🪙 The $14bn Ad
Climate Tech Hots Up, Elon in Trouble x2, & Crypto Comes For Ranching
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
9 tech & startup stories in 117 super short seconds.
🤔 How Does Google Search Work? We wanted an answer to this question too, so we googled it, and it turns out Google have produced a handy 5 minute video that explains it super clearly. Have a watch here.
🔥 Climate Tech is Hotting up! In 2021, around 1,400 investors deployed about $40bn across 600 deals in the climate tech space. Take a look at the breakdown across mobility, energy, carbon and food & water investments here.
🐼 Trusty Panda? Bitpanda, a Vienna based crypto exchange, has acquired Trustology for an undisclosed fee. What’s Trustology? It’s an FCA regulator decentralised finance fintech that focuses on safekeeping of digital assets. Read more here.
😎 Virtual Puppies? Facebooks ‘social’ virtual reality product has reached 300k users. Horizon, which Zuckerberg described as “core to our metaverse vision” allows users to meet and play in a VR world with their own avatar. Check out Facebooks weird and wonderful Hoizon advert here.
⚖️ Elon vs. The Law The US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating whether Elon Musk and his brother violated insider-trading rules one-day before Elon posted a poll on Twitter asking whether he should sell a significant stake in Tesla. This just another chapter in Elon’s battle with the SEC, having been charged with fraud in 2018.
🧠 Musk in Hot Water (again). To add to the mix, Neuralink, Elon Musks’ latest venture to build state of the art ‘brain chips’, has landed him in hot water for animal cruelty. Read more here.
🐦 Trump Time Donald Trump has finally launched his new social media platform “Truth Social”. In development after Trump was kicked off most mainstream platforms, it is due to be a censorship-free and pro free speech platform.
🐎 Crypto Ranching Over the last few months we’ve been highlighting the activities of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) like LinksDAO and ConstitutionDAO. The newest one? A group of 6000 investors forming CityDAO which has bought 40 acres of land in Wyoming. Watch an explainer here.
🪙 The $14bn Ad Coinbase was a clear winner of the NFL Superbowl ad competition with it’s modern take on the DVD screensaver. Watch it here. They also crushed their Q4 results with $2.5bn in revenue, up from $585m a year ago. However, in showing off about their ad’s success, CEO Brian Armstrong managed to get called out.
🎉 Our Sponsor: Comma 🎉
This week, we’ve chuffed that Comma are sponsoring The Grapevine. We’re a big fan of Comma, and the eagle eyed Londoners reading this may have spotted their tube ads on your morning commute. Anyway, let’s talk about virtual payment runs…
What are virtual payment runs?
Virtual payment runs allow you to create a list of payments outside of a bank account. These payments can be shared and collaborated upon by multiple parties (for example, an external bookkeeper can share this with a business owner). They can then be pushed via an API directly to a bank to initiate payment. It’s a simple solution to save you time and improve payment accuracy.
How do virtual payment runs work?
All the information regarding your business payments is already right there in your accounting software — the bills you owe, the supplier details, the amounts due. But, to actually make payments, you have to manually log on to your bank and key in every single payment one by one.
And it doesn’t end there. Once you have made the payments, you go back into your accounting platform and mark each invoice as paid. This whole process becomes even slower if multiple people are involved, and we’ve seen finance teams lose entire days to this.
Now, what if there was a way to remove this workload and streamline the whole process? I’d bet you’d be intrigued.
Well, Comma and virtual payment runs do just that. You can select the bills you want to pay from - lets say - your Xero account, share them with a colleague and approve everything before anyone even needs to log into a bank account. When everything is ready and approved, the list of payments can be initiated with a click via open banking, meaning you don’t have to key in anything to the bank again. Because we connect your accounting software and bank, Comma updates your accounting software to show they’ve been paid, so you don’t have to! The same process, but in a fraction of the time.
Sign up now and find out more at by clicking on the big green button below 👇
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis