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Though inflation appears to be dropping, economic conditions remain uncertain, and the overall fundraising climate is reverting to pre-pandemic levels. For Black founders, who have rarely received more than 1% of total venture capital invested in startups, 2022 wasn’t kind, and 2023 doesn’t look promising given how things are going.

To find out how Black founders are planning to manage their time, money, and expectations for the upcoming months, TechCrunch+ surveyed three founders. Sevetri Wilson, the founder of Resilia, said she, like many other founders, is planning for a recession regardless of whether one happens or not.

“For us as a company, this means not cutting back where it might impact growth, but definitely being conservative and foregoing costly opportunities or hiring roles that won’t yield the highest impact or returns in the first two quarters or more of 2023,” she said.

Abimbola Adebayo, the founder of Pinnu Analytics, echoed that sentiment, saying that as she is based in the UK, she is preparing for a less-than-ideal economic climate. “I’m hedging myself by holding multiple currencies and ensuring my business and myself earn income in multiple currencies,” Adebayo said.

Meanwhile, Vernon Coleman, the founder of Realtime, is focused on fine-tuning his social networking app for the upcoming presidential election. He doesn’t expect the startup environment to get any better for Black founders, but is set on finding success regardless.

“The capital deployed has drastically decreased for all founders, which means that Black founders will be even more severely affected […] In 2020, a lot of folks read books about Black history to further educate themselves, but I think folks missed the books where Marcus Garvey or Dr. King discuss Black economic inclusion,” he said. “Still, the plan is not to just float through next year; we want to fly.”

Here is who we spoke to:

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

(Note: This survey is separate from the Black founder survey we are conducting. If you are a Black founder with a story to share, please fill out this form.)

Vernon Coleman, founder and CEO, Realtime

Which macro issues are you most concerned about in the upcoming year? How do you plan to tackle them?

I am keeping an eye on the economy and how it affects the speed of deploying capital to founders. However, we are focused on delivering products people love and hitting metrics that enable us to continue to raise capital despite the economic condition.

Do you expect the current economic downturn to last throughout next year? What plans have you made to stay afloat?

Yes, I do. As interest rates and inflation soar, big tech companies announce layoffs and the upcoming election, it feels as though this downturn will last throughout the year.

Still, we don’t want to only float; we want to fly. Over the summer, I decided to bring my team fully in-person. There’s nothing like the speed, creativity, and serendipity that comes from working 14+ hour days with a small team that shares a common vision and goal.

Which is the most pressing political issue you are keeping tabs on? How has it impacted you as a founder? Do you have a startup idea that could address any of these issues?

As 2023 approaches, broadly, the most pressing political issue is the 2024 election. Whoever is elected or re-elected will impact me as a founder, as they will affect business policies, inflation, unemployment, and how and when we recover from the downturn.

I don’t have a startup idea to affect an election; however, I’m sure there are plenty of founders out there working on solutions for more accurate, modern, and timely election technologies.

I feel people need to talk through their opinions and viewpoints in eclectic, diverse communities they may not already be a part of. With regard to fueling the conversation around election season, my company, Click, which launches next year, hosts communities and will encourage users to open up discourse around getting people to the polls and discussing what matters to them in the upcoming election.

3 Black founders predict little will change in VC in 2023 by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch

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.

For the new year, TechCrunch+ conducted a mini-survey to found out what Black founders are expecting in 2023. All three founders brought up the same concerns — the economy, the environment, and equality.

Abimbola Adebayo, the founder of Pinnu Analytics, said she is planning for the downturn to continue, and has started ensuring that her business and herself are earning income in multiple currencies. “It’s impossible to predict, but with how unstable life has been recently, I would not be surprised if it continues,” she said.

Vernon Coleman, the founder of Realtime, said he was paying close attention to the upcoming presidential election. “Whoever is elected or re-elected will impact me as a founder as they will affect business policies, inflation, unemployment, and how and when we recover from the downturn,” he told TechCrunch. “I’m sure there are plenty of founders out there working on solutions for more accurate, modern, and timely election technologies.”

As for equality, Coleman and the others are not convinced much will change for them as Black founders.

Sevetri Wilson, founder and CEO, Resilia, said, “There is a popular saying that goes, ‘When white America catches a cold, Black America catches pneumonia.’ This applies to Black founders as well. I think this will be the case in 2023, and we are already seeing it now, as evident in data and reports.”

Read the full mini-survey here.

(Note: This survey is separate from the Black founder survey we are conducting. If you are a Black founder with a story to share, please fill out this form.)

3 Black founders explain how they’re preparing for a tough 2023 by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch

Toyota president Akio Toyoda has made it no secret that he really, really dislikes electric vehicles. This weekend, he offered this latest installment:

“People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority,” Toyoda told reporters in Thailand, according to The Wall Street Journal. “That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.”

He might be right! I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a majority of automotive executives dislike EVs. After all, the legacy automotive industry dragged their feet on EVs. In instances where they had promising products, they left them to wither on the vine. In other cases, the products that rolled off the assembly line were clearly the bare minimum required to comply with the law. They’d probably prefer to keep making gas and diesel vehicles, and if those go away, at least have some alternative to batteries, which have become an industry-wide headache as the supply chains experience growing pains.

Toyota’s electric intransigence might strike some as peculiar. The company pioneered the mass-market hybrid-electric powertrain, which debuted on the Prius and has proliferated throughout its lineup. From that, it’s almost certainly amassed decades of experience with electric motors, battery packs and battery management systems, which comprise the key components of an EV powertrain, too.

But though hybrids might have seemed like a significant breakthrough, they were not a radical shift for an industry that had grown accustomed to tweaking the internal combustion engine ad nauseam to make up for its deficiencies. Hybridization added electric motors to get the car rolling and assist at low speeds, where fossil-fuel engines are the least efficient; it did nothing to eliminate the internal combustion engine.

The ranks at every legacy automaker are filled with mechanical engineers, many of them experts at wringing extra tenths of a percent out of combustion engine technology. While they might be capable enough when it comes to designing electric powertrains, it is not their core competency. Shifting to EVs would put electrical engineers in the driver’s seat.

From that perspective, Toyota’s embrace of hybrid technology should be seen not as a stepping stone to an electric future, but as yet another effort to prolong the reign of the internal combustion engine.

Toyota president keeps pushing idea that people hate EVs, despite epic waitlists by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

A few bright spots remain in the autonomous vehicle industry even amid macroeconomic headwinds that have nearly shut off the spigot of venture capital and led to further consolidation.

Helm.ai, a startup developing software designed for advanced driver assistance systems, autonomous driving and robotics, is one of them.

The Menlo Park, Calif-based startup recently raised $31 million in a Series C round led by Freeman Group, just one year after it snagged $26 million in venture funding. This latest round, which included ACVC Partners, Amplo and strategic investors Honda Motor Co., Goodyear Ventures, and Sungwoo Hitech, has pushed Helm.ai’s valuation to $431 million.

Brandon Freeman, founder of the Freeman Group, is joining the Helm.ai board of directors as part of this financing. The company has raised $78 million, to date.

Like so many other autonomous vehicle startups, Helm.ai launched to push the technology forward with a new approach. Instead of the sensors or compute, Helm.ai co-founders Tudor Achim and Vlad Voroninski took aim at the software.

Helm.ai developed software that can understand sensor data as well as a human — a goal not unlike others in the field. Its approach is the noteworthy part. Autonomous vehicle developers often rely on a combination of simulation and on-road testing, along with reams of data sets that have been annotated by humans, to train and improve the so-called “brain” of the self-driving vehicle.

Helm.ai says it has developed software that can skip those steps, which expedites the timeline and reduces costs; that lower cost also makes it particularly useful for advanced driver assistance systems. The six-year-old startup uses an unsupervised learning approach to develop software that can train neural networks without the need for large-scale fleet data, simulation or annotation. The software is also agnostic to whatever compute and sensors are used in the vehicle, allowing Helm.ai to pitch to a diverse set of customers.

Helm.ai sells its software to various OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers in the automotive industry to help them “achieve software differentiation with high-end ADAS and L4 solutions,” according to Voroninski.

“Strategically, we’ve known that our go-to-market strategy is going to be focused on high-end ADAS or for several years now; our strategy has not changed at all as a function of the recent events,” he said, referring to consolidation in the AV industry. “I’ve been basically predicting for a number of years now that the vast majority of autonomous driving companies will fail to make it to market due to outdated technological approaches and subpar business models. So it has not been a surprise to me by any means. The autonomous driving market generally has not been efficient in the last few years due to all the misplaced hype.”

Helm.ai has attracted a number of customers, although Voroninski said he couldn’t name the other customers due to non-disclosure agreements. Helm.ai has previously disclosed that Honda is a customer. The mathematician and former chief scientist at cybersecurity machine learning startup Sift Security, did say he has spent the last two years focused on commercializing the technology and securing partnerships.

The recent funding will be used to add more employees to the 50-person workforce, R&D and building out those commercial partnerships, he said.

Helm.ai snags $31M to scale its ‘unsupervised’ autonomous driving software by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Instagram is once again offering an in-app method for users to create shareable end-of-year content. The social network announced today that it’s rolling out a new Reels template that allows users to create their own 2022 Recap to share with their friends and followers.

Users can customize their 2022 Recap Reel by choosing a narrated template from artist and producer Bad Bunndy, DJ & producer DJ Khaled, rapper and producer Badshah or Stranger Things star Priah Ferguson. You can create your recap by selecting up to 14 photos to share with your friends and followers, after which they will be automatically edited into a complete Reel that you can share with your followers.

Users will start to see a new “create your 2022 recap reel’ prompt in the app’s homepage that will take them to the new template. Or, you can navigate to the Reels tab to select the 2022 recap template to get started.

Prior to 2021, Instagram users had to create their own version of an end-of-year feature where they would post their top nine images in a photo grid. But last year, Instagram rolled out a “Year in Review” feature that allowed users to select up to 10 stories to share with their followers. Instagram is now once again offering a built-in way to share personalized end-of-year content. This year, Instagram’s end-of-year recap feature is housed in Reels as opposed to Stories, which isn’t surprising given that the social network has been pivoting to video over the past year.

The launch of the new feature comes as shareable end-of-year recaps have become increasingly popular thanks to Spotify’s annual Wrapped experience that is widely shared across social media each year. Given the success of Wrapped, numerous companies have launched their own end-of-year recaps, including Apple Music, YouTube Music and Reddit.

Instagram’s new Reels template lets you create your own 2022 recap by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced Monday morning it will charge Epic Games with a $520 million settlement over charges related to children’s privacy. Epic Games, which makes popular all-ages games like “Fortnite” and “Fall Guys,” allegedly violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by deploying “design tricks, known as dark patterns, to dupe millions of players into making unintentional purchases,” the FTC said in a press release.

The $520 million payment is divided into two settlements: the COPPA fine amounts to $275 million, which is the largest ever penalty for violating an FTC rule. The FTC also proposed that Epic should pay $245 million to refund customers for what it calls “dark patterns and billing practices.” If Epic Games pays that fine, it will be the FTC’s largest eve refund amount in a gaming case.

In addition to making it too easy for children to make online purchases, the FTC also took issue with Epic’s live text and voice communication features, which were set to be turned on by default. The FTC claims that children were exposed to harassment and abuse because of these features, especially since Epic had no way of making sure that children and adults would not be matched together in online play. According to the FTC’s press release, children have been exposed to bullying, threats, harassment and “psychologically traumatizing issues such as suicide” while playing the game.

In the last two years, Epic has raised over $3 billion in venture capital, most recently at a $31.5 billion valuation. Along with Lego, whose parent company invested $1 billion, Epic Games is working on building a kid-friendly metaverse.

Epic Games has also been embroiled in a lawsuit with Apple, accusing the tech giant of anti-competitive behavior. The video game company challenged Apple’s policy that it can remove products from the iOS App Store if the app reroutes customers around paying within the app, which gives Apple a 30% cut.

FTC fines Fortnite maker Epic Games $520M over children’s privacy charges by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Today, at the Google for India event, the company made several announcements focused on healthcare content on YouTube. In particular, it is testing a feature to let users switch between multiple audio tracks in different languages. For now, this feature is only available with a set of healthcare videos with language support for English, Hindi, Marathi, and Punjabi.

Videos with multilingual audio will have an option called “Audio track” under the settings button, which will have a list of available languages for the clip. Technically, this feature could be rolled out in non-healthcare categories as well, but YouTube is currently limiting this feature to select videos.

Unfortunately, there is no visual marker in search results to identify if a video is available in multiple languages. So users will have to look for that specific option in the settings of every healthcare video in India. That’s a bummer.

What’s more, Google also announced that it’s working with a set of creators to test its dubbing product called Aloud. The product, which was originally created by the Area 120 accelerator, helps creators transcribe, translate and dub the original content in multiple languages. The company said that it is making this tool available to a “small group of healthcare providers” initially. It didn’t specify what languages Aloud is supporting at the moment.

The company also clarified that the videos with multiple language audio tracks may or may not have been created through Aloud.

“Video is a particularly effective format for sharing health information in ways that are accessible and digestible not only to a professional audience but to everyone. We want to help truly democratize important health information. And, we remain committed to working closely with experts in healthcare and investing in technologies that will enable them to create multilingual content efficiently, to reach audiences at scale,” Ishan John Chatterjee, YouTube India’s Director, said in a statement.

YouTube is also partnering with more healthcare-related organizations in India — including Narayana, Manipal, Medanta, and Shalby — to have them create content in different languages such as English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, and Bengali.

In the past few months, YouTube has rolled out multiple health-related initiatives. In September, it started to show a new panel in search results called “Personal Stories,” related to ailments like cancer and mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. In October, the streaming service opened up a certification program for health-related channels in the US to get a special badge. This badge certified them as accredited health-related creators.

Apart from language and healthcare-related announcements, YouTube also launched Courses in India, which allows users to purchase a course from an educational creator and get access to ad-free videos and other materials.

YouTube is testing a feature to let users in India watch a video in multiple languages by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

WhatsApp has introduced a feature to undo the ‘Delete for Me’ action to save you from being potentially embarrassed over accidentally deleting a message only for you that you wanted to pull for everyone on the app.

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.

Users sometimes land in a situation when they accidentally tap the ‘Delete for Me’ button instead of ‘Delete for Everyone’ to delete a wrongly-sent message. The new feature aims to help users overcome those situations by getting the small window to reverse their original action.

WhatsApp said its new offering would be available to all users on Android and iPhone. It was beta tested with some Android and iOS users in August, per a report by WhatsApp features tracker WABetaInfo.

In 2017, WhatsApp introduced the ‘Delete for Everyone’ option to let users recall a message for all people in a conversation. The feature was designed to address the issue of sending messages mistakenly in individual and group chats. Although the initial rollout of the option was limited to seven minutes, WhatsApp eventually extended that time limit to up to two days and 12 hours — or 60 hours — in August this year.

WhatsApp lets you undo ‘Delete for Me’ in case you hit that button too quickly by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Revel, an NFT or “social collectibles” platform, raised $7.8 million in seed financing led by Dragonfly Capital, the startup’s CEO, Adi Sideman, exclusively told TechCrunch.

“One way to describe Revel is a cross between Instagram and Robinhood, wrapped in social game economics,” Sideman said.

Instagram is known as a social media platform while Robinhood is known as an investing and trading platform. Revel blends them both, helping consumers build a “portfolio of media [and] of the people they collect,” Sideman said. (As a side note, Instagram announced earlier this month that creators on its platform will soon be able to create their own NFTs and sell them directly to fans, both on and off the visual social network.)

Revel’s marketplace allows users to create NFTs for their followers, friends or community and also allows people to own editions of the media they like and follow, Sideman said.

“Followers have a stake in the community they participate in and that is a powerful new experience,” Sideman said. “It’s nuanced, but it’s powerful.”

And it’s not just a financial stake, he added. “I am talking about the emotional stake, the community stake, the status, the new paradigm in which people become partners of other people’s personal brands.”

The platform leverages “social game economics” through game design and simple rules to manage economic concepts like supply and demand as well as inflation, among other things, Sideman said. The core of Revel’s economy is a gameplay concept that constrains supply and asset publishing to “healthy inflation levels,” he added.

“We call it ‘Proof of Demand Minting,’ whereby anyone can mint their first collection, but only people who get collected can mint more,” Sideman noted. “We gamify it to simplify it and obfuscate economic complexities. The results are that people are trading in a marketplace, contributing to managing efficient economies, by playing a collectibles game.”

Early adopters on the platform are both web3-savvy folks as well as young people “who have more time to engage with new platforms and figure out new games,” Sideman said. The platform has also attracted content creators like Cyrus Dobre, who has nearly 10 million TikTok followers and “regularly mints his art” on the marketplace, Sideman said.

The raise included investors from Union Square Ventures, Sfermion, 6th Man Ventures, Gaingels, Wagmi Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Global Impact Ventures, Hansa Labs and Polygon, among others. The capital will be used to expand Revel’s web3 interoperability, generative and collaborative AI functionality, and social features, Sideman said.

As it stands, there isn’t a robust social media collectible ecosystem. Some marketplaces aren’t very social, like OpenSea or Magic Eden, and collectible platforms like Sorare and NBA Top Shot aren’t social media-focused, Sideman said.

“What is not here yet, and is inevitable, is that the media published on social media, by users, personal media, will all be ownable and collectible,” Sideman said. “This triggers a new breed of services, services that are part social networks, part marketplaces and part social games.”

Revel is a cross between a social network and a marketplace. It’s supposed to be a simple trading platform that’s gamified, allowing individuals to mint photos and videos as collectibles. But whether the concept will pick up among smaller creators and average people is yet to be determined.

“The everyday person won’t want to ‘buy’ your photo, but it’s more nuanced than that,” Sideman said. “The tail of the creator economy keeps getting longer … [and] we’ve created a free economy that we expect most people won’t open their wallets for. They can barter and say, ‘Give me three of these for one of those.’ In many ways, it’s a media game.” Some people can make offers with just assets, or they can offer assets plus money to get a trade, Sideman added.

There are other projects centered around individual creators in the market today — one new entrant is making particular noise — but if the genre of digital collectibles can grow despite a generally lackluster NFT market, Revel may be onto something interesting: a real use case for the blockchain.

Revel raises $7.8M to become the Instagram and Robinhood of NFT platforms by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Ever needed to read your credit card information on the phone to make a massage appointment? The process is annoying, and it makes you wonder how safe it is to give a stranger your personal details. That’s why Los Angeles-based Mangomint built a SaaS tool that strives to streamline the booking experience for the beauty industry, which includes everything from spas and massage parlors to piercing and tattoo studios.

Mangomint recently surpassed 200,000 monthly appointments across more than 1,000 locations in Canada and the U.S., spurred by user growth during the pandemic. Investors have taken notice and funded its $13 million Series A round, which was led by OpenView Venture Partners, the Boston-based VC firm known for backing companies propelled by “product-led growth”, and joined by startup300 as well as existing angels.

Mangomint’s growth in recent times is happening in tandem with the post-COVID labor shortage across developed economies. Businesses that require in-person worker attendance, like restaurants and beauty salons, have been struggling to retain staff, many of whom have quit to deal with COVID sickness, look for higher-paid jobs, or seek better work-life balance.

“Cost [of labor] is up and supply is down because people just quit,” Mangomint’s founder and CEO Daniel Lang told TechCrunch. “We are tapping into these jobs with smart automation.”

Mangomint was born out of Lang’s cross-country road trip back in 2016 after the Austrian founder sold his software development company. “No matter what city or town we went to [in the US], there were salons and spas. We ended up booking a ton of appointments, but we always had to call to book,” Lang recalled.

Lang described the current iteration of Mangomint to be “an OS for salons and spas” that automate booking, point-of-sale, employee payrolls, and customer relationship management. The intention isn’t to remove humans, Lang said, but to augment human work — a mission that has become common for a lot of workplace automation software and a friendlier message without the threat of “robots coming for human jobs.”

“All our competitors believe online booking is the only way, but at Mangomint, you will never see the word AI,” Lang added.

That’s because robots can’t carry out certain human functions, yet. For example, many customers want advice from salons on the type of service they get, so Mangomint leaves that part of the interaction on the phone. After the call, its software automatically sends a text message to the customers, who will then click on a booking link to submit their credit card information — which can be auto-filled if they have it stored on their phones.

By removing some of the most menial work, Mangomint is reducing overhead costs for businesses, Lang suggested. Many vertical SaaS providers tend to overpromise and claim to help boost revenues, “but the ugly truth is that most of [this type of software] is just tools that replace spreadsheets.”

Asked why booking for spas and salons can’t take place on an OpenTable-like, centralized platform, Lang noted that there is already “a graveyard of startups that try to be the Opentable for the beauty industry.

“If I have a trusted salon expert, why would I go through this platform that takes a fee?” asked Lang. Mangomint tries to stay in the background instead. Users can make appointments without creating a Mangomint account. And by integrating its software into the day-to-day operation of small businesses, it aims to be “invisible” so that businesses don’t even feel its existence.

Salon software Mangomint raises $13M as it booms in post-COVID labor shortage by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch