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“Tesla is not cool enough anymore,” wrote Jasmine Sungu with the launch of Olympian Motors.

Sungu started the new electric vehicle company with co-founder Eren Canarslan upon realizing there is a demand for alternative EV designs and experiences. Sungu had previously worked at IBM and EY as a managing consultant in the automotive and mobility industry. Canarslan's career started at Ford as an R&D engineer and, prior to Olympian, the founder had been working on automotive, mobility, and augmented reality at Qualcomm Strategy & Ventures.

The founding team set out to create an experience-first consumer segment in the auto industry, prioritizing aesthetics over horsepower, user experience over torque, and simplicity. In practice, that looks like a "radically minimalistic" cockpit experience, swapping out tons of button and switches for an augmented reality HUD (heads up display) with voice-assistant and head/eye-tracking applications.

Olympian says it has the first fully fabless production model in the US, meaning the company designs its cars and microchips, but contracts out production rather than owning a factory. According to Canarslan, the model keeps Olympian asset-light, enabling it to have a product-development cycle that’s 300% faster than the U.S. average. The team is currently building prototypes for its Olympian O1 (Sedan) and a Model K1 (SUV) with the first shipment scheduled for November 2022.

Whether you agree with Sungu or not about Tesla’s coolness, it will be nice to have new options, faster. Elon Musk also said that Tesla won’t be rolling out any new models in 2022 because of the global chip shortage. Its most recent consumer EV launch was the Cybertruck in 2019, and production won’t start on those until 2023.

Still, think Tesla is pretty damn cool? Check out this new Cyberbackpack while you wait. Otherwise...

Last month, Flutterwave became Africa’s highest-valued startup with a $3 billion valuation after raising $250 million in a Series D round of funding.

The six-year-old company started out as a payment processor, headquartered in San Francisco and based in Lagos. Over the years it’s grown to serve 900,000 businesses, with investors believing it’s building one of the most consequential fintech businesses in the world as Flutterwave expands its offering. For example, it launched a new remittance product last year, Send, for sending money to local bank accounts, mobile wallets, and cash pick-up locations across various countries around the world.

Ambitions reach beyond finance too with products like Flutterwave Grow, which provides business incorporation services. Flutterwave says it can help you can register a business in the US, UK, and Nigeria in 3 to 5 business days.

The funding announcement instigated recognition of funding growth for African fintech overall. Crunchbase data shows that Africa-headquartered fintech companies raised $2 billion in 2021, up from $230 million in 2020, and that doesn’t include Flutterwave since it’s based in the US.

Here are some of the latest startup fintech launches we’ve seen serving Africa.

• Bloom launched yesterday. It offers students and young professionals in East Africa US Dollar banking so they’re not subject to the volatility of their home currencies.
• OyaPay is a digital wallet platform for paying merchants, in-store and online, with your phones instead of cash or through a POS.
• Union54 is an API that helps makers build debit card issuing into their products.
• Suplias is a B2B marketplace for mom & pop stores to buy inventory. Maker Michael Adesanya wrote: “Building a product that allows African women with minimal/no formal education, like my mother, run their businesses conveniently and profitably."
• StartWeb Africa is a drag and drop website builder for building e-commerce stores in minutes.

With Flutterwave seriously shooting for the moon (its mission is “to create endless possibilities for customers and businesses in Africa and emerging markets”) and a ton of funds, expect acquisitions. More of them. The company already recently acquired Disha, another eCommerce store builder, and payment gateway CinetPay.

To dive more into Africa’s tech ecosystem, you can check out Built in Africa, a platform sharing stories and connecting African trailblazers.

To some, it looks like Zuckerberg has abandoned Facebook’s roots, between the re-brand and the $10 billion Meta is spending on AR, VR, and related hardware.

Over the past week though, we saw two innovative new social products from Meta’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) Team. Facebook isn’t new to side projects, but it launched its NPE Team in 2019 to officially dedicate makers to experiments.

The first, Recess, helps remote teams connect. Aman Jain said that the four-person team behind Recess had never met IRL, and they couldn’t recreate the camaraderie you get from lunch chit chat or coffee runs no matter which products they tried.

Recess says it’s different in a couple of ways. The tool delivers conversation prompts through Slack, but the algorithm mixes meaningful questions with lighter-weight ones (whereas “many other apps focus on more frivolous prompts,” Jain wrote). Another difference is the way Recess uses your answers. The Recess bear “automagically surfaces commonalities” and “organizes the team’s responses into a memory vault” for newcomers to assimilate quickly.

Adorable animals indeed prompt conversation over here on the Product Hunt team. But can an alpaca get you to check off your to-do list?

Move, the second recent app launch from a Facebook NPE team, helps groups organize and get things done through social tasking and alpaca avatars. Groups, in this case, means friends, students, nonprofits, and so on (i.e. not enterprises). Matt Gabor explained that his team wanted to help empower grassroots organizers & non-profits but found during testing that any small group can benefit from the app.

How it works is the fun part. Users earn points for completing their tasks, which they can use to “drip out” their alpaca avatars. The implications of that can be anything from social pressure (your alpaca's naked!) to social competition (could your alpaca BE wearing any more clothes?)

Move is currently free (and only in the US, sorry) as the NPE Team hopes to gain more learnings from this release. We can see these alpaca avatars following you into the metaverse one day (after all, we’ve seen llama NFTs before) but how Meta decides to use any learnings remains to be seen.

We’ll end this newsletter with a couple shoutouts to non big tech makers, too. For a gamified to-do lists for yourself mixed with cute birds, Habit Bird just launched. Or if you long left social apps behind, check out Circles.

Apple’s cleverly-named launch event, “Peek Performance,” unveiled new products yesterday and this time new colors are the footnote.

In fact, we asked Twitter which were the best updates and you told us you're most excited about the new Mac Studio with the new M1 Ultra chip.

Let’s start with chip. Apple found a way to package two M1 chips together to create a new, powerful System on a Chip (Apple calls this packaging UltraFusion because everything must sound as cool as if Tony Stark made it).

Apple says the M1 Ultra is nearly 8x faster than the M1. With a bunch of graphs, it illustrated just how powerful the processor is compared to others on the market — “the world’s most powerful chip for a personal computer.” It supports up to 128GB of memory with a 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU. The 32-core Neural Engine covers up to 22 trillion operations per second “to accelerate the most formidable machine learning tasks.” All kinds of professionals are excited to see Apple “serving its pro users again.”

You’ll have the option to choose the M1 Ultra inside the new Mac Studio, which is already generating affectionate memes as a thicc version of the Mac Mini. Powered by the M1 Ultra chip, the visuals on your computer should be drool-worthy too. The Mac Studio can play back up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video “— a feat no other chip can accomplish.” Despite its size, Apple says it will fit under most displays and stay quiet.

Speaking of visuals, you can pair these with the new Apple Studio Display, a 27-inch, 5K Retina monitor that can reach 600 nits of brightness. Above the screen is a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera, and the six-speaker high fidelity system incorporates spatial audio.

Other key announcements from yesterday included a new iPad Air with M1 chip and 5G, an iPhone SE that can give you a similar experience to its pricier iPhone 13 models, and an alpine green option for your iPhone.

If you’re planning to run out and pre-order a whole new environment around the M1 Ultra, it will set you back at least $5,600 — the Mac Studio starts at $3,999 and the Studio Display at $1,599, but you’ll have to shell out more if you want a height-adjustable stand, etc. Just make sure to send your pics to Ryan Gilbert’s Workspaces Newsletter when it arrives so we can see it.

Each International Women’s Day we celebrate the cultural, political, and socioeconomic achievements of women, but progress can’t be celebrated without acknowledging the road ahead. Today LunaJoy’s launch turns our focus to women’s mental health.

The good: “The silver lining of the past two years is that we have gained tremendous flexibility and insight around our previously narrow definition of work schedules, location, and environment,” LunaJoy cofounder Dr. Sipra Laddha told Forbes.

The bad: “Women are 2x as likely to experience mental health challenges and COVID has only accelerated this,” Laddha shared. Reasons may be tied to how women have disproportionally had their work/life balance impacted. For example, 42% of women in tech took on more housework versus 11% of men.

Beyond COVID's timeline, women, in general, are 3x more likely to experience sexual, physical, emotional trauma — a predictor for mental illness. Physiologically, women are also vulnerable to mental health issues during times of transition and hormonal fluctuation, such as during puberty or pregnancy.

With 15 combined years of experience as board-certified psychiatrists, Laddha and her cofounder, Dr. Shama Rathi, took notice of how mental health challenges have impacted women disproportionately. They also found that women-first therapy was hard to come by and expensive.

So they founded a digital mental health clinic for women called LunaJoy (YC W22). LunaJoy delivers affordable (in-network) counseling and therapy, medication management, and genetic testing. Women start by filling out a short form, noting anything they’re experiencing. They’ll get matched with a counselor in about 24 hours, and will meet with them 1:1 virtually.

Since LunaJoy is currently serving 14 US states, we rounded up a few more support networks for women everywhere.

• Elpha launched Talent Pool to connect you with companies that match your cultural values and skills
• leap.club is a professional network that helps women build their social-professional networks through 1:1 connections and micro-communities
• Diem is a knowledge-sharing platform and digital safe space built for women and non-binary people

Sorry Dunkin’ but America’s not runnin’ on your coffee. It’s running on XaaS.

Same with the rest of the world. The global anything and Everything as a Service market is expected to grow from $419.02 billion in 2021 to $2,384.12 billion by 2028, according to Fortune Business Insights.

XaaS refers to the subscription-based business model of offering all sorts of products and tech over the internet, but we probably don’t have to tell you that. Harvard Business Review notes that over 84% of global smartphone users already know what it is. The pandemic increased our love of XaaS and there’s plenty to love as it speeds up progress on anything from sustainability to AI.

As techie nerds, we’re always eager to see which services startups are tackling now, and we thought you would be too. Here are 10 unique problems being tackled by XaaS:

• Snippyly and Liveblocks help devs build real-time multiplayer experiences into their software
• Identance, Persona, and Passbase simplify the complicated process of identity verification
• Terra connects users' wearables and sensor data to apps with an API or widget
• Convoy built an open-source webhooks service to combat fragmented implementations
• Duffel Payments helps travel companies sell flights from their products
• Nyckel and anon let companies integrate machine learning without ML experts
• Climatiq makes it easy for companies to calculate their carbon emissions
• Subspace introduced low-latency, real-time internet for verticals (like gaming) that need fast speeds
• Angle Audio helps makers add audio rooms into their product with ease
• Asserto lets devs add authorization capabilities in a fraction of the time it would take to build it by hand

What happens when a brain researcher who specializes in the rehabilitation of athletes makes an app? A lot of celebrity endorsements will follow.

At least that’s the case for Nuro by Nurosene. If you have already heard of the app, founded in 2019 by neurologist Daniel Gallucci, it may be because of headlines around Michael Phelps (Olympic swimmer) and Richard Sherman (NFL star) joining the advisory council or Joe Jonas investing in the app. There’s are other big names associated as well but what they all have in common is the impetus to speak out about mental health.

Nuro provides a science-based, self-guided platform for better brain health. “Our app was designed by a team of neurological experts that have been using these methods in clinic with elite athletes for decades,” explained Nurosene Product Manager, Jamie Hackett, with today’s launch.

According to the company’s investor information page, Nurosene agreed to acquire NetraMark, a Canadian AI and ML startup that provides learning solutions to biotech companies. The goal is to digitize the experience of seeing a functional neurologist.

One of the most interesting features is a Virtual Neural Scan described as a non-invasive, personalized tool to strengthen your brain basics. It starts with a series of tasks to assess four neural networks (a collection of synapses that fire across the human brain and create meaning) — cognitive flexibility, working memory, long-term memory, and adaptability.

“...[T]he brain is a self-organized series of neurological networks… Your score is a PROXY for what we think certain networks of the brain may be doing, what they may excel at, or not. This is very much ACTIVE data as you progress…” the site explains.

The assessment of these four neural networks serves as the basis for personalizing your experience. The result is Daily Brain Flow exercises, designed to stimulate and optimize the dynamic nature of your brain and improve your mental performance.

Though we may not know what it’s like to compete in the Olympics, we’ve all been through something in the last few years. Would you try Nuro to boost your mental health? Why or why not?

When times get tough, it’s easy to get nostalgic for older, simpler days. Or at least for the things that brought us joy back then.

Every once in a while, we get a new product that resurfaces a sound, smell, or visual that heads straight for the hippocampus. The best ones do all three.

We’re highlighting 10+ new products this Throwback Thursday to reminisce while appreciating how far we've come.

MD Vinyl: Watch the records spin with an iPhone widget that pairs with Apple Music
iPod Classic Player: Vinyl too old? *Click click click* Off to the naughties
My 2000s TV: Flip through Bob Barker, music videos, and the static
Nokia 6310: It doesn’t have Super Retina XDR but Snake still never looked better
HomeMovie: Pass the camcorder around with your friends
Studio Clock: Inspired by 70s clocks, but still used for the most accurate time
Clippy JS Library: There was a time you wanted Clippy to go away — not today
Drag & Drop: Pass on nostalgia with 80s & 90s pixel illustrations for your projects
Vacation sunscreen: Want to smell like Summer of ‘86 in Summer of ’22?
Computer Museum: Re-explore computers like the Macintosh Plus. Here’s a floppy disk, if you need it.

Have more time to kill? Take ten minutes and dive into 70s lingo with Retrogram, go on a duck unicorn hunt like in the 80s, or revisit prehistoric Google times with DinoJump. Then we’ll send you back to the future.

Game Jolt launched its mobile app on iOS and Android today. If you haven’t heard of Game Jolt yet, it’s a social platform “where gen z gamers are hanging out…” wrote Game Jolt’s Events Director, Guy 'Yug' Blomberg, in a tweet. He added: “I've learned more about how they interact and play games in the last 3 months than I did in the last 3 years.”

Game Jolt first launched eight years ago by husband-and-wife founders Yaprak and David DeCarmine. The two met while working at the e-comm retailer, Zulily, which they ultimately left when they decided to focus on Game Jolt full-time.

Now, Game Jolt is where millions go to get social around their favorite games, from indie titles to Pokémon. Gamers have started over 60,000 communities on Game Jolt, with the largest exceeding half a million people. Gen Z gamers particularly love how the platform supports their preferences for personalized and fun engagements.

“[G]amers are the ones that are creating the majority of the content out there. They love creating fan art of their favorite video game characters, they record videos of themselves playing games or playing with their friends. They write guides and review games that they’re playing so that they can have those meaningful discussions,” Yaprak DeCarmine told Venture Beat last autumn after the company closed a seed round of funding.

Though Game Jolt obviously has competition in the form of both newcomer communities and established ones like Discord and Twitch, the startup plans to continue fostering a vibrant and highly social community — “something like a TikTok for gamers.”

On today’s product launch page, Yaprak DeCarmine shared that the team worked closely with the Game Jolt community to build the new mobile app.

“Our team got to build alongside our community, which has been such a fun journey. Thank you for helping us beta test, [giving us] valuable feedback + also for inspiring us. Enjoy the Game Jolt Social app! 😘.”

The launch highlights features like “24/7 parties with your friends” in the form of chats, events, and streaming, and an Instagram-like discovery feed to help users find gaming art, videos, music, and eachother.

Finding a place to live doesn’t look like it used to.

For one thing, people are having a really tough time buying a home all over the world. Renting sucks, too. An extremely competitive market along with the pandemic has changed the way people find their homes. Then there are bullish metaverse investors dropping fat stacks on digital real estate, but that’s another story.

As the world changes, new startups look for ways to open doors to forever and temporary homes.

Home Ownership
DwellWell: When Matthew Canzoneri set out to move from daydreaming on Zillow to taking action on buying a home, he found the process was difficult with information scattered, biased, or generalized. He and Sam Carow set out to make the home buying process seamless. DwellWell offers a guided experience with education, decision-making tools, and connections to experts to help you buy a home.

Realm: Once a buyer closes on their home, they’re left to make it on their own, too. As Liz Young points out, “from the day you buy a home… you’re faced with a series of expensive and confusing decisions: how much to spend on renovations, when to refinance, which projects will increase home value, is it time to move?” Realm helps users navigate home-ownership by making sense of data, enabling you to make smarter decisions about how to invest in your home.

Renting
LeaseLeads: As web developers in the real-estate space, Dave Freund and his co-founders have seen how important in-person leasing is for converting apartment hunting leads to leases. LeaseLeads is a virtual leasing tool for multi-family property owners and operators. It offers virtual (bot-less) property tours, in-person tour scheduling, and ideal-floor plan matching for renters.

Split Lease: For renters seeking a secondary address, there’s Split Lease. An uptick in remote and hybrid work has led to more people seeking non-traditional lifestyles with bi-coastal living or workcations. Split Lease lets you rent certain days of the week each week, or weeks of the month each month. You only pay for the nights you need.

On the hunt now? Check out Relo, a tool to organize your apartment research in one place, and Playhouse, an actionable “TikTk for real estate.”