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TikTok is launching a new feature that allows users to see why a particular video was recommended to them in their For You feed, the company announced on Tuesday. The new feature is designed to bring more context to content recommended in For You feeds, TikTok says.

To understand why a particular video has been recommended to you in your For You feed, you can now tap on the share panel and select the question mark icon called “Why this video.” From there, you can see reasons why a particular video was recommended to you.

You may be informed that you saw a particular video because of your interactions, such as content you watch, like or share, comments you post, or searches. Or, you may be told that you have been shown the video because of accounts you follow. TikTok says you may also be informed that you were shown a particular video because it was posted recently in your region or that the content is popular in your region.

“This feature is one of many ways we’re working to bring meaningful transparency to the people who use our platform, and builds on a number of steps we’ve taken towards that goal,” the company said in a blog post. “Looking ahead, we’ll continue to expand this feature to bring more granularity and transparency to content recommendations.”

TikTok’s personalized For You page algorithm is largely behind the app’s success due to its ability to show users content they will likely find interesting. But, the algorithm system isn’t perfect, as you may sometimes come across a video that doesn’t cater to you. In cases like these, you can now learn more about why the video appeared on your For You page. Although TikTok has already explained how its recommendations work, the new feature launching today offers users additional and specific context about why a specific video was shown to them.

TikTok’s new feature will tell you why a particular video appeared in your For You feed by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

The complexity associated with the development of embedded systems is increasing rapidly. For instance, it is estimated that the average complexity of software projects in the automotive industry has increased by 300% over the past decade.

Today, every piece of hardware is driven by software and most hardware is composed of multiple electronic boards running synchronized applications. Devices have more and more features, but adding features means increasing development and debugging complexity. A University of Cambridge report found that developers spend up to 50% of their programming time debugging.

Thankfully, there are practical ways to reduce the complexity of debugging embedded systems. Let’s take a look.

Earlier is better

Bugs will pop up during the entirety of a product’s lifetime: in development, testing and in the field. Resolving a bug later down the road can increase costs by as much as 15 times and lead to user frustration, in addition to creating challenges associated with updating embedded devices that are in production.

However, identifying bugs at the early stages of your product’s development will allow you to track them while prioritizing them by severity. This will allow you to debug before other dependencies and variables are introduced later in the lifecyle, which makes bugs easier and cheaper to resolve.

Manage versioning

To properly replicate a bug, you must be able to have a device in the exact same state it was when the bug first appeared. With embedded devices, there are three distinct variables to look at when issues crop up:

The software version. This is the version of each feature. This applies to the code you build as well as to potential dependencies, such as imported libraries.
The board version. Specifically, the design of the board. Board design changes constantly as components are added/removed or moved around.

Simplify debugging to reduce the complexity of embedded system development by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

There are some 40 million Mexicans who are excluded from certain financial products due to banks not thinking it is a segment worth going after, but Filiberto Castro does.

The former banking executive worked at banks including Citi and Scotiabank for nearly a decade before moving into the fintech space to be chief of growth at Konfio. That’s where Castro said he saw how well technology could help people access financial services that were previously out of reach.

He met his co-founders David Hernandez and Amran Frey at Konfio, and, along with Israel Garcia, started Aviva, a Mexico-based fintech startup focused on bringing working capital to unserved communities.

Aviva’s approach uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to match customers’ spoken word to the fields of a real-time credit application. Within minutes, customers can qualify for a nano-business or house improvement loan of up to $1,000.

Unlike other fintechs that are concentrating on large, urban areas, Aviva is concentrating on smaller communities where the company can address the lack of trust in banks, predatory interest rates and help users who may not have the technical ability, like a smartphone, to purchase financial products directly.

Now buoyed by $2.2 million in pre-seed funding, the company is rolling out a network of physical and digital onboarding kiosks. The five-minute “video call booths” use biometrics and biosignals to determine the client’s risk and willingness to pay in order to underwrite the loans.

“No one has done anything for this segment in the last 25 years,” Castro told TechCrunch. “Much has been done in big cities, but by creating deep tech, AI and the video calls, we can establish elements to examine credit and lower interest rates. This has the potential to create a new middle class in Mexico and later across Latin America.”

The company makes money from financing the interest on the loans, but is able to charge less than current banks. Average interest rates in Mexico can get as high as triple digits, but Aviva is able to charge around 80%, though still high, he added.

Aviva is still very much in its early stages. It launched its product in November with 10 employees and has three kiosk locations where more than 500 customers have passed through since. The kiosks are located in Chalco de Díaz, Ixtapaluca and Texcoco, towns about an hour’s drive from Mexico City. The company is also seeing a lower percentage of loan delinquencies than initially thought, Castro said.

The pre-seed was led by Wollef Ventures, which was joined by Newtopia VC, Seedstars International Ventures, 500 Startups, Magna Capital VC, Xtraordinary VP and a group of angel investors.

With that new capital, Aviva is going to invest in building out its credit and underwriting system, preparing to launch the company’s own credit card and expanding its kiosks. In the future, Castro also sees the company providing a full banking offer to its customers.

“The credit card will give us a way to deposit loans if customers don’t have a bank account,” he said. “That is great for us because it shows we are tackling the right segment — people who don’t have any relationship with a bank.”

Early-stage Mexico fintech Aviva is making loans as easy as a video call by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

BigScience, a community project backed by startup Hugging Face with the goal of making text-generating AI widely available, is developing a system called Petals that can run AI like ChatGPT by joining resources from people across the internet. With Petals, the code for which was released publicly last month, volunteers can donate their hardware power to tackle a portion of a text-generating workload and team up others to complete larger tasks, similar to Folding@home and other distributed compute setups.

“Petals is an ongoing collaborative project from researchers at Hugging Face, Yandex Research and the University of Washington,” Alexander Borzunov, the lead developer of Petals and a research engineer at Yandex, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Unlike … APIs that are typically less flexible, Petals is entirely open source, so researchers may integrate latest text generation and system adaptation methods not yet available in APIs or access the system’s internal states to study its features.”

Open source, but not free

For all its faults, text-generating AI such as ChatGPT can be quite useful — at least if the viral demos on social media are anything to go by. ChatGPT and its kin promise to automate some of the mundane work that typically bogs down programmers, writers and even data scientists by generating human-like code, text and formulas at scale.

But they’re expensive to run. According to one estimate, ChatGPT is costing its developer, OpenAI, $100,000 per day, which works out to an eye-watering $3 million per month.

The costs involved with running cutting-edge text-generating AI have kept it relegated to startups and AI labs with substantial financial backing. It’s no coincidence that the companies offering some of the more capable text-generating systems tech, including AI21 Labs, Cohere and the aforementioned OpenAI, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in capital from VCs.

But Petals democratizes things — in theory. Inspired by Borzunov’s earlier work focused on training AI systems over the internet, Petals aims to drastically bring down the costs of running text-generating AI.

“Petals is a first step towards enabling truly collaborative and continual improvement of machine learning models,” Colin Raffel, a faculty researcher at Hugging Face, told TechCrunch via email. “It … marks an ongoing shift from large models mostly confined to supercomputers to something more broadly accessible.”

Raffel made reference to the gold rush, of sorts, that’s occurred over the past year in the open source text generation community. Thanks to volunteer efforts and the generosity of tech giants’ research labs, the type of bleeding-edge text-generating AI that was once beyond reach of small-time developers suddenly became available, trained and ready to deploy.

BigScience debuted Bloom, a language model in many ways on par with OpenAI’s GPT-3 (the progenitor of ChatGPT), while Meta open sourced a comparably powerful AI system called OPT. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Nvidia partnered to make available one of the largest language systems ever developed, MT-NLG.

But all these systems require powerful hardware to use. For example, running Bloom on a local machine requires a GPU retailing in the hundreds to thousands of dollars. Enter the Petals network, which Borzunov claims will be powerful enough to run and fine-tune AI systems for chatbots and other “interactive” apps once it reaches sufficient capacity. To use Petals, users install an open source library and visit a website that provides instructions to connect to the Petals network. After they’re connected, they can generate text from Bloom running on Petals, or create a Petals server to contribute compute back to the network.

The more servers, the more robust the network. If one server goes down, Petals attempts to find a replacement automatically. While servers disconnect after around 1.5 seconds of inactivity to save on resources, Borzunov says that Petals is smart enough to quickly resume sessions, leading to only a slight delay for end-users.

In my tests, generating text using Petals took anywhere between a couple of seconds for basic prompts (e.g. “Translate the word ‘cat’ to Spanish”) to well over 20 seconds for more complex requests (e.g. “Write an essay in the style of Diderot about the nature of the universe”). One prompt (“Explain the meaning of life”) took close to three minutes, but to be fair, I instructed the system to respond with a wordier answer (around 75 words) than the previous few.

That’s noticeably slower than ChatGPT — but also free. While ChatGPT doesn’t cost anything today, there’s no guarantee that that’ll be true in the future.

Borzunov wouldn’t reveal how large the Petals network is currently, save that “multiple” users with “GPUs of different capacity” have joined it since its launch in early December. The goal is to eventually introduce a rewards system to incentivize people to donate their compute; donators will receive “Bloom points” that they can spend on “higher priority or increased security guarantees” or potentially exchange for other rewards, Borzunov said.

Limitations of distributed compute

Petals promises to provide a low-cost, if not completely free, alternative to the paid text-generating services offered by vendors like OpenAI. But major technical kinks have yet to be ironed out.

Most concerning are the security flaws. The GitHub page for the Petals project notes that, because of the way Petals works, it’s possible for servers to recover input text — including text meant to be private — and record and modify it in a malicious way. That might entail sharing sensitive data with other users in the network, like names and phone numbers, or tweaking generated code so that it’s intentionally broken.

Petals also doesn’t address any of the flaws inherent in today’s leading text-generating systems, like their tendency to generate toxic and biased text (see the “Limitations” section in the Bloom entry on Hugging Face’s repository). In an email interview, Max Ryabinin, the senior research scientist at Yandex Research, made it clear that Petals is intended for research and academic use — at least at present.

“Petals sends intermediate … data though the public network, so we ask not to use it for sensitive data because other peers may (in theory) recover them from the intermediate representations,” Ryabinin said. “We suggest people who’d like to use Petals for sensitive data to set up their own private swarm hosted by orgs and people they trust who are authorized to process this data. For example, several small startups and labs may collaborate and set up a private swarm to protect their data from others while still getting benefits of using Petals.”

As with any distributed system, Petals could also be abused by end-users, either by bad actors looking to generate toxic text (e.g. hate speech) or developers with particularly resource-intensive apps. Raffel acknowledges that Petals will inevitably “face some issues” at the start. But he believes that the mission — lowering the barrier to running text-generating systems — will be well worth the initial bumps in the road.

“Given the recent success of many community-organized efforts in machine learning, we believe that it is important to continue developing these tools and hope that Petals will inspire other decentralized deep learning projects,” Raffel said.

Petals is creating a free, distributed network for running text-generating AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Over a year after grabbing $4 million in pre-seed funding, Chile-based Kredito, a business lending startup, is back with another $6 million in new funding.

The company launched to the public in 2021 and partners with financial institutions to help small businesses with their spend management, access digital unsecured loans, open a bank account and obtain a business credit card.

When we profiled Kredito last year, Sebastian Robles, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that business credit didn’t automatically come with an account, leaving business owners to use personal credit cards.

“Everyone wants to sell online, so e-commerce capabilities are key,” he told TechCrunch recently. “Most of our customers are moving online, but what’s happened is that banks are more restricted with their products, making it harder for the unbanked or the underbanked to access decent financial services or sometimes even a bank account.”

Instead, Kredito takes on that risk by using a proprietary algorithm and alternative data to evaluate credit risk more inclusively than traditional banks, and in real time, Robles said. It also created products with few requirements so that it could reduce the cost of acquisition and gather data from customers on how best to help them access financial products. For example, the account and corporate card can be used by anyone, while the loan product is accessible to those who qualify and share data with Kredito, Robles said.

Including the new equity funding round — Robles is still finalizing a debt round — the company has raised $11.5 million in equity and debt so far. The new capital came from a group of angel investors and family offices, including Cornershop by Uber founders, Oskar Hjertonsson and Daniel Undurraga, and various partners from real estate developer Patio.

Robles wasn’t necessarily planning to go after new capital this soon, but said Kredito was growing faster than expected. He has run the company very lean, but needed to add to the small team to meet growth.

The company has about 100,000 accounts and approximately 5,000 active users and is seeing 90% revenue growth month over month, he said. It is focused on maintaining that growth throughout the next year as it continues to open thousands of new accounts each month.

Robles intends to use the new capital to expand into new countries and consolidate its growth in Chile. Exporting Kredito’s product — making sure what it does in Chile it can do in other countries — will be key, he said. As such, the company will work first on its underwriting by accessing data in multiple countries and replicating its strategies.

“Internationalization is the main focus,” he added. “We have a lot of work to do. We have made a lot of progress in the underwriting and the loans, and now we have to do the same with other products. Locally, we will focus on growth. We already have product market fit and a lot of traction, and now we want to grow more.”

Kredito banks $6M as the LatAm business lender eyes international expansion by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Amazon has quietly rolled out Prime Gaming, its subscription service that offers access to a number of titles, to its members in India weeks after it started testing the service in the South Asian market.

The gaming service, complimentary to Amazon Prime and Video subscribers, offers users access to a range of mobile, PC and Mac games as well as in-game loot at no additional cost. Each month, the e-commerce group adds a number of new titles to the service.

At the time of writing, some of the free games and their loot boxes available to users in India include League of Legends, DeathLoop, Quake, COD Season 1, EA Madden 23, FIFA 23, Apex Legends, Destiny 2, and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.

Prime Gaming makes Amazon Prime subscription, which costs just $18 a year in India, even more enticing for a certain demographic in the South Asian market. It can also have some “fascinating long-term impact” for PC gaming ecosystem in India, said Rishi Alwani, a long-time industry analyst and communications manager at Pune-headquartered gaming upstart SuperGaming

“It would expose Indian PC gamers with Prime subscriptions to a variety of content they would not necessarily have gravitated towards. By and large, the Indian PC games space is value-driven permeated by either big budget ‘safe’ AAA fare like GTA 5 or free-to-play shooters like Valorant. Prime Gaming brings in a varied, curated selection of genres and titles that many may have not even considered to pick up and play otherwise such as Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons,” he told TechCrunch in a text.

“Throw in in-game content for popular titles like Modern Warfare 2 and Apex Legends and it’s pretty obvious that Amazon India’s at that phase where it is looking at gaming to retain its burgeoning Prime subscriber base.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Amazon quietly launches Prime Gaming in India by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Twitter launched “Blue for Business” last week alongside relaunching Twitter Blue. At that time, the social network had assigned a gold checkmark to businesses. Now it’s offering some more details.

With Blue for Business, Twitter is also providing an additional badge — refer to our checkmark and badges guide — that helps organizations identify brands and people associated with it.

Twitter’s product manager Esther Crawford said the social media platform is launching a pilot program for Blue for Business with select businesses. The company plans to expand this to more organizations next year, Crawford said.

Those with Blue for Business will also get a small badge next to their profile display name, establishing to others that they work with the said organization. For instance, you can see a square Twitter badge next to Crawford’s display name.

Brands, media houses and others now have a square profile picture, instead of the round one, making another clearer distinction. But it’s not clear if the square profile picture is a part of the Blue for Business package.

Twitter has yet to share details about how much it will charge for Blue for Business and what other perks it may entail, but asserted that “a company can link any number of their affiliated individuals, businesses and brands to their account.”

The company said that organizations, media houses, and sports teams can use this feature to link the accounts of their employees, journalists, and players.

“By creating this connection, we’re making it possible for businesses to create networks within their own organizations–on Twitter. Businesses can affiliate their leadership, brands, support handles, employees or teams. Journalists, sports team players, or movie characters can all be affiliated,” Twitter said in a blog post.

While identifying associated brands and employees is a good feature for companies, they would want many more benefits out of this plan.

Twitter has had a rollercoaster of the last 48 hours. The company rolled out a terrible policy banning links and handles to other social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Mastadon, and even link-in-bio tools Linktree, and lnk.bio. After facing backlash over that, Twitter swiftly deleted tweets and the policy page detailing the announcement. On the other hand, Twitter chief Elon Musk put out a poll asking people if he should step down as CEO — and 57% of people voted in favor of that.

Twitter Blue for Business now allows companies to identify their employees by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Viva Republica, an operator of South Korean finance super appToss, has finalized a $405 million Series G funding and it says it is now valued at 9.1 trillion won ( $7 billion), up from 8.5 trillion won in June 2021, when it raised $410 million in pre-Series F funding at a $7.4 billion (8.5 trillion won) valuation. (South Korea’s currency has depreciated against the dollar this year.)

The company’s recent funding caught our attention, including that it signals the company is doing comparatively well amid a gloomy macroeconomic outlook. Indeed, unlike global fintech companies, includingKlarna,Stripe, andCheckout.com, which have seen their valuations cut fairly dramatically in 2022, Viva Republica boosted its valuation again.

Viva Republica was also on a bit of a hiring spree in October, in stark contrast to many global tech companies, includingfintech startups, that have been conducting major layoffs this year. The Seoul-based company had about 1,900 employees as of August.

Fintech-focused investor Tonic Private Equity led the Series G round along with returning backers, including Korea Development Bank (KDB), Altos Ventures, Goodwater Capital, Greyhound Capital, Aspex Management, Bond Capital, and DUMAC. Korea Investment & Securities participated in the latest funding as well. The fintech company said it had completed its first and second close of Series G, approximately $226 million (295.8 billion won) and $175.8 million (229.3 billion won), respectively, in the third quarter of 2022, and the third close of the new funding in November.

Chief operating officer of Viva Republica Hyunwoo Seo told TechCrunch “profitability” is key now and is as significant as growth, particularly in these extremely tough market conditions. (Profitability would also go a long in enabling the company — which is eyeing a potential initial public offering in the near term — to do so successfully.)

Toward that end, Toss plans to use the proceeds of its newest fundraise to invest in its products, including digital lending and online payment service for individuals and local merchants.

The new capital will help also Toss accelerate growth for the challenger bank Toss Bank— launched last year by Viva Republica —and a Robinhood-like retail investment app,Toss Securities, which both look to turn a profit next year, according to Seo.

The company says Toss Securities began a turnaround in the 3Q22. Besides, the registered users of Toss Bank have quintupled to 5 million from 1.1 million since its December 2021 launch.

When asked about its listing plan, Seo declined to comment on its exact IPO schedule, but per previous media outlets, Viva Republica aims to go public in the next four years after increasing its revenue by 2025.

Founded by dentist-turned-entrepreneur Seung-gun Lee, CEO of Viva Republica, the company started as a money-transfer app, Toss, in 2015. Tossjoined the unicorn club with its $80 million financing at a valuation of $ 1.2 billion in 2018.

It has since become a finance super app by adding more features like banking, P2P lending, mobile-basedstock trading and investing, insurance, credit scoring service, and more. Most recently, Toss launched a buy now pay later (BNPL) service in March, which it says has amassed more than 1 million registered users. South Korea’s BNLP Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) is projected to grow by about $36.6 billion by 2028, up from $5.6 billion in 2021, as fintech and e-commerce firms use BNPL as one of their marketing tools.

In fact, Viva Republica claims it has the largest market share with its fintech super app in the country in terms of monthly active users (MAUs), with 24 million registered users for Toss and 14 MAUs as of August this year.

Viva Republica continues to push ahead with its acquisitions. The startup launched Toss Payments, which enables local merchants to accept digital payment, two years ago by acquiring a payment gateway business from LG’s mobile network company LG U+. (Toss Payments’ monthly trading volume surpassed $ 2.7 billion in November.) Toss also took over Merchant Korea, a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), in July this year, planning to offer wireless communication services to consumers in 2023. The latest acquisition comes roughly eight months after it acquired a 60% stake in VCNC, an operator of the Korean ride-hailing platform Tada, wholly owned by car-sharing platform SoCar, in October 2021 to make a foray into the mobility market.

Regarding its international growth strategy, Viva Republica could make equity investments in global companies, including Southeast Asia, following entering Vietnam in 2019. But, it is more likely to focus on the domestic business, for the time being, Seo noted.

Viva Republica with Toss Securities, Toss Payments and Toss Insurance is expected to post about 1 trillion won ($ 767 million) in revenue next year, according to the company.

South Korean financial super app Toss closes $405M Series G as valuation rises 7% by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch

Autonomous trucking technology company TuSimple plans to cut a chunk of its workforce, potentially as early as this week, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited “people familiar with the matter.”

While the Journal reported layoffs could affect at least half of TuSimple’s workforce, TechCrunch’s own source familiar with the matter said that number is not correct, but wouldn’t say more. It might be closer to 15%, according to online forums, some of which have speculated there’s been a game of telephone happening here (e.g. 15 sounds like 50).

Talks of layoffs at TuSimple have been ongoing for weeks, particularly following the end of TuSimple’s deal with Navistar to co-develop purpose-built autonomous semi trucks. TuSimple has rescinded offers it gave to interns to join the company, and posts on LinkedIn and Blind have mentioned “huge layoffs.”

While the number of employees to be let go is still unknown — TuSimple currently has about 1,430 full-time employees globally — it’s not surprising to see yet another tech company downsize as a result of macroeconomic headwinds and internal dramas.

TuSimple has suffered a couple of executive shakeups this year. CEO Cheng Lu, who was asked to step down into an advisory role in March, took over again last month. His predecessor and TuSimple’s founder Xiaodi Hou was fired following an internal probe that showed certain employees having ties and sharing confidential information with Hydron, a China-backed hydrogen-powered trucking company. The company is still facing multiple federal investigations related to its relationship with Hydron.

TuSimple’s stock price has also plummeted this year, dropping 95.63% from January, and the company has dealt with loss of investor confidence following the crash of one of its trucks in April. As a company building frontier technology, TuSimple has struggled to generate nearly enough revenue to cover its cash burn. In the third quarter, TuSimple reported $113 million in losses on a revenue of $2.7 million — revenue which came from hauling freight for shippers in trucks that had a human safety operator behind the wheel.

“Like every technology and self-driving company, we are closely examining our spending and how to align that with our strategy,” Lu told TechCrunch.

WSJ reported that TuSimple plans to scale back its work building self-driving systems and testing autonomous trucks on public roads in Arizona and Texas, a claim that Lu denied to TechCrunch. The teams involved in TuSimple’s operations in Tucson and self-driving software algorithms would be cut down as a result, the sources told the Journal.

Some of the imminent layoffs might come from the teams responsible for co-building trucks with Navistar. However, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that TuSimple is planning on replacing Navistar with a new OEM partner.

Sources told WSJ they expect layoffs to begin Tuesday, and that TuSimple told employees offices would be closed down Tuesday and Wednesday.

Canary in the coal mine

Interns whose offers to join the company were rescinded, as well as current TuSimple employees, have mentioned layoffs occurring at the company on LinkedIn and Blind.

“Affected by today’s TuSimple massive layoffs, my return offer as a Research Engineer was rescinded,” posted one former intern earlier this month who worked at TuSimple from June to September.

In response to a query on Blind by a person who recently interviewed at the company, one TuSimple employee commented on December 5 saying: “We’re going through huge layoffs right now. Stock is at an all time low. No clear path to making money.” The same person also said that staff morale “is pretty low.”

That sentiment is mirrored by other comments on TuSimple’s Blind profile. The latest company review, dated December 6, is titled “never trust this company.” The employee, a software applications engineer, said that a pro of working for TuSimple is the company “provide[s] you with a hallucination that [it] may succeed.” Cons were listed as toxic culture, horrible CEO, no profitable product and massive layoffs on the way.

While Blind posts are anonymous, the company told TechCrunch its community is made up of verified professionals. No one is allowed to post unless they are verified as a current employee of a given workplace using their work email.

Layoffs are coming for self-driving truck company TuSimple by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

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December is getting long in the tooth, there’s Christmas music on every radio station, and the poinsettias are in full bloom. It looks like the year is getting close to the end, and we, for two, are perfectly happy to see the back of it. Bring on the last 300 or so hours of the year, and we can start pondering what the new year will bring. — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

Will he or won’t he?: The poll has spoken — a majority of people who came across Elon Musk’s post asking if he should step down as the head of Twitter felt he should, Ingrid reports. Musk says a lot of things, and then says some more things, so we’ll see if he actually takes his advice and abides by the results of the poll.
Gaming for a fine: Fortnite maker Epic Games agreed to take its lumps from the Federal Trade Commission, which fined the company $520 million related to children’s privacy charges. Amanda has more about the fines and what this means for Epic.
Here’s a gaggle of Google news: Google is doing a lot in India, and Jagmeet, Manish and Ivan were there for it. First, the company addressed official documents with a DigiLocker integration to the Files app, and said that India’s regulations should provide legal and innovation certainty to firms. New features for the country include multisearch and in-video search features and being able to decode a doctor’s bad handwriting. There are also some new YouTube features, like watching a video in multiple languages and Courses, the video unit’s new edtech experience.

Startups and VC

Life as a startup founder is never dull. That’s doubly true for Black founders, who routinely struggle to raise funds, be noticed and get their fair share of attention, Dominic-Madori reports. For the new year, she conducted a mini-survey to find out what Black founders are expecting in 2023. All three founders brought up the same concerns — the economy, the environment and equality.

Connie had the chance to catch up with Fabrice Grinda, a French, New York–based serial entrepreneur who co-founded the free classifieds site OLX — now owned by Prosus — and who has in recent years been building up his venture firm, FJ Labs. He often likens the outfit to an angel investor “at scale,” saying that like a lot of angel investors, “We don’t lead, we don’t price, we don’t take board seats. We decide after two one-hour meetings over the course of a week whether we invest or not.”

We have a few more for you, just to scratch that curiosity itch:

AI see what they did there: ImagenAI, which uses AI to personalize photo editing styles, lands $30 million, reports Kyle.
Really going places: Helm.ai snags $31 million to scale its ‘unsupervised’ autonomous driving software, reports Kirsten.
Very NFTy: Jacquelyn reports that Revel raised $7.8 million to become the Instagram and Robinhood of NFT platforms.
A cut above: Rita reports that salon software Mangomint raises $13 million as it booms in post-COVID labor shortage.
These keyboards really click: Frederic writes up a gift guide for the mechanically (keyboard) inclined.

3 Black founders predict little will change in VC in 2023

A rising tide lifts all boats, but when free-flowing venture capital starts to recede, underrepresented founders are the first to find themselves on dry ground.

Dominic-Madori Davis spoke to three Black founders to get their thoughts on the current funding landscape and the issues that are top of mind for them as we head into the new year.

Vernon Coleman, founder and CEO, Realtime
Sevetri Wilson, founder and CEO, Resilia
Abimbola Adebayo, founder and CEO, Pinnu Analytics

Okay, fine, if that ain’t enough for you, here’s three more TC+ stories to rest thine eyes on:

EVs r the worst: Toyota president keeps pushing idea that people hate EVs, despite epic waitlists,Tim reports.
Less risk, more dollars: The fundraising stages are not about dollar values — they’re about risk,Haje muses.
Chained to a desk: Tech’s latest controversy? The return of the five-day, in-person work week, reports Natasha M.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

Deleting on WhatsApp didn’t always mean delete for everyone, until now. WhatsApp lets you undo that deletion in case you moved too fast. Jagmeet writes that the “new feature, called ‘accidental delete,’ brings a five-second window to let users reverse the action of deleting messages for their own in an individual or group chat and delete them for everyone.” Delete away!

And we have five more for you:

A buyer for Voyager Digital: It’s been a tough year for Voyager Digital, Romain writes, but there is some good news: Binance.US has agreed to buy Voyager Digital’s assets for $1 billion.
Market monopoly: The European Union is proceeding with an investigation into Meta, after some preliminary findings suggest the company abused its dominant market position to benefit Facebook Marketplace, Paul writes.
Get ready for the recap: We all enjoy seeing what the year was about. Remember the top nine? Well, Instagram’s new Reels template lets you create your own 2022 recap, Aisha reports.
Is the WFHer the new slacker?: Marc Benioff made some statements about work-from-home that had Ron scratching his head. He went to the company for some clarification only to find these new statements also muddle the message about Salesforce’s view of WFH.
Bored Apes gets a new Chief Ape: Bored Apes creator Yuga Labs appointed a new CEO — former Activision COO Daniel Alegre, Amanda reports.

Daily Crunch: After Musk puts it to a vote, 57% of Twitter poll respondents tell him to resign by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch