Monthly Archives: January 2021

News: Lacework lands $525M investment as revenue grows 300%

• January 7, 2021
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As the pandemic took hold in 2020, companies accelerated their move to cloud services. Lacework, the cloud security startup, was in the right place at the right time as customers looked for ways to secure their cloud native workloads. The company reported that revenue grew 300% year over year for the second straight year. It

As the pandemic took hold in 2020, companies accelerated their move to cloud services. Lacework, the cloud security startup, was in the right place at the right time as customers looked for ways to secure their cloud native workloads. The company reported that revenue grew 300% year over year for the second straight year.

It was rewarded for that kind of performance with a $525 million Series D today. It did not share an exact valuation, only saying that it exceeded $1 billion, which you would expect on such a hefty investment. Sutter Hill and Altimeter Capital led the round with help from D1, Coatue, Dragoneer Investment Group, Liberty Global Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Tiger Capital. The company has now raised close to $600 million.

Lacework CEO Dan Hubbard says one of the reasons for such widespread interest from investors is the breadth of the company’s security solution. “We enable companies to build securely in the cloud, and we span across multiple different categories of markets, which enable the customers to do that,” he said.

He says that encompasses a range of services including configuration and compliance, security for infrastructure as code, build time and runtime vulnerability scanning and runtime security for cloud native environments like Kubernetes and containers.

As the company has grown revenue, it has been adding employees quickly. It started the year with 92 employees and closed with over 200 with plans to double that by the end of this year. As he looks at hiring, Hubbard is aware of the need to build a diverse organization, but acknowledges that tech in general hasn’t done a great job so far.

He says they are working with the various teams inside the company to try and change that, while also working to support outside organizations that are helping educate under represented groups to get the skills they need and then building from that. “If you can help solve the problem at an earlier stage, then I think you’ve got a bigger opportunity [to have a base of people to hire] there,” he said.

The company was originally nurtured inside Sutter Hill and is built on top of the Snowflake platform. It reports that $20 million of today’s total comes from Snowflake’s new venture arm, which is putting some money into an early partner.

“We were an alpha Snowflake customer, and they were an alpha customer of ours. Our platform is built on top of the Snowflake data cloud and their new venture arm has also joined the round with an investment to further strengthen the partnership there,” Hubbard said.

As for Sutter Hill, investor Mike Speiser sees Lacework as one of his firm’s critical investments. “[Much] like Snowflake at a similar point in its evolution, Lacework is growing revenue at over 300% per year making Lacework one of Sutter Hill Ventures’ most important and promising portfolio companies,” he said in a statement.

News: Hopin buys livestreaming startup StreamYard for $250M as it looks to expand its product lineup

• January 7, 2021
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This morning Hopin, a quickly-growing startup that sells a technology platform for hosting digital events, announced that it has acquired StreamYard. The acquired company, which bootstrapped itself to material revenue scale, will retain its brand and in-market product. The deal is worth $250 million, paid in a mix of cash and stock. Hopin raised a

This morning Hopin, a quickly-growing startup that sells a technology platform for hosting digital events, announced that it has acquired StreamYard. The acquired company, which bootstrapped itself to material revenue scale, will retain its brand and in-market product.

The deal is worth $250 million, paid in a mix of cash and stock. Hopin raised a $40 million Series A in late June of 2020, and a $125 million Series B last November at a valuation of $2.125 billion.¹

At the time of its most recent round, Hopin told TechCrunch that it had grown its annual recurring revenue (ARR) from zero to $20 million in around nine months. In an email Hopin told TechCrunch that StreamYard had itself scaled to $30 million ARR without external capital. And during a conversation regarding the StreamYard deal, Hopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat said that the combined entity would sport around $65 million in ARR.

You can infer from the numbers that Hopin has continued to grow rapidly since its Series B.

If it feels strange that a Series B company is nearly at IPO-scale, recall that Hopin’s technology benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic during which events around the world from conference centers and into browsers, and that Series demarcations for startup funding rounds have lost their historical size, and maturity tethers. (TechCrunch used Hopin’s service to host several of its events in 2020.)

The deal will not subsume StreamYard whole-cloth into the Hopin product. Instead, StreamYard will retain its brand and product, so that it can continue to serve its existing customer base.  Hopin does intend to better integrate StreamYard’s streaming tech into his company’s marquee product, though its platform will remain streaming-provider agnostic; StreamYard will become the default Hopin streaming option, however.

StreamYard co-founder Geige Vandentop told TechCrunch that around 15% to 20% of its customers use its service for events-related activities. The rest comes from sources like the creator economy, and small businesses.

As a company, StreamYard decided to eschew external capital during its growth, keeping its team nigh-skeletal while focusing on customer feedback to help it make product choices. Vandentop said in an interview that StreamYard will keep up its current cadence of weekly livestreams to solicit customer input while part of the Hopin product lineup.

On the same theme, Boufarhat told TechCrunch that Hopin is working to build a customer-first, multi-product lineup, of which StreamYard will be a key piece that the larger company will be known for.

Why would StreamYard sell to Hopin, if it had managed to scale to eight-figure ARR without requiring booster shots of external cash? Vandentop described the deal as best for his current customers, his team, adding that the tie-up should allow his startup to move more quickly.

TechCrunch’s read of the deal is that Hopin managed to roughly double its own size through the transaction that came at a relatively modest cost, when we contrast StreamYard’s revenue scale compared to the acquiring company’s own. However, StreamYard partially traded its equity for Hopin shares that, given the company’s rapid 2020 fundraising pace may indicate, could rapidly grow in value. And as Vandentop noted during our chat with the two executives, Hopin was growing even more quickly than his own startup.

The virtual events space, and the hybrid, online and offline events space that Hoping originally set out to serve before COVID-19, is one worth watching in 2021 as vaccines are deployed and the world looks forward to a future of safe travel. With StreamYard in its camp, however, any slowdown in the growth of virtual events software sales could be mitigated by streaming outfit’s largely distinct customer base.

Now we can begin a countdown of sorts for when the combined Hopin and StreamYard entity reaches $100 million in ARR. After that we’ll start the IPO timer.

1. As an aside, Hopin paying around 10% of its current value for StreamYard puts the deal into a similar bucket to the Facebook-WhatsApp deal. A 10% deal implies that the acquiring company is making a material wager on the choice; the recent Slack-Salesforce deal was just over 10% of the acquiring company’s December market capitalization peak, for reference.

News: Waymo is dropping the term ‘self-driving,’ but not everyone in the industry is on board

• January 7, 2021
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Waymo will no longer use the term ‘self-driving’ to describe the technology it has been developing for more than a decade, opting instead for ‘autonomous.’ The Alphabet company said that this seemingly small shift is an important effort to clarify what the technology does and doesn’t do. It’s also been viewed as an attempt to

Waymo will no longer use the term ‘self-driving’ to describe the technology it has been developing for more than a decade, opting instead for ‘autonomous.’

The Alphabet company said that this seemingly small shift is an important effort to clarify what the technology does and doesn’t do. It’s also been viewed as an attempt to set the standard for the rest of the autonomous vehicle technology industry as well as distance itself from the “full self-driving” terminology that Tesla uses to describe its advanced driver assistance system.

“This past year, we explored the importance of language and how terms like “self-driving car” inaccurately describe what autonomous driving companies, like Waymo, are building,” the company wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “Waymo’s vehicles don’t drive themselves. Rather, Waymo is automating the task of driving and thus the term “autonomous driving” is more accurate. The conflation of terms used to describe vastly different technology — such as advanced driver assist systems and autonomous driving technology — is referred to as and has serious implications for road safety. find people consistently overestimate the capabilities of driver-assisted features.”

Waymo’s decision to drop the self-driving term has been viewed by other AV companies as a call to action by the entire industry. But not everyone in the industry on board.

Several industry insiders and founders that TechCrunch spoke to wondered if a push to drop “self-driving” might have the unintended effect of ceding the term to Tesla. Others suggested efforts would be better spent on other means of education.

“We’re pursuing a driverless application of this technology, and will continue to educate the public on its benefits with language that makes a clear distinction between technologies that drive a truck or car as opposed to technologies that assist a driver,” Aurora CEO Chris Urmson said. “Rather than rename technology based on misleading marketing efforts of other companies, we agree it is important as an industry to align on clear language to define the life-saving technology we’re building.”

The light push back on Waymo is in part an acknowledgement of the company’s position in the industry. Waymo, the former Google self-driving project, is one of the leaders in the development and commercialization of autonomous vehicles. Its efforts carry weight and influence in a nascent industry.

Waymo, which changed the name of its education campaign from Let’s Talk About Self-Driving to Let’s Talk About Autonomous Driving as part of its announcement, argues that automakers have described or marketed the advanced driver assistance systems in personally owned vehicles as self-driving or semi-autonomous. That, the company says, is creating confusion. Waymo never names Tesla as one of the drivers behind this name change. However, Tesla and its use of the terms Autopilot and FSD has prompted criticism from an array of automotive and safety organizations as well as autonomous vehicle companies.

Waymo points to research that has found that human drivers operating cars, trucks and SUVs that have been marketed as self-driving don’t understand the limited capabilities of the technology, which can lead to misuse. The company cited one study conducted in 2019, in which half of respondents believed a driver-assist feature allowed them to drive hands-free, even though these systems require drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel at all times.

Questions and confusion around how to describe technology that allows a vehicle to operate on its own without a human driver behind the wheel have persisted for years. Terms like autonomous, automated driving, driverless and self-driving have been used interchangeably for a decade, some fading off for a time before popping back up in popularity. Fully autonomous driving is another more recent entrant in the sphere of AV linguistics. Even Waymo uses the term autonomous and “fully autonomous” at different times within its blog post announcing its decision to drop the self-driving term.

‘Self-driving’ has been the go-to term for companies dedicated to developing and commercializing autonomous vehicle technology. Argo AI, Aurora, Cruise, Motional, Nuro and Voyage — other leading companies in the industry — use the term ‘self-driving’ on their websites to describe what they’re doing. Zoox is perhaps the one outlier that uses autonomous ride-hailing.

Other companies such as Argo AI are taking a different approach, opting for a storyteller or learn through conversation strategy. Argo AI, which is backed by Ford and VW, launched a podcast in November 2019 and has published about three dozen episodes to date. The company has expanded that effort with the launch of Ground Truth, which Argo describes as a “storytelling platform that provides an inside look at the development of autonomous driving technology.”

“Since there’s no shortage of hype and speculation about self-driving cars, there is a need for a place where people can get a realistic understanding of this revolutionary technology and how it could one day impact their lives,” Argo AI co-founder and CEO Bryan Salesky said in a statement about the new platform. “Ground Truth will be a destination for stories not just about the technology, but about the people doing the work, the cities where it will be deployed, and the businesses it can enable.”

News: Mambu raises $122M at a $2B+ valuation for a SaaS platform that powers banking services

• January 7, 2021
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Challenger banks, incumbent banks, and all of the many businesses that are making inroads into any kind of banking service all have something in common: when it comes to launching a new product like a credit line or a deposit or current account, these days many of them are opting not to build from the

Challenger banks, incumbent banks, and all of the many businesses that are making inroads into any kind of banking service all have something in common: when it comes to launching a new product like a credit line or a deposit or current account, these days many of them are opting not to build from the ground up, but are instead using third-party technology to power these services. Today, one of the big players in providing that tech is announcing a large round of funding to expand its business, underscoring the growth in this market.

Mambu, a Berlin-based startup that describes itself as an SaaS banking platform — providing, by way of APIs, technology to banks and others to power lending, deposit and other banking products — has closed a round of €100 million (about $122 million at today’s rates). The funding gives Mambu a post-money valuation of €1.7 billion (just over $2 billion at today’s rates), the company has confirmed.

CEO and co-founder Eugene Danilkis said it will be using the money to expand deeper in the 50 markets where it is already active, as well as focus more on specific regions like South America and Asia. (And for those keeping tabs on the “Is the Bay Area dead?” story, it’s one of the many tech companies with its US offices established in Miami.)

Mambu has been seeing 100% growth year-on-year, but notably, Mambu covered 50 markets when it last raised money, €30 million in 2019, so you can argue it has some investing and expanding to do on that front.

The round is being led by TCV, with Tiger Global and Arena Holdings, along with past investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Runa Capital and Acton Capital Partners, also participating. TCV, known for making big growth round bets (it’s invested in the likes of Netflix, Facebook and Spotify in the past) has also been carving out a name for itself for backing some of the biggest names in European fintech and e-commerce, with recent investments including Revolut, Spryker, Mollie and Relex.

The market that Mambu is courting is the vast opportunity for a new wave of banking and financial services that tap into the growth of smartphone and web usage.

Long gone are the days where people have to go into physical banks to take out or deposit money, or fill out loan applications and meet with assessors who ultimately decide whether you or your business will get money or not. In fact, many of those brick-and-mortar locations don’t even exist anymore. In their place are apps, websites, and on-demand services that live wherever people are spending time and money online.

Mambu’s platform, according to Danilkis, covers some 7,000 different banking products at the moment. These are roughly split across three primary categories: lending, current accounts and deposit accounts, but the sheer number of products really speaks to just how many ways and forms in which you are offered banking services today. (Take credit for example: you can get it through various kinds of cards, point of sale pay-later products, straight loans, and so on.) Alongside its own products, it also provides links through to certain third-party financial services like TransferWise, additional services such as security (perhaps a given for a banking platform) and a platform for “process orchestration” (its equivalent of providing business process management tools).

Gartner estimates (cited by Mambu) put the banking software market at over $100 billion and growing at double-digits, and Mambu’s customer list reveals the range of companies that are vying these days for a piece of that action: they include the likes of challenger banks like N26 and OakNorth, but also large incumbent banks like Santander and ABN Amro, and telecoms carriers like Orange, which together cover some 20 million customers and some $12 billion under management, Mambu said.

And indeed, the bigger opportunity has also meant that companies like Mambu have a large and growing list of competitors too: they include newer companies like Rapyd and Unit, as well as Thought Machine, which raised a big round last year; Temenos and Italy’s Edera. It will be interesting to see how newer entrants in the SaaS banking-platform space disrupt what are, effectively, becoming incumbents in their own right: Mambu is now approaching 10 years old (it was founded in 2011). That could lead to consolidation, too.

Turning back to that customer list, I can understand the logic of a company not really in the business of financial services like a telco, or a neo-bank taking an API-based service to power banking — it focuses instead on building clever algorithms for running those services, and fast interfaces to make them easy to use — it was interesting to me to see large banks on that list, too. It turns out that the reason is because banks are up against it in another way.

“Yes, banks have the functionality and capability, but launching something new is often a case of speed and cost,” said Danilkis. “The banks might have a generation-2 system but many will be much older. And  changing how a financial product behaves is very difficult and highly risky because even a small change can create problems. And those systems are not designed to work with APIs, so it is extremely hard if not impossible to connect to other systems, never mind in real time. Certain solutions or offerings become impossible or impractical to build yourself.”

John Doran, the TCV partner, is joining Mambu’s board with this round, and while the company may be seen as an incumbent to some, its early mover position has helped it not only gain market share, but to stand out for investors as one of the players with staying power.

“Mambu was one of the first companies to leverage the opportunity to move banking software into the cloud,” he said in a statement. “The team has built a highly composable, truly cloud-native product in a multi-billion dollar, rapidly-growing market traditionally dominated by large, slow-moving on-prem vendors. We have been following Mambu’s progress for many years and are truly delighted to be able to partner with Eugene and the entire Mambu team on their journey to expand their offerings to customers worldwide.”

