Leaked documents show Techstars lost $7 million in 2023 but still had plenty of cash Cuts to Techstars programs are not surprising given its 2023 financial performance.
Cuts to Techstars’ staff and its decision to shutter certain accelerators came after it missed its 2023 revenue goals, according to documents outlining its preliminary 2023 results viewed by TechCrunch.
Techstars 2023 budget targeted an average of 68 “active accelerator programs,” but was reduced to 61 in its mid-year forecast.
The good news was that TechStars had plenty of cash in 2023 to handle these troubles and its closing cash balance in 2023 was actually much better than originally anticipated.
But these documents reveal that the company closed last year with around $50 million in cash for its operational budget.
Telegram CEO and founder Pavel Durov announced today that the company is launching its ad platform next month, allowing channel owners to receive financial rewards.
In March, the Telegram Ad Platform will open to channel owners in nearly one hundred countries, marking a major shift toward content monetization.
“Similar to our approach with Telegram usernames on Fragment, we will sell ads and share revenue with channel owners in Toncoin.
YouTube offers a 55% share of ad revenue to creators in the YouTube Partner Program, while X started offering revenue sharing to users in July 2023.
Telegram has more than 800 million monthly active users around the world, and Telegram users generate over 500 billion views in broadcast channels every month.
Smaller companies are just as eager to use AI tech to supercharge their sales processes as their bigger competitors.
Darwin AI, a Brazil-based AI startup, is developing a conversational AI assistant for small businesses across Latin America who want to get into AI, but don’t have an IT staff.
The assistant is designed to interact with customers in a more human-like manner to help generate more revenue.
Using AI, Darwin takes into account the needs of companies and then filters leads and customers.
As more companies implement automation into their processes, the conversational AI market is expected to grow over 20% annually through 2030.
Caller identity company Truecaller has launched its call recording and transcription for paid users in India, the company’s biggest market.
The recording feature will be available to premium users on both Android and iOS, with support for English and Hindi transcriptions.
In June 2023, the company introduced call recording for premium users in the U.S., and now it is expanding the feature in India.
If you are using Truecaller on Android, the app’s own dialer will show a dedicated recording button.
The app calls another recording line, and then you will have to manually merge the calls to start the recording.
The company’s iPhone revenue in India jumped 42% year-on-year in 2023 to $8.7 billion, Morgan Stanley wrote in a note on Friday.
India’s iPhone business is now larger than any standalone country in the European Union, Morgan Stanley added.
This compares to China iPhone shipments, which represented 20% of iPhone shipments and revenue in CY23 (down 1-2 points Y/Y, respectively),” the analysts wrote.
The average iPhone sold in India last year had around 260GB of memory, a 26% increase over 2022, Morgan Stanley said.
Morgan Stanley estimates the tech giant’s India revenue will reach $40 billion by 2032.
Social media giant Reddit filed to go public today.
Today Reddit approaches the public markets with more than $800 million worth of revenue in 2023, up from $666.7 million in 2022.
In 2022 Reddit generated a net loss of $158.6 million, and adjusted EBITDA of negative $108.4 million.
That figure includes a massive $410 million Series F raised in 2021 and a smaller $368 million Series E raised earlier the same year.
That makes it worth roughly 7.5% of its 2023 revenue, a very nice tailwind for its 2024 results.
When IT was responsible for servers onsite, understanding what you owned and where it lived was not a big problem.
Faddom, an early stage Israeli startup, helps companies map their infrastructure wherever it lives, and helps them visualize the connections and dependencies, taking aim at medium-sized enterprises.
Once the map is in place, companies can use the information for a variety of tasks such as infrastructure change management and migrations, cybersecurity and compliance.
It defines its target market as companies with between a few hundred and a few thousand employees managing perhaps 100 servers or or more with between $100 million to a few billion dollars in revenue.
Usually their budgets will be very low, and usually there’s no innovation tailored for that type of segment,” he said.
However, by the time the merger was closed, much of the SPAC cash was nowhere to be found.
The investors that chose to sell their shares in this way did better than anyone who stuck around, because MariaDB’s stock tanked sharply during its first day as a public company.
In its SPAC pitch, the company forecast its annual recurring revenue (ARR) to reach $53 million in FY 2022, and $72 million in FY 2023.
It also expected revenue of $47 million in FY 2022, and $64 million in FY 2023.
In the first quarter of FY 2024, MariaDB reported revenue of $13.6 million, up from $12.8 million a year ago.
With Twilio under activist pressure, Segment could be put up for sale But recovering the 2020 purchase price could be impossibleTwilio’s foray into the customer data (CDP) business could be heading for an early conclusion.
During the last quarters of Lawson’s tenure atop the company, Twilio came under pressure from activist investors Anson Funds and Legion Capital to divest assets to bolster shareholder value.
With all that value and an eye toward expanding its market, Twilio went out and spent $3.2 billion to acquire Segment.
What is Segment worth?
According to Twilio, its Segment unit generated $75 million worth of revenue in Q4 2023, up 4% from a $73 million result in the year-ago quarter.
Plex CEO Keith Valory confirmed the round closed this month, but was unable to disclose Plex’s new valuation.
Recently, the company has been developing social features, as well, allowing Plex users to opt into a feature that tracks their viewing and shares it with friends.
To date, however, it’s Plex’s ad-supported streaming that’s been helping Plex grow its revenue.
And we’re in, at least, the top five if not higher in this space, and we feel like we’re doing really, really well,” he said.
As a result of Plex’s ability to track users’ media discovery behavior and consumption across platforms and services, the company has a unique perspective from a data standpoint.
