GM Grapeviners,
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? š
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The Grapevine Newsflash š„
12 tech & startup stories in 159 super short seconds.
š£ļø Explaining Blockchain To Congress. This video is a little old, but even if youāve seen it you should watch it again. Itās six minutes of blockchain and crypto experts explaining web3 to congress. It includes one of the greatest explanations of the space we can find. Watch the video here.
āļø Youāve Been Served. Itās officially now legal to serve legal documents using an NFT. This came about from an individual who is suing Binance, the crypto exchange, after his assets were fraudulently cloned. Heāll serve the papers by airdropping the lawsuit into two wallets.
š¤ Seatbelts As A Service? BMW has launched a subscription service for heated seats, priced at Ā£15 a month. Although this is a bit of a gimmick we can see this model doing decent predictable revenue for the car giant. Check out the story here.
š° TikTok VC? Crunchbase has written a cool article on startups that have received investment from celebs in the ācreator economyā. Our favorite? Lighttricks, an israeli company specialising in photo editing software that raised $355m from Goldman Sachs, Insight Partners and DāAmelio family (a famous tiktok family). Read the article here.
āļø Starman Every once in a while, a feel good story comes along that we have to post. This week, itās the first pictures from the $10bn James Webb Space Telescope. They donāt disappoint.
š¤The Monzo Comeback? Monzo has reported a 92% increase in revenue and a 9% reduction in costs. The bank also now boasts 430k subscription customers (plus, premium and business) and doubled lending to Ā£259m through its BNPL product. Good news? Yes. Out the woods? Certainly not. Read the full story here.
šŖšŗ Branson Enters Fintech! Lightyear - a Robinhood, Freetrade and Shares competitor - has launched in 19 countries today and announced their $25m Series A funding round. The round was led by Lightspeed and Richard Branson. Get the full scoop here.
š If It Looks Like a Ponzi Schemeā¦ Celsius Network, a failing crypto lender, has filed for bankruptcy and announced a $1.2bn deficit. They intend to reorganise the company rather than liquidate and said it had enough cash to do soā¦however theyāre still not allowing customers to withdraw their deposits. This is expected to represent at least 500,000 people.
š¦ Poop Emojis & Bots By now, you would have heard that Elon Musk has not only pulled out of buying Twitter, but now the latter is suing the former in order to force him to go through with it. You probably wonāt want to read the 62 page document thing, so here are the highlights.
š 124,000 Files Leak Today, Uber is a big part of many of our lives. Travis Kalanick famously left the company in auspicious circumstances, and Uber has been known to take a few shortcuts from time to time. However, itās been revealed this week the extent to which Uber was bending the rules. Kill switches, friends in high places, and backroom deals. Thisāll be a good TV show one day.
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