Startups

Daily Crunch: Corporate management startup Ramp doubles its valuation to $8.1B with new financing

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Ramp raises $750 million at an $8.1 billion valuation
Image Credits: Ramp / Ramp co-founders Karim Atiyeh, Eric Glyman and Gene Lee

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, March 21, 2022! Short and to the point today: Follow our newest hire, the excellent Jacquelyn Melinek, who joined the TechCrunch+ team as a senior crypto reporter. We’re super stoked to have her aboard! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Tech talent flees Russia: As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds along, technology companies of all sizes are trying to figure out how to handle their business operations and staff. TechCrunch spoke to several founders and investors about how they are handling the crisis. The gist is that Russia’s tech industry has become a pariah from a venture capital perspective, and little human capital wants to remain within its borders.
  • Which SaaS company is next? After news broke that PE shop Thoma Bravo will drop more than $10 billion on financial planning software company Anaplan, TechCrunch wanted to know who might be next. With a host of software companies having endured valuation haircuts in recent months, and private equity having lots of cash, are we heading for a deal bonanza?
  • Ramp raises (again): The startup battle for dominance in the corporate spend market is huge, expensive and rapidly growing. That’s what I took away from today’s news that Ramp has raised more capital, at a higher price, and scaled revenues by around 10x last year. Brex is also busy in the space, as is Airbase.

Startups and VC

Kicking off the day’s startup news, a report … not about a startup. Instead, let’s talk about India’s crypto tax changes, which will impact a host of startups in the country. TechCrunch reports that “India’s proposed taxation law of virtual digital assets won’t permit individuals to offset loss on one asset against profit from another.” As you can imagine, the news isn’t welcome in many quarters.

  • Tire company invests in autonomous shuttle startup: I love this story. First, who thinks of tire companies when it comes to startup investments? No matter, Bridgestone has bought a piece May Mobility, a Michigan-based startup working on self-driving people carriers.
  • Gama wants you to sail the solar rays: Solar sails are science-fiction staples. I just read a whole novel that turned around their being useful ways of getting around the empty. Anyhoo, startups want to make the concept more commercially viable, and, to that end, French startup Gama just raised $2 million.
  • Plotlogic wants to reform mining vision: The visible light spectrum – for humans, at least – is neat but incomplete. There’s more out there to see. Plotlogic wants to bring that concept to mining with “hyperspectral imagery.” If the tech can make mining more efficient, it could cut its carbon footprint, right?
  • Finally raises $95M for its SMB finance suite: Everything is fintech, so it won’t surprise that you that Finally, which offers bookkeeping and other software products to SMBs, is working to roll out a lending product. Everyone collects data. Data powers underwriting. So, soon expect your grocery store to offer you a revolving credit line based on what cereal you bought.
  • Today in Unicorns: Another day, another two new unicorns. On the docket today is a nine-figure round for CommerceIQ for its e-commerce software that it claims can provide real sales lift, and Glia, what we described as a “AI-based CRM” solution provider, which just raised a $45 million round at a $1 billion valuation.

And to close out our startup coverage today, not all startups are out to make money, and some have more mission-driven objectives than growth goals. Such may be the case with U.K. accelerator Subak’s latest cohort – six companies in its 2022 group that we describe as “data-for-climate not-for-profits.” It’s always fun to look at the newest, smallest companies.

Why so many SaaS companies are launching their own media operations

Cloud computing in photography studio
Image Credits: Peter Dazeley (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Content as a service?

In the last few years, Salesforce, Hubspot, Shopify and other enterprise companies have begun scaling their own media operations.

Online audiences are accustomed to consuming well-produced videos, podcasts, infographics and other media. As a result, simple blog posts lost their luster years ago, found reporter Ron Miller. To see what startups can learn from SaaS’ new approach to content marketing, he interviewed several analysts and experts.

“If I’m a CMO, I have to ask how I get access to these audiences,” said Robert Rose, founder and principal analyst at The Content Advisory.

“I can either continue to rent it through the access that Facebook or Google gives me, which are increasingly walled gardens, or I can start to build it on my own or acquire it.”

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Why so many SaaS companies are launching their own media operations

Big Tech Inc.

  • E-commerce growth is slowing globally: Tracking the growth of e-commerce globally in 2020 was simply adding up the latest gains, but 2021 brought a more sober picture of the digital commerce market. One that is, per public company data, slowing. For startups building in the space, there’s still growth to be had, but less than before.
  • Zomato wants to pull off 10-minute deliveries: The race to get consumers goods and food more quickly is a global competition. India’s Zomato intends on launching a service called Zomato Instant. OK. We wonder if the costs to the company’s operations will be worth it from a consumer-value perspective.
  • Tesla unveils news master plan: The company behind the most famous EVs in the world has a new long-term plan, its CEO Elon Musk disclosed today. Per the well-known Twitter user, the plan’s topics include Tesla “scaling to extreme size,” among other matters like space rockets and boring through the Earth. Shoutout recent add to the transit desk, Jaclyn Trop, for this one.

More TechCrunch

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during its I/O 2024 by its own count. CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Everything announced so far

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google gets serious about AI-generated video at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google reveals plans for upgrading AI in the real world through Gemini Live at Google I/O 2024

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade

At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .

Google’s generative AI can now analyze hours of video

The AI upgrade will make finding the right content more intuitive and less of a manual search process.

Google Photos introduces an AI search feature, Ask Photos

Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially…

Apple touts stopping $1.8B in App Store fraud last year in latest pitch to developers

Online travel agency Expedia is testing an AI assistant that bolsters features like search, itinerary building, trip planning, and real-time travel updates.

Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we look at the drama around TabaPay deciding to not buy Synapse’s assets, as well as stocks dropping for a couple of fintechs, Monzo raising…

Inside TabaPay’s drama-filled decision to abandon its plans to buy Synapse’s assets

The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch has learned. The…

Threat actor scraped Dell support tickets, including customer phone numbers

If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and…

On Elon’s whim, X now treats ‘cisgender’ as a slur

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch the AI reveals live

Facebook once had big ambitions to be a major player in enterprise communication and productivity, but today the social network’s parent company Meta will be closing a very significant chapter…

Meta is shutting down Workplace, its enterprise communications business