Daily Crunch: Hacking group penetrates 130+ organizations, captures credentials for nearly 10K workers

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Hello, you sparkling souls!

Thursday is upon us once again. Have you ever noticed how Thursdays seem to keep coming along with alarming regularity? It feels like roughly once per week, but that’s anecdotal. More research may be required. Our incredible team of writers has a trove of awesome news and analysis available for you today.

Less of our babbling, more of the news. Let’s do this. — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

• More to the story: Carly has been following this month’s Twilio breach where about 125 customers’ and companies’ credentials were affected. Well, the hackers went wild and now it looks like close to 10,000 employees were compromised, according to her new story.
• Get your learn on: Alchemy, a cryptocurrency developer platform, made its first acquisition in ChainShot, a bootstrapped education startup running coding bootcamps for aspiring web3 developers. Anita has more.
• Weaving web3 threads: As Ingrid notes, there is “a lot of hype around web3,” but building platforms within the space is still relatively new. Which makes thirdweb banking $24 million in Series A funds a bit exciting. The startup, now with a $160 million valuation, is creating a toolkit for easier development of web3 products and has gained some big-name attention in just nine months.

Startups and VC

Haje’s Pitch Deck Teardown series continues, this time looking at the deck that helped Simba Chain raise its $20 million Series A. It’s available on TechCrunch+, which is our subscription product, but guess what — we were able to talk our subscription team into giving Daily Crunch readers a discount! Use promo code “DC” to get 15% off your annual subscription.

This week, we did a fascinating TechCrunch Live with Benchling and Benchmark, where the team discussed why it’s vital to build a moat around your early customers. The recordings are available now, and it’s well worth a watch or listen; we learned a bunch!

A few more startup highlights:

• More web3 cash: Polygon founder raises $50 million for his new fund “Symbolic Capital,” focusing on emerging markets and web3, reports Anita.
• Try before you commit rentals: Zumper raises $30 million to meet flexible, short-term rental demand, led by Kleiner Perkins, Mary Ann reports.
• Dude, where’s your accounts?: Manish reports that Byju’s audited financial accounts are late and that India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs ain’t too happy. The government org asked the company for an explanation.
• Robots taking VC jobs: Manish writes that Worldcoin co-founder Novendstern leaves the startup to begin a new venture, an “AI venture capitalist that will run autonomously on-chain.”
• Read More