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The londonbusinessblog.com Top 3
- Some developers are not happy: If you haven’t had the chance to meet our new Europe reporter yet, Paul Sawers, you’re in for a treat because he knocked it out of the park today. He wrote about the Software Freedom Conservancy urging open source developers to ditch GitHub after the company’s commercial launch of Copilot. Their advantage is, among other things, that there is now a fee associated with the use of Copilot.
- It’s going down: Buy now, pay later Fintech firm Klarna is reportedly raising another round of funding at a valuation well below some of its previous rounds. Mary Ann has more.
- Valuation waits for no market† Alex digs into OpenSea’s $13 billion valuation and why that doesn’t align with what he sees with NFT trading volumes.
Startups and VC
Bit of a slow day for startup news, but let’s dive in:
- Another wave† Natasha and Amanda are back with the saddest list we’ve compiled – all tech layoffs.
- No head in the clouds here: Snowflake has made a name for itself in all things cloud data warehousing, and Ron writes today that Hydra is here for an open source approach. The company, which raised $3.1 million after graduating from Y Combinator’s winter course in 2022, is building its cloud data warehouse on top of the popular open source Postgres database.
- Extra efficiency: I highlighted Promoted.ai’s new $6 million seed extension that will contribute to the company’s long-term vision to help ecommerce marketplaces become profitable. Their technology brings all that gooey goodness of the market, the search, feed, ads and promotions together under one platform.
- A shot in the arm: Medical testing has never been more important, and hi was notified that Visby Medical brought in another $35 million, an extension of a $100 million Series E round raised earlier this year. The company is working on “the world’s first instrument-free handheld PCR platform to accurately and quickly test for a variety of serious infections for everyone who needs it.”
Pitch Deck Teardown: Wilco’s $7 Million Seed Deck
Image Credits: Wilco
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Founders with a tech background would do well to heed one of the key points of Wilco’s $7 million seed pitch deck: avoid the trap of focusing too much on a product’s features rather than its benefits. , hi writes.
“The ‘how’ will be important, but risk the temptation to go into more detail than what is important for a pitch deck. The ‘what’ is too tactical; for this part of the story, it doesn’t really matter what users have to do to take advantage of these benefits. Focusing on the ‘why’ is why this slide is so powerful; it opens the door to more in-depth conversations if needed, but the basics are there. I wish more startups understood this!”
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Big Tech Inc.
Yes, the Apple Store was offline for 2 hours yesterday, but now all is well with the world. hi reported that it was back with the takedown of Enjoy — the company responsible for supplying and installing Apple devices — after announcing Enjoy’s bankruptcy, and that a $50 gift card will be sent with the purchase of the Apple TV. 4K and Apple TV HD.
annie digs into a story about US commodities regulator, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, filing civil charges against Mirror Trading International Proprietary Limited, a South African bitcoin pool operator, and its CEO Cornelius Johannes Steynberg, for allegedly running a fraudulent commodity pool worth more than $1.7 billion in bitcoin.
Across the pond, Natasha brought up a few stories about the European Union today. One was that Amazon has agreed to make it easier for people to cancel their Prime membership, while lawmakers have approved some new regulations related to cryptocurrency.
- Google is arranging† Ivan writes that the search engine giant agreed to pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit with US developers who accused Google of abusing its app distribution power and charging an unfair 30% fee for app purchases and in-app purchases through the Play Store.
- crypto chaos: A company, whose application for a bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund was rejected by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, is now suing the federal entity. Jacquie reports on why an expert says that approach probably won’t work.
- FTX is at it again: At first it was rumored that FTX wanted to buy Robinhood, which was debunked, but now another deal for BlockFi seems to be sticking. Luke has more.
- No EPA, no crying† Timo delves into why the Supreme Court’s recent ruling by the Environmental Protection Agency “all but ensures that the US won’t be competitive with China or Europe.”
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