It would be one of the greatest startup investments of all time. Masayoshi Son, riding high in the klieg lights of the 1990s dot-com bubble, invested $20 million dollars into a fledgling Hong Kong-based startup called Alibaba. That $20 million investment into the Chinese ecommerce business would go on to be worth about $120 billion […]
Apple outlines new safety measures as it reopens stores, Huawei responds to new U.S. chip curbs and Jack Ma departs SoftBank’s board of directors. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 18, 2020. 1. Apple begins reopening some stores with temperature checks and other safeguards in place In mid-March, Apple closed all of its stores outside […]
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re digging into SoftBank’s latest earnings slides. Not only do they contain a wealth of updates and other useful information, but some of them are gosh-darn-freaking hilarious. We all deserve a bit of levity […]
Uber is laying off another 3,000 employees, the Wall Street Journal first reported. Uber is also closing 45 offices, and rethinking its approach in areas like freight and autonomous vehicle technology. “I knew that I had to make a hard decision, not because we are a public company, or to protect or stock price, or […]
European startups are calling for more flexibility in EU state aid rules to allow national governments to provide liquidity for the region’s fledgling digital businesses during the COVID-19 crisis. In a joint letter addressed to Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager, more than a dozen startup associations from across the bloc have called for rules to be […]
There is a flurry of news out of SoftBank this morning, which announced its Fiscal Year 2019 (ending March 31, 2020) financial results overnight. It’s been a bad year for the Vision Fund, with huge losses at WeWork and Uber due to corporate incompetence, intrigue, and of course, COVID-19. But buried a bit in the […]
Despite a handful of devices and years of sales, Facebook has never shared unit sales of any of their VR headsets. Today, Oculus released a new sales figure as the company reaches the 1 year anniversary of the release of the Quest headset. We didn’t get unit sales but the company did share that they’ve […]
A comprehensive study into how startups will work in the future, in the wake of the global COVID-9 pandemic, has been launched by UK non-profit Founders Forum. The initiative comes in the wake of a number of organizations announcing extended offices closures and ‘Work From Home’ policies. The group hopes the COVID-19 Workplace Survey will […]
With a large proportion of knowledge workers doing now doing their jobs from home, the need for tools to help them feel connected to their profession can be as important as tools to, more practically, keep them connected. Today, a company that helps do precisely that is announcing a growth round of funding after seeing […]
A survey of UK Angel investors regarding their investment strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic has found that over 65% of Angels investors are continuing to invest in startups during Lockdown, but with predominantly new deals. Many are completing more deals and increasing their cheque size by as much as 18%. However, the pandemic has reduced […]