Tech
Quick-commerce startup Flink raises another $150M at a valuation of nearly $1B
Flink, a quick-commerce startup out of Berlin that was an acquisition target of Gorillas, Getir, Amazon, and Gopuff, is spelling out how it plans to go forth on its own. TechCrunch has exclusively learned that the company has raised $150 million, which it will use to double down on business in Germany and the Netherlands in partnership with Just Eat Takeaway.com.
The funding, $115 million in equity and $35 million in debt, is coming from a mix of new and existing investors. BOND, Mubadala, Northzone, and supermarket giant REWE are all backing Flink, along with two unnamed investors.
The company did not disclose whether Just Eat Takeaway is one of the unnamed investors. The Dutch company had also been interested in a merger with Flink, and it looks like they are working together in what Flink described as a “preferred partnership.” REWE was an existing preferred partner of Flink’s.
“This investment will enable us to further expand our footprint, improve operational efficiency, and continue delivering the fast, reliable service that our customers rely on,” Oliver Merkel, founder and managing director of Flink, said in a statement.
Flink did not disclose its valuation, but sources close to the company told TechCrunch that it is just under $1 billion. The company is undergoing some major recapitalising, considering that prior to this round, Flink had raised more than $1.5 billion, per PitchBook.
When interest in quick commerce was at its peak, Flink was valued at nearly $3 billion after an investment from DoorDash in December 2021 and just months later, it raised more funding that put its valuation close to $5 billion, according to sources.
And in April this year, it was rumored that Flink raised $106 million while exploring a sale to either Getir or Just Eat Takeaway. From what we understand, that capital was a mixture of bridge financing and other commitments that dated as far back as 2022. Since then, the erstwhile aggressive Getir has seriously retreated. However, some of those rumors were accurate, as Just Eat Takeaway indeed is in the mix. Today’s funding round, we are told, is a fresh deal.
The news of the new capital for Flink comes at the tail end of a tumultuous time in the instant delivery market.
This branch of e-commerce — in which online retailers offer a smaller assortment of goods that they house in distributed “dark stores” and offer for delivery in an hour or less — made a huge splash early during the COVID-19 pandemic. They came in as a handy way for consumers who were either sheltering in place or interested in maintaining social distance to get items they might have bought at a store in the past.
That gap in the market proved to be catnip for investors, who poured billions into a plethora of startups, which took the same route as ride-hailing companies, with expensive marketing campaigns to lure users. Notably, some of Flink’s investors being announced today were part of that rush. It was all a house of cards, however, and many such startups either collapsed or were scooped up by rivals.
Flink was very much a part of that expansion, consolidation and retreat: It acquired Cajoo in 2022 in a deal that was perceived as a saving-face move for the French startup. Now, Flink has officially called it quits and has exited France.
Just as Getir has retreated to its home market of Turkey, Flink is also narrowing its focus to improve its unit economics, and any future ambitions of expansion would stem from this more solid base. Today, the startup is focusing on Germany and the Netherlands.
Flink said it expects to make gross revenue of $600 million in 2024 in the two countries, up 20% compared to 2023. It also said it has broken even in EBITDA terms in both markets, and is targeting overall profitability by Q2 2025. Its average order (also called basket size) now rests at $40.
Flink has 146 hubs in the two countries across some 80 cities, and it said it will be opening 30 more locations in the next year. It has 8,900 employees.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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