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The newsletter is a little later than usual today and for the next three days. Don’t worry, it’s for fun reasons: we want to be the first to tell you about the awesomeness of our australiabusinessblog.com Disrupt Battlefield businesses. Find them in our dedicated Battlefield section below! And this is the first time EVER we’re writing Daily Crunch, sitting side by side, IRL. — Christine and hi

The australiabusinessblog.com Top 3

• Someone have a nice day: Jasper, who calls himself an “AI content” developer, has raised its first-ever funding round — and a big one, at $125 million, to give it a $1.5 billion valuation, Kylea reports. It’s also because the company is in the process of acquiring a grammar and style checking platform, Outwrite.
• Turn tenants into owners: Christine provides an update on Landis, which has raised $40 million in Series B funding. The company buys houses on behalf of clients and also provides them with a patch to build their credit and eventually get a mortgage on the house they rent.
• So Apple had an event: Romain gives you a look at the new entry-level iPad that it says looks exactly like the iPad Pro. Unfortunately, it’s also more expensive, but you get a bigger screen. Priorities, amirite?

Startups and VC

Venture capital funds targeting niche sectors are ‘in’, says Connieand Will Ventures is for it. Christine reports that the low-flying Boston-based venture outfit has just tripled the size of its second fund to $150 million thanks to its approach to investing in sports technologies with the help of its community of athletes who help promote and grow its portfolio companies.

Turo, the peer-to-peer car-sharing platform dubbed as the Airbnb for cars, will expand to Australia before the end of the year. Rebecca reports. Local car owners in all major cities, including Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane, can sign up for the waiting list on Turo’s website.

Okay, fine, a few more:

News descends from Disrupt

Crypto Accelerator: Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon dishes to Anita about a “Crypto Startup School,” an inaugural accelerator program starting next year in Los Angeles. He also detailed the company’s recent massive investment in our favorite controversial founder, Adam Neumann.
Secret Boot: Both Harris and Timo was in on Ingrid‘s interview with Marc Lore, who revealed a new sports ticket startup he’s working on called Jump Platforms, and gave some insight into the Diapers.com sales to Amazon, calling it a “forced transaction.”
In the seventh heaven: Netflix VP of Gaming Mike Verdu spoke to Amanda about opening a new gaming studio in SoCal and getting started with cloud gaming.

Start battlefield

It’s Disruuuuupt! We are so excited that we can hardly sit still. Here’s the first batch of Battlefield companies that took the stage on this beautiful Tuesday in California – and if you’re curious, Neesha revealed the 20 companies presenting at the Disrupt Stage earlier today. This is the first batch threw today:

NXgenPort: A Saint Paul, Minnesota startup that wants to remotely monitor cancer patients between doctor visits using a port catheter.

Omneky: Uses OpenAI’s DALLE-2 and GPT-3 models to generate images and text that can be used in advertising for social platforms.

Circular Genomics: Claims his new form of genetic testing can identify which drugs will work for a patient in a fraction of that time.

anthill: Connects frontline workers to company assets via SMS.

AppMap: Built on the simple idea that developers should be able to see the behavior of software as they write it so that they can avoid problems when the software is running.

Mother honest: The new commercial offering aims to give employees more freedom when it comes to healthcare spending.

digest.ai: Beyond flash cards to create an AI dialogue assistant that we can all wear on our phones.

Swap Robotics: Paving the way for electric solar vegetation mowing and sidewalk snowploughing.

hormone: Hopes to encourage people with periods to do just that — add hormone monitoring to their quantified health mix.

rod: Thinks peer-to-peer payments could bring a new generation of equity investors on board.

How to combine PLG and corporate sales to improve the funnel and drive bottom-line growth?

Image Credits: Richard Drury (Opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Products and services that sell themselves sound great, but product-driven growth (PLG) startups still launch marketing campaigns and hire sales teams.

Combining PLG with traditional sales-led growth efforts can take retention and acquisition to the next level, said Kate Ahlering, Chief Revenue Officer at Calendly.

In this guest post from TC+, Ahlering outlines multiple strategies that will help teams implement a ‘hybrid GTM strategy’, including suggestions for leveraging PLG data and optimizing success metrics.

Three more from the TC+ team:

australiabusinessblog.com+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams stay ahead of the curve. You can register here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

We’ve got more for you from Apple’s surprise event in October. Brian takes a look at the company’s new M2 iPad Pro, which got a facelift and arrives on October 26. He’s talking about chips and inches, and a pencil… you get the idea.

Even more Apple to bite into:

Since we have all the Battlefield companies for your reading pleasure, here are a few more: