Transmit Safety’s Sequence A, valued at $ 543 million, is one for the file books
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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 22nd, 2021. We have startup product news, funding rounds, and a list of big tech updates for you today. But before we get into all of that, don’t forget to sign up for TechCrunch Spotlight: Pittsburgh Startup Pitch-Off. The Equity Podcast Crew is also doing live taping this Thursday, which should be a lot of fun. I’ll be there! — Alex
The TechCrunch top 3
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Twitter begins with the introduction of Super Follows and Spaces with tickets: The great product push on Twitter continued today with an early introduction of the Super Follow feature. If you have 10,000 followers and you tweet about once a day, you can bill people between $ 2.99 and $ 9.99 per month for bonus tweets. The company is also launching Twitter Spaces with Tickets, its live audio product.
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Another startup that takes on Google: While we await the launch of Neeva’s subscription search alternative, Brave has launched its own search offering. If you want, you can test it out here. The short gist is that it is a “nontracking search engine based on an independent index and touted as a privacy-safe alternative to surveillance technology products like Google Search,” TechCrunch wrote.
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The early stage financing market in focus: TechCrunch has dug its way into the world of start-up and early-stage venture capital rounds that startups are bringing up today. After a VC alerted us to the concept of the belated series A and the premature series B, we asked a number of other investors about the idea. What did we learn? That some startups can start raising the moment they have completed their final round. Wild.
Startups
Everyone and their favorite pup raised money today, so we’re dividing our startup coverage into two parts. The first focuses on product news. The second about financing rounds. Let’s go:
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Airbank builds a small and medium-sized fintech service to consolidate all of a company’s bank accounts and financial data. Read the story here.
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Racial inequality decline is a framework that aims to “combat racial inequality in startup investment and the wider world,” reports TechCrunch.
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Squad launched a new mobile app that connects groups of friends through timed audio messages. You have 24 hours to hear what your friends said now that Squad has completed its focus on more intimate collections of interest group friends.
There are more rounds in the world of money than we can achieve today. But here is a selection of favorites:
The story goes on
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Mollie raises $ 800 million for its payment integration service: Dutch startup Mollie is now worth $ 6.5 billion after raising nearly $ 1 billion in a single round. The startup “gives companies a way to integrate payments with websites, documents, and other services through an API,” TechCrunch wrote. The new round and rating implies that there is still room for more mega unicorns in the payments area. Still.
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Speaking of fintech, Australian startup Zeller has just raised A $ 50 million at a valuation of A $ 400 million. It offers POS and card services for SMEs.
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Lidar-focused Quanergy Systems goes public: Of course via a SPAC. You can peruse the pier deck if you want all of the somber projections. The important thing here is that the SPAC boom is not over yet, even if it seems to be slowing down. And we hear from Series B level founders that SPACs are already meeting them. Over time, expect more and stranger SPAC offers.
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Oyster is half a unicorn now: We learned that when the startup focused on helping employees outside of a company’s home country, raised a $ 50 million Series B, valued at nearly $ 500 million.
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Vantage is raising $ 4 million to help people manage their AWS expenses: All of the growth that Amazon’s AWS cloud service has seen in recent years has come from increasing customer spend. And some AWS customers want to spend less. And Vantage will help.
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G2 raises $ 157 million to help companies choose software: Software is such a large category that even niches can support a wide variety of competitors. But all of that spending means many companies are making decisions about which software to use. G2 wants to help. And it’s a unicorn now after its investors poured nine-digit capital into its coffers with a valuation of more than $ 1 billion.
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Transmit raises $ 543 million in a Series A to kill passwords: The company is now worth $ 2.2 billion and plans to use the new money to “expand its reach and invest in key global areas to grow the company.” Any attempt to erase passwords is approved by TechCrunch.
How much you as a SaaS founder have to pay yourself
Anna Heim interviewed SaaS entrepreneurs and investors to find out how much early stage founders should pay themselves.
Startups led by CEOs who take home a small salary tend to do better in the long run, but there are other points to consider like geography, marital status and frankly what quality of life you want.
Waterly founder Chris Sosnowski raised his own wage to $ 14 / hour last year; on his previous job, his salary exceeded $ 100,000.
“We had been saving money for over a year before we cut my wages,” he said to Anna. “I can live my life without entertainment … so we did that for 2020.”
How much are you willing to sacrifice
(Extra Crunch is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams move forward. You can sign up here.)
Big Tech Inc.
Another day, another series of headlines discussing the latest technology and government junk. Today we learned that the US government may be reviewing Amazon’s plan to buy a huge movie studio. There was more from India today too, with news that the country is taking a lead on Google over its smart TV market. On the same subject, the EU is now examining Google’s adtech software from an antitrust perspective.
In related news, the pressure to unionize Amazon workers doesn’t stop in its home market.
TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing
Illustration montage based on education and knowledge in blue
Photo credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Today we introduce one of the recommendations submitted in our survey. Stay tuned for the whole week as we highlight more answers!
Marketer’s Name: ladder
Recommendation: “You really get what I need. By testing different messaging on different personas, we find out what works and what doesn’t in order to better understand our users and prospects. This is gold for a company of our time. Showing these results to our investors blew her away. “
Make your own recommendation here.
Community
TC City Spotlight: Pittsburgh. Background is black and yellow city skyline.
Natasha Mascaren asked herself aloud, “What makes a great investor?” We asked you for your opinion, and many of you participated. There’s still time to vote and split your two cents.
Speaking of sharing, we posted our final call to include startups in our Pittsburgh Spotlight Pitch-Off. If you know a great startup in the Pittsburgh ecosystem, share it far and wide and encourage people to submit their company. While you’re at it, make sure you signed up to take part on June 29th!
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