In December, just ahead of Instagram head Adam Mosseri’s testimony before the U.S. Senate over the impacts of its app on teen users, the company announced plans to roll out a series of safety features and parental controls. This morning, Instagram is updating a critical set of these features which will now default teen users under the age of 16 to the app’s most restrictive content setting. It will also prompt existing teens to do the same, and will introduce a new “Settings check-up” feature that guides teens to update their safety and privacy settings.

The changes are rolling out to global users across platforms amid increased regulatory pressure over social media apps and their accompanying minor safety issues.

In last year’s Senate hearing, Mosseri defended Instagram’s teen safety track record in light of concerns emerging from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, whose leaked documents had painted a picture of a company that was aware of the negative mental health impacts of its app on its younger users. Though the company had then argued it took adequate precautions in this area, in 2021 Instagram began to make changes with regard to teen use of its app and what they could see and do.

In March of this year, for instance, Instagram rolled out parental controls and safety features to protect teens from interactions with unknown adult users. In June, it updated its Sensitive Content Control, launched the year prior, to cover all the surfaces in the app where it makes recommendations. This allowed users to control sensitive content across places like Search, Reels, Accounts You Might Follow, Hashtag Pages and In-Feed Recommendations.

It’s this Content Control feature that’s receiving the update today.

The June release had put in the infrastructure to allow users to adjust their settings around “sensitive content” — that is, content that could depict graphic violence, is sexualized in nature, or content about restricted goods, among other things. At the time, it presented three options to restrict this content — “More,” “Less,” or “Standard.”

Before, all teens under 18 were only able to choose to see content in the “Standard” or “Less” categories. They could not switch over to “More” until they were an adult.

Image Credits: Instagram

Now, with today’s update, teens under the age of 16 will be defaulted to the “Less” control if they are new to Instagram. (They can still later change this to Standard if they choose.)

Existing teens will be pushed a prompt that encourages them — though does not require — to choose the “Less” control, as well.

As before, this impacts the content and accounts seen across Search, Explore, Hashtag Pages, Reels, Feed Recommendations and Suggested Accounts, Instagram notes.

“It’s all in an effort for teams to basically have a safer search experience, to not see so much sensitive content and to automatically see less than any adult would on the platform,” said Jeanne Moran, Instagram Policy Communications Manager, Youth Safety & Well-Being, in a conversation with TechCrunch. “…we’re nudging teens to choose ‘Less,’ but if they feel like they can handle the ‘Standard’ then they can do that.”

Of course, to what extent this change is effective relies on whether or not teens will actually follow the prompt’s suggestion — and whether they’ve entered their correct age in the app, to begin with. Many younger users lie about their birthdate when they join apps in order to not be defaulted to more restrictive experiences. Instagram has been attempting to address this problem through the use of A.I. and other technologies, including those that now require users to provide their birthdays if they had not, A.I. that scans for possible fake ages (e.g. by finding birthday posts where the age doesn’t match the birthdate on file), and, more recently, via tests of new tools like video selfies.

The company hasn’t said how many accounts it’s caught and adjusted through the use of these technologies, however.

Separately from the news about its Sensitive Content Control changes, the company is rolling out a new “Settings check-up” designed to encourage all teens under 18 on the app to update their safety and privacy settings.

This prompt focuses on pointing teens to tools for adjusting things like who can reshare their content, who can message and content them, and their time spent on Instagram, as well as the Sensitive Content Control settings.

The changes are a part of a broader response in consumer technology about how apps need to do better with regard to how they serve younger users. The E.U., in particular, has had its eye on social apps like Instagram through conditions set under its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Age Appropriate Design Code. Related to teen usage of its app, Instagram is now awaiting a decision about a complaint over its handling of children’s data in the E.U., in fact. Elsewhere, including in the U.S., lawmakers are weighing options that would further regulate social apps and consumer tech in a similar fashion, including a revamp of COPPA and the implementation of new laws.

In response to the new features, child-friendly policy advocate Common Sense Media‘s founder and CEO Jim Steyer suggested there’s still more Instagram could do to make its app safe.

“The safety measures for minors implemented by Instagram today are a step in the right direction that, after much delay, start to address the harms to teens from algorithmic amplification,” Steyer said, in a prepared statement. “Defaulting young users to a safer version of the platform is a substantial move that could help lessen the amount of harmful content teens see on their feeds. However, the efforts to create a safer platform for young users are more complicated than this one step and more needs to be done.”

He said Instagram should completely block harmful and inappropriate posts from teens’ profiles and should route users to this platform version if it even suspects the user is under 16, despite what the user entered at sign-up. And he pushed Instagram to add more harmful behaviors to its list of “sensitive content,” including content that promotes self-harm and disordered eating.

Instagram says the Sensitive Content Control changes are rolling out now. The Settings check-up, meanwhile, has just entered testing.

Privacy breaches are not only bad for users, but also costly for tech companies. For example, GDPR fines now total $1.7 billion, and earlier this year Twitter had to pay $150 million for misrepresenting the security and privacy of user data. Based in Pune, India and Delaware, Privado wants to make it easier for developers to keep user data under wraps.

The company announced today that it has raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capita India and Insight Partners. Together Fund and Emergent Fund, which led Privado’s seed round of $3.5 million in January 2022, also returned for the new funding.

Privado’s Series A will enable it to grow its tech, increase its team to 25 people and grow its open source community. It is post-revenue and has signed six-figure contracts. Its pricing model is based on the number of code repositories, or products, that it scans and monitors.

Privado currently monitors over 600,000 code commits and its clients include Here.com, Thrasio and Zego. It was founded last year by Jasdeep Cheema, Prashant Mahajan and Vaibhav Antil, who previously worked in product and engineering teams. They were motivated to launch Privado after interviewing product and engineering teams at an e-commerce company that needed to find a way to monitor data usage and how it changed with each new software release.

The founders told TechCrunch in an email that “to comply with with any of the privacy laws, the first step is to get visibility into how personal data is being collected, used and shared across thousands of apps and services (Netflix famously has over 1,000 services) powering a tech company. Even if companies achieve this mammoth of a task, realistically, it is close to impossible to continue having visibility when code changes take place every week.”

They added that many of the current tools on the market are manual ones that don’t scale and go out-of-date as soon as there is a product change, or automated ones that only focus on discovering where data is stored, opening the possibility of missing issues around data collection, usage, sharing and personal data leakages.

“There are a lot of privacy tech companies that exist today and some of them have raised big rounds like OneTrust, BigID,” said Antil, Privado’s CEO. “Current tools fall short because they sit outside of the development lifecycle where decisions on data collection, use and sharing are made.”

Privado solves these issues connects with source code management tools including GitHub and scanning code for privacy. It’s able to monitor data usage, identify data flows and notify developers of privacy issues, including excessive user privileges or data leakages to logs.

“Think of us as Grammarly for your code,” the founders say. “We give you a data privacy score for existing products and point out privacy and data security issues as you are writing new code.”

It also created a free tool for Android developers that generates Play Store data safety reports that is used by developers including Automattic and Blinkist. Privado is now expanding it into an open source privacy code canning project.

“We tell engineers to build code and ship features out fast, and we tell them they are responsible for privacy,” said Antil. “If we are giving them the tools to grow engagement, we should also give them tools to grow privacy at the same time.”

There’s been a lot of hype about “Web3”, but the reality is that it’s still a largely nascent and fragmented concept, and that has led to Web3 startups building platforms to engage with it more easily getting a lot of attention. In the latest development, a startup called thirdweb — which has created a development toolkit to make it easier to build and launch Web3 products such as blockchain games, NFTs, DAOs, marketplaces and more — has raised $24 million, a Series A that values the London startup at $160 million.

Thirdweb plans to use the funding to continue enhancing its developer toolkit — which currently covers some 10 features spanning areas like smart contracts, decentralised logins, publishing tools and more — to expand support for a wider array of blockchains; to bring on more users; and to grow its team, both via hiring and potentially acquisitions — all in aid of getting Web3 to become more mainstream.

Thirdweb has been live for just nine months, but it’s been on a roll: CEO Steven Bartlett told TechCrunch that to date some 80,000 developers — which range from independent creators through to organizations like Afterpay and New York Fashion Week — have built a range of NFT items, DAOs, games and other applications using its framework, And as of this week, some 150,000 smart contracts have been deployed across six blockchains. (And in case you’re wondering, he said Polygon is currently the most popular: “Cheaper fees is the straightforward answer,” he said.)

Projects are collectively generating $1.5 million in revenue weekly, although thirdweb is not getting a cut of that. There are no charges or commissions on thirdweb at the moment, the one exception being some of thirdweb’s enterprise customers paying a fee as part of their procurement policies, Bartlett said.

The funding being announced today also speaks to some momentum. The round is being led by Haun Ventures (the firm founded by well-connected ex-a16z partner Katie Haun), with strategic participation also from Coinbase Ventures and Shopify.

Coinbase had already been working with thirdbase — for example the latter is providing a development platform for creators to build NFTs for Coinbase NFT — and this will tie the two closer together. Shopify, meanwhile, is “seeing us as an investment but also a partner,” Bartlett said. He added that there is an integration in the works in which thirdweb’s toolkit will be made available to Shopify customers that want to introduce web3 products to complement, or within, their Shopify-powered storefronts.

These three join an already-long list of investors who backed thirdweb in its $5 million seed round. (That list included Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, and more.)

The gap in the market that thirdweb is addressing is one that Bartlett said he discovered with his co-founder Furqan Rydhan when they were working on building a blockchain application themselves.

“We saw what hard work it was to build the application from the ground up,” Bartlett said. He compares the dearth of tools available to speed up blockchain work to the earlier days of the web we know today, when people also had to code websites, and all of the features within them, from scratch, versus modern times where one can, say, integrate a payments flow by way of a few lines of code and an API that connects to tech built and operated by someone else.

The opportunity was clear: build the same kind of tools for Web3. “We realized we could release as a product what we’d built to work on our own app,” Bartlett said. “We wanted to provide blockchain developers with the same kind of easy-to-use infrastructure, and tools, that they have in Web2.”

The co-founders’ past experiences likely also played a role here. Bartlett likes to tackle opportunities when they’re only starting to emerge: was an early adopter and proponent of social media and specifically brands leveraging it to grow, long before brands came to recognize social media strategy as a must-have. Rydhan, meanwhile, has a lot of experience around API-based tools for developers. Among his many past roles, he was the founding CTO of Applovin, a major player in apps monetization.

Part of Web3 still being a nascent, idealised concept is that the actual world of Web3 as it’s unfolding is still full of a lot of bumps and bruises. Right now, it doesn’t feel like a day goes by that you don’t hear about how yet another blockchain project has been hacked, or how prices are tanking in the once much-hyped world of NFTs; and that’s before you even start to consider that the flip side often just feels like a lot of empty and very self-interested speculation.

Thirdweb is part of that ecosystem, even if it’s not a direct operator of any blockchain exchange or smart contract, but Bartlett claims that they unexpectedly found that it hasn’t seen a drop in its business by association.

“The surprising thing is that the builders have continued building,” he said. “Our weekly growth activity hasn’t slowed down and has continued to increase. Our hypothesis has been that although there are fluctuations people who are building projects in the long term will continue regardless of the crypto or macro outlook.”

That’s one of the things that’s also been compelling to investors, too, he added. “Our data showed that we had bucked the trend.”

“Our mission is to accelerate the next generation of the internet and we believe thirdweb will play a critical role in realizing that,” said Katie Haun, founder and CEO of Haun Ventures, in a statement. “As complexity to develop in web3 continues to increase, the experienced team at thirdweb led by Furqan and Steven have built an elegant solution that allows developers to build fast while avoiding costly mistakes. I’m pleased to see proven founders of this caliber dedicating their next chapter to crypto and look forward to supporting their efforts.”

Longer term, I wonder if thirdweb will continue to pour resources into building all of its own tools, or whether it will open up, marketplace style, to bring in third-party developers including those that will emerge as specialists in specific categories. For now, Bartlett said that plan is to continue pursuing a full-stack approach on its own steam — aided potentially by acquiring teams and tech — not least because it’s still an early mover and has the opportunity to do so. It’s also why it’s opting not to introduce fees: do as much as you can to pick up critical mass as early as you can.

“We believe this particular play is winner takes all,” he said. “Our objective is to acquire as much of the base as we can. in future we will take a small fee for enterprise level clients, or a small fee for certain toolsets.”

Collage-style video “mood boards” are going viral on TikTok — and so is the app making them possible. Pinterest’s recently soft-launched collage-maker Shuffles has been climbing up the App Store’s Top Charts thanks to demand from Gen Z users who are leveraging the new creative expression tool to make, publish and share visual content. These “aesthetic” collages are then set to music and posted to TikTok or shared privately with friends or with the broader Shuffles community.

Despite being in invite-only status, Shuffles has already spent some time as the No. 1 Lifestyle app on the U.S. App Store.

During the week of August 15-22, 2022, Shuffles ranked No. 5 in the Top Lifestyle Apps by downloads on iPhone in the U.S., according to metrics provided by app intelligence firm data.ai — an increase of 72 places in the rankings compared to the week prior. It was the No. 1 Lifestyle app on iPhone by Sunday, August 21st, and broke into the Top 20 non-gaming apps on iOS as a whole in the U.S. that same day, after jumping up 22 ranks from the day prior.

Additionally, the firm Sensor Tower found the app is now No. 66 Overall on the U.S. iPhone App Store and is the No. 1 Overall app in Ireland, New Zealand, and the U.K. It’s No. 2 Overall in Australia and No. 3 in Canada.

