To get TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3pm PDT; Register here.
Hello and welcome to your Friday. Has the week been long or fast for you? Or maybe you had the day off. Anyway, I’m here to present you with today’s technological goodness. Today’s lesson: “Never leak information.”
Oh, and support our colleagues in Chain Reaction and Found Podcasts: They’ve been nominated for a Webby, so please support them by voting until April 20th. — Christine
TechCrunch’s Top 3
- That’s a one-spice app.ByteDance’s latest hit, Lemon 8, which some describe as a cross between Instagram, Pinterest and Amazon, is now in the top 10 apps in the US. Rita Lemon 8 is similar to another app called Xiaohongshu and explains why ByteDance has taken another page from China’s playbook.
- Prepare your unicorn hornYou’ll need a TechCrunch+ subscription to read this next, but I promise, it’s worth it. Alex He went on a unicorn IPO hunt and came back with a list of names, “The first batch of upcoming unicorn IPOs is shaping up nicely.
- In a galaxy far, far awayIf you’re a Star Wars fan, Disney+ is launching a new series in 2024 called “The Acolyte.” Aisha He wrote that this story takes place before the events of the main Star Wars movies at the end of the High Republic era.
Startups and VCs
Everyone needs good competition to keep the creativity flowing. KyleDevin and Manish Collaborated to oversee Anthropic’s $5 billion, four-year plan to adopt OpenAI. Walking through the company deck, the trio describes the business model that’s taking Anthropic to where it is and the investors behind it.
Wrapping up the week, as mentioned yesterday, we were the group watching Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 demo day. Artificial intelligence and open source were the big buzzwords on Day 1, but Day 2 made us wonder why crypto is back and why accountants are suddenly falling in love.
VCs to Remarket Startups: Let’s take some accounts
Image Credits: Kinga Krzeminska (Opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Thanks to the general interest in sustainable marketing, remarketing is growing to new heights, and VCs are looking for what’s to come.
In the year After ET went public in 2015, companies like Poshmark, The Real Real, and thredUP followed suit, attracting more investors to the sector. Last year, VCs poured nearly $6 billion into reselling platforms, writes Brian Schwarzbach, an investor at Cathay Innovation.
In a post for TC+, he explores three remarketing niches attracting VC funds and shares “ideas for founders building startups in this (re)space.”
TechCrunch+ Our membership program helps founders and startup teams stay ahead of the pack. You can register here.. Use code “DC” for 15% off annual subscription!
Big Tech Inc.
Sometimes things don’t go as planned. In India, the central bank has decided to put a pause on a plan to rival the country’s flagship payments system, the Unified Payments Interface. Manish The project, called a new umbrella institution, has attracted interest from large companies and financial institutions and invited bids to license new retail payment and settlement systems to operate in India by 2021, he wrote. However, the project failed to get the sizzle and pop that the Reserve Bank of India wanted.
Catch a falling iPhone and put it in your pocket…Harry The toddler-like iPod that can do it all: music, videos and books, no smartphone or smartwatch needed. Even if you are not sure how to read on a small thing. I guess we’ll see.
And we have five more for you:
