Airbnb nears IPO as Asana and Palantir land their direct listings

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. The going has not always been easy but the tech IPOs keep coming. Airbnb itself is almost here, in what is likely to be the ultimate stock market listing of this dramatic year. After the pandemic triggered mass layoffs for the short-term rental marketplace, it has managed to make up all of the lost ground to pre-pandemic projections, TechCrunch and others have reported. Now, news is leaking...

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Twitter will make users remove tweets hoping Trump dies of COVID-19

President Donald Trump’s positive COVID-19 result has made Twitter a busy place in the past 24 hours, including some tweets that have publicly wished — some subtly and others more directly — that he die from the disease caused by coronavirus. Twitter put out a reminder to folks that it doesn’t allow tweets that wish or hope for death or serious bodily harm or fatal disease against anyone. Tweets that violate this policy will need to be removed, Twitter said Friday. However, it also clarified that this does not automatically mean suspension. Several...

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Daily Crunch: Twitter confronts image-cropping concerns

Twitter addresses questions of bias in its image-cropping algorithms, we take a look at Mario Kart Live and the stock market takes a hit after President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis. This is your Daily Crunch for October 2, 2020. The big story: Twitter confronts image-cropping concerns Last month, (white) PhD student Colin Madland highlighted potential algorithmic bias on Twitter and Zoom — in Twitter’s case, because its automatic image cropping seemed to consistently highlight Madland’s face over that of a Black colleague. Today, Twitter said it...

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Index Ventures’ Nina Achadjian and Sarah Cannon: ‘There’s basically an infinite bid’ for growth-stage startups

The venture world is swimming in capital these days, and the flood doesn’t appear to be abating. That’s changing the game for venture capitalists and their firms, which transformed from solo practitioners focused on one stage and a single geographical area to covering all startups in all geos in all industries in just a handful of years. One firm that has navigated those changes for decades is Index Ventures, one of the first funds to launch in Europe that has evolved into a multi-stage firm in recent years. The firm last raised a total of $2 billion...

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Twitter is building ‘Birdwatch,’ a system to fight misinformation by adding more context to tweets

Twitter is developing a new product called “Birdwatch,” which the company confirms is an attempt at addressing misinformation across its platform by providing more context for tweets, in the form of notes. Tweets can be added to “Birdwatch” — meaning flagged for moderation — from the tweet’s drop-down menu, where other blocking and reporting tools are found today. A small binoculars icon will also appear on tweets published to the Twitter Timeline. When the button is clicked, users are directed to a screen where they can view the tweet’s history...

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Which neobanks will rise or fall?

Denis Barrier Contributor Share on Twitter Denis Barrier is co-founder and CEO of Cathay Innovation, a global venture capital firm investing across North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Alex Lazarow Contributor Share on Twitter Alex Lazarow is an author, a global venture investor with Cathay Innovation and is an adjunct professor with the Middlebury Institute for International Studies MBA program. The neobank, or digital bank, phenomenon continues to take the world by storm, with global winners, from Brazil’s Nubank valued at...

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Writer pens a $5M seed round for its AI style guide that flags bias and tone

Anyone who writes online or in a word processor has likely gotten used to the inevitable squiggly line denoting a misspelled word or clumsy phrase. But what if you use a word that’s loaded, a phrase that’s too formal or not formal enough, or refer to a group of people in an outdated way? Writer is a service that watches as you type, flagging language that doesn’t match up with your style guide and values, and it just raised $5M to scale up. Both people and the companies they work for want to improve the way they write, but not just in terms of...

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Coinbase lets you withdraw funds to your debit card

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is adding a new way to withdraw funds from your Coinbase account. If you’ve added a compatible debit card to your account, you can transfer USD, EUR or GBP to your bank account nearly instantly. There are some drawbacks, and the main one is that you’ll pay a lot of fees. In the U.S., Coinbase deducts 1.5% from the transaction, or a minimum $0.55 if it’s a small transaction. In Europe and the U.K., you pay 2% in fees or a minimum fee of £0.45/€0.52. You also need to have a compatible card. Not all debit cards support...

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Air quality monitoring service Airly raises $2 million as fires, pollution force consumers to take note

As smoke from fires chokes the skies in the western U.S. and pollution chokes much of the world, air quality has become yet another issue for civilization to address. Industrialization and natural disasters wrought by climate change are spewing more toxic matter into the air, and governments around the world are racing to monitor what the combination of catastrophes and economic growth could mean for their citizens. The ability to get an accurate measurement of the air quality in their home city of Krakow, Poland is what drove the team of engineers...

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Indianapolis-based Malomo raises $2.8 million to turn order tracking into a branded customer experience

Yaw Aning named Malomo, the service he launched for small businesses to turn their order-tracking services into branded customer experiences, as a tribute to his mother, who was a small business owner herself. “Malomo” means flowers in Swahili and it was the name of Aning’s mother’s small soap-making business which she built over the years — even as she was battling the cancer to which she would eventually succumb. The small Indianapolis startup has just raised $2.8 million to expand its services providing a new marketing channel for the Shopify...

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With $2.7M in fresh funding, Sora hopes to bring virtual high school to the mainstream

Long before the coronavirus, Sora, a startup run by a team of Atlanta entrepreneurs, was toying with the idea of live, virtual high school. The program would focus on student autonomy and organize its curriculum around projects that learners wanted to work on, such as finding ways to reduce the impact of climate change on the world. Students and teachers would use Zoom and Slack to communicate with each other, with standups everyday to pulse-check progress. The pandemic has both undermined and underscored Sora’s focus. On one end, the millions...

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Announcing the TC Pitch-Off: Mobility startups

For the past two years, TechCrunch has brought together the best and brightest minds in mobility at for our TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility event. This year, we are adding a little extra twist. On October 5, the day before Mobility 2020, TC is hosting a pitch-off — which only ticket holders can access — highlighting disruptive startups in the mobility space. Startups from all over the world applied and only 10 made the cut. Founders will pitch on the virtual TC Stage for one-minute followed by an intense Q&A with our judges. After all 10 companies...

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Twitter may let users choose how to crop image previews after bias scrutiny

In an interesting development in the wake of a bias controversy over its cropping algorithm Twitter has said it’s considering giving users decision making power over how tweet previews look, saying it wants to decrease its reliance on machine learning-based image cropping. Yes, you read that right. A tech company is affirming that automating certain decisions may not, in fact, be the smart thing to do — tacitly acknowledging that removing human agency can generate harm. As we reported last month, the microblogging platform found its image...

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Paired picks up $1M funding and launches its relationship app for couples

Paired, a new app for couples, is launching today and disclosing $1 million in funding. Backing the startup, which wants to support “happier and healthier” relationships, is Taavet Hinrikus of TransferWise, the co-founders of Runtastic (which was sold to Adidas), Ed Cooke of Memrise and Bernhard Niesner of Busuu. Founded in September 2019 by Kevin Shanahan and Diego López, who previously worked together at language learning app Memrise, and joined shortly afterwards by Chief Relationships Officer Dr Jacqui Gabb, who is Professor of Sociology and...

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