So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
11 tech & startup stories in 138 super-duper short seconds.
💰 2021 Tech IPOs. Crunchbase have published a handy list of all of 2021s tech IPOs here. Expect to learn more about Coinbase, Bumble, Affirm, and way more.
🚀Buy Robinhood on Robinhood The free stock-trading app has finally released it’s ‘S-1’ displaying its intention to go public. Some key figures include 17.7m users, 50% are first-time investors, $958m in revenue in 2020 with $7m profit, and more here. Crypto has been key to their revenue this year - with 17% coming from crypto trades (and 34% from Dogecoin). This comes the same day they were fined $70m for misleading customers and system outages.
🤔 Do stocks love a scandal? The team at Freetrade have written an awesome article on how stock prices respond to scandal. My favourite example is probably the Volkswagen April prank.
🤖 The Facebook Shopping AI! Facebook is using Artificial Intelligence to make shopping easier for everyone. Facebook has built an AI called GrokNet that can show you visually similar products to the one you’re looking at. Soon it’ll be on Instagram, enabling people to find similar products by tapping on images. Read Facebook’s blog here.
🎨 Twitter is now making NFTs! They released 20 that are totally free and have names like ‘Furry Twitter’, ‘Vitamin T’ and ‘Reply Guy’. See them here.
🌐 “This Changed Everything” The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has sold the internet’s original source code as an NFT for $5.4m in a Sotheby’s auction. This makes it one of the most expensive NFTs of digital artworks ever sold. The proceeds will be used to help causes him and his wife support.
🤓 MITs 35 under 35s. Take a peak at MITs 35 innovators under the age of 35. Our favourite? Kayla Lee, who is building a diverse quantum computing world. See the entire list here.
💃 TikTok is changing The company known for its short form videos (60 seconds or less) is rolling out the ability to record 3 minute long videos. This comes as the service, with around 100m monthly active users, faces increasing competition from the big tech companies. It reminds us of when Twitter abandoned its 140 character limit. Will it pay off?
🤑 Another Unprofitable Tech Co! Chinese ride-hailing platform, Didi, went public on the New York Stock Exchange this week at a valuation of $69bn. It’s shares began trading up 20% from the offering price, another example of a crazy hot tech IPO market (especially considering it lost $1.6bn last year…). An unlikely big winner here? Uber - they had a stake in Didi which is now worth around $8bn.
👁️ Crypto Eye Former President of the illustrious startup accelerator, Y Combinator, has co-founded a new company which plans to give a particular cryptocurrency to everyone in the world… by scanning their eyeballs. ‘Worldcoin’ seeks to help economies transition to crypto using an eye-scanning device that’ll ensure no-one can defraud the system. Read more about this ‘secret’ project here.
☄️ Space Wars Upon the news that Jeff Bezos is going to take a trip to space next month, Richard Branson is looking to beat him by flying in his Virgin Galactic space plane on July 11. Billionaires and their toys eh?
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis