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Well, hello there, and welcome to your Tuesday Daily Crunch. I will be your host this week Hey operates from a secret location where day is night and night is day. If you’re not enjoying the Found podcast about tampons today, we hope you at least saw some stars at the TC Sessions: Space event. Let’s dive into some news! — Christine
Table of Contents
The businessroundups.org Top 3
- First AI, now soft porn: We recently wrote about artificial intelligence and porn, but since everyone has been running to the App Store to try out Lensa AI’s avatars, Hey finds out that as he put it, “it’s far too easy to trick Lensa AI into creating NSFW images.” Can’t say we didn’t see that coming. In reality, Taylor is raising red flags here.
- Robinhood is retiring: Mary Ann reports that Robinhood is moving into the game of individual retirement accounts, with a 1% match on every dollar brought in — the company says this is an industry first. And it doesn’t go after the typical saver. Instead, it targets gig workers and contractors who often lack that ability outside of traditional workplaces.
- Email is life: For some people, not having access to email may be relaxing, but for those whose email has been impacted by the recent Rackspace outage, we hope Carly‘s story sheds some light on what happened. It was indeed a ransomware attack.
Startups and VC
The venture market has been a tough call for many startups to better control their runways. So if a sloppy young company can grow up in this environment, Alexears prick up. He spoke to Cacheflow, which builds tools for closing software sales, about the $10 million raise that doubled the valuation.
And speaking of industries that have been hit hard by the market, Ingrid reports good news for the beleaguered fast-trading sector, with Norwegian grocery delivery company Oda raking in $151 million, but at a lower valuation of $353 million.
And we have five more for you:
How companies can reduce rising SaaS costs
Image Credits: Ong-ad Nuseewor (Opens in a new window) /Getty Images
A recent study by procurement management platform Vertice found that one in every eight dollars companies spend goes on SaaS products.
“That’s not surprising when you consider that the average organization now uses about 110 SaaS solutions,” reports Kyle Wiggers. As a result, customers spend 53% more on software licenses today than they did in 2017.
“Most organizations have expanded their portfolio of software vendors tremendously over the past 10 years,” said Stephen White, senior director analyst at Gartner. “It is not uncommon for the supplier portfolio to more than double.”
Four more from the TC+ team:
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Big Tech Inc.
We are now looking at an era where human journalists may become obsolete (probably not, but anyway). Natasha L had a chat with OpenAI’s ChatGPT about its features and limitations. We won’t ruin it for you.
And we have five more for you:
