Ah, spring has sprung here in the Northeast United States, and it’s not only flowers that are blooming.
Today on Equity’s startup-focused Wednesday show, we dug into the Multiverse-Searchlight deal, which reminded us of the Wonderschool-Early Day transaction that we covered on the show a few weeks ago.
Startup Land is feeling quite busy and high-dollar again, and that’s a lot of fun!
We wrapped up the show with a cool discussion of this new venture capital fund that’s targeting growth-rounds in Africa.
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Lucid Motors is raising another $1 billion from its biggest financial backer, Saudi Arabia, as it looks to blunt the high costs associated with building and selling its luxury electric sedan.
The fresh funding comes just a few weeks after Lucid told investors that it only plans to build around 9,000 of its Air electric vehicles this year, a slight bump over last year’s output.
It lost $2.8 billion in 2023 and finished the year with just shy of $1.4 billion in cash and equivalents.
Lucid also plans to start building its electric Gravity SUV at the end of this year.
Lucid announced the investment less than three weeks after CEO Peter Rawlinson told the Financial Times that he was wary of relying too heavily on Saudi Arabia to keep shoveling money into its proverbial furnace.
Fisker’s finances are back in the news after the company warned back in February that it didn’t have enough cash to make it through its next year.
The company said this week that it intends to halt production for six weeks to get its business back in order.
Softening demand growth for EVs is making the normal challenges of scaling a company all the harder for Fisker and its peers.
Not that we’re all doom and gloom here at TechCrunch — we’re actually rather bullish on the prospect for EVs in the near and far future.
Let’s take a look at what’s going on under the hood here:
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:
Google said on Friday it will start removing apps from its Play Store in India if developers fail to comply with its payment policy, taking a definitive stand weeks after the top Indian court granted the Android-maker with relief.
Without naming them, Google said 10 companies in India, including “many well-established ones,” have not paid Google Play’s fee despite being provided with three years to prepare.
“After giving these developers more than three years to prepare, including three weeks after the Supreme Court’s order, we are taking necessary steps to ensure our policies are applied consistently across the ecosystem, as we do for any form of policy violation globally,” the company wrote in a blog post.
“Enforcement of our policy, when necessary, can include removal of non-compliant apps from Google Play.”This is a developing story.
More to come.
Media startup Dailyhunt is in advanced stages of talks to acquire the Bengaluru-headquartered social network Koo, two sources familiar with the matter told me.
The potential deal under discussion involves a share-swap agreement and could be finalized within weeks, the sources added, requesting anonymity as the matter is private.
The deliberation follows Koo, which has sought to become a Twitter rival, aggressively hunting for new capital throughout last year.
The social network, available in India and Brazil, is betting on the idea that its approach of supporting multiple local languages will help the eponymous app resonate broadly with the larger masses.
Dailyhunt, which was last valued at $5 billion, and Koo declined to comment.
Sony is laying off around 900 employees in its PlayStation division, the company announced on Tuesday.
The cuts will impact 8% of the division’s global workforce, as Sony becomes the latest company to announce major cuts in recent weeks and months.
The layoffs come two weeks after Sony cut its sales forecast for the PlayStation 5 after warning of decreasing demand.
Sony isn’t the only company in the gaming business to announce recent job cuts.
Last month, Microsoft laid off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees and Unity laid off 25% of its workforce.
Google is hopeful it will soon be able to ‘unpause’ the ability of its multimodal generative AI tool, Gemini, to depict people, per DeepMind founder, Demis Hassabis.
The capability to respond to prompts for images of humans should be back online in the “next few weeks”, he said today.
Asked by moderator, Wired’s Steven Levy, to explain what went wrong with the image generation feature, Hassabis sidestepped a detailed technical explanation.
Instead he suggested the issue was caused by Google failing to identify instances when users are basically after what he described as a “universal depiction”.
The issue is “very complex”, he suggested — likely demanding a whole-of-society mobilization and response to determine and enforce limits.
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 Wednesday show, in which we talk through the week’s leading startup and venture capital news.
This is a short week, but there’s still a lot to talk about:We’ll be back Friday morning!
