Pet roosters, Fancy founders, and Shein becomes entangled with China's top cybersecurity watchdog

Welcome back to what proved a comparatively slow news day (we are not complaining).

The Supreme Court has refused to hear Apple's appeal of a lower court's ruling that the $3 trillion tech giant must allow App Store developers to use outside payment methods, thus potentially costing Apple many billions of dollars in revenue. 

Shortly ahead of its official February 2nd release date, Apple sent out a bunch of Apple Vision Pro units to journalists for one last go-around, but as Cult of Mac concluded, the $3,499 headset's true killer app might be neck pain. 

German researchers confirm what you already intuit, that Google search is getting worse, and SEO spam and generative AI may be a big reason why.

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Electra, a Paris startup that building a network of fast-charging EV stations in France and other European countries, raised a $330.7 million Series B round co-led by PGGM and Bpifrance, with additional participation from previous investors Eurazeo, RIVE Private Investment, 574 Invest, and Serena. TechCrunch has more here.

HashKey Group, a five-year-old Hong Kong startup that runs a cryptocurrency exchange and provides products including digital asset custody software and a hosted blockchain infrastructure, raised approximately $100 million at a $1.2+ billion post-money valuation. OKX Ventures was one of the lead investors. SiliconANGLE has more here.

Quantinuum, a two-year-old startup Honeywell spinout based in Broomfield, Co., that makes quantum computers, raised a $300 million at a $5 billion valuation led by JPMorgan, with Mitsui & Co., Amgen, and Honeywell also participating. Honeywell retains majority ownership in the company. The company has raised a total of $625 million. Bloomberg has more here.

Carmoola, a two-year-old London startup that provides car financing via an app, raised a $19.6 million Series B round. Investors included QED Investors, VentureFriends, InMotion Ventures, AlleyCorp, and u.ventures. Finextra has more here.

Disco Pharmaceuticals, a startup that specializes in discovering new therapeutic targets by mapping the cancer cell surface, raised a $21.8 million seed round. AbbVie Ventures, M Ventures, and Panakès Partners all invested. Endpoints News has more here.

Onera Health, a six-year-old Dutch startup that help clinicians conduct sleep studies in patients’ homes, raised a $32.6 million Series C round co-led by EQT Life Sciences and Gimv, with previous investors Innovation Industries, Invest-NL, imec.xpand, BOM, and 15th Rock also taking part. TechCrunch has more here.

Sakana AI, a year-old Tokyo startup that is aiming to build small generative AI models that don't need a lot of data, raised a $30 million seed round at a $200 million post-money valuation. The deal was led by Lux Capital and included Khosla Ventures, Sony, and NTT. Bloomberg gas more here.

Trojan Energy, a seven-year-old startup based in Aberdeen, Scotland, that provides on-street EV charging, raised a $32.9 million round. BGF and previous investor Scottish National Investment Bank were the deal leads. Insider has more here.

Weavix, a two-year-old startup that sells radios and software aimed at helping companies manage and communicate with their frontline workforces, raised a $23.6 million round led by Insight Partners. The company has raised a total of $33.6 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Xyte, a three-year-old Tel Aviv startup that enables hardware OEMs and their channel partners to build subscription services for devices,
raised a $20 million Series A round led by Intel Capital, with Samsung Next as well as previous investors S Capital and Mindset Ventures also chipping in. BlackRock also provided a $10 million venture debt line. TechCrunch has more here.

Detected, a four-year-old London startup that provides KYC services for clients looking to onboard business customers, raised a $2.4 million round from previous investors Thomson Reuters Ventures and Love Ventures. EU-Startups has more here.

Meiro, a five-year-old Singapore startup that helps brands engage with their customers, raised a $3 million pre-Series A round. Wavemaker Partners was the deal lead. Tech.eu has more here.

QDI Systems, a five-year-old Dutch startup that is developing imaging devices that use nanomaterial quantum dots for medical applications, raised a $5.4 million Series A round led by NOM, with previous investors Carduso Capital, RuG Ventures, and Maki.vc also contributing. More here.

Spot Technologies, a five-year-old El Salvador startup that provides cloud networking and computer vision technology for retail security cameras, raised a $2 million round. Investors included Femsa Ventures, Bridge Latam, Daedalus, Kuiper, and Casque. TechCrunch has more here.

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Darkmode Ventures, a new fund co-founded by Amir Shevat, a former head of Twitter’s developer platform, has raised a $5 million fund to invest $100,000 to $200,000 in approximately 35 Israeli startups. Darkmode will target investment in companies focused on open developer platforms, enterprise AI, and the modern data stack. CTech has more here.

Thomvest Ventures, a 25-year-old San Francisco- based venture firm founded and funded by Peter Thomson (his family is the majority owner of Thomson Reuters), is announcing a new $250 million fund to invest in the next generation of companies across the firm’s core focus areas of financial and real estate technology, cybersecurity, and cloud and AI/data infrastructure. This new fund will bring the outfit's total assets under management to $750 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Helios, a Tel Aviv startup that helps developers troubleshoot and understand their microservices in production, has been purchased by Snyk, a UK startup valued at $8.5 billion in 2021 that provides tools for developers and organizations to find and fix vulnerabilities in their code. The only capital Helios has raised is a $5 million seed round co-led by Entrée Capital and Amiti VC. TechCrunch has more here. 

Uber is shutting down alcohol delivery service Drizly three years after the cab-hailing company acquired it for $1.1 billion, as first reported by Axios. At the time of the acquisition, Uber planned to integrate Drizly into Uber Eats, but it never did, and some speculate now that a 2020 data breach that impacted 2.5 million Drizly customers might have been a major gating factor. In a statement to TechCrunch, Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, SVP of Delivery at Uber, told the outlet simply that: “After three years of Drizly operating independently within the Uber family, we’ve decided to close the business and focus on our core Uber Eats strategy of helping consumers get almost anything – from food to groceries to alcohol – all on a single app. We’re grateful to the Drizly team for their many contributions to the growth of the BevAlc delivery category as the original industry pioneer.”

China’s powerful internet regulator is conducting a cybersecurity review of Shein’s data handling and sharing practices as the fast-fashion company seeks Beijing’s blessing for its planned IPO. As the WSJ notes, similar investigations have taken months to complete and in the worst case, the plan could be scuttled altogether.

Elon Musk appears to be pressuring his board to increase his bonus. Yesterday, he tweeted that he is "uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control." Musk currently has a 12% stake in Tesla thanks to his decision to sell Tesla stock in order to finance his purchase of Twitter. (Can anyone say "shareholder lawsuit"?)

Founder Joseph Einhorn, known best for his 2010s e-commerce site The Fancy, an upscale shoppable Pinterest rival, is back with a new luxury goods e-commerce startup dubbed Long Story Short that has a provocative concept: charge customers $1,000 per month for the privilege of shopping its curated collection.

Adam Boutin has joined the venture firm Greycroft in its San Francisco office, where he'll be leading climate tech investing for the Greycroft Coca-Cola Sustainability Fund, announced last summer. Boutin previously spent eight years with Capital One Ventures.

No big surprise here: metaverse funding is drying up. Crunchbase News has the stats.

According to new data by the research group IDC, Apple in 2023 became the world’s top smartphone maker by volume for the first time, ending Samsung’s 12-year reign as the industry leader as consumers trade up to higher-priced handsets.

Renaissance Capital sold all its holdings in Airbnb and Palantir, and bought more shares of Robinhood and Rivian Automotive in the quarter per stock trades filed with the SEC and spied by Barron's. A senior strategist told the outlet of the moves: “We sold Airbnb and Palantir in our fourth-quarter rebalance because by that point they had been publicly traded for more than three years. The Renaissance IPO exchange-traded fund is designed to hold unseasoned equities not found in many core portfolios.”

Davos kicks crypto to the curb; at the World Economic Forum, it's all about AI.

It turns out it's much easier to train an AI to be evil than to reverse the process.

A man is suing a whole lot of people and companies for talking about him in the "Are We Dating the Same Guy?" Facebook group.

It's so cold in Chicago that Teslas are struggling to hold a charge.

The Bear's Ayo Edebiri stokes her very own Internet meme.

A rooster reads the paper with his granddad. ❤️

Uh, ghost kitchen to the max.

Bookshelf wealth.

Jewelry encoded with love.

Now you can feel the heat with either an infrared sauna blanket or a Saunabox.