Stripe responds to report that it seeks to raise $2B with a terse 'no comment'

Friday, January 27, 2023

Well, it’s Friday again. And as the Equity pod team noted today, “You could be Wasted and not even know it.” — Christine and Haje

Image Credits: mustafaU / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3

The search for more money: Mary Ann follows up on yesterday’s story about Stripe setting a deadline to go public with some additional information that Stripe had reportedly tried raising additional capital at a decreased valuation. Look for more on this developing story in Mary Ann’s Interchange newsletter, which comes out on Sundays. If you don’t already get it in your inbox, click here.
No music for you: Google displayed its musical chops and now won’t share it with the world, Kyle writes. The search engine giant created an artificial intelligence system that can generate music from text descriptions, but he reports that “fearing the risks, has no immediate plans to release it.” Maybe if we all say something nice to them…
From angel to the board room: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is the newest board member of audiovisual startup Chroma, a company Stone began investing in two years ago. Sarah has more.

Startups and VC

Kano, the venture-backed U.K. startup known for its build-your-own computer kits and software for teaching coding and associated STEM skills, has accused Warner Bros. of copying one of its products and infringing on its intellectual property, Paul reports.

By any measure, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been a successful executive. He helped build Salesforce from the ground up, starting in an apartment in San Francisco in 1999 and eventually erecting Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in the city, Ron reports. He took the idea of running software in the cloud and grew it into the de facto way to deliver software at a time when most companies offered software in boxes or on-prem seat licenses. As activist investors target Salesforce, what’s next for the CRM giant? (TC+)

And we have five more for you:

Here comes the space train: Haje reports that Atomos tows a $16 million load of funding to create tugboats in space.
I pee what they did there: Christine reports that Starling Medical’s new urine-testing device turns your toilet into a health tracker.
A peek behind the curtains: Tage breaks down how African startups raised venture capital in 2022.
Here’s how to get customers: Matt invites you to come hear the right way to acquire customers with Cube and Mayfield on TechCrunch Live.
More money to reduce fraud: Inscribe bags $25 million to fight financial fraud with AI, reports Kyle.

4 practical steps for using no-code to evolve your prototype to an MVP

Forget about dogs: No-code development tools can be a nontechnical founder’s best friend.

Building a minimum viable product once required engineering and design ability. Now, bootstrapping founders can iterate without developers to keep costs and extend their runway.

“Instead of getting caught up trying to design the perfect and complete MVP release all at once, try to deliver value as quickly as possible and continuously improve your prototype,” advises Katherine Kostereva, CEO and managing partner of Creatio.

She shares four tactics for transforming prototypes into usable products via no-code:

Embrace an everyday delivery approach
Proper scoping and decomposition
Carefully manage and decouple dependencies
Invest in continuous deployment automation

Three more from the TC+ team:

Gewoon, gezellig: Haje spoke to HRH Prince Constantijn to figure out what’s going on in the Dutch startup scene.
That’s a Lot of Dollars: Energy transition investments hit $1.1 trillion — with a T — last year, Tim reported.
A near-perfect deck: Haje finds very little to complain about in his most recent Pitch Deck Teardown, of Orange’s $2.5 million seed deck.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

Apparently, “AI that can generate art, text and more is in for a reckoning,” Kyle writes today. He’s been following a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI that “accuses them of violating copyright law by allowing Copilot, a code-generating AI system trained on billions of lines of public code, to regurgitate licensed code snippets without providing credit.” Kyle lays it all out for you and even notes that cases like these against generative AI are just the beginning.

If you’ve been enjoying HBO’s new zombie thriller “The Last of Us,” you’ll be able to enjoy it a little longer. The show got picked up for a second season after delighting over 22 million viewers, Lauren writes.

Here’s your Friday five:

Gobbling up your information: Uber Eats has a new feature that shows you how much of your information is shared with delivery people, Aisha reports.
Lock and key: Speaking of features that protect what someone sees, Chrome for Android now lets you lock your incognito session, Ivan writes.
Texting with Walmart: Sarah tests out Walmart’s new “Text to Shop” feature that has a few bugs to work out — wait until you see what happens when she tries to add La Croix to her cart.
Taking the dating helm: Will Wu, former Snap VP of product, found his “Match” joining the parent company of popular dating apps as its new CTO, which was one of the changes made when Match restructured its executive leadership, Aisha reports.
Buyer’s remorse: After buying shares in African e-commerce company Jumia, investors are now rethinking that decision — for better and worse, Tage writes.