Hello friends, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter that recaps notable happenings in technology from the past few days.
This week, TC automotive reporter Sean O’Kane revealed how electric vehicle startup Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it expanded deliveries, leading to an internal audit that began in December and took months to complete.
Elsewhere, Lorenzo reported how Facebook spied on users’ Snapchat traffic in a secret project known internally at Meta as “Project Ghostbusters.” According to court documents, the goal was to intercept and decrypt network traffic between people using the Snapchat app and its servers.
And Manish wrote about him Resignation of Stability AI Founder and CEO Emad Mostaque at the end of last week. Mostaque’s departure from Stability AI, the startup known for its popular Stable Diffusion imaging tool, comes amid an ongoing fight for stability (pun intended) at the company, which was reportedly spending ~$8 million a month in October 2023 with little income to show for it.
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
Fisker suspended: Fisker’s bad week continued with a halt in trading in the startup’s shares. The New York Stock Exchange moved to delist Fisker, citing its “abnormally low” stock levels.
AI-powered itineraries: In an update of his Generative search experience, Google has added the ability for users to ask Google Search to plan a travel itinerary. Using AI, Search will be based on ideas from Internet websites along with reviews, photos and other details.
The new Robinhood card: nine months later acquire startup X1 credit card For $95 million, Robinhood on Wednesday announced the launch of its new Gold Card, powered by X1 technology, with a list of features that could make Apple Card users envious.
On AT&T, the word mom is: The personal information of about 73 million AT&T customers was spread online this week. But AT&T won’t say how, even though the hack responsible occurred more than three years ago.
Money
Co-pilot on the rise: Copilot, the budgeting app, has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Nico Wittenborn’s Adjacent. The app benefits in part from the death of Mint, Intuit’s financial management product.
Liquid assets: In an article looking at the venture capital-backed beverage industry in general, Rebecca and Christine point to canned water startup Liquid Death’s recent $67 million fundraising, which brought the company’s total raised to more than of 267 million dollars. Talk about liquidity.
Air conditioning company: Dan Laufer, a former Nextdoor executive, has raised $25 million from Canvas Ventures and others for PipeDreams, a startup that acquires mom-and-pop HVAC and plumbing companies and scales them using its software that helps with scheduling and marketing.
Analysis
Is Nvidia the next AWS?: Ron writes about how there are many parallels in the growth trajectories of Nvidia and AWS.
Podcasts
this week in Equity, the team investigated Robinhood’s new credit card, Fisker’s latest troubles, and even Databricks’ new AI model it spent $10 million on. They also highlighted two companies creating kid-focused startups and, to conclude, discussed a new $100 million fund that seeks to support innovative climate technology.
Meanwhile in FoundAllison Wolff, co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet, a cloud-based planning and monitoring tool for adaptive land management, discussed why the wildfires we’re seeing today are hotter and spreading faster than we thought. we can contain and how proper land management can help encourage lower, slower burning fires.
And in Chain reaction, Jacquelyn interviewed Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time. Space and Time is intended to be a verifiable computing layer for web3 that scales zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic action used to prove something about a piece of data without revealing the source data itself.
Bonus round
Spotify tests online learning: In its continued efforts to get its more than 600 million users to spend more time and money on its platform, Spotify is launching a new line of content: e-learning. Beginning with its launch in the UK, the (traditionally audio) streaming platform is testing the waters for an online educational offering of freemium video courses.