The days of European startups relocating to the U.S. if they want to grow (and raise money to do so) have been receding in the rearview mirror for a while now, so much so that even in these leaner times — where all fundraising and tech bets are tightening up — we’re still seeing some significant money and optimism getting channeled into later-stage businesses. In the latest development, EQT — the private equity and venture firm based out of Stockholm — is announcing that it has closed a €2.2 billion ($2.2 billion) fund for EQT Growth, which it will be using for investing in European and Israeli founders and startups in areas like enterprise, consumer, health, and climate tech, with typical rounds ranging between €50 million and €200 million.
EQT partner Carolina Brochado said in an interview that the fund was first opened in 2021 and that the company has made seven investments out of it already since then. Over two-thirds of that capital is still available. (The full size of the fund is €2.4 billion including commitments from EQT employees and the EQT Network; the latter are not fee-generating.)
This is the first fund EQT Growth has raised specifically for tech investments, Brochado added, and it stands as one of the biggest first-time growth funds in Europe to date.
These are notable details not just because of the current, constricted investment climate, but because Europe has actually been a minority player in the growth-funding story in this region. Investments in European startups stood at $20 billion in 2017 and ballooned to more than $100 billion by 2021 — with bigger, later-stage rounds accounting for a bulk of that increase. But within that European investors accounted for just 30% of growth round funds by value. (Those figures, incidentally, come from Atomico, Brochado’s previous home and also a stalwart of European-based funding for home-grown startups.)
Looking at some of the biggest names in growth funding and their activities in Europe, there indeed does seem to be a vacuum in the market at the moment, providing interesting opportunities for those willing to step up.
SoftBank and its mighty Vision Fund made a big play in Europe several years ago, out of offices in London, but it’s also seen a number of bum bets among them, and this year the bad news has compounded, with the firm reporting huge losses, leading to downsizing and restructuring to shore up investor confidence. Another firm, Tiger Global, saw the value of its flagship fund fall 50%, and its long-term bets fund by nearly 64%, in the first half of this year. Both firms are still active in Europe, but focusing more on smaller, earlier stage rounds.
(It’s not only a “go big or go home” story though: just last week, Thoma Bravo announced an expanded presence in Europe with a new office in London. The firm last year disclosed it was raising its own $3 billion debut growth fund, which has yet to be closed.)
The fact that money is not flowing quite as freely as it did previously raises some interesting questions about how people will regard the capital that is there for the investing. EQT haspreviously made it clearthat it’s not working with those tied to Russia but has been relatively quiet beyond that.
With the funding being announced today, Brochado would not be drawn out on details regarding EQT’s limited partners in this €2.2 billion fund except to say that it’s coming from “institutional LPs, very large pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and family offices” generally from Europe, Asia, North America and the Middle East. Sovereign wealth funds may well be playing a big part here: they have more generally been proving to be strong forces in offsetting current declines, betting when the market is low, with the Saudi state fund recently investing some $7 billion in U.S. stocks; and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, currently the biggest in the world, also still looking bullish.)
There was a time, before the current downturn, when talk focused on whether startups should be more selective about the origins of the funding on its cap table. With capital less easy to come by today, the ship may have sailed for that kind of scrutiny (at least for now). Or ideally firms are themselves scrutinizing sources more than before. Brochado said that startups have asked questions about these details and they are disclosed in those cases, but that the answers have never killed a deal.
In terms of what categories are attracting interest for investing, the name of the game continues to be opportunities for potentially realizing huge scale. Some of the investments that have already been made out of the fund include the music catalogue giant Epidemic Sound, embedded finance juggernaut Mambu and second-hand goods platform Vinted, all working on building tech for services that are arguably more “recession-proof” than some others that might focus more on consumers or enterprises buying nice-to-have rather than must-have goods and services. On its side, EQT uses a proprietary AI-based investment platform called Motherbrain to help evaluate potential deals.
Brochado noted that the fact that some investors are rationalizing or downsizing their investments means that EQT has the opportunity to do some secondary purchases, but by and large it’s coming into deals as a primary investor. The fact that the IPO market very much remains closed for the moment gives a company like EQT a foot in the door for providing finance to companies that might have otherwise looked at that kind of exit, either to position themselves as consolidators, or simply to keep scaling on their own steam, at a time when money is harder to come by, and thus needing to be treated more carefully than before.
“I think the way that we’re trying to help entrepreneurs, who are sometimes younger than 35, is to guide them through the cycle. To navigate through, for example, what the cost of capital means when there is a recession coming. How do you take advantage of it? It can be a great position to have a ton of cash on the balance sheet.”
Imagine yourself working at Apple. It’s April 2022. You’re being told by the higher-ups that you’ve got to come back to the office — by which I mean you’ve read a Slack message on your laptop. You continue your workday, pissed that your bosses don’t seem to understand that you can do this job remotely.
Then somebody sends you a YouTube link to a nine-minute commercial for remote work, telling the story of a group of people who quit their company after being forced to return to the office. The advertisement is by Apple, which is currently telling you to go back to the office. You punch your desk so hard that your screensaver deactivates.
It’s strange that the companies that have made so much money off remote work seem to be the most allergic to its possibilities. Google, which literally lets you run a company in a browser, has been forcing workers back to offices three days a week.
Meta, Apple and Google are industry leaders, yet they are leading their industry backward — back to offices where people will do the same thing they did at home.
Meta, which has lost billions trying to make us live in the computer, has also made people return to the office. In reading almost every remote-work article that has been published for a year for my research, I have yet to find a single compelling argument about why employees should go back to the office.
“In-person collaboration” and “serendipity” are terms that make sense if you live in Narnia and believe in magical creatures. In reality, office environments resemble our remote lives, only with more annoying meetings and the chance to smell our co-workers’ lunch choices.
The tech industry pretends to be disruptive, but is following a path forged by older companies like Goldman Sachs. How is it that Apple and Google, the companies that effectively gave us the ability to remote work at scale, sound like they’re reading from a generic New York Times anti-remote op-ed?
Happy Saturday, friends. Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we very quickly sum up the most read TechCrunch stories from the past week. Want it in your inbox every Saturday AM? Get it here.
This week saw two big events running in parallel: an Apple hardware announcementandY Combinator’s Demo Day. Either one of those on their own would generally lead our traffic for the week — having them smash into each other on the same day was … interesting. And maybe a little exhausting.
most read
The Apple stuff: Apple’s event, as their events tend to do, mostly dominated the tech news cycle this week. Rather than turn this entire newsletter into one big list of Apple things, I’ll just say: new iPhones, new AirPods, and a beefy new Apple Watch. Want more words than that? Here’s our roundup of the news.
Y Combinator moonshots: Startups are hard. But every YC batch has at least a handful of companies that seem a little extra hard — the moonshots, if you will. From faux fish to teams that want to reinvent flying, the Demo Day team rounded up some of the wildest pitches.
Musk/Twitter drama continues: Elon Musk is still aiming to undo his multibillion-dollar offer for Twitter, and Twitter still wants to hold him to it. This week a Delaware judge made two decisions in the ordeal: The trial will not be delayed by a month as Musk’s legal team had requested, but Musk will be allowed to “amend his counterclaim with details” disclosed by Twitter security whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko earlier this month.
Kim Kardashian’s new gig: “America’s favorite reality star is leveling up her repertoire,” writes Anita, with another job title: private equity investor. Kardashian is teaming up with Jay Sammons, formerly the head of Consumer/Media/Retail at the Carlyle Group, to launch a new private equity firm called SKKY Partners.
Jeep’s EVs: Another legendary auto brand is diving deep into electric vehicles — this time it’s Jeep, which this week revealed plans to roll out three different EVs (the Recon, Wagoneer S, and Avenger) by 2025. The company, notes Jaclyn, expects “EVs to compose half of its sales in North America — and all of its sales in Europe — by 2030.”
Patreon layoffs: Patreon, a company that helps creators build out paid membership offerings, laid off employees this week. The layoffs purportedly leave Patreon without much of a security team, which seems … not ideal?
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
audio roundup
What’s up in TC podcast land this week? “Selling Sunset” star Christine Quinn stopped by Found to tell ’em about her new startup, the Chain Reaction crypto crew talked about the latest drama at Binance, and Burnsy took a virtual trip to Minnesota to put the spotlight on the Minneapolis startup scene for TechCrunch Live.
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Want 15% off an annual TechCrunch+ subscription? Use promo code “WIR” when signing up. Just want to know what TC+ readers were reading most this week? Here’s the breakdown:
YC Demo Day favs: Nearly 230 pitches later, which Y Combinator S22 companies stood out to the Demo Day team? Here are their favorite pitches from Day 1 and Day 2.
The most important slides in your pitch deck: Reporter/former VC/resident pitch deck expert Haje shares his insights on which of the perhaps-too-many slides in your deck are most crucial.
The freemium bar is shifting: Across products from Slack to Google Meet to Heroku, many companies are shifting up their free tiers to offer less. Why now? Anita explores the trend.
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.
Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced 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. Global spending across iOS and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.
This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.
But what will most intrigue app developers are a few other changes — both expected and unexpected.
With the updated mobile operating system iOS 16, developers will have a way to reach their users directly from the phone’s Lock Screen, thanks to the new widget platform. Announced at this year’s WWDC, these new widgets join a larger Lock Screen makeover that now includes a built-in editor, wallpaper gallery, theming tools and a Live Activities feature for delivering real-time updates to this key iPhone real estate.
With WidgetKit, developers will be able to build using the same code for both watchOS and the Lock Screen, Apple had explained at WWDC. On the iPhone’s Lock Screen, they can choose from three widget designs: circular, rectangular and inline — the latter being a way to convey information with a small amount of text and SF Symbols above the Lock Screen’s clock, instead of below it like the other two.
Already, developers are coming up with clever ways to take advantage of this new screen space.
In some cases, they see the Lock Screen widgets as the extension of their existing apps — like what Flighty is doing to convey flight status and other travel updates to users. Others see the widgets as part of a larger set of personalization offerings, allowing users to pin their favorite photos, motivational quotes or even favorite app shortcuts to their Lock Screen, as ScreenKit has done.
So Live Activities are cool right? And the Dynamic Island just makes them even better. It was amazing to work on and god I’m excited to see what you all build for it.
For apps with real-time updates, the Live Activities feature will allow developers to display further information on the Lock Screen — like when a customer’s pizza is arriving or when their Lyft is nearby, for example.
But what really blew us away was when Apple surprised everyone with an extension of Live Activities that hadn’t yet been leaked: the new Dynamic Island feature. Frankly, it was exciting to learn about a new feature for the first time during the keynote, instead of reading about it in the news — something that’s become a much more common occurrence these days.
A smart combination of hardware and software, the Dynamic Island turns the dreaded sensor “notch” at the top of the device — now more compact in the latest iPhone models — into a feature. The pill-shaped cutout introduces a unique way to interact with activities, alerts and notifications, said Apple, underselling it a bit.
This adaptive area can expand, contract and morph into different shapes and sizes as it delivers information to the end user through animations and transitions — taking advantage of the black space required by the notch, rather than trying to hide it.
You can imagine keeping an eye on your Uber while you text a friend, watching a timer while you read the next steps in a recipe or getting turn-by-turn directions while in another app, among other things. It also works to deliver informational updates in a visually engaging way without interrupting what you’re already doing on your phone. This could include things like confirming your AirPods are connected, muting, starting a charge, starting a FaceID, confirming your transit card was activated when tapping your iPhone in transit locations and more, Apple suggested.
And it can show other background activity, like the music you’re playing when you exit the music app — it even includes a tiny photo of the album art. When you want to access the “now playing” controls again, you can then tap the Dynamic Island to see it expand into a larger, interactive floating widget of sorts with more options. (Will the selfie camera get dirty, we wonder?)
The same goes for phone calls, where a tap can bring up a larger interface for tapping the mute button, speaker button, FaceTime option, the “end call” button and more.
Needless to say, developers and designers were enthralled by the possibilities, praisingthefeatureonTwitterduring and after Apple’s event. It’s fair to say we’ll likely see adoption of this feature in the months ahead, when the technology becomes available.
This is some extremely slick conceptual design – integrating hardware and software perfectly – that has been implemented shockingly well. Truly Apple-only stuff. I love this. pic.twitter.com/1NTeHleo1P
Not to be upstaged by Apple, Google this week announced it will host an in-person Pixel hardware event on October 6 at 10 a.m. ET in Brooklyn, where the company is planning to introduce the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel Watch.
Android 13 got its first patch, which addresses some issues around wireless charging and battery drains.
Google rolled out a broader Android update that includes an upgrade to its AirDrop-like “Nearby Share” feature that now has a “self-share” mode for moving files between your own devices. Other updates include redesigned widgets, sound alerts, audio descriptions for Google TV and live-sharing on Google Meet.
Image Credits: Google
Google also touted how Android 13 will make it easier to keep users’ personal data and work data separated thanks to the OS’s new “work profiles,” which let users indicate how apps should be used. This option lets users have separate photo galleries for personal and work use, and can help keep their YouTube watch history separate when used for work or personal use, among other things.
Shortly after news came out that Google was blocking Trump’s Truth Social app from Google Play, the company reversed another controversial decision by allowing the conservative-leaning Parler app back in, over a year after its removal following the January 6 violence. Justifying its decision, Google said Parler had implemented the necessary moderation controls required by user-generated apps.
E-commerce
Instagram is preparing to test a version of its app that reduces its focus on shopping, according to The Information. The app will try removing the Instagram Shopping page as part of this test. The company says the new version, known as Tab Lite, will be tested over the next few months to see how it fares.
Augmented Reality
Image Credits: Snap
Snap is powering several custom-built AR experiences for the Vogue World Event at New York’s Fashion Week. The event on Monday, September 12, will feature a “Skywalk” Lens that transforms the show with AR as blossoming flowers emerge as models walk the runway. Other Lenses bring sunlight or moonlight to users’ faces. The Lenses were built by Arcadia, Snap’s creative studio for AR.
