Startups Weekly: SoftBank is screwing up

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about All Raise’s expansion, Uber the TV show and the unicorn from down under. Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here. The SoftBank saga According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal,...

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Mark Zuckerberg makes the case for Facebook News

While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed cheerful and even jokey when he took the stage today in front of journalists and media executives (at one point, he referred to the event as “by far the best thing” he’d done this week), he acknowledged that there are reasons for the news industry to be skeptical. Facebook, after all, has been one of the main forces creating a difficult economic reality for the industry over the past decade. And there are plenty of people (including our own Josh Constine) who think it would be foolish for publishers to...

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Daily Crunch: Facebook launches its News section

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Facebook starts testing News, its new section for journalism Facebook’s news section, which was previously reported to be imminent, is here: The company is rolling out Facebook News in a limited test in the U.S. as a home screen tab and bookmark in the main Facebook app. Should publishers trust Facebook? Well, Josh Constine argues that none of them have...

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Meet Bespoke Financial, a lender for cannabis companies backed by Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde Capital

Bespoke Financial wants to provide cannabis businesses with the same kind of financial services that other businesses get, but that dispensaries and growers can’t yet access. The regulations around cannabis operations are so stringent at the local level — and so nebulous at the federal level — that national banks won’t give businesses in the cannabis industry the same basic services (like short-term loans). That’s why one former Goldman Sachs banker has partnered with two entrepreneurs from the traditional agriculture industry to create Bespoke...

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Growth is out, profitability is in

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week Kate and Alex held the reins as a duo (check out our chat with Greylock’s Sarah Guo from last week here) to dig into an enormous raft of news. And don’t worry, it’s not all late-stage happenings. We’re discussing early-stage news every week because that’s what the listeners want! Up top we dug into Kate’s excellent work covering the Superhuman founder’s new micro fund, or at least his attempt at raising...

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Facebook starts testing News, its new section for journalism

Facebook’s news section, which was previously reported to be imminent, is here: The company is rolling out Facebook News in a limited test in the U.S. as a home screen tab and bookmark in the main Facebook app. In a blog post, Facebook’s Campbell Brown (vice president of global news partnerships) and Mona Sarantakos (product manager, news) said that news articles will continue to appear in the main News Feed. However, they said that creating a specific tab focused on journalism “gives people more control over the stories they see, and the...

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Workplace learning platform HowNow scores $3M funding

HowNow, the workforce learning platform, has raised $3 million (£2.4m) in a “pre-series A” funding round. The round is led by Mark Pearson’s Fuel Ventures and brings the total raised by the startup to $4.5 million. Other investors include Andy Murray OBE; Michael Whitfield and Chris Bruce (founders of Thomsons Online Benefits); Bernie Sinniah (former managing director at Citi Bank); and Alwin Magimay (a former partner at McKinsey). Designed for organisations that want to support teams with self-directed learning and the development of “business-critical”...

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StepLadder, the collaborative deposit saving platform for first-time buyers, raises £1.5M

StepLadder, another London-based startup aiming to help so-called “generation rent” get onto the housing ladder, has raised £1.5 million in seed funding. Backing the round is Spanish banking giant BBVA and fintech VC Anthemis via the London-based venture studio the pair have partnered on. Early investor Seedcamp also followed on, in addition to unnamed angel investors. StepLadder says it will use the new capital and support provided by BBVA/Anthemis to further develop its “collaborative finance platform”. The startup is also eyeing up international...

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Why publishers shouldn’t trust Facebook News

Are we really doing this again? After the pivot to video. After Instant Articles. After news was deleted from the News Feed. Once more, Facebook dangles extra traffic, and journalism outlets leap through its hoop and into its cage. Tomorrow, Facebook will unveil its News tab. About 200 publishers are already aboard including the Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed News, and some will be paid. None seem to have learned the lesson of platform risk. When you build on someone else’s land, don’t be surprised when you’re bulldozed. And really, given Facebook’s...

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SoftBank says it has now invested $18.5 billion in WeWork, ‘more than the GDP’ of Bolivia, which has 11.5 million people

Yesterday, in addressing nervous WeWork employees at an all-hands, the company’s new chairman, SoftBank executive Marcelo Claure, told those gathered that their days of worrying are over, says Recode, which obtained a leaked recording of the meeting. In comments that may stun industry observers who haven’t done the math — and upset at least some percentage of SoftBank investors — Claure is quoted as telling employees: “We have guaranteed the future of WeWork, but more importantly is we’re putting the future back into our hands. There’s no more...

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Here’s what the Pixel 4’s radar chip looks like

{rss:content:encoded} Here’s what the Pixel 4’s radar chip looks like https://ift.tt/2PhLkOa https://ift.tt/31LpnJE October 24, 2019 at 07:59PM I’ve been tearing my gadgets apart for as long as I can remember. Consoles, phones, printers, whatever — I’ve always needed to see what makes it all work. Sometimes they even work when I put them back together. As soon as Google announced that the new Pixel 4 had friggin’ radar built-in for detecting hand gestures, I needed to see under the hood. While I haven’t picked up a Pixel 4 yet, our friends over...

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Stewart Butterfield says Microsoft sees Slack as existential threat

In a wide ranging interview with Wall Street Journal global technology editor Jason Dean yesterday, Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield had some strong words regarding Microsoft, saying his company represented an existential threat to the software giant. The interview took place at the WSJ Tech Live event. When Butterfield was asked about a chart Microsoft released in July during the Slack quiet period, which showed Microsoft Teams had 13 million daily active users compared to 12 million for Slack, Butterfield appeared taken aback by the...

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NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine explains how startups can help with Artemis Moon missions

At this week’s International Astronautical Congress, where the space industry, international space agencies and researchers from around the world convene to discuss the state of space technology and business, I asked NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine about what role he sees for startups in contributing to his agency’s ambitious Artemis program. Artemis, named after Apollo’s twin sister Artemis, one the gods of Greek myth, is NASA’s mission to return human beings to the surface of the Moon – this time to stay – and to use that as a staging ground...

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Newly launched pet health startup Gallant wants you to bank your dog’s stem cells for $990

With $11 million in funding and a mission to open up the doors of regenerative therapies to dogs across the nation, the Los Angeles-based startup Gallant is now opening its doors for the first time. The company was founded by DogVacay founder and chief executive Aaron Hirschhorn after seeing his own pet’s struggle with debilitating illness and knowing firsthand that regenerative medicine and stem cell therapies could help. “I struggled with debilitating chronic back pain for more than a decade, leaving me incapable of doing activities I loved,...

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Mobile banking app Current raises $20M Series B, tops half a million users

Mobile banking app Current, which began as a teen debit card controlled by parents, expanded to offer personal checking accounts earlier this year. Now the company says it has grown to host more than 500,000 accounts on its service and has closed on $20 million in Series B funding to further its growth. The round included new investors Wellington Management Company, Galaxy Digital EOS VC Fund and CMFG Ventures — the venture capital arm of the CUNA Mutual Group, a mutual insurance company serving credit unions and their 120 million members. Returning...

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