Hey folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch's newsletter that recaps the tech highlights of the past few days.
This week, TC's auto reporter Sean O'Kane revealed how electric vehicle startup Fisker temporarily lost millions of dollars in customer payments as it scaled up deliveries, triggering an internal audit that began in December and took months to complete.
Elsewhere, Lorenzo reported on how Facebook snooped on Snapchat users' 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.
Manish wrote about the resignation of Stability AI founder and CEO Imad Mushtaq late last week. Mostaque's departure from Stability AI — the startup known for its popular image generation tool Stable Diffusion — comes amid an ongoing struggle for stability (pun intended) at the company, which was reportedly burning nearly $8 million a month as of October 2023 with little revenue l show up for it.
A lot happened. We recap it all in this edition of WiR – but first, a reminder to sign up to receive the WiR newsletter in your inbox every Saturday.
News
Fisker Comment: Fisker's bad week continues as trading in the startup's shares halts. The New York Stock Exchange moved to delist Fisker, citing its “abnormally low” stock levels.
AI-Powered Itineraries: In an upgrade to its generative search experience, Google has added the ability for users to ask Google Search to plan an itinerary. Using artificial intelligence, the search will be based on insights from websites around the web as well as reviews, images and other details.
Robinhood's new card: Nine months after acquiring credit card startup X1 for $95 million, Robinhood on Wednesday announced the launch of its new gold card, powered by X1 technology, with a list of features that might make Apple Card users envy.
At AT&T, it's the mother's word: The personal information of about 73 million AT&T customers leaked online this week. But AT&T won't explain how to do that, even though the hack responsible occurred more than three years ago.
Finance
Booming Copilot: Copilot, the budgeting app, has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Neco Wittenborn's Adjacent. The app partly benefits from the death of Mint, Intuit's financial management product.
Liquid Assets: In an article looking at the venture capital-backed beverage industry more broadly, Rebecca and Christine note bottled water startup Liquid Death's recent fundraising of $67 million, bringing the company's total funds raised to more than $267 million. Talk about liquidity.
HVAC Venture: Dan Laufer, a former Nextdoor executive, has raised $25 million from Canvas Ventures and others for PipeDreams, a startup that acquires small HVAC and plumbing companies and expands them with its software that helps with scheduling and marketing.
analysis
Is Nvidia the Next AWS?: Ron writes that there are a lot of similarities in the growth paths of Nvidia and AWS.
Podcasts
This week on Equity, the crew delved into Robinhood's new credit card, Fisker's latest problems and even the new AI model from Databricks that it spent $10 million to spin. They also highlighted two companies building child-focused startups, and in conclusion, they delved into a new $100 million fund that seeks to support innovative climate technology.
Meanwhile, at Found, Allison Wolfe, co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet, a cloud-based planning and monitoring tool for adaptive land management, discussed why the wildfires we are seeing today are hotter and spreading faster than we can contain them and how sound land management can To help promote slower fires.
On Chain Reaction, Jacqueline 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 measures zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic procedure used to prove something about a piece of data without revealing the original data itself.
Bonus round
Spotify is testing online learning: In its ongoing effort to get its 600 million-plus users to spend more time and money on its platform, Spotify is rolling out a new line of content: e-learning. Starting with its UK rollout, the (traditionally audio) streaming platform is testing the waters to offer online education for free video courses.
