Startups

Daily Crunch: Shark Tank India host Ashneer Grover tries to get his BharatPe CEO removed from board

Comment

BharatPe founder Ashneer Grover resigns from board amid turmoil at Indian fintech
Image Credits: Anindito Mukherjee / Bloomberg / Getty Images

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Friday, February 4, 2022! The TechCrunch team is getting pretty stoked for our 2022 slate of live and online events. Equity and Found are hosting live tapings – for which I can confirm that tech checks are underway – and we’ve got Early Stage coming in short order. It’s going to be, if I may, a party. – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • The public cloud keeps winning: The Big Tech companies with public clouds did well in the recent earnings cycle. Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon, that’s to say. The latest data on the cloud market makes it plain why – cloud is big business, software-market equity repricings aside. (More on Google Cloud here, in case you want a dive into the numbers. Ron’s been all over the cloud beat.)
  • Insurtech venture funding soars as insurtech stocks sour: Last year was perhaps the best year ever for fundraising for insurtech startups. It was also a reckoning year for insurtech companies that went public in the last year or so. TechCrunch, in the first of a two-part series, digs into what’s going on and what good news can be found.
  • How to reform coding bootcamps: TechCrunch’s Natasha Mascarenhas has a great look at the world of teaching folks to code in rapid fashion. She told me earlier today that “edtech is always in search of a magic metric, one that encompasses outcomes, engagement and, heck, even fun. But in the world of coding bootcamps, which have been scrutinized over lack of efficacy, is it time to ditch the old way of tracking success?” Enjoy!

Startups/VC

  • The latest from France: Fintech upstart Numeral wants to update corporate banking by “using a modern application programming interface” that will allow its customers to connect “directly to bank servers to upload payment files and interact with outdated information systems.” In short, it’s turning discrete banking services into microservices. I dig it.
  • Been reading more French startup news in the last few quarters? Here’s why. Romain, Anna and others have done a great job keeping our eyes on the country.
  • Artisanal Ventures raises $62M: Looking to invest in the competitive B2B SaaS startup market, Artisanal Ventures’ first fund is “backed by more than 50 founders and senior executives,” which could provide it with some leverage for its portfolio companies inside major companies. Let’s see if that edge gets it into the right deals.
  • Another €30M for Marathon Venture Capital: Based in Athens, Marathon just stacked extra chips for its investing activities. The addition to its latest fund comes after the firm first raised €40 million for its second fund’s first close.
  • Drama at BharatPe: The Tiger-backed Indian fintech company is seeing turmoil in its leadership, with co-founder and managing director Ashneer Grover asking its board “for the removal of chief executive Suhail Sameer” from the leadership group at the company. Throw in the tea from Better.com, Bolt and other firms, and 2022 is shaping up to be a year of tech drama. Why? A lot of companies raised a lot of money, and not all of them are going to manage to make it at those prices. So expect to see more of this, not less, as time rolls along.
  • And to close us off, if you want to know which funding rounds stood out to us this week, Equity has you covered. We also talked about cute robots!

How to organize and execute an effective hybrid sales kickoff event in 2022

Abstract vector illustration is showing a team using a diagram to visually organize information.
Image Credits: DrAfter123 (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

One recent survey of sales and marketing professionals found that only half of respondents said they were likely to attend an event in H1 2022.

Traditionally, companies hold in-person sales kickoffs (SKOs) in January and February to brief sales teams about new products and devise strategies. Today, those convention centers and hotel ballrooms are dark and quiet.

Hybrid events won’t give teams a chance to bond over karaoke, but with a tight agenda and a compelling theme, you can create a virtual or hybrid SKO that people will actually want to attend.

If you lead a sales team, this post shares strategies for finding a theme that reflects your goals, as well as advice on scheduling and tips on ways to express your company culture.

Even if your team is spread across several time zones, there’s still time to grab a sandwich and network, and Zoom karaoke counts as team-building.

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

How to organize and execute an effective hybrid sales kickoff event in 2022

Big Tech Inc.

  • Why is there no Spotify HiFi? The leading music streaming business in the world has yet to roll out a higher-priced, higher-quality tier to its service. Why? Licensing, it appears. Which is a somewhat strange answer. Spotify is part-owned by labels, and it has huge market clout. Why can’t it get this done?
  • Personal space comes to Meta: This is going to be an odd blurb, but roll with me. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is rolling out anti-harassment tools to Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues, its metaverse properties. So, if that applies to you, good news.

TechCrunch Experts

dc experts
Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you’re a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

More TechCrunch

Meta launched its Meta Verified program today along with other features, such as the ability to call large businesses and custom messages.

Meta rolls out Meta Verified for WhatsApp Business users in Brazil, India, Indonesia and Colombia

Last year, during the Q3 2023 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg talked about leveraging AI to have business accounts respond to customers for purchase and support queries. Today, Meta announced AI-powered…

Meta adds AI-powered features to WhatsApp Business app

TikTok is testing streaks that are similar to Snapchat’s in order to boost engagement, including how long people stay on the app.

TikTok is testing Snapchat-like streaks

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Your usual…

Inside Fisker’s collapse and robotaxis come to more US cities

New York-based Revel has made a lot of pivots since initially launching in 2018 as a dockless e-moped sharing service. The BlackRock-backed startup briefly stepped into the e-bike subscription business.…

Revel to lay off 1,000 staff ride-hail drivers, saying they’d rather be contractors anyway

Google says apps offering AI features will have to prevent the generation of restricted content.

Google Play cracks down on AI apps after circulation of apps for making deepfake nudes

The British retailers association also takes aim at Amazon’s “Buy Box,” claiming that Amazon manipulated which retailers were selected for the coveted placement.

UK retailers file a £1.1B collective action against Amazon over claims of data misuse

Featured Article

Rivian overhauled the R1S and R1T to entice new buyers ahead of cheaper R2 launch

Rivian has changed 600 parts on its R1S SUV and R1T pickup truck in a bid to drive down manufacturing costs, while improving performance of its flagship vehicles.  The end goal, which will play out over the coming year, is an existential one. Rivian lost about $38,784 on every vehicle…

3 hours ago
Rivian overhauled the R1S and R1T to entice new buyers ahead of cheaper R2 launch

Twitch has come up with a solution for the ongoing copyright issues that DJs encounter on the platform. The company announced Thursday a new program that enables DJs to stream…

Twitch DJs will now have to pay music labels to play songs in livestreams

Google said today it is partnering with RapidSOS, a platform for emergency first responders, to enable users to contact 911 through RCS (Rich Messaging Service).

Google partners with RapidSOS to enable 911 contact through RCS

Long before product-led growth became a buzzword, Atlassian offered free tiers for virtually all of its productivity and developer tools. Today, that mostly means free access for up to 10…

Atlassian now gives startups a year of free access

Featured Article

A social app for creatives, Cara grew from 40k to 650k users in a week because artists are fed up with Meta’s AI policies

Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts. Instagram is a necessity for many artists,…

3 hours ago
A social app for creatives, Cara grew from 40k to 650k users in a week because artists are fed up with Meta’s AI policies

Google has developed a new AI tool to help marine biologists better understand coral reef ecosystems and their health, which can aid in conversation efforts. The tool, SurfPerch, created with…

Google looks to AI to help save the coral reefs

Only a few years ago, one of the hottest topics in enterprise software was ‘robotic process automation’ (RPA). It doesn’t feel like those services, which tried to automate a lot…

Tektonic AI raises $10M to build GenAI agents for automating business operations

SpaceX achieved a key milestone in its Starship flight test campaign: returning the booster and the upper stage back to Earth.

SpaceX launches mammoth Starship rocket and brings it back for the first time

There’s a lot of buzz about generative AI and what impact it might have on businesses. But look beyond the hype and high-profile deals like the one between OpenAI and…

Sirion, now valued around $1B, acquires Eigen as consolidation comes to enterprise AI tooling

Carlo Kobe and Scott Smith believed so strongly in the need for a debit card product designed specifically for Gen Zers that they dropped out of Harvard and Cornell at…

Kleiner Perkins leads $14.4M seed round into Fizz, a credit-building debit card aimed at Gen Z college students

A new app called MyGlimpact is intended not only to help people understand their environmental footprint, but why they shouldn’t feel guilty about it.

How many Earths does your lifestyle require?

Prolific Machines believes it has a way of transitioning away from molecules to something better: light.

Prolific Machines, with a $55M Series B, shines ‘light’ on a better way to grow lab proteins for food and medicine

It’s been 20 years since Shira Yevin, the lead singer of punk band Shiragirl drove a pink RV into the Vans Warped Tour grounds, the now-defunct punk rock festival notorious…

Punk singer Shira Yevin pushes for fair pay with InPink, a women-focused job marketplace

While the transport industry does use legacy software, many of these platforms are from an earlier era. Qargo hopes its newer technologies can help it leapfrog the competition.

Qargo raises $14M to digitize and decarbonize the trucking industry

When you look at how generative AI is being implemented across developer tools, the focus for the most part has been on generating code, as with Github Copilot. Greptile, an…

Greptile raises $4M to build an AI-fueled code base expert

The models tended to answer questions inconsistently, which reflects biases embedded in the data used to train the models.

Study finds that AI models hold opposing views on controversial topics

A growing number of businesses are embracing data models — abstract models that organize elements of data and standardize how they relate to one another. But as the data analytics…

Cube is building a ‘semantic layer’ for company data

Stock-trading app Robinhood is diving deeper into the cryptocurrency realm with the acquisition of crypto exchange Bitstamp.

Robinhood acquires global crypto exchange Bitstamp for $200M

Torpago’s Powered By product is geared for regional and community banks, with under $20 billion in assets, to launch their own branded cards and spend management programs.

Fintech Torpago has a unique way to compete with Brex and Ramp: turning banks into customers

Over half of Americans wear corrective glasses or contact lenses. While there isn’t a shortage of low-cost and luxury frames available online or in stores, consumers can only buy them…

Eyebot raised $6M for AI-powered kiosks that provide 90-second vision exams without an optometrist

Google on Thursday said it is rolling out NotebookLM, its AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 new countries, nearly six months after opening its access in the U.S. The platform,…

Google’s updated AI-powered NotebookLM expands to India, UK and over 200 other countries

Inflation and currency devaluation have always been a growing concern for Africans with bank accounts.

Starting in war-torn Sudan, YC-backed Elevate now provides fintech to freelancers globally

Featured Article

Amazon buys Indian video streaming service MX Player

Amazon has agreed to acquire key assets of Indian video streaming service MX Player from the local media powerhouse Times Internet, the latest step by the e-commerce giant to make its services and brand popular in smaller cities and towns in the key overseas market.  The two firms reached a…

11 hours ago
Amazon buys Indian video streaming service MX Player