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The TechCrunch Top 3
- Turo is taking its car rental business public: Turo, a well-known U.S. startup that allows folks to rent their car to other folks, has privately filed to go public. Oh boy, are we curious what its numbers show? Not only because it’s an S-1 that we’ve wanted to read for some time, but also because we’re incredibly curious about how the company navigated the pandemic and the changing world of transit during the last 18 months or so. More when it files publicly, you know, to go public.
- China’s tech crackdown continues Another weekend, another set of regulatory actions from China’s government. Tencent and the larger gaming world could be in trouble next. The turbulence was enough for NetEase, a major gaming company in China, to delay the Hong Kong listing of its music business. Recall that Tencent Music is publicly listed.
- SpaceX buys Swarm Technologies: After seeing a friend get hooked up to Starlink the other day, what SpaceX does in the connectivity space is now more accurate to your humble scribe than theoretical. So the news that the space launch company is buying Swarm Technologies caught my eye. What does Swarm do? Per TechCrunch, it “operates a constellation of 120 sandwich-sized satellites as well as a ground station network.” Precisely how that may or may not link up to current SpaceX efforts is unclear.
Startups/VC
Let’s start with a brace of unicorn stories and then delve into some earlier-stage startup news, yeah?
- Indian edtech is still hot: Another day, another edtech unicorn. This time its UpGrad, a Bangalore-based startup that “specializes in higher education and upskilling courses.” It just raised $185 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. Temasek led the round. Notably, it was a two-part affair, with an earlier tranche worth $120 million first valuing UpGrad at a price of around $600 million.
- Turkey’s first $10B startups: $1 billion isn’t cool. Do you know what it is? $10 billion. I suppose that that means that Turkish e-commerce platform Trendyol is cool? At least General Atlantic and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 think that it is cool enough to be worth $16.5 billion. Per our reporting, the company serves around 30 million shoppers who generate about 1 million packages per day. That’s a lot of shipping.
