Techcrunch blog!: TikTok is in trouble again

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Good morning, and welcome to TechCrunch AM for February 20, 2024. We took the day off yesterday to enjoy a holiday in the U.S., but we're back with a truckload of news this morning. We have a super-cool French startup raising a Series C, interviews with leading women in AI, a big win against cybercrime, jokes about due diligence, and even a few startup deals that you should know about. Let's get into it!

– Alex

Betterment makes your money hustle, so you don't have to

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The future of brand equity is AI joy: If a company has a neat service but a terrible mobile app or website, you might avoid it. Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor's new company Sierra believes that a company's conversational AI models could become "dominant form factor that people use to interact with brands," and thus just as important as websites and apps. The implication here is that companies are going to need slick conversational AI agents.
Planity raises $48M for salon SaaS: Vertical SaaS remains a solid startup business model because the underlying idea is simple: Find an sizable industry that still uses outdated tech to operate and then attack it with software. That's what Planity is doing in France with hair salons and other personal grooming businesses. With more than 40,000 businesses using its software, it's seeing good volume, joining the ranks of French startups that have been doing well.
The women making a difference in AI: TechCrunch has a new series of interviews highlighting women in the world of AI. One of every six tenure-track faculty focused on AI are women, but they occupy only a quarter of analytics-related and AI positions. Check out our interviews with Irene Solaiman (HuggingFace), Eva Maydell (EU AI policy), and Lee Tiedrich (international AI expert). We have more on the way.

Image Credits: Carol Yepes / Getty Images

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TikTok is in trouble, yet again: The EU is investigating popular social media service TikTok under the auspices of its Digital Services Act, or DSA. TechCrunch writes that the company is being examined under the lenses of "protection of minors, advertising transparency, data access for researchers, and the risk management of addictive design." Given the potential for stiff penalties, this is worth keeping an eye on.

LockBit gets kicked in the (digital) teeth: A multinational effort to disrupt a massive cybercrime operation has succeeded, meaning that the impact of LockBit's efforts to undermine security has been greatly diminished. The ransomware gang extorted nine figures from various parties before it got a legal and operational smackdown.

Techtaka raises $9.5M for logistics: E-commerce may not be growing as fast as it did back during the pandemic, but we're hardly going to see people stop buying stuff online. That means the business of helping e-commerce actually work is, well, big business. So big that South Korean third-party logistics provider Techtaka just raised nearly $10 million in a Series B round from a single investor, Altos Ventures.

Dili wants to help you complete your due dilly: If you want to make an investment banker hate you, ask them how their due dilly is going. The phrase is slang for due diligence, and is a hated way of describing the work. It's a bit like calling all cooking "flipping burgers," or referring to AI work as overly complicated arithmetic. Anyway, Dili is a startup that wants to leverage AI to help others execute their due diligence, using machine intelligence to pull data from unstructured documents and the like. Honestly, it's a good idea.

Indian venture strikes new tone: Of all the venture markets that rose to prominence during 2021, India's was among the most striking. So, too, was its comedown from that peak. Indian startups raised $33 billion in 2021, but that figure fell to $9 billion last year, per Lightspeed partner Bejul Somaia. Still, despite the fundraising drought and some high-profile struggles, investors are still bullish on India as a market to target with technology products.

Under Pressure: After a piece that Ron Miller and I wrote about Twilio, activist investors and what a divestment of Segment might look like, we have another corporate name to add to our Under Pressure list: MariaDB. The former well-financed startup has seen most of its value evaporate since going public. Now it has an acquisition offer on the table, but at a price that it may not want to accept.

Sticking to the distressed narrative, Nigerian-French fintech FairMoney is working to buy Umba, another fintech with operations in Kenya and Nigeria, for about $20 million in stock. That's not very much. (If you need even more deals, Singaporean fintech Xalts has purchased digital trade platform Contour Network.)

PhonePe is taking on Google Play: If you could sell your app in a marketplace that charged 30% or 0%, which would you pick? PhonePe bets that you would like the fee-free alternative. That's why its upcoming launch of an Android app store is big news. Keep in mind the global context: Apple and Alphabet are under pressure around the world to loosen rules on alternative mobile app marketplaces, and reduce their fees.

Image Credits: Chukrut Budrul/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

Before you go

Founders, get into the nitty-gritty of your plans: TechCrunch's Haje Jan Kamps, a former founder and investor, has a new essay out discussing why founders should explain their plan for how they’re going to go from being an upstart company to a success story. His analogy is simple: If you expect a builder that you hire to tell you how your money will be put to use, shouldn't startup founders also get specific about their own monetary plans when it comes to pitching investors?