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Patreon has tripled its valuation to $4 billion in a $155 million funding round led by Tiger Global, the company confirmed to the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. 

The creator economy platform, which allows artists to be directly funded by their fans, received new attention amid the Covid-19 pandemic as creators were forced to push more of their work online. The creator payments space has seen a multitude of new entrants in recent months but the eight-year-old Patreon has already built up an extensive network. In a blog post last year, Patreon noted that more than 30,000 creators signed up for the service in the first weeks of March 2020.

Patreon makes money by taking a 5-12 percent fee from creators depending on which of the company’s services they use. The company wrapped a $90 million round in September that valued the company at $1.2 billion.

Other investors in this new round include Woodline Partners, Wellington Management, Lone Pine Capital and New Enterprise Associates, the report notes. 

European regulators have questions about a Facebook data breach, Clubhouse adds payments and a robotics company has SPAC plans. This is your Daily Crunch for April 6, 2021.

The big story: Facebook faces questions over data breach

A data breach involving personal data (such as email addresses and phone numbers) of more than 500 million Facebook accounts came to light over the weekend thanks to a story in Business Insider. Although Facebook said the breach was related to a vulnerability that was “found and fixed” in August 2019, the Irish Data Protection Commission — Facebook’s lead data regulator in the European Union — suggested that it’s seeking the “full facts” in the matter.

“The newly published dataset seems to comprise the original 2018 (pre-GDPR) dataset and combined with additional records, which may be from a later period,” said deputy commissioner Graham Doyle in a statement. “A significant number of the users are EU users. Much of the data appears to been data scraped some time ago from Facebook public profiles.”

In addition, it looks like EU regulators may also look into Facebook’s acquisition of customer service company Kustomer.

The tech giants

Apple launches an app for testing devices that work with ‘Find My’ — Find My Certification Asst. is designed for use by Made for iPhone Licensees who need to test their accessories’ interoperability with Apple’s Find My network.

Google Cloud joins the FinOps Foundation — The FinOps Foundation is a relatively new open-source foundation that aims to bring together companies in the “cloud financial management” space to establish best practices and standards.

Facebook confirms ‘test’ of Venmo-like QR codes for person-to-person payments in US — The feature will allow a user to scan a friend’s code with their smartphone’s camera to send or request money.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Clubhouse launches payments so creators can make money — It’s like a virtual tip jar, or a Clubhouse-branded version of Venmo.

Robotic exoskeleton maker Sarcos announces SPAC plans — The deal could potentially value the robotic exoskeleton maker and blank check company at a combined $1.3 billion.

Hipmunk’s founders launch Flight Penguin to bring back Hipmunk-style flight search — I’ve missed Hipmunk.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Giving EV batteries a second life for sustainability and profit — Automakers and startups are eying ways to reuse batteries before they’re sent for recycling.

Will Topps’ SPAC-led debut expand the bustling NFT market? — Topps and its products are popular with the same set of folks who are very excited about creating rare digital items on particular blockchains.

LG’s exit from the smartphone market comes as no surprise — Why didn’t it happen sooner?

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

Everything else

GM to build an electric Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck with more than 400 miles of range — GM is positioning the full-sized pickup for both consumer and commercial markets.

Putting Belfast on the TechCrunch map — TechCrunch’s European Cities Survey 2021 — This is the follow-up to the huge survey of investors we’ve done over the last six or more months, largely in capital cities.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Encrypted chat app Signal is adding payments to the services it provides, a long-expected move and one the company is taking its time on. A U.K.-only beta program will allow users to trade the cryptocurrency MobileCoin quickly, easily, and most importantly, privately.

If you’re in the U.K., or have some way to appear to be, you’ll notice a new Signal Payments feature in the app when you update. All you need to do to use it is link a MobileCoin wallet after you buy some on the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, the only one that lists it right now.

Once you link up, you’ll be able to instantly send MOB to anyone else with a linked wallet, pretty much as easily as you’d send a chat. (No word on when the beta will expand to other countries or currencies.)

Just as Signal doesn’t have any kind of access to the messages you send or calls you make, your payments are totally private. MobileCoin, which Signal has been working with for a couple years now, was built from the ground up for speed and privacy, using a zero-knowledge proof system and other innovations to make it as easy as Venmo but as secure as… well, Signal. You can read more about their approach in this paper (PDF).

MobileCoin just snagged a little over $11M in funding last month as rumors swirled that this integration was nearing readiness. Further whispers propelled the value of MOB into the stratosphere as well, nice for those holding it but not for people who want to use it to pay someone back for a meal. All of a sudden you’ve given your friend a Benjamin (or perhaps now, in the UK, a Turing) for no good reason, or that the sandwich has depreciated precipitously since lunchtime.

There’s no reason you have to hold the currency, of course, but swapping it for stable or fiat currencies every time seems a chore. Speaking to Wired, Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike envisioned an automatic trade-out system, though he is rarely so free with information like that if it is something under active development.

While there is some risk that getting involved with cryptocurrency, with the field’s mixed reputation, may dilute or pollute the goodwill Signal has developed as a secure and disinterested service provider, the team there seems to think it’s inevitable. After all, if popular payment services are being monitored the same way your email and social media are, perhaps we ought to nip this one in the bud and go end-to-end encrypted as quickly as possible.

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals.

Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words.

This is your chance to put Belfast on the Techcrunch Map!

If you are a tech startup founder or investor in the city please fill out the survey form here.

This is the follow-up to the huge survey of investors (see also below) we’ve done over the last six or more months, largely in capital cities.

These formed part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing regularly for ExtraCrunch, our subscription service that unpacks key issues for startups and investors.

In the first wave of surveys, the cities we wrote about were largely capitals. You can see them listed here.

This time, we will be surveying founders and investors in Europe’s other cities to capture how European hubs are growing, from the perspective of the people on the ground.

We’d like to know how your city’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and generally how your city will evolve.

We leave submissions mostly unedited and are generally looking for at least one or two paragraphs in answers to the questions.

So if you are a tech startup founder or investor in one of these cities please fill out our survey form here.

Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com and/or reply on Twitter to @mikebutcher.

Wisk Aero, the air mobility company borne out of a joint venture between Kitty Hawk and Boeing, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Archer Aviation alleging patent infringement and trade secret misappropriation.

Wisk claims in the lawsuit that Archer perpetrated a “brazen theft” of confidential information and intellectual property. The lawsuit points to the design of Archer’s first electric aircraft that was released in February, which Wisk says is a copy of one of its potential designs. That design was submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in January 2020, and Wisk alleges the similarities are too numerous to have been a coincidence.

Wisk further claims that during a forensic investigation it opened after Archer hired 10 former Wisk engineers, one of those hires secretly downloaded thousands of files before his departure. Another engineer also downloaded files, the suit alleges.

The information contained in the stolen files includes systems designs, test data, and aircraft designs, Wisk said in a blog posted Tuesday.

“As our Complaint explains, the design Archer disclosed above reflects its insider knowledge of Wisk’s extensive aerodynamic test and evaluation data based on years of experimentation and modeling,” the company said in the blog post. “The similarity in overall aircraft design further indicates Archer’s use of more detailed design features, including features related to aircraft propulsion, power management, avionics, flight control, and manufacturing methodology.”

Archer has snagged some major wins in 2021, including an announcement in February that it would merge with special purpose acquisition company Atlas Crest Investment Corp. for an equity valuation of $3.8 billion. Also in February, the Palo Alto, California-based startup landed a $1 billion order with United Airlines as a customer and investor.

“It’s regrettable that Wisk would engage in litigation in an attempt to deflect from the business issues that have caused several of its employees to depart,” an Archer spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch. The plaintiff raised these matters over a year ago, and after looking into them thoroughly, we have no reason to believe any proprietary Wisk technology ever made its way to Archer.  We intend to defend ourselves vigorously.”

The Archer spokesperson added that the company has “placed an employee on paid administrative leave in connection with a government investigation and a search warrant issued to the employee, which we believe are focused on conduct prior to the employee joining the company. Archer and three other Archer employees with whom the individual worked also have received subpoenas relating to this investigation, and all are fully cooperating with the authorities.”

The suit was filed with the California Northern District Court under case no. 5:21-cv-02450.