Good afternoon, and welcome to TechCrunch PM. For your reading pleasure today, we saw SpaceX’s Starship hit orbital velocity on its third test flight. Meanwhile, Google is changing how it warns you about unsafe sites and there were a lot of venture rounds. TikTok was fined by Italy’s government and microbiome startups are defending themselves.

— Christine

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TechCrunch PM Top 3

SpaceX’s third Starship orbital makes the grade: SpaceX’s Starship rocket made it to orbital velocity on its third test flight. See what other milestones the mission achieved.

Google alert: Google made a major change to its Safe Browsing feature in Chrome that has it moving to real-time monitoring of unsafe sites instead of once or twice per hour. The search engine giant believes it can catch up to 25% more phishing attacks this way.

Microsoft institutes its own no egress fee policy: Microsoft is following cloud rivals AWS and Google in adopting a no egress fee policy so that business customers can have an easier time transferring data out of its Azure cloud infrastructure. But there are caveats, of course.

More top reads

Money, money, money: Lots of funding news today. ShopMy, a marketing platform for content creators to connect with brands and monetize their content, raised $18.5 million; WarpStream grabbed $20 million to build a cheaper cloud-native streaming service; and Fluent Metal added $3.2 million to its pocket on a quest to innovate in the metal 3D-printing market. And can we say NFTs are making a comeback? Pallet Exchange, an NFT marketplace, got some investor love in the form of $2.5 million.

Venture capital returns: Initial public offerings continue to be scarce, so it might not be a surprise that venture capital liquidity is going to come from the secondary market in 2024, not IPOs. Meanwhile, Ted Schlein’s two-year-old Ballistic Ventures firm raised a second $360 million fund.

The Digital Services Act is gonna get ya: LinkedIn is the latest social media company to get a formal request for information from the European Union’s oversight commission about its use of user data for ad targeting. And Google, Meta, Microsoft, Snap, TikTok and X got requests for information about how they’re handling risks regarding the use of generative AI as it relates to elections.

In social media news: TikTok was fined €10 million (almost $11 million) by Italy’s government after the country’s competition and consumer authority opened an investigation into the “French scar” challenge in which users were reported to have shared videos of marks on their faces made by pinching their skin. Shaking my head. Meanwhile, Reddit has a new ad format and Instagram is working on a “Spins” feature for its Reels short-form video product.

Paytm secures license: While this doesn’t sound that interesting, it actually is a “Hail Mary” pass for the Indian company, whose banking unit is poised to be shut down Friday. Now with this third-party application license, Paytm can offer payments through the UPI network.

Go with your gut: Microbiome has become the word du jour in healthcare. Everything seems to be driven by how well you are maintaining your gut health. But a report in Science alleges that companies providing products and services in the microbiome space lack scientific rigor and meaningful regulation. Devin gets some startup takes on this criticism and what they are doing to achieve legitimacy.

Humanoid skepticism: While Figure’s recent $675 million raise sent shock waves across the robotics industry, it also raised the question of just how sustainable the humanoid market is. Brian got the scoop at this week’s Modex supply chain show in Atlanta — one populated by very few humanoids.

TechCrunch Minute

Electric vehicle manufacturers are getting creative in their strategies to evade what seems like an EV winter. Here is Alex’s take on how Rivian and Telo are making it work. I’ll even admit their designs are cute.

Speaking of adoption, EVs typically sell for higher prices than their fossil fuel–powered cohorts, and that’s keeping a lot of people from purchasing one. Coreshell is out to change that, revealing a way to lower the cost of lithium-ion batteries.

On the pods

It’s blockchain and AI integrations month on Chain Reaction. For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Melody Hildebrandt, CTO of Fox Corporation, and Mike Blank, COO at Polygon Labs.

Why these two companies? Well, Polygon Labs, the layer-2 blockchain focused on scaling Ethereum, and Fox Corporation, the well-known media conglomerate, joined forces in January to tackle deepfakes as artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent.

They discuss:

• The Fox and Polygon partnership.
• Protecting content from misuse.
• What role blockchain technology can play with verifying news.
• How deepfakes can affect the U.S. 2024 election.

This episode is part of Chain Reaction’s monthly series diving into different topics and themes in crypto. Listen here.

• Senior Policy Analyst / Senior Economist at Center for AI Policy (Washington D.C., DC, USA)
• Unified Technology Solutions Supervisor at Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (Middletown, PA, United States)
• Principal Software Engineer/Developer at Health Research, Inc. (Menands, NY, USA)
• Systems Administrator II at City of Newport (Newport, Oregon, USA)
• Product Manager at imgix (San Francisco, CA, USA)

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