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Hello and welcome to the Daily Crunch for September 23, 2021. We’ve put our final arc on Disrupt, which has gone very well. Thanks to everyone who came out and, of course, a big jolt to the Startup Battlefield winner (more below).
Take Crunch The next event focuses on SaaSSo be sure to mark your calendars! – Alex
Top Tech Crunch 3
- Cellino wins by disrupting Battlefield: from Incredibly competitive group of finalistsAnd Cellino The house took the grand prize. Start-up platform for stem cell production automation combines laser And AI, it turns out. Her vision impressed the judges during today’s final presentations, as she edged out other strong competitors such as Nth Cycle, who was the runner-up. Congratulations, Seleno!
- Twitter product team acquires Red Bull fortune, delves deeper into crypto: The drumbeat of new products from Twitter continued today, with the company announcing “support for tipping with encryption and NFT authentication” and more. The social network has also moved into email newsletters and social audio in recent quarters. In particular, it has managed the product deluge while not harming its core services – for now at least.
- The limits of educational technology: Duolingo CEO joined TechCrunch at Disrupt this year, sitting down with our edu tech expert Natasha Mascarenhas. The two delved into the ethics of unpaid education content and how to make money without sacrificing core values.
Startups / VC
While Celino won the annual Battlefield competition, she was Join the finals With four other startups we found impressive:
Now, the rest of the startup news:
- High-Risk FinTech Ratings: Thanks to a few initial public offerings, the public market demonstrates that the value of fintech revenues in tech startups is greater than many expected. For startups, it’s good news.
- Clubhouse kinda takes on Discord: Clubhouse is known for its public chats. Discord is famous for private chats. So when the Clubhouse released the work in private rooms, we took notice. The service has a new feature called Wave that “makes it easy to start private rooms with friends when you see they’re online,” according to TechCrunch.
- Syng closed $48.75 million Series A for home spatial audio: If you are satisfied with listening to music with your laptop speakers, Syng is not for you. But if you’re the type to fiddle with your home’s music setting to the max, Syng’s “Triphonic” devices that want to bring spatial sound home might be your jam.
- Open banking Vyne raises $15.5 million: according to our area Ingrid LundenThe concept of open banking is enjoying a moment in the spotlight. According to my colleague, Open Banking is “a new approach to payments and other financial services that disrupts traditional card-based infrastructure through direct linkages with banks,” and Vyne wants a part of the measure. Focusing on merchants, the company has just secured eight figures of new capital for its vision.
- There is endless capital for emerging grocery delivery companies: Many grocery delivery companies in Europe make deliveries more quickly. Jeffy is one of them. Jiffy is also racing through capital increases, putting $28 million on its balance sheet after its founding in April.
To close our startup section, Here are TechCrunch’s latest summaries of bot news. The Apple Foundation Show will be out tomorrow, so this seems rather fitting for Asimov fans out there.
Duolingo does not want to disable the university degree
Duolingo CEO and co-founder Luis von Ahn has appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt before, but this year it was his first time representing a public company.
A few months ago, reporter Natasha Mascaren described Duolingo’s debut as “the education technology IPO of the year,” so she was well-equipped with questions about the company’s plans to increase revenue. For example, is premium content in the cards?
“If we were to make more money in the short term, we would probably start to transfer money, but I think that would stifle our growth,” von Ahn said.
“If we start charging for some aspects of language learning, eventually we’ll be charging for everything.”
Here’s a summary, with a video that captures the entire interview.
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