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Shared micromobility startup Bird said it is investing $150 million into a European expansion plan that will including launching in more than 50 cities this year, a move that it says will double its footprint in the region.

This growth plan is already underway with Bird recently bringing its scooters to Bergen, Norway, Tarragona, Spain and Palermo, Italy.

Bird emphasized that its European expansion will be more than just a geographic one. Bird said it is adding more scooters to its fleets in existing cities, which is nearing 50. The company also made several other promises as part of its announcement, including plans to launch new mobility products and safety initiatives, “the next generation of recycling and second-life applications for vehicles,” investing in equity programs and “securing partnerships across the region.”

It isn’t clear what these new mobility products or initiatives around safety or recycling will be. A Bird spokesperson said these will be new vehicles and “transport modes” in the region. Bird didn’t provide details about what it means by securing partnerships, a phrase that could mean an extension of its franchise program called the Bird Platform or some other kind of arrangement with local governments or operators. Under the Bird Platform, which was first introduced in November 2018, the company provides independent operators with scooters to manage as they please in exchange for a percentage of the cost of each ride.

Bird did say plans will include programs like the subsidized ride passes it announced last week.

Bird has promoted company insiders Renaud Fages to head of operations and Brendan O’Driscoll to global head of product to lead the effort.

How Bird will pay for this expansion is as interesting as what it plans to do. A Bird spokesperson told TechCrunch it’s using “existing resources” to fund these various initiatives. However, the pandemic, its acquisition of Circ and its effort to launch operations in new cities while maintaining existing fleets have depleted its funds. (Last June, Bird shut down scooter sharing in several cities in the Middle East, an operation that was managed by Circ.) The company’s last public fundraising announcements were more than a year ago. The company raised $275 million in a Series D round back in September 2019. That round was later extended to $350 million.

Bird was reportedly close to accessing new funds, according to a report from The Information. The media outlet reported in January that Bird was in the midst of finalizing a deal to raise more than $100 million in convertible debt, led by existing investors Sequoia Capital and Valor Equity Partners.

Stripe gets a mind-boggling valuation, Facebook promotes COVID vaccines and Elon Musk has an interesting new title. This is your Daily Crunch for March 15, 2021.

The big story: Stripe valued at $95B

That’s right: The popular payments company has raised $600 million in new funding at a $95 billion valuation. It says it will use the money to expand in Europe while also growing its global payments and treasury network.

“Whether in fintech, mobility, retail or SaaS, the growth opportunity for the European digital economy is immense,” said president and co-founder John Collison in a statement.

Meanwhile, over in Extra Crunch, Alex Wilhelm takes a closer look at the company’s new growth numbers, like the fact that it’s now working with more than 50 companies that are each processing more than $1 billion annually.

The tech giants

Facebook to label all COVID-19 vaccine posts with pointer to official info — The company says it has also implemented some “temporary” measures aimed at limiting the spread of vaccine misinformation/combating vaccine hesitancy.

His Majesty Elon the First, Technoking of Tesla — In Musk-speak, his new title still translates into the chief executive officer of the electric car company.

Netflix gets 35 Oscar nominations, including 10 for ‘Mank’ — Of course, this is a streaming-centric year for movies overall.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Airtable is now valued at $5.77B with a fresh $270 million in Series E funding — Airtable is a relational database that many describe as a souped-up version of Excel or Google Sheets (and there’s at least one TechCrunch editor who swears by it).

WeWork unbundles its products in an attempt to make itself over, but will the strategy work? — The pandemic presented WeWork with challenges, but also, some might say, opportunity.

ElevateBio raises $525M to advance its cell and gene therapy technologies — The company’s business model focuses on both developing and commercializing its own therapies, while also working through long-term partnerships with academic research institutions.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Julia Collins and Sarah Kunst outline how to build a fundraising process — Collins is the first Black woman to co-found a venture-backed unicorn, so it should come as no surprise that investors lined up to bet on her latest venture.

Olo raises IPO range as DigitalOcean sees possible $5B debut valuation — It’s a busy day in IPO-land.

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

Everything else

US e-commerce on track for its first $1 trillion year by 2022, due to lasting pandemic impacts — The COVID-19 pandemic boosted U.S. online shopping by $183 billion, according to a new report by Adobe’s e-commerce division.

BMW debuts the next generation of its iDrive operating system — With its new system, BMW is expanding the center dashboard display all the way through the cockpit.

4 signs your product is not as accessible as you think — Bringing decades-long legacy code and design into the future isn’t easy.

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.

Every once in a meme-ified blue moon, the wildly irrational cryptocurrency ecosystem gives birth to something that might outlive the hype.

The crypto art hype may be silly and expensive, but it might also empower artists from emerging economies and under-represented groups to access the global art market in ways that they couldn’t before.

On March 5, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey auctioned off a blockchain receipt, called a non-fungible token (NFT), for a screenshot of his first tweet in 2006, and bids for it promptly exceeded $2.5 million. Since 2018, people have spent roughly $237 million on NFTs, with the vast majority of those funds spent since the trend exploded in January 2021.

Bryana Kortendick, VP of operations and communications at the NFT startup Enjin, said the platform and corresponding NFT wallet’s growth is up 100 percent since December 2020, now tallying more than 47,426 registered users. Her company was funded by a token sale in 2017 that amassed 75,041 ether (ETH), worth more than $130 million today. Kortendick declined to comment on how the cryptocurrency treasury is managed, other than to say they have enough runway for the startup’s continued growth because “Enjin has retained a portion of the funds raised through our ICO in ETH.”

As of 2021, Kortendick said the wallet app’s fastest-growing markets include the United States, Korea, the United Kingdom, Iran, Germany, Canada, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Australia. In sanctioned countries like Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, NFTs provide one of the only ways for up-and-coming artists to transact with global art collectors. It can also be a way for dancers to make money by selling NFTs with GIFs showcasing specific moves or NFTs that allow video game characters to dance a specific move.

“There has been an influx of new [app] users in countries like Iran, and we are working to localize the app accordingly to make it more accessible for these growing markets,” Kortendick said. “We recently saw a surge of [web] users in Cuba too, which prompted us to translate our entire website into Spanish.”

A new world coming under compliance

It remains to be seen if that type of market activity is sustainable, with regards to compliance across jurisdictions.

The U.S. Treasury penalized the crypto company BitGo in 2020 for allowing users to transact with people in sanctioned countries. Maintaining financial sanctions appears to be one of the regulator’s priorities in 2021. In any case, companies can delist artists and pieces, which means anyone who isn’t fluent in command-line Ethereum tricks can lose access to their NFTs. It will still exist “on the blockchain,” yet it would be quite a stretch to call NFTs “permissionless” art, as many blockchain advocates do.

Kelauni Jasmyn, general partner at the new Black Tech Nation Ventures, can explain her aims for the new firm quite succinctly: “The goal is to get more Black people funded.”

That’s something Jasmyn has been working on already with Black Tech Nation, a Pittsburgh-based organization that supports Black entrepreneurs with education, content, community and more. Now she’s tackling the funding size of the equation more directly by raising a $50 million first fund with her fellow GPs Sean Sebastian and David Motley.

“We’re really at the beginning of something brand new, that I think will be historic and offer a literal economic shift for the Black community in building generational wealth,” Jasmyn said. “We get to be the ones who mold the foundation of that.”

Sebastian is a partner at Birchmere Ventures, a seed fund also based in Pittsburgh, while Motley is co-founder of BlueTree Venture Fund and African American Directors Forum. Sebastian also suggested that he and Motley are involved partly to enable a “transfer of knowledge” that will empower a new generation of Black investors, starting with Jasmyn.

Motley, meanwhile, suggested that this is an effort to take “take the Black Tech Nation platform and combine it with the Birchmere platform.” He recalled speaking to Jasmyn for the first time at Sebastian’s urging and immediately responding, “Sean, this is the real deal.”

All three of BTNV’s partners emphasized that while the fund has a social mission, they’re also focused on financial returns. 

“We are no different than any other fund just because you put a specific community around it,” Jasmyn said. “You shouldn’t expect any less valuable returns. We just happen to have the advantage of untapped potential.”

The fund will make seed and Series A investments, and Motley said they’re focused on software startups — which could be software as a service, B2B or B2B2C. These ideas can be pre-revenue and even pre-product, but they need to be “scalable and lend themselves to significant value creation.”

Sebastian added that although BTVN is based in Pittsburgh, they’ll look at investments across the country, particularly entrepreneurs that come from outside Silicon Valley.

I wondered whether the fund’s financial goals could, at times, conflict with the more inclusive approach of Black Tech Nation, but the partners countered that the for-profit fund and nonprofit organization can actually complement each other. Motley said that Black Tech Nation “gives us more opportunities to say yes,” while Jasmyn suggested that if the venture fund has to turn someone down, she can still tell them, “Scoot over across the street [to Black Tech Nation] and maybe we can revisit this another time.”

From distributed homes in Cambridge, Mass. and Cambridge, England, inBalance Research is joining Y Combinator as it looks to accelerate its business as the oracle for independent energy providers, utilities, and market makers.

Selling a service it calls Delphi, the very early stage startup is hoping to provide analysis for power producers and utilities on the demand forecasts of energy markets.

The orchestration of energy load across the grid has become a more pressing issue for utilities around the country after witnessing the disastrous collapse of Texas’ power grid in response to its second “once-in-a-century” storm in the last decade.

“If we want to address the solution longterm, it’s a two part solution,” said inBalance co-founder and chief executive, Thomas Marge. “It’s a combination of hardware and software. You need the right assets online and you need the right software that can ensure that markets operate when there are extreme market shocks.”

Prices for electricity change every 15 minutes, and sometimes those pries can fluctuate wildly. In some places, even without the weather conditions that demolished the Texas grid and drove some companies out of business, prices can double in a matter of hours, according to inBalance.

That’s what makes forecasting tools important, the company said. As prices spike, asset managers of finite responsive resources such as hydro and storage need to decide if they will offer more value to the market now or later. Coming online too early or too late will decrease the revenue for their clean generation and increase peak prices for consumers.

The situation is even worse, according to the company, if storage and intermittent renewables come online at the same time. That can create downward price pressure for both the storage and renewable assets, which, in turn, can lead to increased fossil fuel generation later the same day, once cleaner sources are depleted.

The software to predict those pressures is what inBalance claims to provide. Marge and his fellow co-founders, Rajan Troll and Edwin Fennell have always been interested in the problems associated with big data and energy.

For Marge, that began when he worked on a project to optimize operations for wind farms during a stint in Lexington, Mass.

“Fundamentally we’re a data science solution,” said Marge. “It’s a combination of knowing what factors influence every single asset on every single market in North America. We have a glimpse into how those assets are going to be working one day before to one hour before in order to do price forecasting.” 

So far, one utility using the company’s software in the Northeast has managed to curb its emissions by 0.2%. With a focus on renewables, inBalance is hoping to roll out larger reductions to the 3,000 market participants that are also using its forecasting tools for other services. Another application is in the work inBalance is conducting with a gas peaker plant to help offset the intermittency of renewable generation sources.

The reduction in emissions in New England is particularly impressive given that the company only began working with the utility there in December. Given its forecasting tools, the company is able to provide a window into which assets might be most valuable at what time — including, potentially, natural gas peaking plants, hydropower, pumped hydropower (basically an energy storage technology), battery or flywheel energy storage projects and demand response technologies that encourage businesses and consumers to reduce consumption in response to price signals, Marge said.

Already, six companies have taken a trip to see the Delphi software and come away as early users. They include a global renewable asset manager and one of the top ten largest utilities in the U.S., according to Marge.

“We use machine learning to accurately forecast electricity prices from terabytes of public and proprietary data. The solution required for daily power system stability is both hardware—like storage and electric vehicle charging—and the software required to optimally use it. inBalance exists to be that software solution,” the company said in a statement.