European regulators share increased privacy concerns about Facebook’s smart glasses – TechCrunch

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for September 20, 2021. It’s Disrupt week everyone and TechCrunch is buzzing. From tomorrow morning, Disrupt is bound to be a pretty ass-kicking affair. Check the agenda here, the speakers here, the Battlefield companies here, and if you want to see your humble minion make his first (last?) Run to hosting, well, stick to the Extra Crunch phase. Just good tweets, please.

See you tomorrow morning! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3 Coinbase pulls the plug on the lending product: US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has decided to shelve its Lend product which would have provided returns to investors who bet on their crypto assets. Why? The U.S. regulatory body involved in such products views the creation as a security and said it would sue Coinbase if it launched the product. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong publicly claimed the SEC was stupid, which didn’t seem to help much. Perhaps somehow sarcastic Twitter threads aren’t the road to regulatory victory. IPOs Galore: Okay folks who care about public market liquidity, we have a handful of stories for you today. Here’s who will get rich from GitLabs IPO, here’s a dig into the new price for Toasts ‘IPO, and here are some notes on Freshworks’ increased IPO price. Have fun! Europe wants Facebook to turn on the lights: or at least more. In the wake of Facebook’s announcement of Ray-Ban camera goggles, Europe’s leading privacy regulator has raised concerns about the hardware. The problem is the little light that indicates they are recording. Maybe a bigger light would be better. That or we could be in another cycle of the Glasshole talk, which I’m sure we all would rather avoid. Startup / VC You don’t have to go into space to imagine Earth – that’s the lesson from Near Space Labs’ latest round of capital, an infusion of $ 13 million. While several startups want to take a lot of photos of the Earth for commercial purposes from satellites (Albedo is one we talked about earlier), Near Space wants to use balloons that are simply, well, close to space. Reaching orbit is cheaper than ever, but it certainly isn’t cheap yet. Maybe this is the way to go? Fivetran raises a huge turnaround, buys a smaller company: Hard Enterprise reporter Ron Miller covered this $ 565 million investment for TechCrunch, noting that Fivetran is now worth around $ 5.6 billion. The company is also shelling out $ 700 million for HVR, what Miller describes as a data integration competitor that has raised more than $ 50 million. The latter deal is a mix of cash and stocks. Fivetran helps companies move data. Given the scale of data in the world, this is big business. Salesforce invests in Razorpay: As China’s startup investment market retreats, India continues to collect checks, the latest of which is an investment by Salesforce Ventures in Razorpay, a major fintech player in the Indian market that has been valued the last time at $ 3 billion. This deal doesn’t look huge in dollar terms, but the fact that Salesforce is crossing the Pacific is really important. Video and photo editing is an industry – as companies like Picsart increase rounds to nine figures, it’s perhaps no surprise to see the company behind Facetune and other editing applications increase rounds of a similar size. In this case, Facetune developer Lightricks put together a $ 130 million round. The company operates more than a dozen subscription-based photo and video editing apps on iOS and Android, according to TechCrunch. B2B fintech is hot: Airwallex just secured a $ 200 million round with a $ 4 billion valuation, which is notable not only for the dollars involved, but also for the fact that the company is based in Australia. The now multiple unicorn offers built-in fintech services for other companies as well as corporate banking services. A marketplace for the sale of companies sells part of its business: this is the news of Flippa, a marketplace where you can buy and sell online businesses and digital assets. The company just secured a $ 11 million round and, as part of that, released what has to be the single worst non-GAAP metric from community-adjusted EBITDA. TechCrunch writes that the company sees over 600,000 monthly searches from investors looking to connect with entrepreneurs. To which I say, gentlemen, are you so afraid of sharing real metrics that is what you went with? In related news, this newsletter is the leading Internet missive that includes both the newspaper and the crunch in its header, giving us a market-leading pace for activating readers and converting our newsletter-to-read pipeline. Cars24 raises $ 450 million in cash and debt: The Indian used car market Cars24 is now worth $ 1.84 billion after raising $ 340 million in equity and 110 million in debt. It’s a healthy round for a company that has sold 400,000 vehicles to date. Do you see? This is a really useful metric. Not incredibly useful; a sell rate would be better than an absolute statistic, but still! The next healthcare revolution will have AI at the center

In an excerpt from “AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future,” author Kai-fu Lee argues that recent advances in artificial intelligence are beginning to transform healthcare.

Studies have shown that AI is as good as humans when it comes to diagnosing disease, but the pandemic has accelerated the digitization of medical records and patient data.

“Over the next few decades, we can expect medical diagnosis to evolve from an AI tool providing option analysis to an AI assistant recommending treatments,” writes Lee.

Lee identifies several areas where AI will improve outcomes in drug discovery, complex surgery, and monitoring, but also examines potential issues, such as legal liabilities.

“AI healthcare is not just a market, it represents a wave of transformations that will change the entire industry.”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams move forward. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc. Maybe we understand this generation of mobile operating systems: TechCrunchs dives into iOS 15 notes that the new mobile operating system has brought with it quality of life improvements and feature enhancements to Apple’s apps. This is what you have to expect. Or, more precisely, you will update to the new code, I guess, and then immediately forget you have it. This is the state of today’s mobile operating systems, which, along with smartphone hardware, appear to have reached a level of boring excellence. It’s time for a new paradigm to shake things up. Big Tech wins some awards your parents cared about: How many shares do you put in Emmys? Do you really know what an Emmy is? I do not. But it turns out Netflix and Apple won the other day. Good for them. It turns out that if you are among the richest companies in the history of the world, you are able to acquire talent and make enough shots on goal to score a few points. Or in this case, small, ugly trophies. TechCrunch Experts: Growing Marketing

Image credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in new window) / Getty Images

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have experience in SEO, social, content writing, and more! If you are a growing marketer, pass this survey to your customers; we would like to know why they loved working with you.

If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our reach, check out this interview Anna Heim did with Ammo, the Australian growth marketing agency Ammo helps startups calibrate their efforts.

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