Zendesk sells to private equity group for $10.2B – TechCrunch

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, Subscribe here.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Friday edition Daily Crunch. As you might’ve seen, the Supreme Court issued a major decision on abortion today, effectively overturning Roe v. Wade in declaring that the Constitution doesn’t guarantee the right to abortion. While the outcome was expected — a draft of the decision leaked months ago — the implications for the tech industry are only starting to become clearer. Keep watching as I and my colleagues analyze the developments.

In other news, TechCrunch’s Summer Party yesterday was a major success — thanks to all who turned up! Not to sound like a broken record, but on the events front, don’t forget about the upcoming TC Sessions: Robotics in July. TechCrunch Disrupt will be returning to San Francisco in October 18. I can’t wait to see your smiling faces there.

Do you need reading or listening material? Consider giving TechCrunch’s podcast and newsletter library a look. I’ll bet there’s a large enough backlog to keep you occupied — and, more importantly, informed! — Kyle 

TechCrunch Top 3

• Move over, there’s a new copilot in town: Proving that GitHub isn’t the only platform with the chops to launch an AI-powered pair programmer, Amazon this week debuted CodeWhisperer, a tool that can autocomplete entire functions based on only a comment or a few keystrokes of code. As Frederic writes, Amazon trained the system — which currently supports Java, JavaScript and Python — on billions of lines of publicly available open source code and its own codebase, as well as publicly available documentation and code on public forums.
• While your company is being bought, please be patient:Zendesk has been having a difficult time lately with activist investors constantly hounding Zendesk for changes and misguided attempts at increasing its valuation. Still, the news of Zendesk’s acquisition today came as Something of a surprise, if only because of its suddenness. Ron notes that the $10.2 billion transaction — led by Permira and Hellman & Friedman — gave investors a way to get someAlthough they received a $17 billion offer in February, their return on investment was lower than that offered to them.
• When you have Benjamins, who needs megapixels? Leica makes great digital cameras. Leica M-A Titan is a limited-run, special-edition digital camera. The German imaging firm chose to go analog instead. The Titanium-clad M-A Titan takes film, and — if that weren’t unobtainable enough — costs an eye-watering $20,000. HajeAccording to reports, Leica only sells approximately 100,000 cameras annually. It is possible to forgive the high price.

Startups and VC

Wondermed, a drug-related startup, raised $4.6 million to provide ketamine-assisted treatment at-home to patients. You might be asking, “Is this safe?” Wondermed and other competitors claim that it is. Mindbloom Fieldtrip Health. But they would. Haje is little suspicious of how easy it is to get approved for ketamine treatment but points to clinical studies that prove the drug’s efficacy as a therapeutic option for anxiety and depression.

Technology:

• Delivering the goods — for a price: Offering evidence that the instant delivery market isn’t toast just yet, Zomato this week acquired Blinkit, a struggling 10-minute grocery delivery startup, in a $568.1 million deal. Manish reports that investors have questioned Zomato’s expansion into the space, given its punishingly high costs and low margins.
• Hold my battery: Drones that can transport packages are very cool. What’s not cool is having to swap their batteries and payloads once they’ve landed. Fortunately, there’s a startup for that. Airrow manufactures a device that works in the same manner as a CNC machine, 3D printer, or CNC router. BrianReports, that the gantry moves along X and Y axes to transfer the battery from charger to drone and back. How clever is that?
• The struggle is real It’s never a good look when, fresh from raising capital, a startup cuts a substantial portion of its staff. That’s what happened this week with Ro, which laid off 18% of its full-time workforce to “manage expenses, increase the efficiency of [its]organization and better map out our resources [its] current strategy.” Natasha notes that former and current employees have previously spoken about the health tech company’s inability to gain meaningful revenue from newer products.
• Looking for a long-term relationship? Communication is important in any relationship, but it doesn’t always happen right off the bat. That’s why Hinge this week introduced “Dating Intentions,” a new profile feature that’s designed to encourage users to be up front about their expectations. As per Aisha, the curated choices include “life partner,” “long-term,” “long-term, open to short-term,” “short-term, open to long-term,” “short-term’” and “figuring out my dating goals.”
• If life gives you lemons turn to cryptoSolana, a startup founded in 2016 by former engineers and designers at Essential, is shifting its focus to embrace cryptocurrency. Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana, announced this week that their first product, the Osom OV1, is an Android smartphone that supports decentralized applications that are reliant on Solana’s blockchain. Reactions were mixed. Jacquelyn reports.
• Don’t eat the lentils: Daily Harvest is blaming the health problems a portion of its customers have been experiencing on lentils — specifically leeks and lentils. A Wall Street Journal article. article, the company recalled its French Lentil and Leek Crumbles product, which reportedly caused some people to have to undergo surgery to remove their gallbladders and might’ve contributed to liver damage and fevers. Daily Harvest is valued at more than $1 billion and has received backing from a number of celebrities. AishaNotes include Bobby Flay, Gwyneth Patrow, and Serena Williams

Twitter Space: Karl Alomar, M13 managing partner, discusses fundraising in a downturn

Image CreditsGetty Images/dblight

Monday, June 27, at 11:30 a.m. PST/2:30 p.m. ET: M13 managing partnership Karl Alomar joins senior editor Walter Thompson in a Twitter Space to discuss strategies and tactics for founders looking to fundraise during this downturn.

Alomar was a pioneer in startups during the dot-com bust and Great Recession of 2008. He will discuss whether investors still prioritize growth over profits and how founding teams can identify the proof points they must establish before raising their next round.

We’ll take questions, so please follow @techcrunch on Twitter set a reminder for Monday’s chat.

TechCrunch+ (our membership program) helps founders get ahead.Register here.)

Big Tech Inc.

The future is here. It’s sort of. San Francisco residents can now pay for a ride in an autonomous taxi, courtesy of Cruise’s ride-hailing service. Darrell writes that Cruise’s offering will initially operate only between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. and on designated city streets, but that in the future, those limits might change. It’ll depend on how smoothly the service goes.

Reports indicate that India’s central bank is cracking down against fintech startups. Manish. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has informed dozens of vendors that it’s barring the practice of loading “non-bank prepaid payment instruments” — prepaid cards, for instance — using credit lines. Some of the founders who were affected are arguing that the RBI made a favorable decision because incumbent banks lobby it.

In other news:

• Fresh coat of paintGoogle announced several new features in Chrome for iOS as part of a larger update to Chrome. Among the key additions, the Chrome app is gaining access to Google’s Enhanced Safe Browsing feature that proactively warns you about dangerous web pages, Lauren writes. Other updates include user interface changes and the ability to set Google’s password manager as the autofill provider.
• The slow pace of electric: What’s not to like about EVs? The wait. As per Jaclyn, surging demand for this year’s most hotly anticipated EVs is smashing order books and lengthening waitlists. Customers of the Lyriq or other EVs might pay hundreds to thousands more for vehicles that arrive months later than they expected due to rising supply chain costs. Bummer.
• Streaming still struggling: Ivan reports that Netflix this week laid off 300 people, the firm’s second layoff spree in 2 months. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, COVID pandemic, and password sharing are just a few of the challenges facing Netflix. Netflix lost more than 250,000 subscribers in its first quarter.
• It’s almost as good as the real deal: FredericAmazon announced synthetics in SageMaker Ground Truth at its re-:MARS conference. This new feature allows you to create virtually unlimited numbers of images of an object in different positions and under different lighting conditions. It’s intended to help create synthetic data for training AI models in situations where real-world data isn’t plentiful.
• Spyware now available on Android Outlook security researchers recently linked a previously unattributed Android mobile spyware, dubbed Hermit to Italian software house RCS Lab. Zack reports. Now Google threat researchers have confirmed much of Lookout’s findings and are notifying Android users whose devices were compromised by the spyware.