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Daily Crunch: Peloton Guide with body-tracking camera now on sale for $295

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Image Credits: Peloton

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Welcome to the Daily Crunch for Tuesday, April 5, 2022. Today was one of those days reporters love — frenzied writing, source-gathering — all the trappings of a good newsletter! Join us as our fingers dance joyous Lindy Hop routines across our keyboards.

While we have you here: Do you love robots? We sure do! Join us in Boston on July 22 to nerd out about arms, assembly, articulation, actuators and Asimovian legal discourse. Come to think of it, we are 12% sure we’ll cover the rest of the robotics alphabet, too. — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Fast slows to a halt: Despite raising quite a bit of cash last year, it seems one-click checkout company Fast found itself having to slow down. It all happened very quickly, though. Last Friday came reports that Fast was looking for a buyer, and then the company surprised us all today by announcing it will close its doors, with us reporting “that its 2021 revenue growth was modest, its cash burn high and its fundraising options limited.”
  • Venture capital market still in motion: When funding deals in 2021 were that good, it was always going to be difficult to match. So it’s not much of a surprise that when The Exchange examined Crunchbase data on venture capital deals in the first quarter, it saw some slowdown. Given the current macroeconomic conditions, that is to be expected: inflation, higher interest rates, bigger check sizes, higher valuations. The Exchange’s recommendation? Be proactive in this environment.
  • Peloton lowers price point for Guide: Peloton’s set-top system Guide is now available for sale at the sliced-and-diced lower price of $295 after earlier announcing it would be $495. This is not the first product where the fitness giant reduced the price — in the name of affordability perhaps?

Startups and VC

Hellooooo startup nerds. We’re back with another round of news from the world of startups, starting with an op-ed from Marc Schröder, managing partner at MGV, about how VCs don’t need to worry about a financial slowdown. A propos of VC — the biggest VC firms have a lot more assets under management than you might be aware of, as Connie explores in her article.

News I choose for you to peruse:

Q1 crypto losses spike 695% on year following massive hacks

Image of a grenade made from computer keys against a neon yellow background.
Image Credits: Peter Dazeley (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The total value of cryptocurrencies reached nearly $2.3 trillion last year, but as that number soared, so did interest from malign actors looking to exploit bugs, poor code and social engineering hacks.

The web3 ecosystem “lost” $1.23 billion to exploits in just the first quarter of 2022, a nearly eight-fold increase compared to a year earlier, and that number is likely to continue increasing as the space expands, reports Jacquelyn Melinek.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Q1 crypto losses spike 695% on year following massive hacks

Big Tech Inc.

  • Instacart makes it harder to remove tips: Tipping has been a constant Instacart issue for years, so it’s good to see the grocery delivery giant doing something about it. Users will now have to report an issue in order to zero out the tip, and Instacart will cover up to $10. It’s a good start, and we’ll reserve our comments about users who do this with no cause.
  • Twitter’s edit button debacle: We have triple the Elon Musk/Twitter news for you today. First, Amanda Silberling opines about why an edit button would not solve much, then she joins Alex Wilhelm and Kyle Wiggers to discuss what Musk’s motives might be in buying all that Twitter stock, and finally, Wilhelm discusses Musk joining the Twitter board.
  • Flutterwave CEO in the hot seat: A former employee is accusing Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola of alleged bullying after the two parties could not come to a settlement as part of a lawsuit. TechCrunch reached out for comment addressing these claims, and among the responses, the company stated, “We confirm that at the point of resignation, all monies due to our former employee at the time were promptly disbursed and we have records to confirm this. We however sincerely regret the circumstances that led to the dispute and wish it had been addressed in a more timely manner.” Stay tuned.
  • Gogoro drives into the public market: Taiwan’s two-wheeler battery-swapping company closed its SPAC and expects to be $335 million in cash proceeds richer. That’s a lot of batteries it can swap. We report that “backed by more favorable market conditions and much better timing, Gogoro has been able to unlock the recipe needed for scaling its battery swapping system.” It just now needs to catch on over on this side of the pond.

More TechCrunch

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Copilot, Microsoft’s brand of generative AI, will soon be far more deeply integrated into the Windows 11 experience.

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Uber and Lyft drivers in Minnesota will see higher pay thanks to a deal between the state and the country’s two largest ride-hailing companies. The upshot: a new law that…

Uber’s and Lyft’s ride-hailing deal with Minnesota comes at a cost

Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism fund has established a new fellowship program aimed at introducing top engineers and technologists to venture investing, a move that could help the firm identify less…

a16z’s American Dynamism team launches program to introduce technical minds to VC

Another fintech startup, and its customers, has been gravely impacted by the implosion of banking-as-a-service startup Synapse. Copper Banking, a digital banking service aimed at teens, notified its customers on…

Teen fintech Copper had to abruptly discontinue its banking, debit products

Autodesk — the 3D tools behemoth — has acquired Wonder Dynamics, a startup that lets creators quickly and easily make complex characters and visual effects using AI-powered image analysis. The…

Autodesk acquires AI-powered VFX startup Wonder Dynamics

Farcaster, a blockchain-based social protocol founded by two Coinbase alumni, announced on Tuesday that it closed a $150 million fundraise. Led by Paradigm, the platform also raised money from a16z…

Farcaster, a crypto-based social network, raised $150M with just 80K daily users

Microsoft announced on Tuesday during its annual Build conference that it’s bringing “Windows Volumetric Apps” to Meta Quest headsets. The partnership will allow Microsoft to bring Windows 365 and local…

Microsoft’s new ‘Volumetric Apps’ for Quest headsets extend Windows apps into the 3D space

The spam reached Bluesky by first crossing over two other decentralized networks: Mastodon and Nostr.

The ‘vote Trump’ spam that hit Bluesky in May came from decentralized rival Nostr

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at the continued fallout from Synapse’s bankruptcy, how Layer wants to disrupt SMB accounting, and much more! To get a roundup of…

There’s a real appetite for a fintech alternative to QuickBooks

The company is hoping to produce electricity at $13 per megawatt hour, which would be more than 50% cheaper than traditional onshore wind.

Bill Gates-backed wind startup AirLoom is raising $12M, filings reveal

Generative AI makes stuff up. It can be biased. Sometimes it spits out toxic text. So can it be “safe”? Rick Caccia, the CEO of WitnessAI, believes it can. “Securing…

WitnessAI is building guardrails for generative AI models

It’s not often that you hear about a seed round above $10 million. H, a startup based in Paris and previously known as Holistic AI, has announced a $220 million…

French AI startup H raises $220M seed round

Hey there, Series A to B startups with $35 million or less in funding — we’ve got an exciting opportunity that’s tailor-made for your growth journey! If you’re looking to…

Boost your startup’s growth with a ScaleUp package at TC Disrupt 2024

TikTok is pulling out all the stops to prevent its impending ban in the United States. Aside from initiating legal action against the U.S. government, that means shaping up its…

As a US ban looms, TikTok announces a $1M program for socially driven creators

Microsoft wants to put its Copilot everywhere. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft renames its annual Build developer conference to Microsoft Copilot. Hopefully, some of those upcoming events…

Microsoft’s Power Automate no-code platform adds AI flows

Build is Microsoft’s largest developer conference and of course, it’s all about AI this year. So it’s no surprise that GitHub’s Copilot, GitHub’s “AI pair programming tool,” is taking center…

GitHub Copilot gets extensions

Microsoft wants to make its brand of generative AI more useful for teams — specifically teams across corporations and large enterprise organizations. This morning at its annual Build dev conference,…

Microsoft intros a Copilot for teams

Microsoft’s big focus at this year’s Build conference is generative AI. And to that end, the tech giant announced a series of updates to its platforms for building generative AI-powered…

Microsoft upgrades its AI app-building platforms

The U.K.’s data protection watchdog has closed an almost year-long investigation of Snap’s AI chatbot, My AI — saying it’s satisfied the social media firm has addressed concerns about risks…

UK data protection watchdog ends privacy probe of Snap’s GenAI chatbot, but warns industry

U.S. cell carrier Patriot Mobile experienced a data breach that included subscribers’ personal information, including full names, email addresses, home ZIP codes and account PINs, TechCrunch has learned. Patriot Mobile,…

Conservative cell carrier Patriot Mobile hit by data breach

It’s been three years since Spotify acquired live audio startup Betty Labs, and yet the music streaming service isn’t leveraging the technology to its fullest potential — at least not…

Spotify’s ‘Listening Party’ feature falls short of expectations

Alchemist Accelerator has a new pile of AI-forward companies demoing their wares today, if you care to watch, and the program itself is making some international moves into Tokyo and…

Alchemist’s latest batch puts AI to work as accelerator expands to Tokyo, Doha

“Late Pledge” allows campaign creators to continue collecting money even after the campaign has closed.

Kickstarter now lets you pledge after a campaign closes

Stack AI’s co-founders, Antoni Rosinol and Bernardo Aceituno, were PhD students at MIT wrapping up their degrees in 2022 just as large language models were becoming more mainstream. ChatGPT would…

Stack AI wants to make it easier to build AI-fueled workflows

Pinecone, the vector database startup founded by Edo Liberty, the former head of Amazon’s AI Labs, has long been at the forefront of helping businesses augment large language models (LLMs)…

Pinecone launches its serverless vector database out of preview

Young geothermal energy wells can be like budding prodigies, each brimming with potential to outshine their peers. But like people, most decline with age. In California, for example, the amount…

Special mud helps XGS Energy get more power out of geothermal wells

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