Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Monday show, in which we take a look back at the weekend and what’s ahead in the week.
We’re coming to the end of earnings season, which means that there are just a few weeks left in the first quarter.
With spring in the air, here’s what we got into this morning:
Late-stage VCs may be preventing their startups from going public in 2024 Founders might have unintentionally given their VCs too much power to block an IPOWhile some investors are loudly bemoaning that the IPO window can’t stay shut forever, other VCs themselves are actually part of the problem.
It’s a common term for late-stage investors agreeing to pay higher prices for their stake to boost a startup’s valuation.
When late-stage startups raised at sky-high valuations in 2021 they may not have realized how much power they were giving their late-stage investors if the market cooled, which it did.
“People confuse up and to the right, with a god-given right,” Hinkle said.
He added that there is always a lot more friction between investors and startups about the decision to IPO than investors would like to admit.
Sensor Tower, a leading app analytics firm, is acquiring rival Data.ai in a move that consolidates the mobile intelligence industry, creating a powerhouse that could dominate the sector and provide aggressively competitive insights into the app economy.
Sensor Tower didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal but said Bain Capital and Riverwood Capital are providing credit-based financing.
Data.ai had secured over three times the amount of funding compared to Sensor Tower, according to Crunchbase.
Data.ai had raised over $157 million over various rounds, whereas Sensor Tower had raised just $46 million.
Sensor Tower issued an apology in 2020 and said the company had taken the route it did to stay competitive.
Elon Musk’s xAI has open-sourced the base code of Grok AI model, but without any training code.
In a blog post, xAI said that the model wasn’t tuned for any particular application such as using it for conversations.
Last week, Musk noted on X that xAI intended to open-source the Grok model this week.
Some AI-powered tool makers are already talking about using Grok in their solutions.
Yep, thanks to @elonmusk and xAI team for open-sourcing the base model for Grok.
Arjun Sethi speaks with the confidence of someone who knows more than other people, or else who knows that sounding highly confident can shape perception.
Namely, if Termina is so good, why are Sethi and Tribe giving other investment firms a way to better compete?
Relatedly, why should other investors trust Termina, which ingests its customers’ data to improve over time?
This may prove doubly true given Termina’s ties to Tribe Capital.
Among these is Alex Chee, who cofounded MessageMe with Sethi, joined him at Social Capital, and subsequently co-founded both Tribe and Termina with him.
Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter recapping noteworthy happenings in tech over the past few days.
This week, TechCrunch viewed leaked documents out of SpaceX showing some questionable practices related to employee stock options.
X CEO Elon Musk announced that he would open source Grok, X’s AI-powered chatbot meant to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Grok — developed by Musk’s AI startup, xAI — was released last year, armed with features such as access to “real-time” information on X and views undeterred by “politically correct” norms.
On Found, Becca and Dom spoke with Rebecca Hu, the CEO and co-founder of Glacier, an AI robotics company that’s building robots to accurately sort recycling.
India will lower import taxes on certain electric vehicles for companies committing to invest at least $500 million and setting up a local manufacturing facility within three years, a move that could potentially bolster Tesla’s plans to enter the South Asian market.
Firms meeting these requirements will be allowed to import 8,000 EVs a year at a reduced import duty of 15% on cars costing $35,000 and above.
India currently levies a tax of 70% to 100% on imported cars depending on their value.
The decision could pave the way for Tesla to enter India, as the Elon Musk-led company has been in talks with the government to lower import duties on its electric cars for years.
The move also aligns with India’s goal to boost the adoption of EVs and reduce its dependence on oil imports, with the country setting a target of achieving 30% electric vehicle sales by 2030.
Microsoft has revealed that it too will allow business customers to transfer data out of its Azure cloud infrastructure with no so-called “egress fees” attached, following hot on the heels of similar moves by cloud rivals AWS and Google.
The latter of these announced it was ditching egress fees in January, followed by AWS earlier this month.
Similar to rivals including AWS, Microsoft did already allow customers to transfer 100GB of data out of Azure each month for free.
This is notable, because a lot of companies will want to use some Azure services, without having to go all-in on it.
So data transfers from other Azure services, such as the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN), will still include the standard charges.
SpaceX is continuing to make progress on the development of Starship, the largest rocket ever built, with the third test flight Thursday accomplishing considerably more than the previous two tests.
The 400-foot-tall Starship rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southeastern Texas at 8:25 a.m. local time.
Although SpaceX has been developing Starship for years, this is only the third time the company has attempted an orbital mission.
The hot-staging technique was performed for the first time, ever, during the second Starship test flight last November.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk congratulated the team on X, saying, “Starship reached orbital velocity!”Starship reached orbital velocity!
Instagram is working on a feature that would allow you to let others put a ‘Spin’ on your ReelInstagram is working on a “Spins” feature for Reels, its short-form video TikTok clone, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
The feature, which was first spotted by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, would allow other users to swap out the text or audio in your Reels.
The feature could be used as a way for users to start trends by creating templates that other people can then put their own creative spin on.
#Instagram keeps working on “Spins” for #Reels 👀 ℹ️ Allow people to swap out text or audio in your Reel.
If released, the new feature would give Reels users and viewers access to a functionality that isn’t available on TikTok.
