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Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Happy Memorial Day everyone. In this issue: Astranis’ novel approach to GEO satellites Virgin Galactic’s return to the skies News from SpaceX, and more Astranis’ novel approach to internet satellites is starting to pay off Astranis , a satellite internet startup based in San Francisco, said Wednesday that its first spacecraft completed a milestone test and will start bringing broadband access to rural Alaskans as soon as mid-June. It’s a major step for the company, which was founded in 2015 by John Gedmark and Ryan McLinko. By taking a first principles approach to satellite development, the pair bet that they could make a smaller, cheaper spacecraft for geosynchronous orbit — the orbit farthest from Earth and arguably the most inhospitable — and use them to bring internet to millions, or even billions, of people around the globe. Their bet is paying off: The company’s first satellite, Arcturus, launched on a Falcon Heavy at the end of April. W...

It’s Memorial Day here in the United States, which means that the flow of tech news is slower than normal. This might leave you feeling bereft, adrift without the usual 3,239 individual items that happen daily in startup land. But have no fear, for TechCrunch+ is here with a quick rewind of our work from May. Consider this a roll call of some of our favorite journalism from the last few weeks, packaged in a simple format for your quick perusal and ingestion. To the lists! News you wished you had read 10 years ago: Haje has been a busy bee this month, writing about how to write the perfect cold email , how to hire early employees , how to get warm intros to investors (he’s hot then he’s cold , etc.), and even more on the warm intro front . We also have notes from a founder on how they bootstrapped to $40 million ARR  and key metrics from an investor for cybersecurity product managers (cybersecurity is a topic Alex has been working on as well ). Oh, and if you want to get yo...

JioCinema, the affordable on-demand video streaming service rival to Netflix and Disney’s Hotstar in India, will soon be the home for “The Office” and other NBCUniversal titles. The Viacom18 streaming service said on Monday said it has signed a “multi-year” partnership with NBCUniversal to bring “thousands of hours” of NBCU movies and TV shows to India. The partnership follows Viacom18 bagging the streaming rights for HBO and other Warner Bros. titles for the South Asian market. The partnership is not exclusive, so Netflix is likely to continue to offer NBCU titles on its platform in India as well. Nonetheless, JioCinema scoring these international catalogs should be cause of concern for global giants. JioCinema, which has over the years poached many high-profile talent from Hotstar, offers the most affordable streaming service among the mainstream streamers. Compared to a standard Netflix plan, which costs $6 a month, JioCinema Premium costs $12 for a year. The streaming serv...

JioCinema, the affordable on-demand video streaming service rival to Netflix and Disney’s Hotstar in India, will soon be the home for “The Office” and other NBCUniversal titles. The Viacom18 streaming service said on Monday said it has signed a “multi-year” partnership with NBCUniversal to bring “thousands of hours” of NBCU movies and TV shows to India. The partnership follows Viacom18 bagging the streaming rights for HBO and other Warner Bros. titles for the South Asian market. The partnership is not exclusive, so Netflix is likely to continue to offer NBCU titles on its platform in India as well. Nonetheless, JioCinema scoring these international catalogs should be cause of concern for global giants. JioCinema, which has over the years poached many high-profile talent from Hotstar, offers the most affordable streaming service among the mainstream streamers. Compared to a standard Netflix plan, which costs $6 a month, JioCinema Premium costs $12 for a year. The streaming serv...

Arm CEO Rene Haas Just ahead of CEO Rene Haas’ keynote at Computex in Taipei today, Arm launched two new products designed to increase smartphone performance. The first is the Arm Cortex-X4, its fourth-generation Cortex-X core. Arm said the Cortex-X4 is the fastest CPU it is made so far and will bring 15% more performance than its predecessor, the Cortex X-3, with a focus on enabling artificial intelligence and machine learning-based apps. The second new product is the Arm Immortalis-G720, which is based on its fifth-generation GPU architecture. Its predecessor, the Immortalis-G715 GPU, is currently inside flagship devices from OPPO and vivo through a partnership with MediaTek. Arm’s fifth-generation GPU architecture was created with high geometry games and real-time 3D apps in mind, in order to replicate the feel of console gameplay on mobile devices. Arm said the Cortex-X4’s microarchitecture consumes 40% less power than Cortex-X3 on the same process, increasing responsiveness...

Techstars’ Kerty Levy knows a thing or two about where seed funding is, and where it might be going, in the Northeast. During a presentation at TechCrunch’s Early Stage in Boston last month, Levy took a brief look at deal counts and valuations before exploring in more depth what the obstacles to funding are right now, and what founders are going to have to expand on in order to cut a deal. From 2021 to 2022, overall deal count in the Northeast was down around 25%. It might not be surprising, but it is quite stark. If you take a look at seed funding specifically, things are even more contracted. “Even if you extrapolate out past this quarter, even if we have a great second half of the year, I’m afraid that the deal count is looking bad,” she said. In the first quarter of 2023, most of the investments in New England were in the productivity, business productivity, software, health care, climate, energy and fintech sectors. But in Levy’s opinion, founders seeking investment are expec...

a16z, a venture capital firm known for its large fund sizes and for shaking up the VC game when it piled into the industry back in 2009, is cooking up a new strategy to potentially bolster its deal flow, according to a recent report.  It’s creating a fund-of-funds to invest in smaller venture capital pools, giving it visibility on the next generation of breakout tech companies. a16z did not respond to requests for comment on this story. The trend of large funds — traditionally more focused on later-stage deal-making, as it’s hard to deploy big funds into smaller, earlier deals — trying to find a way to get involved in earlier-stage companies is not new. And it is not hard to see the logic behind the a16z effort, provided that it pans out as expected: If it is hard for huge funds to go early, and therefore small, why not simply fund the folks investing early, and then leverage those relationships? The new a16z effort sparked up a little conversation inside of TechCrunch+, so we...