Bluesky and Mastodon users are fighting over the future of social

Good morning, and welcome to TechCrunch AM for February 15, 2024. Remember Evernote? The note-taking app that everyone used when Android and iOS lacked anything that could compete? Well, the app’s parent company has raised a huge round now.

Today’s newsletter also features a look at the future of distributed social networking; new AI tech that is flaunting major progress; and drugs made in space. As TechCrunch’s resident science-fiction nerd, I can’t resist anything that involves rockets and space, so I’m all for that last bit. Let’s dive in!

– Alex

TechCrunch Top 3

1. Evernote’s parent raises $155M: Bending Spoons, the Italian mobile app company that owns Evernote, Meetup and photo-editing service Remini, has raised a nine-figure round at a $2.65 billion valuation. The company is expected to make more acquisitions with its latest capital infusion, and could generate $500 million worth of revenue this calendar year.
2. Bluesky and Mastodon are fighting for the soul of social media: While the market praises Meta’s financial performance, two smaller social companies are sorting out whether or not they want to play nice with one another. Bluesky and Mastodon are decentralized social networks, but on different protocols. Should third-party developers be able to bridge them? (Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also argued recently that Meta’s choice to not recommend political content on some of its platforms is evidence of why her company’s model is superior.)
3. How lucrative is investing in crypto startups? After a largely miserable 2023, web3 startups are starting 2024 with a much better outlook. Crypto prices are up, bitcoin spot ETFs are racking up numbers, and spot-trading levels have risen since last summer’s lows. Still, it appears venture investors aren’t making as much money as you’d think from their crypto investments.

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Text-to-speech AI models are getting smarter: LLMs get lots of attention for their ability to write intelligent sentences, but text-to-speech AI models are also advancing rapidly. A team at Amazon recently discovered that as they increased the data size to create “the largest ever text-to-speech model yet,” the resulting technology got much better. Indeed, the model started showing “emergent” capabilities to handle very complex sentence structures, Amazon’s team said.

Space drugs cleared for landing: Varda Space, a startup that wants to take drug manufacturing into orbit, has been cleared to bring back its low-gravity-produced pharmaceutical crystals to the planet. The company took a while to get the approval, but this marks a key step for the startup – and for the rest of us who could benefit from specialized, in-orbit manufacturing.

Alibaba looks to shed IRL stores: When Alibaba started touting the idea of “new retail” that would meld online and offline shopping in 2017, the Chinese e-commerce giant held a very different market position (for context, its share price was higher in 2017 than it is today). Since then, new rivals have taken to the battlefield, and Alibaba itself went through the regulatory wringer. Now, the company wants to divest some of its physical retail businesses.

Solar startup Arnergy catches $3M worth of fresh rays: The Nigerian power grid has a long way to go before it can meet the country’s energy needs. Arnergy wants to improve the situation by bringing solar power and batteries to more businesses and homes. After raising a $9 million Series A back in 2019, the company recently returned to raise a modest bridge round. Solar power is getting cheaper and battery tech is slowly improving as well, so the combination holds a lot of potential for Arnergy.

GM is taking its self-driving tech to the country: If you own a GM vehicle, you may be familiar with Super Cruise, the company’s hands-free driving technology that has so far been quite limited in terms of where it could be used. In 2022, GM expanded its total purview to more than 400,000 miles of roads in the United States and Canada. Now, the automaker is targeting 750,000 total miles, which will include “rural and minor highways that often connect smaller cities and townships,” Kirsten Korosec reports. As long as self-driving cars continue to improve, I am content. Driving is the worst.

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