DDG to make fuller disclosure, writing: “We will work diligently today to find a way to say something in our app store descriptions in terms of a better disclosure — will likely have something up by the end of the day.”

“I understand the concern here that we are working to address in a variety of ways but to be clear no app will provide 100% protection for a variety of reasons, and the scripts in question here do currently have significant protection on them in our browser,” he added. 

We reached out to Weinberg with questions. He sent us this statement:

“We have always been extremely careful to never promise anonymity when browsing, because that frankly isn’t possible given how quickly trackers change how they work to evade protections and the tools we currently offer. When most other browsers on the market talk about tracking protection they are usually referring to 3rd-party cookie protection and fingerprinting protection, and our browsers for iOS, Android, and our new Mac beta, impose these restrictions on third-party tracking scripts, including those from Microsoft. We’re talking here about an above-and-beyond protection that most browsers don’t even attempt to do — that is, blocking third-party tracking scripts before they even load on 3rd party websites. Because this can cause websites to break, we cannot do this as much as we want to in any case. Our goal, however, has always been to provide the most privacy we can in one download, by default without any complicated settings, so we took this on.”

We also put questions to Microsoft about the limitation it imposes on search syndication partners but at the time of writing the tech giant had not responded.

Privacy trade-offs are never great but one conclusion looks inescapable here: Antitrust regulators need to closely examine the search syndication market — given it’s essentially comprised of two gatekeeping adtech giants, Google and Microsoft, which are fully empowered to enforce (unfair) terms on anyone else wanting to offer a competitive search product, or, indeed in certain cases, an alternative web browser.

European regulators have recently agreed a new ex ante competition regime that’s aimed at the most powerful intermediating platforms — which the Digital Markets Act refers to as internet “gatekeepers”. The DMA is clearly applicable to search engines but it remains to be seen whether the Commission will spot the opportunity to use the incoming regulation to crack open the search market by enforcing fair usage terms around search syndication on the only two indexes that count.

I have looked at tech from both sides now (h/t Joni Mitchell), as a three-time entrepreneur and as a venture investor through two downturns.

On the startup side, my first company, VXtreme, was acquired by Microsoft and became the platform for media streaming over the internet. My second experience was the rocket ship run up to an IPO and subsequent nosedive in valuation that characterized so many startups in the dot-com era.

My third startup had been in the market only a year when the internet bubble burst and had not yet found product-market fit. To survive, we had to take drastic measures, including two rounds of layoffs until we were able to merge with another company, which is still thriving today.

As a venture investor, I have invested in over 60 companies, and while many have gone public or been acquired, the journey has included pivots, near-death experiences and navigating through the 2008/2009 downturn.

Today, as people throw around scary words like cram downs, structure, ratchets, illiquid portfolios and wind down of funds, I truly empathize with founders of companies who are having trouble raising capital, have seen their valuation drop and are making tough survival decisions.

Every era is different, but here are some tips for our new normal:

If you’re out raising money, due diligence your investor

In a time of contraction, firms with funds that are close to their end of life will be under tight constraints and may not have allocated enough follow-on capital for their existing investments.

Reserve management can become an issue, and existing investors won’t be able to come through on their pro-rata amounts, especially if you’re conducting internal rounds or bridge extensions. So, as part of your evaluation of investors, you should ask which fund they are investing from, how far along they are in investing it and how much they hold in reserves for future rounds.

This will help you ensure that they can continue to support your future capital needs.

Be creative when tightening the belt

When capital is scarce, you have to be willing to kill your darlings so you can extend your runway.

At Rivio, my third startup as a founder, we came up with a zero-based budget plan after the dot-com bust that assumed we’d have no access to any future capital. We then drastically cut product features, re-thought our go-to-market strategy and rightsized the business.

Since the launch of Pokémon Go in 2015, players have been coordinating meet-ups in-game raids and battles on platforms like Reddit and Discord. This summer, parent company Niantic is unveiling Campfire, a social app designed to help mobile augmented reality (AR) gamers connect.

Niantic’s games incentivize people to use their technology to go outside and meet others — that’s why it calls its AR development the “real-world metaverse.” Campfire wants to make that even easier (or offer an alternative to long-running Pokémon Go Discord servers), and is supposed to be the “homepage” of this slice of techno-reality. Following in Snapchat’s footsteps as a map-based social platform, the app also includes the ability to connect with people, find nearby events, join communities, and message people. Users can also share their location with friends (don’t share with strangers!).

“There are the Niantic gaming communities that have already been formed all around the world, with tens of thousands of enthusiastic explorers. These local groups already exist,” CEO John Hanke said in a kenote speech at Niantic’s Lightship summit.  “We’re giving them a platform to better conduct their activities and find other players for players to find these groups. Basically, just providing some tools to make all this smoother and easier for these users.”

Image Credits: Niantic

The next step in its mission to build the “real-world metaverse,” Campfire is part of a new slate of AR products unveiled today, including Niantic’s much-hyped Lightship VPS, or Virtual Positioning System.

For years, Niantic has been inviting users on Pokémon Go and Ingress to scan local landmarks, even offering in-game incentives for this crowd-sourced data. Then, those short video snippets of real world locations are validated by developers, which is then processed to become part of the AR map of the world. At launch, Niantic’s head of product for mapping Tory Smith said that San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, London and Tokyo are the most densely mapped. By the end of the year, Lightship VPS will be available in over 100 global cities. With the help of Niantic’s recent 8th Wall acquisition, these features will also be available in mobile web browsers.

With Lightship VPS, if a user scans their location, the VPS can determine where they are, almost like a GPS (which the name of the product is nodding to). Of course, GPS shows you can where you are and what’s around you, but VPS adds another layer, showing you user-generated experiences designed to enhance your real-world experience.

Lightship VPS functionality will be available to AR developers via Niantic’s Lightship AR Developer Kit now.

PlanetScale, the highly scalable MySQL database service founded by the co-creators of the increasingly popular Vitess open source project, today announced a series of updates that push the platform beyond its basic database features by adding new enterprise features and new tools to improve the developer experience.

The first of these new features is PlanetScale Portals, a new multi-region read-only replica system that will allow PlanetScale customers to replicate their data to any other AWS region (with support for Google Cloud and potentially other clouds coming later). “If you have a database in Frankfurt and you have — as companies do these days — customers in Australia or India or the U.S., you can have read replicas close to all of them literally in about four clicks. We’ll give you a connection string for each of them and then you can set up your application,” PlanetScale VP of Engineering Nick Van Wiggeren told me during a meeting at last week’s KubeCon conference in Valencia, Spain. He noted that this is the first time PlanetScale offers these kinds of automated read replicas.

Previously, users would have had to use an external system to replicate the data, with all of the complexities that come with that, but now, it’s a built-in feature that can then also make use of PlanetScale’s standard dashboards and monitoring tools. “It’s a way lower operational burden to the point where it’s point-and-click, which is rare,” Van Wiggeren said. “Behind the scenes, of course, there’s a whole lot of complexity that we abstract for our users.”

With this update, PlanetScale is also launching Insights, a new real-time performance monitoring service for its database system that will allow users to keep tabs on how their queries are performing without having to use a third-party system. Van Wiggeren noted that PlanetScale’s systems give the company unparalleled data into what the database is doing. “We’re expecting that it’s really going to help developers figure out what’s going wrong when something goes wrong,” Van Wiggeren said. He also stressed that this isn’t a play to replace existing services like Datadog (and the company is actually partnering with them). 

The last piece of news today is the launch of PlanetScale Connect. Using the service’s open-source Airbyte connector, users can now more easily extract and move data from PlanetScale to other platforms like BigQuery, Snowflake or RedShift for analysis. Using PlanetScale’s ability to incrementally sync this data, the analytics database stays fresh, all without the risk to corrupting the production data. While the current iteration of this service depends on Airbyte, the company also plans to work with services like Fivetran in the future. “We used air bite as the proving point because that didn’t require any kind of external coordination,” explained Van Wiggeren.

Earlier this week, PlanetScale also published its “The Future Database” manifesto. The reaction from many developers to this was lukewarm, but the overall ideas seem sound: build databases that are easy to operate, reliable and serverless and interoperable by default, globally distributed and highly scalable. You can read the full document here.   

“Today’s announcement builds on our commitment to deliver The Future Database, enabling companies to get out of the infrastructure business and focus on their business,” said Sam Lambert, CEO, PlanetScale. “PlanetScale’s platform-based approach lets development teams take back control of their workflow with a database that’s as easy to use as writing code.”

Stellantis and Samsung SDI said on Tuesday they will team up to build a $2.5 billion lithium-ion battery plant in Indiana.

The project, which will create 1,400 new jobs and could surpass the $3 billion mark once it’s complete, is Stellantis’ first battery plant in the U.S. and its fifth worldwide.

The latest factory is slated to open in 2025 near Stellantis’ engine, casting and transmission plants in Kokomo, Indiana, where the company is also investing $229 million to produce electrified, eight-speed transmissions to help reach its goal for EVs to represent more than half of its U.S. sales by 2030.

The news comes one day after Hyundai’s blockbuster announcement that it plans to invest $10 billion in mobility innovation in North America through 2025, including $5.5 billion in an EV plant and battery manufacturing facility outside of Savannah, Georgia. That project represents the largest-ever economic development deal recruited by the Peach State.

Stellantis’ joint venture with the South Korean battery manufacturer in Indiana will support the global juggernaut’s goal to ramp up electric vehicle production. The Chrysler parent company is investing more than $35 billion in electrification, software, and technology through 2025, and expects to launch more than 75 new battery-electric models, including 25 nameplates in the U.S. and Canada, by 2030.

Stellantis announced in March plans to invest $4.1 billion in a separate lithium-ion battery joint venture with LG Energy Solution. That plant is expected to open in Windsor, Ontario, in 2024.

The new battery factory in Kokomo will have an initial annual production capacity of 23 gigawatt-hours, with the ability to increase to up to 33 gigawatt-hours in the future, said Mark Stewart, COO of Stellantis North America.

After being delayed for months, it’s about time that Google rolls out its personalized profiles for Google TV.  According to the company, users will get profiles “over the next few weeks.”

In October, Google TV announced profiles that will give each user their own tailored recommendations, watchlists and personalized Google Assistant answers. While this was initially supposed to be available for users at the end of 2021, the update is finally launching.

Once you receive the update, add a profile by clicking on your profile picture at the top right of the Google TV home screen. Select “Add an account” and follow the prompts to set up the profile.

The update makes it easier for large households to navigate the content they want. Google TV allows up to 12 profiles on a single connected TV device. Plus, app downloads and login details appear across all profiles, excluding kids’ profiles. This makes it easier than ever to stream without having to start from scratch each time you want to set up a new Google TV profile.

The tech giant has been improving Google TV, expanding it in order to be less of a single storefront experience for household members who enjoy different TV shows and movies, among other content. Last year, the company launched kids’ profiles, where parents can choose which apps are available and set watch time limits. More recently, users also got the ambient mode screensaver with personalized information and recommendation cards that show things like weather, news, sports scores, podcast links and more.

In a classic “pivot to crypto to reinvent yourself” moment, controversial WeWork founder Adam Neumann recently launched a startup, Flowcarbon, to sell tokenized carbon credits on the blockchain.

Venture capitalists just can’t seem to get enough of Neumann and his spouse/co-founder, Rebekah, who started the company alongside its CEO Dana Gibber and two others, Caroline Klatt and Ilan Stern. Now, Flowcarbon says it has raised $70 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto division (a16z crypto) through a combination of traditional VC equity and a token sale.

General Catalyst, Samsung Next, 166 2nd, Sam and Ashley Levinson, RSE Ventures and Allegory Labs participated alongside a16z in the venture round, the company said, with Fifth Wall, Box Group and the Celo Foundation taking part in the token sale.

Flowcarbon’s protocol helps projects sell tokenized carbon credits to companies looking to reduce their carbon footprint. The credits can then be traded on crypto exchanges, the company says.

Why put these credits on-chain, though? Proponents, including Gibber, say doing so allows projects that provide these credits to more easily raise capital and boosts transparency for buyers.

Of the total funds raised in this round, $32 million came from venture capital firms and $38 million from the sale of Flowcarbon’s Goddess Nature Token (GNT), a crypto token on the Celo blockchain backed by carbon credits, Reuters reported. GNT’s underlying carbon credits are pre-certified by industry groups including Verra, Gold Standard, Climate Action Reserve and the American Carbon Registry and are then sold in bundles to companies, according to Reuters.

Gibber told Reuters that carbon credit providers pay a 2% tokenization fee to Flowcarbon to sell their credits on-chain, lower than the cost they’d incur when selling these credits through traditional channels, which can be up to 30% of the project value.

The credit can also be isolated from the bundle and delivered physically to a token holder if that holder wants to sell it off-chain, according to Gibber.

The company is playing in a crowded space, as lots of startups have hopped on board with crypto’s regenerative finance (ReFi) movement, which seeks to leverage blockchain technology to solve environmental issues. Projects like Toucan, Regen, Moss and KlimaDAO are all working on crypto-based carbon credit solutions.

A private sale of Flowcarbon’s GNT token ends in two days, and the company is currently allowing people to pre-register for an upcoming public sale of GNT, according to its website.

PayPal laid off dozens of employees from its San Jose headquarters, filings show. As first reported by The Information and later confirmed by Techcrunch, the layoffs impacted 83 employees.

PayPal’s layoffs, while just now coming to the surface, were conducted around a week before the fintech confirmed that it was shuttering its San Francisco office. When asked about this round of layoffs, a PayPal spokesperson told TechCrunch that it is “constantly evaluating how we work to ensure we are prepared to meet the needs of our customers and operate with the best structure and processes to support our strategic business priorities as we continue to grow and evolve.”

It did not directly speak to the filing and layoffs but said that it will continue hiring. PayPal did not offer specific details about severance packages offered to employees impacted.

In April, the fintech told TechCrunch that it “remains fully committed to the Bay Area and to California and we will continue to hire into and invest in our business and people working within the state.”

PayPal, which has over 30,000 employees, told staff during a recent all-hands meeting that there will be no mass layoffs, sources say. Yet, to scale back resources both in real estate and employees in a short time frame could signal that PayPal isn’t playing full offense right now. The financial services company, like everyone else in tech, wants to trim costs. Earlier today, the Irish Times reported that the well-known fintech is relocating 131 Irish employees and offering them the option to volunteer for redundancy.

In late April, PayPal reported that its revenue was up 8% to $6.5 billion for the three-month period ending March 31. That (slightly) beat analysts’ expectations of $6.4 billion. Meanwhile, adjusted earnings per share of 88 cents met expectations. Today, PayPal’s stock is trading at around $78, down about 3.4%. That’s just a tad higher than its 52-week-low of $71.83 and significantly lower than its 52-week-high of $310.16.

It takes a lot of people to bring a tech conference to life, and we’re looking for a few fabulous volunteers to support our events team and help make TC Sessions: Climate & The Extreme Tech Challenge 2022 Global Finals an awesome experience for our attendees.

If you’re fabulous and interested in event planning, tech startups, climate change or all of the above, apply to volunteer at TC Sessions: Climate, which takes place on June 14 in Berkeley, California. It’s a great way to see what it takes to produce a world-renowned startup event.

We expect around 1,000 people at this event, and volunteers will handle a variety of tasks. At any given time, you might help with registration, wrangle speakers, direct attendees, scan tickets or help with general event setup.

What’s in it for you? Fair question. If you’re selected, not only will you get a behind-the-scenes look at how events are produced, but you’ll also earn a free pass to attend TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, October 18–20.

Plus, when you complete your volunteer shift, you can attend the interviews, presentations and breakout sessions. Did you know that Bill Gates is one of the speakers? Check out the agenda to see the incredible lineup. Swing by the expo floor, too, where you’ll find these early-stage startups exhibiting the latest climate tech.

Volunteer spots are limited. If you want to gain valuable event experience, take in all the climate-startup goodness and earn a free pass to TechCrunch Disrupt, apply to volunteer before May 31 to be considered!

Apple revealed that it will be expanding its Today at Apple Creative Studios initiative to seven new cities, including Berlin, Miami, Milan, Nashville, Sydney, Taipei, and Tokyo. It will also return for the second time in Bangkok, Beijing, Chicago, London, New York City, Paris, and Washington, D.C. In total, the program will reach 14 cities.

The new sessions are all free and open to the public; however, not every class is available in every location. Registration is available at apple.com/today.

The expanded program will bring career-building mentorship, training, resources, and all-new curricula in app design, podcasting, spatial audio production, and filmmaking to even more young creatives from underrepresented communities across the globe.

While various classes are being pushed by Apple, not every public session will be available in every location. For instance, a new app design program will only be hosted at Apple Store branches in New York. Meanwhile, art and design courses will only run in Milan and Taipei; Miami and Washington D.C. will have books and storytelling; Berlin, Nashville, Chicago, and Paris will offer the music, radio, and podcasts program; and London, Sydney, Beijing, Tokyo, and Bangkok will be the location of photography, film and TV classes.

Image Credits: Apple

The aim of Today at Apple Creative Studios is to foster creative education for young people who struggle to find similar classes elsewhere. The initiative connects participants with Apple mentors as well as over 30 nonprofit community partners who specialize in areas like books and storytelling, app design, radio and podcasts, photography, film, and TV. Programs are designed to celebrate creative skills and talents that could potentially encourage social change in each community.

Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s senior vice president of Retail + People, said in a statement, “Our stores have long provided a platform to showcase the great talent of local artists, and our retail teams are proud to play a role in supporting creativity within their communities and creating a place where everyone is welcome. We’re enormously grateful to our Apple Creative Pros, our retail team members, and local partners, who together make it possible for us to expand access to free arts education and mentorship to even more communities.”

Last year, more than 400 youths participated in Creative Studios programming, with some creators getting to showcase their creations in Apple Music, Apple Books, and elsewhere in the Apple ecosystem.

“It was an honor to share my passion for Apple technology and storytelling with these young people. Technology entered my life at a young age and completely changed my trajectory. My hope for these published authors is that they continue to tell the stories of their lives. The world needs their point of view,” said Rudy P., an Apple Creative Pro at Apple Carnegie Library in Washington.

Uber, today, announced a significant milestone — it has completed 1 billion rides across all its markets in Africa. This feat translates to over 10 billion kilometres in terms of distance covered, according to the company. 

This milestone for Uber is coming nearly a decade after the mobility tech company set shop on the continent in Johannesburg, South Africa. It has since established a presence in seven other African countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Ivory Coast.

“Since entering the market in 2013, we have created over 6 million economic opportunities in over 50 cities across SSA that we are present in,” said Lorraine Onduru, the company’s spokesperson and head of comms for East and West Africa, in a statement. 

Uber expanded to over 30 cities across its major markets within the past year: 21 in South Africa — its most dominant market, four cities each in Kenya and Nigeria, and two in Ghana. 

Part of Uber’s growth efforts has also included expanding Uber Eats, its food delivery arm across a few South African cities and Nairobi, Kenya. Uber Eats launched in 2016 in South Africa with just 1,000 restaurants. Now, it serves over 8,000 merchants across 36 cities in South Africa and Kenya. 

The company also highlights that Uber and Uber Eats have collectively reached over 30 million riders and eaters in sub-Saharan Africa. As of 2017, the company services reached under 2 million riders. 

Here are other metrics the company highlighted in its decade-old growth report. The most popular time to request a ride is 2 pm. The most popular day to request a ride is Friday. The most popular drop-off destination is the OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg. The most popular ride option is UberX (from a list that includes Uber Go, Uber Moto, Uber Boda and Uber Poa). The average trip time is 24 minutes, and the longest recorded trip was over 492 km. 

Over the years, Uber has disrupted local cab industries while creating over 50,000 driver jobs. But within this time, Uber has faced stiff competition from Bolt in its major markets, which has led to price wars that still affect drivers’ earnings today. 

In 2016, the company sliced fares by almost 50% due to fresh competition from Bolt. Although it sparked a civil suit filed against the company and Uber BV from its drivers, a former Uber executive in charge of launching new products in East Africa and negotiating partnerships with third-party companies told TechCrunch that Uber had intended to reduce commuter charges for UberX in Kenya further. 

The company withdrew this plan and introduced Chap Chap, a lower-priced service, in January 2018; however, it wasn’t enough to thwart the civil suit — which is still ongoing despite talks about Uber opting to settle via arbitration. 

A California county court judge ruled Monday that a sexual harassment suit against Tesla can proceed in court, rejecting the automaker’s request for closed-door arbitration, according to Bloomberg.

That means that Tesla must defend itself in open court against claims that female employees face “rampant sexual harassment” at its Fremont, California, factory. Alameda County Superior Court Judge Stephen Kaus denied the automaker’s request in a one-sentence order without explanation, even though the plaintiff in the class-action case signed an arbitration agreement giving up her right to sue.

“The Motion to Compel Arbitration filed by Tesla, Inc. on 02/16/22 is Denied” is all Kaus wrote.

Tesla also faces harassment suits filed by at least six other female employees since late last year alleging that they were subjected to discrimination, catcalling, unwanted advances and physical contact at work.

Jessica Barraza, the plaintiff in Barraza v. Tesla, 21-cv-2714, Superior Court of California, Alameda County (Oakland), alleges that supervisors failed to take action after she reported working under “nightmarish” conditions as a night-shift employee, with co-workers and supervisors repeatedly making lewd comments and gestures to her.

The complaint, filed in Alameda County Superior Court in November, stated, “The pervasive culture of sexual harassment, which includes a daily barrage of sexist language and behavior, including frequent groping on the factory floor, is known to supervisors and managers and often perpetrated by them.”

Meanwhile, Tesla has also faced a spate of lawsuits alleging racial discrimination at its Fremont factory. In February, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against the automaker in state court alleging that it has received “hundreds of complaints from workers” and found evidence that the California factory is a “segregated workplace where black workers are subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay and promotion creating a hostile work environment.”

CEO Elon Musk has been vocal in his complaints against the state, moving Tesla’s headquarters from Fremont to Austin, Texas, last year, after filing a lawsuit against Alameda County due to COVID restrictions that forced the automaker to shutter its Fremont plant.

“Frankly, this is the final straw,” Musk tweeted. “Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependent on how Tesla is treated in the future. Tesla is the last carmaker left in CA.”

It’s Demo Day time! Today marks the 30th Demo Day for Alchemist, the enterprise-focused accelerator that helped grow companies like LaunchDarkly, Rigetti Computing, and Privacera early on.

As an enterprise accelerator, the companies Alchemist backs generally focus on selling things to other companies as opposed to selling straight to consumers. Some of the companies might have a consumer angle to them as well — but their primary market will generally be other businesses.

In a conversation ahead of Demo Day, Alchemist Accelerator director Ravi Belani told me that Alchemist companies have collectively raised over $2.2 billion in capital. Alchemist has also continued to grow AlchemistX, a program in which Alchemist helps companies like LG, Siemens, and NEC build accelerators of their own; today it announced ten companies selected into a space-focused accelerator built in partnership with Amazon’s AWS.

As with Alchemist’s last few Demo Days, today’s presentations will be entirely virtual and streamed on YouTube. Pitches are scheduled to start at 10:30 am pacific, with nineteen companies presenting in all. A list of the companies presenting today follows below, plus a bit about what each is doing as I understand it.

The companies presenting today:

FaradaIC Sensors: Making mini gas sensors, allowing companies to add things like oxygen sensors to “any IOT device”

Rocketbrew: A competitive analytics dashboard for e-commerce brands, giving you an easy view of “how competitors price, launch new products and manage their product portfolio”

OneCommons: Building a low-code platform to allow anyone to quickly deploy open source apps to cloud providers like AWS or Google Cloud

Firecell: Helps enterprises build private 4G/5G networks

RED Atlas: A platform for real estate insights and analytics, focusing first on Puerto Rico.

SmartAn: A financial analytics platforms (to aggregate things like financial statements and risk assessments) — used, for example, when one company is deciding if it’ll work with another.

Liqui: A marketplace, focusing first on Latin America, meant to help gig workers find jobs and establish employment history.

Recoshelf: A computer-vision tool that lets retail employees use cameras to more quickly audit shelves, checking for things that are out of stock, in the wrong place, or priced incorrectly.

GiveShop: A matchmaking platform to connect companies that want to give with social impact projects that need money.

Ntapi: An edtech platform for Africa, built to feel more like a social network than a traditional upskilling platform.

Budee Solutions: An “all-in-one digital safety platform” for industrial workers (construction, mining, transportation, etc.) to help them keep track of safety checklists, record certifications, receive safety/weather alerts, etc.

Var.energy: Developing proprietary hardware for solar power generation facilities to improve compatibility with the existing power grid

Lynxai: An analytics platform meant to help companies make decisions about their ESG (Environmental/Social/Corporate governance) investments, with things like social network sentiment analysis and tools to help you stay on top of new regulations.

Joinedapp: E-commerce tools for selling on apps like Instagram/Facebook/Whatsapp with support for cryptocurrencies

engageLively: A drag-and-drop interface meant to help data scientists build interactive dashboards quickly, beginning with data from the open-source data science app Jupyter.

MotionRay: Redundant internet service to help ensure that your critical hardware (like your retail POS) stays connected through any outage.

NavigateIO: a “self-contained” service for precisely locating individuals — think first responders or warehouse/industrial workers — when GPS is insufficient.

xLight: Working on what Ravi Belani calls “the next generation of semi-conductor fabs” to help build the chips of the future. Co-founder Will Schumaker says this is a commercialization of a FEL (Free Electron Laser) project he worked on at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Lab.

Codelock: Pitched as “software security at the code level”, Codelock helps companies monitor for unauthorized changes to their codebase and identify where they came from.

Waze announced today that users can access Apple Music content directly from the app’s built-in Audio Player via a new integration. The integration will make it easier for users to pause, play, and switch between songs while navigating to their destination without having to open the Apple Music app. To take advantage of the integration, users need to open the Waze app, tap the music note icon to select Apple Music as their audio app to then start listening to content directly in Waze.

It’s been over a year since Waze launched its Audio Player to safely deliver music, podcasts, audiobooks, news, and more while guiding drivers to their destinations. Since the launch of the Audio Player, Waze has introduced integrations with several audio partners, including Audible, Deezer, NPR, iHeartRadio, Pandora, YouTube Music and Amazon Music. Waze’s integration with Apple Music comes several years after it launched an integration with Spotify.

“For years, Waze has partnered with audio services to give you the best, safest and most fun driving experience,” Waze said in a blog post about the announcement. “With a direct connection between the apps, you can now access Apple Music content directly from the Waze Audio Player. Enjoy more than 90 million songs, tens of thousands of curated playlists, Apple Music Radio and more while you navigate. We’re thrilled to join forces with Apple Music to bring Apple Music subscribers their tunes while driving with Waze on iPhone.”

Waze says the new integration with Apple Music will allow for a seamless and fun experience for users. The new integration is available to users starting today.

Chrysler’s new EV will create a new category, drawing upon lessons learned from designing the brand’s minivan, according to chief design officer Ralph Gilles.

“Chrysler was one of those brands that was honestly on the OR table, and we decided to reinvest in it big time,” Gilles said at the TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility conference last week. Now, the brand is planning to go fully electric by 2028, beginning with the 2025 launch of its first EV.

Based on the Chrysler Airflow crossover concept shown at the New York Auto Show in April, this inaugural EV is tasked with setting the design direction for parent company Stellantis’ $35 billion investment in bringing more EVs to market.

Gilles said the Airflow creates a new vehicle segment that harkens back to the vehicle Gilles most wants to be known for: the Chrysler Pacifica minivan.

“It’s such a Swiss Army knife,” Gilles said. “It’s the unsung hero of a lot of busy people’s lives.”

So you want to know what’s going on with Elon Musk and Twitter, but you thought maybe it’s a little too late to ask your tech-obsessed buddies for the low-down. You’ve come to the right place.

Last month, in perhaps the year’s biggest tech news story yet, Elon Musk announced his intent to buy Twitter for $44 billion. But like everything that the Tesla and SpaceX exec touches, it turned to chaos. Now, the relationship between Elon Musk and Twitter has become the greatest “will-they-or-won’t-they” of our time (… okay, maybe more like this month).

Without further ado… Let’s start at the basics.

Who is Elon Musk? The electric car guy?

I know I’ve heard this guy’s name a lot, but… who is he exactly?

You sweet summer child. Elon Musk is a South African-born entrepreneur best known for serving as CEO of Tesla (electric car company), SpaceX (let’s go to Mars?) and The Boring Company (something to do with tunnels, idk, don’t worry about it). Early in his career, he founded X.com, a startup that was acquired by the company that became PayPal. He is also the richest man in the world.

Oh right, he’s the one who had children with Grimes, and they named their kids weird things! Is Grimes ok? “Visions” is a good album.

Yes, Elon Musk dated the Canadian electronic musician Grimes for several years, and they had two children named X Æ A-Xii and Exa Dark Sideræl. They are no longer dating.

It seems like Elon Musk is a pretty controversial figure. Is it just because he’s super rich?

That’s part of it. But as TechCrunch’s Taylor Hatmaker wrote, he “generally conducts himself like a person who doesn’t give a single shit about the literally incomprehensible power differential between himself and basically every other person on the planet.” He has peddled vaccine skepticism to his 92.8 million Twitter followers and said that panic around COVID-19 was “dumb,” his companies have been routinely cited for union-busting, poor working conditions, coverups of worker injuries and racist treatment, and he often uses his Twitter to make racist, transphobic jokes. He also allegedly paid an employee $250,000 to sign an NDA to keep her quiet after he sexually harassed her. Overall, he’s pretty insufferable.

Why does Elon Musk want to buy Twitter?

He’s already the CEO of so many companies, and he has more money than anyone else in the world — why buy Twitter?

At first, Musk flirted with the idea of starting his own social media platform. I regret my past headline choices, but I’ll admit, I didn’t think he would actually offer Twitter $44 billion to buy their platform instead of building one from scratch. Oh, how naive I was.

Before he made the offer, he bought a 9.2% stake in the company, was offered a board seat, declined the board seat… a lot of silly shenanigans.

Musk calls Twitter the “town square” of the internet, but he doesn’t like how it’s run.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said. He has declared that his definition of “free speech” is “simply that which matches the law.” This is similar to the approach taken by fringe social networks like Parler and Truth Social, Trump’s new platform. He declared that if people want the law to be different, they can simply just get the government to change it, a shockingly stupid statement from someone who doesn’t understand how hard it is to pass legislation, or just… generally how the world works.

But Twitter’s existing platform guidelines aren’t that stringent. Beyond prohibiting illegal activity, Twitter bans hateful conduct (attacking or threatening people based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, etc.), depictions of graphic violence, promotion of suicide or self-harm, etc. The platform doesn’t even censor pornographic content, so long as it doesn’t appear in a live video or a profile header.

By the way, isn’t a Saudi Arabian prince’s sovereign wealth fund helping finance the Twitter deal? Saudi Arabia enforces serious restrictions on speech and the media, so doesn’t that seem weird? I thought Musk was really into free speech.

Yeah.

So why does Elon Musk think that Twitter is censoring people, anyway?

Elon Musk gets away with tweeting things like… comparing Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler, comparing Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to Joseph Stalin, saying that gender pronouns “suck” … Yet he’s still concerned that free speech isn’t possible on Twitter (or is he just concerned that people hold him accountable when he says offensive shit?).

Shortly before Musk vocalized his interest in buying Twitter, the conservative satire site the Babylon Bee was suspended from Twitter for making a hateful, transphobic post about a public official. According to Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, who is also a director at Parler, Musk told him that he “might need to buy Twitter” to protect free speech.

How does the SEC figure into all of this?

The SEC keeps an eye on what the business mogul says on his account. The SEC tries to keep stock trading as fair as possible — that’s why things like insider trading are illegal, AKA, when someone makes investment decisions based on information about a company that isn’t public.

In 2018, Musk tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share (yes, that number is intentional), which of course, impacted the company’s stock. In reality, the potential buyout wasn’t close to going through (to this day, Tesla is still a public company). So, both Musk and Tesla had to pay a $20 million penalty, and Musk stepped down from the board.

Anyway, Elon Musk has now had a “Twitter sitter” for about 4 years, as part of his 2018 deal with the SEC. Honestly, it’s pretty funny that he has a “Twitter sitter.” But it’s not funny that he can impact the stock market (and thus, real people’s finances) by tweeting whatever crosses his mind. Even if he has to be careful when tweeting about Tesla, that doesn’t mean that his posts don’t still impact the market.

Musk is also currently being probed by the SEC because when he first purchased a 9.2% stake in Twitter, he failed to file a form that is required when purchasing over 5% of a company’s shares. Though the public learned of this news on April 4, Musk actually surpassed 5% ownership on March 14, and per SEC rules, he should’ve disclosed that within ten days (he didn’t). Daniel Taylor, a University of Pennsylvania accounting professor, told the Wall Street Journal that this failure to disclose his purchase likely saved Musk more than $143 million.

What other plans does he have for Twitter?

At a TED event the day he announced his $44 billion bid, Musk said he wants to make Twitter’s algorithm and code open source. That means that anyone would be able to access the publicly-available code that powers Twitter and iterate on it.

Several U.S. legislators have called for greater transparency around social media algorithms, especially in the wake of former Facebook employee Frances Haugen’s document leaks, which show that Facebook favors content that’s more likely to incite anger. But, like most things in life, there’s more nuance there. While greater transparency might give users more agency over what content they’re served, there are also security issues that open-sourcing Twitter’s code and algorithm might pose. More on that from one of our great security reporters, Carly Page, here.

At the same event, Musk stated: “The top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter. They’re making the product much worse. If I had a dogecoin for every crypto scam … .”

To combat bot spam, he proposed “authenticating all humans.” While these strategies can help mitigate spam, they can also make it more difficult for marginalized people to speak out. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog post, “Pseudonymity and anonymity are essential to protecting users who may have opinions, identities, or interests that do not align with those in power. For example, policies that require real names on Facebook have been used to push out Native Americans; people using traditional Irish, Indonesian, and Scottish names; Catholic clergy; transgender people; drag queens; and sex workers. Political dissidents may be in grave danger if those in power are able to discover their true identities.”

Still, bots have been Musk’s hill to die on. More on that in our next section…

Is Elon Musk really buying Twitter though? Like, really really?

I heard that the deal is on hold because of bots. What does that mean?

Perhaps our valiant protagonist has finally realized that spending $44 billion on a social platform is more trouble than it’s worth. He’s been very concerned about bots on the platform for a while, as evidenced by his fantasy of verifying all humans on Twitter (it’s as if he doesn’t follow any very good bots).

Twitter estimates that bots make up less than 5% of accounts on the site, but “lame duck” CEO Parag Agrawal said that he doesn’t think this calculation could be verified externally, since it requires use of private company data. Musk replied with a poop emoji.

He followed up his pixelated fecal matter with a question for Agrawal (can’t they just text each other?): “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.” Apparently, advertisers aren’t as concerned as Musk is. For years, Twitter has hedged in its earnings reports that the number of fake accounts may be higher than their data shows, which isn’t that outlandish a disclosure. Wouldn’t Musk have actually read a shareholder letter before buying the whole company?

Musk has said that the deal is “on hold” over spam, though he apparently remains committed to the acquisition. Still, this statement caused stock to drop by 25%. Twitter’s top lawyer and head of policy Vijaya Gadde told staff at an all-hands meeting, according to Bloomberg, that there is “no such thing as a deal being on hold.” He has a contractual obligation to go through with the deal — he can’t just not do it unless he has a really good reason, and according to his contract, having more than 5% of users as bots is not a good enough reason. Speaking of which…

So is he just trying to get out of the deal? Is that even possible?

I mean, technically he can get out of the deal? It seems unlikely, but Musk is a chaos demon, so anything is possible. In any case, it takes a while for these deals to close, so we really have until September or October to make popcorn see what goes down.

According to an SEC filing, Twitter could (in layman’s terms) back out of the deal if they get a better offer, or if the Twitter board votes against the deal. At first, it seemed like the board was opposed to the idea, as they adopted a “poison pill” defense to make it more difficult for Musk to buy the company. But the shareholders seem to still favor the deal.

On Musk’s end, he would violate the SEC agreement if he tweets disparagingly about the company or its representatives. Does sending a poop emoji to Parag count? It doesn’t seem like Twitter wants to get out of the deal as much as Musk (maybe) does, though, so he can essentially tweet whatever he wants (as long as it’s not material information about Tesla — remember his Twitter sitter?)

There’s also a $1 billion termination fee if the deal doesn’t go through, but that’s chump change to this dude.

But is it really about the bots?

Oh, to understand the inner machinations of Elon Musk’s mind. Personally, I’d say he’s full of shit and is using bots as an excuse to back out of the deal — remember how when this all started, he wanted to buy the company because he knew bots were a problem, and he wanted to fix it? He often contradicts himself like this, and it’s not because he’s stupid. He’s being strategic, using his public persona to stir the pot and cause drama. One possibility is that he knows that his back is up against the wall when it comes to getting out of this deal, so he’s basically just being as big an asshole as possible to piss Twitter off and get them to drop the ball.

It also may not be a coincidence that Musk is getting cold feet during a time of macroeconomic upheaval — across the tech industry, companies are staging layoffs left and right, stock prices are dropping and social media competitors like Meta and Snap are cutting costs.

I asked Alex Wilhelm, our resident guy-who-understands-stocks (and editor-in-chief of TechCrunch+), to explain this to me.

He said: “Musk offered to buy Twitter in early April, pushing the value of the company from just under $40 per share, to more than $50. While under its recent record highs set in 2021, the price that Musk agreed to pay for Twitter was a comfortable premium over its then-trading price. Why is the price point controversial now, given that it was above recent lows and below recent highs? Because the Nasdaq 100 has lost around 3,000 points since the start of April, meaning that Musk’s deal was priced at a time when the value of tech stocks was higher than it is today. That fact alone could be pushing Musk to try to reprice the deal through, variously, bullying, tweets, and bullying tweets.”

Is buying Twitter actually a good investment anyway?

Maybe? Maybe not? Musk has said that he “doesn’t care about the economics” of the deal, which is an objectively absurd thing to say about a multi-billion dollar purchase. I feel bad when I buy a jug of almond milk for $5 from CVS when I know it’s like $2 at Aldi, but Aldi is so much further a walk — I digress.

The New York Times obtained Musk’s investment presentation, outlining his plans for Twitter. He wants to cut its reliance on advertising to less than 50%, yet he also wants to quintuple revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028. In 2020, 90% of Twitter’s total revenue came from advertising. I’m no business mogul, but that seems like a tough promise to keep.

Alright, I got the basics. But I still have some questions.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about the Elon Musk-Twitter deal — but, we can use what information we have to put some of the pieces together.

What benefit is there to Twitter going private?

When companies go public (meaning, average people can buy stock in them), they have to answer to their shareholders, who can collectively control the price of the company’s stock. So if Twitter did something that shareholders think is stupid, the stock may drop to reflect that attitude. And a company wants their stock to be high, because, you know, stonks.

Musk famously does not get along with the SEC, which regulates publicly traded companies. So if Twitter were private, Musk could tweet unhinged shit about his role as the owner of Twitter without worrying about being slapped with more regulations.

Former CEO and co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey allegedly told Musk that he believes Twitter could benefit from going private — that way, the platform could have some breathing room to get its act together without the pressure of public stakeholders. Dorsey even tweeted that he believes Musk is the “singular solution” he trusts to operate Twitter.

Or he could take it private just to take it public again. I don’t know. Stonks.

What’s unique about Twitter’s board, and how does that impact the deal?

Twitter’s board doesn’t own that much stock in the company. Founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, who is slated to depart the board, is its largest shareholder with only about 2% of the company. Compared to Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg owns around 13% of the company and sits on the board. So, Musk has commented that Twitter’s board is less aligned with shareholders than other companies.

Remember that Musk does already own 9.2% of Twitter after his purchase a few months ago. So he’s already the company’s largest shareholder, but he’s not on the board yet, because he declined the board seat in order to just buy the company instead. If he had taken the board seat, his contract would have stipulated that he not exceed 14.9% ownership in Twitter. In other words, if he joined the board, he wouldn’t have been allowed to buy the company outright, as he’s trying to do now.

Why is this deal so out of the ordinary in the greater context of the tech sphere?

Elon is the richest man in the world, after all, so if this deal closes, it would be one of the greatest single purchases of a tech company by an individual person ever. Or maybe one of the biggest purchases ever, period? For comparison, this year Microsoft announced its intent to buy Activision Blizzard for $69 billion, which was considered a mammoth deal — and that’s, you know, Microsoft. As opposed to just this one guy.

This deal also gets so much attention because it’s social media — more people use Twitter, care about it, and understand its cultural impact than a less consumer-facing company. If Musk gets his way, his content moderation ideas (or lack thereof) could actually affect us in a tangible way, and we learned the hard way that Twitter can actually influence global politics. Just look at how poorly platforms responded to a terrorist shooting this past week — you think that’s going to get better under an owner who doesn’t believe in permanent bans or much moderation at all?

Also, we care because it’s just so ridiculous. A poop emoji? Really?

Stripe, the payments upstart now valued at $95 billion, has been launching a number of new products to expand beyond the API that helped make its name, to build out its position as a platform for financial services and related business infrastructure. The latest of these is making its debut today: App Marketplace, as the new service is called, is a new offering where Stripe will both provide access to third-party apps, as well as scripts created by app publishers, users, and Stripe itself, that incorporate those apps with Stripe. It potentially represents its biggest leap yet away from payments.

The Marketplace is launching with 50 apps that Stripe’s customers are already using as part of their marketing, payments and business development stacks, such as DocuSign, Dropbox, Intercom, Mailchimp, Ramp, and Xero. There will be more added over time, Stripe tells me.

Initially, scripts incorporating those apps with Stripe will be free to use — the aim is to get some critical mass around usage, so barriers are low — although given it’s a marketplace, and that it will try to encourage more third-parties to build apps for that ecosystem, Stripe might in the future incorporate charging for some of those scripts. Third-party apps that are part of those scripts and are paid services, meanwhile, will charge customers directly if those users are not already subscribers. But as with the scripts themselves, Stripe might also, over time, also bring new payments on to its own platform as well.

And perhaps most interestingly of all, while initially the idea will be to create scripts for some of the most common usages, in theory those scripts can cover any kind of business flow that sits naturally with Stripe, even if it doesn’t involve Stripe services themselves. 

“We have requirement in the app review process that it has to have real business functionality,” Bowen Pan, the head of product for Stripe Apps, said in an interview. “So it can’t just be, say, a quiz app. It has to be business focused. But it doesn’t have to have existing Stripe functionality. It can be a productivity workflow that helps with processing.”

The idea with the App Marketplace, Pan told me, came out of the observations that the company was making about how Stripe products are used: in short, payments do not come in a vacuum but are part of wider business services flows that could involve sales or marketing campaigns, customer support teams, and the issuing of contracts or other agreements.

Up to now, customers typically have used those tools alongside each other, either building manual integrations or never integrating them at all. (If you’ve ever been on a call or interaction with customer support and have found yourself waiting many minutes for responses… this is typically one of the reasons why: they are looking through and updating multiple databases.)

The idea here is to provide ways to help speed all of that up — and of course make it more likely to keep people within the Stripe ecosystem to carry out all business activity.

The launch of the Marketplace is coming on the heels of a few other product launches that Stripe has made in recent months that have taken the company beyond the services that helped to make its name, namely an API that was largely used to make it easier for merchants and others taking card payments online to do so (even the company’s name, Stripe, is a reference to the magnetic strip on the back of payments cards). That has included making long-awaited strides into cryptocurrency; Connections, a Plaid-like service to help customers pull in financial data from bank accounts; and most recently an ETL product to funnel and analyze Stripe data more effectively in Snowflake and AWS Redshift wareshouses.

To be fair, the company has for years been making small moves to expand it beyond payments into adjacent areas like tax calculations, money advances, and even business incorporation. This new wave of tools however represents very large financial infrastructure plays that speak to how the company is looking to fully fill out its outsized valuation, these days perhaps an even more important task, given what is happening both the public and private funding markets.

Nowports, an automated digital freight forwarder in Latin America, has raised $150 million in a Series C funding round which values the company at $1.1 billion.

For the unacquainted, digital freight forwarders use digital tools that improve communication and efficiencies in the shipping process, among other things, to help shipments get where they need to go in a timely manner. With so much attention on supply chain issues since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of an efficient supply chain is more apparent than ever. To quote my colleague Anna Heim, digitizing freight forwarding is a global challenge because the sector still lacks transparency and efficiency. Latin American startups have a steeper hill to climb, but this also drives them to innovate and help each other in interesting ways.

Nowport’s raise — led by SoftBank Latin America Fund — comes just six months after the Monterey, Mexico-based startup announced it had secured $60 million in a Series B funding round led by Tiger Global Management. It also marks Nowports’ third equity raise in less than one year’s time, and brings its total funding to over $240 million since its 2018 inception. The company had also raised $16 million in a Series A funding round that TechCrunch reported on in July of 2021. 

The startup’s valuation jump is a huge one, considering that Nowport was valued at $80 million in March of 2021, according to CEO and co-founder Alfonso De los Ríos. In the first quarter of 2022, the company saw its revenue climb by “more than 12x” year-over-year, he said, while achieving a 10x growth year-over-year in containers shipped and customers served.

Nowports raised its initial seed round in 2019 after graduating from Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 batch with a mission to innovate the freight forwarding industry by helping companies — with an emphasis on SMEs — improve the import process. As former TC reporter Jonathan Shieber put it, the company was “sett[ing] itself up to be the Flexport of Latin America.” Its software and services track freight shipments from ports to destinations across Latin America. Over time, it has expanded its offerings and now also automates insurance policies for, and provides inventory financing, to its clients. 

Put simply, Nowports aims to streamline the import and export processes of Latin American companies and improve the visibility of their supply chains with “valuable information.” 

The company’s inventory financing tool — released last year — is designed to give its customers the ability to acquire more merchandise for import and pay for it later. The end goal is to help companies increase their imports and exports with fintech. 

“They can get faster financing with Nowports since we can use our shipping history and preloaded information to approve them,” said De los Ríos. “We started with Inventory Financing at the end of last year and have plans to offer it in every country we work on by the end of this year.”

The move, in addition to offering cargo insurance, is part of Nowport’s goal to serve as a one-stop shop for the companies it serves.

In the first quarter of 2022, Nowports started operations in Panama and expanded into Concepcion, Chile, and Medellin, Colombia. Today, the startup has 10 active offices in seven countries, including Mexico, Peru, Brazil and Panama. It has more than 500 employees.

The company plans to use its new capital to, naturally, do more hiring with an emphasis on engineering for technological development. It also plans to expand its presence in countries where it already operates and to open offices in more cities. The first planned openings will take place in Brazil, Mexico and Chile.

Also participating in the latest round were Tiger Global, Foundation Capital, Monashees, Broadhaven Ventures, Mouro Capital and Base10 Partners. Daniel Vogel of Bitso, Ricardo Amper of Incode, Alex Bouaziz of Deel and Roger Laughlin of Kavak also participated in the round.

“We were not expecting to start Series C that quickly, but we were growing at giant steps, now competing in the top five countries for maritime trade, joining the fintech environment, and with a strong team,” De los Ríos told TechCrunch. “We needed a new investment round to expand our financing services and create a robust platform. We are confident we can revolutionize the supply chain faster with this new capital.”

Juan Franck, managing partner of SoftBank Latin America Fund, said that Nowports has all the characteristics the firm is looking for in a startup: “technology at its core, a promising business model, exceptional founders, and a solution to a complex challenge, with great potential for transformation, starting with Latin America.”

He is also impressed by the company’s use of artificial intelligence, big data and IoT to improve the import and export chain.

“We believe the investment will help Nowports to consolidate its presence in the Brazilian market and create new services and solutions, becoming a true reference in innovation in Latin America,” Franck added.