First launched in late July 2022, the app has seen 211,000 iOS downloads worldwide in the month it’s been live. 160,000 of those downloads were in the U.S., data.ai says. Sensor Tower, meanwhile, estimates the app has seen approximately 338,000 installs during this time.

Considering it’s still not “publicly launched,” Shuffles appears to be an out-the-gate hit for Pinterest, which has been trying to reinvent itself for the creator-driven, video-first era with products like Idea Pins, similar to TikTok, and live video shopping on Pinterest TV. 

Similarly, Shuffles is also targeting a younger demographic who’s using social media in a new way: for self-expression, not just networking.

The new app allows users to build their own collages using Pinterest’s photo library or by snapping photos of objects they want to include using the camera. One clever feature involves its use of technology, built in-house, that allows users to cut out objects from their photos, their Pinterest boards, or by searching for new Pins.

This is similar to iOS 16’s forthcoming image cutout feature that is, arguably, one of the more fun additions to ship with Apple’s new mobile operating system. Here, you can effortlessly copy an object from one of your photos — like your dog, for instance — then paste that cutout anywhere you choose, like in an iMessage chat. This feels a bit magical, as you only need to touch and hold to lift the image away from the background.

Shuffles, meanwhile, makes image cutouts even easier. When you either search for or snap a photo, the app often automatically identifies the object in the photos and you only have to tap the “Add” button to place it into your collage where it can be resized and moved around the screen. At other times, you can use the included tool to cut out the portion of the image you want to utilize in your creation.

You can also choose to add effects and motion to the images to make them shake, spin, pulse, swivel and more. For instance, you could add an image of a record player, then animate it so it actually spins.

Image Credits: Pinterest

The final product can be saved locally to your device, shared in a message with friends, or published to a dedicated community using a hashtag. These hashtags are browsable in the app’s discovery section where collages tagged with popular hashtags — like #moodboard, #vintage or #aesthetic, for instance — are also showcased.

While the app does make for good TikToks, it helps drive traffic to Pinterest too. The objects in users’ collages are linked to Pinterest and a tap will bring you to a dedicated page for the item in question, which you can then open to view directly in Pinterest. In the case of items that are available for purchase — like fall fashion or home decor, for instance — users could also buy the item by clicking through to the retailer’s website.

Demand for the app has been aided by its exclusivity, for the time being.

Users need an invite code to get in — and they can only get it from an existing Shuffles user who has just 5 invites to share.

Invite codes have often been used to drive demand for new products, after seeing outsized success as a growth mechanism for Google’s new email system Gmail in the early 2000s. But in later years, their usage has felt less authentic, as they became a way for app marketers to push users to post to social media in exchange for early access to a new product.

With Pinterest, however, the use of the invite code mechanism is not tied to a request that users must take some sort of action to be let in. Instead, you have to know someone to get an invite, which has led some TikTokers to lament how they’ve had to beg friends for codes.

(Beg no more: Pinterest provided TechCrunch readers with an invite code to use for Shuffles: FTSNFUFC. If that runs out, you can visit Pinterest’s Instagram or Twitter account for future code drops. This is not an advertisement or paid promotion, we’re just sharing the code!) 

Pinterest told TechCrunch the app is invite-only because, technically, it hasn’t publicly launched.

Shuffles, we’re told, is the first-ever standalone app created by Pinterest’s in-house incubator, TwoTwenty. The team, which also had a hand in the creation of Pinterest TV, is focused on researching and testing new product ideas and iterating on those that gain traction.

As to why the app is resonating with Gen Z, it seems to be the combination of the technology used to simplify collage making with the desire for creative expression tools that serve the demographic’s social habits.

“The app is seeing budding download momentum, targeting younger users. It’s building off the empowerment of creativity and user-generated content, popularized in many ways by TikTok,” Lexi Sydow, Head of Insights at data.ai, told TechCrunch. “Especially for younger generations, photo editing and creative projects are mobile-first more than ever, leveraging robust mobile apps to create robust projects that once required sophisticated desktop software. The app takes collaging one step further with simple embedded tools that would require multiple steps or coordination across multiple apps,” she explained.

“Users curate their mood boards and ‘vibes’, which touches on a similar cultural thread to visual-first campaigns by Spotify showing your unique music tastes. The app inherently relies on Gen Z’s social habits where users leverage social media apps to share with their networks and close circles of friends. The app has received 4.31 out of 5 stars to date since launch, with 72% of all reviews being 5 stars,” Sydow added.

Shuffles is currently iOS-only and a free download on the App Store.

Founders are often told to keep their head down and build. On today’s TechCrunch Live, you’ll hear how there has to be a balance. On one hand, founders need to stay focused, but they also need access to feedback loops — essentially, don’t build in the dark.

Sajith Wickramasekara founded Benchling with his co-founder to improve laboratory data collection and collaboration. Since its 2012 founding the company has grown to the de facto market leader, and Wickramasekara will join TechCrunch Live, along with Benchmark General Partner Miles Grimshaw, on its recent acquisition and growth.

Benchling was essentially the first mover in this market. When Wickramasekara started Benchling, laboratory and research projects did not have a proper, dedicated cloud-based platform. Data collection was still with pen and paper or spreadsheets. Not only was Wickramasekara founding a company, he was founding an industry. Now, nearly 10 years later, Benchling is a unicorn with a valuation in October 2021 of 6.1 billion.

This TechCrunch Live event opens on August 24 at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT with networking. The interview begins at 12:00 p.m. PDT followed by the TCL Pitch Practice at 12:30 p.m. PDT. Apply for TCL Pitch Practice by completing this application.

TechCrunch Live records weekly on Wednesdays at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT. Join us!

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.

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It’s not a bad year for startup fundraising. While venture totals are off sharply from records set last year, evidence is accumulating that 2022 is more of a return to an elevated baseline than a historic collapse.

According to a review of a Crunchbase dataset tracking funding for unicorn companies — private startups worth $1 billion or more as of their most recent funding round — it’s clear that investors are still paying amply for unicorn equity.

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A decline in total unicorn fundraising is not a surprise. As we explored earlier this week, late-stage rounds are shrinking. That’s generally where unicorns fall in the fundraising lifecycle, albeit with exceptions, meaning that if late-stage rounds are getting smaller, it makes sense that unicorns would raise less capital.

In 2020, Chinese startup Zilliz — which builds cloud-native software to process data for AI applications and unstructured data analytics, and is the creator of Milvus, the popular open source vector database for similarity searches — raised $43 million to scale its business and prep the company to make a move into the U.S. Nearly two years on, today Zilliz is announcing further funding of $60 million as it finally makes its move West, with a new HQ in San Francisco to capitalize on the growing demand for more efficient processing techniques for an ever-expanding trove of unstructured data getting commandeered to power AI applications.

The funding is being led by Prosperity7 Ventures, a $1 billion venture fund created by Saudi oil giant Aramco (the name is a reference to the first commercial well to strike oil in the country), with Chinese backers Temasek’s Pavilion Capital, Hillhouse Capital, 5Y Capital, and Yunqi Capital — all previous investors — also participating. The company is not disclosing its valuation, but it’s worth pointing out that this latest injection is being described as an extension to that $43 million Series B rather than a new round. We’ll update this if we learn more. The total raised by the company is now $113 million.

The capital and relocation speaks not just to key moment for the company, but also for the area of machine learning and wider trends impacting Chinese-founded startups.

On the first of these, Zilliz’s breakout product, the open-source Milvus, has boomed. The company said that downloads have now passed the 1 million mark, compared to 300,000 a year ago, with production users growing by 300% in the same period. Customers include the likes of eBay, Tencent, Walmart, Ikea, Intuit and Compass.

As we pointed out back in 2020, Milvus has not leaned heavily on advertising and marketing spend, instead choosing to leverage word of mouth on the places where developers like to hang out for ideas and inspiration to get itself noticed, such as Github and Reddit. That strategy has worked: “Stargazers” on Github are up 200% to more than 11,000 with the number of contributors doubling. (For a point of comparison, in 2020 it had been starred some 4,400 times.)

The reason for the interest in Milvus — and subsequently Zilliz’s roadmap, which is based around creating further products, most recently a Zilliz Cloud managed service that is now in private preview; and Towhee, another open-source framework, this one for for vector data ETL — is because of the rising interest in vector databases as how they are being used in AI applications.

Put simply, while data can be (and often is) processed via more traditional databases, the complexity of and structure of activities like anomaly detection, recommendation, rating and other AI-driven tasks lends itself more naturally and efficiently to vector databases designed to work with how AI data is represented. (Zilliz notes that its vector database “is both cloud native and capable of processing billion-scale vector data in milliseconds.”)

“Zilliz’s journey to this point started with the creation of Milvus, an open-source vector database that eventually joined the LF AI & Data Foundation as a top-level project,” said Charles Xie, founder and CEO of Zilliz, in a statement. “Milvus has now become the world’s most popular open-source vector database with over a thousand end-users. We will continue to serve as a primary contributor and committer to Milvus and deliver on our promise to provide a fully managed vector database service on public cloud with the security, reliability, ease of use, and affordability that enterprises require.”

There are others (competitors) like Pinecone and Weaviate also building solutions to address this; and big cloud providers like AWS also have their own solutions. All of that points to a market opportunity that Zilliz is focused to tackle.

It’s notable that back in 2020, Zilliz already said that more than half of the users of Milvus were outside of China: that speaks to how the company has long positioned itself and where it saw its growth longer-term. These days, a number of startups in the country are looking to move elsewhere to have more freedom in terms of how they grow their businesses, and to work with a wider set of customers, and Zilliz is an example of that in action.

“With its leadership on Milvus, Zilliz is a global leader in vector similarity search on massive amounts of unstructured data,” said Aysar Tayeb, executive MD of Prosperity7 Ventures, in a statement. “We believe that the company is in a strong position to build a cloud platform around Milvus that will unleash new and powerful business insights and outcomes for its customers, just as data analytics platforms like Databricks and Snowflake have done with structured data. There is already over 4x more unstructured data than structured data, a gap that will continue to grow as AI, robotics, IoT, and other technologies meld the digital and physical realms.”

AI copywriters are getting a lot of attention from investors. A couple that have recently raised funding include Copy.ai and Copysmith. Now Scalenut is entering the arena with a $3.1 million funding round led by Saama Capital and Amit Singhal, formerly a senior vice president at Google and head of Google Search.

Launched earlier this year by Mayank Jain, Gaurav Goyal and Saurabh Wadhawan, Scalenut says it has since signed up 100,000 users, primarily SMBs and mid-market sized businesses, grown its revenue 10 times and is now trending at a seven-digit run rate.

About 70% of its paying subscribers are from the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, and the rest are from Asian countries. Its last round of funding was a seed round of $400,000 led by Titan Capital, First Principles VC, AngelList, Abhishek Goyal and other angel investors.

When asked how Scalenut sets itself apart from other AI copywriting startups, Jain said “whilst Copy.ai, Copysmith and quite a few other tools have built a layer over a vanilla integration with [language model] GPT-3, we on the other hand have built a comprehensive content marketing suite that automates the entire content workflow.”

Scalenut founders Gaurav Goyal, Saurabh Wadhawan and Mayank Jain

“Our in-house deep learning models and integrations with other NLP providers enable end users to create content that has a much higher chances of ranking on search engines, hence driving organic growth,” he added. “Having said that, we also host one of the highest quality generic copywriting toolkits as well.”

One of Scalenut’s key differentiators is covering the entire content lifecycle, from content planning to research, writing and SEO optimization.

Jain demonstrated the platform for TechCrunch. For example, a green tea manufacturer who wants to create a blog post about the benefits of the beverage would first use a keyword to create topic cluster reports, or lists of potential topics with clusters of keywords. If they select the topic cluster “green tea benefits,” they would see keywords like “green tea benefits,” “dandelion benefits” and “tazo green tea benefits,” among many others.

Then they open the report they want and see statistics for the top 30 URLs ranked on search engines already, as well as their outlines. Other information includes the questions that people are asking about the topic on Google or Reddit, citations and key search terms to help content rank better on search engines.

Once a content creator has this info, they can enter Scalenut’s “Cruise Mode.” This provides a title, defines an outlet, provides writing points and creates a first draft, as well as SEO insights they can use to optimize the content.

Jain says users have relied on Scalenut to create in-depth blog posts, along with how-to guides, listicles, “why” posts, FAQs and comparison posts. Scalenut’s SEO optimization features tells users how long their posts should be. It can write blog posts as long as 10,000 words, but Jain says they’re usually between 1,200 to 1,500 words.

In a prepared statement, Saama Capital managing partner Ash Lilani said, “One common problem that businesses face to power up their organic marketing is scaling content meaningfully. There is no easy way to scale content and Scalenut is solving precisely that with its robust AI platform.”

WhatsApp Communities, the messaging app’s anticipated expansion aimed at supporting larger discussion groups, has now rolled out to additional users as it nears a public launch. The company declined to share specific details as to how many users or which countries were seeing the new feature as testing expands, but confirmed that more users have now been given early access.

First announced in April, WhatsApp Communities is a significant attempt to re-create the popularity of Facebook’s Groups within a messaging app environment. Created by the app’s end users, communities include features designed to add structure to larger group chats such as support for file sharing, 32-person group calls, emoji reactions, as well as admin tools and moderation controls, among other things.

In addition to capitalizing on WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption and users’ growing desire to network within private communities outside of larger social networks, WhatsApp Communities also present a challenge to other messaging apps that have grown in popularity, like Telegram. The feature could also appeal to clubs or organizations that today engage in group chats across private platforms and apps like Apple’s iMessage, GroupMe, Band, Remind and others.

What makes the feature appealing to larger groups is that not all the discussions take place in a single chat, which can get busy. Instead, only admins have the ability to share announcements to all Community members through the main announcement group, which can support thousands of users. Meanwhile, members can chat in smaller sub-groups that admins have created or approved.

Unlike Facebook Groups, WhatsApp Communities aren’t public or discoverable on the platform. Users have to be invited to a Community in order to join.

Image Credits: WhatsApp screenshot via WABetaInfo

According to reports by sites including Android Police and WABetaInfo, some WhatsApp beta testers were newly reporting they had gained the ability to create a community in the app. The reports noted that the ability to hide your phone number from other sub-group members wasn’t immediately supported — though it’s expected to be available when the feature publicly launches.

However, the reports claimed it was WhatsApp beta app users who were gaining access to this feature. This isn’t quite accurate, we understand. WhatsApp clarified to TechCrunch it’s the full feature that’s rolling out to a small number of users in a few countries at the moment.

The company declined to share which countries were among those with access but at least one report claims that Malaysia is among them.

TechCrunch+ dug into the late-stage funding market yesterday using recent data from Carta to explore how the largest startup rounds are changing. Catching up those who missed the piece: We are seeing late-stage startup rounds shrink rapidly, even if valuations for the startups closest to going public are proving stickier than we perhaps expected.

Today we’re flipping the script and looking at the earliest startup stage, using the same dataset as before. Why seed? Because if you want to understand the startup market, tracking how investors are placing wagers on the youngest companies is the only to way grok what comes later; today’s seed companies are tomorrow’s recalcitrant unicorns clinging to paper valuations taller than Olympus Mons, after all!

Seed is holding up better than late-stage investing in some important ways, pushing back against the narrative that we’re in some sort of startup recession. Indeed, times appear to be pretty good for brand-new startups hunting for capital.

Walmart is introducing another perk designed to sweeten the deal for its Walmart+ membership program — the retailer’s answer to Amazon Prime, which today offers a combination of free shipping, fuel discounts, contact-free checkout, exclusive deals, free streaming, and more. On Wednesday, the Walmart+ subscription will gain a new cash back in the form of digital rewards that can be used on future Walmart purchases, the retailer told TechCrunch.

Walmart+ subscribers will be able to browse the Walmart app for offers across a range of bestselling items, including groceries, household goods, pet care, and other categories. They can then “clip” these offers like digital coupons to be used on upcoming purchases. After buying a rewarded item, Walmart+ members will earn cash back in the form of digital “Walmart Rewards” that are saved to their Walmart Wallet in the app.

Those rewards can accumulate over time, allowing customers to apply their balance to a future Walmart purchase for further savings.

The system has some similarities with Target’s discount program, Target Circle, which presents various offers and digital gift cards to loyal customers who shop for specific products that can be redeemed at checkout. But in Walmart’s case, the new rewards program is limited to its Walmart+ subscribers instead of being available to all shoppers. It’s also not an entirely in-house effort.

Instead, the feature is the first product to emerge as a result of Walmart’s partnership with the cash-back rewards platform Ibotta, announced last year. The retailer said at the time that the agreement would later allow customers to redeem rebates and offers to save on purchases along with other benefits.

The addition of Walmart Rewards is meant to serve as another perk designed to encourage consumers to sign up for Walmart’s membership program instead of Amazon Prime.

Of note, it also arrives at a time when Amazon Prime is in the Federal Trade Commission’s crosshairs. The FTC is investigating whether Amazon used interface designs that manipulated customers into signing up for the membership program and whether it made it difficult to cancel. Amazon customers, meanwhile, are also newly debating the value of Prime after price hikes this year in markets like the U.S. and Europe, amid inflation and other economic issues that have U.S. households reconsidering their budgets for subscription services.

At $139 per year, Amazon Prime is a bit pricier than the $98 per year Walmart+ — and if used primarily for free shipping benefits or free grocery delivery, some customers may opt for the latter to save the extra cash.

Launched in September 2020, Walmart+ combines a free shipping perk with other benefits that appeal to a more cost-conscious and budget-minded shopper, like gas discounts. It also offers six months of free streaming music with Spotify and last week unveiled a new partnership with Paramount, allowing Walmart+ members to gain access to the streaming service and home to shows like “1883” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” without raising the membership fee.

Still, Walmart+ membership has slowed in recent months, requiring it to expand the subscription perks in an effort to reach more potential customers. An August 2022 report by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) found Walmart+ subscriptions had plateaued, estimating the program had some 11 million members in the U.S. But Morgan Stanley had pegged the number higher — at 16 million members.

Prime, for comparison, has over 200 million members worldwide but doesn’t provide figures on a per-country basis.

With this new cash-back program, Walmart potentially gains an advantage over Amazon Prime, as it allows customers to earn money without having to apply for a credit card — a financial risk many budget shoppers are unwilling to take. Amazon, on the other hand, markets its Amazon Prime Rewards Visa card to shoppers as a way to generate 5% on Amazon.com purchases. Walmart Rewards, however, won’t impact customers’ credit, as it’s a different type of product altogether.

Walmart’s partner on Rewards, Ibotta, is a digital couponing service, not a cash-back credit card. Before today, Walmart has been one of the retailers available in Ibotta’s own app, in fact.

Typically, Ibotta users find offers they like in the Ibotta mobile app, save them to their profile, then show proof of purchase — either by linking a store’s loyalty card or taking a photo of their receipt — in order to receive their cash back. These payments are relatively small. They’re often under a dollar for grocery items — similar to coupons. But over time they can add up. With the Walmart app integration, customers will no longer have to take an additional step to demonstrate their proof of purchase — the clipped rewards are automatically added to a member’s account after the item is purchased.

To receive the benefit, Walmart+ members just scan their Walmart Pay QR code at checkout and tap the “Use Walmart Rewards” option to utilize their cash back. (If the member forgets to scan the QR code, they can still scan their receipt, Walmart told TechCrunch.)

Ibotta’s website indicates it does collect and share customer data but anonymizes it to remove names, phone numbers and emails. In its agreement with Walmart, Ibotta will also receive “some time-bound transaction data” that will help it to measure the effectiveness of the deals, Walmart also told us. The retailer declined to share the terms of its agreement any further, or the specifics around the consumer data sharing practices.

“First and foremost, we’re always focused on using data in a way that builds trust with our customers, not taking it away,” a Walmart spokesperson said when asked about how the Walmart shopping data was being used.

Walmart says it plans to expand the Walmart Rewards program over time with a focus on rewarding member loyalty, but again didn’t share specifics.

A developer, Steve Moser, recently discovered what appeared to be the Walmart Rewards feature inside the company’s app before it had gone live.

The Walmart+ rewards feature will go live as of Wednesday, August 24, in the Walmart mobile app. If customers don’t see the option in the app by Thursday, they’ll need to update their app.

As developed-world populations increasingly get older, healthcare is being rapidly digitized and “platformized” in order to meet the huge scale of change heading our way. I recently covered how Cera in the U.K. just raised $320 million to shift monitoring of patients into the home rather than over-flowing hospitals.

Now another startup aims to create an almost “gig-economy style” platform for people providing live-in care to the elderly, this time in Europe.

Marta, the European digital platform for live-in care, says when people try to arrange this kind of care for their elderly relatives, there are up to six intermediaries involved, and four out of five placements fail. Marta’s solution is an AI-driven matching platform where carers can be found for live-in positions. I guess you might call it UpWork for live-in care?

It’s now raised a €6.6 million seed round led by Capnamic, alongside co-lead Almaz Capital. Ithaca, GMPVC, SumUp Impact Fund, Verve Ventures and angels also participated. Existing investors such as Christian Vollmann, Johannes Schaback, Laura Esnola, Dr. Steffen Zoller and Julian Stiefel also participated.

The startup plans to now scale up in its European markets of Germany, Poland, Romania and Lithuania.

The market it’s addressing is an €18 billion market in the DACH region alone.

Given that Germany alone has more than 4 million people seeking at-home care and there are only 280,000 caregivers able to do this, the market is sizable.

Marta’s says its algorithm-based marketplace enables matchmaking between care seekers and caregivers, increasing transparency and a person-to-person experience.

“There are hundreds of examples of how elderly care can go wrong and it’s almost impossible for humans to accurately predict placement success because it’s just so many data points. We have seen how difficult it was to organize care with our grandparents. Aging is a normal process and should not pose a major problem. We believe that we can leverage technology significantly to help elderly people and their families as well as the caregivers,” said Jan Hoffmann, co-founder of marta in a statement.

Marta’s founders, Philipp Buhr and Hoffmann started marta in 2020 after having problems finding carers for relatives.

“Marta has created a transparent marketplace where it connects caregivers directly with families seeking care. At this point a truly unique approach based on digitization. We have been following marta for the past months and are impressed by the technology and traction the team has delivered. Most importantly, we are excited about the teams’ enthusiasm for solving a paramount societal problem,” added Jörg Binnenbrücker, founding partner at Capnamic.