Proptech company Roofstock has laid off about 27% of its staff today, according to an email sent to employees viewed by TechCrunch. The cuts come just five months after the startup laid off 20% of its workforce. The company’s website states that it has 400+ employees, or “Roofsters” as they’re dubbed, but it is not known if that figure is current. Roofstock, an online marketplace for investing in leased single-family rental homes, one year ago raised $240 million at a $1.9 billion valuation. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led that financing, which included participation from existing and new backers i ..read more

Southeast Asia’s mental health startups are getting more investor attention. Last week, Intellect announced a strategic investment from IHH Healthcare, Asia’s largest private healthcare group. Now Thoughtfull, another digital mental health platform focused on Asia, has raised $4 million in a pre-Series A round led by Sheares Healthcare Group. Sheares is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek. The round, which Thoughtfull said was oversubscribed, also included participation from returning investors Vulpes Investment Management, The Hive Southeast Asia, global family offices and founding members o ..read more

The funding landscape in Southeast Asia is still wintery, but one fintech managed to land a major round. Kredivo Holdings, which offers credit services to underbanked consumers in Indonesia and Vietnam, has raised $270 million in what it says was an oversubscribed Series D. The round was led by Japanese bank Mizuho Bank, a subsidiary of Mizuho Financial Group that contributed $125 million. It included participation from returning investors like Square Peg Capital, Jungle Ventures, Naver Financial Corporation, GMO Venture Partners and Openspace Ventures. The company has now raised a total of ab ..read more

Epic Games announced a new system for paying creators on Fortnite, the ultra-popular, free-to-download battle royale game. Announced on Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference, Epic will now share 40% of Fortnite revenue with anyone who design “islands” in the game. This includes money that Epic earns from the purchase of V-Bucks (in-game currency), real money spent in Fortnite on items like starter packs, quest packs and cosmetics, and Fortnite Crew subscriptions. On their personal island, creators can develop their own unique in-game experiences with custom rulesets and designs. A creato ..read more

American crypto giant Coinbase received a Wells notice today from the Securities and Exchange Commission. In the wake of Coinbase’s filing regarding the Wells notice, shares of the company are off sharply in after-hours trading. Per a Coinbase SEC filing regarding the matter, the company writes that the government agency’s staff has “advised the Company that it made a ‘preliminary determination’ to recommend that the SEC file an enforcement action against the Company alleging violations of the federal securities law.” The SEC also took legal action Wednesday against Justin Sun, the founde ..read more

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Welcome to Humpday Crunch! Today we’re sad that Aloria passed away on Sunday, as Lorenzo reported. She was a veteran of the cybersecurity community, especially the one in New York, her home for many years. The Twitter account of the New York City security conference Summercon announced her death on Monday, prompting a seemingly endless list of people to publicly mourn her loss and pay tribute to her life. — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 X marks the spo ..read more

At first glance, Boston Dynamics is a strange fit for a show like ProMat. For decades, the firm has presented a flashy image to the world — a company well known for robotic highlight reels, from the snow-traversing Big Dog to parkour-performing Atlas. But a recent approach has found it facing one of its biggest challenges to date: commercialization. As anyone in hardware (robotics especially) will happily tell you, bringing products to market presents an entirely new set of challenges, namely: repeatability, robustness and reliability. Making a robot work for long enough to shoot a viral video ..read more

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Justin Sun, the founder of Tron, on allegations of orchestrating “unregistered offer and sale, manipulative trading and unlawful touting of crypto asset securities,” the agency stated Wednesday. The SEC said it was suing Sun, his Tron foundation, the BitTorrent Foundation and BitTorrent (now referred to as Rainberry) over the sale of two tokens: TRON, or TRX, and bitTorrent, or BTT. Both TRX and BTT were referred to as unregistered crypto asset securities by the SEC, stoking the debate on whether cryptocurrencies are in fact securities. Both tok ..read more

Oma Fertility is on a mission to improve in vitro fertilization. The company says it accomplishes this by offering clients better technology, respectful care, and ethical pricing. Founded by Gurjeet Singh in 2020, the company raised $71.5 million over three rounds of funding. Chrissy Meyer and Root Ventures invested in the last two rounds. I’m excited to have Gurjeet speaking at an upcoming TechCrunch Live event on March 29 at 12 pm PDT. Oma Fertility investor Chrissy Meyer is speaking at the event, too. TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield editor Neesha Tambe is conducting the interview. Chrissy ..read more

Microsoft Loop, a Notion-like hub for managing tasks and projects that sync across Microsoft 365 apps and services, launched in public preview today. Loop is available to users with a Microsoft Account or Azure Active Directory account. A companion app for iOS and Android is set to arrive soon; Microsoft didn’t provide firm timing. Unveiled at Ignite 2021, Loop is in some ways Microsoft’s answer to Google Workspace Spaces, which provides dashboards for real-time, digital-first project collaboration. As with most team-based productivity platforms, Loop has progress-tracking tools for projects a ..read more