After quarters of explosive progress, a worthwhile Robinhood recordsdata to go public – TechCrunch

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch on July 1st, 2021. It’s Robinood IPO Day! That’s the headline, really. This afternoon, the American consumer fintech company filed for an initial public offering, which will prove to be an early contender for the most important IPO of the third quarter. We also have a metric ton of other startup news for you. And don’t forget that next week is the next TechCrunch event! Let’s go! – Alex

The TechCrunch top 3

• Robinhood goes public: When we first looked at the company’s IPO, we saw a rapidly growing consumer fintech company making money in 2020. The company posted a loss in the first quarter of 2021, but as TechCrunch reported, that loss is largely negligible. Robinhood closed the first quarter of 2021 with an annual maturity of more than $ 2 billion. Hot crap.
• Apple’s software rollout continues: After Apple discontinued public betas for iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 yesterday, Apple released the public beta version of macOS 12.0 Monterey. You can download it now if you are a brave person who wants to do some testing. For the rest of us, this is the sound of a corporate update required in our future.
• Articulate raises $ 1.5 billion in Series A: After much bootstrapping, corporate edtech company Articulate has raised a Series A round of $ 1.5 billion at a valuation of $ 3.75 billion. The oversized, supposedly early stage staged round was the main story of the day until Robinhood arrived and she shot into third place.

Startups / VC

To get back to some of the topics that TechCrunch has covered extensively over the past few weeks, there’s new news from Karat, a neobank aimed at the creator economy. Everyone wants to make money with creators starting to make money, it seems. And from the global startup market, TechCrunch has fresh notes on the future of European IPOs for those of you who are into such things.

Now the daily rounds:

• Nowports Raises $ 16 Million to Automate Latin American Freight: Supply chain software startups are big business, and Nowports is keen to join the boom. The latest round of the startup was led by Mouro Capital, with Nowports having backed around $ 24 million to date.
• Codat is raising $ 40 million to build the plaid for businesses: APIs are popular. Fintech APIs are very popular. And fintech APIs connecting individuals’ money to other businesses are plaid. Codat wants to build plaid, but for SMB financial data. And Tiger supports it now.
• Mercado Bitcoin Raises $ 200 Million For Its Bitcoin Market: With Coinbase’s direct listing and seemingly strong crypto trading volume in the second quarter, it’s no big surprise that fintech companies making it easier for consumers to buy Bitcoin are attracting attention. So it comes as no great surprise to see Brazil’s Mercado throw such a large check.
• Good news for hungry Europeans: If you want groceries, right now, “Rohlik, a Czech startup that has built an online grocery order and delivery business that sells groceries,” reports TechCrunch, has just raised 100 million euros in a round that the company won with 1 Euro valued billion.
• Ghost raises $ 100 million for crash prevention: How much money can self-driving auto technology raise? We learned at least nine digits more thanks to the new Ghost round. Ghost is also the name of a web content CMS. This is not that. Instead, this ghost is working on what TechCrunch called “universal collision avoidance technology” for autonomous driving systems.

To prevent data loss and abuse, the cybersecurity discussion needs to evolve

Locking down data centers and networks against intruders is only one aspect of a company’s security responsibility. Cloud services, collaboration tools and APIs extend the security perimeter even further. In addition, the systems that are designed to prevent the misuse and mishandling of sensitive data often depend heavily on the better angels.

According to Sid Trivedi, partner at Foundation Capital and seven-time CIO Mark Settle, IT managers need to replace existing DLP frameworks with a new one that focuses on DMP – protecting against data misuse.

These solutions “will add more sophisticated self-defense mechanisms to databases, rather than relying on traditional security perimeter surveillance,” and many startups are already competing in this area.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams move forward. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

We have revisited some of the topics we saw earlier in our startup section. The same applies to our view of big tech. On the government and tech side of things:

• India Doesn’t Appreciate Big Tech Companies, Part 47: Manish Singh reports that “The Central Bank of India has identified big tech’s foray into financial services as a challenge for banks in the South Asian market and says the growing presence of these companies raises concerns about creating an unequal playing field.” Think about India being upset about twitter too and having various other beefs with various tech companies.
• Paris fines Airbnb: To stick with the government issue, Airbnb was fined € 8 million today, a fee equal to 0.14% of the company’s $ 6.6 billion in cash it held at the end of the first quarter, according to the latest results report. The Daily Crunch would like to congratulate the City of Light on its auspicious regulatory victory.
• Lastly, from Pinterest, something that caught my eye while flipping through the news of the day: a ban on advertising for weight loss. Many people struggle with eating disorders, body image, and related issues. So Pinterest is eliminating one type of advertisement that could harm these people. With decisions like this, we don’t want to be too friendly to the company in question as we don’t know how much money it is leaving on the table, but the move could point to more active social media regulation of its own platforms in the US in the future. At least when it comes to advertising.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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We reach out to startup founders to let us know who to turn to for the latest growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here.

Read one of the recommendations we received below!

Marketer’s Name: Amy Konefal

Name of the recommender: Dan Reardon, formerly from vudu.com

Recommendation: “Amy drove us to scale as we grew into a half billion dollar company. She identified and used increases in efficiency and built up a rich portfolio of channels. “

Community

The Pittsburgh City Spotlight was a complete success! Many thanks to everyone who took part and to the over 80 companies that submitted to participate in our pitch-off. In case you missed the event, check out the Pittsburgh Mayor interview, our chat with the CMU President, and the latest on Duolingo from their director of technology.

Cool things happen in your city? Drop us a tweet about where you’d like us to be in the spotlight next.

TC Eventful

Photo credits: Stephanie McCabe / Unsplash

We’re rolling into the long holiday weekend here in the USA and are offering, in true American style, advance sales on July 4th for tickets for not just one, but all FOUR TechCrunch events in 2021: TechCrunch Early Stage (9/8), TC Disrupt (September 21-23), TC Sessions: SaaS (October 27) and TC Sessions: Space (December 14-15).

Our ticket sales for July 4th begins today through July 6th, where you two tickets for the price of one at one of these TechCrunch events soon on a virtual platform near you. At techcrunch.com/events you can find all of our events and secure your two-for-one tickets.