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Daily Crunch: PSG, Battery Ventures invest $100M in open source password manager Bitwarden 

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Hey, hey, hey! It’s going to be a busy week for the TC crew this week. We’re excited about the Apple event, and Y Combinator has its demo day. Alex welcomes you to YC and Apple week on the Equity podcast, and your trusty Daily Crunch team is poised at our laptops to share the cream of the news-crop with you!
Stay tuned, it’s going to be a wild one!  — Christine and Haje
The TechCrunch Top 3
2Dh1?..Spth!Lmng: Bitwarden’s ability to generate hard-to-guess passwords has made it attractive to investors who just pumped $100 million of new funding into the company, which aims to rid the world of people using the same passwords across their personal and business lives, Paul writes.
‘Wild West’ of climate tech: Mike has a story about Ceezer closing on €4.2 million to figure out a better way for businesses to carbon-offset.
DAO makes us proud: Gaming guild Metaverse Magna is now valued at $30 million after raising $3.2 million in a recent round. Tage writes the company plans to build “Africa’s largest gaming DAO.”
Startups and VC
The EU — those guys who ensured we ended up with cookie banners on every damn website you’ve ever visited — are back at it with a new initiative that could have some major-league unintended consequences on open source software, Kyle reports. The EU’s AI Act could have a chilling effect — “if a company were to deploy an open source AI system that led to some disastrous outcome (…) it could sue the open source developers.”
Our brains are melting in the heat, so here’s some truly god-awful puns to match our current mental age:
What’s a pirate’s favorite growth metric? ARR: Userpilot, a product-led growth platform for SaaS companies, raises $4.6 million, Annie reports.
What do you call suburban justice? Lawn and order: Dominic-Madori reports that JusticeText raises $2.2 million to increase transparency in criminal evidence-gathering.
What kind of bees are made of plastic? Frisbees: Hardware startup Mantle is 3D-printing manufacturing tooling, which could drastically reduce the amount of time to make new plastic parts, Haje reports.
My credit card company is proud of my circus skills. They keep telling me I have outstanding balance: Brex’s CRO is leaving to join Founders Fund, and in her fintech newsletter this weekend, Mary Ann talks with him to figure out what drove that decision.
I walked into an EV dealership, and asked them how much they charge: Exciting news for cars-with-built-in-solar-panels fans; EV carmaker Lightyear raised $85 million and starts to gear up for production, Paul reports.
10 onboarding improvements that cut our customer churn by nearly 3x
Image Credits: Hill Street Studios (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Managers who run businesses that rely on recurring revenue are often distracted by the never-ending sprint to maintain favorable KPIs. But one metric may rule them all: customer churn.
If new users can’t quickly figure out how to use (or benefit from) your products, it won’t matter how many new customers you onboard each month. But to reduce churn, marketing and product teams need onboarding goals, says Sam DeBrule, co-founder and head of marketing of Heyday.
In a TC+ guest post, he explains the tactics he and his co-founder used to insert themselves into the customer journey, and how the changes helped them reduce turnover by almost 3x.
“If you’re working on onboarding and saw something you liked here, feel free to steal it.”

10 onboarding improvements that cut our customer churn by nearly 3x

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Big Tech Inc.
Manish was behind two of our big stories over the weekend, including crypto exchange Binance announcing it would stop supporting USDC, USDP and TUSD and begin converting the three rival stablecoins into its own stablecoin, BUSD, on September 29. He also writes about India’s information technology junior minister sending a summons to Wikipedia after edits were made to the page of cricketer Arshdeep Singh, “suggesting that some people from Pakistan were behind the act and were attempting to disrupt peace in the South Asian market.”
More to the story: Zack is back with some new developments on Samsung’s data breach notice last month.
Data dilemma: Instagram was handed “a fat fine” by the European Union after it was determined Meta’s social media platform was not properly handling children’s data, Natasha L writes.
Don’t click on that: The Los Angeles School District, the second-largest in the U.S., warned its community of disruptions while the district manages an ongoing ransomware attack, Carly reports.
Trading places: European trading platform Bitpanda added commodities to its list of items that can be traded. Romain writes the move comes as natural gas prices soar across the continent due to the ongoing conflict between Russia and the Ukraine.
Writing the playbook on video games: Rita talks to Tencent’s Steve Martin about the Chinese social networking and gaming company’s ambitions around intellectual property and autonomy.
Daily Crunch: PSG, Battery Ventures invest $100M in open source password manager Bitwarden  by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Daily Crunch: PSG, Battery Ventures invest $100M in open source password manager Bitwarden 

Daily Crunch: WhatsApp launches payments

WhatsApp is adding support for in-app payments, Apple is upgrading the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro desktop and we argue about the future of startup hubs.
Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 15, 2020.
1. WhatsApp finally launches payments, starting in Brazil
After months of talks and trials, WhatsApp has finally pulled the trigger on payments. Users in Brazil will be the first to be able to send and receive money through the messaging app, using Facebook Pay.
WhatsApp says that the payments service — which currently is free for consumers to use, but comes with a 3.99% processing fee for businesses receiving payments — will work by way of a six-digit PIN or fingerprint to complete transactions.
2. Apple adds new MacBook Pro graphics option and Mac Pro SSD upgrade kit
A week before kicking off WWDC, Apple introduced a pair of upgrades to its pro-level hardware lines. Both the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro desktop are getting select internal upgrades, starting today.
3. 3 perspectives on the future of SF and NYC as startup hubs
Three TechCrunch writers address one of the big questions about the future: Will tech continue to centralize in hubs like San Francisco and New York City, or will remote work and all the other second-order effects lead to a more decentralized startup ecosystem? (Extra Crunch membership required.)
4. Interstellar Technologies’ privately developed MOMO-5 rocket falls short of reaching space
The company first launched a vehicle in 2017, but the launch didn’t go exactly as planned and failed to reach space. In 2019, its MOMO-3 sounding rocket did break the Karman line, though just barely, and unfortunately its MOMO-5 sounding rocket launched over the weekend did not make space, as planned.
5. Introducing The Exchange, your daily dive into the private markets
The Exchange is Alex Wilhelm’s regular dive into the financial side of the startup world, and how the public markets exert gravity (or lift) on private companies. These themes might sound familiar to Daily Crunch readers, since we’ve linked to plenty of Alex’s pieces, but now it’s an official column with an official name.
6. Tesla’s US-made Model 3 vehicles now come equipped with wireless charging and USB-C ports
Tesla Model 3 vehicles produced at its Fremont, Calif. factory will reportedly come standard with a wireless charging pad and USB-C ports, upgrades that were first spotted by Drive Tesla Canada.
7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts
The latest full-length episode of Equity discusses Facebook’s new startup venture fund, while the Monday news roundup covers the latest problems at Quibi. Over at Original Content, we review the latest season of “Queer Eye.”
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Daily Crunch: WhatsApp launches payments