CNBC is now accepting nominations for the 2023 Disruptor 50 list — our annual look at the most innovative venture-backed companies using breakthrough technology to meet increasing economic and consumer challenges.
The deadline for submissions is Friday, Feb. 17 at 11:59 pm EST.
All independent, privately-owned companies founded after Jan. 1, 2008, are eligible, and any company founder or executive, investor in the company, or any of their communications representatives can access and submit an application.
The companies named to last year’s Disruptor 50 list continue to face a challenging environment in 2023, as sustained higher interest rates and ongoing hikes by the Federal Reserve risk tipping the economy into recession. The IPO market has collapsed in lockstep: only three Disruptor 50 companies went public in 2022, compared to a record-breaking 20 companies in the year prior.
Pullbacks have forced private companies to reckon with frothy valuations that defined an extended bull run for tech, during which some of the more notable Disruptor 50 companies like Uber, Coinbase, Twilio and Snowflakefinally went public.
Stripe, which topped 2020’s Disruptor 50 list as the pandemic accelerated a shift to online payments, cut its internal valuation by 28% in July, from $95 billion to $74 billion. Last month, another Disruptor 50 fintech firm, Checkout.com, slashed its valuation from $40 billion to $11 billion. Klarna raised financing at a $6.7 billion valuation last year, an 85% discount to its prior valuation of $46 billion.
Instacart has also taken multiple hits, reducing its valuation from $39 billion to $24 billion in May, then to $15 billion in July, and finally to $10 billion in December.
But it’s workers who have been hit the hardest by these severe haircuts: at least one-third of companies on the 2022 Disruptor 50 list announced layoffs last year, signaling leaner times ahead.
Still, history has shown that tough times aren’t enough to prevent the next great idea from taking hold. In fact, some of the most resilient startups were born in challenging economic environments. The Great Recession of 2008 produced Disruptor 50 companies that fundamentally changed the way people live and work, including Airbnb, Block, Pinterest, Cloudera, Slack and others.
In its original mission to identify the next generation of great public companies, this year’s Disruptor 50 list could be the most consequential yet. Nominees will be put through a comprehensive and rigorous process of researching and scoring across a wide range of quantitative and qualitative criteria, including scalability, revenue and user growth, as well as workforce diversity.
An advisory board made up of leading thinkers in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship will provide weighting for the quantitative criteria, while a team of CNBC editorial staff will read submissions and provide qualitative assessments of every single nominee.
2023 honorees will be notified in April, and the list will be released in May across CNBC’s TV and digital platforms.
Sign up for our weekly, original newsletter that goes beyond the annual Disruptor 50 list, offering a closer look at prior list-making companies and the founders driving innovation.
Mario poses at the “SUPER NINTENDO WORLD” welcome celebration at Universal Studios Hollywood on February 16, 2023 in Universal City, California.
Rodin Eckenroth | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Nintendo on Tuesday cut forecast for Switch sales for its fiscal year ending March 2025 as demand wanes for its ageing console.
The Japanese gaming giant said it now expects to sell 12.5 million units of the Switch over the course of the period. That’s down from a previous forecast of 13.5 million units.
Nintendo has been contending with fading demand for its flagship Switch console, which is now more than seven years old.
Investors are waiting for news surrounding a successor to the Switch, which they hope will re-energize Nintendo’s gaming business. In the past, the company said that the Switch successor will be announced in its current fiscal year, which ends in March 2025.
Nintendo also cut full fiscal year forecasts for sales and operating profit. The company said it now expects sales of 1.28 trillion yen versus a previous forecast of 1.35 trillion yen. The operating profit outlook for the period was slashed from 400 billion yen to 360 billion yen.
Here’s how Nintendo did in its fiscal second quarter ended Sept. 30 versus LSEG estimates:
Revenue: 276.7 billion Japanese yen ($1.8 billion), compared with 273.34 billion yen expected.
Net profit: 27.7 billion yen, versus 48.06 billion yen expected.
Revenue fell 17% year-on-year. Net profit plunged just over 69% versus the same period last year.
Super Mario, Zelda boost fading
The Switch is Nintendo’s second best-selling console in history, behind the Nintendo DS. Despite the recent fall in sales, Nintendo has prolonged the console’s appeal for an extended period of time since its launch in 2017 by relying on its recognizable characters.
In its last fiscal year, Nintendo managed to reinvigorate sales of the Switch thanks to the the success of the “Super Mario Bros. Movie” and the highly anticipated release of the “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” game, which underscored the appeal of its iconic characters.
But that effect is fading.
On Tuesday, Nintendo noted the boost that the company received in the first half of its last fiscal year, but said “there were no such special factors in the first half of this fiscal year, and with Nintendo Switch now in its eighth year since launch, unit sales of both hardware and software decreased significantly year-on-year.”
Sales of the Switch totaled 4.72 units in the six months ended Sept. 30, compared with 6.84 million units in the same period of last year.
In the face of falling sales, Nintendo has tried to license out its intellectual property for use everywhere, from movies to theme parks. A new Super Mario movie is slated for release in 2026.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg plans to visit South Korea, scheduling key meetings during the trip, according to a statement by Meta on Wednesday, which did not provide further details. Reportedly, Zuckerberg is anticipated to meet with Samsung Electronics chairman Jay Y. Lee later this month to discuss AI chip supply and other generative AI issues, as per the South Korean newspaper Seoul Economic Daily, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
Alex Wong | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Meta extended its ban on new political ads on Facebook and Instagram past Election Day in the U.S.
The social media giant announced the political ads policy update on Monday, extending its ban on new political ads past Tuesday, the original end date for the restriction period.
Meta did not specify the day it will lift the restriction, saying only that the ad blocking will continue “until later this week.” The company did not say why it extended the political advertising restriction period.
The company announced in August that any political ads that ran at least once before Oct. 29 would still be allowed to run on Meta’s services in the final week before Election Day. Other political ads will not be allowed to run.
Organization with eligible ads will have “limited editing capabilities” while the restriction is still in place, Meta said. Those advertisers will be allowed to make scheduling, budgeting and bidding-related changes to their political ads, Meta said.
Meta enacted the same policy in 2020. The company said the policy is in place because “we recognize there may not be enough time to contest new claims made in ads.”
Google-parent Alphabet announced a similar ad policy update last month, saying it would pause ads relating to U.S. elections from running in the U.S. after the last polls close on Tuesday. Alphabet said it would notify advertisers when it lifts the pause.
Nearly $1 billion has been spent on political ads over the last week, with the bulk of the money spent on down-ballot races throughout the U.S., according to data from advertising analytics firm AdImpact.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, January 18, 2024 (L), and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, November 2, 2021.
Reuters
Physical Intelligence, a robot startup based in San Francisco, has raised $400 million at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed Monday to CNBC.
Investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, a Physical Intelligence spokesperson said. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital are also listed as investors on the company’s website.
Physical Intelligence’s new valuation is about six times that of its March seed round, which reportedly came in at $70 million with a $400 million valuation. Its current roster of employees includes alumni of Tesla, Google DeepMind and X.
The startup focuses on “bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world,” per its website, and it aims to do this by developing large-scale artificial intelligence models and algorithms to power robots. The startup spent the past eight months developing a “general-purpose” AI model for robots, the company wrote in a blog post. Physical Intelligence hopes that model will be the first step toward its ultimate goal of developing artificial general intelligence. AGI is a term used to describe AI technology that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks.
Physical Intelligence’s vision is that one day users can “simply ask robots to perform any task they want, just like they can ask large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants,” the startup wrote in the blog post. In case studies, Physical Intelligence details how its tech could allow a robot to do laundry, bus tables or assemble a box.