February 12, 2025
Amazon raises fees, ChatGPT ventures in, and Apple holds a press conference to announce

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Hello friends, and welcome to the Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter that summarizes the major happenings in the tech space over the past few days. If you’ve been criticized for following play-by-play developments, you’ve come to the right place. That’s what YR is for.

In this edition of YR, we cover TeamShare, the New York-based VC-backed startup quietly buying mom-and-pop shops; Zepto, set to become India’s first unicorn of 2023; OpenAI, which is launching ChatGPT for enterprise customers; and Google, which is unveiling BigQuery Studio, a “new way” to work with data. We also highlight highlights from Apple’s upcoming press conference, where the iPhone 15 is expected to be announced, as well as new travel-friendly features in Google Flights, a Brazilian phone being hacked with spyware, and more.

If you haven’t already, sign up here to get WiR delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Now, without further ado, here’s the news of the week!

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there goes the Neighborhood: TeamShare has big ambitions to capitalize on an opportunity with a clear vision: that of small businesses without succession planning. Although TeamShare says it sometimes pays less than market value for a company, it installs a new chairman and grants its employees 10% of the business’s stock. According to co-founder and CEO Michael Brown, the plan instead is to generate revenue from a growing range of fintech products that it sells to the businesses it buys.

A newly made unicorn: Instant grocery delivery startup Zepto has raised $200 million in a new funding round at a $1.4 billion valuation, it said on Friday, at a time when most other companies in the category are either dead or struggling. Zepto, which sells and delivers everything from groceries to electronic gadgets, processes over 300,000 orders a day across seven Indian cities. The company plans to launch an IPO in 2025.

ChatGPT comes in enterprise: In an attempt to capitalize on the viral success of ChatGPT, OpenAI has announced the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise, a business-focused version of the company’s AI-powered chatbot app. ChatGPT Enterprise adds “enterprise-grade” privacy and data analysis capabilities on top of vanilla ChatGPT, as well as improved performance and customization options.

Google launches BigQuery Studio: Unveiled this week at the Google Cloud Next conference, BigQuery Studio is a new service within BigQuery, Google’s fully managed serverless data warehouse. The service provides a single experience for editing programming languages ​​including SQL, Python and Spark to run analytics and machine learning workloads at “petabyte scale”. With BigQuery Studio, teams can access data directly from wherever they’re working and take advantage of additional controls for “enterprise-level” governance, regulation, and compliance.

New iPhone Coming: Apple’s next iPhone event is scheduled for September 12. The company has sent out invites for the press conference this week, which is once again set for its Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino. The iPhone 15 will almost certainly be the centerpiece of the big show, writes Brian, with the Apple Watch Series 9 possibly appearing alongside the Vision Pro, Apple’s AR headset, ahead of its 2024 launch.

Alert for cheap airfares: Google Flights is rolling out a new feature to help travelers better time their bookings. Introducing this week, the company is introducing insights that take advantage of historical trend data to help users see when prices were typically lowest at their chosen destination on their selected dates. In some cases, Google will refund the difference if the fare is reduced before departure.

Brazilian Phone Spyware Hack: Portuguese-language spyware called Webditative has been used in recent years to break into more than 76,000 Android phones across South America, mainly in Brazil. WebDetective is also the latest phone spyware company to be hacked in recent months. In an undated note seen by TechCrunch, the unnamed hackers described how they discovered and exploited several security vulnerabilities that allowed them to compromise WebDetective’s servers and access its user databases.

Amazon increased shipping fees: Amazon is increasing its free shipping to a minimum of $35 for customers who don’t have a Prime membership in some regions. Until now, the minimum $25 minimum was free shipping. Amazon says it’s testing the new free shipping limit randomly by ZIP code-grouped areas and everyone in the same area will see the same free shipping limit.

Babylon’s health deteriorated: It’s the end of the road for Babylon Health, the London telehealth startup once valued at nearly $2 billion backed by DeepMind’s founders and some deep-pocketed health insurers. The UK subsidiary of the business formally went into administration this week, after the company’s US shares became worthless and its operations went bankrupt earlier this month. At the same time, the administrators sold a substantial part of their assets to the new subsidiary of the American company, Emed Healthcare UK. Ingrid has the full story.

The new law gives users the ability to opt-out of the algorithm: Internet users in the European Union this week ushered in a quiet revolution on mainstream social networks: the ability to say “no thanks” when attention is hacked by AI. Thanks to the Block’s Digital Services Act, users of Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat can easily decline “personalized” content feeds based on “relevancy” (i.e., tracking) — and on more modest types of news feeds. The friends’ posts that are populated are displayed in chronological order.

Audio

If you’re looking for a podcast to while away the hours (let’s say, weekday commute), good news. TechCrunch hosts a few that would fit the bill.

This week on Equity, The Crew explores how “great” founders are successfully guiding their companies toward cash-flow positivity. The episode featured Anu Hariharan, who previously worked with a16z, is on the board of Brex and most recently at Y Combinator investing in later stage companies.

Meanwhile, on Found, Ida Josefina, co-founder and CEO of social knowledge sharing platform Sane, sat down for an interview. Josefina talks about how her foray into existentialist thought and the power of collective intelligence led her on the journey to start this company.

And Chain Reaction highlights Craig Salm, Chief Legal Officer at Grayscale Investments. Grayscale is a digital asset investment firm that aims to provide institutional and individual investors with products and services such as its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. The company was founded in 2014 and is now one of the largest digital asset currency managers in the world.

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TC+ subscribers get access to in-depth commentary, analysis and surveys – which you know if you’re already a subscriber. If you haven’t, consider signing up. Here are some highlights from this week:

All products are garbage: Haje writes that, as we move deeper into late-stage capitalism, a paradoxical phenomenon is taking shape. Despite economic prosperity as more people are able to afford high-quality goods, there appears to be a broader trend toward lower quality and disposability. In short: even though you can buy high quality products that are designed and built to last, they are becoming increasingly challenging to find.

IPO Drought: Exit volumes for startups have been weak since late 2021. But it’s easy to get caught up in new market conditions and lose track of how long they’ve dragged on, Alex and Anna write — and how different they are from those who came before. They highlight new data on IPOs – or the lack of recent IPOs.

S-1 of Instacart: Speaking of the IPO, Alex and Anna also examine Instacart’s SEC paperwork from last week. What does the startup have in store for its existing investors and perhaps those who want to buy some of its shares when the IPO comes around? They attempt to answer that burning question.

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