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After reports circulated that “Westworld,” among other titles, would soon be pulled off HBO Max, the company sent out an announcement via email yesterday confirming the sad news. Westworld isn’t the only show to get the axe.

More than a dozen shows will leave the streaming service in the coming days, including “The Nevers,” “Raised by Wolves,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” “Love Life,” “Made for Love,” “Minx” and more.

However, there’s a silver lining. Warner Bros. Discovery, which has been canceling shows left and right, plans to license 13 of its HBO/HBO Max originals to third-party free ad-supported streaming (FAST) services. While HBO Max subscribers will no longer have access to these titles, they won’t be disappearing forever. And now you won’t have to pay $9.99/month to stream them.

HBO Max series switching to FAST services:

Westworld: seasons 1 through 4
The Nevers: season 1
Finding Magic Mike: season 1
Head of the Class: season 1
The Time Traveler’s Wife: season 1
Raised by Wolves: seasons 1-2
FBOY Island: seasons 1-2
Legendary: seasons 1-3

The remaining titles—“Gordita Chronicles” (S1), “The Garcias” (S1) “Love Life” (S1, S2), “Made for Love” (S1, S2) and “Minx” (S1, S2)—are not guaranteed to have new streaming homes. However, WBD is in talks with studio partners to license the shows to either FAST platforms or other streaming services.

It’s likely these shows were the least-watched HBO Max titles, so it makes sense why Warner Bros. Discovery removed them. Viewership ratings for “Westworld” continued to decline over the years, with the third season finale only getting 1.8 million viewers–about an 18% drop from the season two finale.

WBD didn’t say which free ad-supported streaming service will get “Westworld” and other HBO originals. Popular streaming services in the FAST market include Peacock, Pluto TV, Tubi, The Roku Channel and Amazon Freevee.

The company also noted that, in 2023, it would provide more details about its own FAST offering. Earlier this summer, CEO David Zaslav mentioned the company’s plans for a free ad-supported streaming service. There’s a possibility that its own FAST platform could offer the above 13 titles.

Here are the 13 shows leaving HBO Max (yes, ‘Westworld’ is one of them) by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

As China looks to reignite growth, what role will its technology industry play? And is there enough capital flowing to support a new generation of tech startups that could keep China competitive?

It’s not a secret that the Chinese economy slowed in recent quarters, thanks to global macroeconomic turbulence, geopolitical matters and the country’s now-fading zero-COVID policies. The policies, which China’s government is presently dismantling, resulted in frequent lockdowns in the populous nation’s cities, while other precepts of the policy disrupted trade and transit.

The zero-COVID policies worked to limit the spread of the pandemic in the country for some time, but the cost of the policy — in human and economic terms — appears steep today as the nation begins to endure a wave of infections that were perhaps delayed instead of avoided.

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Other factors played into China’s slowing economic growth. The country’s highly leveraged real estate market has taken blows thanks to changing regulations and a history of debt-fueled expansion, the price of which eventually came due. And China’s government cracked down on its domestic tech industry starting in late 2020 with the scuppering of Ant’s then-planned epic fintech IPO.

After Ant was put into the penalty box, a host of other regulations rained down from the Chinese Communist Party’s pen, whacking gaming, e-commerce and edtech, among other technology subsectors. Unsurprisingly, venture capital activity in the country declined.

Can China’s venture capital market help it reignite growth? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

Aztec Network, a privacy layer for web3, has raised $100 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the startup’s co-founders Zac Williamson and Joe Andrews exclusively told TechCrunch.

“At a high level, Aztec is an encrypted version of Ethereum,” Andrews said. “Normally on Ethereum everything is public, but we are making it encrypted. That journey has taken us many years to play out.”

Aztec Network launched Aztec Connect, an ecosystem that integrates with Ethereum DeFi protocols like Aave, Lido and Element Finance, in July 2021. In the future, it will integrate with Compound, and five other DeFi protocols, according to its website.

Encrypted blockchains provide transparency for the protocol but privacy for the users, so people aren’t required to show their identities when transacting, Williamson said.

“The world isn’t nice to live in without encryption,” Andrews said. “Go through your day and think about how many things you wouldn’t want people to see. Not all of it is bad; it’s just your daily life. But think about how you take that for granted. Doing things without privacy would be a pretty scary world and not one we want.”

Aside from a16z, there were a “few major funds and new investors” in the round, but Andrews didn’t disclose their names.

“We chose [a16z] to lead the round because they’ve been through this before with the dawn of the internet,” Andrews said. “It’s a similar situation to what we find ourselves in; yes, different, but the same problem. We have this exciting new technology and opportunity to transform the lives of everyone in the world, but we need encryption to make it a reality.”

The capital will mainly be used to hire more engineers globally to build the network, Andrews said. In the past year, the Aztec team has expanded from seven people to about 40, but it hopes to double that number in the near term, he added.

In general, public blockchains lack a “missing piece” of encryption, which could enable more use cases by providing privacy on a case-by-case basis, Andrews said. Adding encryption to blockchain technology could “spawn a whole wave of personal consumer finance,” among other things, he said.

While there are several encrypted blockchains like Zcash and Iron Fish network, Aztec differentiates itself from them because it’s programmable, Williamson said. “Those ones are a bit like Bitcoin — what you can do to those networks is determined by those who created it.”

Until recently, the technology for programmable encrypted blockchains didn’t exist, Williamson said. “One of the reasons we could raise $100 million is because our internal research and development made it a reality.”

The network is targeting a testnet launch within 12 months, but they hope it will be fully deployed on the mainnet within 8 to 24 months, Williamson said. Aztec Connect will be grandfathered into the network as its first application, Williamson added.

In the long term, the network wants to create a system using which people can transact and coordinate with the level of encryption needed for mainstream blockchain adoption, Andrews said.

“The goal is to make blockchains encrypted and use them to disrupt the traditional financial services industry to its core,” Williamson said. “If we succeed, in two to five years banks will have a lot of sleepless nights.”

Aztec Network takes on encrypted blockchains with $100M round led by a16z by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Dakotah Rice spent years working in the investment banking industry at firms such as Goldman Sachs, Carlyle and Coatue.

One thing that stood out to him was how only a small group of select people and firms could invest in venture capital and private equity funds. The barrier of entry is high, as minimums to invest in private equity often start at $1 million. While attending Harvard Business School, Rice became determined to build a platform that provides accredited investors with access to invest in such entities with as little as $1 — essentially giving them a way to be LPs without meeting the strict requirements that have historically existed.

In building out his business plan in late 2021, Rice talked to players in the space and got feedback that such a product would be welcomed by the industry — so much so that several high-profile investors agreed to back him in his efforts. Earlier this year, Rice raised $5.3 million in seed funding for Poolit, a Miami-based fintech startup that aims to open up access to investing in private equity and VC funds.

Harlem Capital led the financing, which included participation from the family office of The Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein, Coatue Management co-founder Thomas Laffont, Declaration Capital, Picus Capital and Gilgamesh Ventures.

Encouraged by the validation and spurred by the belief that alternative investments should be part of any healthy investment portfolio, Rice in April dropped out of Harvard to work full time on the project. And today, Poolit is emerging from stealth and out of beta.

Currently, Poolit offers accredited investors the ability to put money in two funds. The Imagine fund is all venture capital firms. The Horizon fund is all private equity firms. Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, CD&R and Apax are among the firms that investors can put money into through the platform.

“This is the first time someone can be an LP in those firms for no minimum amount,” Rice told TechCrunch in an interview. “There has not been a single fund that we’ve talked to that has had any reservations about being on the Poolit platform.”

That might be because Poolit offers the firms on its platform a free way to get investors as well as a diversified channel for distribution. Many of these firms go to private banks to get funding via “an old-school model” of paying a marketing fee to get backers in their funds, Rice said.

“2023 will be a fantastic year in all likelihood for venture and private equity. It’s kind of like you’re starting from a new base,” he added. “So these larger institutions who have had this exposure that goes up and down now have some other channel that they can also bring assets in and take advantage of the environment that we live in today. I do think there’s something unique about this timing.”

To ensure that the startup is adhering to federal regulations, Poolit partners with a firm called Maketa, which has $2 trillion in assets under advisory, to conduct its due diligence and vetting the quality and efficacy of investments themselves. The company spends 2-3 months alongside its sub-advisor rigorously vetting managers for inclusion in its funds before compiling the various funds into a portfolio.

In Rice’s view, Poolit’s registered funds structure is especially critical in today’s environment. Registered funds have strict disclosure requirements from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which are designed to protect investors more than non-registered funds.

KPMG audits Poolit, and each fund created on the platform essentially operates as their own company. So if Poolit ever ceases to exist, the funds will continue to exist.

“And if anything happened to Poolit, those people would be able to select a new advisor,” Rice added. “There are just all of these protections that exist out there for the underlying investors.”

Registered funds also have majority independent boards. Poolit’s includes a retired PWC audit partner and a JPMorgan executive that are meant to represent the voices of underlying investors and approve fees from third parties (even Poolit).

“In the wake of something like an FTX, I think this is really, really, really important,” Rice said. “They have the external third-party custodians, third-party fund administrators and it’s all codified on the SEC Edgar database website.”

As of December 9, the Poolit platform became available to the public. It currently has more than 500 users and about $140 million of reservations.

The company makes money by charging a percentage of assets under management from investors — an annualized 1% management fee. Most firms, Rice said, charge investors before they even put their money into any funds, and then management and sometimes performance fees on top of that.

So that investors have some flexibility, Poolit has established a limited quarterly share repurchase program that kicks in following the first year in the investment.

To be clear, while Poolit certainly has the potential to bring institutional-style funding to more people, it is still for now only for those in a certain higher income bracket. As defined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the criteria to be an accredited investor is having a net worth over $1 million, excluding one’s primary residence — either individually or with a spouse or partner and having an individual income of over $200,000 or combined income of $300,000 in each of the prior two years, “with reasonable expectations for the same for the current year.”

Historically, one has been required to have had over $5 million in liquid assets to be a qualified purchaser.

For Rice, who grew up in rural Alabama before attending Brown University, it would be a dream to one day open access to investing in VC and private equity funds to an even broader pool of people.

“There is a big part of me that wants to expand this to true retail, but that’s a regulatory question, and less of something I could actually control,” he told TechCrunch.

Rice believes his growing up with a challenging socio-economic background and working as a young, black gay investor as an adult enabled him to tackle the building out of Poolit “from a different lens.”

“I thought it was a worthwhile thing to do because of the disparity that exists,” he told TechCrunch. “When you look at the space that we operate in and you look at the founders of a lot of these other companies, there is a lot of similarity in their backgrounds. And I think that’s why people have been tackling the problem in a lot of the same ways.”

Harlem Capital managing partner Jarrid Tingle told TechCrunch he was drawn to Rice’s “passion and grit” in addition to the company’s attempt to democratize access to investments.

“Poolit’s tech platform is phenomenal. Relationships with top firms are essential,” Tingle wrote via email. “Dakotah and the investor group have a significant advantage there. And, Dakotah and the team’s sense of urgency is unmatched.”

Poolit raises millions to turn accredited investors into LPs in VC, private equity funds by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch

Agriculture produces what might be some of the hardest planet-warming carbon emissions to eliminate. People need to eat, and right now, the way we make food generates a lot of greenhouse gases — about a third of the total created by human activity. There are some simple ways to reduce it, like eating less meat, but there’s a point where cutting is no longer an option.

That’s why there’s growing interest in something called enhanced rock weathering, where minerals that naturally absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are crushed up and spread on soils to speed the process. It happens that some of these minerals are also beneficial for farmers and ranchers, many of whom have been searching in vain for ways to reduce their operations’ carbon emissions.

There are a few startups chasing this market, and one promising company, Eion, is announcing a $12 million Series A today, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The round was led by AgFunder and Ridgeline, with participation from Carbon Removal Partners, Mercator Partners, Orion, Overture, SLVC, Trailhead Capital, and mineral supplier Sibelco, with which the company has an off-take agreement.

“We need a hockey-stick growth path to deal with the gigaton challenge that we have in front of us,” Eion founder and CEO Adam Wolf told TechCrunch. Enhanced rock weathering, he added, offers that potential.

Eion is one of the companies that Stripe’s climate program bought carbon credits from last year, and it’s been using that money to kick-start its operations. The new funding will allow the startup to finalize its methodology, expand operations and build a mill to crush rock to help produce its patented soil amendment called CarbonLock.

Stripe-backed Eion digs up $12M Series A to help farms capture carbon with green rock dust by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

Every developer knows that it’s a bad idea to hardcode security credentials into source code. Yet it happens and when it does, the consequences can be dire. Until now, GitHub only made its secret scanning service available to paying enterprise users who paid for GitHub Advanced Security, but starting today, the Microsoft-owned company is making its secrets scanning service available for all public GitHub repos for free.

In 2022 alone, the company notified partners in its secret scanning partner program of over 1.7 million potential secrets that were exposed in public repositories. The service scans repositories for over 200 known token formats and then alerts partners of potential leaks — and you can define your own regex patterns, too.

“With secret scanning we found a ton of important things to address,” said David Ross, a staff security engineer at Postmates. “On the AppSec side, it’s often the best way for us to get visibility into issues in the code.”

Now, if you host your code on GitHub, the company will automatically notify you directly about leaked secrets in your source code. This also means that you will get alerts for secrets where there isn’t a partner to notify (maybe because you self-host your HashiCorp Vault, for example).

To begin using the service, you have to enable the feature in their GitHub security settings. However, the rollout of the service will be gradual and it will not be available to all users until the end of January 2023.

GitHub’s own tool is, of course, not the only service that will scan for leaked secrets. There are also open-source tools like gitLeaks (which can integrate with GitHub actions) and a plethora of security companies like Nightfall and CheckPoint’s Spectral, though their services tend to go well beyond secret scanning and are generally geared toward enterprises.

GitHub brings free secret scanning to all public repos by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

The market for lab-grown meat, also called cultivated or cell-cultured meat, is expected to reach $1.99 billion by 2035, growing at an annual rate of 21.4%. Beef is poised to be the dominant segment.

The market got a boost last month when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave what amounts to a safety blessing to Upside Foods, a cultivated meat product startup, effectively setting in motion what many of these companies have been working toward: accelerated commercialization.

The FDA concluded that it had “no further questions” related to how Upside is producing its chicken made from the cultured cells of animals and said it is working with other cultivated meat companies in other pre-market consultation discussions.

However, cultivated meat continues to struggle with cost, chiefly how expensive it is to make products, which means that having price parity with traditional meat isn’t likely to happen soon. There’s also the all-important perspective of taste: Will people really want to eat these products?

While companies are working on taste, they are also making claims about the sustainability of the cultivated meat industry. A Good Food Institute report from last year showed that cultivated meat production processes could significantly reduce both global warming and land use. For beef, it can be, in some cases, reductions of more than 80% in environmental impact when compared to traditional beef production.

Today, cultivated meat startup SCiFi Foods, which raised $22 million this summer, revealed results from an analysis it conducted with The Ohio State University. It showed that 1 kilogram of its SCiFi burger had a smaller environmental impact than a traditional beef patty.

SCiFi’s burger consists of cultivated beef cells and plant-based ingredients, like water and soy protein isolate, and its production showed an overall greenhouse gas emissions reduction of 88.5%, while reducing energy use by 37.7%, land use by 90.6% and water use by 96.9%, according to a press release.

The company claims it is the first to have a study like this to prove its sustainability claims. SCiFi co-founder and CEO Joshua March told TechCrunch via email that “all previous studies were performed on generic, non-specific cultivated meat (pork, chicken, etc.). This is the first study that clearly lays out and quantifies the sustainable benefits of cultivated beef cells in detail. What makes it even more exciting is the potential for us to make our numbers even more impactful by using renewable sources of energy.”

Cultivated beef companies tout sustainability. Will it lead to marketability? by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Instagram is introducing and expanding a number of features to help users keep their accounts secure, the company announced on Thursday. Most notably, the social network is launching a new “hacked” hub where users can report and resolve account access issues. If you’re unable to log into your account, you can enter Instagram.com/hacked on your mobile phone or desktop browser to access the new hub.

Next, users will be able to select if they think they have been hacked, forgot their password, lost access to two-factor authentication or if their account has been disabled. From there, users will be able to follow a series of steps to regain access to their account. If a user has multiple accounts associated with their information, they will be able to choose which account needs support.

In addition to the roll out of this hub, Instagram is expanding access to a feature that is designed to give users multiple ways to get their account back if they lose access. Earlier this year, Instagram began testing a way for people to ask their friends to confirm their identity in order to help regain access to their account. Now, this option is available to everyone. If you are locked out of your account, you can choose two of your Instagram friends to verify your identity and get back into your account.

Instagram is also testing new ways to help prevent hacking on its platform before it actually happens. The company already removes accounts that its automated systems determine to be malicious, and is now taking this measure a step further.

“Because bad actors often don’t immediately use accounts maliciously, we’re now testing sending warnings if an account that we suspect may be impersonating someone requests to follow you,” the company wrote in a blog post. “In the coming months, we’ll also send warnings if an account that may be impersonating a business sends you a Direct Message (DM).”

The company is also going to start displaying the blue verified badge forverified accounts in more places across the platform to make it easier for users to quickly determine if the account they’re interacting with is legitimate. You can now see verified blue badges in Stories and DMs. Instagram will also start featuring them in the Feed in the future.

Instagram launches a new hub to help users resolve account access issues by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

While hiring freezes at Big Tech firms might be hurting certain AI investments, it’s clear that there remains a strong appetite throughout the enterprise for AI technologies — whether developed in-house or outsourced to third parties.

According to a McKinsey survey from early December, AI adoption at companies has more than doubled since 2017, with 63% of businesses expecting spending on AI to increase over the next three years. In February, IDC forecast that companies would increase their spend on AI solutions by 19.6% in 2022, reaching $432.8 billion by the end of the year and over $500 billion in 2023.

Generative AI is driving much of the recent corporate interest, with text-to-image tools such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion seeing swift uptake despite the risks. Adobe just this month announced that it would open its stock image service, Adobe Stock, to creations made with the help of generative AI programs, following in the footsteps of Shutterstock (but not rival Getty Images). Meanwhile, Microsoft partnered with OpenAI to provide enterprise-tailored access to DALL-E 2 to customers like Mattel, which is using DALL-E 2 to come up with ideas for new Hot Wheels model cars.

Sequoia, the venture capital firm, said in a September blog post that it thought that generative AI could create “trillions of dollars of economic value.” That might sound optimistic, but there’s some evidence to suggest that AI has crossed the threshold from research project to serious revenue generator.

Companies — and VCs — continue to invest in AI despite market slowdown by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Twitter is where the world shares its opinions and aspirations; it’s where brands, celebrities, and politicians interact with people, live and in the open.

From 2006 to 2012, Twitter’s public API was free for all, which developers took advantage of to build a wide range of value-add services (like TweetDeck) for the growing community. But after 2012, Twitter sharply curbed data access, eroding developer trust. To help reverse this trend and enable the developer community to flourish, Twitter acquired my startup, Reshuffle, in May 2021.

After the acquisition, Jack Dorsey and Bruce Falk (former CEO and GM of Revenue Products, respectively) charged me with re-opening the Twitter API. This came after I gave harsh feedback as an external developer in a public forum to Twitter’s leadership about how broken the developer platform was and the investment needed to correct it.

I told them that with proper attention, we could create a delightful and successful platform that gave developers the tools and APIs to thrive and improve Twitter’s user experience. Paraphrasing Ned Segal, Twitter’s then-CFO: “Amir told us how broken it is, so we bought his company to fix it.”

My startup and I joined an amazing, small team working to revive the Twitter developer platform. In addition to making sure developers had a growing suite of API endpoints that allowed them to build successful solutions, the team was also migrating the old API to new GraphQL-based infrastructure. On November 15, 2021, we officially launched the new Twitter V2 API, which was met with a lot of developer love and excitement.

But our ambition was bigger than that.

Dorsey and the board funded us even further (gave us approval to hire 50 more people) to build something much bigger — something they had been wanting to build for a long time. The vision was to make Twitter a true developer platform. We wanted developers to create in-Twitter apps that interact with users.

We envisioned a world in which you could share your favorite song from Spotify and listen to it live with all your followers on Twitter. We wanted you to be able to share your donation to your favorite cause and get your followers to donate as well through an integrated, GoFundMe-style experience. We wanted you to play Wordle inside Twitter, not just share the results. We wanted you to be able to interact with developer-powered apps inside the Twitter user experience.

That was just the beginning: we also envisioned a true decentralization of the Twitter timeline. We wanted to let developers create and share their own timelines.

Interested in tech? Here’s the TechCrunch-curated timeline. Interested in video games? Here is Twitch’s games and streamers timeline. Custom Timelines were the superhero evolution of Twitter Lists, giving developers advanced powers to curate and create their favorite topics, or do so on behalf of others.

The next part of our plan was to create a discovery mechanism, something like a store to discover and install these apps and timelines. We even started to explore the possibility to let developers monetize these experiences.

In the past year, we started to launch experiments around all these experiences.

We launched the tiles experiment, which was the first step towards apps:

We launched the timeline experiment, the first step towards open, custom timelines:

Twitter launched the toolbox, our first discovery experiment:

We pulled all that off during the rollercoaster of Twitter’s acquisition period. We believed (quite mistakenly) that Elon would spend time understanding the range of projects within Twitter and their impact on the public conversation. We believed that the developer platform was a crucial piece of his outspoken vision for an “everything app.” We were excited to present our vision to him, hopeful that he would be excited by our vision.

And then, on November 4, we were fired. Our work computers were bricked in the middle of the night and emails appeared in our personal accounts telling us we were fired.

According to one of our engineers’ public Tweets, two people remain out of our 100+ person organization. All our dreams and plans for developers were blown to dust.

When I joined Twitter, I’d told Dorsey, “We cannot mess this up. We can fix the relationship between developers and Twitter only once. If we blow this chance, I would not hire a developer that trusts our platform ever again.”

That’s because when developers start building on a platform, they’re making a bet that it will continue to exist with a high degree of stability. It’s a lot of work to build on a platform, and developers have been burned in the past by unsuccessful platforms such as Windows Mobile, and unreliable ones like some of the Facebook API.

I have worked on some of the best platforms out there — from Android and Sharepoint to Twitch and Slack — and they all have one thing in common: openness and trust.

Last month, we broke that trust, and I am sorry I couldn’t stop that from happening. I wake up in the middle of the night still thinking about it. We were excited and looking forward to announcing our vision to developers at Chirp last month, and now that vision is just an opening keynote document, lost on my bricked Twitter computer.

A developer once asked me how we could ensure that Twitter would continue to maintain and invest in this developer platform. My answer was, “As long as we have this amazing team our leadership tasked with building the platform, developers will see that we are serious about it, and I will let you know when that changes.”

Let this be my personal notice to Twitter developers: the team is gone, the investment has been undone. Love does not live here anymore.

The team that built the Twitter developer platform is amazing. They will build awesome platforms for developers and other developer tools in other companies. I am honored to have worked with each and every one of them.

As for me, as I move forward and transition into the venture capital world, I intend to invest in impactful developer platforms — ones that are committed to being open and trustworthy.

Developer platforms are all about trust, and Twitter lost it by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch