Building a creator-focused OS

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading.  A week ago TechCrunch covered Pico’s $6.5 million funding round and described it as “a New York startup that helps online creators and media companies make money and manage their customer data.” The Exchange has also covered Pico before, most recently during a mid-2020 dive into the world of indie pubs and subscription media. While our own Anthony...

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What the MasterClass effect means for edtech

MasterClass, which sells a subscription to celebrity-taught classes, sits on the cusp of entertainment and education. It offers virtual, yet aspirational learning: an online tennis class with Serena Williams, a cooking session with Gordon Ramsay. While there’s the off chance that an instructor might actually talk to you — it has happened before — the platform mostly just offers paywalled documentary-style content. The vision has received attention. MasterClass is raising funding that would value it at $2.5 billion, as scooped by Axios and confirmed...

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India orders Twitter to take down tweets critical of its coronavirus handling

Twitter has taken down dozens of tweets in India, some of which were critical of New Delhi’s handling of the coronavirus, to comply with an emergency order from the Indian government. New Delhi made an emergency order to Twitter to censor over 50 tweets in the country, Twitter disclosed on Lumen database. The social network has complied with the request, and withheld those tweets from users in India. TechCrunch has learned that Twitter is not the only platform affected by the new order. India, which has also previously ordered Twitter to take...

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8 investors, founders and execs predict cybersecurity, fintech will take Belfast by storm

Things have been looking up for Belfast since the end of the Troubles. The city has undergone infrastructure improvements over the past two decades, tourism has boomed thanks to attractions such as the shipyard where the RMS Titanic was built and Game of Thrones shooting locations, and employment has risen steadily in the city since 2016, according to Northen Ireland’s Department for the Economy. The city also has the famed Queen’s University and low living costs to count in its favor, and gentrification is starting to take place, which shows things...

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Filing: Snap paid $124M for Fit Analytics as it gears up for a bigger e-commerce push

Earlier this year we reported on how Snap had acquired Berlin-based Fit Analytics, an AI-based fitting technology startup, as part of a wider push into e-commerce services, specifically to gain technology that can help prospective online shoppers get a better sense of how a particular item or size would fit them. A 10-Q filing from Snap today has now put a price tag on that deal. Snap paid a total of $124.4 million, covering technology, IP, customer relationships and payouts to the team. The filing also noted that Snap spent a total of $204.5 million...

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Extra Crunch roundup: Klaviyo EC-1, micromobility’s second wave, UiPath CFO interview, more

Origin stories are satisfying because we already know the hero will overcome the odds — and in doing so, they’ll reveal their core strengths. This week, we published a four-part series about how Klaviyo co-founders Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen bootstrapped their startup into an e-commerce marketing automation platform now valued at $4.15 billion. Neither founder was bitten by a radioactive spider or received a serum that enhanced their entrepreneurial skills; instead, they focused on outreach to prospective customers to find out what they were...

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