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Hello dear readers! We’re back once again (like a renegade master) with a wall of great tech news. Plug in some headphones and bob your head to that song as you catch up with what’s happening in the rest of the world. Remember: there is no such thing as a standing desk. It’s a dance desk. Aw yeah. (We may have had too much coffee this morning. That could explain our bad behavior.) christina Y The wine
TechCrunch Top 3
- put on your woof: With pet ownership on the rise since the pandemic, vets are pushing themselves to the max. Here comes Digitail, based in Romania, a company that automates the administrative work of vets so they can focus on our four-legged friends. Miguel reports that the company closed with $11 million in new funding to scale its operations in the US and Canada.
- your move: amanda writes that proposed changes to the Dungeons & Dragons open play license threaten an entire cohort of D&D content creators, and they are fighting to protect their livelihoods.
- SBF starts a substack: In an effort to explain his side of the FTX debacle, Sam Bankman-Fried took to Substack to say, “I didn’t steal funds, and I certainly didn’t stash billions.” maria anna has more.
Startups and VCs
The prospect of investing in China is suddenly brightening as the country phases out its draconian zero-COVID policy, which has caused business disruptions of all kinds and kept the country’s borders closed for the past three years. rita reports. For venture capitalists, the pandemic has been a tumultuous ride. Tony Wu, a partner at Northern Light Venture Capital, a China-focused venture capital firm with $4.5 billion in assets under management, calls 2022 the “toughest” in his 15 years of investing in Chinese startups.
Another handful of headlines for your edification:
Why didn’t Africa have unicorns last year despite record fundraising?
Image Credits: fake images
Unicorns are becoming an endangered species in Africa’s startup ecosystem, Tage Kene-Okafor reports.
Although funding in the region increased slightly in 2022, “no unicorns appeared for the entire year, compared to five in 2021,” he writes.
“So what happened in Africa in 2022 that made it so…weird?”
And there’s more for our loyal TC+ subscribers:
TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps start-up founders and teams get ahead of the rest. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” to get 15% off an annual subscription!
big tech inc
We started some of this yesterday, but Natasha L. brings us an article warning other ad-supported programs to pay attention to Meta ads that are illegal in the European Union. She writes that “just because Facebook has, for years, processed and profited from the data of Europeans serving illegal ads doesn’t mean other ad-supported platforms are going to get the same free ride from the bloc’s regulators. The app is finally here.”
And we have five more for you:
