Tim Cook weighs in on standardized messaging features: 'Buy your mom an iPhone'

Helloooo! Since our last Daily Crunch, our adrenaline-fueled TechCrunch team has added more than 70 stories to the site. We’re picking out some of the best below, but we’ll almost certainly miss a story you wish you’d read. Give our homepage a quick scroll to see what strikes your fancy! — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Tim Cook and green bubbles: Christine is an Android user and her iPhone-using friends talk about “green bubbles,” but until now she did not know this was a problem. Christine’s text bubbles come in all different colors and even tells her who is “speaking” when in a group. However, she’s now learned that her iPhone-using friends secretly hate her green bubbles. Tim Cook is on their side, Ivan writes.
• Ambient Mesh: That’s the name of Google and Solo.io’s new Istio service mesh. We’ll yield to Frederic to explain what all of that means.
• Electric vroom: Jeep has three, three new electric vehicles, ah ah ah!, poised to enter the market beginning in 2023, Jaclyn reports.

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Startups and VC

It’s day 2 of Y Combinator-vaganza, which means we have buckets and buckets of news for you. Assuming news comes in buckets, but that’s a conversation for another day.

Tage reports that YC’s latest batch cuts African startup presence by more than half, and Anna, Alex and Tage are curious where Y Combinator is startup-hunting in 2022. And Kyle explored 7 AI startups that stood out among the YC hopefuls, and a load of TechCrunch writers selected our 11 favorite companies from Day 1 and Day 2 and the moonshots.

Whew. In addition to YC, Apple ran an event yesterday, and boy did we cover a bunch of that, too. Luckily, Christine has you covered on that front in the Big Tech section below.

Here’s a few more for ya:

• We’ve got our eye on you: Ingrid writes about FocalPoint grabbing $17 million and its mission to fix all that is wrong with GPS.
• Getting farmers to see green: Natasha L does a deep-dive into the world of agriculture technology, focusing on Klim, which raised $6.6 million to help farmers adopt regenerative practices.
• Data grows like a weed: More data means more storage, and Catalog is partnering with Seagate on an interesting approach to data storage using DNA technology, Kate writes.
• Education aspiration: Tage has a look at Nexford, an online university, which banked $8 million “to plug affordability and relevance gaps in education.”
• Cloudy storage days ahead: Lucidity raised $5.3 million to continue developing tools to keep all of your cloud block storage “neat and tidy,” Catherine writes.

5 metrics Series A investors look for at dev-tools startups

The median Series A for developer-tooling companies fell to $47.5 million in Q3 2022, “the lowest it has been since the beginning of 2021,” writes Rak Garg, a principal at Bain Capital.

After meeting with hundreds of companies since the start of the downturn, Garg has written a fundraising guide for seed-stage founders who are hoping to reach the next level.

“I’ve noticed a common characteristic among founders who have raised successful Series A rounds: They’re great at telling their companies’ stories,” says Garg.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

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Big Tech Inc.

So much Apple, so little time. The Apple iPhone 14 event dominated our news cycle for the second day, especially this one by Greg, who we think nicely summed up everything from the event. If you want to read every drooling detail, head over to the Apple fall event hub.

Speaking of things to drool over, Christine wrote a brief piece about Bloomingdale’s getting into the metaverse with its new virtual store that looks like it will give you purse envy.

• Deadline dilemma: Online learning company Byju has missed its financial audit deadlines for so many months that even lawmakers are now wondering what’s up, Manish reports.
• An EV for everyone: We’ve run our fair share of electric vehicles with some pricey price tags associated with them, so it was only fitting that we highlight what General Motors is doing with its $30,000 all-electric Chevrolet Equinox SUV. Kirsten has more.
• No cap: Annie writes about Uber and its quest to have a Kenyan court nullify the country’s new law that caps rail-hailing service fees at 18%.
• Point of order: Vista Equity Partners has a deal to buy Avalara, announced in August. Well, now one of Avalara’s biggest shareholders, a family office called Altair US, says it plans to vote against the sale. Paul has more on what’s happening there.

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