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Heyy! Today was a fun, rich and varied day of news on your favorite tech news site. Haje got the unfortunate news that he will be attending his 15th CES in Las Vegas, so if you’re coming along with your startup, the TC hardware team would love to hear from you. Oh, and there’s a slew of gift guides coming up – here’s a sneaky preview for the first few, if you want some inspiration to take the plunge on your Christmas shopping. — Christine and Hey
The ukbusinessupdates.com Top 3
Startups and VC
Smoodi wants to see its smoothies in the hands of, well, everyone, and it closed $5 million to expand reach for its robotic smart blender, Christine reports. I’m not going to lie: we prefer smoothie robots to robots used to kill people. To see Brian‘s article on how San Francisco police can now use robots to kill people. In other robot news, also from Brian, Monarch is delivering its first “smart tractor.”
Meanwhile, it looks like Mozilla is buying. Today, Kyle reports that it acquired Active Replica to build on its inverted vision, and yesterday, Paul wrote that the company picked up the team behind Pulse, an automated status updater for Slack.
Another handful of news items to brighten up your day:
Pitch Deck Teardown: Hour One’s $20 Million Series A Deck
Image Credits: ukbusinessupdates.com
Startups approach language learning from every angle: Hour One uses AI to deploy avatars that convert text into video.
In 2020, the Founders raised a $5 million seed round, but earlier this year it raised $20 million more through a Series A. Here’s a full rundown of the company’s unedited 11-slide deck:
- Cover slide
- “At a Glance” Summary Slide.
- Solution slide
- Market size slide
- Value proposition slide
- Product slide 1
- Product slide 2
- Target audience slide
- Case Study Slide
- Team slide
- Closing slide
Haje takes a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly in the company’s $20 million A-pitch deck:
Three more from the TC+ team:
ukbusinessupdates.com+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams lead the way. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!
Big Tech Inc.
While we dig through Elon Musk’s tweet about hate speech today, we should point out that there is a lot of “FAFO” going on in the Twitterverse, and Kanye West is the last to know what happens when he FAs. Just over a month after Kanye was active again on Twitter, Elon Musk suspended his account again for violating the social media giant’s rules. Ivan writes. This also comes as West decides he’s not buying Parler after all. Darrell has more.
Meanwhile, in the world of corporate shake-ups, Mary Ann delivers a primo headline for her story about Opendoor’s CEO Eric Wu, who stepped down today, while Aria reports that aerospace company Astra is restructuring its management team after Benjamin Lyon steps down.
Enjoy the start of your weekend with four more:
