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It’s Thursday, April 28, 2022, and Haje’s blood stress is slowly returning to what passes for regular after raging about Social Security numbers for a few minutes. Look, it’s arduous to get used to the quirks and foibles of a brand new nation, OK? No one inform him about how healthcare works on this nation, please; we’d by no means hear the tip of it.
In different information, TechCrunch has a shiny new fintech publication launching on Sunday. Sign up today so you don’t miss it this weekend! The third ep of our crypto and blockchain podcast, “Chain Response,” is out immediately, so fill your ears with the dulcet tones of Lucas and Anita’s calming voices.
Friday tomorrow, woohoo! – Christine and Haje
The TechCrunch High 3
- Twitter admits it overcounted accounts: Hey guess what? Twitter announced its first-quarter earnings today. And it didn’t depend proper, revealing that it was reporting extra customers than it actually had — by almost 2 million — one thing Sarah factors out is “a predicament that will have inspired the corporate to extra severely think about its acceptance of Elon Musk’s proposal to take the corporate personal in a $44 billion deal.” In the meantime, Alex appeared into what the acquisition could mean for Twitter’s advertising revenue.
- Death and taxes are indeed certain: It’s not each day that we get to cite Ben Franklin in a narrative, however on this case, it’s tied to expertise making it simpler for us to do issues like pay our taxes. To that time, cellular tax-filing app Taxfix introduced in a $220 million spherical to turn out to be a unicorn. Taxes should not all the time straightforward, so it’s good to have somebody who is aware of what to do. We like how CEO Martin Ott put it, “We’ve hacked the mind of a tax accountant into codes.”
- There’s a Google of Russia: Its identify is Yandex, and it’s promoting its media division to, get this, an organization referred to as VKontakte, which is taken into account “the native Fb equal.” Unsure it will get higher than that. That is information Natasha was following for a month now, and he or she stories the sale was fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which resulted in lots of corporations reassessing their media belongings.
Startups and VC
Certainly one of our favourite issues about placing the Day by day Crunch collectively is that we get to cheer on our colleagues and skim their improbable work. At the moment, it’s a Kyle-o-rama. He wrote about how Synthesis AI raised $17 million to create artificial information to enhance laptop imaginative and prescient and the way payroll supplier Symmetrical.ai raised $18.5 million to make worker payouts smoother. CommandBar landed $19 million to proceed making a search-and-browse plugin for internet apps, and Deepset raised $14 million to assist corporations construct natural-language processing apps. Kyle, your fingers have to be exhausted — go deal with your self to a cup of espresso and a spherical of baseball or one thing.
We love Christine’s story of Lemon Excellent’s investor journey with the queen bee: Two years after Lemon Perfect was spotted in Beyoncé’s limo, the superstar is now a backer.
Additionally! We kicked off a sequence of pitch deck teardowns, and we’re looking for startups that want to have their pitch decks reviewed. Become involved!
Extra information than you may shake a cap desk at:
GV’s Frederique Dame on product-market match: ‘You’ve gotten one likelihood at expertise’

Picture Credit: John Lamb (opens in a new window) / Getty Photos
In a hearth chat at TechCrunch Early Stage, Frederique Dame, an investing companion at GV who beforehand led product and engineering groups at Uber, Yahoo and Smugmug, shared her ideas about product-market match.
Dame addressed a number of points, together with the necessity to acquire buyer information as early as potential, methods for iterating and testing with out tapping engineering sources, and, notably, why founders ought to make themselves susceptible when pitching buyers:
“Belief me with what you don’t know or what’s not working” she mentioned, “as a result of as soon as we make investments, we’re going to need to work on these items anyway.”
(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup groups get forward. You can sign up here.)
Massive Tech Inc.
Get your popcorn ready: We already talked about Google and Fb within the High 3, so let’s begin off this part with somewhat little bit of Amazon. The corporate launched its film rental service in India, with over 40 unique and co-produced reveals and flicks that can allow prospects to get early entry to each Indian and international motion pictures.
Rounding up some earnings: At the moment’s earnings are delivered to you by the letter “T,” which rhymes with “P,” and that spells Peacock, which added 4 million paid subscribers. Meta’s metaverse is not doing so hot, however Fb gained customers.
Ac(quisi)tion information: It appears to be like like Microsoft might be including one other firm to its household. Activision Blizzard shareholders voted to approve the sale. In the meantime, Hackerone acquired PullRequest, a YC-backed firm that can give the bug bounty firm some code-review expertise.
Judge sides with Elon Musk: He’s most likely going to win with the Twitter deal, however he can positively put a checkmark within the “win” class right here. A Delaware choose dominated in his favor following a lawsuit introduced by Tesla shareholders that accused Musk of coercing Tesla’s board into shopping for SolarCity again in 2016.
Oh Snap!: Our reporters have been busy masking Snap immediately in assorted tales we’ll bullet beneath. We wish to spotlight that it created a brand new gadget that can have you ever forgetting what a selfie stick is. Pixy, Snap’s mini drone, is your digicam while you don’t have anybody else to carry your telephone. Additionally: