🚴 Delivery Wars!
Facebook struggles, Wordle hits the jackpot & Hackers take $325bn
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
10 tech & startup stories in 110 super short seconds.
📉 2022 = The Worst Year to IPO? Sifted has written a really interesting blog on this topic here.
🐟 Engineering Management? Jellyfish wants to do ‘for engineering what Salesforce did for sales’. They’ve developed a nifty product that lets engineering managers track work and ship features for users. Read more here.
📅 Makers Schedule vs. Managers Schedule. For us here at the Grapevine, this is THE must read blog if you work with software engineers. It’s about managing calendars in a way that gets the most done. Sounds boring…but it’s super important. Read more here.
🥽 VR Gets Shutdown. Mozilla is shutting down its Firefox VR browser that allowed users to access the web in Virtual Reality environments and use their hand controllers instead of a mouse. Could this be a good example of a product being too early? Read more here.
🚴 Delivery Wars! Zapp, a London based grocery delivery startup, has raised $200m of Series B funding to compete with Gorillas. Getir, Gopuff, Jiffy and Deliveroo. Read more here.
🐦 Twitter Alternative India’s version of Twitter, Koo, expects to hit 25m+ users this year. It has emerged as a Twitter alternative ever since the Indian government fell out with Twitter. Considering it only launched in 2020, it is impressive growth.
📉 Meta Disaster Facebook has encountered its first ever drop in daily active users in 18 years. As a result, shares fell by 20% which wiped out around $200bn. Nevertheless, revenue grew to $33.67bn. Mixed results for ‘Meta’. A big part of the company’s spending was $10bn on the metaverse.
🐒 Bored Apes The leading venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is set to invest in Yuga Labs (the startup behind the “Bored Ape Yacht Club” phenomenon). It’s rumoured their investment will value the company between $4-5bn. The price of a Board Ape has soared in recent months to $250k+.
🎲 RIP Crossword Wordle, the daily word game, has taken over our timelines recently. Growing in popularity, the New York Times has acquired it for ‘low millions’. Take a look at the whole phenomenon here.
👮 A Hacker Stole $325m DeFi platform, Wormhole, was victim to one of the largest crypto hacks of all time. Read more here.
🎉 Our Sponsor: ApTap 🎉
So listen, we first met the ApTap team a few years ago when they were just getting started up. We genuinely love this product, and love the team behind it.
So, what’s AptTap?
ApTap is building the world’s subscription store.
Sitting at the intersection of FinTech, e-commerce and data analytics, ApTap empowers customers to sign up, switch, share or cancel services with the click of a button, all without ever leaving their banking app. ApTap’s tools can be white labelled or embedded to keep that user experience as seamless as possible.
This is all about enabling clarity and control for the end customer while driving engagement and revenue for our partners and merchants. With dozens of partners and merchants now involved we’re growing quickly and would love to have more brands join us. This is a fantastic way for merchants to connect with customers in the place they’re managing their money, and an opportunity for banks to support their customers in making the best possible financial decisions.
If you’re a merchant, a bank or a FinTech looking at engaging your customers and generating some organic revenue, please reach out to Will Billingsley using the big green button below. ⬇️
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Over & Out,
Nick, Louis & Dr Monkey