Twitter glitch ruins Ron DeSantis’ US election campaign

It was supposed to be a pivotal moment, but turned into an embarrassing event. Also: AI gives Nvidia rosy prospects and OpenAI sets up its own fund.

Good morning! While you slept, work continued elsewhere in the digital scene.

The top topics:

Technical glitches Twitter turned the start of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign into a rather embarrassing event on Wednesday. What was intended to be the defining moment for the Republican began 20 minutes later than planned. In a first attempt with more than 500,000 listeners, it was not possible to transmit the sound for more than a few seconds at a time.

DeSantis, who appeared in a live conference (“Spaces”) with Twitter CEO Elon Musk and venture capitalist David Sacks, needed Sacks’ help to eventually relaunch the Space with a smaller audience via his own Twitter feed. At times, the conversation felt more like a Twitter Spaces endorsement than a presidential bid, with DeSantis, Musk and Sacks praising DeSantis’ ability to speak directly to audiences through the platform. [Mehr bei Bloomberg, Techcrunch und The Information]

On Founder Scene: Build an app without programming knowledge? With the startup program Smapone from Hanover this should work: It should take just 30 minutes to complete an app. The founders Sven Zuschlag and Thomas Schwarz run the company in Hanover together with around 130 employees. We have the pitch deck for you, with which they already convinced football legend Thomas Müller. [Mehr bei Gründerszene+]

And here are the other headlines of the night:

Nvidia has clearly exceeded the expectations of the analysts: In the current quarter, the chip group wants to achieve around eleven billion US dollars in revenue. The experts had just expected 7.2 billion. In the past quarter, sales slipped by 13 percent to 7.19 billion dollars, but with 2.04 billion the Californian company was able to post a significantly higher profit than in the previous year. According to Nvidia, technology for data centers and applications with artificial intelligence (AI) was particularly in demand. The stock rose more than 25 percent after the announcement. [Mehr bei Handelsblatt und CNBC]

OpenAI has closed a $175.3 million fund to invest in other startups, according to a securities filing. The fund, managed by CEO Sam Altman and COO Brad Lightcap, has raised funds from 14 investors, according to the filings. While OpenAI is a startup itself, the firm also invests in more than a dozen early-stage companies and often offers special incentives to companies that use its language models. [Mehr bei The Information]

Snowflake has reported its slowest annual revenue growth since its IPO in 2020 and cut its fiscal year revenue guidance by just over $100 million. The database provider’s revenue for the three months ended April 30 increased 48 percent compared to the same quarter last year to $623.6 million, compared to growth of 53 percent in the prior quarter. Snowflake also announced the acquisition of Neva known, a search engine startup founded by former Google– Executives was established. [Mehr bei CNBC und Bloomberg]

Meta has laid off employees in ad sales, partnerships and communications, ending the third stage of cuts announced in March. The social media giant wants to cut costs, but media reports in the US have already reported that the cuts have led to a drop in morale and productivity. [Mehr bei Techcrunch und The Information]

Investment: Figure, a Californian startup that aims to build general-purpose humanoid robots, has raised $70 million from investors in its first round of funding. The funds will be used to accelerate the development and manufacture of the first autonomous humanoid, which is expected to be launched in the coming months. The value of the year-old company was not disclosed, but a source close to the company put the value at over $400 million. [Mehr bei Reuters]

Our reading tip on Gründerszene: Most recently, the Berlin Schnell-lieferdienst succeeded Considerable not to close a new financing. An emergency sale seemed more and more likely. But the startup has now been able to avert this: several investors – including the supermarket chain rewe – have provided further growth capital of 150 million euros. However, the Flink founders pay a high price for this. [Mehr bei Gründerszene]

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A nice Thursday!

Your Gründerszene editors