News: US says India, Italy, and Turkey digital taxes are discriminatory, but won’t take any actions for now

• January 7, 2021
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Digital services taxes adopted by India, Italy, and Turkey in the past years discriminate against U.S. companies, the U.S. Trade Representative said on Wednesday. USTR, which began investigations into the three nation’s digital services taxes in June last year, said it found them to be inconsistent with international tax principles, unreasonable, and burdening or restricting

Digital services taxes adopted by India, Italy, and Turkey in the past years discriminate against U.S. companies, the U.S. Trade Representative said on Wednesday.

USTR, which began investigations into the three nation’s digital services taxes in June last year, said it found them to be inconsistent with international tax principles, unreasonable, and burdening or restricting U.S. commerce.

In its detailed reports, which the office has made public, USTR studied how these digital taxes affected companies including Amazon, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Twitter. USTR said it conducted these investigations on the ground of Section 301 of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974.

India, which has become the largest market for Silicon Valley giants Google and Facebook, introduced digital taxes in 2016 to target foreign firms. Last year, the world’s second largest internet market expanded the scope of its levy to cover a range of additional categories.

USTR investigation found (PDF) that New Delhi was taxing “numerous categories of digital services that are not leviable under other digital services taxes adopted around the world” and that the aggregate tax bill for U.S. companies could exceed $30 million per year.  It also took issue with India not levying similar taxes on local companies.

Despite the strong findings on three nations’ digital services taxes, USTR said it is not taking any specific actions “at this time” but will “continue to evaluate all available options.”

U.S. tech companies have in the past supported terms brokered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. But OECD, which is currently in the middle of working out technical details for agreements for over a 100 nations, doesn’t expect to finish the work until mid-2021. In the absence of OECD agreements, various countries are moving forward with their own versions of the taxes.

Since June last year, USTR has initiated investigations into digital services tax instituted — or proposed to be put in place – by a number of countries including Austria, Brazil, the Czech Republic, the European Union, Indonesia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and France, which resumed collecting digital services tax from US companies late last year.

In retaliation, USTR had set a January 6 deadline for levying a 25% tariff on a range of French imported goods including cosmetics and handbags.

USTR did not say whether the tariff had been enforced, but in a statement said it expects to announce the progress or completion of additional investigations in the near future.

News: Too Good To Go raises $31 million to fight food waste

• January 7, 2021
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Too Good To Go, the startup that lets you buy food right before it goes to waste, is raising a $31.1 million round. blisce/ is leading the round and investing $15.4 million as part of today’s round. Existing investors and employees are also participating. While the company has been around for a while, this is

Too Good To Go, the startup that lets you buy food right before it goes to waste, is raising a $31.1 million round. blisce/ is leading the round and investing $15.4 million as part of today’s round. Existing investors and employees are also participating. While the company has been around for a while, this is the first time Too Good To Go is raising money from a VC firm.

The startup has been operating across several European countries for a few years now. It runs a marketplace focused on food waste. On one side, restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries and other food businesses contribute surplus food items. On the other side, consumers can snatch food right before it becomes unsellable.

It’s a win for everybody as businesses can generate a bit of revenue from surplus food, customers can buy food at great prices and it reduces unnecessary waste. Of course, it’s also beneficial for Too Good To Go as the company takes a commission on transactions.

The company’s CEO Mette Lykke told TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden that one-third of food produced today is either lost or wasted — so there’s a big market opportunity. While the startup has been growing nicely, the pandemic has had a big impact on revenue — many restaurants shut down and many customers prefer to stay at home.

Back in September, Lykke told TechCrunch that Too Good To Go saw a 62% drop in revenue due to Covid-19. But that’s not going to stop the company.

Overall, Too Good To Go is operating in 15 countries and has saved 50 million meals. 65,000 businesses have sold something on Too Good To Go so far. 30 million people signed up to the service.

Too Good To Go is already working on its biggest expansion — the U.S. Just like in Europe, billions of pounds of food go to waste. According to USDA’s Economic Research Service, it represents 30 to 40% of the food supply.

As the startup’s operations are extremely local, Too Good To Go is starting with specific metropolitan areas in the U.S. In September, the company started its operations in the U.S. with New York City and Boston. Too Good To Go has expanded to part of New Jersey since then.

In the U.S. alone, the startup has attracted 150,000 users and is working with 600 businesses. It has sold 50,000 meals. Those numbers are still somewhat small, but it’s been a weird quarter for restaurants and grocery stores in the U.S.

Let’s see how it evolves in the coming months. With today’s new funding round, it should definitely boost usage in the U.S. and make it easier to plan for the long run.

News: Pennylane raises $18.4 million for its accounting service

• January 7, 2021
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French startup Pennylane has raised $18.4 million (€15 million) for its accounting service that combines automated processes with human accountants. Existing investors Global Founders Capital and Partech are investing once again. Pennylane is both a software-as-a-service company that helps you deal with your financial data and an accounting firm. By working with accountants directly, it

French startup Pennylane has raised $18.4 million (€15 million) for its accounting service that combines automated processes with human accountants. Existing investors Global Founders Capital and Partech are investing once again.

Pennylane is both a software-as-a-service company that helps you deal with your financial data and an accounting firm. By working with accountants directly, it means that you can talk with your accountant through the company’s platform. It becomes a single source of information for financial data.

The startup wants to improve the experience for both its clients and its accountants. Usually, accounting firms receive data every month or every quarter. They waste a ton of time opening files and entering information in accounting software.

Similarly, accounting reports are a black box for CEOs and CFOs. They can’t leverage that data for financial projections and visibility. Pennylane wants to change that so that you don’t have to use Excel to predict your company’s P&L.

When you first start working with Pennylane, you connect your account with third-party services that already hold valuable information, such as Stripe, Payfit, Qonto, Zoho, Sellsy, etc. This way, information is always up to date, and not just when you manually export data from all your services.

A year after launch, Pennylane has generated €2 million in revenue ($2.5 million) and attracted 550 customers. There are now 30 accountants working for the company.

Up next, the startup wants to attract more companies, and especially companies that have an in-house accounting team or work with an accounting firm already. You’ll be able to use Pennylane’s software-as-a-service with your own accountant.

Pennylane had previously raised a $4.3 million (€4 million) seed round with Global Founders Capital, Partech and Kima Ventures.

News: IPRally is building a knowledge graph-based search engine for patents

• January 7, 2021
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IPRally, a burgeoning startup out of Finland aiming to solve the patent search problem, has raised €2 million in seed funding. Leading the round is by JOIN Capital, and Spintop Ventures, with participation from existing pre-seed backer Icebreaker VC. It brings the total raised by the 2018-founded company to €2.35 million. Co-founded by CEO Sakari

IPRally, a burgeoning startup out of Finland aiming to solve the patent search problem, has raised €2 million in seed funding.

Leading the round is by JOIN Capital, and Spintop Ventures, with participation from existing pre-seed backer Icebreaker VC. It brings the total raised by the 2018-founded company to €2.35 million.

Co-founded by CEO Sakari Arvela, who has 15 years experience as a patent attorney, IPRally has built a knowledge graph to help machines better understand the technical details of patents and to enable humans to more efficiently trawl through existing patients. The premise is that a graph-based approach is more suited to patent search than simple keywords or freeform text search.

That’s because, argues Arvela, every patent publication can be distilled down to a simpler knowledge graph that “resonates” with the way IP professionals think and is infinitely more machine readable.

“We founded IPRally in April 2018, after one year of bootstrapping and proof-of-concepting with my co-founder and CTO Juho Kallio,” he tells me. “Before that, I had digested the graph approach myself for about two years and collected the courage to start the venture”.

Arvela says patent search is a hard problem to solve since it involves both deep understanding of technology and the capability to compare different technologies in detail.

“This is why this has been done almost entirely manually for as long as the patent system has existed. Even the most recent out-of-the-box machine learning models are way too inaccurate to solve the problem. This is why we have developed a specific ML model for the patent domain that reflects the way human professionals approach the search task and make the problem sensible for the computers too”.

That approach appears to be paying off, with IPRally already being used by customers such as Spotify and ABB, as well as intellectual property offices. Target customers are described as any corporation that actively protects its own R&D with patents and has to navigate the IPR landscape of competitors.

Meanwhile, IPRally is not without its own competition. Arvela cites industry giants like Clarivate and Questel that dominate the market with traditional keyword search engines.

In addition, there are a few other AI-based startups, like Amplified and IPScreener. “IPRally’s graph approach makes the searches much more accurate, allows detail-level computer analysis, and offer a non-black-box solution that is explainable for and controllable by the user,” he adds.

News: Snapchat locks President Donald Trump’s account

• January 7, 2021
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Snapchat locked President Donald Trump’s account after pro-Trump rioters stormed the United States Capitol. A Snap spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the action was taken on Wednesday and added that the company will monitor the situation closely before re-evaluating its decision. This is not the first time Snap has taken action against Trump’s account over

Snapchat locked President Donald Trump’s account after pro-Trump rioters stormed the United States Capitol. A Snap spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the action was taken on Wednesday and added that the company will monitor the situation closely before re-evaluating its decision.

This is not the first time Snap has taken action against Trump’s account over concerns about dangerous rhetoric from the president. In June, it announced content from Trump’s Snapchat would no longer be promoted in its Discover tab, and would only be visible to users if they subscribe to or search for it.

In a blog post published shortly before Snap announced its decision, co-founder and chief executive officer Evan Spiegel said that Snapchat “simply cannot promote accounts in America that are linked to people who incite racial violence, whether they do so on or off our platform.”

Unlike many other social media platforms, Snapchat was created for users to communicate with friends instead of a wider audience, the Snap spokesperson said. It has focused on making it harder to spread misinformation by relying on moderated and vetted content. For example, the Discover tab only features content from editorial partners like Reuters and other news organizations.

Twitter also locked Trump out of his account after forcing the removal of three tweets, but that action may last for only twelve hours. Facebook and Instagram locked Trump out of posting for 24 hours and blocked the #StormTheCapitol hashtag.

Many activists are calling for Twitter and Facebook to make their bans permanent, with ethics organization Accountable Tech tweeting that “the violent assault on the Capitol today has been heartbreaking, but not entirely unexpected. Sadly, Twitter and Facebook’s preparedness and response has been wildly inadequate. Simply labeling incitements of violence is not enough.”

News: State Department reportedly orders diplomats to stop posting on social media after U.S. Capitol riots

• January 7, 2021
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The State Department ordered diplomats to stop posting on social media after pro-Trump rioters stormed the United States Capitol, reports CNN, citing three diplomatic sources. Diplomats overseas were also told by the under secretary for public affairs to remove scheduled content for Facebook, Hootsuite and Twitter until told otherwise, and that planned social media posts

The State Department ordered diplomats to stop posting on social media after pro-Trump rioters stormed the United States Capitol, reports CNN, citing three diplomatic sources. Diplomats overseas were also told by the under secretary for public affairs to remove scheduled content for Facebook, Hootsuite and Twitter until told otherwise, and that planned social media posts from the State Department’s main accounts were also being suspended.

According to CNN, diplomats are usually only told to pause social media posts after a terrorist attack or major natural disaster.

As of late Wednesday evening in the United States, the main State Department Twitter account had only retweeted a thread by Secretary of State MIchael Pompeo in which he said “the storming of the U.S. Capitol today is unacceptable.”

So far, the official Instagram accounts of the State Department’s Instagram and Pompeo and the State Department’s YouTube have made no posts after the rioting at the Capitol, while the State Department’s Facebook page has a post repeating Pompeo’s Twitter thread.

TechCrunch has contacted the State Department for comment.

Social media platforms scrambled to react after an extraordinary and terrifying day of violence that resulted in the deaths of four people. Rioters breached the Capitol early Wednesday afternoon, as electoral votes were being counted, forcing lawmakers to evacuate (the joint session was later reconvened).

On Wednesday afternoon, Twitter required the removal of three of President Donald Trump’s tweets and locked his account for twelve hours, before stating that he would be permanently suspended for future violations of its Civic Integrity policy. Facebook and Instagram announced that the president would barred from posting to his accounts for 24 hours and began blocking content posted to the #StormTheCapitol hashtag.