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Oh heeeeeey. We’re back with another crunchy edition of our Tues-daily Crunch.
With Early Stage behind us, we’re setting our sights on our Disrupt event that’s coming up — and Alex just shared the agenda for the Builders Stage. Come check it out — and get your tickets for Disrupt sooner rather than later!
Our favorite story this morning was Rebecca admitting she actually had fun at Fatboy Slim’s metaverse rave, and now we’re regretting that we missed it.
The TechCrunch Top 3
- This is only a test: Yesterday, Elon Musk tweeted a photo of his Twitter account, which seemed to show Musk also logged into another account that looked like @ErmnMusk with the name “Elon Test.” Is this a burner account? We don’t know. Amanda has more.
- Another car bites the dust: When other carmakers are saying “the more the merrier” when it comes to building electric vehicles, General Motors is “bolt”ing for the door on a few of its models. Kirsten reports that GM is killing off both the Chevy Bolt and Bolt EUV in favor of other EVs.
- Fly me to the moon: Aria and Devin have been monitoring ispace, a Japanese company that attempted to land on the moon for the first time. Unfortunately, ispace lost contact with its lunar lander just moments before it was supposed to make the landing.
Startups and VC
Data is becoming as precious as water in precision agriculture, and Hydrosat aims to help provide both with a new set of Earth-observation satellites, Stefanie reports. The company has raised a $20 million Series A round, including $5 million in non-dilutive funding, which should put the first two thermal infrared satellites into orbit.
Survey a lot of industrial warehouses and you’ll see a lot of cages. It’s a safety thing — effectively a way of ensuring that robots don’t accidentally hurt people. They’re big, fast and made of metal. We’re small, squishy and don’t always look where we should, Brian explains. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the best we’ve had for a long time — until robotics safety firm Veo raised $29 million, with help from Amazon, that is.
Heavy on the AI news today. Here’s a fistful of tasty snacks for ya:
How to pitch me: 5 investors discuss what they’re looking for in April 2023
Image Credits: MirageC (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Walter Thompson asked five investors to share some frank advice for first-timers and found that most aspiring founders are probably not yet ready to pitch an investor.
If you haven’t spoken to scores of customers, or created a contact spreadsheet for at least 25 investors who’ve backed companies like yours, for example, it’s too soon.
And if your team added “AI” to the pitch deck to make it more appealing, here’s some more bad news: FOMO is passé, and due diligence is the new black.
Here’s who participated in this month’s investor Q&A:
- Rudina Seseri, founder and managing partner, Glasswing Ventures
- Patrick Salyer, partner, Mayfield Fund
- Josh Constine, venture partner, SignalFire
- Alexa von Tobel, managing partner, Inspired Capital
- Oren Yunger, partner, GGV Capital
Three more from the TC+ team:
TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!
Big Tech Inc.
Mark Zuckerberg announced that WhatsApp is rolling out multi-device support, and users can log into the same WhatsApp account on up to four phones, Ivan reports. Meta has been testing this feature since 2021.
Meanwhile, Kyle writes that in pursuit of “safer” text-generating models, Nvidia released a toolkit called NeMo Guardrails to make AI-powered apps more “accurate, appropriate, on topic and secure.”
And we have five more for you: