Only Products and Other Stuff

Bungie, the studio responsible for the creation of Halo and Destiny , two of the gaming world’s biggest franchises, has been acquired by Sony. It’s part of a consolidation and turf war being waged as the next generation of gaming (and the metaverse, whatever that is) builds up steam. The news was announced by both companies Monday morning (with industry sleuth Jason Schreier reporting early ) and the deal valued at $3.6 billion . That may be just a fraction of Microsoft’s recent $60B Activision Blizzard acquisition, but Bungie is no less a legend in gaming. Beginning as a Mac-focused studio in the ’90s with forgotten classic FPS Pathways Into Darkness and the influential Marathon , Bungie threatened to change the balance in power in the gaming world with Halo, which was intended to serve as the moment Apple took gaming seriously. Even Steve Jobs got in on the hype. But then Microsoft announced it was buying Bungie and making Halo an exclusive to its new Xbox console — seemingly ...

We’re in the business of talking to very impressive people who are working to solve incredibly tough problems— but Elizabeth Ruzzo, founder and CEO of adyn, may be one of the most impressive yet. Not only did she develop the only test for women to ensure they are prescribed the birth control that will be the least likely to have detrimental side effects, she also founded the company and fundraised as the sole employee of the company. She talks to Darrell and Jordan about the challenges she faced as a solo founder/employee raising money for a solution for birth control, why she decided to leave academia, and the complicated regulatory maze she had to navigate to get adyn off the ground. Take our listener survey and let us know a bit about yourself and what you think of FOUND. Links from the episode: adyn Elizabeth on Equity Connect with us: On Twitter On Instagram Via email: found@techcrunch.com Call us and leave a voicemail at (510) 936-1618

Last year, Ember outlined one of the more fascinating expansions of recent vintage we’ve seen in the hardware space. Primarily known for its smart mugs designed to keep their contents hot, the firm took a long, hard look at the cold chain — specifically, the transport of medicine across distances. What began as a conversation was bolstered by a $23.5 million raise last year, and now the firm has a new product — and partnership to showcase where things go from here. The centerpiece of the new direction is the Ember Cube — what the company calls “the world’s first self-refrigerated, cloud-based shipping box.” The technology is designed to update some antiquated shipping technologies for important cargo that still rely on this, like cardboard, Styrofoam and disposable ice packs. At its core is Ember’s proprietary temperature control technology designed to keep the contents between 2-8 degrees Celsius (36-46 degrees Fahrenheit). Temperature/hudmidity information, along with GPS locatio...

Over the last decade, late-stage and crossover funds have faced sharper elbows from a wider number of non-traditional market participants that write checks to maturing but still-private companies. A lot of these firms have done well as their portfolio companies begin to to trade publicly or get acquired. Still, it’s harder every year to stand out from the pack. That kind of heated competition may explain in part why Technology Crossover Ventures, which closed on a $4 billion fund in January of last year, just raised a separate, $460 million fund that will focus exclusively on Series A, B, and C-stage companies. Called its Velocity fund, the idea is to “help founders of innovative companies as they shift from product-market fit to scaling up,” says the now 27-year-old firm. The apparent thinking: maybe it improves the firm’s odds of backing the best later-stage companies if it can start working with them a little earlier. “We wanted to make sure companies have a full-stack approach,” ...

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation.  Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox . Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. As always, you can email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions or tips. You also can send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec Before we jump in, I wanted to bring your attention to a plea by TechCrunch editor Devin Coldewey to “ Please make a dumb car .” That might sound silly coming from a media outlet focused on technology — and the people investing and building it. But technology for technology’s sake can lead us down some tricky paths. Just look at some of tech-laden vehicles on roads today. This doesn’t just lead to a poor user experience, a point that Coldewey makes. This feature bloat has also helped fuel the...

As is commonly the case, datasets used inside companies almost always come from diverse sources and in different, unstructured formats. Connecting them up can lead to a be a very large headache. But if it can be done, there are all sorts of benefits, especially in finance, such as fraud detection, KYC/AML checks etc. This is a problem particularly faced by financial firms, but it could also be useful in the areas of Covid contact tracing or general business intelligence. The main platforms used at this point include Neo4j, Senzing, or Neptune from AWS. Alternatively, companies try to build their own solutions using Elasticsearch. But it remains a big problem to solve. Now a new Berlin startup, which has tested its theories after being spun out from a larger corporate, is poised to tackle this thorny problem. Tilo’s data infrastructure tool TiloRes says it helps companies match data points from different sources and formats, by being both serverless and doing it in near real-time a...

To buy a share in Amazon, you’d have to fork out almost $3,000. It’s a luxury very few can afford and despite the prospects of the trillion-dollar company or returns from its share price, it’ll take some contemplating to pay that full price for those who can afford to. But with fractional investing, pioneered by Robinhood, access to these securities are democratized and people can own smaller shares in big companies. There are many Robinhood-esque platforms globally because of a growing need to invest in U.S. stocks in different parts of the world. Bamboo , launched in January 2020, is one of such in Nigeria. Following two years of significant growth and raising $2.4 million to facilitate it, the investment firm is announcing that it has raised $15 million in a new financing round. U.S.-based Greycroft and Tiger Global co-led the Series A round (it’s the second Tiger Global-led investment announced this month after Ghanaian fintech Float). Motley Fool Ventures, Saison Capital, Ch...

The Egyptian social e-commerce market will be worth over $14.8 billion by 2024. The opportunity in the market can be attributed to the growth in online social sellers in the country, over 1.25 million them, helping little-known brands sell and distribute their goods via different networks. Brimore –a market leader in the country and, to an extent, Africa–off the back of witnessing impressive growth in the last three years, has raised $25 million in a Series A round. The company was founded by Mohamed Abdulaziz and Ahmed Sheikha in 2017. While working in the FMCG business, both founders witnessed how difficult it was for emerging brands to get their products to the mass market due to the dominance of established brands, who, for the most part, had built distribution infrastructure for themselves over the years. On the other end, thousands of individuals, particularly women and stay-at-home moms, wanted to start their e-commerce shops but had no clue how to go about it, nor did...

French startup Pennylane has raised a $57 million Series B round (€50 million) from existing investors, such as Sequoia Capital, Global Founders Capital and Partech. The startup wants to replace legacy accounting solutions in France — and in Europe. If you’re an accountant, you might be familiar with tools like Cegid and Sage. Essentially, Pennylane wants to overhaul these tools and modernize the tech stack of accounting firms. Pennylane connects directly with third-party services that hold valuable information. For instance, you can get banking statements in the Pennylane interface, import receipts from Dropbox and get billing information from Stripe. And because it’s an online platform, accounting firms can use Pennylane collaboratively. Clients can also access the platform to centralize receipts, create invoices and automate some tasks. Instead of sending information back and forth with spreadsheets and photo attachments, both clients and accounting firms can interact directly ...

Niklas Adalberth’s Norrsken Foundation is in the news again barely two months after opening its Norrsken House in Kigali , Rwanda, which plans to accommodate thousands of entrepreneurs by next year. This time, the foundation has teamed up with thirty unicorn founders and a couple of seasoned venture capital and private equity investors to launch a $200 million fund targeted at African startups. The fund, dubbed the Norrsken22 African Tech Growth Fund , has reached its first close of $110 million, per a statement seen by TechCrunch. It’s the latest fund launched by Norrsken after closing €125 million impact fund for European startups last March. Hans Otterling , a partner at Northzone, a U.K.-based early VC firm that led the investment in Adalberth’s previous company Klarna, is Norrsken’s founding partner alongside the Klarna co-founder. Making up the firm’s investment are the general partners Natalie Kolbe , the ex-global head of private equity at Actis, a private equity fun...

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. The market is down. The party is over. And Peloton of X startups aren’t too happy right now. As tech stocks take a hit, the big question on my mind is how a dip in market performance impacts early-stage startups. There’s the obvious argument here that startups have been preparing for a re-correction, and that market highs were knowingly unsustainable, but just because expectations exist doesn’t mean that ripple effects float away. Despite investor’s outward rationalization, the red, or millennial pink , flags are not going unnoticed, with some firms lowering revenue expectations even at the earliest stages . On Equity this week, Alex and I interviewed Bessemer growth partner Mary D’Onofrio , who admitted that her expectations for exit multiples have changed, and that the IPO window is mostly closed. The stocks may be sane, but that’s still kind ...

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports . App Annie says global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China grew 19% in 2021 to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5% reaching 230 billion in 2021 and mobile ad spend grew 23% year-over-year to reach $295 billion. In addition, consumers are spending more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users su...