Startups Weekly: With Asana, JFrog, Palantir, Snowflake, Sumo and Unity, we’re in peak season for tech IPOs

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here. Pandemic numbers are looking better, it’s still a couple months before U.S. elections and a growing line of tech companies have already ventured out into public markets successfully this summer. Hard to imagine conditions beating the present any time soon, whether you’re traditionally banked, going with a direct listing or getting inside a SPAC vehicle. We covered the frenzy this week with an eye...

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TikTok’s rivals in India struggle to cash in on its ban

For years, India has served as the largest open battleground for Silicon Valley and Chinese firms searching for their next billion users. With more than 400 million WhatsApp users, India is already the largest market for the Facebook-owned service. The social juggernaut’s big blue app also reaches more than 300 million users in the country. Google is estimated to reach just as many users in India, with YouTube closely rivaling WhatsApp for the most popular smartphone app in the country. Several major giants from China, like Alibaba and Tencent...

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Apple terminates Epic Games’ App Store account

{rss:content:encoded} Apple terminates Epic Games’ App Store account https://ift.tt/34JWhzM https://ift.tt/2YLRFoZ August 28, 2020 at 11:40PM Epic Games has been removed from Apple’s App Store. If you’ve already downloaded Fortnite to your Mac or iOS device, it should still work, but Epic’s termination means the Fortnite developer will no longer be able to submit new apps or updates. MacStories Managing Editor John Voorhees noted the termination on Twitter, as well as the fact that the App Store is currently featuring Fortnite competitor PUBG. Apple...

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TikTok’s rivals in India struggle to cash in on its ban

For years, India has served as the largest open battleground for Silicon Valley and Chinese firms searching for their next billion users. With more than 400 million WhatsApp users, India is already the largest market for the Facebook-owned service. The social juggernaut’s big blue app also reaches more than 300 million users in the country. Google is estimated to reach just as many users in India, with YouTube closely rivaling WhatsApp for the most popular smartphone app in the country. Several major giants from China, like Alibaba and Tencent...

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Steno raises $3.5 million led by First Round to become an extension of law offices

The global legal services industry was worth $849 billion dollars in 2017 and is expected to become a trillion dollar industry by the end of next year. Little wonder that Steno, an L.A.-based startup, wants a piece. Like most legal services outfits, what it offers are ways for law practices to run more smoothly, including in a world where fewer people are meeting in conference rooms and courthouses and operating instead from disparate locations. Steno first launched with an offering that centers on court reporting. It lines up court reporters,...

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Banks aren’t as stupid as enterprise AI and fintech entrepreneurs think

Simon Moss Contributor Share on Twitter Simon Moss is CEO of Symphony AyasdiAI, an enterprise artificial intelligence company for financial services. Announcements like Selina Finance’s $53 million raise and another $64.7 million raise the next day for a different banking startup spark enterprise artificial intelligence and fintech evangelists to rejoin the debate over how banks are stupid and need help or competition. The complaint is banks are seemingly too slow to adopt fintech’s bright ideas. They don’t seem to grasp where the industry...

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What does GPT-3 mean for the future of the legal profession?

Rudy DeFelice Contributor Rudy is co-founder and CEO of Keesal Propulsion Labs, a digital transformation company serving the law departments of the Fortune 500. Rudy is an attorney, technology entrepreneur, TEDx speaker and best-selling author. He is a an alumnus of Harvard Business School and the University of Connecticut School of Law. One doesn’t have to dig too deep into legal organizations to find people who are skeptical about artificial intelligence. AI is getting tremendous attention and significant venture capital, but AI tools frequently...

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Facebook tests linking your FB account to your news subscriptions

Facebook is testing out a new feature that could help news publishers create a better experience for paying subscribers on the social network. The idea is that when Facebook identifies a subscriber from one of its publisher partners, that subscriber will be invited to link their news account to their Facebook account. Once they’re linked, if they encounter a paywalled article on Facebook, they’ll be able to read it without hitting the paywall or having to log-in again. Facebook also says that when subscribers link their accounts, it will show them...

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Xiaomi plans to bring under-screen cameras to its smartphones next year

{rss:content:encoded} Xiaomi plans to bring under-screen cameras to its smartphones next year https://ift.tt/2D6IKqq https://ift.tt/2YLDzE6 August 28, 2020 at 05:00PM The front-facing camera has been a pretty constant bugbear for phone makers for a number of years now. Xiaomi certainly isn’t the first to offer a clever technological solution to the problem — and it’s also certainly not the only company to have show off under-screen camera tech — but next year, it’s committed to bringing that technology to market. The manufacturer noted its plans...

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SaaS stocks survive earnings, keeping the market warm for software startups, exits

We’re on the other end of nearly every single SaaS earnings report that you can name, with the exception of Slack, and shares of software companies are holding onto their year’s gains. Which means SaaS and cloud companies have made it through a somewhat steep gauntlet largely unscathed. There were exceptions, of course, but when we consider public software and cloud companies, the tale of the tape is somewhat clear. And it appears to indicate that today’s huge revenue multiples will stick around for a while yet.   The Exchange explores startups,...

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Femtech poised for growth beyond fertility

The market for female-focused health products (aka ‘femtech’) is set for growth via segmentation, per an analyst note from PitchBook which identifies opportunities for entrepreneurs to target a growing number of health issues that specifically affect women or affect women in a specific way — broadening out from a traditional focus on reproductive health. Femtech remains a “significantly underdeveloped” slice of healthtech, according to the analysis, which highlights the disparity between how much women spend annually on medical expenses — estimated...

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Undermyfork scores $400K seed for its diabetes tracking app and US launch

Undermyfork, a diabetes tracking app designed to help people with the disease improve “time-in-range” and better manage their condition, has raised $400,000 in seed funding. Investment comes from AltaIR Capital and Runa Capital. Undermyfork co-founder Mike Ushakov’s previous company, Metabar (the maker of the browser add-on Sovetnik), was also backed by Runa, before being acquired by Yandex several years ago. The Undermyfork app combines meal photos with glucose data coming from a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) device. The aim is to let users...

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Daily Crunch: TikTok’s CEO resigns

{rss:content:encoded} Daily Crunch: TikTok’s CEO resigns https://ift.tt/31wZ8Kj https://ift.tt/2CoAoqu August 28, 2020 at 12:10AM Turmoil continues at TikTok, Salesforce lays off 1,000 people and Warby Parker is now valued at $3 billion. This is your Daily Crunch for August 27, 2020. The big story: TikTok’s CEO resigns Kevin Mayer, the former Disney executive who joined TikTok as CEO just over 100 days ago, announced yesterday that he’s resigning. While Mayer was likely brought on to reassure U.S. legislators about the app’s Chinese owners, it...

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Facebook sues developers who violated terms to collect user data, sell fake ‘likes’

Facebook announced today it’s suing multiple developers in the U.S. and, for the first time, in the U.K., for violations of its policies. In the U.K., both Facebook Inc. and Facebook Ireland are suing MobiBurn, parent company OakSmart Technologies and its founder Fatih Haltas, in the High Court of Justice for failing to comply with Facebook’s audit request, after security researchers flagged the company’s technology for collecting data from Facebook users through its malicious software. Separately, Facebook Inc. and Instagram Inc. sued Nikolay...

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A faster, easier, cheaper way of going public

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is the fourth episode of the week, pushing our production calendar to the test. Happily we’ve managed to hold it together amidst the news deluge that the last few days have brought. It was a good week for our scheduling change, with the main episode of the show coming to you on Thursday afternoon versus Friday morning. Change is good. But unchanging this time around was our hosting lineup,...

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To reach scale, Juni Learning is building a full-stack edtech experience

 Juni Learning connects kids with math and science tutors, but co-founder Vivian Shen would prefer not to be lumped in with other edtech startups, despite the sector’s pandemic-born boom. “We’re not just in the middle to take a few percentage points off of each side and pretend like we’re delivering value,” said Shen. “That’s not scalable.” Semantics aside, Shen’s words underscore a truth about live tutoring businesses: Anyone can start one. All it takes is smart friends, eager students and a platform to bring them together. The low barrier...

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Black founders can get tactical advice at Disrupt

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and widespread protests for racial justice, a number of venture capitalists made public statements about wanting to improve diversity in the tech industry — and more specifically to fund more diverse founders. Their comments are certainly worth applauding, but actual change is a lot harder. And if it comes at all, it will take time. In the meantime, how can Black founders navigate a tech and venture capital industry where they have historically been underrepresented, overlooked and worse? To answer that...

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