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Better.com CEO Vishal Garg apologizes for how he handled firing ~900 employees, ~9% of staff, over Zoom, as a report says Better.com is delaying its SPAC (Mary Ann Azevedo/TechCrunch)

Meta acquired synthetic data startup AI.Reverie in August, consolidating it into Reality Labs and terminating its US Air Force contract worth up to $950M (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)

Leak shows Microsoft is working on One Outlook, a version of its Outlook app that will merge existing mail and calendar apps for desktops; release goal is 2022 (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Fireblocks, which lets users store, transfer, and issue digital assets, raises a $550M Series E at an $8B valuation, after raising $310M in July 2021 (Yogita Khatri/The Block)

Bella Thorne’s Boyfriend Benjamin Mascolo Grabs Her Butt During Bikini Workout In Mexico

European anti-fraud office supports Polish-led operation against fake medicines racket worth more than €5 million

Spark Capital decides to “sever all ties” with David Dobrik’s photo sharing Dispo after claims of sexual assault emerged from past Vlog Squad videos (Natasha Mascarenhas/TechCrunch)

SeedFi, which provides financial products to underprivileged Americans, raises $50M in debt and $15M in equity, in a round led by a16z (Mary Ann Azevedo/TechCrunch)

Copenhagen-based Labster, which sells virtual STEM lab software to educational institutions, raises $60M Series C led by a16z, bringing total raised to $100M (Natasha Mascarenhas/TechCrunch)

Call center software provider Genesys raises $580M at a $21B valuation led by Salesforce Ventures (Joseph Williams/Bloomberg)

Berlin-based Razor Group raises a $125M Series B at a $1B+ valuation to buy and scale up e-commerce merchants, says 12% of its revenue is “non-Amazon” (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Japan-based SODA, which operates sneaker reselling marketplace SNKRDUNK, raises $22M Series B led by SoftBank Ventures Asia (Catherine Shu/TechCrunch)