To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here.
Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for January 26, 2022! Today we have surveillance robots, a Harry Potter reference, layoffs and startup news galore. Heck, we even have some Reddit news in the mix. It’s a good day to be a tech fan, worker and general consumer. Enjoy! – Alex
The TechCrunch Top 3
- Taking a robot surveillance company public in 2022: Is not an easy feat, frankly. Given a rising general consciousness about privacy, Knightscope is going public at an interesting time. The IPO window has also been tricky of late, with some companies delaying their offerings. We have our eyes on this, if for no other reason than the fact that robots are inherently cool.
- Firebolt’s valuation soars higher: Announcing a $100 million round at a $1.4 billion valuation is big news for any company. For a startup that shares a name with a Harry Potter broomstick, it’s somewhat epic (we tried to work a golden snitch joke into the headline here and failed). Per our own Ingrid Lunden, Firebolt is “taking on Google’s BigQuery, Snowflake and others” with a cloud data warehouse product that it claims is both less expensive and faster.
- Layoffs at Glossier: Eighty corporate staffers at Glossier are out, we learned today. TechCrunch notes that the layoffs are worth about a third of the company’s corporate workforce. The gist, per an internal…
