Gap year student secures last open seat for Blue Origin’s first human spaceflight – TechCrunch

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s greatest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3:00 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 15, 2021. Good news from the TechCrunch front: The agenda for our big disrupt conference in September is set. It’s going to be incredible, frankly, so take a look. In addition, the latest EC-1 has just fallen. So if you want to get a glimpse of CockroachDB, we have just the compendium for you. – Alex

The TechCrunch top 3

  • Revolut is now worth $ 33 billion: British neobank Revolut has put together an $ 800 million round that values ​​the company at $ 33 billion. The company’s new valuation is a multiple of what it was worth in early 2020. Why is it worth so much today? TechCrunch has done a little research on the subject.
  • Valve makes gaming hardware: Yes, the folks behind the Steam gaming store are getting into the handheld gaming market. Their device, the Steam Deck, costs 399 US dollars and contains “a quad-core Zen 2 CPU coupled with AMD RDNA 2 graphics and 16 GB of RAM,” according to our own Brian Heater. If you need more storage, you can spend up to $ 649 on the handheld computer.
  • Autonomous vehicle unicorn Aurora goes public: As TechCrunch has already announced, the autonomous vehicle unicorn Aurora is going public via a SPAC. The company expects to be valued at $ 13 billion when it begins trading. Keep in mind that Aurora previously acquired Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit, valued at around $ 10 billion.

Startups / VC

The venture capital market has been on fire lately, resulting in quick deals and more rounds than journalists can dream of. However, if you’re still in the marketplace raising capital, check out Norwest’s Lisa Wu for a few tips that might come in handy. Boss among them? Think like a VC when you are on your way to raise.

  • AmEx immerses itself in financial planning: It was announced today that credit giant American Express invested in BodesWell through its venture arm last year. Now the credit card company, in cooperation with the startup, has “started a pilot project for its first digital self-service financial planning tool”. Discuss an early customer for BodesWell.
  • Prefab tries again: That is the word from a new $ 20 million round for Abodu – what we suspect is a suitcase made up of “place of residence” and “you”. Sure, the prefabricated unicorn Katerra is broken, but Abodu takes the model with the consumer in mind. Norwest led the way, with the participation of Initialized Capital.
  • Lightyear Raises $ 13.1 Million for Online Network Procurement: On the geekier side of tech, we got news today from Lightyear, a startup that its CEO says is “the first tool to buy your telecommunications infrastructure on the Internet”. Ron Miller notes that everything goes online, so why not network buying?
  • $ 20 million for financial data extraction: Daloopa has completed an eight-digit Series A conducted by Credit Suisse Asset Management’s NEXT Investors to help finance types “avoid repetitive data extraction to gather insights for analysis and forecasting,” reports TechCrunch. The deal stood out for us because of its obvious corporate venture capital (CVC) approach; CVCs have been more active than ever in recent quarters.

The Cockroach DB EC-1

Ants and camels are known to be resilient animals, but when it was time to choose a name for a startup that offered an open source cloud-based distributed database architecture, you can imagine why “Cockroach Labs” was the last candidate .

Database technology is a fundamental infrastructure, which partly explains why it is so innovation-resistant: Oracle Database was released in 1979, and MySQL didn’t come out until 1995.

Since its inception, CockroachDB has become a “next-generation database competitor valued at $ 2 billion,” writes corporate reporter Bob Reselman, who interviewed the company’s founders to write a four-part series:

Part 1: Origin story: From developing the popular open source image editor GIMP to some of Google’s best known infrastructure products.

Part 2: Technical design: Analyzes the key differences that CockroachDB offers, specifically its focus on geography and data storage.

Part 3: Developer Relations and Business: How CockroachDB works with developers as it moves to the cloud at a major tipping point.

Part 4: Competitive Landscape and Future: A look at the tough competition and what possible exit routes could look like.

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

Big Tech Inc.

  • Apple hearts Fintech: News this week that Apple is considering entering the “buy now, pay later” sector rocked Affirm and Afterpay share prices. But what about startups in space? TechCrunch has reconsidered the question a little.
  • Xiaomi grabs Apple’s number 2 mobile phone brand: Apple’s cell phone shipments rose in the second quarter, but a huge 83% increase in Xiaomi brought the Chinese hardware company to Cupertino and its iPhone line, according to Canalys data. Samsung remains the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer in terms of number of units.
  • Be jealous of this 18 year old: After the successful space flight bidder on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin was sold for $ 28 million to someone who couldn’t bother to take the first flight, an 18-year-old “high school graduate” becomes a college graduate Utrecht ”go instead. Oliver Daemen, enjoy the trip, we are jealous. (Yes, Daemen’s parents are rich.)

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Illustration montage based on education and knowledge in blue

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

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social media, content writing, and more! If you’re a growth marketer, share this survey with your customers. We’d love to know why they enjoyed working with you so much.

If you’re curious about how these surveys are affecting our reporting, check out this guest column on Extra Crunch by Mark Spera, “5 Advanced SEO Tactics in 2021”.

Leave a Comment