Top News of the Week:
Stripe acquires Nigerian Paystack for $200M (link)
Twilio to acquire cloud data startup Segment for $3.2B (link)
Disney announces reorganization to focus on streaming (link)
Dropbox goes permanent wfh—turn HQ into WeWork-like space (link)
Cruise gets permit to test AVs in SF without safety drivers (link)
Weekly Synthesis:
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the pandemic is leading to permanent changes to work, life, and organizations. Disney restructured towards streaming, Dropbox moved to permanent work from home and will turn their offices into collaborate WeWork-like spaces, Uber is hiring more engineers in India, startups in the ‘future of living’ and edtech spaces raised large rounds, and founders are setting up ‘hacker homes’ outside Silicon Valley. Also this week, digital currencies, specifically Bitcoin (on the heels of last week’s news that Square purchased $50M bitcoin) but also central bank digital currency efforts in China and similar explorations in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and around the world are heating up—expect this battle between sovereign and stateless digital currencies to be a bigger narrative next year.
Also, two interesting charts this week. The first by Adjust showing that ~70% of people spend $30+ per month on streaming and on-demand services:
Second from this article by Decrypt showing how $6B in bitcoin is now held by 13 publicly traded companies. Expect this to increase dramatically:
Covid-19 Related News:
San Francisco rents plunge 31%—most in U.S. (link)
WSJ: How Airbnb came back from the brink (link)
Uber hiring hundreds of engineers in India to cut costs (link)
Startup founders setting up hacker homes (link)
Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous:
Whisper raises $35M to improve hearing aids with AI (link)
Google’s moonshot to help farmers with robot (link)
Infiot raises $15M to manage edge devices with AI (link)
Fintech:
India’s Razorpay raises $100M @ $1B+ valuation from Sequoia (link)
Roboadvisor Wealthsimple raises $87M @ $1B+ valuation (link)
Snapdocs raises $60M to manage mortgages in cloud (link)
2,000+ Robinhood accounts hacked (link)
Blockchain & Crypto:
China gives away $10M in digital currency pilot (link)
PWC: Blockchain will give $1.7T boost to economy by 2030 (link)
Fidelity: Bitcoin’s current price is ‘drop’ compared to potential (link)
Consumer Tech:
Apple reveals new 5G iPhone (link)
Lyft, Grubhub partner to take on Uber Eats (link)
Mexican short-term rental startup raises $48M from a16z (link)
Kava raises $30M to create a ‘more formal’ Airbnb (link)
EdTech:
Kahoot raises $215M from Softbank for gamified e-learning (link)
Engageli raises $15M to bring e-learning to universities (link)
Future Tech:
Plenty raises $140M from Softbank for vertical farming (link)
NASA awards $140M to transformative space tech companies (link)
Enterprise Tech:
Zoom launches virtual events platform (link)
Microservices startup Temporal raises $20M from Sequoia (link)
IPOs:
Venture Capital:
Ex-WeWork CEO leads $42M investment in living startup (link)
Khosla Ventures seeks $1.1B for latest fund (link)
AC Ventures closes $80M fund focused on Indonesia (link)
4-year founder vesting is dead—hello 7 years (link)
IDEO CoLab Crypto Startups Hiring:
Things I’m Involved In / Tracking:
Boardroom raises $2M to scale and simplify crypto governance (link)
Coinbase Wallet supports Optimism’s Layer 2 testnet (link)
Rally launched $RLY on Ethereum mainnet (link)
Coinbase VP will leave over apolitical mission statement (link)
About Synthesis
Synthesis is a weekly newsletter of the top tech and innovation news for busy executives. Stay up to date, and save time. Delivered every Friday.
About the Author
I’m Ian. I’ve been in the venture and corporate innovation space for the last 10 years and helped build and operate investing, venturing, and innovation units at IDEO, Citigroup, and Deloitte. You can find me on Twitter here, mostly rambling about the latest in decentralization and crypto.
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