Layoffs hit Instacart, Mozilla as tech companies sharpen focus

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Happy Valentine’s Day! May it be full of candy and comfort. Today’s TechCrunch AM focuses on Mozilla’s future plans, big rounds raised by software testing and Latin American fintech startups, layoffs at Instacart, and a blizzard of Big Tech updates. Let’s dive in!

– Alex

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Mozilla is narrowing its focus to work more on Firefox, which, TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois writes, is bound to make the browser’s fans happy. However, there’s a cost: Mozilla is cutting staff and some product work, including its Mastodon instance and its Hubs virtual world effort. The company is moving several teams under Firefox itself. Let’s see if the changes can help the well-known browser grab some market share from Chrome, Edge and the like.
Antithesis wants to remake software testing: Flush with $47 million in new capital, the former makers of FoundationDB, a distributed database platform that was sold to Apple, want to use simulated environments that mimic hardware to allow for continuous code checking. This startup is not alone in tackling software testing, a large space that includes Qase and CodiumAI.
Instacart cuts staff: 2024’s wave of tech layoffs is hitting companies of all sizes. Grocery delivery company Instacart is letting go of 7% of its personnel, or around 250 jobs. That’s a lot of savings, and the company told its backers that the cuts will help it build a flatter organization. A leaner, faster team is not something that Instacart is the first tech company to cite in its choice to downsize.

Image Credits: Mozilla

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Foundry to close after current fund: Despite raising a $500 million fund somewhat recently, Foundry Group isn’t going to raise another. The firm had raised $3.5 billion during its lifetime, but its backers say that they didn’t intend to build a firm that would stretch to a second generation of investors. Fair enough, but still a slightly novel ending to a long venture saga that saw the firm backing successful companies like Fitbit and Zynga.

Earlybird Health closes larger, second fund: With a second fund worth €173 million, Europe-focused healthtech investors at Earlybird are sticking to their thesis and sector. This is great, since we saw many venture firms raise larger funds in 2021, but the trend has reversed somewhat since.

France’s Alan looks to AI to bolster profitability: We just can’t stop talking about France, can we? This time, it’s Alan, a French insurtech startup that has become quite large, but remains unprofitable. But the startup is hopeful that with the help of modern tooling it can grow its revenue at a quick clip this year without a commensurate rise in its expense base. That’s operating leverage, and we love to see it.

Intuitive Machines takes aim at the Moon: We tend to consider Lunar milestones in nation-state terms, but Intuitive Machines wants to become the first private company to land a spacecraft on Earth’s OG satellite. If the upcoming launch goes well, Intuitive Machines’ spacecraft will enter orbit around the Moon and try to touch down. We’ll be watching.

Roam recharges with fresh capital to scale its EV business: EV companies have been a thing in North America for a while now, and China has its share of successes in the space, but other parts of the world are hardly idle in developing their own EVs. Roam, for one, is a Kenyan EV company that just added $24 million to its own coffers.

Fintech in Latin America is still venture-backable: Colombian payments startup Bold just raised $50 million. That’s a big check in a region that has seen venture capital interest fade in recent years. The round is also a win for fintech startups in LatAm more generally — it was a popular niche during the last venture boom, but has seen its capital inflows slow in recent quarters.

Andrej Karpathy dips from OpenAI: TechCrunch is famous for having boomerang employees. Folks work here, go away, and then come back when they discover that life outside of their home publication isn’t always replete with greener grass. Karpathy had left OpenAI to go join Tesla back in 2017, and now the research scientist is out once again. He insists there’s no drama and he wants more time instead for personal projects.

And from the world of Big Tech: TikTok is building a feature that will give creators more ways to hang out with their subscribers. It’s called “Sub Space,” and you have to wonder how the name made it through brand checks, but here we are.

Airbnb also wants to use AI to become a better concierge, and is working on those despised cleaning fees. Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks that his company’s VR headsets are better than Apple’s offerings; Waymo is updating its self-driving software, and Akamai doesn’t intend to allow mega-cap tech companies control over edge computing.

Image Credits: mustafaU / Getty Images

Before you go

Why does everyone want me to eat more mushrooms? I consider mushrooms to be useful as pizza toppings but little else, but they can apparently do everything. They can be used to make fake leather, energy drinks, and in the case of Spacegoods, a powdered drink that will help you relax and put you in a better mood.

I always thought that other, greener plants were good at that, but perhaps mushrooms will sit well in the herbal pantheon. Bottoms up!