Former web3 gaming founders raise $2.5M for their NFT marketplace to retain users even when there ‘isn’t money to be made’Even though NFT sales volume is still down 88% from 2022 all time-highs (and down 38% year-to-date), Pallet Exchange is building a new type of NFT marketplace focused on user retention.
“It’s cool if there’s a lot of financial innovations happening, but at the same time we saw there’s pain points from a user experience,” Li said.
It’s using social media tactics like in-app messaging that lets people interested in the same NFT collections engage with each other on its marketplace.
That’s when Seiyans, an Sei-based NFT collection fueled by meme culture, capitulated the new blockchain and marketplace into the talk of the crypto world.
Down the line, Pallet plans to look into working with big partners in the art marketplace and create a separate marketplace for those creators.
There is perhaps no bigger jump for a startup to make than from the incubatory seed stage to its Series A round.
Enter Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Alex Kayyal, who is coming to TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 to discuss how startups can avoid common pitfalls on the path to raising their own Series A.
Not that raising an A round was ever easy — how many times have we discussed a Series A crunch at TechCrunch over the years?
And, of course, as with all TechCrunch Early Stage events, he’ll answer questions directly.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024?
Lago, developer of an open-source billing platform, has picked up the funding across two rounds of funding it’s revealing to coincide with its official launch.
The Lago doing business today as a billing platform got its start in a very classical startup way: it had no idea that it would be a billing platform.
There are even a number of providers already pursuing an open-source approach, including FossBilling, ChargeBee, Kill Bill, AppDirect’s jBilling and the imaginatively named “Open Source Billing.” (Why beat around the bush?)
So it’s an it’s still an unsolved problem.” In Lago’s view, offering open source tools is that best solution to meet a variety of needs and ideas.
For some of those users, the open source ethos also lines up with what they are hoping to espouse themselves as businesses.
The past couple of years have gone from a few select companies to seemingly everyone in and around warehouse robotics looking to tackle the problem.
And then there’s TruckBot.
Instead, TruckBot sat atop a conveyer belt.
In fact, TruckBot is actually part conveyer belt.
“TruckBot is a game-changer for warehouses looking to streamline their operations and reduce costs,” the company notes.” The dock door is the largest bottleneck in our supply chain and unloading trailers is back-breaking work.
Creators are frustrated but energized as TikTok ban gains momentum TikTok creators and their followers want their concerns taken seriously — and plan to push backThe bill that could ban TikTok took one step closer to becoming a law on Wednesday.
Some lawmakers’ offices reported that they were being overloaded with calls from angry TikTok users, a situation that was parodied by late night host Stephen Colbert.
“This time around is just so going much faster within the legislative process,” Jules Terpak, a gen Z tech commentator on TikTok, told TechCrunch.
Though there is no evidence of the CCP spying on TikTok, there has been evidence of ByteDance accessing TikTok data without authorization.
My understanding of the push to ban TikTok pic.twitter.com/KMXtWuFbS5 — Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) March 13, 2024Phillips has been frustrated by condescending attitudes toward TikTokers.
Agility’s Digit wasn’t the only humanoid holding court at Modex in Atlanta this week.
On the opposite end of the Georgia World Congress Center, Reflex Robotics, a younger and smaller startup, was drawing its own crowd.
Passersby requested something from the Reflex robot, and it spring into action, grabbing the item off the shelf (it didn’t hurt that the company was giving out free food and beverage).
The system has a wheeled base, which is perfectly effective for navigating these kinds of layouts.
He adds that the current timeline involves having 10 to 20 Reflex robots in the world, followed by “hundreds” next year.
Earlier this year, Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor launched a new company, Sierra with the goal of building these flexible AI agents.
“We believe that somewhere between 70% and 90% of interactions are going to be through AI agents in the future.
And Ultimate has done a really nice job solving up to 80% of interactions via their AI agents,” Eggemeier told TechCrunch.
He says that while the plan is to incorporate Ultimate technology into the Zendesk platform, they will continue to offer stand-alone products to other companies.
Ultimate launched in 2017 and raised $27 million, per Crunchbase.
The goal was straightforward but ambitious: upend the cement industry.
Furno’s smaller kilns fly in the face of trends in the cement industry today, which has been chasing ever larger equipment.
By building smaller kilns, Furno is hoping to lower capital expenditures through mass production and lower operating expenses through energy efficiency.
And because Furno’s kilns are smaller, they could allow cement to be remade right on a construction site.
Already, Furno has captured the attention of ready-mix concrete companies, which have to buy cement from vertically integrated companies.
TikTok ban: What’s going on with the proposed bill in Congress Congress could force TikTok to part with its Chinese parent companyTikTok faces an uncertain fate in the U.S. once again.
The bill, which many of its detractors reasonably describe as a “ban,” would force ByteDance to sell TikTok within six months for the app to continue operating here.
The campaign to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. company originated with an executive order during the Trump administration.
Trump’s threats against the company culminated in a plan to force TikTok to sell its U.S. operations to Oracle in late 2020.
We may learn more next week if senators begin weighing in on the prospect of creating their own version of the House bill.
When electric-vehicle startup Telo Trucks announced its pint-sized pickup, people predictably went nuts.
Fleet customers went nuts, too.
“There’s this unspoken thing where fleet companies that do work in cities can no longer buy small trucks,” Jason Marks, Telo Truck’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
“We will still want to address the early users, and we want to intermingle that with delivering to bigger fleet customers at the same time.”With that opportunity comes more funding.
Rivian is notably similar in that it’s chasing both consumers and fleet customers, though its production ramp is radically different.
