DoorDash acquires a salad-making startup, Twitter confirms subscription plans, and Tesla makes a big bet on Bitcoin. This is your daily crisis for February 8th, 2021.
The big story: DoorDash acquires Chowbotics
DoorDash acquired the Bay Area startup behind Sally, a salad machine-style robot that added contactless orders last fall.
DoorDash said the acquisition will “improve consumer access to fresh and safe meals and enhance our robust retailer offering and logistics platform,” although it does not specify how Chowbotics’ technology will be used in the delivery platform.
This continues the exploration that DoorDash has done with robotics, for example with Starship Technologies to test delivery robots.
The technology giants
Twitter confirms plans to experiment with new models like subscriptions in 2021. The company confirmed that it is researching and experimenting on new models but declined to provide details.
Tesla is buying $ 1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin and may accept the cryptocurrency as payment in the future. When the news broke, the price of Bitcoin instantly jumped around 7% to over $ 40,000 per coin.
Amazon Warehouse Workers Begin Historic Union Formation Vote – On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board rejected an attempt by Amazon to postpone a union vote that began today.
Startups, Finance and Venture Capital
The clubhouse in China is locked after a short uncensored period. Thousands of Chinese users suddenly no longer had access to the clubhouse early Monday evening.
WeWork is apparently doing better, not that SoftBank wants you to talk about it. There is some good news buried in the footnotes of today’s SoftBank earnings report regarding WeWork.
Automattic Acquires Analytics Company Parse.ly – Parse.ly is now part of WPVIP, the organization within Automattic that provides enterprise hosting and support to publishers and marketers, including TechCrunch.
Advice and analysis of extra crunch
Oscar Health’s IPO filing will test the venture-backed insurance model. While Oscar has demonstrated a strong ability to raise private money and scale revenue, it is a deeply unprofitable company.
Container Security Acquisitions Increase As Companies Accelerate Move To Cloud – Why Are There So Many M&A Now?
Two $ 50 million ARR companies discuss growth and plans for the coming quarters. In this part of Alex Wilhelm’s series, we look at SimpleNexus and PicsArt.
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Everything else
The Silenced No More Act is designed to ban the use of NDAs in situations involving harassment or discrimination. This draft law would extend the protection of workers through the Act on Cohesion Against Secrecy, which came into force in 2019.
MIT is building a “one-stop shop” for 3D printing robots – The CSAIL department of the university presented “LaserFactory”, a new project that seeks to develop robotics, drones and other machines as part of a one-stop -Shops can be made.
Hasselblad X1D II 50C: Out of the Studio and onto the Street – We took out the $ 10,000 camera kit for a socially distant shoot.
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