Reddit's month gets worse, OpenAI's (possible) app store, and the latest on that lost submersible

A whistleblower raised safety concerns about OceanGate’s submersible in 2018. Then he was fired. More in TechCrunch.

Reddit's month just went from bad to worse. Courtesy of The Verge: "A ransomware group is claiming responsibility for a hack on Reddit’s systems earlier this year — and demanding not just money but policy changes. BlackCat, a ransomware group, says it was behind the February phishing attack on Reddit, as previously reported by Bleeping Computer. In a post shared by researcher Dominic Alvieri, BlackCat claims to have stolen 80GB of data from Reddit and threatens to release it publicly if demands aren’t met. The group wants a $4.5 million payout in exchange for the data and also demands Reddit roll back its planned API pricing changes that spurred user and moderator protests last week." More here.

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Jason Del Rey has spent the last 15 years reporting on e-commerce businesses, including Walmart and Amazon. Now, in a new book that hit shelves today called Winner Sells All, he tells the broader story of Walmart -- which long focused on preserving what it had built -- and its epic battle with Amazon, whose land-and-expand strategy has led it into the lucrative cloud-storage business, the grocery business, the logistics industry, hardware and even Hollywood.

Indeed, what began as an annoyance to Walmart and later evolved into a bare-knuckle fight has in more recent years turned into an existential crisis for the 61-year-old business -- and Del Rey finds out what the company is doing about it. At the same time, he examines the challenges that 29-year-old Amazon increasingly faces, including a growing inability to move quickly as it once did and its stubborn reluctance to address serious criticisms.

With access to Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, Jeff Wilke, the now-former CEO of Amazon's Worldwide Consumer business, and 150 other sources, including other executives at both companies, the story the Del Rey tells is about innovation but it's also about what the growth of these two giants have meant for consumers, for their employees and even for the environment. We talked with him yesterday, excerpts from which have been lightly edited below for length.

I wonder if you knew going into this that this would be a story of how Walmart has only ever tried to play catch up to Amazon, and often fallen short. Amazon's market cap is more than three times bigger than Walmart's at this point -- $1.3 trillion to 400 billion. The book seems to underscore that this rivalry is over. Would you say that's accurate?

The book does lean in rather heavily to the Walmart tenure of CEO Doug McMillon over the last 10 years and all the trials and tribulations of an amazingly successful company being faced with an upstart that it first ignores, then pays attention to, but doesn't really execute well on its competitive strategy. Inside the company a lot of you know, the CEO chief among them felt like [by 2016] that, 'If we don't make up some ground soon, I know it sounds ridiculous to some people, but we may really not be around in a couple of decades.'

You say in the book that you once spoke with U.S. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, whose district includes Amazon's hometown of Seattle and she said Amazon's usual response to critics is that there's just a blanket dismissal of any criticism being real. Do you share that same observation?

Amazon is now an easy target for different groups -- often for some really credible reasons, but there are also hosts of people who just love to hate the company. That said, in the last few years, especially with regard to how they've interacted with powerful people in government, [Amazon has] just shown either a lack of awareness or just arrogance [and] unnecessarily made more enemies than they needed. [Meanwhile] Walmart execs, whether self-serving or not, have gone on listening tours of critics over the years, at least pretending to want to hear the other side of things.

Slow-moving Walmart wanted Quidsi and lost it to Amazon; it lost PillPack to Amazon. Leaving aside Amazon's cultural issues, labor relations issues, and DOJ issues, etc., have you been particularly surprised by any of Amazon's own operational missteps?

A lot of media and even folks in tech assumed Amazon would enter physical retail as the innovator and the smartest guys and gals in the room and just kind of get it right, and it's really been a pretty big failure to date.

More here.

Attovia Therapeutics, a startup based in Fremont, Ca., that plans to develop medicines for autoimmune diseases and cancer, raised a $60 million Series A round led by Frazier Life Sciences, with venBio and Illumina Ventures also contributing. BioPharma Dive has more here.

KoBold Metals, a five-year-old Berkeley startup that says it is using AI to explore for metals such as copper, lithium, and cobalt, raised a $195 million Series B round at a $1.15 billion valuation. T. Rowe Price was the deal lead, while BOND, Standard Investments, Equinor Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BHP Ventures, Mitsubishi Corporation, Earthshot Ventures, and the July Fund also participated. The company has raised a total of $212.5 million. The WSJ has more here.

ElevenLabs, a one-year-old Brooklyn startup whose AI platform can turn text into speech using synthetic voices, cloned voices, or entirely new voices that mimic the sounds of people of various genders, ages, and ethnicities, raised a $19 million Series A round. Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and Cue cofounder Daniel Gross co-led the deal, with additional participation from Creator Ventures, SV Angel, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, and Deepmind and Inflection AI co-founder Mustafa Suleyman. The company has raised a total of $21 million. TechCrunch has more here.

GreenPlaces, a two-year-old startup based in Raleigh, NC, that links a customer’s operational data with its sustainability benchmarks through integrations with thousands of existing business tools, raised a $13 million Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures, with Felicis, Tishman Speyer Ventures, and Bull City Venture Partners also chipping in. More here.

Guardian Agriculture, a six-year-old startup based in Woburn, Ma., that is developing autonomous electric drones for use in commercial farming, raised a $20 million Series A round. Fall Line Capital was the deal lead. The company has raised a total of $35 million. AgFunder News has more here.

Parrot, a four-year-old Miami startup whose transcription platform provides speech-to-text depositions for the legal and insurance industry, raised an $11 million Series A round. Amplify Partners and XYZ Venture Capital co-led the deal. The company has raised a total of $14 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Yendo, a two-year-old Dallas startup that issues a credit card secured by vehicle equity, raised a $24 million Series A round led by FPV Ventures and including Human Capital, Autotech Ventures, and Mark Cuban. The company has raised a total of $92.5 million. Axios Pro has more here.

BrainTale, a five-year-old Paris startup that develops and distributes diagnosis and prognosis tools that decipher white matter to enable better brain care, raised a $4.9 million round. Investors included Capital Grand Est and MACSF. The company has raised a total of $6.1 million. Silicon Canals has more here.

Digantara, a five-year-old Bengaluru startup that is focused on providing tools to enable better satellite traffic management, raised a $10 million round. Peak XV Partners was the deal lead, while Global Brain, Campus Fund, and previous investor Kalaari Capital also participated. The company has raised a total of $12.5 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Gladia, a one-year-old Paris startup that claims its audio transcription API is faster and cheaper than existing alternatives, raised a $4 million seed round led by New Wave, with Sequoia Capital and Cocoa also taking part. TechCrunch has more here.

Glystn, a two-year-old San Francisco startup that allows content creators to engage with followers, gather insights, and read/answer comments from multiple social media platforms from a single dashboard, raised a $4 million seed round from Eniac Ventures, Hannah Grey VC, Precursor Ventures, and Future Perfect Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Hyperline, a Paris startup that handles pricing and billing for software-as-a-service companies, raised a $4.4 million seed round led by Index Ventures and including Cocoa. TechCrunch has more here.

Kitt, a five-year-old London startup that provides an office makeover service for office spaces and helps companies manage the booking of spaces, raised an $8 million seed extension round. Hoxton Ventures led the transaction. The company has raised a total of $15.9 million. Tech.eu has more here.

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Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, a pair of founders turned startup investors, have quietly raised an investment fund with more than $1 billion in assets to invest in AI and infrastructure startups, according to a regulatory filing first spied by The Information. The personal websites of both men also say they are investing $1 million to $100 million "at a time."  More here.

Illuminate Financial, a nine-year-old, London-based venture firm, says it has raised $235 million in capital commitments for its third fund from investors, including Bank of New York Mellon and Euroclear. The fund will invest in startups that offer tech services to financial institutions; its LPs include JPMorgan Chase & Co., Barclays and Jefferies Financial Group. Bloomberg has more here.

An India-based climate-focused venture capital firm, Avaana Capital, has held a first close on $70 million in capital commitments, aided by limited partners like India's Small Industries Development Bank of India and UK India Development Cooperation Fund. Avaana Climate and Sustainability Fund aims to hold a final close on between $100 million and $125 million in capital commitments. Reuters has more here.

USA Today publisher Gannett is suing Google for allegedly illegally monopolizing the advertising technology market, adding to an already-extensive list of lawsuits against the company for alleged anti-competitive behavior. It also echoes arguments made by the U.S. Department of Justice in its second lawsuit against Google. CNBC has more here.

Singapore-based Grab Holdings, Southeast Asia's leading ride-hailing and food delivery app, is cutting 1,000 jobs or 11% of its workforce, its CEO said today citing the need to manage costs and ensure more affordable services long term. Reuters has more here.

Olx Group, the online marketplace and classifieds business arm of Prosus, has cut around 800 jobs globally. Today’s move comes as the company started to close operations of its automotive business unit Olx Autos in some markets. TechCrunch has more here.

Ali Farhadi, a computer vision specialist and startup founder who most recently led Apple’s machine learning initiatives, will rejoin the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence as the second CEO in the non-profit research organization’s history. GeekWire has the story.

SoftBank founder and CEO Masa Son, 65, said he intends to keep running the company and has found no successor.  More in Bloomberg.

Twitter employees are suing the company, claiming it refuses to pay 2022 bonuses, despite promises that they would be paid out at 50% of their target amounts.

OpenAI is reportedly considering launching a marketplace in which customers could sell AI models they customize for their own needs to other businesses. App stores are lucrative, notes The Information; the move could also be a push to collect more high quality data for the purposes of improving ChatGPT, notes one of its readers. More here.

Jack Ma-backed Ant Group is now developing large-language model technology that will power ChatGPT-style services, joining a list of Chinese companies seeking to win an edge in next-generation artificial intelligence. Bloomberg has more here.

People are using AI to automate responses to a site that pays them to train AI.

How Christopher Nolan learned to stop worrying and love AI.

How your expectations form the way you experience the world.

John Oliver: face of the Reddit API protest.

"We Don’t Look So Bad Now, Do We?" says Carnival Cruise ad in response to missing submersible.

The 11 best steakhouses in the world (according to Michelin).

Backyard bars.

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