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The SPAC route to listing on public markets was incredibly popular in 2020 and 2021, but many companies that took this avenue didn’t exactly fare well after going public. So why did consumer car rental marketplace Getaround decide to list by merging with a blank-check company?

To answer that question, we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

In hindsight, the 2020-2021 SPAC boom was unable to materially diminish the rising unicorn backlog. In 2022, unicorns continued to be minted faster than M&A and public offerings could convert their illiquid equity into liquid capital. It’s become a difficult time for high-priced startups: The traditional gateway to the public markets — the venerable public offering — remains closed, would-be acquirers are looking to trim costs instead of getting adventurous with their balance sheet and SPAC performance has proved abysmal.

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Per SPAC Insider data, companies that merged with blank-check companies recently have seen their value fall sharply. SPAC combos worth $300 million to $2 billion in pro forma equity are off around 71% on a median basis since 2009, to pick a data point. Smaller blank-check combinations are down even more over the same time frame, while larger deals did slightly better.

Why the SPAC route makes sense for Getaround by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

According to Grand View Research, the global sports betting market is expected to grow to $182.12 billion in revenue by 2030, up from $76.75 billion last year.

So we are seeing a number of startups throng around this market. Thus, HotStreak, a web3 platform for daily fantasy sports (DFS) contests, is betting that a decentralizing payments is an ideal solution for DFS platforms.

Meanewhile, you have Polymarket, a global information markets platform for sports betting; BetDEX, a global decentralized sports betting exchange; Aver, a decentralized betting and prediction exchange; and Divvy, a decentralized betting protocol. Plus, Super Bowl ads boosted crypto app downloads by 279%, so there is a burgeoning market.

And, thus is is that New York-based Frontrunner, a decentralized sports prediction market, has now raised a $4.75M funding round by Susquehanna Private Equity Investments LLP. Joingin get raise was Soma Capital, Gilgamesh Ventures, FBG Capital, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, Toy Ventures, Gaingels, Ledger Prime, WAGMI Ventures, and NOA Capital.

So what makes Frontrunner different?

One of its schticks is that is makes its bettering market look much more like a stock market-like experience. So, betting odds are presented more like stock prices. Users can buy shares of teams and players across markets like NFL, NBA and Premier League, using crypto, through a simplified trading interface. The company also plans to rollout ETF-style offerings, allowing uses to invest in teams, favorite ownership groups and league divisions. They will also be able to buy and sell using stablecoins.

Frontrunner is a zero gas fee, decentralized sports prediction market built on the blockchain, employing Injective, a protocol built on COSMOS, to support decentralized financial markets and order books, usinsing blockchains like Ethereum and Solana.

The company launched its testnet last quarter, and plans to add the FIFA World Cup 2022 market, and extend the offering in its existing leagues NFL, NBA and Premier League, by the end of this year.

Neil Zhang, Founder and CEO of Frontrunner said: “Rather than being a generalized prediction market product, we are launching Frontrunner focusing specifically on sports and esports markets… We believe that blockchain brings the sector closer to what users truly want when using a sports prediction market product.”

Speaking to me over a call, he added: “The majority of our competitors thus far are in the Solana ecosystem. But we have really had more of a multi chain type vision of the long term vision of our products. And so we’ve chosen first to be in the cosmos ecosystem, which we are really bullish on in terms of the interchain operability and some of the multi chain technologies that are being built there.”

“We are particularly excited about the possibilities of the Cosmos ecosystem that Frontrunner is built upon and believe it has a great future,” said Dean Carlson, Head of Digital Asset Investments at Susquehanna Private Equity Investments LLP, in a statement.

Eventually, next year, Frontrunner says it will give users social features, allowingthem to create group funds in which they team up by pooling capital and investing collectively.

The Company is in the process of obtaining an off-shore gaming license in the Isle of Man during the first quarter of next year, which would allow it to legally operate in a variety of jurisdictions including Canada, Mexico, parts of Europe, and much of South America, Africa, and Asia.

Despite the Crypto Winter and other scandals, blockchains seem here to stay in the sports betting market by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

The Twitter account @ElonJet, which uses publicly available data to track the whereabouts of Elon Musk’s private jet, has been permanently suspended from Twitter.

“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk tweeted on November 6. Over the last month, it seems Musk changed his mind.

Jack Sweeney, the University of Central Florida student who created @ElonJet, also operates similar bots that track private jet activity of tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg. Yet none of Sweeney’s other accounts have been affected, including an account that tracks the travel of Elon Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk.

The account has been a sore spot for Musk for a long time. In January, Musk DMed Sweeney on Twitter and offered the student $5,000 to delete @ElonJet, but he turned down the offer.

“Any chance to up that to $50k? It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3,” Sweeney responded, according to DMs obtained by Protocol at the time.

Unfortunately, Musk would not be paying Sweeney’s tuition.

According to Sweeney, @ElonJet has been under close watch at Twitter HQ. He posted on his personal account that an anonymous Twitter employee told him that his account was visibility limited on December 2. Sweeney also posted a screenshot, allegedly leaked from Twitter’s internal Slack, that appears to show Trust and Safety VP Ella Irwin asking that the team immediately apply high visibility filtering to @ElonJet. TechCrunch emailed Irwin for confirmation of the message’s legitimacy.

After being suspended from Twitter, Sweeney set up an Elon Jet account on Mastodon.

Elon Jet, the Twitter account tracking Elon Musk’s flights, was permanently suspended by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Meet one dozen rising-star startups that are hard at work paving the future of Web3 infrastructure, DeFi, NFT and gaming applications at The Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day on January 11, 2023. This free online event will showcase pitches from 12 projects across the world’s fastest growing industry.

Each startup will have five minutes to pitch to an audience of influential industry investors and founders — just the kind of trajectory-changing exposure every startup needs.

Want to see what some of the best up-and-coming Web3 founders are building? If you wanna know, you gotta go. It’s easy, and it’s free — just register today and then tune in on January 11.

So, which startups will step into the spotlight? We’re ready to reveal two of the 12 projects.

Meet Mentaport — founded by Cynthia Alexander and Mariale Montenegro — a gaming infrastructure platform to create context-aware smart contracts and on-chain parameters for digital assets in a few lines of code. It allows developers and creators to easily set up rules and triggers for dynamic NFTs connected to locations, time events and more. The founders aim to change the future of blockchain gaming.

Meet Verbwire, founded by Justin Bojarski and Bankole Omodunbi. These former hedge fund traders spent decades on Wall Street and left it all behind with one goal in mind: help the next million+ devs dive into Web3. This January, they’ll debut a product that lets anyone, regardless of experience, create and deploy smart contracts.

Join us on January 11 and see for yourself what the brilliant minds behind 12 up-and-coming projects are building. The Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day, which takes place on January 11, 2023, is a joint production between the CCC and TechCrunch.

Register now for this free online event and reserve your seat at the virtual table.

Meet two of 12 rising startups pitching at Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

Revue, the newsletter platform acquired by Twitter in January 2021, is shutting down. The platform helped writers monetize their Twitter following by integrating their newsletters directly into the Twitter timeline, competing with platforms like Substack and Medium.

Revue sent a message to newsletter writers today declaring, “We’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Revue.” Writers have until January 18, 2023 to retrieve their data before it all gets deleted.

Twitter is working on making tweets 4,000 characters instead of 280, according to app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi and Elon Musk himself. But longer tweets don’t necessarily make up for the features that users will no longer access from Revue.

Twitter seems to be losing interest in many of its products relating to longform writing, including those that were birthed from acquisitions. Twitter acquired Scroll, an ad-free reading subscription, in May 2021, and then rolled it into the original, pre-Musk iteration of Twitter Blue, which had a feature that let users read ad-free articles from certain news outlets. But the subscription was not too popular, so when Musk waged layoffs across the company, Scroll and its team were on the chopping block.

Just yesterday, former Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey started a Revue newsletter to publish his thoughts about the Twitter Files, a series of threads posted by journalists like Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, whom Musk granted access to internal Twitter documents.

“well… after 17 hours, my career as a newsletter writer is coming to an end,” Dorsey tweeted today.

Twitter shuts down Revue, its newsletter platform by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

It’s commonly held that solar panels need as much sun as they can get. That’s true, but only up to a point, as heat and other hazards can become a serious problem beyond that point, and solar panels can degrade pretty quickly.

SmartHelio wants to help prevent that from happening. The startup uses AI tech to measure live data (current, voltage, weather parameters) from solar plants, and offers suggestions for fixes when a solar array starts underperforming. The company has just raised $5 million to scale its product.

“Every summer, my parents would bring my brother and me to our ancestral village in India, which didn’t have electricity. The lack of good governance meant that it took a long time for the village to get electricity. This is what sparked my interest in decentralized energy solutions that don’t require external intervention,” Govinda Upadhyay, CEO at SmartHelio told TechCrunch.

“I am always thinking about how we can accelerate the adoption of clean energy. As I interacted with solar companies in India, Europe, and Africa, I realized that many of these companies were struggling with the performance of their solar plants, often due to the late detection of faults. This inspired me to start SmartHelio,” he added.

Upadhyay met his co-founder Neeraj Dasila, who was working at the energy department in the Indian government at the time. His journey matches Upadhyay’s in that he grew up in a remote village in the Himalayas that had little infrastructure.

The company is wading into a rapidly developing industry, but it has remarkably few direct competitors — the thrust of software/AI companies seems mostly focused on where to install solar or making solar more accessible. Glint Solar, for example, raised $3 million earlier this year for its AI-powered analytics tool to figure out where to build solar plants. Aurora Solar is in a similar space and closed a $250 million round in mid-2021. On the installation front, recent funding rounds include Enact Systems’ $11 million Series A, Zolar’s $105 million Series C, and Project Solar’s $23 million haul.

The funding round

SmartHelio was part of the W22 batch of Y Combinator and this round saw the incubator participating, in addition to a flurry of other investors from its native Switzerland and the U.S., including Collab Fund, Serpentine VC, ACE & Company, Pegasus Tech Venture, Gaingel VC, Soma Capital, and a number of angel investors.

SmartHelio raises $5M to fix solar panels before they break by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

VCs continue to bet big on legal tech. According to Crunchbase, firms have invested over $1 billion in legal tech companies, an uptick from the $512 million invested last year. Contract management vendors have benefitted in particular as contracting workloads increase; contracting teams at large organizations now manage an average of 19,000 contracts a year while the busiest organizations manage more than 50,000, according to a 2021 EY survey.

Angling to cash in on the gold rush, LexCheck, an AI-powered contract analysis platform, closed a $17 million Series A funding round today led by Mayfield Fund, the startup announced. Co-founder and CEO Gary Sangha says that the proceeds will be put toward fueling the expansion of LexCheck’s contract review tech, specifically focusing on R&D and sales and marketing.

“At a time of macroeconomic challenges, companies need a solution that accelerates key business processes,” Sangha told TechCrunch in an email interview. “My prior experience as an entrepreneur, along with LexCheck’s unique product development model, success, and ease of implementation, positions us to take on the potential headwinds in tech head-on.”

Sangha, a law lecturer at the University of Pennslyvania and a licensed attorney in the State of New York, founded LexCheck in 2015. After practicing securities law at Shearman & Sterling in New York City and White & Case in Hong Kong, Sangha founded Intelligize, a regulatory filings research platform that was acquired by LexisNexis in 2016.

“I’ve seen firsthand the complexity, heavy workload and time constraints faced by corporate legal teams, and how contracting can sometimes be a barrier rather than a business accelerator,” Sangha said. “I founded LexCheck to increase revenue by simplifying and accelerating commercial contracting processes across an entire organization.”

There’s evidence to suggest that AI, indeed, can make a difference where it concerns contracting. A study cited by legal workflow automation vendor Onit — not the most impartial source, to be fair — found that contract review software can make human reviewers roughly 33% more efficient by completing tasks such as first-pass contract reviews and delivering contract risk profiles.

LexCheck uses AI, including natural language processing, to support processes around editing and negotiating contracts. The platform attempts to standardize the contract negotiation process, providing organizations with digital playbooks that automate contract reviews by delivering redlines (i.e. edits), comments, insertions and deletions and automatically escalating deviations from “playbook-preferred” positions.

“These industry-standard playbooks are available for use immediately. If custom playbooks are required, LexCheck only requires between 24 and 50 sample documents to train the AI,” Sangha explained. “LexCheck’s products are built by practicing lawyers in collaboration with linguists and software engineers … Our mission is to create solutions that work the way lawyers need them to work, and this staffing model helps us achieve this goal.”

LexCheck competes with a host of companies in the contracting space including Blackboiler, LawGeex, LegalOn, ThoughtRiver, Luminance and Ontra. Lexion, which was incubated at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, uses machine learning and AI to automate aspects of contract management. Terzo recently raised $16 million for its tech that automatically extracts key data from contracts. Not to be outdone, ContractPodAi leverages IBM’s cloud AI tech to streamline contract management and (in theory) reduce the burden on corporate in-house legal teams.

The size of the segment isn’t terribly surprising considering the opportunity it presents. In-house lawyers are already using contract tools more than any other form of legal tech, according to a recent Bloomberg Law survey. Over half of the survey respondents said that they actively use contract management programs.

Sangha claims that LexCheck’s solution can be implemented more quickly than most and uniquely requires only a small sample set of contract redlines to train its AI for custom playbooks. It can also be integrated with existing contract lifecycle management solutions, he notes, complimenting — not replacing — their capabilities.

Regardless of whether that’s true, LexCheck appears to have notched some size of foothold in the market, tripling its customer base to include some of the world’s largest financial institutions, tech providers and “top law firms” (although Sangha wouldn’t name names). Sangha wouldn’t disclose revenue figures when asked, saying only that LexCheck “continues to experience significant growth” and is “optimistic” about future funding.

“Business leaders have four critical priorities that impact contracting teams — reducing costs, improving risk management, digitizing the business and enabling growth — all of which LexCheck can help with,” Sangha added. “Contract management solution implementations can be time-consuming and challenging to deploy, often requiring significant oversight and involvement from IT teams. Deploying LexCheck is quick and seamless, reducing the IT team’s burden.”

LexCheck, which is based in New York, has 32 employees currently. To date, the startup has raised $22 million.

LexCheck raises $17M to automate common contracting processes by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Spotify looks to be scaling back its live audio ambitions, as the company is ending production of several of its live audio shows. A spokesperson for the company confirmed to TechCrunch that “Deux Me After Dark,” “Doughboys: Snack Pack,” “The Movie Buff” and “A Gay in the Life” are all coming to an end. The news was first reported by Bloomberg.

The spokesperson said Spotify will continue to have live offerings from its shows “The Fantasy Footballers” and “The Ringer MMA Show.”

Spotify integrated its live audio capabilities from its companion app, Spotify Greenroom, within the main Spotify streaming app in April. Spotify acquiredthe app that would become Greenroom in March 2021 with its$62 million purchase of Betty Labs. Initially known as Locker Room, the app had focused on live audio’s intersection with sports content. Spotify rebranded the app, then introduced it as Greenroom in June 2021.

Spotify’s foray into the live audio market had initially seemed like a natural fit for the company as it had been heavily investing in podcasts and related technology in recent years. Also, the COVID-19 pandemic had driven increased usage of new audio streaming apps, such as Clubhouse.There was an obvious use case for Spotify where podcast creators had established fan bases who would likely want to audio chat with hosts in real time. But as pandemic lockdown measures ended and in-person live events returned, adoption of audio apps like Clubhouse declined. As a result, Spotify’s move to scale back its live audio ambitions isn’t exactly surprising.

It’s worth noting that Spotify isn’t the only company to pull back from live audio. Earlier this year, Facebook integrated its Live Audio Rooms offering, which is its Clubhouse clone, into its Facebook Live experience. The social media giant also discontinued its short-form audio Soundbitesfeature and itsAudio hub.

Spotify is ending production of several of its live audio shows by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

I’m thrilled to announce TechCrunch Live is filming live and in real life at CES 2023. We’re filming on the first day of the show at 11:00. If you’re not attending CES, that’s fine. Just like every TechCrunch Live, the show will be streamed live on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter Spaces — basically anywhere I can blast the show.

The mission remains the same despite the change of location: TechCrunch Live helps founders build better venture-backed business. I do this by hosting conversations with successful startup founders and their early investors and board members. We talk through pitch decks, fundraising strategies, and founder/investor relations. But for this show, I’m featuring a hardware company and investor. Because CES.

I hope you can come and hang out. We’re filming at Stagwell’s Content Studio, located at booth 60488, in the Grand Lobby of theLas Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). We’re right next to the Starbucks, I’m told.

TechCrunch has a team of writers attending CES, and we’d love to connect. Fill out this form, and we’ll reach out if your company is a good fit.

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TechCrunch Live is filming at CES, and you’re invited! by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch

Tesla owners: Go check your cars. You have some new toys. The latest OTA update added a bunch of features; most notable, Steam, which brings along thousands of games. This app, however, is limited to Model S and X vehicles with 16GB of RAM (only found in vehicles made in 2022).

Elon Musk tweeted in July that Tesla was adding Steam support. The Beta version in this update even adds support for Steam’s cloud synchronization, allowing for games to be resumed in the vehicle or any Steam device. Better yet, the OTA update finally added Bluetooth support gaming controllers while using Arcade Mode. Tesla’s release notes state the PS5 controller works the best.

But this update has something for everyone, too. There’s an updated Dog Mode that allows owners to access the in-vehicle camera from the mobile app. Media controls were relocated, and Apple Music and Zoom was added, too. Tesla also updated the navigation UI, pinning the next turn information window to the top of the screen while the rest of the navigation information is located at the bottom. Drivers can relive Mario Kart memories and drive on a rainbow road, turn signals can automatically turn off and the door handles have new options while parked at home.

And just in time for the holidays, Tesla’s long-popular light show mode now allows it to sync with other Tesla vehicles. Now you and your buddies can line up your Tesla vehicles, and together, they’ll put on a show to the same song. Festive.

Tesla’s latest OTA update adds Steam games, Apple Music, Zoom and a wild light show mode by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch