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Property tech startup Habi raises $10M to drive expansion in Latin America

Published August 26, 2020

When Brynne McNulty Rojas moved to Bogotá, Colombia four years ago, she encountered a fragmented real estate industry that lacked a central database for consumers to find or compare homes. Rojas was struck by the magnitude of the problem; she was also inspired by the opportunity.

Rojas and business partner Sebastian Noguera homed in on some of the biggest issues in the city’s real estate market, particularly for middle class buyers. They found a market where the average home took 14 months to sell; that figure drops to 10 months for middle class homes. It was a market that lacked price transparency and where sellers used analog tactics like posting a sign in the neighborhood in a futile attempt to attract buyers.

From these problems, Rojas and Noguera founded Habi, a property tech startup with a two-fold approach. The startup founders built a centralized database of residential real estate prices and trends — essentially a multiple listing service — and then used that information to create an automated pricing algorithm to buy and sell homes quickly and efficiently. The company buys, renovates and then sells homes, generating revenue off the margin. It also offers a tool that lets sellers estimate the value of their homes and a database that buyers can use to search for listings. The foundation of its business is its automated pricing technology, which was built using data from its real estate, financial and government partners.

“You can think of it as an MLS plus Opendoor model,” Rojas said in a recent interview. (Opendoor is the U.S.-based property tech startup backed by SoftBank.)

The Bogotá-based startup has now raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Inspired Capital, with participation from 8VC, Clocktower, Homebrew, Vine Ventures and Zigg. The round included angel investments from Flatiron Health and Looker. The company has raised $15.5 million to date.

Habi co-founders Brynne McNulty Rojas and Sebastian Noguera. Rojas is CEO and Noguera is president of the Bogota-based real estate startup. Image Credits: Habi

Since launching in fall 2019, Habi has scaled rapidly — and has even picked up speed during the city’s strict lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. Transaction volume has increased threefold since March, Rojas noted.

Rojas said its data-driven approach works, allowing the company to sell a home three times faster than the market average.

The company currently covers all of Bogotá. It plans to use this fresh injection of capital to expand to Medellin this month and eventually to other Latin American markets, according to Noguera, who previously ran the digital transformation at Banco de Bogota and co-founded Marqueo.

The founders also intend to eventually expand Habi’s services to become a “one-stop shop for everything related to the home,” Rojas said. In the long term, this might mean connecting consumers with moving, storage, furnishings and other services.

The bullish case for Palantir’s direct listing

Published August 26, 2020

The Palantir S-1 finally dropped yesterday after TechCrunch spilled a bunch of its guts last Friday. You can read the filing here, if you are so inclined.

Today, however, instead of our usual overview, I have a different goal: We’re going to be a bit more specific.

It’s fun and easy to clown on Palantir’s ridiculous ownership structure, in which a few dudes have decided that, in perpetuity, they must remain co-Lords of the Ring. And, sure, the company is smaller in terms of revenue-scale than many expected (a bit more Hobbiton than Bree, really). And, yes, its net losses are somewhat staggering (post-Helm’s Deep Saruman?), reaching nearly 100% of revenue in 2018.

But things have gotten better in Palantir-land (Mordor?) in recent quarters, which we should note.

So, in light of the generally negative reviews of Palantir’s finances (similar to what is left of Moria?) that I’ve seen in the media and from investors both publicly and privately, here are the bullish bits about the impending direct listing.

The good stuff

In brief, falling net losses in absolute and percent-of-revenue terms paint the picture of a company that is past a high-burn period, allowing profitability to continue to improve; improving gross margins point to a company that is less service-focused and more software-driven over time; the company’s falling operating cash burn is encouraging, and new customer revenue appears sharply higher in 2020 than 2019.

Let’s examine each in order:

Falling net losses in absolute terms: Palantir lost fractionally less money in 2019 than 2018, but it was a decline all the same. More recently, the first two quarters of 2020 have seen Palantir cut its net loss from $280.5 million in 2019 to $164.7 million. Even better, the company grew during the same period, which means that in percent-of-revenue terms, Palantir did even better.

The H-1B visa ban is creating nearshore business partnership opportunities

Published August 26, 2020

Andrés Vior
Contributor

Andrés Vior is the VP and country manager for Argentina at intive. A computer engineer who graduated from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), he is also a member of the Chamber of Software and Computer Services Companies of Argentina (CESSI).

In June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order temporarily suspending work visas for H-1B holders, which includes skilled workers like software developers.

Considering that 71% of workers in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs are international, the order poses a number of logistical and business challenges for startups.

While nearshoring was an option before the virus struck, the urgency to nearshore due to the visa ban, combined with the remote revolution taking place, has meant companies are reconsidering it as a solution. As a result, the suspension presents an opportunity for companies to bring on board software development capabilities from abroad.

Nearshoring is a way to hire teams in locations that share similar time zones and are easily accessible. Nearshoring also enables U.S. companies to utilize services from close locations, where the talent, working conditions, and salaries are more favorable. In fact, it can save businesses up to 80% on costs, while providing employees with flexibility, autonomy and better career development pathways.

Not only is nearshoring a pragmatic response to the visa ban, it has the potential to be a long-term hiring alternative for businesses. Here’s how:

Laying the groundwork for remote teams

Amid the pandemic, demand for developers has remained high, no doubt due to companies needing teams to build, maintain and optimize digital platforms as they transition to online services. The visa ban means that businesses in foreign markets can help meet such demand, particularly as tech talent from other countries comes with a fresh, different skill set that empowers companies to solve problems in new ways.

In the past, moving to the U.S. and living the American Dream oriented many foreign businesses’ professional paths. However, the trend has changed. The appeal of the United States was slipping prior to the virus — it ranked 46th out of 66 for “perceived friendliest to expats” — and post-COVID-19 may be even more detrimental.

In a more connected world, businesses and individuals can reap the benefits of U.S. opportunities — top technology stack, access to exciting companies and world-class research — without having to actually live in the country. In this respect, nearshoring means foreign teams have the best of both worlds: the comfort of home and ties to an international powerhouse.

The remote shift is demonstrating that teams can function well at a distance; some studies have even revealed that employee productivity and happiness benefit from remote work. In the global remote shift, nearshoring is being seen as an accepted and advantageous model. Companies that opt to nearshore in response to the visa ban can take advantage of the changing tides and use this time to lay the groundwork for best practices within remote teams. For instance, by devising policies for things like communication, tracking progress, vacation and development plans according to the new conditions and specific mission statements. As a result, businesses can seamlessly build professional partnerships.

Another advantage of nearshoring is that the flexible teams contribute to a ready-to-scale model for startups. By having development partners located in different countries, companies can network on a wider level and grow faster among local markets. Rather than start from scratch when expanding, nearshoring gives companies a presence — no matter how small — across regions, which can later be built upon.

Attracting fresh investment

Similar to having a readiness to scale, the H-1B visa suspension positions nearshoring as a viable way to strategically partner with foreign development studios. In contrast to offshoring, nearshored businesses are often more vested in the projects they work on because they share time zones and are thus able to work more closely and with greater agility. Within startups, such agility is essential to continuously test, iterate and pivot products or services. Outsourced teams often have defined outputs to achieve, while freelancers are split across several projects, so aren’t completely ingrained in companies’ visions.

With nearshoring, startups can target partners that have experience in a particular area of business or with a specific tech feature and accelerate their time to market. Instead of building systems from zero, they can launch into version 2.0 because the wider choice of experts means there’s a higher chance of partnering with teams who already understand how the industry functions. Nearshore partners also have vast knowledge across industrial fields at a level that is impossible for direct hires to have. Companies therefore don’t have to tackle the difficulty of curating a great team, because nearshore partners are an already solid pairing.

When it comes to funding, this synchronicity, agility and preparedness indicates that a startup has momentum. For investors, nearshoring shows that the company has on-the-ground insights about potential markets to disrupt, and that the business model can thrive using remote teams. As the world braces itself to go fully digital, startups that have already adopted remote processes that catalyze growth will no doubt catch the attention of investors.

Promoting greater diversity in teams

Latin America is a clear choice for U.S. businesses looking to nearshore. The region’s proximity, increasing internet penetration, and impressive number of highly skilled developers are all a significant draw.

It’s also worth noting that diversity plays a core role in nearshoring. Currently within tech, Hispanic workers are noticeably underrepresented, making up a mere 16.7% of jobs. Despite the physical distance, nearshoring in Latin America can bring people from different social and economic backgrounds into companies, boosting their visibility in industries as a whole, and setting a firm foundation for equality.

Studies also show that diversity influences creativity among teams, as well as increases company revenue.

Moreover, nearshoring accelerates diversity in a manner that isn’t disruptive. Foreign team members don’t have to sacrifice their home, friends and family to further their professional career. Relocating to the U.S. can be daunting for people who haven’t previously worked abroad, especially when factoring the change in living costs and new culture norms. Nearshoring means teams can work from locations they’re familiar with, so need less time to get up to speed on business processes. They additionally have the emotional support of their social circles nearby, which in the current climate is important for employees’ personal and professional wellbeing.

Leveraging the right partnership

Research is key to successfully find a nearshore company, and startups don’t always have the time and resources to conduct an in-depth analysis of locations and their ecosystems. The most practical manner to nearshore the right talent is with a nearshoring partner that is responsible for scouting, vetting and communicating with foreign developers.

To find an appropriate partner, ensure that they have previous experience in your industry and positive testimonials from startups in your location. They should also have a clear presence in the regions they operate in; try checking online for their press releases, events they sponsor and general content that validates they are active and respected.

Once you’ve found an appropriate nearshore partner, rely on them to know what teams in your preferred locations need in terms of culture. Nearshore partners will essentially be your development partner — you can leverage them to be your whole Research and Development department. They can guide you on the tech side of your business, advise you on the right team at the right time, give you direction on stack and methodology, and curate the right environment for the team to be productive. In contrast, hiring freelancers comes with risks because you won’t necessarily know the specific needs of the location they’re in. Be aware — if there’s a cultural disconnect, you risk not finding a partner, but a vendor that’s buying into a superficial version of your startup, as opposed to your real startup vision.

Once you’ve settled on a well-fitting nearshoring partner, ensure you have detailed contracts with all team members, as well as nondisclosure agreements. Nearshoring requires a level of mutual trust, however, at such an early stage of your company’s lifecycle, you need to know that your processes and data will not be revealed to competitors. Check that your nearshore partner’s financial status is secure and sufficient for a long-term model. Correspondingly, service level agreements will set the parameters for job responsibilities and deliverables. After all the formalities are covered, you can focus on curating fruitful, long-term relationships.

Acclimatizing in the new normal

The COVID-19 crisis has made recruitment a remote-dominated sphere. Traditional modes of hiring are being reassessed, and companies are realizing that teams don’t have to be in an office to be productive. In fact, not having to cover visa and administration fees for foreign employees is much more cost-effective for companies.

As time passes and businesses develop habits best-suited to remote work, nearshoring will become increasingly popular. People are prioritizing joining teams where their career development, well-being and ethics are protected, all of which nearshoring can offer with the added benefit of not completely upheaving workers’ lives.

Startups who embrace nearshoring early on could find themselves competing with top tech firms that struggle because of recruiting limitations. With the end of the pandemic unknown, and thus no hard deadline for the visa ban, tech companies have to look at alternative modes of building teams. Startups have the advantage of revising their remote product development approach without disturbing workflows too severely. They are also known for pioneering fairer and more innovative workplaces that are enticing for a broader scope of employees.

Nearshoring is mutually beneficial because developers don’t have to give up their culture for a great employment opportunity, and businesses can reap the benefits of diversification. Ultimately, the H-1B visa suspension could stimulate true globalization in tech, where companies can achieve their best performance using global resources.

Course Hero, a profitable edtech unicorn, raises rare cash

Published August 26, 2020

Like any successful founder, Andrew Grauer had bright, long-term ambitions for Course Hero from the moment he launched it in 2006.

He started the business to create a place where students could ask questions and get answers similar to Chegg, which launched 15 months before Course Hero . But as he slowly built it, he was tempted by a larger question: “What would a university look like if it was built by the internet?”

And so, the Redwood City-based startup itched at that nebulous goal throughout the years. Course Hero tested and failed products: free curated e-courses, in-person tutoring and teacher advice and ratings.

Clarity only came when Grauer realized that the core goal Course Hero launched with — giving students a place to ask and answer questions — wasn’t simply one product that should be fit into a broader suite of services. Instead, it was a thesis around which to build products. So, the startup began looking for different ways and formats to organize knowledge and questions and answers.

“That was a breakthrough insight,” Grauer said. The startup stopped launching other business verticals and decided to stick to Q&A as its core — and only — business. It sells Netflix -like subscriptions to students looking for access to learning and teaching content. Teachers and publishers can put course-specific study content on the platform.

Image Credits: Getty Images/manopjk

In 2020, Course Hero is a profitable business with annual run revenue upward of $100 million.

Today, Course Hero tells TechCrunch that it has raised a new tranche of capital in a Series B extension round of $70 million. The round is now totaling $80 million, bringing Course Hero’s total known venture capital to date to $95 million.

Its $80 million Series B round is one of the largest U.S. funding deals of 2020, and brings Course Hero’s valuation to $1.1 billion.

From a high level, the new raise is not surprising. Other edtech companies have also recently added on more capital to their balance sheets to meet remote learning demand amid the coronavirus pandemic.

But in Course Hero’s case, the new capital comes as a stark contrast to how the business functioned before 2020. After launching, the startup waited eight years to raise a $15 million Series A. Now, after going another nearly six years without raising venture capital, Course Hero has closed two rounds in this year alone.

Grauer tells TechCrunch that the capital will be used for operations, product innovation and feature development. It also plans to use the capital for future acquisitions (in 2012, Course Hero bought an in-person tutoring business).

Course Hero’s change of heart with venture capital boils down to the company meeting new scale demands. Last year, it passed 1 million subscribers on the platform. Now, it is eyeing “many millions” of students, the co-founder says.

Paraphrasing Bill Gates, Grauer said, “We do overestimate what we can do in just three years. And we dramatically underestimate what we can do closer to 10 years.”

Any edtech company that raises money off of current momentum in remote education will have to face the reality of what it is like to grow when remote learning is no longer a necessity. In other words, when the coronavirus pandemic ends, will these same platforms still find surges in usage?

“That’s the risk and reward of raising capital,” Grauer said. He added that “if you raise too much money early on, you can get misaligned expectations based on different time horizons set up by different terms of incoming shareholders or investors.”

Course Hero sees tailwinds in a dynamic that has been brewing since before the pandemic and will likely grow during and after: the growth of “nontraditional students” enrolling in and participating in higher education. Grauer noted that more than 40% of students work 30 hours or more per week. Over a quarter of students are parents, and of that quarter, over 70% are single moms.

“Because that’s the reality, and because we can make an affordable subscription and the economics can work, Course Hero is aligned to serving the majority, the real majority, and that’s the beauty of opportunity,” he said. There is a freemium model, but on an annual plan, a subscription costs $9.95 per month. On a monthly plan, a subscription costs $39.99 per month.

It’s not an opportunity the company hopes to expand into, it’s a reality of its diverse customer base. An internal data analytics survey of Course Hero shows that 58% of students that subscribe work at least part time. Over 25% of subscribers are 35 years old or older, and 22% of subscribers are parents.

Looking ahead, Course Hero hopes to continue to broaden its multisided marketplace.

In July, the business announced it is launching Educator Exchange, which allows college faculty to make money by uploading study materials for fellow teachers or students.

The “direct-to-faculty” relationship could pacify earlier tensions between the platform and teachers by giving the latter a way to monetize on how Course Hero “open sources” creative content on the point of copyright infringement.

Grauer compares Course Hero’s long-term vision to that of Google Maps, in that the platform can make recommendations of content based on other people’s usage.

But we’re not talking recommendations for the closest gas station. Based on how a user learns, Course Hero can recommend a specific professor who has a specific syllabus on a topic in which the user is interested.

“We’ve seen that specificity level differentiates us from others,” he said. “It helps students when they’re doing their real work, that one homework, that studying for one test. And I think that’s where the magic is for us.”

Edtech startups flirt with unicorn-style growth

Synthetic biology startups are giving investors an appetite

Published August 26, 2020

There’s a growing wave of commercial activity from companies that are creating products using new biological engineering technologies.

Perhaps the most public (and tastiest) example of the promise biomanufacturing holds is Impossible Foods . The meat replacement company whose ground plants (and bioengineered additives) taste like ground beef just raised another $200 million earlier this month, giving the privately held company a $4 billion valuation.

But Impossible is only the most public face for what’s a growing trend in bioengineering — commercialization. Platform companies like Ginkgo Bioworks and Zymergen that have large libraries of metagenomic data that can be applied to products like industrial chemicals, coatings and films, pesticides and new ways to deliver nutrients to consumers.

The new products coming to market

In fact, by 2021 consumer products made with Zymergen’s bioengineered thin films should be appearing at the Consumer Electronics Show (if there is a Consumer Electronics Show). It’s one of several announcements this year from the billion dollar-valued startup.

In August, Zymergen announced that it was working with herbicide and pesticide manufacturer FMC in a partnership that will see the seven-year-old startup be an engine for product development at the nearly 130-year-old chemical company.

Bingie is an app for all your streaming recommendations and debates

Published August 26, 2020

If you’re overwhelmed trying to choose the next movie or TV show to watch on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max or any other streaming service, Bingie could be the app for you.

You may recall a previous wave of TV recommendation apps from a decade ago, like Viggle and GetGlue. Those apps have largely disappeared, with most of us relying on social media and group chats when we want to talk about TV with our friends.

However, Bingie’s co-founder and CEO Joey Lane pointed out that the world has changed since then, with people needing more guidance than ever when it comes to navigating the streaming world. (Obligatory plug: TechCrunch has a podcast devoted to that very proposition.)

“I think the time is unique,” Lane said. “The amount of content that’s out there makes it such a big challenge.”

He recalled surveying potential users at the beginning of the year and having them say, “Let me show you this notes section of my phone with 60 titles and no idea where to watch them [and] no one to tell me, ‘Dude, that was horrible’ or ‘That was really great.’ ”

Image Credits: Bingie

So with Bingie, you can search for different shows and movies, then share a recommendation link with a friend and start a chat about that specific title, with a direct link to wherever people can stream that title. And if your friend isn’t on Bingie already, the app allows you to send them a link via SMS.

The Bingie team created the app (launching today, and currently iOS-only) with digital agency Wonderful Collective, and Wonderful’s Matt Knox is a co-founder of the startup. He described the startup’s approach to content discovery as “the human algorithm,” where you’re getting recommendations from people you care about, rather than relying on Netflix’s technology.

Lane added that his hope is to make Bingie the home for all your conversations and arguments about this content.

“There’s no politics, there are no pictures of food,” he said. “Here, it’s all about sharing this really, really fun content that’s out there in TV shows and movies.”

Netflix’s ‘Emily’s Wonder Lab’ is smart, interactive science TV for kids

LaunchNotes raises a $1.8M seed round to help companies communicate their software updates

Published August 26, 2020

LaunchNotes, a startup founded by the team behind Statuspage (which Atlassian later acquired) and the former head of marketing for Jira, today announced that it has raised a $1.8 million seed round co-led by Cowboy Ventures and Bull City Ventures. In addition, Tim Chen (general partner, Essence Ventures), Eric Wittman (chief growth officer, JLL Technologies), Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan (VP Product, LinkedIn), Scot Wingo (co-founder and CEO, Spiffy), Lin-Hua Wu (chief communications officer, Dropbox) and Steve Klein (co-founder, Statuspage) are participating in this round.

The general idea behind LaunchNotes is to help businesses communicate their software updates to internal and external customers, something that has become increasingly important as the speed of software developments — and launches — has increased.

In addition to announcing the new funding round, LaunchNotes also today said that it will revamp its free tier to include the ability to communicate updates externally through public embeds as well. Previously, users needed to be on a paid plan to do so. The team also now allows businesses to customize the look and feel of these public streams more and it did away with subscriber limits.

LaunchNotes helps companies better communicate their software updates

“The reason we’re doing this is largely because [ … ] our long-term goal is to drive this shift in how release communications is done,” LaunchNotes co-founder Jake Brereton told me. “And the easiest way we can do that and get as many teams on board as possible is to lower the barrier to entry. Right now, that barrier to entry is asking users to pay for it.”

As Brereton told me, the company gained about 100 active users since it launched three months ago.

Image Credits: LaunchNotes

“I think, more than anything, our original thesis has been validated much more than I expected,” co-founder and CEO Tyler Davis added. “This problem really does scale with team size and in a very linear way and the interest that we’ve had has largely been on the much larger, enterprise team side. It’s just become very clear that that specific problem — while it is an issue for smaller teams — is much more of a critical problem as you grow and as you scale out into multiple teams and multiple business units.”

It’s maybe no surprise then that many of the next items on the team’s roadmap include features that large companies would want from a tool like this, including integrations with issue trackers, starting with Jira, single sign-on solutions and better team management tools.

“With that initial cohort being on the larger team size and more toward enterprise, issue tracker integration is a natural first step into our integrations platform, because a lot of change status currently lives in all these different tools and all these different processes and LaunchNotes is kind of the layer on top of that,” explained co-founder Tony Ramirez. “There are other integrations with things like feature flagging systems or git tools, where we want LaunchNotes to be the one place where people can go. And for these larger teams, that pain is more acute.”

The fact that LaunchNotes is essentially trying to create a system of record for product teams was also part of what attracted Cowboy Ventures founder Aileen Lee to the company.

Image Credits: LaunchNotes

“One of the things that I thought was kind of exciting is that this is potentially a new system of record for product people to use that kind of lives in different places right now — you might have some of it in Jira and some in Trello, or Asana, and some of that in Sheets and some of it in Airtable or Slack,” she said. She also believes that LaunchNotes will make a useful tool when bringing on new team members or handing off a product to another developer.

She also noted that the founding team, which she believes has the ideal background for building this product, was quite upfront about the fact that it needs to bring more diversity to the company. “They recognized, even in the first meeting, ‘Hey, we understand we’re three guys, and it’s really important to us to actually build out [diversity] on our cap table and in our investing team, but then also in all of our future hires so that we are setting our company up to be able to attract all kinds of people,” she said.

Atlassian acquires StatusPage

Cisco acquiring BabbleLabs to filter out the lawn mower screeching during your video conference

Published August 26, 2020

We’ve all been in a video conference, especially this year, when the neighbor started mowing the lawn or kids were playing outside your window — and it can get pretty loud. Cisco, which owns the WebEx video conferencing service, wants to do something about that, and late yesterday it announced it was going to acquire BabbleLabs, a startup that can help filter out background noise.

BabbleLabs has a very particular set of skills. It uses artificial intelligence to enhance the speaking voice, while filtering out those unwanted background noises that seem to occur whenever you happen to be in a meeting.

Interestingly enough, Cisco also sees this as a kind of privacy play by removing background conversation. Jeetu Patel, senior vice president and general manager in the Cisco Security and Applications Business Unit, says that this should go a long way toward improving the meeting experience for Cisco users.

“Their technology is going to provide our customers with yet another important innovation — automatically removing unwanted noise — to continue enabling exceptional Webex meeting experiences,” Patel, who was at Box for many years before joining Cisco, recently said in a statement.

In a blog post, BabbleLabs CEO and co-founder Chris Rowen wrote that conversations about being acquired by Cisco began just recently, and the deal came together pretty quickly. “We quickly reached a common view that merging BabbleLabs into the Cisco Collaboration team could accelerate our common vision dramatically,” he wrote.

BabbleLabs, which launched three years ago and raised $18 million, according to Crunchbase, had an interesting, but highly technical idea. That can sometimes be difficult to translate into a viable commercial product, but makes a highly attractive acquisition target for a company like Cisco.

Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, says this acquisition could be seen as part of a broader industry consolidation. “We’re seeing consolidation taking place as the big web conferencing players are snapping up smaller players to round out their platforms,” he said.

He added, “WebEx may not be getting the attention that Zoom is, but it still has a significant presence in the enterprise, and this acquisition will allow them to keep improving their offering.”

The deal is expected to close in the current quarter after regulatory approval. Upon closing, BabbleLabs employees will become part of Cisco’s Collaboration Group.

Daily Crunch: Judge says Apple can’t block Unreal Engine

Published August 25, 2020

Epic Games wins a victory against Apple, Fitbit announces a new smartwatch and Microsoft Word adds a transcription feature. This is your Daily Crunch for August 25, 2020.

The big story: Judge says Apple can’t block Unreal Engine

U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers weighed in on the legal battle between Epic Games and Apple with a mixed verdict. She denied Epic’s motion to restore the popular game Fortnite to Apple’s App Store, but also ordered Apple not to block Epic’s developer accounts or to restrict developers on Apple platforms from accessing Epic’s Unreal Engine tools.

“Apple has chosen to act severely, and by doing so, has impacted non-parties, and a third-party developer ecosystem,” Rogers said.

A full hearing on the dispute is scheduled for September 28.

The tech giants

Fitbit launches a $330 Apple Watch competitor — The Sense is designed to be a premium alternative to the Versa line, described by the company as its most advanced health smartwatch.

Facebook is bringing a Shop section to its app, while Instagram expands Live Shopping — Facebook Shop doesn’t sound too different from the similarly named Instagram Shop, where users can browse products from their favorite brands and businesses.

Microsoft brings transcriptions to Word — This new feature lets you transcribe conversations, both live and pre-recorded, and then edit those transcripts right inside of Word.

Startups, funding and venture capital

YC’s most anticipated startup raised $16M from a16z before Demo Day — Trove sells a suite of internal compensation tools to other startups.

Self-charging, thousand-year battery startup NDB aces key tests and lands first beta customers — NDB has created a new, proprietary nano diamond treatment that allows for more efficient extraction of electric charge from the diamond used in the creation of the battery.

Instacart workers are demanding disaster relief amid CA wildfires — Gig Workers Collective, a gig worker-activist group led by Instacart shoppers, is asking Instacart to provide disaster relief to workers impacted by natural disasters.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

How to establish a startup and draw up your first contract — We invited James Alonso from Magnolia Law and Adam Zagaris from Moonshot Legal to join us at TechCrunch Early Stage to give us a 360 overview of the legal side of running a startup.

Unity, JFrog, Asana, Snowflake and Sumo Logic file for IPOs in rapid-fire fashion — Alex Wilhelm does a big roundup of new IPO filings.

As DevOps takes off, site reliability engineers are flying high — The emergence of site reliability engineers is not a new trend, but one closely coupled with the theme of DevOps over the last decade.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Netflix’s ‘Emily’s Wonder Lab’ is smart, interactive science TV for kids — TV science host (and former TechCrunch contributor) Emily Calandrelli told us that “Wonder Lab” is the realization of a concept that she’s been pitching for years.

Porsche experiments with subscription pricing, expands to Los Angeles — Porsche now has three tiers under its newly rebranded Porsche Drive vehicle subscription program.

Meet the Disrupt 2020 ‘TC10’ — The TC10 is a group of entrepreneurs, investors, etc. who have been a staple of our Disrupt conference over the past decade. And they’re all coming back!

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Our 12 favorite startups from Y Combinator’s S20 Demo Day: Part 2

Published August 25, 2020

Figma for filmmakers, TikTok for English learners and a cryptocurrency twist that actually makes sense?

After 197 pitches, Y Combinator’s Demo Day for its Summer 2020 cohort has concluded. While the fanfare, run-ins and fortune cookies were missing in this virtual session, it was still exciting to see and hear founders from 26 countries pitch their passions. Of course, some opted for a more quiet route, raising millions before the two-day pitch session even kicked off.

Members of the Summer 2020 class drew attention from nearly 2,400 investors across the world. For those who didn’t tune in, no worries: here’s our write-up of the companies that presented yesterday.

Participating startups spanned a number of sectors: we saw companies in the future of work, sustainability, no-code, consumer, edtech and delivery solutions. Several entrepreneurs aimed big at e-mail, small at socks and straight at Shopify’s recent success.

While TechCrunch reporters aren’t in the business of cutting checks or predicting success, read on to learn about the 12 startups that stuck out to us for a variety of reasons (apart from their Zoom backgrounds).

Our 11 favorite companies from Y Combinator’s S20 Demo Day: Part 1

CarbonChain

Jonathan Shieber

CarbonChain may be the company that times the carbon market correctly. Now that the European Union and other regions are taking a serious look at penalizing businesses that fail to reduce carbon emissions, a service that provides accurate accounting for a company’s carbon footprint will be increasingly valuable.

And if the company can add marketplace and offsetting services on the back of its assessments, then its proposition becomes even more valuable. But what really makes CarbonChain stand out is the rigor with which it approaches its measurements.

The company uses independent software tools to make a digital twin of the carbon-emitting assets in a company’s business and claims that it can determine the emissions footprint of operations down to a cup of coffee (it also has models for the carbon footprint of heavy industrial equipment in the world’s most polluting industries).

For the world to address its carbon emissions, companies must understand their contribution to the problem. CarbonChain could be an invaluable tool in that effort.