Apple announces new devices, Amazon opens a hair salon and Venmo adds cryptocurrency support. This is your Daily Crunch for April 20, 2021.
The big story: Apple announces a new iPad Pro and much more
Apple revealed a bunch of new products at its press event today. As expected, there’s going to be a new iPad Pro that’s supposed to represent a 50% performance increase over the previous model, with pricing starting at $799 for an 11-inch model.
In addition, Apple announced a redesigned Podcast app with support for paid subscriptions, a new purple iPhone 12, its long-awaited AirTag devices for finding lost objects, a new Apple TV 4K with a new remote (you also can buy the remote separately) and colorful new iMacs with M1 chips.
The tech giants
Amazon is opening a London hair salon to test AR and other retail technologies — The salon will occupy over 1,500 sq. ft on Brushfield Street in London’s Spitalfields.
Venmo adds support for buying, holding and selling cryptocurrencies — This is similar to the support that Venmo’s parent company PayPal added late last year.
Netflix blames ‘lighter content slate’ for slowing subscriber growth — But the company said production has resumed “in every major market, with the exception of Brazil and India.”
Startups, funding and venture capital
Discord walked away from Microsoft talks, may pursue an IPO — Before Discord walked away, the talks valued the company at around $10 billion.
Clearbanc rebrands its way into a unicorn — The fintech company raised a $100 million Series C.
Tom Brady and Salesforce Ventures pour millions into Class, a Zoom-friendly edtech startup — The product integrates exclusively with Zoom to make remote teaching more elegant.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Who’s funding privacy tech? — New regulations, stricter cross-border data transfer rules and increasing calls for data sovereignty have helped the privacy startup space grow.
Insurtech startups are leveraging rapid growth to raise big money — Since the end of the first quarter, we’ve seen several players in the broad startup category announce new capital, including Clearcover, Alan, Next Insurance and The Zebra.
Deep Science: Introspective, detail-oriented and disaster-chasing AIs — Our latest research roundup.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Cannabis banking act passes US House with bipartisan support — Couldn’t have happened on a better day!
Announcing our TC Sessions: SaaS virtual event happening October 27 — The single-day event will take place 100% virtually and will feature actionable advice, Q&A with some of SaaS’s biggest names and plenty of networking opportunities.
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