Welcome, guys, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter that recaps the major events in tech over the past few days. If you’re too bothered to follow game-by-game developments, you’ve come to the right place. This is the purpose of WiR.
In this edition of WiR, we cover Teamshares, a New York-based venture capital-backed startup that is quietly buying up convenience stores; Zepto, which becomes India’s first unicorn of 2023; OpenAI, which launches ChatGPT for enterprise customers; and Google, which unveils BigQuery Studio, a “new way” to work with data. We’re also highlighting Apple’s upcoming press conference, where it’s expected to announce the iPhone 15, as well as new travel-friendly features in Google Flights, a Brazilian phone spyware hack, and more.
If you haven’t already, sign up here to get WiR in your inbox every Saturday. Now, without further ado, here is the week’s news!
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They were neighbors: Teamshares has big ambitions to capitalize on an opportunity that exists in plain sight: the small business opportunity with no succession plan. Although Teamshares says it sometimes pays below market price for the company, it hires a new president and gives 10% of the company’s shares to its employees. aAccording to co-founder and CEO Michael Brown, the plan is instead to generate revenue from a growing range of fintech products that it sells to companies that buy them.
Newly made rhinoceros: Instant grocery delivery startup Zepto said it has raised $200 million in a new $1.4 billion funding round, at a time when most other companies in the category have died or are struggling. Zepto, which sells and delivers everything from groceries to electronics, processes more than 300,000 orders a day in seven Indian cities. The company plans to go public in 2025.
ChatGPT comes to the enterprise: Seeking to capitalize on the viral success of ChatGPT, OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise, a business-focused version of the company’s AI-powered chatbot app. ChatGPT Enterprise adds “enterprise-grade” privacy and data analytics capabilities over vanilla ChatGPT, as well as enhanced performance and customization options.
Google launches BigQuery Studio: Unveiled at the Google Cloud Next conference this week, BigQuery Studio is a new service within BigQuery, Google’s fully managed service Without a server data warehouse. The service provides a single experience for editing programming languages, including SQL, Python, and Spark, to run analytics and machine learning workloads at “petabyte scale.” With BigQuery Studio, teams can directly access data wherever they work and benefit from added controls for “enterprise-level” governance, regulation, and compliance.
New iPhone arrival: Apple’s next iPhone event is scheduled for September 12. The company sent out invitations to this week’s press conference, which is once again scheduled to be held at Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino. The iPhone 15 will almost certainly be the centerpiece of the big show, Brian wrote, and the Apple Watch Series 9 will likely appear alongside the Vision Pro, Apple’s AR headset, before the latter launches in 2024.
Alerts regarding cheap flights: Google Flights is launching a new feature to help travelers better determine the right time to book. This week, the company began rolling out new insights that leverage historical trend data to let users see when prices were typically lowest to their chosen destination on selected dates. In some cases, Google will refund the difference if the price drops before you check out.
Brazilian phone spyware hacked: A Portuguese-language spyware called WebDetetive has been used to hack more than 76,000 Android phones in recent years across South America, mostly in Brazil. WebDetetive is also the latest phone spyware company to be hacked in recent months. In an undated memo seen by TechCrunch, anonymous hackers described how they found and exploited several security vulnerabilities allowing them to compromise WebDetetive’s servers and access its user databases.
Amazon increases shipping fees: Amazon is increasing the free shipping minimum to $35 for customers who don’t have a Prime membership in some regions. Until now, the minimum for free shipping was $25. Amazon says it’s testing the new free shipping limit randomly by zip code clustered areas and that everyone in the same area will see the same free shipping limit.
Babylon’s health is collapsing: It’s the end of the road for Babylon Health, the London telehealth startup that was once valued at nearly $2 billion after it was backed by DeepMind’s founders and some deep-pocketed health insurers. After the US company’s shares became worthless and its operations went bankrupt earlier this month, the company’s UK subsidiary officially entered judicial administration this week. Meanwhile, officials sold a significant portion of its assets to eMed Healthcare UK, a new subsidiary of the US company eMed. Ingrid has the full story.
The new law allows users to terminate the algorithm: Internet users in the European Union registered a quiet revolution on major social networks this week: the ability to say “no thanks” to an artificial intelligence hack for attention. Thanks to the bloc’s Digital Services Act, users of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat can easily reject “personalised” content feeds based on “relevance” (i.e. tracking) – and switch to a more modest type of news feed filled with posts from their friends displayed in chronological order.
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If you’re looking for a podcast to fill your work hours (say, your workday commute), this is good news. TechCrunch hosts a few that fit the bill.
This week on justice, the crew looked at how “great” founders successfully steered their companies toward cash flow positivity. The episode featured Anu Hariharan, who previously worked with a16z, is a Brex board member and recently invested in later-stage companies at Y Combinator.
Meanwhile, it’s over is found, Ida Josefina, co-founder and CEO of Sane, a social knowledge sharing platform, sat down for an interview. Josefina spoke about how her foray into existential thoughts and the power of collective intelligence set her on a journey to start this company.
And Chain reaction The spotlight is on Craig Salem, Chief Legal Officer at Grayscale Investments. Grayscale is a digital asset investment firm that aims to provide products and services, such as Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, to institutional and retail investors. The company was founded in 2014 and is now one of the largest digital asset currency management companies in the world.
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TC+ subscribers get access to in-depth commentary, analysis and polls – which you know about if you’re already a subscriber. If not, consider subscribing. Here are some highlights from this week:
All products are garbage: Hage writes that as we move deeper into the last stage of capitalism, a paradoxical phenomenon is taking shape. Despite economic prosperity enabling more people to purchase high-quality goods, there appears to be an overall trend toward lower quality and inability to dispose of them. In short: Even if you can afford high-quality products that are designed and manufactured to last, they are becoming increasingly difficult to find.
IPO drought: The volume of startup exits has been weak since the end of 2021. But it’s easy to get used to new market conditions and lose track of how long those conditions have lasted, Alex and Anna write — and how different they are from what came before. They break down new data on IPOs — or rather, the recent lack of IPOs.
Instacart S-1: Speaking of IPOs, Alex and Anna have also been digging into Instacart’s SEC paperwork since last week. What does the startup have in store for its existing investors and those who might be looking to snap up some of its shares at its IPO? They are trying to answer this pressing question.
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