Online used-car marketplace Shift cuts workforce 30% following CarLotz merger

Online used vehicle retailer Shift Technologies cut its workforce by 30% in the first quarter as the company sought to reduce costs and eliminate duplicate positions following its merger with CarLotz, CEO Jeff Clementz said during an earnings call.

The layoffs came as the company saw its revenue plummet in the fourth quarter and its operating losses expand.

Shift closed its merger with CarLotz in December and immediately eliminated duplicate costs and roles, Clementz said during Tuesday’s earnings call. In early February, the company decided to exit CarLotz’s presence on the East Coast and shut down the Downer Grove, Illinois location in order to focus on core West Coast markets. One remaining CarLotz location in Pomona, California remains open. Shift also has three locations in Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area and Portland.

“While difficult, we reduced headcount by approximately 30% in the first quarter,” Clementz said on the call. “In addition to corporate roles, the majority of reductions were due to our move to decentralized sales organization, which occurred in February.” He added that the “CarLotz integration and strategic moves to rightsize our SG&A are largely behind us.”

Shift Technologies, which went public in 2020 via a merger with special purpose acquisition company, reported it generated $65.6 million in revenue in the fourth quarter, a 67% drop from the same year-ago period. Shift reported an operating loss of $60.7 million in the fourth quarter, a 14% increase from the same period in 2021.

Shift did report net income of $13 million in the fourth quarter compared to a net loss of $75.8 million in the same quarter in 2021. However, much of that was due to the one-time gain of $76.7 million from its acquisition of CarLotz. Shift had a net loss of $172 million in 2022, up from the $162.2 million loss it reported the year prior. Notably, the company’s gross profit per unit fell 42% between 2021 and 2022 to $1,208 per vehicle. 

The earnings report caused Shift shares to fall. Share fell nearly 28% on Wednesday to $1.21. However, the share price is still hovering above $1, which has allowed the company to regain the Nasdaq exchange listing requirement.

Online used-car marketplace Shift cuts workforce 30% following CarLotz merger by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

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Ramp reports 4x revenue growth, says it still has ‘vast majority’ of equity funding

2022 was a tumultuous year for many fintech startups. But for Ramp, it was a year of opportunity.

The company shared today that it saw its revenue grow by 4x last year, buoyed by what co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman describes as a desire on the part of companies of all sizes and stages seeking to save money by managing their spend better.

“During one of the most rapid raises of interest rates we’ve really seen in U..S history and with the cost of capital gone up, companies realized they need to make the most of every dollar,” he said.

Last July, Ramp revealed that it had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue before its third birthday in March of that year. Glyman this week declined to share updated revenue figures, noting only that business continued to grow – led by its fastest growing segment of bill pay. 

Notably, the executive also claimed that the startup – which has secured $670 million in equity financing and $700 million in committed debt funding since its 2019 inception – still has “the vast majority of [equity] funds” it has “ever received” still on its balance sheet. 

It has intentionally remained lean, currently operating with 464 staffers and has not conducted any layoffs.

Ramp is not yet profitable as it is focused on growth while aiming to be efficient, Glyman said.

“We’ve grown our contribution to profit and our bottom line even faster,” he told TechCrunch. 

Over time, Ramp said it has helped its customers cut expenses by over $400 million. It counts over 15,000 businesses as customers with “well into hundreds of thousands of users,” and is onboarding about 1,000 users per day.

Notably, like some of its competitors in the space such as Brex and Navan (formerly TripActions), Ramp says it is working with increasingly larger companies. So while the majority of its customers are mid-market businesses, it is attracting more late-stage private companies, such as Attentive, as well as publicly traded ones like EventBrite. Other customers include Betterment, Waymo, Deel, Webflow, Barry’s Bootcamp, Caraway, TaskRabbit and Quora.

Glyman says Ramp supports a “wide variety” of businesses including tequila brand 818, airlines, farms, manufacturers and even steel mills. He also believes its boost in business was also due in part to actions of its competitors. For example, Brex infamously announced last summer it would stop working with small businesses and non-funded startups.

“We think that our customers evaluate companies and their character, and what they’ve done, not just at a moment in time, but what they’ve done over the years,” Glyman said. “I think when other players in the market don’t serve companies or change their behavior rapidly, companies will often ask their peers who they recommend.”

Ramp, he added, is not seeking to raise more capital currently.

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Got a news tip or inside information about a topic we covered? We’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at maryann@techcrunch.com. Or you can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com. Happy to respect anonymity requests.

Fintech Roundup: The gloves are off in the spend management space

Ramp reports 4x revenue growth, says it still has ‘vast majority’ of equity funding by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch

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Instagram now lets you bookmark posts with friends and store them in a dedicated space

Back in 2017, Instagram launched a bookmarking feature called “collections,” which allows users to organize the posts they save into private groupings for easier access. Now, Instagram is introducing a new feature that lets users create collections with their friends.

The social network told TechCrunch in an email that it’s rolling out “collaborative collections,” a way for people to connect with friends over their shared interests by saving posts to a collaborative collection in their group chat or a one-on-one DM. In other words, you can now share posts with a friend of a group of friends and save them in a dedicated space.

The new feature could be seen as a way for Instagram to rival Pinterest, which has offered a “Group boards” feature since 2018, letting users collaborate with each other on the platform.

“Now when you go to save a piece of content on Feed or from your DMs, you’ll see a new option to create a collaborative collection,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said on Wednesday in the IG Updates Channel on Instagram. “From there you can give the collection a custom name and share the collection with your friends. Once they receive it, your friends can start adding content from reels, Explore, Feed and DMs to the collection as well.”

Image Credits: Instagram

Any member of the chat can add or remove posts from the collection. Users also have the option to add posts shared in a chat directly to a collaborative collection. If there is a post in a chat that you want to add to a collaborative collection, you can tap the bookmark icon that appears next to the post and then either add it to a current collaborative collection or create a new one.

Collaborative collections is a welcome addition to the platform and has numerous use cases. For instance, the feature could be used to help a group of friends plan a trip by allowing them to save posts of places they want to see or things they want to try when visiting a new place. Or, collaborative collections could be used for day-to-day things like curating a dedicated space where you and your friends can share posts about your mutual interests, such as memes, baking recipes, workout tips, craft ideas and more.

The launch of the new feature comes as Instagram recently introduced a new way for users to connect with others on the social media platform. Last month, the company rolled out a new broadcast chat feature on Instagram called “Channels.” The feature lets creators share public, one-to-many messages to directly engage with their followers. Channels support text, images, polls, reactions and more.

Earlier this month, the social network began testing a new feature that lets users quickly access your recently shared reels in order to make it easier for users to reshare a reel they liked to another friend at a later time.

Instagram launches a new broadcast chat feature called ‘Channels’

Instagram is making it more accesible to reshare Reels you already sent to friends

Instagram now lets you bookmark posts with friends and store them in a dedicated space by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

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Italy’s ban on cultivated meat could set the industry back

Just when the U.S. government was getting more comfortable with the concept of cultivated meat, the Italian government put forth a bill banning the use of lab-grown food.

The process of making cultivated meat includes a method, like precision fermentation in a laboratory, that uses animal cells without slaughtering the animals.

Reuters reported that the bill “aims to safeguard the country’s agri-food heritage,” according to the country’s agriculture minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, who also said, “Laboratory products in our opinion do not guarantee quality, well-being and the protection of our culture, our tradition.”

The bill will now go in front of parliament, and if passed, any violation of the law in the future could result in fines of up to €60,000, or about $65,000.

In a response to the proposed ban, Cellular Agriculture Europe called it “bad public policy,” and that it would “reduce consumers’ ability to choose the food they want,” especially new products for those “who are concerned about animal welfare and the environmental impact of their food.”

Currently, Singapore is the only country allowing sales of cultivated chicken. Good Meat was the first company to get approval to sell its cultivated chicken product there and received a U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance last week, joining Upside Foods, as the only two companies to move to the next stage of commercializing their products in the U.S.

Dozens of companies, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, are not far behind in getting cultivated, or cell-cultured, meat products on the market. In the U.S., these companies have to receive approval from both the FDA and U.S. Department of Agriculture before commercializing their products in this country.

If you have a juicy tip or lead about happenings in the venture and food tech worlds, you can reach Christine Hall at chall.techcrunch@gmail.com or Signal at 832-862-1051. Anonymity requests will be respected.

Cultivated meat is closer to our plate now that Good Meat also gets FDA blessing

Italy’s ban on cultivated meat could set the industry back by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

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Are cryptocurrencies commodities or securities? Depends on which US agency you ask

It’s a confusing time to be a crypto company. The markets are volatile and trading activity is shaky right now, but the biggest problem for crypto firms seems to be that there’s no clarity at the moment around the laws they’re supposed to be in alignment with.

Take, for instance, what the U.S. Commodity Futures and Trading Commission (CFTC) considers crypto to be: In its lawsuit against the crypto exchange Binance and its CEO, the CFTC alleged the firm violated trading and derivative rules, and referred to the two largest cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and ether, as commodities.

Per the CFTC’s filing against Binance, the regulator said certain digital assets, including bitcoin, ether, litecoin, and “at least two fiat-backed stablecoins,” tether and the Binance USD, “as well as other virtual currencies as alleged herein, are ‘commodities.’”

The complaint also alleged that Binance and the respective parties charged “solicited and accepted orders, accepted property to margin and operated a facility for the trading of futures, options, swaps and leveraged retail commodity transactions involving digital assets that are commodities.”

Binance CFTC suit shows that ‘regulators will keep regulating, and regulate more’

This stance is “a significant issue if the same company [and] exchange is sued by multiple agencies for the same tokens,” Yankun Guo, partner at Chicago-based law firm Ice Miller, told TechCrunch+. “This stand is also a stark contrast to the position taken by the SEC and possibly weakens the SEC’s argument that the tokens are securities.”

The CFTC’s viewpoint diverges from another major U.S. government agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which views most crypto assets (aside from Bitcoin) as securities.

Earlier this month, SEC Chair Gary Gensler told Bloomberg that the crypto market, while smaller than capital markets, is “not necessarily compliant” compared to traditional finance.

At the SEC, there’s “one goal,” Gensler said: “For them to come into compliance. […] They can call themselves crypto exchanges or lending or staking-as-a-service or other intermediaries. [Our goal is for them] to come into compliance and ensure that they don’t mislead the public or commingle the funds or take the publics’ funds and do things we don’t allow in our financial markets.”

Gensler compared it to how the SEC doesn’t allow the New York Stock Exchange to play with customers’ funds, make markets, run hedge funds or be in the clearing business. “We separate out those conflicts,” he added.

The CFTC and SEC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

So are cryptocurrencies commodities or securities? Well, it depends on who you ask. As someone who’s been covering this space, I can empathize with firms offering crypto trading on this, as it feels wishy-washy. Almost like if your mom told you one thing, but your dad told you another. Who are you going to listen to?

Are cryptocurrencies commodities or securities? Depends on which US agency you ask by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

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Apple tvOS 16.4 update gives light-sensitive users a ‘Dim Flashing Lights’ feature

Apple released the tvOS 16.4 update to the public yesterday, bringing various improvements to the system, including a new “Dim Flashing Light” feature. The new accessibility option can detect flashes of light or strobe effects and then automatically dim the display of a video.

The “Dim Flashing Light” feature is notable as it will likely benefit Apple TV users with light sensitivity or, possibly, users with epileptic seizures. According to the Epilepsy Foundation, 2.7 million Americans have epilepsy, and approximately 3-5% of them are photosensitive. Photosensitive epilepsy is when seizures are triggered by flashing lights, patterns or color changes. Flashing lights can also cause headaches and migraines.

The tvOS update is available for the Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD. It can be installed manually by going to “Settings,” “System” and then “Software Update.” If your Apple TV is set to update automatically, then it should be downloaded already.

The other updates weren’t as significant but included some performance and stability improvements.

Apple rolled out the tvOS 16.4 update shortly after tvOS 16.3.3, which fixed a bug that caused some Siri remotes to randomly disconnect from the Apple TV. When Apple released a new version of the Apple TV 4K in November 2022, there were customers that reported connectivity issues with the Siri remote. According to a Reddit user, the remote would disconnect from the Apple TV without explanation and would only work again if they did a full restart of their TV.

Apple tvOS 16.4 update gives light-sensitive users a ‘Dim Flashing Lights’ feature by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

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Binance CFTC suit shows that ‘regulators will keep regulating, and regulate more’

Another bomb has fallen on the crypto space — and the impact could be far-reaching

On Monday, the U.S. Commodity Futures and Trading Commission announced it was suing Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume; its CEO, Changpeng Zhao; and chief compliance officer Samuel Lim. The company, Zhao and Lim are being sued for allegedly breaking trading and derivatives rules.

“Crypto is under attack,” Yankun Guo, partner at Chicago-based law firm Ice Miller, told TechCrunch+. “The past six months has seen a wave of complaints and enforcement actions against blue-chip names including Coinbase, Kraken and KuCoin, and it was only a matter of time until Binance had their turn.”

Binance had about $11 billion in trading volume in the past 24 hours and has over 90 million customers globally, according to CoinMarketCap data. It launched in June 2017, and within 180 days became the largest crypto exchange in the world.

The exchange has never registered with the CFTC in any capacity and has “disregarded federal laws” for U.S. financial markets, including laws that implement controls to prevent and detect money laundering and terrorism financing, among other aspects, the filing said.

TechCrunch reached out to CFTC for comment but did not hear back by the time of publication.

A Binance spokesperson said the filing was “unexpected and disappointing as we have been working collaboratively with the CFTC for more than two years.” They added that they intend to continue to collaborate with regulators in the U.S. and around the world. “The best path forward is to protect our users and to collaborate with regulators to develop a clear, thoughtful regulatory regime.”

Binance has spent $80 million on external partners like know-your-customer vendors, transaction monitoring, market surveillance and investigative tools to support its compliance programs, the spokesperson added.

The ultimate impact on Binance could send shockwaves through the global digital asset market, Jason Allegrante, chief legal and compliance officer at Fireblocks, said.

The lawsuit is also interesting because two executives, Zhao and Lim, were named, Guo noted. “This is a major shift that shows regulators are not only going after the company, but also executives.”

Binance CFTC suit shows that ‘regulators will keep regulating, and regulate more’ by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

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