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Snapchat is introducing three new features for its paid subscription service, Snapchat+, which costs $3.99 per month. Subscribers can now make the look and feel of the app more personalized by customizing the camera capture button, app icons and more. Users can change the camera capture button to a specific color or shape, such as a heart or a soccer ball.

Subscribers can now also add a custom background to their chats with the new “Chat Wallpapers” feature. Chat Wallpapers were arguably first made popular by Meta’s WhatsApp, which has had the feature for quite some time now. Snapchat+ subscribers can now change their chat wallpapers to standard backgrounds available in the app or to an image from their camera roll.

Last, subscribers can now send a Snapchat+ subscription to a friend for the holidays with a new “Gifting” feature. The launch of this feature isn’t a surprise, given that Snapchat said back in October that this feature would be rolling out this month. With Gifting, you can send a 12-month Snapchat+ subscription to a friend for $39.99.

The social network’s previous Snapchat+ feature drop in October gave users the ability to have their Snapchat Stories expire at different intervals instead of 24 hours. With the update, Snapchat+ subscribers gained the ability to set Snaps on their Story to expire after either one hour, six hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, two days, three days or one week. It also gave subscribers the option to use different custom notification sounds for when a friend Snaps them.

Snapchat introduced its paid subscription back in June with exclusive, experimental and pre-release features. Snapchat+ unlocks the ability to see who has rewatched your story, along with a special badge and the ability to pin a friend as your No. 1 friend. Among other things, the subscription also includes the ability to see “the general direction of travel for where friends have moved recently.” In the first month since its launch, Snapchat+ had helped the app rake in over $5 million in revenue, according to estimates.

Snapchat+ adds new customization features and the option to gift a subscription by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Software spend is becoming a prime target for cuts as it grows into a larger line item in enterprises’ budgets. According to one recent report, customers are putting 53% more toward software-as-a-service (SaaS) licensing compared to five years ago. Management has come down aggressively; 57% of IT teams told Workato in a 2022 poll that they’re under pressure to significantly reduce software spend at their organizations.

Cutting software spend is a task that’s easier said than done in companies where teams and even entire divisions rely on specific software to get their work done. The solution, Mark Ghermezian argues, is avoiding cuts in the first place — with business loans. But not just any loans — business loans specifically made out for software and infrastructure purchases.

Ghermezian is the founder of Gynger, a New York-based platform that offers companies capital to procure software and services products for their bespoke tech stacks. Gynger emerged from stealth today with $10 million in debt from Upper90 and $11.7 million in seed funding co-led by Upper90 and Vine Ventures with participation from Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture fund), m]x[v Capital, Quiet Capital and Deciens Capital.

Ghermezian previously founded Braze, a cloud-based customer engagement platform for multichannel marketing. There, he says, he saw how difficult it was to sell software and — on the flip side — how difficult it was for buyers to purchase the software.

“Going through those pains while managing our budgets and thinking of cash flow and runway, I experienced the shortcomings of the business-to-business SaaS market firsthand,” Ghermezian told TechCrunch in an email interview. “As a founder, you raise all this money and immediately need to spend a lot of capital to build your tech stack. We wanted a way to combine software with capital to service the startup ecosystem and help them get the best software while extending and managing their cash flow.”

Gynger’s core product is an automated underwriting model for financing software and infrastructure purchases. The company provides a line of credit and debt financing to corporate customers, allowing them to pay their SaaS bills upfront while paying back Gynger later. (Ghermezian says that the debt Gynger raised will be used to finance these, although Gynger can — and has — loaned off its balance sheet.)

Ghermezian lists what he sees as the top benefits of Gynger’s platform, including giving customers access to upfront payment discounts from vendors and the ability to spread out lump sum payments over the course of three to 12 months. Gynger also provides a unified dashboard for SaaS expenses that consolidates them into a single monthly payment.

There’s some customizability with Gynger. Customers can choose to pay vendors the full year upfront in exchange for a discount or spread out existing bills, for example, and decide which contracts they want Gynger to finance on their behalves. Ghermezian says that Gynger’s decisioning algorithm looks at cash, burn rate and revenue to determine how much capital a company is eligible for.

The alterative financing market has exploded as macroeconomic headwinds spur companies to seek out nondilutive forms of capital. Ghermezian sees Gynger competing closely with fintechs like Pipe and Capchase, both of which provide businesses funding outside of equity and venture debt. But he notes that many loaners focus on purchasing a company’s receivables (i.e. funds owed goods and services) and lending against their annual recurring revenue. While Gynger considers revenue in making its loan decisions, it doesn’t require a company to have it.

“Companies of all sizes can benefit from Gynger, but we’ve seen particular success with pre-Series B companies,” Ghermezian said. “With Gynger, any company of any size can access non-dilutive capital, purchase the software and infrastructure they need to run their business and pay on their terms.

Lending to a company without revenue might sound risky. And Gynger’s website pitches the platform as a way for vendors to upsell customers by using flexible financing as an incentive for larger purchases, which also seems risk-seeking.

But Gradient Ventures’ Darian Shirazi said he believes that Gynger is taking a measured approach to doling out capital.

“The per-seat annual billing software model is evolving and we believe Gynger is offering new ways for companies to buy software that best suits their financial situation,” Shirazi added in a statement. “Many have attempted to innovate on the underwriting model for software financing, but the real multi-billion dollar opportunity is in offering a myriad of payment and financing workflows depending on customer need. Gynger is revolutionizing how customers pay for and purchase software and we’re thrilled to partner with them.”

In any case — setting the risks aside — lending for software spend seems like a decently safe business model bet, given that worldwide IT spending is expected to grow 4% to $4.5 trillion by the end of 2022, according to Gartner. That’s certainly a large and growing addressable market.

To date, Ghermezian says that Gynger has financed SaaS contracts as small as $1,000 to as high as $1 million from vendors including Airtable, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Slack and Zoom. He declined to reveal Gynger’s revenue, but claimed that the 13-person company is “super healthy” in terms of cash flow.

Gynger launches out of stealth to loan companies cash for software by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Solid Power, one of the leaders in the race to commercialize all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries, has been stumbling of late. But a new deal with BMW might give it the boost it needs.

After going public via SPAC in late 2021, Solid Power’s share price followed the all-too-familiar SPAC bump then bust, trading for much of this year at a discount to its $10 debut. Then, in late November, its co-founder and CEO, Douglas Campbell, announced that he was stepping down, hastening the stock’s slide.

Campbell said that while the company had been able to deliver sample cells to partners BMW and Ford on time, it was having trouble finding talent to staff its facilities and high-quality materials to make its batteries.

Solid Power was founded in 2011, the year before battery pioneer A123 Systems collapsed. The larger company’s bankruptcy undoubtedly left an impression on the founding team. Instead of trying to compete with large battery manufacturers like LG, CATL, and SK Innovation, Solid Power has long sought to supply larger companies with battery materials that would enable denser, lighter cells.

Still, to win those large, long-term contracts, Solid Power still has to prove that its materials can be mass-produced. Hand-crafting a breakthrough cell in a lab is one thing; making hundreds or thousands of them in short order is another.

Solid Power has been making progress, unveiling a pilot production line in June that went on to make the cells for BMW and Ford. But that line apparently hit a few snags, and production hasn’t been proceeding as quickly as the company would like. It still has plenty of money — over $370 million in cash and securities, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — but it needs manufacturing expertise to surmount whatever barriers it’s encountered.

Enter BMW: Today, the two companies announced an expanded joint development agreement in which BMW pays Solid Power $20 million in exchange for the company’s manufacturing know-how. BMW will replicate Solid Power’s pilot production line in Germany, and it will also send battery and manufacturing experts to Colorado to help troubleshoot the original pilot line.

Solid Power and BMW’s R&D deal offers a sneak peek into the battery industry’s future by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

Hello and welcome back toEquity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Mary Ann is taking the reins with another favorite from the TechCrunch Disrupt stage. She sat down with Brex CEO and co-founder, Henrique Dubugras, and Anu Hariharan, YC’s managing director for continuity and an early Brex investor, to expose the context around this whirlwind of a year.

The conversation candidly uncovers details behind the fintech’s pandemic pivot, layoffs, and going remote. If you love the conversation, share it with a friend. And if you want more on Brex, Mary Ann dove deeper into the conversation last month.

Equity drops every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has agreat show on crypto, ashow that interviews founders, ashow that details how our stories come togetherand more!

Brex’s 2022 reality by Theresa Loconsolo originally published on TechCrunch

We gift each other a lot of books each year. It’s a good practice, as having more books makes you a more handsome individual, and buying books helps support the arts. Or at least quasi-vanity business book publishers.

Regardless, we’re wrapping up the TechCrunch Book-A-Thon today with a series of recommendations from founders. Recounting the best books that entrepreneurs read in 2022 follows our list of recommendations from venture capitalists andthe TechCrunch staff.

Naturally, you’ll find a good number of business books below. There are also recommendations from founders that stray into the autobiographical and fiction realms. If you need even more book ideas, you can check out both parts of our 2021 list hereand here.

This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission.

Founder book favorites, 2022 edition

Process Mining: Data Science in Actionby Wil van der Aalst

Recommended by Alex Rinke, co-founder and co-CEO of Celonis.

His research changed my life and the course of my career. Reading that book opened my eyes to a new way of running processes to companies everywhere — an adventure that involved my co-founders and me hand-writing over a thousand letters to top executives, driving all over Germany in a beat-up Opel Astra and so much more.

The best books that startup founders read in 2022 by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

You’d have thought that the quantified self movement was stalling out, but Metriport would like to tell you otherwise, thank-you-very-much. We covered the company back in February, and now it has raised $2.4 million to evolve to the next level.

The company went through Y Combinator, and in the process discovered how fractured the healthcare IT space was.

“One major issue that exists in the U.S. today is the fact that many individuals still aren’t able to access their own medical data, largely due to gatekeeping by hospitals and other medical providers. This is because these hospitals and providers use proprietary software systems that make it difficult for patients to access their own medical records or to share them with other providers,” says Colin Elsinga, co-founder & COO at Metriport, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We realized that there was so much work to be done in this space to make the data more accessible and that hardly anyone in the space was working on an open source, non-proprietary solution. Since we’ve always been mission-driven founders, having previously built a consumer health app, we decided to go after this larger problem with the goal of democratizing access to healthcare data and ultimately improve patient health outcomes.”

The funding round came together with investment from Y Combinator, Triple Impact Ventures, Nueterra Capital, Leonis Investissement, Zillionize, VentureSouq, Stonks and MyAsiaVC, along with a number of angel investors.

“The fundraise allowed us to grow our team and accelerate our engineering velocity, which is great since we have a lot of product to build. Additionally, it allows us to pave our way through the various compliance and legal fees tied to entering the healthcare space, which is extremely regulated. Today we’re excited to have launched our first product, our Health Device API, which allows digital health companies to gain access to their users’ consumer health data from various wearables, RPM devices and mHealth apps,” says Elsinga. “The next steps for us in the near term will be launching our second main product, our Medical API, which will allow companies to gain both access to their patients’ medical records and interface with EHRs. Both of these products are open source, which is a huge differentiator in the market.”

The company tells me it raised a $2.4 million seed round at a $20 million valuation, all on post-money SAFEs, and are working to launch its Medical API in 2023.

“Being the first open source solution of its kind, we’re really excited to see what sort of community contributions will come out of this, and how it will enable new companies to make innovations in the space that weren’t previously possible. We will set a new standard for dev-friendliness, transparency and accessibility in the health tech data space,” Elsinga explains.

The company thinks of itself as the medtech equivalent of what Plaid did for fintech; opening up a door for emerging digital health companies to get access to the data they need to grow and scale quickly.

“Based on the volume of customers lining up eager to use our product, we ask ourselves the same thing,” says Elsinga, when asked why nobody is doing this already. “The way we see it is that in every industry, when the existing players stagnate from being comfortable off of profits from the status quo, the market is open for disruption by younger, hungrier and more modern companies. That time is now in the healthcare data space, we know this needs to be built, and we’ll be the company to spearhead those efforts — setting industry standards along the way.”

Healthcare data is a mess and Metriport is here with a broom by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

As the world continues to become more digital, the demands and needs of consumers are changing — and NFTs might be a big part of the future for brands looking to shake up their rewards programs, Adam Brotman, co-CEO and co-founder of Forum3, said to TechCrunch.

“We’re hearing from a lot of other brands, whether they have a loyalty program or not, that what all big brands are contending with right now is that the consumer is changing,” Brotman, who is also the former chief digital officer of Starbucks, said. “It’s not just Gen Z or millennials, but the consumer in general has become more hyperdigitalized and more appreciative of digital goods.”

At the beginning of this month, Starbucks launched a blockchain-based loyalty program and NFT community dubbed Starbucks Odyssey. The initiative was launched through a partnership with Forum3, which helped build out the coffee giant’s NFT project, Brotman said.

In September, Starbucks said it envisioned the program as a way for its most loyal customers to earn a broader, more diverse set of rewards beyond the perks they can get today, like free drinks. Instead, Odyssey introduces a new platform where customers can engage with interactive activities called “Journeys” that, when complete, allow members to earn collectible Journey Stamps — which is Starbucks’ less technical terminology for NFTs.

Aside from Starbucks, web3 customer loyalty-focused Forum3 has been working mainly with consumer brands, retailers (including restaurants), sports leagues and direct-to-consumer subscription companies, Brotman said.

“Odyssey is an extension of the Starbucks loyalty program,” Brotman noted. “It’s an opportunity to innovate and extend loyalty.”

Separately, earlier this year, Nike launched an NFT and metaverse platform, .Swoosh, which will allow shoe fanatics to trade and create digital “wearables and virtual sneakers.”

A loyalty program is often centered around giving something to customers in return for their loyalty to a brand, Brotman said in a blog post. “What does the brand give in return? Discounts and digital convenience, such as remembering your favorite items, address, and payment methods, suggesting items, and letting you order ahead.”

But what if these digital points, or royalty rewards, could actually be owned by customers? That’s where NFTs, or true digital ownership, comes into play — and provides a “much more immersive loyalty layer,” Brotman said. It allows customers to receive points and digital collectibles that they own and could use in ways beyond what a typical rewards program allows today.

Starbucks’ NFT program may drive more digital collectible integrations with big brands by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

British newspaper The Guardian has confirmed its systems have been hit by a “serious IT incident,” which it believes is likely a ransomware attack.

The Guardian, whose media editor was first to report the incident, said that the incident began late on Tuesday and has affected parts of the company’s IT infrastructure.

“There has been a serious incident which has affected our IT network and systems in the last 24 hours,” Guardian Media Group chief executive Anna Bateson and editor-in-chief Katharine Viner said in a note to employees: “We believe this to be a ransomware attack but are continuing to consider all possibilities.”

As a result, the publisher said it’s experiencing disruption to “behind the scenes” services, and employees have been told to work remotely for the rest of the week. However, the company says that online publishing is largely unaffected, adding that it was “confident” it could still produce Thursday’s print newspaper.

Further details about the attack remain vague, and it’s unclear how The Guardian’s systems were compromised, whether data was stolen, or whether it received a ransom demand. Ransomware actors typically exfiltrate then threaten to publish a victim’s personal data unless a ransom demand is paid.

It’s also unclear who is behind the attack, and the incident doesn’t yet appear to have been claimed by any major ransomware group.

When reached by email, a spokesperson for The Guardian — who declined to provide their name — would not answer TechCrunch’s questions.

News organizations around have become regular targets for cyberattacks. In September, hackers breached the internal systems of U.S. business publication Fast Company to send offensive push notifications to Apple News users.

The New York Post also confirmed that it was hacked in October. However, the company later claimed that a rogue employee was to blame for the “unauthorized conduct,” but declined to say what evidence the newspaper had to show that the employee was to blame.

British newspaper The Guardian says it’s been hit by ransomware by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

The great surge in entrepreneurship following the pandemic resulted in a significant disruption of most industries, which was mainly reflected in significant and widespread adoption of tech, both old and contemporary. Today, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are being applied across multiple departments and are helping teams work in synergy at a faster pace.

Finance teams are no exception to this trend. The month-end closing process benefits greatly from automation, reducing manual errors, streamlining internal controls, executing recurring events and tasks, and providing real-time insights into the process for quicker decision-making.

However, adopting new platforms and technologies to speed up processes can be overwhelming and time-consuming, especially when you don’t know where to start. So, I’ve put together three main strategies to put you on the path to fully digitizing your business and noticeably improve the closing process.

Automate low-value tasks

There’s an increasing need to remove laborious and recurring tasks from your team’s plate so they can focus on what’s important. But when it comes to the financial closing process, what can and should be automated?

These are a few recurring tasks that, when automated, can help your team check their status or progress at a glance:

The preparation and review of balance sheet reconciliations.
Completion and management of closing checklists.
Balance sheet flux and/or P&L variance analysis.
Data analytics on the health and status of the month-end close.

The data gathered in these steps will allow you to identify your business’ root issues quickly, which will then let you assess what to do next.

Not only will the adoption of automation tools further optimize the closing process, but as technologies continue to evolve, teams that layer these together will substantially improve speed and accuracy. These investments result in financial and operational growth, offering greater analytics and aiding the decision-making process.

Streamline internal controls

How to solve the financial close dilemma: 3 strategies that never fail by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Google already offers parents and guardians tools to restrict purchases their children make on Play Store using the family payment method. The company is now introducing an additional feature that will allow children to send a purchase request for the manager of the family account to approve when there is no present payment method.

Children can ask for approval for both paid apps and in-app purchase when the family hasn’t set up a payments method. Once the family manager gets this request through a notification (or in their request queue), they can use their own payment method including Google Play gift cards to approve the request and make the purchase. The manager can look at these requests under pending and history tabs.

This method works best when you want to have full control over your children’s purchases and family spending. You can see all apps and in-app purchases children are interacting with and decline the ones that you think are harmful — or not necessary for whatever reason.

Google has introduced a number of changes in recent months to put better oversight on how children interact with its services. In October, the company rolled out a redesigned Family Link app with highlights, controls, and location tabs alongside granting it a web version. Last month, it announced policy tweaks for the Play Store, making the requirements for an app to be certified as a “kids” app stricter.

Google Play now lets children send purchase requests to guardians by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch