CB Insights - Amazon inches toward drone delivery

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This week in data, we've got the reported largest single-day valuation drop ever for a US-listed company, a $200M renewable energy contract, a black hole 142x the size of the sun, and more. Check it out below.

+1.4M jobs: The US economy added 1.4M jobs last month, bringing the unemployment rate to 8.4%. Though the level of unemployment is the lowest reported since April, it remains significantly higher compared to before the pandemic and the rate of new job creation has slowed over the summer. Read about how Covid-19 is reshaping industries like healthcare, retail, and finance in this report.

-$180B: Apple’s market cap decreased by about $180B on Thursday — the largest single-day drop ever for a US-listed company according to Barron's — as its share price declined by 8% amid a broader sell-off of tech stocks.  

-50%: Juul is reportedly planning to lay off about half of its workforce. The company, which helped popularize vaping, has seen a dramatic change in fortunes over the last year. It was valued at as much as $50B in early 2019 — making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world at the time — but its most recent funding in February was reportedly just a fraction of this. See the current most valuable unicorns in this infographic.

30 minutes: Amazon received approval from the US Federal Aviation Administration for its Prime Air drones. The certification brings the company closer to eventually launching a commercial drone delivery service, which it says could allow some packages to be delivered within 30 minutes of an order being placed. Drones are set to transform more than just e-commerce — see 38 ways the tech could impact society in this analysis. 
 

+1 edtech unicorn: India-based edtech company Unacademy became a unicorn after raising $150M at a $1.4B valuation in a mega-round led by SoftBank. The company offers an online platform for watching classes and preparing for tests. We dig into how tech could transform education in a post-Covid world in this report. 

$200M: Chicago announced a $200M contract to make all city-owned buildings powered by renewable energy by 2025. Expert Intelligence clients can  see tech companies working to make cities more sustainable in this market map. 

$1.2B: Patreon, a platform that helps users monetize creative content, raised $90M at a unicorn-minting valuation of $1.2B. Smart Money VC Index Ventures was an early backer of the startup, first investing when it was valued at just $75M. See where Smart Money investors are currently placing early-stage bets in this report.

-3,280 feet: The deepest freshwater cave in the world, Hranice Abyss in the Czech Republic, was found to extend about 3,280 feet into the ground, according to a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The new figure is more than 2x the previous estimate.
 

142 solar masses: Astronomers detected the biggest collision yet observed between 2 black holes. Occurring about 7B years ago, the merger created a new black hole that was about 142x the size of the sun — an intermediate size that hadn’t been detected before. 

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Romance scams are nothing new. People fall in love with a fake online profile and are duped into sending cash. Then, the object of affection disappears without a trace.  

In 2020, the romance scam has found a new form: the object of affection isn’t even human. People are getting swindled in their search for pandemic puppies, with the number of pet scams tripling from mid-February through July compared to the same period last year. 

Scammers are posting these fake listings of dogs — with adorable pictures stolen from popular pet influencers — on carefully faked adoption websites or Craigslist. In some cases, buyers actually received the pets listed — they were just stolen.