Kiki World, a beauty startup launched last year, wants consumers to co-create products and co-own the company with the help of web3 technology.
Kiki co-founder Jana Bobosikova said she believes that being a loyal user of a brand in the Web 2.0 world could be a net negative experience.
Kiki is flipping that model by allowing its community members to vote on the features they want before the beauty products are made.
Although members’ product votes are recorded on Ethereum, Bobosikova said some participants don’t need to know they are taking action on blockchain.
But, as Simpson pointed out, Kiki has plans to eventually expand beyond the world of beauty.
Ford announced Thursday that it’s delaying the production of two electric vehicles, a next-generation EV pickup and a three-row EV SUV.
Most recently, that startup mentality was on display with the Mustang Mach-E, Ford’s all-electric crossover.
The result was a crossover that has helped Ford claim second place in U.S. EV sales for several quarters in a row.
And don’t forget the original Ford assembly line, which while not a product, was definitely a product of entrepreneurial thinking.
Ford has excelled at those tasks: The Mustang Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning are by most accounts not just excellent EVs, but excellent vehicles overall.
Data transformation and optimization — tasks that many, if not most, large enterprises deal with — aren’t easy.
The result was Coalesce, a San Francisco-based company building a suite of data transformation services, apps and tools.
“The data transformation layer has long been the largest bottleneck in analytics,” Petrossian, Coalesce’s CEO, told TechCrunch.
Coalesce’s response is a platform that standardizes data while automating the more repetitive, mundane data transformation processes.
That sort of vendor lock-in could be an anathema to expansion, especially given that Coalesce isn’t the only data transformation tool vendor in town.
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.
Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the company announced on Tuesday.
Artifact will no longer operate as a standalone app, and its proprietary AI-powered personalization technology will be integrated across Yahoo, including the Yahoo News app in the coming months.
Although Artifact started off as a simple news app, the end result seemed more like a Twitter replacement.
Artifact’s technology surfaces content users want to see and becomes more attuned to their interests over time.
As a result, users receive a personalized feed of news stories that they want to read.
ChowNow snaps up YC-backed POS platform Cuboh and is laying off staffChowNow, the online ordering platform and marketing service for local restaurants, acquired Cuboh, a Y Combinator-backed point-of-sale (POS) platform that consolidates all orders from delivery apps into one place.
This marks ChowNow’s first acquisition, which will help strengthen its POS integration solution and help restaurants tackle orders across multiple services.
Meanwhile, Cuboh’s entire 30-person team — including marketing, sales, product and engineering — is transitioning to ChowNow.
Starting next week, restaurant owners can access a newly launched bundle, “ChowNow + Cuboh,” for $275 per month.
“It’s getting back to the longer-term product vision of what we’re building, of being the only platform restaurants need for their entire takeout business,” Webb said.
Amazon has been fined in Poland for misleading consumers about the conclusion of sales contracts on its online marketplace.
For Amazon, the conclusion of a sales contract only occurs once it has sent information about the actual shipment.
“Thus, Amazon misleads consumers as to the moment of conclusion of the sales contract,” the authority wrote [in Polish; this is a machine translation].
It also found the e-commerce giant failed to provide information about the “Delivery Guarantee” in the purchase confirmation sent to shoppers.
Amazon was contacted for comment on the sanction but at the time of writing it had not responded.
Nsave, a fintech based in Geneva making banking in Switzerland accessible to people in countries at war or those with unstable banking sectors or facing high inflation, has raised $4 million seed funding.
Amer Baroudi and Abdallah AbuHashem co-founded nsave in 2021 from lived experiences.
“And then based on the risk scores, you might be prompted into different streams of questions or enhanced due-diligence mechanisms.
Also, in war-torn countries like Sudan, people with savings in local banks have a hard time accessing their money.
“Now nsave is live, there’s finally a trusted option to protect their users against the rampant inflation of distressed economies, providing safe, stable offshore accounts to people who need them the most.”
The Browser Company, which makes the Arc browser, has raised $50 million in a round led by Pace Capital at a $550 million valuation, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
However, in January, the company released the Arc Search app on iOS, focusing on putting AI-powered search at its center.
This is ingrained in the DNA of The Browser Company.
Paul Frazee, who built a decentralized browser called Beaker, said that scaling a browser product is hard as people are set in their way and making them switch is tough.
The Browser Company has a big ambition to build an “internet computer” for users.
How crypto exchange Backpack climbed its way to success after its major investor FTX died Backpack hit $27.5 billion in total trading volume during its beta phaseBackpack’s founders, who are building a crypto exchange and wallet, have experienced strong growth since launching in 2022.
There’s a bunch of lessons to learn from FTX, Ferrante said.
This is done in hopes that there’s no single point of failure and that the operations of the Backpack crypto exchange can be split up across multiple entities.
At the end of February, Backpack raised $17 million at a $120 million valuation in a Series A round led by Placeholder VC.
But product distribution is top of mind for the exchange as it hopes to get into every country around the world.
