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Hello and welcome to the Daily Crunch on January 27, 2022! Today’s news is a pretty positive summary. New fund? Oh yeah. Big rounds? You bet. We even have new unicorns to discuss. On the other hand, the IPO market seems more ossified than open. – Alex
The TechCrunch Top 3
- Facebook’s stablecoin bet is proving unstable: So much for Facebook – ahem, Meta – taking over the blockchain world with its own stablecoin. Diem’s assets, for which Meta was a key member of the consortium, are reportedly being sold for a few hundred million dollars. Cheap? No. But also a fraction of the hopes that the project once had.
- The new Seed, Series A and Series B benchmarks: How far have the standards shifted for early-stage startups in terms of revenue? The good news is that we have the data. The bad news is that most of the time it’s what you’d expect – startups are accumulating larger, later rounds with less revenue than before. Growth, it turned out, was the more surprising delta to study.
- New funds! TechCrunch today published notes on a number of new funds worth exploring. This week in fintech now has a fundand Portugal’s Indico Capital Partners 50 million euros for his ocean tech fund. There are others. The South Korean Internet company Naver Group has a $100 million fund for what TechCrunch calls the “Metaverse creators.” It’s amazing how quickly this word became ubiquitous and thus passé.
Startups/VC
We’ve got a lot of mega rounds to cover today, but first some words of warning: It the IPO climate seems to have frozen.
What this means for companies like Esusu, who just raised $130 millionor Ascend, the just raised $280 million in equity and debt for its BNPL-like approach to insurance is that there’s a mountain of private market wealth out there that needs an exit. The only question is when these checks can be cashed. And when they get back more than a dollar per dollar invested.
IPO issues or not, the crypto world is busy raising more outside capital. A particular play in the blockchain world is infrastructure overhead, building products that support other products. This is often a good bet. Twilio is an example of how the infra game shows trumps. AWS is another. So if another crypto backend player how Fireblocks increases its valuation to $8 billion, we know what’s going on. (Speaking of crypto, don’t forget the upcoming tax question or the startups working to keep people off the government’s naughty list.)
And now our regular financing round overview:
- Quan wants to fight employee churn: From a business perspective, there are two types of employee attrition: regretted churn and unrepented churn. The former is when someone you wanted to fire does you a favor and the latter when someone you wanted to fire does you a favor. Quan, which has just raised capital, aims to address the former by what we report bridging the “gap between engagement surveys and wellbeing perks.”
- Bloss is building a business for expectant parents: With birth rates falling in many parts of the world, it is clear that we are in a new era of parenting. A time when there is more choice than standard. Mere wants to network expectant parents with experts, which makes sense since babies are not exactly born with a manual. The company just started a pre-seed round.
- Parthean will teach you personal finance whether you like it or not: It’s a bit unfair, but the idea behind Parthean is that most people aren’t great with money and need help. So, it will teach users concepts and then prompt them to take a specific action toward financial health. Natasha’s story here is great and worth reading if you’re curious about the intersection of edtech and fintech. The company just raised $1.1 million.
- The.com is a website builder with a great URL: Short URLs were all the hype back when you had to have a .com or live a life away from the consumer limelight. Things have changed since then. But The.com takes us back to the 90’s with its great name and product: website building. But unlike the template-oriented builders of the past, this time the company uses “blocks”. As someone with both websites and no programming knowledge, this appeals to me.
- The Vets is a bet you want the vet to come to you: With $40 million in new capital, The Vets aims to make pet care an at-home affair. As someone who has spent far too much time in the last year standing in front of their local vet waiting for a certain pup to finish their check-up while he alternately burns in the summer and freezes in the winter, I love the idea.
And there was more. France’s Sigfox, which has raised more than $300 million, is dead. A Quizup founder build an MMOand PortalOne Raised $60 million for its “immersive” gaming platform. Furious! What a day!
Dear Sophie, 3 questions about immigration and naturalization
Photo credit: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Dear Sophie,
My F-1 OPT expires this June. My employer agreed to enroll me in the H-1B lottery in March.
What are my options if I am not selected in the lottery?
—Gritty Grad
Dear Sophie,
I am in the US on an L-1A visa which will be exhausted later this year. My wife was with me the whole time on an L-2. Can my wife apply for H-1B this year?
Would she have to leave the country to activate it?
— Helpful husband
Dear Sophie,
I have a 10 year green card that expires later this year. I have been married to a US citizen for 11 years but we are in the process of divorcing.
Can I apply for US citizenship after my divorce?
-New Year New Life
(TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead. Here you can sign up.)
BigTech Inc.
- LG Energy Solution goes public: The IPO market is closed, but there are always exceptions. Such is the case with EV battery maker LG. For obvious reasons — the global auto industry is racing toward an all-electric future as fast as its aging leaders can. And all these cars will need batteries. The company is now worth just over $98 billion.
- Messenger updates its E2E encryption: As governments around the world continue to try to find enough backbone to make the comically bad decision to ban encryption, Meta continues with its work to make its messenger service more secure. Well!
- And if you’ve been longing to pay for yet another streaming service, that’s the good news Disney+ is coming to 42 more countries later this year.
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