Daily Crunch: Cartona will use $12M Series A to expand its Egypt-based, B2B e-commerce platform

Image Credits: Cartona

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Happy new week! Christine went on a well-deserved break, so you’ll have to deal with a double dose of my awful puns and worse headline shenanigans for a bit.

Oh! And we have a live Q&A session tomorrow at noon PT on Twitter Spaces about what a 409A valuation is and why you should care. Our very own Natasha Mascarenhas and Anita Ramaswamy will be speaking with Sumukh from AngelList and Phil from Equityzen. You can set yourself a handy reminder here. – Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

Startups and VC

Since its launch nine years ago, Seedstars has invested in 81 companies in over 30 emerging countries. Now the firm has set a goal of investing in 100 more startups with the launch of its second emerging market seed-stage fund, Catherine reports.

BAI Capital, the storied China-focused venture investment firm that was formerly known as Bertelsmann Asia Investments, has raised $700 million to back Chinese companies that are part of the country’s structural reform as well as those expanding overseas, reports Rita.

Devin reviews Framework’s modular laptop computer. “Framework isn’t necessarily trying to get people already wild for DIY to go upscale — this is about capturing people who’d like a little more flexibility and reusability but can’t find it in mainstream devices”: I thought this helped to cement the target audience a bit. If that sounds like you, give it a read!

Go on then, have a few more:

How e-commerce brands can outlast this market downturn

Image Credits: Roc Canals (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Inflation is up and consumer confidence is down, which is why e-commerce startups that hope to weather the ongoing downturn should expand their product offerings. Does that sound counterintuitive?

“The more complementary and additive a product is to your catalog, the larger your cart size, and the more likely a customer is to return,” says Bennett Carroccio. Prior to co-founding Canal, he worked with hundreds of companies as a consumer investment partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

In this TC+ post, he identifies two cost centers that are the easiest to control and shares three tactics for “staving off the brand-pocalypse.”

How e-commerce brands can outlast this market downturn

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Big tech – including Facebook and Google – have signed a pact to self-regulate over harmful content shared across digital platforms in New Zealand. Critics say it’s a ‘weak attempt to preempt regulation’, reports Paul

Rita reports exciting news for lovers of self-driving cars – there are plenty of autonomous driving vehicles testing on the roads of Shenzhen today: Pony.ai, Baidu, DeepRoute, AutoX, you name it. To date, these vehicles haven’t been the unmanned vehicles that tech upstarts envision for the future. That is changing from August 1st, as driverless car become legal in Shenzhen, China.

Also in the land of Automotive, Cruise is making good on its promise to launch an autonomous driving service in Dubai. Just a few weeks after the General Motors-backed AV company officially launched its commercial driverless operations in San Francisco, Cruise has sent two of its autonomous vehicles to Dubai to begin mapping the city in preparation for a planned launch in 2023, Rebecca reports.

More, more, always more:

A bit spicy for the mouse: In the U.S., Disney+ rolls out a number of R-rated films, as ‘Deadpool,’ ‘Deadpool 2’ and ‘Logan’ make it onto the streaming platform, writes Lauren.

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