Goodbye passwords, hello Google passkeys

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

In today’s top story, Google makes passkeys the default sign-in method for all users. Just don’t misplace it.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of changes going on over at X, the company formerly known as Twitter. First, we hope you don’t always want to comment because a new setting lets only verified accounts reply to a post. Second, your view of what’s newsy may not match X’s. There were some changes to its public interest policy to redefine “newsworthiness” of posts.

And Zest Equity, a UAE-based startup digitizing private market deals, raised $3.8 million in seed funding to provide a place to make all of those private market deals quicker. Read more.

Image Credits: Martin Barth / EyeEm / Getty Images

The Q3 venture capital market explained in five charts

The global venture capital market failed to turn the corner in the third quarter of 2023, instead racking up another quarter’s worth of declines in most parts of the world.

The data, however, can become a little bit abstract in numerical form. So, today, the TechCrunch+ team has charted the most important venture capital data we’ve seen thus far to help you better understand where global startup investing really is today. See where deal count and deal activity were the best and worst.

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.

On the pods

This week on Found, we’re joined by Giovanni Fili, the founder and CEO of Exeger, a startup that creates flexible solar cells that can create electric energy off of any light condition.

Fili talked about what it has been like devoting the last 15 years of his career to a company based on tech that hadn’t previously been proven to work.

He also talked about running a deep tech company as a nontechnical founder and how he’s built a capital-intensive startup off of relatively little funding. Listen here.