Pavel Durov
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Daily Crunch: Telegram prepares to monetize
Telegram will introduce ads, TikTok’s parent company is moving into drug discovery and President Trump continues his battle against Section 230. This is your Daily Crunch for December 23, 2020.
The big story: Telegram prepares to monetize
Telegram founder Pavel Durov said the messaging app will introduce advertising next year on public one-to-many channels. Durov wrote on his Telegram channel the ad platform will be “one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of server and traffic.”
He also pointed to premium stickers as another way that Telegram could monetize, while emphasizing that existing features will remain free and that he does not support showing ads in private chats.
In addition to discussing the company’s monetization plans, Durov said that Telegram is “approaching” 500 million users.
The tech giants
Nikola’s stock crashes after announcing cancelation of contract with Republic Services for 2,500 garbage trucks — This is the latest deal to unravel for Nikola as it tries to patch up following recent devastating reports.
TikTok parent ByteDance hiring for AI drug discovery team — “We are looking for candidates to join our team and conduct cutting-edge research in drug discovery and manufacturing powered by AI algorithms,” the company said in a job posting.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Chinese autonomous driving startup WeRide bags $200M in funding — The new funding will see WeRide joining hands with Yutong, a 57-year-old company, to make autonomous-driving minibuses and city buses.
Voyager Space Holdings to acquire majority stake in commercial space leader Nanoracks — Nanoracks provided the Bishop Airlock that was installed on the International Space Station.
Honk introduces a real-time, ephemeral messaging app aimed at Gen Z — Instead of sending texts off into the void and hoping for a response, friends on Honk communicate via messages that are shown live as you type.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Dear Sophie: What’s ahead for US immigration in 2021? — Sophie Alcorn weighs in on what’s next for U.S. visas and green cards.
Looking ahead after 2020’s epic M&A spree — This year, four deals involving chip companies totaled over $100 billion on their own.
Heading into 2021: Venture fundraising, liquidity and the everything bubble — Alex Wilhelm’s final column of the year.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Trump vetoes major defense bill, citing Section 230 — President Trump has vetoed the $740 million National Defense Authorization Act, a major bill that allocates military funds each year.
XRP cryptocurrency crashes following announcement of SEC suit against Ripple — The XRP token’s value has declined more than 42% in the past 24 hours.
TaskRabbit is resetting customer passwords after finding ‘suspicious activity’ on its network — The company later confirmed the activity was a credential stuffing attack, where existing sets of exposed or breached usernames and passwords are matched against different websites to access accounts.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
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Daily Crunch: Telegram soars after Facebook outage
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
1. Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage
In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov wrote, “I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.” Durov doesn’t offer an explicit explanation for Telegram’s sudden spike in signups, but he does take a thinly veiled swipe at social networking giant Facebook.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Facebook and its related family of apps went down for most of Wednesday.
2. Google removed 2.3B bad ads, banned ads on 1.5M apps + 28M pages, plans new Policy Manager this year
Using both manual reviews and machine learning, Google said that in 2018 it removed 2.3 billion “bad ads” that violated its policies — which at their most general forbid ads that mislead or exploit vulnerable people.
3. Uber reportedly raising $1B in deal that values self-driving car unit at up to $10B
Uber is in negotiations with investors, including the SoftBank Vision Fund, to secure an investment as large as $1 billion for its autonomous vehicles unit. The deal would value the business at between $5 billion and $10 billion, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
4. Opportunity’s last Mars panorama is a showstopper
The Opportunity Mars Rover may be officially offline for good, but its legacy of science and imagery is ongoing — and NASA just shared the last (nearly) complete panorama the robot sent back before it was blanketed in dust.
5. AI photo startup Polarr raises an $11.5 million Series A
At the moment, Polarr is probably best known for its photography app for iOS and Android, which utilizes machine learning and AI to improve image editing. The company says it has around four million monthly active users.
6. WeWork Labs is launching a food tech accelerator
WeWork is committing $1 million to back the first batch of companies.
7. Facebook won’t store data in countries with human rights violations — except Singapore
When Mark Zuckerberg said in a lengthy blog post that Facebook would not build data centers in countries with poor human rights, he chose to ignore Singapore — known for a lack of privacy and freedom of expression.
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Reports in the Russian press that Google tried to acquire the Telegram messaging app last year for $1 billion have been firmly rebutted by Telegram founder Pavel Durov. The rumors had been widely reported in the tech press today.