Techcrunch blog!: Meta says WhatsApp Business went from 50M to 200M monthly active users in 3 years

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Welcome to your Daily Crunch for Tuesday. I waded through over 60 stories to bring you the best of the best, so please enjoy.

Today was a big day for WhatsApp Business. It crossed 200 million monthly active users. Do you think it was the television commercial with the carrier pigeon that made the difference? Or perhaps it's the features — WhatsApp also introduced a personalized messages feature.

Sometimes it's the one who spies that gets spied on. That's what happened to LetMeSpy, a phone tracking app known for parental controls and employee monitoring, which now says it was hacked.

Speaking of parental controls, Meta is rolling out new parental control tools for Instagram and Messenger that will preemptively block unwanted DMs and tell teens when it's time to put down the phone.

Now meet Dust. It's not a startup helping you to clean better; it uses large language models on internal data to improve team productivity.

We promised you more on what's going on with Indian edtech giant Byju's, and today it was reported that one of the company's largest shareholders decided to slash Byju's valuation.

Image Credits: SOPA Images / Contributor

More top stories

Reduce, reuse, recycle: DePoly attracts $13.8 million in new funding to keep hard-to-recycle plastic from ending up in landfills.

Threat initiated: We reported earlier this month that Lordstown Motors was threatening to sue Foxconn. Now get the scoop on the actual lawsuit. Lordstown also filed for bankruptcy.

How to handle data: Data security startup Cyera lands a $100 million investment to help enterprises manage all of that proprietary data.

Shopper's delight: E-commerce enablement company Cart.com's valuation was boosted into unicorn territory after raising $60 million.

No "honey do" list for you: Khosla Ventures just doubled down on its investment into Honey Homes, a company that provides handyman-on-demand services for homeowners.

Red light, green light: NoTraffic raises $50 million to tackle congestion and enhance road safety. We're hoping traffic lights change for the better with this one.

Double the funding, double the fun: After raising capital 16 months ago, Redpanda is back with an even bigger round of funding as its streaming service experiences significant growth.

Let's stream: Roku and CBS Sports became besties and announced their first live sports deal. Meanwhile, you can now get Paramount+ with Showtime.

Cover girl: Kenyan fashion marketplace Shop Zetu grabs a round of pre-seed funding to add beauty and home decor items to its shopping list along with growth beyond Kenya.

Now you're speaking my language: Loora raises $9.25 million to continue developing a generative AI app that uses an audio interface to help users learn English.

Add these to your reading list:

Dexory nabs $19M to bring visibility to warehouses through analytics and autonomous robots

Snowflake-Nvidia partnership could make it easier to build generative AI applications

Twitter now allows subscribers to post 25,000-character-long tweets

CalypsoAI raises $23M to add guardrails to generative AI models

Supply chain startup Baskit supports Indonesia's middlemen

Image Credits: Juj Winn / Getty Images

See How Neon One increased revenue 500% with Payrix Pro

4 VCs illustrate why there's good reason to be optimistic about the machine learning startup market

Training the expansive models that power AI applications is thirsty work: Machine learning startups can charge their clients for anything from optimizing ad campaigns to generating gargantuan datasets.

Kyle Wiggers surveyed four investors to get their thoughts on whether "the hype cycle in ML is dying down or going strong," as well as to discuss technical roadblocks holding the industry back and get their advice for founders who are building in the sector:

Lonne Jaffe, managing director, Insight Partners
Jerry Chen, partner, Greylock
Ashish Kakran, principal, Thomvest
Janelle Teng, VP, Bessemer Venture Partners

Five more from the TC+ team:

The quest for better AI recommendation engines

As Lordstown immolates, SPAC deals that didn't go to zero feel like the exception

Gusto reaches $500M in trailing revenue, teams up with Remote to support international hires

How Greenlyte is going from zero to 1,000 metric tons of captured CO2 in a year

SignalFire's State of Talent report 2023

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