Daily Crunch: Byju’s edtech buying spree continues with $100M purchase of Austria’s GeoGebra – TechCrunch
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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 8, 2021! TechCrunch is getting into the holiday spirit with …….
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here.
Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 8, 2021! TechCrunch is getting into the holiday spirit with some end-of-year content, including our Vaunted, Famous and World-Renowned gift guides. Lucas dug into camping gear, if that is your jam. And Anna and I have the first of two book guides, sourced from venture capital recommendations. Enjoy! —Alex
Image Credits: TechCrunch
The TechCrunch Top 3
- Byju’s buys Austrian edtech startup GeoGebra: Indian edtech giant Byju’s is once again buying a smaller company, this time GeoGebra, or what TechCrunch described as an “interactive and collaborative mathematics learning tool.” We reported the purchase price as around the $100 million mark.
- That awful CEO is sorry about how he fired you: By now you have seen the video of Better.com CEO Vishal Garg firing a big chunk of his staff in a stilted video call, despite having pulled forward hundreds of millions of dollars from a future fundraise to finance his company’s operations. He went viral, amazingly, with TikToks cropping up mocking his pretty sucky way of firing a bunch of folks before the holidays. Now he’s apologizing. Surely he will shape up now and stop committing such epic gaffes. We’re certain.
- Synthesia’s bet on corporate avatars: Jordan Crook wrote up a $50 million round for a startup betting on synthetic avatars and the work of turning PowerPoints into videos. It’s one of those ideas that if it takes off, will appear obvious in hindsight. Today, the future is less certain. Still, when it comes to doing something fresh, Synthesia is a good example of how startups can tinker with the digital world and perhaps write a new path forward for businesses more generally.
Startups/VC
Before we get into a chunk of the day’s incremental startup news, Ron Miller wrote up Twilio’s new corporate venture capital fund. CVC is not a new idea, but it has seen its activity soar in recent quarters. Companies like Coinbase are rewriting the rulebook on how to invest from the corporate perspective. So, it’s not a huge shock to see Twilio jump into the game.
- And speaking of new venture funds: TechCrunch has a brief look today at Black Ops Ventures, a new $13 million fund built to invest in Black founders. While some progress has been made …….
