Thursday, May 2, 2024

Good morning, and welcome to TechCrunch AM! Today, we're talking about how big AI companies want even bigger customers, and why venture capitalists love to trade jobs. We also have several stories about the rebounding web3 market, notes on a tasty nine-figure acquisition, why Peloton's laying off 400 people, and more. To work! — Alex

TechCrunch Top 3

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1. Anthropic targets the enterprise: Foundation model company Anthropic is in a hurry. This week it announced a new enterprise-focused plan for multi-seat deals, joining OpenAI in building AI for larger corporate customers. Anthropic also has an iPhone app out now. The race to own the future of AI continues! Read More

2. Venture capitalists and their affinity for musical chairs: The reset in venture capital investment to historically normal levels is a big deal for founders. It also appears to be a big deal for VCs themselves, as an abnormal number of investors have been swapping gigs and bouncing from prior employers to build new investing groups. TechCrunch's Rebecca Szkutak has all the moves for you in one tidy post. Read More

3. Haun Ventures picks up its checkwriting pace: Crypto is having a far better year than it did in 2023, with token prices doing well, bitcoin ETFs making it into the market, and the Binance mess somewhat in the rearview mirror. The warming climate for web3 work is helping some VCs accelerate their own pace of investment — good news for founders in the market who want to build with blockchains. Read More

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Morning Must Reads

Image Credits: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto / Getty Images

TikTok makes nice with UMG: We need a new rule: If companies are happy to reveal numbers when publicly fighting with one another, they must share the terms when they eventually kiss and make up. Otherwise, we'll be feeling stuck as we are today, watching TikTok and UMG happily buddying up once again without telling anyone the terms of their agreement. Show us where the money is going! Read More

Freshworks drops $230M to pick up Device42: Freshworks has dropped nearly a quarter billion dollars to buy Device42, an IT-focused company that has raised a total of nearly $40 million, per Crunchbase data. The pairing makes sense for Freshworks, because it has an IT-focused product line, which means that this deal is additive. Read More

Butcher Box snaps up Truffle Shuffle: More startups should have fun names like these. Meat delivery company Butcher Box has purchased Truffle Shuffle, a service that started life as a truffle purveyor, but pivoted into a cooking-at-home service during the pandemic. Read More

Private equity is interested in cybersecurity: Tel Aviv-based BioCatch is now worth $1.3 billion after private equity firm Permira snapped up more shares from existing investors and became a majority investor. Recall that last week we saw Thoma Bravo buy Darktrace for $5 billion. Given the sheer number of cyber breaches that TechCrunch reports, I get the opportunity in the market for such companies. Read More

Renda raises $1.9M to power African logistics: The business of moving goods around is no small enterprise, especially in e-commerce, where delivery times are competitive and incumbents are often wealthy. But in Africa, Renda reckons that an asset-light, end-to-end fulfillment solution is going to help it win. The startup intends to use its new capital to expand in its current markets of Nigeria and Kenya. Read More

Change Healthcare hack may impact one-third of Americans: During a Congressional hearing, the CEO of UnitedHealth, admitted that the recent breach of its subsidiary, Change Healthcare, impacted "maybe a third [of Americans] or somewhere of that level." That's a lot of people; like nine-figures. If every person that got impacted by this hack were a dollar, and one startup raised that much, we'd be shouting about it at the top of this newsletter. Read More

Free-market the way to Mars: NASA wants private companies to help it get to Mars. We first learned that when the agency scrapped its Mars rock return mission and turned to external parties. Now, NASA is awarding a dozen research tasks to private companies as a prelude to commercial support for future missions to the Red Planet. Read More

Around the Web

Twenty. Billion. Dollars. That's how much Google paid Apple back in 2022 to be the default search engine on Safari, Bloomberg reports. The information came from court documents filed in an antitrust case against Google. Read More

Drone startups take flight: In Ukraine, for obvious reasons. WIRED has an interesting look at the upstart industry in the besieged nation, which is fighting for its life against Russia. Read More

Bored Ape (Discount) Yacht Club: Want a fancy NFT? Well, you can get a Bored Ape on the cheap these days, CNBC reports. However, despite the massive decline in the value of the such image collections, the NFT market itself is showing some signs of life. Read More

Before You Go

Image Credits: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg / Getty Images

Peloton sheds staff to keep pedaling: As part of cost-cutting measures, Peloton is letting go of 400 employees. It's CEO is also stepping down. The company's comedown from its highs during the pandemic has been a turbulent one: Once worth more than $200, Peloton's shares are trading at $3.22 today. Still, investors were sending its shares higher in premarket trading this morning, no doubt happy with the cost cuts. Read More