Techcrunch blog!: Drizly loses its buzz as Uber winds it down

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Welcome to the very first issue of TechCrunch PM! By now you should have enjoyed the TechCrunch AM version with your coffee and donut. If you haven't yet heard about the great things happening with the TechCrunch newsletters in 2024, here's more from TechCrunch editor in chief Connie Loizos.

Let's dig in!

—Christine

Image Credits: Getty Images

TechCrunch PM Top 3

Uber is shuttering Drizly: After acquiring Drizly three years ago, Uber is closing the alcohol delivery service in March. During this entire time, Drizly remained an independent company. Uber was supposed to integrate Drizly into UberEats, and now we know why that didn't come to fruition.

Supreme Court says, “No thanks”: In a surprise move, the Supreme Court decided not to hear the antitrust case between Apple and Fortnite maker Epic Games that related to Apple's App Store. This is a surprise because a jury had already ruled in Epic's favor in a similar suit involving Google. The original ruling still stands, but app makers can steer their customers to the web from links inside their apps.

Beeper users say Apple is not playing nice: Just when we thought the Apple-versus-Beeper beef was over, there is a new development. The iMessage-on-Android Beeper Mini was removed from the Play Store last week, and now Apple customers using Beeper's apps report that they've been banned from using iMessage on their Macs.

Image Credits: Emmanuel Dunand / AFP / Getty Images

Why the future of AI for business is now

More top reads

Biting more into the Apple: The Apple Vision Pro headset is still set for sale on February 2. It will include features such as 150 3D movies, immersive films and series, a Travel Mode feature, streaming services like Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video and more. In particular, Travel Mode makes it so you can use the headset on an airplane. If you're nice, your seatmate might share with you. Meanwhile, over on TechCrunch+, some things are going to have to change for Apple to stay on its long-term growth trajectory.

Pinecone goes serverless: Pinecone launches Pinecone Serverless, a new and significantly enhanced serverless architecture to power its service. Enhancements are in the way of cost reduction, says the company. That's because Pinecone Serverless now separates reads, writes and storage, which means it can handle a massive amount of data.

OpenAI wants you: That's right, you could be one of the lucky ones that OpenAI turns to for ideas on how to ensure its future AI models "align to the values of humanity." First, the AI startup is forming a Collective Alignment team made up of researchers and engineers that will create a system to collect and analyze all of the ideas.

Another VC source: Thomvest Ventures has a fresh fund of $250 million in capital commitments that it intends to deploy into the areas of financial and real estate technology, cybersecurity, cloud and AI/data infrastructure. The venture capital firm, under the helm of Peter Thomson, has already invested in companies such as Cohere, Kabbage and LendingClub, so it knows what it's looking for. That could be your startup.

Ivanti is hacked: Cybersecurity company Volexity said that China state-backed hackers infiltrated Ivanti's widely used corporate VPN appliance. And now they have begun mass-exploiting two critical zero-day vulnerabilities. Over 1,700 of the appliances are said to have been hit, affecting its customers in the aerospace, banking, defense, government and telecommunications industries.

Snyk acquires Helios: Snyk, a developer-focused security company, has acquired Helios, a Tel Aviv–based startup that helps developers troubleshoot and understand their microservices in production. This is Snyk's second acquisition in this sector after acquiring Enso Security back in June 2023. It also shows that smaller startups have made inroads in solving certain security pain points being felt by enterprises.

Image Credits: Apple

On the pods

Grab your spoon and a carton of milk because this week on Found we're talking to Magic Spoon co-founder and CEO Gabi Lewis.

Magic Spoon creates cereal flavors that play on our nostalgia for Froot Loops and Cocoa Puffs with a grown-up high-protein twist. Dominic-Madori and Becca talk with Gabi about how he and his co-founder prioritized product-market fit and found investors who didn't think cereal was dead.

They also talked about:

What Gabi learned from his previous startup Exo, which made cricket-protein bars and how he's changing his leadership style at Magic Spoon.
The transition from being a solely DTC brand to in-store retailer and how he's learned to manage buyer relationships and store-to-store drama.
How meticulously they develop new cereals and how they've incorporated customer feedback.