Connect with us

Technology

Daily Crunch: Microsoft dumps Yammer and makes Viva Engage its preferred enterprise social platform

Published

on

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here.

Happy V-Day! What happens when you poll crypto traders about whether liking crypto was an “attractive feature”? Well,  4 out of 5 think that’s hella sexy, and 70% said they’d be more likely to go on a date with them if they were into the old ’chains. Our bet is that there may be some confirmation bias in there, because if you were to wave your Ledger wallet at Christine or Haje on a first date, that’d also 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 keep things immutable.

Want a free Disrupt pass? That can be arranged for folks who choose to volunteer at our Early Stage event!

Today, we bring you a great book 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 available again. The book features candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis De Veaux and many more, highlighting the practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after.

Christine and Haje

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 chief 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 confusion and made it challenging to drive 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 more funding calling: In PhonePe’s quest to raise $1 billion, an investor group that included Tiger Global and Ribbit Capital invested another $100 million into “India’s most valuable fintech startup,” which is valued at $12 billion, Manish writes.

Startups and VC

It’s always nice to have a lot of capital to invest, but managing a large new fund can be even more advantageous right now given that many later-stage companies that put off fundraising last year will likely be in the market come hell or high water in 2023, Connie reports. Buyout firm Bain Capital just closed 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 great idea into a viable startup takes patience, perseverance and more than a little luck. But when an idea originates in a lab — whether it’s AI, biotech, robotics or another deep tech research project — things quickly become tougher and much more expensive. Pae Wu, general 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 more for you:

10 years of fintech failures: 5 innovations that didn’t live up to the hype

Red and blue darts in wall around red, white and blue dart board

Image Credits: Jeffrey Coolidge (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The tech industry (and the media that covers it) thrives on hype cycles.

Sometimes, relentless cheerleading can bear 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 back over the last decade, TC+ contributor Grant Easterbrook recaps five trends that flopped and the underpinning factors that prevented them from changing fintech “in the way the founders originally intended.”

Three more from the TC+ team, complete with a smattering of retro tunes to keep you going:

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

It’s easy to come away from a meeting not having caught every bit of what was discussed. That is where Otter.ai comes in with OtterPilot, its new AI meeting assistant. Aisha reports that this feature automatically sends an AI-generated summary of meeting topics to attendees with hyperlinks to key moments. It will also capture slide presentations and insert those in the summary, too. You can now safely get up and use the bathroom during your next virtual meeting and miss nothing.

And we have five more for you:

Technology

Tesla more than tripled its Austin gigafactory workforce in 2022

Published

on

Tesla’s 2,500-acre manufacturing hub in Austin, Texas tripled its workforce last year, according to the company’s annual compliance report filed with county officials. Bloomberg first reported on the news.

The report filed with Travis County’s Economic Development Program shows that Tesla increased its Austin workforce from just 3,523 contingent and permanent employees in 2021 to 12,277 by the end of 2022. Bloomberg reports that just over half of Tesla’s workers reside in the county, with the average full-time employee earning a salary of at least $47,147. Outside of Tesla’s factory, the average salary of an Austin worker is $68,060, according to data from ZipRecruiter.

TechCrunch was unable to acquire a copy of the report, so it’s not clear if those workers are all full-time. If they are, Tesla has hired a far cry more full-time employees than it is contracted to do. According to the agreement between Tesla and Travis County, the company is obligated to create 5,001 new full-time jobs over the next four years.

The contract also states that Tesla must invest about $1.1 billion in the county over the next five years. Tesla’s compliance report shows that the automaker last year invested $5.81 billion in Gigafactory Texas, which officially launched a year ago at a “Cyber Rodeo” event. In January, Tesla notified regulators that it plans to invest another $770 million into an expansion of the factory to include a battery cell testing site and cathode and drive unit manufacturing site. With that investment will come more jobs.

Tesla’s choice to move its headquarters to Texas and build a gigafactory there has helped the state lead the nation in job growth. The automaker builds its Model Y crossover there and plans to build its Cybertruck in Texas, as well. Giga Texas will also be a model for sustainable manufacturing, CEO Elon Musk has said. Last year, Tesla completed the first phase of what will become “the largest rooftop solar installation in the world,” according to the report, per Bloomberg. Tesla has begun on the second phase of installation, but already there are reports of being able to see the rooftop from space. The goal is to generate 27 megawatts of power.

Musk has also promised to turn the site into an “ecological paradise,” complete with a boardwalk and a hiking/biking trail that will open to the public. There haven’t been many updates on that front, and locals have been concerned that the site is actually more of an environmental nightmare that has led to noise and water pollution. The site, located at the intersection of State Highway 130 and Harold Green Road, east of Austin, is along the Colorado River and could create a climate catastrophe if the river overflows.

The site of Tesla’s gigafactory has also historically been the home of low-income households and has a large population of Spanish-speaking residents. It’s not clear if the jobs at the factory reflect the demographic population of the community in which it resides.

Continue Reading

Technology

Launch startup Stoke Space rolls out software tool for complex hardware development

Published

on

Stoke Space, a company that’s developing a fully reusable rocket, has unveiled a new tool to let hardware companies track the design, testing and integration of parts. The new tool, Fusion, is targeting an unsexy but essential aspect of the hardware workflow.

It’s a solution born out of “ubiquitous pain in the industry,” Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa said in a recent interview. The current parts tracking status quo is marked by cumbersome, balkanized solutions built on piles of paperwork and spreadsheets. Many of the existing tools are not optimized “for boots on the ground,” but for finance or procurement teams, or even the C-suite, Lapsa explained.

In contrast, Fusion is designed to optimize simple inventory transactions and parts organization, and it will continue to track parts through their lifespan: as they are built into larger assemblies and go through testing. In an extreme example, such as hardware failures, Fusion will help teams connect anomalous data to the exact serial numbers of the parts involved.

Image credit: Stoke Space

“If you think about aerospace in general, there’s a need and a desire to be able to understand the part pedigree of every single part number and serial number that’s in an assembly,” Lapsa said. “So not only do you understand the configuration, you understand the history of all of those parts dating back to forever.”

While Lapsa clarified that Fusion is the result of an organic in-house need for better parts management – designing a fully reusable rocket is complicated, after all – turning it into a sell-able product was a decision that the Stoke team made early on. It’s a notable example of a rocket startup generating pathways for revenue while their vehicle is still under development.

Fusion offers particular relevance to startups. Many existing tools are designed for production runs – not the fast-moving research and development environment that many hardware startups find themselves, Lapsa added. In these environments, speed and accuracy are paramount.

Brent Bradbury, Stoke’s head of software, echoed these comments.

“The parts are changing, the people are changing, the processes are changing,” he said. “This lets us capture all that as it happens without a whole lot of extra work.”

Continue Reading

Technology

Amid a boom in AI accelerators, a UC Berkeley-focused outfit, House Fund, swings open its doors

Published

on

Companies at the forefront of AI would naturally like to stay at the forefront, so it’s no surprise they want to stay close to smaller startups that are putting some of their newest advancements to work.

Last month, for example, Neo, a startup accelerator founded by Silicon Valley investor Ali Partovi, announced that OpenAI and Microsoft have offered to provide free software and advice to companies in a new track focused on artificial intelligence.

Now, another Bay Area outfit — House Fund, which invests in startups with ties to UC Berkeley — says it is launching an AI accelerator and that, similarly, OpenAI, Microsoft, Databricks, and Google’s Gradient Ventures are offering participating startups free and early access to tech from their companies, along with mentorship from top AI founders and executives at these companies.

We talked with House Fund founder Jeremy Fiance over the weekend to get a bit more color about the program, which will replace a broader-based accelerator program House Fund has run and whose alums include an additive manufacturing software company, Dyndrite, and the managed app development platform Chowbotics, whose most recent round in January brought the company’s total funding to more than $60 million.

For founders interested in learning more, the new AI accelerator program runs for two months, kicking off in early July and ending in early September. Six or so companies will be accepted, with the early application deadline coming up next week on April 13th. (The final application deadline is on June 1.) As for the time commitment involved across those two months, every startup could have a different experience, says Fiance. “We’re there when you need us, and we’re good at staying out of the way.”

There will be the requisite kickoff retreat to spark the program and founders to get to know one another. Candidates who are accepted will also have access to some of UC Berkeley’s renowned AI professors, including Michael Jordan, Ion Stoica, and Trevor Darrell. And they can opt into dinners and events in collaboration with these various constituents.

As for some of the financial dynamics, every startup that goes through the program will receive a $1 million investment on a $10 million post-money SAFE note. Importantly, too, as with the House Fund’s venture dollars, its AI accelerator is seeking startups that have at least one Berkeley-affiliated founder on the co-founding team. That includes alumni, faculty, PhDs, postdocs, staff, students, dropouts, and other affiliates.

There is no demo day. Instead, says Fiance, founders will receive “directed, personal introductions” to the VCs who best fit with their startups.

Given the buzz over AI, the new program could supercharge House Fund, the venture organization, which is already growing fast. Fiance launched it in 2016 with just $6 million and it now manages $300 million in assets, including on behalf of Berkeley Endowment Management Company and the University of California.

At the same time, the competition out there is fierce and growing more so by the day.

Though OpenAI has offered to partner with House Fund, for example, the San Francisco-based company announced its own accelerator back in November. Called Converge, the cohort was to be made up of 10 or so founders who received $1 million each and admission to five weeks of office hours, workshops and other events that ended and that received their funding from the OpenAI Startup Fund.

Y Combinator, the biggest accelerator in the world, is also oozing with AI startups right now, all of them part of a winter class that will be talking directly with investors this week via demo days that are taking place tomorrow, April 5th, and on Thursday.

Continue Reading

Trending