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To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 31, 2021. Today the TechCrunch machine was busy covering the first day of Y Combinator’s Demo Day event, so expect to see all sorts of coverage on the site after this hits your inbox. We’ll bring you a recap in tomorrow’s edition, though we do have a first taste down below. In Disrupt news, TechCrunch is bringing an AI investor and a science-fiction author together and will have lots on deck for startups currently raising external capital . — Alex Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan will share their vision of our AI-powered future at Disrupt The TechCrunch Top 3 Databricks is now worth $38B: Data and AI unicorn Databricks confirmed its previously reported financing event today, raising $1.6 billion at a $38 billion valuation. TechCrunch spoke with the company’s CEO about what the money’s for, and we dug a ...

Russian internet and ride-hail giant Yandex has acquired Uber’s stake in its Self-Driving Group (SDG), as well as Uber’s indirect interest in Yandex.Eats, Yandex.Lavka and Yandex.Delivery. The total cost of the deal came to $1 billion, giving the Russian company 100% ownership over all four businesses. Yandex SDG is an autonomous technology spinout from MLU B.V., the ride-hailing and food delivery joint venture Yandex formed with Uber in 2018 by merging Yandex.Taxi and Uber’s Russian operations. At the time, Uber had a 36.6% stake in the new company. Last year, when SDG was spun out into a separate business , Uber was left with an 18.2% stake in the company, which has just been bought out by Yandex. Yandex also purchased Uber’s 33.5% collective interest in Yandex’s food delivery service, last-mile logistics service and 15-minute convenience store delivery service. Back in 2019, Yandex and Uber were reportedly considering an IPO for their JV , which Morgan Stanley estimated to be valu...

Russian internet and ride-hail giant Yandex has acquired Uber’s stake in its Self-Driving Group (SDG), as well as Uber’s indirect interest in Yandex.Eats, Yandex.Lavka and Yandex.Delivery. The total cost of the deal came to $1 billion, giving the Russian company 100% ownership over all four businesses. Yandex SDG is an autonomous technology spinout from MLU B.V., the ride-hailing and food delivery joint venture Yandex formed with Uber in 2018 by merging Yandex.Taxi and Uber’s Russian operations. At the time, Uber had a 36.6% stake in the new company. Last year, when SDG was spun out into a separate business , Uber was left with an 18.2% stake in the company, which has just been bought out by Yandex. Yandex also purchased Uber’s 33.5% collective interest in Yandex’s food delivery service, last-mile logistics service and 15-minute convenience store delivery service. Back in 2019, Yandex and Uber were reportedly considering an IPO for their JV , which Morgan Stanley estimated to be valu...

One of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies is getting into the NFT game. Larva Labs, the creator of CryptoPunks , just signed with United Talent Agency (UTA) in a representation deal that will bring one of the earliest and most iconic NFT projects into the entertainment and branding worlds. “I would say that it is one of the first opportunities for an IP that fully originated in crypto-world to enter a broader entertainment space, and they earned it,” head of UTA Digital Assets Lesley Silverman told The Hollywood Reporter . “They really have hit the zeitgeist in a tremendous way.” The deal could see CryptoPunks popping up across film, TV, video games and other licensing areas. Larva Labs’ other art projects, Meebits and Autoglyphs, will also be represented by UTA moving forward. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. As speculative investment in NFTs explodes, CryptoPunks remain one of the most recognizable — and valuable — pioneers in the space. Larva Labs launched 10,000 of the...

What do LinkedIn and Twitter have in common? They both introduced ephemeral story features that were pretty fleeting . LinkedIn announced today that it will suspend its Stories feature on September 30 and begin working on a different way to add short-form videos to the platform. LinkedIn announced the upcoming change to warn advertisers who might have already purchased ads that would run in between Stories. Those will instead be shared on the LinkedIn feed, but users who promoted or sponsored Stores directly from their page will need to remake them. This sucks. I met my wife on LinkedIn Stories https://t.co/rMeA6gpYWI — Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) August 31, 2021 LinkedIn introduced Stories in September, around the same time that Twitter rolled out Fleets to all users before doing away with the feature. This was part of a larger web and mobile redesign, which also added integrations with Zoom, BlueJeans and Teams to help professionals stay connected while working from ho...

Can reading glasses actually be cool? A new eyewear company called Cheeterz Club thinks so. The startup is working to change the perception of reading glasses from being just cheap, disposable items you pick up from a rotating display rack at your local drug store to being something you’d actually be proud to wear. To do so, the company is designing its glasses with quality lenses and frames in range of styles, while still keeping the pricing affordable. The startup — whose name is a reference to the slang term for glasses, “cheaters,” — was founded by Jennifer Farrelly , whose background includes work in advertising and sales at companies like Uber and Virool. She said the idea to make a better set of readers came to her because she found herself frustrated by the current options on the market. “It all started a few years ago. My friends were posting on social media these really depressing comments and posts like: ‘I’m old and turning into my parents, this is awful.’ And I [though...

What do LinkedIn and Twitter have in common? They both introduced ephemeral story features that were pretty fleeting . LinkedIn announced today that it will suspend its Stories feature on September 30 and begin working on a different way to add short-form videos to the platform. LinkedIn announced the upcoming change to warn advertisers who might have already purchased ads that would run in between Stories. Those will instead be shared on the LinkedIn feed, but users who promoted or sponsored Stores directly from their page will need to remake them. This sucks. I met my wife on LinkedIn Stories https://t.co/rMeA6gpYWI — Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) August 31, 2021 LinkedIn introduced Stories in September, around the same time that Twitter rolled out Fleets to all users before doing away with the feature. This was part of a larger web and mobile redesign, which also added integrations with Zoom, BlueJeans and Teams to help professionals stay connected while working from ho...