In funding news, budgeting app Copilot raised $6 million in a Series A round, and canned water startup Liquid Death raised $67 million. PipeDreams, a startup that acquires HVAC and plumbing companies, raised $25 million. The newsletter also featured analysis on Nvidia's growth trajectory, podcasts on Robinhood's new credit card and wildfires, and Spotify's test of online learning content.
Key takeaways:
- EV startup Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it scaled up deliveries, leading to an internal audit that took months to complete.
- Facebook reportedly snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in a secret project known internally at Meta as “Project Ghostbusters” with the goal to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers.
- Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque resigned amid an ongoing struggle for stability at the company, which was reportedly spending around $8 million a month as of October 2023 with little revenue to show for it.
- Robinhood announced the launch of its new Gold Card, powered by X1’s technology, nine months after acquiring credit card startup X1 for $95 million.