LeadSquared turns into India’s latest unicorn

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Good afternoon, you high-quality people! We hope you had a stunning weekend. Christine is off on a well-deserved vacation, and I’m going to be engaged on some particular tasks for a couple of weeks (together with my tan and my browsing expertise), so beginning tomorrow, we are going to depart this honest publication within the succesful palms of Kyle. Give the person a observe on Twitter — you’ve seen a ton of his writing linked to from this article, and I like his writing usually, so that you’ll have a blast.

Oh, and when you wanna come hand around in particular person, we only have, like, 50 tickets left to our summer party. Come hang around and be jolly!

Oh, and when you wanna brighten your day and mine — let’s go mad with cat gifs on my Twitter account. Go on, let’s have a bit of cat-gif sharing social gathering. — Haje 

The TechCrunch Prime 3

• Oh dear, who tripped over the wire again? Cloudflare is a cornerstone of the web, which is reassuring and beautiful, till all of it falls aside. An enormous variety of companies, together with Discord, DoorDash, Crunchyroll, NordVPN and others had important outages when Cloudflare took a mud nap for a couple of hours. Issues ought to be up and whirring once more now, and little question the Cloudflare ops groups could have a few intense weeks determining what occurred and tips on how to stop it sooner or later, Manish writes.
• The <?= ordinal($cutcounter++); ?> cut is the deepest: Klarna is reportedly contemplating elevating at a $15 billion valuation — an enormous haircut from its mid-2021 $45 billion valuation. Over on our subscription product TechCrunch Plus, Alex makes it make (extra) sense.
• LeadSquared grows a unicorn horn: Manish experiences that LeadSquared raised $153 million in a Sequence C funding spherical that valued it at $1 billion. The spherical was led by Westbridge Capital, and the startup is now seeking to broaden its product with new options, together with gross sales efficiency analytics and a collection of instruments to digitize software processing.

Startups and VC

I adore it when massive, bold tasks flip into viable firms. Brian’s report on how Impossible Mining is combing the seafloor for battery metals very a lot tickles my curiosity bones. It employs bacterial respiration to “liberate” metals from rocks, and the corporate raised $10 million to, ahem, go a bit of deeper.

You already know what actually grinds my gears? You already know when customer support people appear to be so painfully pleasant, but additionally as ineffective as an ice-cream tea cozy? Neuron7 is using some clever tech to help customer service folks find data and solutions extra shortly, and simply raised $10 million to do exactly that, Kyle experiences.

Let’s look a bit of deeper:

• God solely is aware of it’s not what we’d select to do: Oh I like, love enjoying with Dall-E as a lot as the following man, and it delights me {that a} Ukrainian deep tech startup has trained an AI to paint war art, as Natasha L experiences.
• Simply one other brick within the wall: Kyle experiences how building SaaS firm Join secures new cash to change into a alternative for the Excel and different email-based workflows that many building stakeholders use to make choices about tasks.
• Tongue-tied and twisted, simply an earthbound misfit: NFT market Magic Eden, launched simply 9 months in the past, has raised $130 million in a Series B round co-led by Electrical Capital and Greylock Companions, bringing its valuation to $1.6 billion, writes Jacquelyn.
• We don’t want no educ… Wait, sure, really, we do:  Kibo School gets $2 million to offer online STEM degrees to students in Africa,  Annie experiences.
• The solar is eclipsed by the moon: On our Chain Response podcast, Lucas and Anita spoke with Aaron Levie — CEO at Field — about where web3 makes sense, and where it does not.
• There’s somebody in my head nevertheless it’s not me: Apropos podcast, I liked Natasha M’s roundup of her favorite tech podcasts.
• In case your head explodes with darkish forebodings: We’ve been masking how Brex ditched small companies, nevertheless it didn’t actually make excellent sense to us — till Mary Ann dove in and dug into why Brex really decided to ditch SMBs.

Write a TechCrunch+ visitor put up that would assist somebody navigate this downturn

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We final up to date our submission pointers for TechCrunch+ visitor posts in June 2021, however loads has modified since then.

These are unsure instances, however expertise is the very best trainer, which is why we’re searching for visitor articles that may assist others navigate this downturn.

As a result of the stakes are so excessive, we’re not searching for articles that share “thought management” about basic challenges folks within the tech business are going through proper now.

We’re solely taken with posts providing actionable recommendation which can be written by authors who’ve expertise working underneath adversarial financial circumstances.

When you’ve got an thought, please review our new submission guidelines and get in contact.

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Massive Tech Inc.

Coding simply will get simpler, because the instruments and frameworks change into extra highly effective and smarter. One instance of that’s Copilot, GitHub’s AI-powered programming assistant, which grew to become usually out there, as Kyle experiences.

Over on the fowl sanctuary, the narrative trundles on, with Ivan reporting that Twitter is asking its shareholders to approve the $44 billion takeover by Elon Musk.

And at last, I used to be stanning exhausting for Amanda’s panel at our Local weather occasion final week — she tackled the query of whether or not capitalism can solve climate change. I’m not gonna spoil it for you — simply learn her wonderful piece on our subscription service TechCrunch Plus. And when you end that one, get into Harri’s TC+ piece the place she asks “How doomed are we?” on the local weather query. Ugh, I can’t consider I get to work with sensible, passionate writers like them. Fortunate me!

There’s extra — much more:

• A soul in rigidity that’s studying to fly: Sarah experiences that after a few years, Twitter is bringing back its long-lost developer conference, Chirp.
• New automobile, caviar, 4 star daydream; assume I’ll purchase me a soccer workforce: Unhealthy information for crypto followers, as Bitcoin dipped under $20K and Ethereum took a dive into triple digits as the market free fall continued over the weekend, Lucas experiences.
• I open my door to my enemies and I ask if we are able to wipe the slate clear: Tesla has been within the information a bit, most not too long ago for being sued by former workers for allegedly violating federal law during “mass layoffs,” as Jaclyn experiences.
• Cash it’s a criminal offense / share it pretty however don’t take a slice of my pie: Aisha experiences that Meta is about to roll out new monetization tools on Instagram and Facebook, together with a market for creators.
• You’re older, shorter of breath, and at some point nearer to dying: Dunno ’bout you, however I’m getting actually bored of firms which can be dropping my private particulars. This time it’s Flagstar’s flip, with a data breach affecting 1.5 million customers, Carly experiences.
• I’m so afraid of errors that I’ve made: And whilst I rage about Flagstar’s report, they’re n00bs in comparison with the ex-Amazon employee who was convicted over a data breach affecting 100 million Capital One prospects. The breach of Capital One’s cloud knowledge, a lot of it saved on Amazon’s cloud, was one of many greatest hacks of the last decade, Zack experiences.