Startups Weekly: US visa freeze is latest reason to build remote-first

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here. While the US tech industry relentlessly tries to do business with the rest of the world, this week it became further embroiled in national politics. High-skill immigration visas have been suspended until the end of the year by the Trump administration, precluding thousands of present and future startup employees and founders from coming to the US and building companies here. Instead, the suspension...

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Newzoo forecasts 2020 global games industry will reach $159 billion

Games and esports analytics firm Newzoo released its highly cited annual report on the size and state of the video gaming industry yesterday. The firm is predicting 2020 global game industry revenue from consumers of $159.3 billion, a 9.3% increase year-over-year. Newzoo predicts the market will surpass $200 billion by the end of 2023. Importantly, the data excludes in-game advertising revenue (which surged +59% during COVID-19 lockdowns, according to Unity) and the market of gaming digital assets traded between consumers. Advertising within games...

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Newzoo forecasts 2020 global games industry will reach $159 billion

{rss:content:encoded} Newzoo forecasts 2020 global games industry will reach $159 billion https://ift.tt/3870e0N https://ift.tt/31kb3vl June 27, 2020 at 12:00AM Games and esports analytics firm Newzoo released its highly cited annual report on the size and state of the video gaming industry yesterday. The firm is predicting 2020 global game industry revenue from consumers of $159.3 billion, a 9.3% increase year-over-year. Newzoo predicts the market will surpass $200 billion by the end of 2023. Importantly, the data excludes in-game advertising...

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TuSimple seeking $250 million in new funding to scale self-driving trucks

TuSimple, the self-driving truck startup backed by Sina, Nvidia, UPS and Tier 1 supplier Mando Corporation, is headed back into the marketplace in search of new capital from investors. The company has hired investment bank Morgan Stanley to help it raise $250 million, according to multiple sources familiar with the effort. Morgan Stanley has sent potential investors an informational packet, viewed by TechCrunch, that provides a snapshot of the company and an overview of its business model, as well as a pitch on why the company is poised to succeed...

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Commenting platform Spot.IM becomes OpenWeb

Spot.IM, which offers a platform for publishers (including TechCrunch) to manage their user comments, announced this week that it’s rebranding as OpenWeb. CEO and co-founder Nadav Shoval told me that the new name reflects a vision that’s far grander and more ambitious than the company’s initial product, a location-based messaging service. “We all felt that this is the time to be proud of what we actually do,” Shoval said. “It’s about saving the open web.” Specifically, Shoval is hoping to move more online conversations away from the big social...

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Agora starts life as a public company by more than doubling to $50 a share

Shares of Agora, a China and U.S.-based “real-time engagement” API company, soared today after it went public. Yesterday Agora priced 17.5 million shares at $20 apiece, up from its target range of $16 to $18 per share. The firm raised $350 in its debut, or around 10 times its Q1 2020 revenue and is now amply capitalized and has runway for effectively forever, given its modest cash consumption as an ongoing concern. But while the debut was a success, seeing Agora’s share price rise as quickly as it did was not universally popular. Regular critic...

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Airvet, a telehealth veterinary platform, just clawed its way to a $14 million Series A round

Telemedicine is becoming more widely embraced by the day — and not just for humans. With a pet in roughly 65% of U.S. homes, there is now a dizzying number of companies enabling vets to meet with their furry patients remotely, including Petriage, Anipanion, TeleVet, Linkyvet, TeleTails, VetNOW, PawSquad, Vetoclock and Petpro Connect. One of these — a two-year-old, 13-person, LA-based startup called Airvet — unsurprisingly thinks it is the best among the bunch, and it has persuaded investors of as much. Today, the company is announcing $14...

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Who really benefits from reskilling?

Nearly 40 million Americans are unemployed, and a recent study that examined more than 66,000 tech job layoffs found that sales and customer success roles are most vulnerable amid COVID-19. In response, some quarters of Silicon Valley are abuzz about a long-standing technology: reskilling, or training individuals to adopt an entirely new skillset or career for employment. As millions look for a way to reenter the workforce, the question arises: Who really benefits from reskilling technology? That depends on how you look at it, said Jomayra Herrera,...

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As advertisers revolt, Facebook commits to flagging ‘newsworthy’ political speech that violates policy

As advertisers pull away from Facebook to protest the social networking giant’s hands-off approach to misinformation and hate speech, the company is instituting a number of stronger policies to woo them back. In a livestreamed segment of the company’s weekly all-hands meeting, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recapped some of the steps Facebook is already taking, and announced new measures to fight voter suppression and misinformation — although they amount to things that other social media platforms like Twitter have already enacted and enforced in more...

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YC to cut the size of its investment in future YC startups

In a blog post this Friday afternoon, Y Combinator’s president Geoff Ralston said that the accelerator would make two changes to its terms for startups. The first would see the size of the standard deal for YC startups decline from $150,000 for 7% (roughly a $2.1 million post-money valuation) to $125,000 for the same equity (or roughly a $1.79 million post-money valuation). The deal will continued to be offered using a SAFE, which YC and a group of others pioneered as a simpler investment option compared to convertible notes. Interestingly, the...

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Only 12 hours left to apply for Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2020

It’s now o’clock, founders. A mere 12 hours stands between you and a chance to compete in Startup Battlefield and launch your pre-Series A startup during Disrupt 2020 — in front of the world’s influential technorati. You won’t find a bigger launching pad, and this window of extraordinary opportunity slams shut on June 26 at 11:59 pm (PT). Apply to Startup Battlefield right here, right now. This year’s legendary pitch competition is virtual, but the benefits and opportunity that comes from competing are very real and often life changing — for...

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Unilever and Verizon are the latest companies to pull their advertising from Facebook

Advertiser momentum against Facebook’s content and monetization policies continues to grow. Last night, Verizon (which owns TechCrunch) said it will be pausing advertising on Facebook and Instagram “until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable and is consistent with what we’ve done with YouTube and other partners.” Then today, it was joined by consumer goods giant Unilever, which said it will halt all U.S. advertising on Facebook, Instagram (owned by Facebook) and even Twitter, at least until the end of the year. “Based...

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Running a queer dating startup amid a pandemic and racial justice uprising

The events of the past few months have shaken the lives of everyone, but especially Black people in the U.S. COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted members of the Black community while police violence has recently claimed the lives of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and others.  Two weeks ago, two Black transgender women, Riah Milton and Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells were murdered. In light of their deaths, activists took to the streets to protest the violence Black trans women face. Two days after Floyd’s killing,...

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Fleetsmith customers unhappy with loss of third-party app support after Apple acquisition

{rss:content:encoded} Fleetsmith customers unhappy with loss of third-party app support after Apple acquisition https://ift.tt/3g2DZfw https://ift.tt/3dFU0X0 June 26, 2020 at 08:50PM When Apple confirmed it had acquired Fleetsmith, a mobile device management vendor, on Wednesday, it seemed like a straightforward purchase, but Fleetsmith customers quickly learned a key piece of functionality had stopped working  — and many weren’t happy about it. Apple systems administrators began complaining on social media on the morning of the acquisition...

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Tim O’Reilly makes a persuasive case for why venture capital is starting to do more harm than good

Tim O’Reilly has a financial incentive to pooh-pooh the traditional VC model, wherein investors gamble on nascent startups in hopes of seeing many times their money back. Bryce Roberts, who is O’Reilly’s longtime investing partner at the early-stage venture firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), now actively steers the partnership away from these riskier investments and into companies around the country that are already generating revenue and don’t necessarily want to be blitzcaled. Yet in an interview with O’Reilly last week, he nonetheless...

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Running a queer dating startup amid a pandemic and racial justice uprising

The events of the past few months have shaken the lives of everyone, but especially Black people in the U.S. COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted members of the Black community while police violence has recently claimed the lives of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and others.  Two weeks ago, two Black transgender women, Riah Milton and Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells were murdered. In light of their deaths, activists took to the streets to protest the violence Black trans women face. Two days after Floyd’s killing,...

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Volcker Rule reforms expand options for raising VC funds

It’s time to put on our thinking caps so we can discuss an esoteric but important policy change and how it is going to impact the VC world. The 2008 financial crisis devastated the global economy. One of the reforms that came from the detritus of that situation was a policy known as the Volcker Rule. The rule, proposed by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker and passed into law with the Dodd-Frank Act, was designed to limit the ways that banks could invest their balance sheets to avoid the kind of cataclysmic systemic risks that the world witnessed...

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Near Space Labs expands high-altitude Earth imagery to Texas and ramps remote deployment

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has had a number of unexpected impacts on global economic activity – most of them negative. But the pandemic has also highlighted the need for alternative solutions to challenges where traditional solutions now prove either too costly, or too difficult to do while maintaining good health and safety practices. Near Space Labs, a startup focused on providing timely, location-specific, high resolution Earth imaging from balloons in the stratosphere, is one company that has found its model remarkably well-suited to the conditions...

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