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Four years after partnering with Apple on the launch of the Apple Card , Goldman Sachs may be eyeing the exits. The Wall Street Journal reports that Goldman is “looking for a way out” of its high-profile deal with Apple, which recently expanded to include savings accounts for Apple Card holders.  The investment banking firm is apparently in talks to offload the partnership to American Express, the WSJ report added, but so far nothing seems to be set in stone, nor is it clear if Apple would support the handoff. However, it wouldn’t be surprising if such an arrangement comes to pass. Earlier this year, Goldman CEO David Solomon said he was “ considering strategic alternatives ” for the investment firm’s consumer arm. Beyond its deal with Apple, Goldman’s consumer-facing business includes a credit card partnership with General Motors as well as GreenSky, the lending company Goldman bought for $2.2 billion in 2021 . For their part, Apple and Goldman did not immediately respond to r

Travis VanderZanden’s slow-motion departure from Bird is now complete. The scooter rental company announced in a late-Friday news dump that the executive has stepped down from his role as chairperson of Bird’s board, “ effective immediately .” Replacing VanderZanden is John Bitove, who played a role in saving Bird’s bacon this past December via its merger with Bird Canada. VanderZanden had led the micromobility company from its inception as its president and founding CEO, but that all changed last year when Bird’s declining stock price culminated in a delisting warning from the New York Stock Exchange. Soon after, VanderZanden stepped down from his role as president , handing over the title to Bird’s then-chief operating officer Shane Torchiana. Torchiana went on to assume the CEO post as well several months later. At the time, VanderZanden called the reorg a “long-planned transition.” According to Bird,  VanderZanden “decided to step down [from the board] to pursue other ventur

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. This week, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how some of the biggest companies in the world have as much — if not more — power than entire countries. Most countries, at least, have some level of democratic oversight, but that isn’t true in the same way for companies. My question, then: In a world where the policies of, say, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter become de facto standards all around the world, should we have a greater degree of say (TC+) in what those policies are? The other thing that’s kept me busy this week is fundraising. Alex talked with 11 VCs (TC+) about how hard it was for their companies to raise so far this year. Meanwhile, I talked with a number of founders who were really struggling to raise money. The truth is, the founders struggling the most have three things in common (TC+). Now let’s take a look at what happened in the world of startups this week. Notes from the securi

Police are starting to turn to robotaxis — specifically all of that footage captured by cameras — for video evidence to help solve crimes. While it might not be a trend quite yet, evidence suggests that the robotaxi is the new proving ground for privacy advocates and law enforcement, especially as companies like Cruise and Waymo scale to new cities. Self-driving cars can have more than a dozen cameras capturing 360-degree views and reams of data as they navigate city streets. And it turns out, that’s attractive to government agencies looking for evidence. For instance, Bloomberg reported Thursday that it found nine search warrants that had been issued for autonomous vehicle company Waymo’s footage in San Francisco and Arizona’s Maricopa County. Waymo is also testing in Los Angeles. Cruise, a Waymo rival that has operations in San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Houston, also received a warrant, according to Bloomberg. The instances all seem reasonable — police wanted help learning m

An Indian court has dismissed Twitter’s lawsuit against the Indian government that sought to challenge New Delhi’s block orders on tweets and accounts. The Karnataka High Court dismissed the plea, filed last year, and also fined the Elon Musk-owned firm 5 million Indian rupees ($61,000). “Your client (Twitter) was given notices and your client did not comply. Punishment for non-compliance is 7 years imprisonment and unlimited fine. That also did not deter your client. So you have not given any reason why you delayed compliance, more than a year of delay… then all of sudden you comply and approach the Court. You are not a farmer but a billon dollar company,” a single judge bench said in scathing verdict Friday. Twitter filed the plea against the Indian government in Karnataka High Court in Bengaluru last year, before the takeover by Musk, alleging that New Delhi had abused its power by ordering it to arbitrarily and disproportionately remove several tweets from its platform. Additio

Seoul-based e-commerce company Levit , an operator of the shopping app Alwayz , wants to make the shopping experience more entertaining and affordable. The two-year-old startup has recently raised $46 million in a Series B round of funding led by DST Global Partners with participation from new investor BOND and existing backers KB Investment, Mirae Asset Capital, Korea Investment Partners, GS Ventures, and Klim Ventures. With the latest round, Levit has raised a total of $67 million since its inception. Alwayz offers a wide range of products, from daily groceries to home appliances and apparel to cosmetics. But it deviates from typical e-commerce platforms by incorporating social features like short videos and gamification into online shopping to draw customers.  For example, users can earn rewards by playing games nurturing the pig character Don-Don-E, or receive crops in real life after successfully cultivating crops by playing a game called AI-Farm in its app. In addition, Alwayz

Ayal Yogev Contributor Share on Twitter Ayal Yogev is the co-founder and CEO of Anjuna , a multi-cloud confidential computing platform. Generative AI has the potential to change everything. It can inform new products, companies, industries, and even economies. But what makes it different and better than “traditional” AI could also make it dangerous. Its unique ability to create has opened up an entirely new set of security and privacy concerns. Enterprises are suddenly having to ask themselves new questions: Do I have the rights to the training data? To the model? To the outputs? Does the system itself have rights to data that’s created in the future? How are rights to that system protected? How do I govern data privacy in a model using generative AI? The list goes on. It’s no surprise that many enterprises are treading lightly. Blatant security and privacy vulnerabilities coupled with a hesitancy to rely on existing Band-Aid solutions have pushed many to ban these too

Fund of funds (FoF) were created to serve as a bridge for LPs to get access to managers they couldn’t back otherwise. But in an environment where funds are not seeing consistent support from their existing LPs, and there are more venture funds than ever, is their role still relevant? Fund of funds fundraising — say that five times fast! — has declined for years. To compare, traditional U.S. venture firm fundraising set a record in 2022 with $162 billion. U.S.-based VC FoF raised just $400 million in the first quarter of 2023, according to PitchBook, and $3 billion in 2022. This compares to $24.4 billion in 2021 and $33.7 billion — the fundraising peak — in 2017. It’s not surprising why many LPs have soured on the strategy, said Kyle Stanford, a senior venture analyst at PitchBook. For one, backers of these funds pay a mix of fees to both the FoF and the underlying commitments the FoF manager makes. “LPs have that double layer of fees. And that extra time it takes after [an LP] inves

Sometimes baseball feels like a game of inches. Clubs often compete for seemingly small advantages to get a leg up. Over the last couple of decades, that’s meant investments in both advanced analytics and cutting-edge technologies. Sometimes both at the same time. While baseball fans themselves can be highly critical of changes to the 180+-year-old game, Major League Baseball has been looking for ways to spice things up, from the addition of a time-saving pitch clock to the sanctioning of the PitchCom device to thwart sign stealing. This week, the league announced a deal with Uplift Labs , which brings the Bay Area-based company’s movement tracking technologies to the minors. The system will be used to evaluate and scout players as part of the Summer League and Appalachian League drafts and the Draft Combine. The startup’s primary offering is mobile 3D motion capture, which relies on a pair of iPhones or iPads and a couple of tripods to track athletic movements in 3D. The system, wh

Pokémon GO maker Niantic laid off 230 employees today, just one year after it laid off around 90 employees . During last year’s layoffs, Niantic cancelled four projects, including a Transformers game. Some Niantic games will meet the same fate this time around. After four months in the App Store, Niantic is shutting down NBA All-World ; the company will also cancel production on a game based on the Marvel franchise. “In the wake of the revenue surge we saw during Covid, we grew our headcount and related expenses in order to pursue growth more aggressively,” CEO John Hanke wrote in an email to employees , cross-posted to the company blog. This has been a common refrain among the hundreds of tech companies that have conducted layoffs over the last year; companies claimed they overhired during the pandemic and now need to right-size their teams. In Niantic’s case, Hanke said that revenue has returned to pre-pandemic levels, and new projects have not delivered as much revenue as they

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot , has taken the world by storm. Capable of writing emails, essays and more given a few short prompts, ChatGPT has become one of the fastest-growing apps in history. Beyond that, it’s begun to find a place in the enterprise, particularly with the launch of plugins that connect the chatbot to third-party apps, websites and services. Most recently, ChatGPT Plus subscribers now have access to a new feature called Browsing, which allows ChatGPT to search Bing for answers to prompts and questions. But ChatGPT isn’t always the most cooperative assistant . Getting it to output something specific requires careful fine-tuning of the prompts. A number of resources and guides for ChatGPT prompt writing have sprung up since the tool’s launch. But not all of them are especially easy to follow — or intuitive. To help folks both new to ChatGPT and looking to learn new tricks, we’ve compiled a list of the best ChatGPT prompts for different types of workflows —

Earlier this year we wrote that the “ the $100 million venture round is going extinct .” Often our predictions wind up sideways. This time we were on the right track. According to new data from PitchBook , the U.S. venture market is continuing to endure lackluster velocity for nine-figure investments into private companies, colloquially referred to as “mega-rounds.” The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. In the first half of 2023, PitchBook counted just 108 mega-rounds in the United States. If we presumed that this rate will hold throughout the year, we’re looking at just over 200 nine-figure deals in the U.S. in 2023. That’s a dramatic decline from prior levels. Starting in Q4 2020 through Q3 2022, there were more than 100 mega-rounds recorded per quarter. In 2021, the average was more than 200 per quarter. To see perhaps 200 this year implies that the number of late-stage startup

Startup accelerator Techstars is raising $150 million for its new fund, SEC filings show. The accelerator is seeking new capital ahead of the end of the deployment period of its third institutionally-backed fund, Techstars Accelerator 2021 , later this year. Techstars declined to offer details on how it intends to use or deploy the funding, citing regulatory restrictions. However, like its predecessors, the new fund, Techstars Accelerator 2024, is expected to be used for accelerator-stage and/or post-accelerator investments. Notably, the Boulder-based early-stage investor has used its current fund only for accelerator-stage investments. Its previous funds backed startups both during the accelerator stage and with follow-on investments after the program. Fund 3 aimed to back over 800 pre-seed and seed startups that are part of its global accelerator programs by the end of 2023. Through its accelerator groups, Techstars has so far backed over 3,500 early-stage startups in various sec

In wake of Twitch’s seemingly unattainable Partner Plus program , which grants a 70/30 subscription revenue split on the first annual $100,000 that qualifying Partners make, jaded streamers are claiming that they’ll move to the streaming rival Kick .  The new livestreaming platform offers streamers a 95/5 subscription revenue split — a fraction of Twitch’s standard 50% cut, which it takes from both Affiliates and Partners. Though it isn’t uncommon for new social platforms to use bait and switch tactics to attract new users, many streamers are already flocking to Kick. It’s possible that Kick will change its revenue split as it grows, or move the goalposts to qualify for monetization, but the site has already signed prominent streamers.   Major Twitch creators have been swayed into joining Kick, including Félix “xQc” Lengyel, who signed a $100 million non-exclusive deal with the platform last week. Days later, Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa also announced that she’s joining Kick.

Among Us, the popular multiplayer game where one crewmate is a murderous imposter, is getting an animated series. Innersloth, the independent game studio behind the game, announced Tuesday that it has partnered with CBS Studios to develop the show. As reported by Variety , the premise of the series is based on the game; members of a spaceship — in brightly-colored spacesuits — discover that an alien shapeshifter is sabotaging the ship and slaughtering crewmates, resulting in a cat-and-mouse chase where players have to suss out the imposter before everyone dies. A release date for the Among Us series has yet to be announced. However, CBS is in talks with TV networks and streaming services, per Variety. Titmouse, the studio behind “Big Mouth” and “The Legend of Vox Machina,” will serve as the animation studio for the Among Us series. Innersloth launched Among Us in 2018, however, the game didn’t become popular until 2020. In fact, it saw such a huge spike in popularity that even Rep.