Voodoo, a French mobile apps and games publisher, has acquired BeReal for €500 million.
As part of the acquisition, BeReal co-founder and CEO Alexis Barreyat will leave the company after a transition period.
Aymeric Roffé, the CEO of Wizz, one of Voodoo’s social media apps, will take over as CEO of BeReal.
On BeReal, users receive a push notification each day prompting them to post they’re up within a two-minute window.
“Voodoo has a proven track record of driving significant growth in mobile apps,” said BeReal founder Alexis Barreyat, in the press release.
Two years ago, Prolific Machines unveiled its technology for a unique manufacturing approach to grow cells for industries, including cultivated meat.
In addition, cell growth is hard to optimize because it’s not in a format that machines can understand.
“For the last few decades, the way that we’ve been controlling cells is with molecules,” Kent said.
We add these molecules into the bioreactors and hope for the best.”Prolific Machines’ protein manufacturing bioreactor (Image credit: Prolific Machines) Image Credits: Prolific Machines /Prolific Machines believes it has a way of transitioning away from these molecules to something better: light.
It includes convertible notes and brings Prolific Machines’ total funding to date to $86.5 million.
For Informatica investors, it was the opposite: The price was too low to warrant selling — they wanted more, more, more — and their stock also dropped, down a similar amount over the same period.
The biggest by far of that bunch was the $28 billion deal to buy Slack at the end of 2020.
Informatica is also far smaller than Salesforce, making its potential revenue bump to Marc Benioff’s company modest.
The ace up Informatica’s sleeve is that while its total revenue growth is slow, one important segment of its revenues is expanding quickly.
If we were to compare Informatica cloud net-new ARR that it expects this year instead, the percentage becomes even smaller.
Tesla is laying off thousands of employees as it tries to simultaneously cut costs and boost productivity, according to an internal email sent to staff by CEO Elon Musk, Electrek and Bloomberg News reported.
The electric automaker is cutting “more than 10%” of its global headcount, Musk said in the email.
Tesla finished 2023 with over 140,000 employees, meaning the cuts could impact more than 14,000 people.
The company has warned investors that sales growth could be “notably lower” in 2024 than its stated goal of 50% growth each year.
This will enable us to be lean, innovative and hungry for the next growth phase cycle,” Musk wrote.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!
This week, we’re looking at how two fintech companies serving the underserved are faring, and more!
The big storyPayJoy is an example of a company with positive unit economics and a mission to help the underserved.
It last raised a $50 million Series C funding round in 2021.
And with fintech funding on the decline, this could perhaps partly explain YC’s lack of LatAm interest.
Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding round just five years after its inception.
This funding round comes as a bit of a surprise as large rounds have been few and far between in France.
Before Pigment, Crespo worked for VC firm Index Ventures and Google.
We’ve developed a lot of modules that enable us to serve HR teams, supply chain teams and sales teams,” Crespo said.
Like many software companies, Pigment has also added AI features.
Crucially, Tesla shipped fewer cars than it did in the first quarter of 2023, meaning this was the first year-over-year drop in sales in three years.
Production was also down year-over-year, which Tesla attributed to switching to making the new Model 3, as well as the other disruptions.
These drops come just two months after Tesla warned that sales growth could be “notably lower” in 2024 as it comes off a successful 2023 fueled by price cuts.
Bloomberg News reported last month that Tesla curtailed output at its Shanghai factory as a result of slower sales growth in the country.
Tesla tried to pull a few tricks at the end of the quarter to boost sales, as it usually does.
The deal is interesting on a number of fronts including the round’s structure and how Skyflow has been impacted by growth of AI.
The new capital comes after Skyflow expanded its data privacy business to support new AI technologies last year.
(In its latest news dump, Skyflow said that it expanded its support of China and that market’s particular data rules.)
This Skyflow round slots neatly into several trends we’ve observed recently.
The explosive growth in AI is creating healthy businesses for LLM infrastructure and support companies.
The 13-year-old cash-back startup looks to make its public debut after turning profitable and recording impressive revenue growth in 2023.
The company reported $320 million in revenue in 2023, up 52% from 2022 when it produced $210 million in revenue.
Ibotta’s gross profits grew 68% from 2022, $164.5 million, to 2023, $276 million.
According to the S-1, this partnership plays a big role in Ibotta’s revenue boost.
“Our revenue growth significantly accelerated with the addition of new publishers to the IPN,” according to the S-1.
Nvidia could be primed to be the next AWS There are a lot of parallels in the two companies' growth trajectoriesNvidia and Amazon Web Services, the lucrative cloud arm of Amazon, have a surprising amount in common.
But AWS growth has begun to slow down, even as Nvidia’s takes off.
The question is whether Nvidia can sustain that growth to become a long-term revenue powerhouse like AWS has become for Amazon.
The short-term financial outlookAs the above chart notes, Nvida’s revenue growth has been astronomical in recent quarters.
Much like AWS, Nvidia will face stiffer competition eventually, but it controls so much of the market right now, it can afford to cede some.