A new Wonderlab AR app, powered by Niantic’s Lightship ARDK, allows people in the U.K. to discover the science behind ordinary objects using AR and geospatial technologies.
It's here! The Wonderlab AR app by @sciencemuseum allows people in the UK to discover the extraordinary science behind ordinary objects using AR and geo-spatial technologies. Powered by Lightship ARDK, developed with @Preloaded. pic.twitter.com/GsNny8XX3t
In a crackdown on unethical lenders, India said its central bank will prepare a whitelist of legal loan apps and the IT ministry plans to ensure that only approved apps are hosted on app stores.
Trading app Robinhood launched an Investor Index that will be updated monthly to track the performance of the 100 most popular stocks on its platform by weighting its users’ “conviction.”
London-based finance app Revolut launched a one-click payments feature to rival PayPal. The feature, Revolut Pay, will work with retailers like Shopify, Prestashop, WH Smith Plc, and Funky Pigeon to start.
Adtech
One year later, Apple’s privacy changes with ATT have helped to boost its own ads business,a new report found. According to a review by the performance insights platform InMobi’s Appsumer, Apple’s Search Ads business has now joined the Facebook-Google advertising duopoly after growing its adoption by 4 percentage points to reach 94.8% year-over-year, while Facebook’s adoption dropped 3% to 82.8%. In addition to the growing advertiser adoption of Apple’s Search Ads, the report also found Apple’s business grew its share-of-wallet by 5 percentage points, to reach a 15% share, while Facebook’s share-of-wallet dropped 4 percentage points, to 28%, from Q1 2021 through Q2 2022.
Ahead of the U.S. midterms, Twitter said it would begin to add 1,000 contributors per week to its crowdsourced fact-checking tool, Birdwatch, which had been previously tested with 15,000 contributors. The tool will now require users to earn their way to contributor status by rating notes as helpful or not, and earning points based on those ratings’ accuracy.
Twitter says its new “edit tweet” feature, now in testing, will allow users to edit their tweets up to five times during the first 30 minutes it’s live. This functionality seems to be designed to better cater to marketers or other attention-getters, who want to find the right combination of words or hashtags, rather than helping everyday users who want to fix a typo — a feature already addressed by Twitter Blue’s “Undo Tweet” option.
Instagram confirmed it’s planning to test a feature that will allow users to repost others’ Feed posts — its alternative to something like Twitter’s Retweet. The feature would be a way for aggregator accounts to better credit others’ work, instead of just stealing it.
Instagram removed Pornhub’s account for undisclosed reasons. Though the site offers adult material, its social media account only shared nonpornographic images and videos. The move follows a lawsuit where Pornhub parent MindGeek is being sued for allegedly distributed child sexual abuse material on its platform.
Nextdoor announced it would again partner with Vote.org to help increase voter turnout for U.S. midterms by encouraging its users to verify their voter registration, find their polling place and more.
Dating
Match Group and its flagship app Tinder announced their advocacy for the passage of the “Respect for Marriage Act,” federation legislation that protects the rights to same-sex and interracial marriage. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the legislation in July with bipartisan support and now Match Group and Tinder are asking the Senate to do the same. The Act arrives at a critical time, given the threat to people’s rights posed by the current Supreme Court.
Messaging
Signal appointed a former Google manager and Big Tech critic, Meredith Whittaker, as its first president. The new exec will help to determine Signal’s policy and stragey, including its communications policy.
In case there was any question about Apple’s position on adopting RCS, CEO Tim Cook put that to rest by telling an audience member who asked a question about this during a tech conference that he should just “buy your mom an iPhone” if she wanted to see clear videos.
Streaming & Entertainment
Image Credits: Disney+
Disney+ released its first AR-enabled short film, ‘Remembering,’ starring Brie Larson. The film uses ShazamKit to listen for an audio cue that will alert users when to launch the AR experience during the film, which focuses on exploring a child’s imagination. When launched, the AR companion app will display a waterfall spilling off the TV and other effects to augment the film’s storytelling.
Triller is facing a third lawsuit, this time from a company called Phiture, which offers consulting services to mobile app developers, over non-payment. The company has already been sued by Sony Music for nonpayment and by creators Timbaland and Swizz Beatz, who say they are owed $28 million for selling Verzuz to the company.
Spotify’s CFO Paul Vogel said the music streaming platform will begin testing and trialing audiobooks “very soon.” The company last fall had acquired audiobook distributor Findaway to enter this market, allowing it to compete with Amazon and Apple.
