Hello friends, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter covering notable happenings in the tech industry.
This week, investment firm KKR Announced that would acquire Broadcom’s VMware end-user computing business for $4 billion. As Ron explains, that deal included VMware Workspace One and VMware Horizon, two remote desktop applications that had been part of the VMware product family.
Elsewhere, French AI startup Mistral launched a new model to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4, and its own cheekily named chatbot called Le Chat. the launches were timed with a partnership with Microsoft to provide Mistral models to Microsoft’s Azure customers, and a minority investment ($16 million) from Microsoft in Mistral.
Many more things happened. We summarize it all in this edition of WiR, but first, a reminder to register to receive the WiR newsletter in your inbox every Saturday.
News
Canceled Apple Car: Apple has scuttled its secretive, long-running effort to build a self-driving electric car. The company is likely cutting hundreds of employees from the team and all work on the project has stopped. Joins a list of other projects that Apple has scrapped at various stagesincluding AirPower and a television (not to be confused with Apple TV).
Bumble stumbles: Bumble posted weak fourth-quarter results, showing a net loss of $32 million and $273.6 million in revenue, missing Wall Street expectations. To right the ship, CEO Lidiane Jones announced that 30% of Bumble’s workforce, or about 350 employees, would be laid off and that Bumble would embark on an overhaul of the app aimed at reigniting growth.
Google AI fails: Google apologized for an embarrassing AI mistake this week: an image generation model that injected diversity into images with a ridiculous contempt for historical context. While the underlying problem is perfectly understandable, Google blames the model for “becoming” too sensitive.
Bad appearance: Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, which owns Tumblr, is reportedly taking a sabbatical. Instead, he argued with Tumblr users this week over a content moderation decision that sparked accusations of transphobia, Amanda reports.
Founder expelled: Last Friday, a group of Byju’s investors voted to oust the edtech group’s founder and CEO, Byju Raveendran, and separately filed an oppression and governance lawsuit against the company’s leadership to block the recently released rights edition.
Money
GenAI eBooks: Inkitt, a self-publishing platform that uses artificial intelligence to develop bestsellers, has raised $37 million. The startup’s app allows people to self-publish stories and then, using artificial intelligence and data science, selects the ones it believes are the most compelling to modify and then distribute and sell.
Keeping it old school: Lapse has raised $30 million for its smartphone app that makes you wait for photos to be “developed” (without the ability to edit and retake them) before sharing them with a select group of friends, if you choose.
Analysis
Techstars calculate: Mary Ann interviewed Maëlle Gavet, executive director of the startup acceleration program Tech starsfollowing changes in its operations that have attracted harsh criticism.
Podcasts
In Equitythe team talked about startup news from Microsoft and Mistral AI, Thrasio and Glean, and also covered developments at COTU Ventures and Zacua Ventures.
Meanwhile, Found outstanding Ariel Kaye, founder of Parachute, a direct-to-consumer bedding and home goods company.
And to Chain reactionTC pulled from the archives to stream an earlier conversation with Jack Lu, CEO and co-founder of Magic Eden, a “community-focused” NFT marketplace.
Bonus round
Mirai with great discounts: Toyota is offering $40,000 off a 2023 Toyota Mirai Limited, a fuel cell vehicle that sells for $66,000, plus $15,000 in free hydrogen for six years. As Tim writes, there’s only one catch: finding the hydrogen to fuel it.