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Happy Thursday! Did everyone recover from the Zoom crash this morning? Don’t worry, Zoom is available again, but we hope it helped you have a calmer day…for a while at least. — Christine and hi
The ukbusinessupdates.com Top 3
- One rival at a time: The digital design world got a treat today when Adobe announced it was buying Figma, one of its biggest rivals, in a $20 billion deal that left investors and Figma enthusiasts alike wondering what will change and whether those changes will be bad, Ingrid reports. In the meantime, Alex gives his take on the deal in ukbusinessupdates.com+ land.
- “The Merge” is here: Talking about “The Merge” has been with us for weeks, and today it’s finally here. Not following cryptocurrency means that Ethereum, one of crypto’s most popular blockchains, has now switched to proof-of-stake consensus, which also means it will now consume much less electricity, Romain writes. And for TC+, Jacquelyn tells us why it matters that Lido, Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance have majority stakes in ETH.
- There is a solution for that: Apple clears a path for easy iPhone 14 integration with a setup solution. Ivan has more.
Startups and VC
Today, hi walked around Micromobility America. They insist on using the MMA acronym so he expects a fist to the face any minute, but so far the only risk of injury has come from neck-breaking micromobility in the form of electric rollerblades. To be probably Coincidentally, Kav announced on the same day that it was setting up a 3D printing factory for bicycle helmets.
It seems that mobility is everywhere these days — Mat notes that mobility startups are filling the void at a Detroit auto show that’s a shadow of its former self.
The ukbusinessupdates.com team has been extremely busy. There is a wall of news on the ukbusinessupdates.com homepage; here are a few that caught our eye on this beautiful Thursday:
Pitch Deck Teardown: Helu.io’s $9.8 Million Series A Deck
Image Credits: hello (Opens in a new window)
Helping SMEs with their auditing, reporting and budgeting may not sound exciting, but the storytelling skills of Austrian fintech startup Helu.io got investors excited enough to shell out a $9.8 million Series A in July. to fetch.
With the exception of some details about the unit economy and revenue, Helu has shared his entire winning pitch deck with us. As these slides suggest, the founders took a simple approach:
Problem: “The CFO’s pain is Excel.”
Solution: “Goodbye Excel Sheets.”
(ukbusinessupdates.com+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams move forward. You can register here. Use code “DC” for 15% off an annual subscription!)
Big Tech Inc.
Whenever Call of Duty is mentioned, we can’t help but remember Rashida Jones’ character in “The Office” give the game a shout-out. In the case of today, Jordan was there when Activision revealed what the next generation of the game will look like.