The Tencent-backed Indian music streaming app Gaana switched to a paid subscription biz model after failing to find an exit or close on new funding, Reuters reported.
Gaming
Google is launching a one-year pilot in India that will allow daily fantasy sports apps and rummy games but will bar the use of Google’s billing for IAPs. The pilot begins on September 28.
Apple confirmed it will bring its Apple Fitness+ subscription to all iPhone users regardless of whether they own an Apple Watch, as promised earlier this year at WWDC. The service will arrive in all 21 countries where Fitness+ is offered and will ship alongside the iOS 16 update on Monday, including some new workouts.
Google Maps expanded its fuel-efficient and eco-friendly routing options to 40 more countries across Europe. The feature was first introduced to the U.S. in 2021, allowing users to plan their drive by how much gas they’d need to expend over other factors.
The Compass app will be updated with the release of watchOS 9, Apple said during its keynote this week, where it also unveiled the rugged Apple Watch Ultra. The refreshed app will surface more in-depth information and include three distinct views. A new hybrid view will simultaneously show an analog compass dial and a digital view. Turning the Digital Crown will reveal an additional view that includes latitude, longitude, elevation and incline, as well as an orienteering view showing Compass Waypoints and Backtrack (a feature powered by GPS data to show where the user has been), noted Apple’s press release.
Government & Policy
EU privacy regulators are fining Instagram €405 million as a result of a complaint over how the social media app handles children’s data in violation of the GDPR. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) found Instagram, at the time of the complaint, would set accounts of child users to the public by default, among other violations, including the publication of kids’ emails and phone numbers. This fine is the second-highest fine under the GDPR, and DPC’s third for the company.
Security & Privacy
Thanks to a Google Play Services update, Android will now alert users if data breaches had compromised any of their passwords.
Funding and M&A
LA-based Remento, an app that focuses on capturing and preserving family stories, raised $3 million in seed funding led by Upfront Ventures. The app launched this week on iOS after a year of beta testing.
Grocery delivery app Instacart announced its acquisition of the e-commerce platform Rosie, which helps local and independent retailers and wholesalers and provides them with tools for powering order flow, fulfillment and customer insights. Deal terms were not disclosed but Ithaca, New York-based Rosie had raised $11.9 million to date.
Latana, a platform that bids on mobile ad space, raised €36 million (~$35.79 million) in Series B funding — €10 million (~$9.94 million) of which was debt — led by Oxx.
Subscription-based Android fintech app Stack raised $2.7 million from Madrona, The Venture Collective, Santa Clara Ventures and others. The app aims to offer crypto education and trading for teens and their parents.
Headspace Health acquired Shine, a mental health and wellness app dedicated to providing an inclusive mental health experience for the BIPOC community. Deal terms weren’t disclosed.
Downloads
LineupSupply
If you often find yourself making Spotify playlists to get hyped for an upcoming music festival or to relive a favorite past show, a new mobile app called LineupSupply can now help make that process easier. This clever new utility allows you to upload a photo of a music festival’s poster to have it automatically transformed into a Spotify playlist in a matter of moments. Alternately, you can use the app to find playlists created by others or, with a one-time purchase of $1.99, tap into music recommendations based on the artists in the images you uploaded.
LineupSupply also lets you customize the playlist before its creation by removing artists you don’t want to be included in your playlist. And if you don’t want to do the work of finding and uploading your own image, you may be able to find an existing playlist built by other users in the app’s “Discover” section.
There’s no limit to the number of playlists you can create with the free version. But with a one-time upgrade of $1.99, you can gain access to a few additional features, including the ability to set a custom app icon or further customize the playlist by controlling the number of songs per artist, the song sorting options, and the playlist description.
Tracking the growth and frequency of open source startups has been a long-running project at TechCrunch. This column joined the fun in the last few years, noting what seemed to be a rising wave of startups building open source projects that they later monetized.
Software companies predicated on open source code have in fact become so normalized today that we’ve seen a few companies go public after building with the model. Confluent was one. Hashicorp was another.
Toby Russell is a veteran entrepreneur and helped to found Shift. The company was among the first online-only used car marketplaces and pioneered many of the services now standard across the industry. Long-time DCM partner Kyle Lui invested in several of Shift’s fundraising rounds, and he’s now at Bling Capital as the fund’s second general partner. Together they can speak to building products that anticipate market movements.
If you haven’t joined us before on Grip — our TCL online platform —click here to register for free and gain access to all TechCrunch Live events, including TechCrunch Live, City Spotlight, Startup Pitch Practice, Networking and other TechCrunch community events, with just one registration.
Amazon has made a string of startup acquisitions over the years to build out its robotics business; now, the e-commerce leviathan is taking an interesting turn in that strategy as it expands its industrial warehouse capabilities. Amazon is acquiring Cloostermans, a company out of Belgium that is a specialist in mechatronics. It’s been building technology to move and stack heavy palettes and totes, and robotics used to package products together for customer orders. Amazon has been using those products as a customer of Cloostermans’ since 2019 for e-commerce operations; it’s making the acquisition to ramp up its R&D and deployment in that area.
“We’re thrilled to be joining the Amazon family and extending the impact we can have at a global scale,” said Frederik Berckmoes-Joos, CEO of Cloostermans, in a statement in a blog post published by Amazon. “Amazon has raised the bar for how supply chain technologies can benefit employees and customers, and we’re looking forward to be part of the next chapter of this innovation.”
The bigger picture for Amazon is that it will likely be doing a lot more in warehouse robotics in the years ahead to meet the demands of its ever-expanding e-commere operation.
An internal report at the company leaked earlier this year to Vox projected that Amazon is facing a major shortage of workers in its warehouses — not necessarily because of the labor disputes its been facing in various markets, but because it’s running out of people to hire. The report suggested that alongside higher wages, further automation could be one way to offset that crisis. Deals like this one to acquire Cloostermans and ramp up its usage of robotics in those warehouses would fit into that strategy.
Notably, Cloostermans is no startup, nor is it a typical M&A target for a tech leviathan: it was founded in 1884 and has been privately held for the last six generations.
Amazon is not disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but it will see some 200 machinists, engineers and others from Cloostermans join Amazon.
Amazon has been expanding its robotics work in Europe in recent years, including opening a robotics innovation lab in Italy and operating R&D facilities in Germany; and as you can see from its job board, it’s hiring aggressively in robotics in both of those places and elsewhere. Now you can add operations in Belgium to that list: Amazon will continue to operate out of Cloostermans’ facilities in a town called Hamme after the deal completes (no details on the timing for that close).
It doesn’t look like Cloostermans had any outside investment. You could say it was “bootstrapped” although I’m not even sure you can apply that term to a family-owned company as old as this one. From what I understand Amazon has been one of Cloistermans’ biggest customers; its other clients will continue to be served until the end of their existing contracts — meaning, those may not get renewed as Amazon ramps up its engagement with the business.
Amazon’s robotics ecosystems — which include both what it’s doing for its industrial warehouse operations, as well as products that are more directly connected to consumers and customer experience — has been built up over the years through a mix of acquisitions, internal development and partnerships with third parties.
The Kiva deal in particular has resulted in some 520,000 robotic drive units distributed across warehouses worldwide and some 1 million related jobs, Amazon said in its blog post. Kiva has also been central to the development of Proteus, an autonomous mobile warehouse robot that it unveiled earlier this year.
All that has been complemented by internal development an extensive network of third-party partnerships. Cloostermans was part of the latter category, building machines to automate packing orders and moving boxes of products from one place to another for that purpose. Amazon wanted to take it in house because it’s planning to expand its capacity to design and build those kinds of machines and how it uses them in its warehouses. (I’ve asked but have not had any insight into whether that will be for non-perishable items, or for electronics, or for delicate products like food for its ever-growing grocery business. Feasibly, the idea could be to develop for all of those, and even for scenarios where items might be packed up for customers in retail locations.)
converted PNM file
“Amazon’s investments in robotics and technology are supporting how we build a better and safer workplace for our employees and deliver for our customers,” said Ian Simpson, vice president of Global Robotics at Amazon, in a statement. “As we continue to broaden and accelerate the robotics and technology we design, engineer and deploy across our operations, we look forward to welcoming Cloostermans to Amazon and are excited to see what we can build together.”
Jobbatical – which specializes in relocating workers and whose business has seen an uplift in the post-pandemic work environments as so many workers become ‘digital nomads’ – has raised a €11.6m funding round, led by Nordic VC Inventure. Additional investors included Union Square Ventures, Swiss Post Ventures, Karma VC, Metaplanet, Devotion Ventures, and angel investors Kristel Kruustük, Indrek Prants, Andres Kull, and former Head of Airbnb Experiences Joe Zadeh. As the world becomes fully paperless in terms of migration, Jobbatical is well placed to take advantage of a world previously dominated by the likes of Deloitte and others.
Jobbatical manages employee relocations, in particular for high-growth tech and Fintech companies like N26, TravelPerk, and Personio.
Around 1 in 30 people move internationally annually.
The company says it’s experienced 8x ARR growth in the past 12 months and 19x MRR growth in Germany, while also getting to cash flow and EBITDA positive, it claims.
Joe Zadeh, angel investor & former Head of Airbnb Experiences said in s statement: “When my family was relocating internationally the process was confusing and required several months of administrative hurdles. When I learned about Jobbatical, I was compelled by their progress on making the whole process extremely simple. This will be great for companies since crossing country borders brings in new perspectives and gives employees far more flexibility.”
Founded by Estonian entrepreneurs and siblings Karoli and Ronald Hindriks, and Ankur Agarwal, Jobbatical pivoted from recruitment, toward streamlining employee relocation and immigration processes.
Karoli Hindriks told me via email: “The exciting part about our market is that a lot of it is being created as we speak. On top of the traditional relocation, the number of digital nomad employees exploded post-pandemic. Never in human history have people moved as much as they do today and the needs are very different from traditional relocation. I call this new market borderless living technology and we are helping to create it.”
“Within the three years since we pivoted, with just €2m we have built by far the most scalable product in our industry and we can start a new country on the platform within a day with zero code. In addition, we have automated the most crucial steps of relocation from the automated case assessment to form filling and can seamlessly adapt that to every new country within days. That is why with this Series A we are able to expand to thirty new countries in the next 24 months,” she added.
ScreenKit, an iPhone personalization app that’s topped 12 million downloads to date, is ready to embrace the new Lock Screen customization options shipping with the release of iOS 16 on September 12. Already a comprehensive solution for theming your iPhone or iPad with wallpapers, custom widgets and icons, the soon-to-be updated ScreenKit app will now expand into Lock Screen widgets, with a sizable update that brings over 100 new widget options to iPhone owners.
Unlike some other planned Lock Screen widget apps which focus on a single Lock Screen widget type — like a contacts or countdown widget, for example — ScreenKit will be coming out of the gate with a collection of over 100 custom widgets across over 200 pre-made Lock Screen themes, the company says.
This is in addition to the over 500 Home Screen themes and over 200 Home Screen widgets the app already offers across a range of styles, and its over 5,000 custom app icons.
The Lock Screen widget collection includes around 25 major categories, the company says, each of which can be customized in 5 to 10 different ways, depending on the widget type.
After iOS 16 arrives, the updated app will introduce the following Lock Screen widgets: a clock, time, date, battery, calendar, music, steps, utilities (volume, brightness, storage, Wi-Fi, CPU, device storage, etc.), weather, room temperature, a medication shortcut, bedtime clock, time spent, heart rate, emoticons, bit-icons, text, photos, reminders, an event tracker, astrology, moon phase, year progress or countdown, contact launcher, app launcher, stickers, motivational quotes, and Bible verses.
Image Credits: Screen Kit
The company says its Lock Screen widgets will be designed to coordinate with its existing lineup of widgets and themes, so users’ final, customized designs remain consistent.
We’ve also found it interesting that some Lock Screen widget makers, ScreenKit included, have been expanding beyond informative widgets to include actionable ones in the form of app shortcuts.
ScreenKit won’t be the only one to introduce this type of widget with its updated experience. For example, we’ve been testing a pre-release app called Launchify, currently available through the app testing playground Airport, that’s doing something similar. The solution requires some setup, but afterward, you can directly access your favorite app with just a tap on the Lock Screen. (You’ll still need to authenticate with Face ID, Touch ID or a passcode, however).
ScreenKit’s app will continue to be a free download with a one-time upgrade option of $9.99 that opens up access to the premium version, with expanded access to its collection of icon kits and themes. However, the company will kick off the iOS 16 Monday launch with 2 free weeks of the premium features and pro customization options.
ScreenKit isn’t the only app planning to address the needs of users in search of Lock Screen customization options that ship with iOS 16, but it is one of the larger offerings in terms of both its collection and its reach. The company claims to add around 300,000 new users per month to its platform. It also offers a separate app, StyleKit, which also includes app icon themes, calendar wallpapers, and Lock Screen animations that appear when the phone is charging.
The company says it plans to launch its app as soon as iOS 16 is released on Monday, but it may not arrive on the App Store immediately due to App Review delays out of its control.
In its note discussing the end of the transaction and its latest fundraise, Wealthfront shared some useful information about its financial health, including that it will soon stop consuming cash to operate.
Why do we care about a transaction that failed to consummate? Information. Wealthfront’s notes on its financial results, crossed with its freshly affirmed valuation and what we know from external sources about its assets under management, provide an interesting window into what fintech companies may be worth today — and which might be overvalued.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
During the 2020-2021 peak of the last business cycle’s startup arc, we saw fintech companies riding high in terms of investment attracted, valuation earned, and, to a related degree, consumer interest observed. But as we have seen in the results of major trading platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood, there has been a softening in demand for investing products among consumers; given the generally lackluster lilt of the economy today, this is not a staggering surprise.
Yesterday, Wednesday, September 7, TechCrunch Live hosted a special, extended event focusing on Minneapolis, Minnesota. The area is quickly becoming a major hotbed of startups in the Midwest, and the event featured some of the best founders and investors from the region. Following the panels and interviews, three Minneapolis startups competed for free tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt.
Startups
Axon Athletics, a mental health platform for student athletes
Kyros Care, a digital platform for substance recovery services.
NXgenPort, an implantable chemo port that features added sensors and remote connectivity functions.
After deliberating and measuring the startups’ potential for social or monetary impact, the two judges picked NXgenPort as the winner. The judges were impressed by NXgenPort’s CEO and co-founder Cathy Skinner, saying, in part, her pitch was well polished and made it easy to understand the complex nature of the company’s device and business model.
Google and Solo.io today announced the next evolution of the Istio service mesh. Dubbed the “Ambient Mesh,” this new framework does away with Istio’s sidecar-centric architecture and replaces it with a sidecar-less approach that promises to improve the service’s security posture and make it easier for new users to adopt the technology by reducing the resources needed to run it.
Service meshes are a critical piece of infrastructure for a lot of companies that aim to be (or become) cloud native. With hundreds or more microservices, all running in a variable number of containers, businesses need a way to track what’s running in their networks and ensure connectivity between all of these services. A simple IP address doesn’t cut it when you’re constantly spinning containers up and down, after all. There are a number of competing service mesh projects, but Istio, which Google recently donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), has become somewhat of a standard.
The new Ambient Mesh will be an optional feature, but in a joint interview before today’s announcement, both Google principle engineer Lous Ryan and Solo.io CEO and founder Idit Levine noted that they expect a lot of new users to opt for the Ambient Mesh approach.
“In a lot of environments, everybody is using [Istio] at crazy scale. But we wanted to figure out how to improve adoption,” Levine said. “What we learned from our customers is that we want to make the operational side of Istio better. It’s not bad right now, but we want to make it even better. We want to make sure that performance will get even better and we want to improve anything related to cost.”
Both Google and Solo started their own projects to address some of these issues but soon realized that they were both working toward the same goal and decided to combine their resources. Ryan stressed that Google had put a lot of emphasis on the security aspects of this new solution when it started working on this project.
“We’re very deliberate about what we do. We don’t make wild claims unless we can back them up — and in particular, Google is extremely security-conscious,” he said. “A big part of what services mesh is trying to do is solve security problems for people. We saw this operational friction that we wanted to help customers with. We also wanted to make sure that we didn’t lose any of the security properties of the system when we did.”
He noted that Solo brought a lot of the operational perspective to this project as the two teams worked together to develop this new framework.
Both Levine and Ryan stressed that this is an evolutionary step for Istio. The current way the system works won’t change — at least for the foreseeable future. Users can even mix and match the current sidecar approach with the sidecar-less Ambient Mesh if that’s what they want to do.
“We’ve done a lot of internal evaluations about security, but we want to let the community work through this and get feedback,” Ryan noted. “If people are comfortable with the existing security model and sidecars, they need time to get comfortable with a different — or slightly different — security posture. It’s my belief that the security posture of Ambient is at least as good as sidecar, if not better, but the community is going to need time to wrap its head around it and give us feedback and for us to react.”
Solo’s Levine meanwhile stressed that her team focused on the operational aspects of this new approach, from installing the mesh to updating it and the day-to-day operations of it. She noted that when Solo showed its new approach to customers, most wanted to start using it right away. “They were: ‘oh my god.’ And that was in terms of the operations and everything related to usability. How you install the mesh, upgrade the mesh — for that, Ambient is amazing. It’s really what we wanted to build — a service mesh that’s transparent to the application. You can apply resources, you can delete the mesh — the application doesn’t even know that it’s there. And I think that’s a big point for Ambient.”
When a platform owner now installs Ambient into a cluster, the existing applications just keep on running. As Ryan noted, you then tell the system that you want a given application to be part of the mesh and that’s it. There are no restarts and, of course, no need to inject any sidecars. And if there’s an update to Istio, the applications don’t even notice.
“The biggest enemy of service mesh adoption has always been complexity,” said Joe Searcy, a member of the technical staff at T-Mobile. “The resource and operational overhead to manage service mesh for a large enterprise has continued to make service mesh adoption cumbersome even as projects like Istio have worked to decrease complexity. The opportunities that Ambient Mesh provides are extremely exciting. With better transparency to applications, fewer moving parts, simpler invocation, and huge potential in savings of compute resources and engineering hours…all I can say is: Sign me up!“
Ambient Mesh is now available as a beta to Solo customers and will become generally available once the company launches its Gloo Mesh 2.1. And, of course, it’s also part of the Istio open source project.
LA-based Remento, an app that focuses on capturing and preserving family stories,
Grocery delivery app Instacart 
