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Founded by Ece Kural and Furkan Bayraktar,Scrintal is a visual note-taking and collaboration tool. The Sweden-based company’s product combines visual canvases with documentation to help professionals and teams go from idea to presentable work on the same screen — think Miro meets Notion meets a slew of other tools companies use to keep their knowledge in one place and their projects pointed more or less in the right direction.

The company today told TechCrunch it closed a €1 million round (around $1 million in today’s exchange rate) led by Spintop Ventures, and joined by existing investor Icebreaker VC.

“We’re creating a new category in work tools; a visual knowledge base. Our company was born out of the real-life struggle we experienced ourselves. When I was finishing my PhD at Stockholm University I realized I needed a more visual way of working,” says Ece Kural, co-founder and CEO of Scrintal.

The company told TechCrunch it will use the funding for launching the app, along with accelerating commercialization and product development. The company says it has more than 40,000 interested folks on its waitlist.

The image at the top of this story is from Scrintal’s pitch deck, which it used to raise the €1 million round. Stay tuned for our Pitch Deck Teardown of the company’s full deck coming later this week. For founders who want to submit their own pitch deck to the Pitch Deck Teardown series, here’s how!

Scrintal raises $1 million for its visual collaboration tool by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Ditching HomePod was a strange choice. At the time, Apple told us, “HomePod mini has been a hit since its debut last fall, offering customers amazing sound, an intelligent assistant, and smart home control all for just $99. We are focusing our efforts on HomePod mini.”

While the smart home hasn’t panned out precisely the way Apple or its competition hoped (just ask Amazon), the company never took its eye off that ball. HomeKit — and all it entails — is still a central piece of the company’s strategy, and getting Siri, the Home app, etc. into the home is still an important goal — another key branch of the ecosystem play.

This morning, however, it became clear that the HomePod wasn’t dead. It was just resting. Biding its time. Given that it took nearly two years for that triumphant return — and Apple completely cleared out stock of the old speaker in the meantime — this is apparently a “back by popular demand” situation. The fact of the matter is, however, a good hub is still an essential piece of the smart home puzzle.

Amazon, for example, may have been hemorrhaging money with its Echo play, but that doesn’t mean that getting those devices in the home is a key component of a long-tail strategy (the problem, ultimately, is the question of just how long a tail the people in charge of the money are willing to put up with). HomePod mini, while it has its place, is probably not going to fill that central smart home hub role for everyone. Nor, frankly, does it serve as a great replacement for a home speaker or TV surround sound. Sure, I said the thing has “remarkably big sound” in my review, but that’s relative to its size.

The other important factor in all of this is Matter. The new smart home standard frankly blows the doors wide open for Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung and the rest. Prior to its stage-one rollout late last year, the world of smart home standards was one of warring kingdoms, with companies duking it out to get their respective “Works With” logos on the back of boxes. Matter is effectively one standard to rule them all. If it works with one, it will work with all.

You can read an interview I did with a Matter exec at CES over here.

A thing that gets lost in all of this is how effective these devices can be in serving as a kind of catch-all platform for so many different home functionalities, from more complex smart home routines to doubling as an intercom. It also couples with existing features like Find My, so you can check in on a loved one who’s shared their location with you. New features include a temperature and humidity sensor, as well as the ability to detect and alert you when a smoke or fire alarm is going off — a nice little workaround for those who haven’t upgraded to a smart device like the kind Nest makes. It doesn’t include alerts for things like broken glass, however, which feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.

The real value proposition is, however, the same as ever. Unlike most of the competition, HomePod is a speaker first, smart home hub second. That’s not a knock on its smart home bona fides, mind — it’s an acknowledgement that the product is sound-first in a way that few other products in this category are. It was always a gamble in a category that’s been largely defined by ultra cheap, loss-leading devices. Apple knew it was limiting its potential userbase right out of the gate with a $349 price tag for the original. The new product is $50 cheaper, in spite of its advances, but that’s still a far cry from Google and Amazon, which have quite literally been giving away entry-level smart speakers at various points.

I spent some time with the new HomePod (technically “The All New HomePod,” by Apple’s official naming convention) early today. And I can attest to the fact that it sounds really great. The isolation is terrific. The treble is clear. The bass is powerful, without being overwhelming. As a long-time Google Home Max owner, I considered a potential move over (though the move away from Spotify is another question entirely).

The system audio calibrates its EQ based on its location in a room. It utilizes the on-board accelerometer to recognize when it’s been lifted, and then takes about 20 or so seconds to adjust accordingly. That means, in theory, that you’ll get great sound regardless of whether it’s sitting against a wall or in the middle of a room (these are all the sorts of things I’ll feel confident saying once I’m able to bring a review unit home).

Spatial Audio is an interesting feature here. I’ve mostly regarded it as a way to recreate a fixed point music source using headphones through head tracking. Here it means a more dynamic way of separating stereo channels.

Stereo pairing is, once again, a big thing. The footprint is exactly the same as the last one. It’s a big size as far as smart speakers go, but once again, the sound is even bigger. Get two of these things and your home speaker needs are pretty much taken care of. I’m not going to suggest that they’re replacement for truly high-end speakers for the true audiophile set, but as far as normal listeners go, I think most folks will be more than satisfied with a couple of these, be it as standalone speakers or flanking your TV.

I didn’t have the opportunity to A/B test against an older HomePod yet. I’m curious how easy it is to hear the difference in real time. Given how many of the updates here can arrive in the form of software updates, it would be an interesting test.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that the new device is not backward compatible with the last generation when it comes to this feature. It’s presumably a hardware limitation. Though, while I understand why this would be an issue with an uneven match like the HomePod mini, this is frankly a big bummer for those who invested in the previous generation. Even if it’s not a perfect experience, the option would beat starting over from scratch again.

The power cable is detachable for easier movement. There’s still no aux-in port here, which is, again, a bummer. It would be great to, say, plug in a turntable, but Apple’s really all in on a wireless music streaming experience here.

I’m excited to spend more time with the system soon. The system arrives February 3. More soon.

Some initial thoughts on Apple’s resurrected HomePod by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

Last year, U.S. startups with all-women teams received 1.9% (or around $4.5 billion) out of around the $238.3 billion in venture capital allocated, according to the latest PitchBook data.

That percentage is a notable drop from the 2.4% all-women teams raised in 2021. The decline was expected, given the economic climate of last year: the bear, the bust, the winter. In fact, aside from 2016, the last time all-women-led startups raised such a low percentage of funds was in 2012, another period of funding decline caused by economic uncertainty and an election.

Fitting, almost. And naturally, the percentage of funds raised increases when an “all-women team” turns into having “at least one women founder,” signifying the importance of always keeping a man in the room. The augmentation is quite noticeable, too: All-women teams raised 1.9% of VC funds last year, a percentage that skyrocketed to 17.2% when the team was mixed-gender. This trend has remained consistent for at least a decade.

“When the economy tanks, discrimination feels justified,” Ruth Foxe Blader, a partner at Anthemis Group, told TechCrunch. “Managers double-down on what they perceive as ‘safe’ and ‘boring.’ Investing in women is still perceived as high-risk. LPs need to look beyond manager diversity and into their investment portfolios if we want to change this industry; 1.9% is deplorable.”

There is good news, however.

Women-founded startups raised 1.9% of all VC funds in 2022, a drop from 2021 by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch

Predicting spending is a tricky business, especially in a period of economic uncertainty. Perhaps that’s why both IDC and Gartner have cut their fall predictions in the new year with Gartner now predicting modest 2.2% growth for 2023 with IDC a bit more optimistic at 4.4%.

In the fall, Gartner was predicting a far more robust 5.1% and IDC was looking at between 5% and 6%. Both companies look at a combination of business and consumer spending in their numbers.

Gartner says it’s the consumer side of the ledger that’s become a drag on their predictions, while the firm expects enterprise buyers to increase expenditures in the coming year.

“While inflation is devastating consumer markets, contributing to layoffs at B2C companies, enterprises continue to increase spending on digital business initiatives despite the world economic slowdown,” Gartner analyst John-David Lovelock said in a statement.

When we spoke to IDC analyst Rick Villars for an article on 2023 spending, he left some wiggle room in his prediction:

“Spending on core IT infrastructure, business software, professional services to implement and operate the systems — even if the economy stays flat, we expect to see continued healthy growth in the 5% to 6% range in aggregate for those spaces. It would take a more severe economic downturn from what we’re seeing for that to change,” Villars told TechCrunch.

Perhaps the squeeze on consumer spending is the source of the problem, although the Adobe Digital Price Index found prices for electronics, which include items like phones and PCs, were down over 12% for the year (with prices increasing 1.9% in December). But that was more than offset by groceries, which were up 13.5% year over year, a number more likely to have a much bigger impact on consumers overall.

Gasoline prices (which Adobe doesn’t measure) dropped 2% in December (per CNBC), but fuel oil was up a whopping 41%. The bottom line is that consumers probably aren’t feeling confident right now when it comes to buying new technology if basics are costing them so much more than the prior year.

The numbers bear this out as PC sales were down for the fourth straight quarter. That translated into a 28% drop for Q4 2022, numbers so low that Gartner reported it was the biggest single quarter drop since the firm has been tracking this data in the mid-1990s

Phone sales were similarly dismal with sales the lowest in a decade. Numbers were off 17% in Q4 2022, down 11% for the year.

While consumers are clearly cutting back, enterprises are less likely to cut their spending as tech can help blunt the impact of an economic downturn, something Villars told us in the December article on IT spending:

“The main thing we’re hearing from CIOs is that technology is part of solving the business challenges that a recession brings. And if the focus is on just cutting technology investments, they’re not actually helping the company get through the recession or through these disruptions.”

Certainly, enterprises won’t be cutting back on cybersecurity as new data from Canalys shows. The firm is predicting that security spending will increase 13% in 2023.

Consumers will probably continue to think twice about buying electronics in the first part of the year if food and fuel prices don’t come down, and that will have a big impact on the numbers overall, but as these firms predict, business spending continues to look much brighter as companies see tech as a critical budget item.

Analysts cut 2023 techs spending predictions as consumers hold back by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

PureTerra, a venture firm that aims to fund “disruptive water technologies,” is pumping millions into Membrion so the Seattle startup can mass-produce its wastewater treatment tech.

Membrion claims its ceramic membranes can filter out problematic heavy metals (not the genre, but toxic stuff like lead, arsenic and lithium) for around a twelfth of the cost of evaporative processes. Founder and CEO Greg Newbloom tells TechCrunch that he “wouldn’t recommend drinking the water we purify,” but the executive said the end result “can definitely be reused within an industrial facility,” without having to truck it off-site for treatment.

Membrion says its membranes can treat wastewater across a variety of industries, including fossil fuels, semiconductors, automotive and food and beverage production. “When we talk about ‘harsh wastewater,’ we mean wastewater that will literally burn your hand due to the pH and oxidizers present,” explained Newbloom. “These types of wastewaters cannot be treated with existing desalination membrane technology,” he added, so facilities today are stuck with “environmentally damaging alternatives,” such as boiling wastewater and using “single-use materials” to filter out harmful metals and salts.

The startup is in the process of raising its Series B amid climate-driven droughts. Heck, much of the West is abnormally dry or worse, even after record-setting storms that’ve hammered California in recent weeks.

Membrion says it’s secured $7 million so far, with a target of $10 million. PureTerra Ventures led the round, while investors such as Safar Partners, GiantLeap Capital and Freeflow also chipped in, per a press release.

“I anticipate that we’ll hit our [fundraising] goal within the next couple of months given the interest we have,” Newbloom told TechCrunch.

Wastewater recycler Membrion makes light work of removing heavy metals by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch

Ethereum’s shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) in September 2022 increased interest in staking across a number of parties — including institutions.

The success of the Merge propelled Ethereum from “a smart contract platform lagging behind” into “something that was doing things right,” Diogo Mónica, co-founder and president of Anchorage Digital, a crypto bank last valued over $3 billion, said to TechCrunch. “Interest from investors grew and the appetite changed dramatically.”

And it’s true: Institutional interest in ETH staking increased after the Merge, Matt Hougan, CIO at Bitwise Asset Management, said to TechCrunch.

“All of a sudden, by holding Ethereum, you went from holding a bet on smart contract platform to holding a bet that holds yield,” Mónica said.

Staking is a way of earning rewards for holding a certain token (in this instance, ETH) for a certain amount of time. In return for staking, people are paid out yield or additional rewards in exchange for holding their coins to secure the network.

In a way, it’s like having cash in your wallet or parking your cash in a bank CD, Hougan said. “You lock your money up in the CD and the bank pays you interest. In this example, you lock your ETH up in a staking pool and earn interest.”

Ethereum’s shift to proof-of-stake draws increasing institutional interest by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Sequoia Capital, a storied venture capital firm, announced today that it has raised $195 million for its fifth, dedicated seed fund. The vehicle will be used to back founders across the United States and Europe, as well as follow-on funding rounds for companies spinning out of the firm’s accelerator program, Arc.

The new fund comes alongside an expansion of Arc, Sequoia’s internal program that invests between $500,000 and $1 million into rising founders across the world. While the growing program is now advertised to have two cohorts in America and one in Europe, Latin American companies are welcome to apply as well. TechCrunch reached out to Sequoia for further comment and will update this piece accordingly.

The capital comes as the pre-seed and seed world, already a growing part of the startup ecosystem, becomes even more attractive to investors who want to steer clear of the turbulence of the later-stage market. AngelList data, released today, tells part of the story, noting that average seed-stage valuations hit $24 million last year, a decline of 13.9% compared with 2021. Median pre-seed valuations held consistent quarter over quarter, while later-stages, such as Series B, fell by nearly a third.

Jess Lee, a Sequoia partner and All Raise co-founder, said on Twitter that the firm will be looking at all verticals for potential outlier founders, but specifically called out artificial intelligence and consumer social as two areas she’s investing in.

In a blog post announcing the seed fund, other partners similarly hinted at areas of interest. Alfred Lin pointed to augmented reality and virtual reality as the makings of the “next consumer platform to drive wide-scale innovation,” while Shaun Maguire said that “hardware will always have my heart.”

Roelof Botha, the recently-appointed global head of Sequoia, kept it simple: he said in the post that he’s looking for founders who are taking advantage of a more disciplined market, and the decreasing cost of automation, artificial intelligence, and even genetic sequencing.

Sequoia, like many firms, has seen its portfolio humbled during the downturn, which may impact how partners are handling due diligence and sourcing in the year ahead. Just this past week, Sequoia-backed company GoMechanic cut 70% jobs, with its founder admitting in a LinkedIn post that the outfit made “grave errors in judgment as we followed growth at all costs.”

Other Sequoia portfolio companies with sizable cuts include Bounce, Ola, and well, FTX. Indeed, Sequoia’s $200 million investment in FTX has brought fair criticism to the firm’s decision-making track record.

Lin, who TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos interviewed last week at her StrictlyVC event, said the experience hasn’t soured Sequoia’s interest in crypto. Though he said that just 10% of Sequoia’s crypto fund has been deployed one year after it was launched, he added that Sequoia remains “long-term optimistic” about crypto.

Sequoia injects $195 million into an ever-eager seed environment by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

The past few years have been a rollercoaster for the startup world’s herd of unicorns.

Two years ago, we saw a record number of companies cross the $1 billion valuation milestone. But that momentum slowed to a trickle last year, and this year’s market conditions look likely to reverse course to a point that we may witness some of those companies losing that status.

Down rounds are likely to become the norm this year as venture firms and investors look to bring valuations back to earth. We’ve already started to see some decacorns, like Stripe and Instacart, lowering their valuations, but they are so highly valued that they aren’t at risk of losing their unicorn status. But most unicorns don’t enjoy that luxury.

CB Insights’ unicorn index shows that there are 1,205 companies currently worth over $1 billion. But if you look closely, you’ll notice that the majority of these startups are actually hovering right at the $1 billion mark. Currently, 685 unicorns were last valued between $1 billion and $2 billion — that’s more than half the list.

How many of these will stay unicorns through this calendar year? To find out, we recently surveyed more than 35 investors on how many startups they thought would drop below the $1 billion valuation mark in 2023. While nobody could peg a specific number, of course, the vast majority felt the herd has likely already been winnowed.

Losing the horn: VCs think majority of unicorns aren’t worth $1 billion anymore by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch

Understanding the biodiversity of forests is crucial to their conservation or restoration. Collecting “external DNA” left behind by animals is a good way to find out what lives there without having to spot them or even be there at the same time — and this drone from Swiss researchers makes taking samples from tree limbs safer and easier.

External DNA can come from lots of forms — dead skin or feathers, waste, fluids — and can be found in soil, water, or on surfaces like rocks and tree branches. Basically anywhere an animal might hang out, it leaves a trace of itself and we can detect that. Until recently this type of DNA amplification and analysis might have been too complex or expensive, but the tools to do it have become much cheaper and easier to use.

There remains the matter of collecting the DNA, though, and while biologists can certainly collect soil and water samples or scrape the sides of trees, high-up limbs where birds, small mammals, and insects live their whole lives are inaccessible without special equipment. Try telling your department head you need an extra $20K to get a tree-climbing team because their wasn’t enough guano on the forest floor.

The adventurous roboticists at ETH Zurich have come up with a clever method of sampling external DNA from tree branches that can easily be done from the ground. In a paper published in Science Robotics, they propose a drone-based solution: an aerial robot that can fly up to high branches and snag samples from them without damaging the branch or itself.

The drone looks a bit like a modernist light fixture, with a beautifully crafted wood frame and plastic shielding, and strips of adhesive tape or “humidified cotton” mounted on its lower surfaces. After being guided to a generally favorable position, it hovers above a branch to be sampled and monitors any movement like swaying or bouncing, synchronizing its approach. When it makes contact, it pushes with enough pressure to cause loose eDNA materials to transfer to the strips, but not so much that it pushes the branch out of the way. Essentially, it leans on the tree.

The initial outings with the drone in the arboretum surrounding the institute (we know a lot about forests right by universities, just as we know a lot about the psychology of undergraduates), the team was able to identify dozens of species of plants and animals (as well as microorganisms). That they collected much more before it rained than after suggests the method finds recent presence, which can be helpful or limiting depending on what a project needs.

The team plans to continue working on the drone, letting it go further into trees or higher up, or adjusting its collection technique to work in different circumstances.

“Our results pave the way for a generation of robotic biodiversity explorers able to survey eDNA at different spatial and temporal scales,” write the researchers. “By allowing these robots to dwell in the environment, this biomonitoring paradigm would provide information on global biodiversity and potentially automate our ability to measure, understand, and predict how the biosphere responds to human activity and environmental changes.”

You can see the drone in action below:

This gentle drone collects loose DNA from swaying tree branches by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

Wikipedia, one of the world’s top 10 most visited websites, and a resource used by billions every month, is getting its first makeover on the desktop in over a decade. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the Wikipedia project, announced today the launch of an updated interface aimed at making the site more accessible and easier to use with additions like improved search, a more prominently located tool for switching between languages, an updated header offering access to commonly used links, an updated table of contents section for Wikipedia articles, and other design changes for a better reading experience.

The interface has already been launched on hundreds of language versions of Wikipedia in recent weeks, but is now rolling out to English Wikipedia, it said.

The changes being introduced are not very dramatic — in fact, they may not even be immediately noticed by some users. The organization, however, says the update was necessary in order to meet the needs of the next generation of Internet users, including those who are more newly coming online and may have less familiarity with the Internet.

To develop the new interface, the foundation engaged with over 30 different volunteer groups from around the world, with users in places like India, Indonesia, Ghana, and Argentina, among others, all helping to test the update and provide insights into the product development. The goal for the update was to make Wikipedia more of a modern web platform, it said, and to remove clutter, while also making it easier for users to contribute. It additionally aimed to make the desktop web version more consistent with Wikipedia’s mobile counterpart.

Among the changes is a newly improved search box that now uses both images and descriptions in its autocomplete suggestions that appear as you type to help direct users to the article you need. This change, like many being introduced, is relatively small but offers a visual clue that could speed up searches and make them more helpful. The Wikimedia Foundation said this update led to a 30% increase in user searches when it was tested — a reminder that even minor changes can have larger impacts on a product’s real-world use.

Another change involves an updated sticky header, where you’ll find commonly used links like Search, the Page name, and Sections that moves with you as you scroll down, staying pinned to the top of the page. That means you’ll no longer have to scroll back up to the top to find what you’re looking for, allowing users to stay focused on reading or editing the content instead.

Again, this seems like a smaller tweak but one that decreased scroll rates by more than 15% during tests — something that may be helpful to those who spend a lot of time on Wikipedia navigating between pages and sections, though it largely addresses an annoyance with the site, more so than any real problem. The tests also found that edits people started using the edit button in the sticky header were reversed less often than those initiated through other edit buttons on the page.

Language-switching tools were previously available but are now bumped up to a new, more prominent position at the top right, allowing readers and editors to switch between over 300 supported languages. This could be helpful in emerging markets where multi-lingual users want to access pages from other languages, at times.

The new table of contents section on the left side of articles, which helps people navigate through longer content, will now remain visible as you scroll down the page and helps you to see which section you’re currently reading. This makes it easier to jump around, moving in between various parts of the article as you further investigate a topic. Again, helpful but not world-changing.

Other changes to the site include the addition of a collapsible sidebar for a more distraction-free reading experience and a change to the maximum line width. The foundation explained that limiting the width of long-form text makes for a more comfortable reading experience and improves retention of the content. However, a toggle is available for logged-in and logged-out users on every page if the monitor is 1600 pixels or wider, allowing users to increase the width of the page. Logged-in users can also set a width in their preferences page.

The default font size was also increased for better reading comfort.

Given the size of Wikipedia’s readership, it’s clear the organization was careful not to make disruptive changes. Today, Wikipedia offers over 58 million articles across more than 300 languages, which are viewed nearly 16 billion times every month, it said. The announcement also noted that no existing functionality was removed as a part of these changes — instead, the focus of the update was on usability improvements and modernizing the site.

The makeover, which is also known as “Vector 2022” — a reference to the name of the default Wikipedia skin (Vector — and yes, there are others!) — had been in the works for three years and had been slowly rolled out across the Wikipedia platform ahead of today. As of December 2022, Vector 2022 was the default skin for around 300 Wikipedias globally, and became the default on Arabic and Greek Wikipedias.

Today, the update is live on 94% of the 318 active language versions of Wikipedia for all desktop users and is rolling out to English Wikipedia on the desktop.

Wikipedia gets its first makeover in over a decade…and it’s fairly subtle by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch