Lucid zooms past Ford, Staples Center gives way to Crypto.com Arena, and divisive chicken project in Georgia

*TUESDAY.* (Hello.)

* Electric vehicle carmaker Lucid Group’s market value blew past Ford Motor today to $89.9 billion following a 24% run-up its price after executives told investors that reservations for its first vehicles had jumped and that its production plans for 2022 are still on track. Lucid could next eclipse General Motors, which has a market cap of $90.9 billion. CNBC has more here.

* The UK government has launched an in-depth antitrust investigation into Nvidia's $40 billion purchase of Arm. Earlier today, Digital and Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries ordered the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to undertake the investigation in response to findings that the deal could create "real problems" to competition. The U.S. chipmaker giant announced it was going to purchase Arm from SoftBank last September. ZDNet has more here.

* Goodbye, Staples Center; hello, Crypto.com Arena.

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Nader Al-Naji, a crypto entrepreneur who today lives in L.A., has been on a roller coaster in recent years — and he doesn’t pretend otherwise.

In 2018, roughly 16 months after raising $140 million from investors for a cryptocurrency startup that aimed to develop a stablecoin, Al-Naji and his Princeton classmates returned $130 million when they couldn’t make a go of things. As Al-Naji came to realize at the time, Basis’s technology road map and U.S. securities regulations didn’t quite mix.

That didn’t stop Al-Naji from trying again. Instead, two years ago, he began work on DeSo, which he describes as a blockchain that was built from the ground up to power social applications and whose most renowned app is BitClout, a kind of stock market that invites people to bet on the popularity of influencers and celebrities by buying tokens linked to their profiles.

BitClout took off last spring in part because it scraped the profiles of tens of thousands of Twitter users, then awarded different amounts of “creator coins” to each profile to populate the app. But along with attention and curiosity came contempt by users surprised to see their names associated with the project, and speaking at a San Francisco event late last week, Al-Naji told interviewer Erin Griffith of the New York Times that he regrets ever rolling it out.

More here.

*Anydesk, an eight-year-old, Stuttgart, Germany-based maker of remote access software, has raised $70 million in new funding led by General Atlantic, with participation from earlier backers Insight Partners, EQT Ventures and Possible Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

* Facily, a two-year-old, São Paulo, Brazil-based social commerce marketplace, has raised $250 million in Series D funding co-led by DX Ventures and Berlin-based Delivery Hero, with Citius as co-anchor investor. Other investors include Glade Brook, Tiger Global, Hill House, Luxor, Quona Capital, Monashees, Canary and Tru Arrow. TechCrunch has more here.

* H1, a 4.5-year-old, New York-based LinkedIn for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, has raised $100 million in Series C funding led by Altimeter Capital, with participation from Goldman Sachs, Flex Capital, and earlier backers IVP, Menlo Ventures, Transformation Capital, Lux Capital and LeadEdge. H1 has raised $171 million to date. FierceHealthcare has more here.

* Mensa Brands, a seven-month-old, Bangalore-based startup that acquires direct-to-consumer brands and helps them scale within their home market and overseas, has raised $135 million in Series B funding led by Falcon Edge Capital, with participation from Prosus Ventures and earlier investors Tiger Global, Norwest Venture Partners and Accel. TechCrunch has more here. 

* PlanetScale, a three-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based server-less database company founded by the co-creators of the Vitess open source project that powers YouTube, has raised $50 million in Series C funding round led by Kleiner Perkins. Earlier investors a16z, SignalFire and Insight Partners also participated in this round, together with GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Lattice CEO and founder Jack Altman and Instacart co-founder Max Mullen. The company has now raised a total of $105 million. TechCrunch has more here.

* StarkWare, a four-year-old, Netanya, Israel-based startup that builds an Ethereum scaling solution called StarkNet, just raised $50 million in Series C led by Sequoia Capital. The raise comes months after the firm raised a $75 million Series B led by Paradigm, the crypto VC firm. The outfit is now valued by its backers at $2 billion. TechCrunch has more here.

* Upgrade, a 5.5-year-old, San Francisco-based lending company founded by Renaude Laplanche (he previously founded Lending Club), has raised $280 million in Series F funding just four months after closing its previous financing. Coatue Management and DST Global led the round; CNBC has more here.

* Cognixion, a seven-year-old, Santa Barbara, Ca.-based startup designing an intuitive brain-monitoring headset and interface for people with physical disabilities, has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Prime Movers Lab, with participation by Northwell Health, Amazon Alexa Fund and Volta Circle. TechCrunch has more here.

* Facet, a four-year-old, Bay Area-based maker of what it calls content-aware imagine editing software, has just raised $13 million from Two Sigma Ventures, with participation from Accel, Basis Set Ventures, Slow Ventures and South Park Commons. TechCrunch has more here.

* Velocity, a 1.5-year-old, Bangalore, India-based startup that operates a revenue-based financing platform for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer businesses in the country, has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Valar Ventures, which also led Velocity’s seed round earlier this year. The company has now raised $30 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.

* Deskimo, a months-old, Singapore-based on-demand app that lets people find co-working spaces and pay by the minute, has raised $3 million in seed funding from Y Combinator (Deskimo was part of its summer 2021 cohort), Global Founders Capital, Pioneer Fund, Seed X, Starling Ventures and TSVC. TechCrunch has more here. 

* Goodles, a 17-month-old, Santa Cruz, Ca.-based new macaroni and cheese brand cofounded by serial entrepreneur Jen Zeszut, has raised $6.4 million in funding from Springdale Ventures, Willow Growth Partners, and Third Craft, among others. TechCrunch has more here. 

* NFTfi, a 1.5-year-old, South Africa-based platform that acts as a marketplace where users can get a cryptocurrency loan on their NFTs and offer loans to borrowers against their NFTs, has raised $5 million in funding, from Sound Ventures, Maven 11, Scalar Capital, Kleiner Perkins and others. TechCrunch has more here.

* Nirvana Health, a 1.5-year-old, New York-based startup that streamlines the day-to-day business functions of practice management for therapists, has raised $7.5 million in additional seed funding, bringing an earlier seed round to $12 million. Inspired Capital led the newest tranche, joined by earlier investors Eniac Ventures, RTP Seed and Arc Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

* SnapAttack, a months-old, Columbia, Md.-based threat hunting startup that was just spun out from the IT consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Volition Capital, with participation from Strategic Cyber Ventures and Booz Allen Hamilton, which is retaining a “significant” minority stake in the standalone company. TechCrunch has more here.

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* London firm Balderton is today announcing its latest fund, a $600 million war chest targeting early-stage investments. The fund is Balderton’s biggest yet earmarked for seed and Series A bets, and it comes five months after the firm closed a $680 million fund for later and growth-stage investments. TechCrunch has more here.

* Section 32 has closed its fourth fund with approximately $740 million in capital commitments from returning and new investors, says the firm. The new vehicle brings assets under management for Section 32 to more than $1.8 billion. To-date, the San Diego-based outfit (founded by Google Ventures founder Bill Maris) has made investments in more than 70 companies, including the now publicly traded companies Coinbase, Crowdstrike, and Relay Therapeutics. More here.

Talkspace sank 36% today, the most since merging with a blank check company earlier this year, after its third-quarter report came up short on sales. The nine-year-old, online mental health company has lost almost half its market value over the past two weeks in a rout that deepened today after it withdrew its guidance and cofounder and CEO Oren Frank left the company. The venture capital-backed firm is now worth about $329 million after going public in a $1.4 billion deal with Hudson Executive Investment Corp., a special purpose acquisition company run by former JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive Doug Braunstein. Bloomberg has the story here.

* Global investors are pouring money into Pakistan’s budding tech sector. Funding this year has outstripped the last six combined.

* A handful of the nation’s most powerful financial technology companies made a splashy announcement in April aimed at grabbing the attention of federal policymakers starting to consider a crackdown on cryptocurrency. But seven months later, says the Washington Post, the council still hasn’t opened its doors in Washington. Nor has it hired any staff. The apparent sticking point? Who will be its chief executive.

* It's hard to see how Bobby Kotick, the longtime CEO of videogame giant Activision Blizzard, does not resign in five, four, three . . .

* What it's like to be a hand model.

* A polarizing chicken topiary (three words we didn't imagine using together).

* An ode to dogs.

* Zabar's gift baskets. ❤️

* A Timex by Todd Snyder.

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