Daily Crunch: After quarters of explosive growth, a profitable Robinhood files to go public

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 1, 2021. It’s Robinood IPO day! That’s the headline, really. This afternoon the American consumer fintech company filed to go public in what will prove to be an early contender for the third-quarter’s most important IPO. We also have a metric ton of other startup news for you. And don’t forget that the next TechCrunch event is next week! Let’s go! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Robinhood is going public: In our first look at the company’s IPO filing we observed a quickly growing consumer fintech company that made money in 2020. The company swung to a loss in the first quarter of 2021, but as TechCrunch reported, that loss is largely immaterial. Robinhood closed out Q1 2021 on an annual run rate of more than $2 billion. Hot dang.
• Apple’s software rollout continues: After dropping public betas for iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 yesterday, Apple released the public beta version of macOS 12.0 Monterey. You can download it now, if you are a brave soul who wants to do some testing. For the rest of us, yes that’s the sound of a required corporate update in our future.
• Articulate raises $1.5B in Series A: After bootstrapping for ages, corporate edtech company Articulate raised a $1.5 billion Series A round on a $3.75 billion valuation. The outsized, putatively early-staged round was the leading story of the day until Robinhood arrived and kicked it into third.

Startups/VC

Looping back to a few topics that TechCrunch has been covering extensively in recent weeks, there’s fresh news from Karat, a neobank aimed at the creator economy. Everyone wants to make money off creators starting to make money, it seems. And from the global startup market, TechCrunch has fresh notes on the future of European IPOs for those of you into such things.

Now, the day’s rounds:

• Nowports raises $16M to automate Latin American freight: Supply chain software startups are big business, and Nowports wants in on the boom. The startup’s latest round was led by Mouro Capital, with Nowports now backed by around $24 million in capital to date.
• Codat raises $40M to build the Plaid for companies: APIs are popular. Fintech APIs are super popular. And fintech APIs that connect individuals’ money to other companies are Plaid. Codat wants to build Plaid, but for SMB financial data. And Tiger is now backing it.
• Mercado Bitcoin raises $200M for its bitcoin market: In the wake of the Coinbase direct listing, and seemingly strong crypto trading volumes in the second quarter, it’s not a huge surprise to see fintech companies that facilitate consumer bitcoin purchases attract attention. Seeing Brazil’s Mercado raise such a huge check, then, is not a huge surprise.
• Good news for hungry Europeans: If you want groceries, and want them now, “Rohlik, a Czech startup that has built an online grocery ordering and delivery business selling grocery fare,” TechCrunch reports, has just raised €100 million in a round that values the company at €1 billion.
• Ghost raises $100M for crash prevention: How much money can self-driving car tech collect? At least nine-figures more we’ve learned thanks to the new Ghost round. Ghost is also the name of a web content CMS. This is not that. Instead, this Ghost is working on what TechCrunch called “universal collision avoidance technology” for autonomous driving systems.

To guard against data loss and misuse, the cybersecurity conversation must evolve

Locking down data centers and networks against intruders is just one aspect of an organization’s security responsibilities; cloud services, collaboration tools and APIs extend security perimeters even farther. What’s more, the systems created to prevent the misuse and mishandling of sensitive data often depend heavily on someone’s better angels.

According to Sid Trivedi, a partner at Foundation Capital, and seven-time CIO Mark Settle, IT managers need to replace existing DLP frameworks with a new one that centers on DMP — data misuse protection.

These solutions “will provide data assets with more sophisticated self-defense mechanisms instead of relying on the surveillance of traditional security perimeters,” and many startups are already competing in this space.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

We revisited some themes we’ve seen before in our startup section. The same goes for our look at Big Tech. On the government-and-tech side of things:

• India doesn’t appreciate Big Tech companies, part 47: Manish Singh reports that “India’s central bank has identified Big Tech’s push into financial services as a challenge for banks in the South Asian market, saying the growing presence of these firms have prompted concerns about creation of an uneven playing field.” Recall that India is also irked at Twitter and has various other beefs with different tech companies.
• Paris fines Airbnb: Sticking to the government theme, Airbnb got hit with an €8 million fine today, a fee worth 0.14% of the company’s $6.6 billion in cash it held at the end of the first quarter, per its latest earnings report. The Daily Crunch would like to congratulate the City of Light on its auspicious regulatory victory.
• Lastly, from Pinterest, something that stood out while going back through the day’s news: A prohibition of weight-loss advertising. Lots of folks struggle with eating disorders, body image and related issues. So Pinterest is doing away with one type of advertisement that might harm those folks. With decisions like this we don’t want to be overly kind to the company in question as we don’t know how much money it is leaving on the table, but the move could hint at more active social media regulation of owned platforms in the future. At least when it comes to ads.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here.

Read one of the recommendations we’ve received below!

Name of marketer: Amy Konefal

Name of recommender: Dan Reardon, formerly of vudu.com

Recommendation:  “Amy drove scale for us as we grew to a half-billion-dollar company. She identified and exploited efficiencies and built out a rich portfolio of channels.”

Community

The Pittsburgh City Spotlight was a huge success! Thank you to everyone who attended, as well as the over 80 companies that submitted to participate in our pitch-off. In case you missed the event, you can check out the interview with Pittsburgh’s Mayor, our chat with CMU’s President and the latest on Duolingo from their director of Engineering.

Cool things happening in your city? Drop us a tweet about where you’d like to see us spotlight next.

TC Eventful

We’re rolling into the long holiday weekend here in the States, and in true American style, we’re offering a Fourth of July sale on tickets to not just one but all FOUR TechCrunch events in 2021: TechCrunch Early Stage (July 8-9), TC Disrupt (Sept 21-23), TC Sessions: SaaS (October 27) and TC Sessions: Space (December 14-15).

Our 4th of July ticket sale kicks into gear starting today through July 6 where you can get two tickets for the price of one on any of these TechCrunch events coming soon to a virtual platform near you. You can find all of our events and lock in your two-for-one tickets at techcrunch.com/events.