Hola, 

We're heading to our first annual team "Guac-Off," so let's get right to it.

Wreaking havoc
 

As the coronavirus spreads across the globe, multinational retailers are scrambling to adjust their supply chains. 

You'll get what the market demands
 

One of the most famous VC adages is "make something people want." Case in point? Lack of product-market fit was the top reason for failure, cited by 42% of the cases we analyzed. 

Check out the top 20 reasons that startups fail here.

David vs. Goliath

Latin American incumbent banks are ripe for disruption. 

Clients can take a look at our analysis of the LatAm banking market, tailwinds inviting fintech innovation, fintech investment trends, and more here.

Have a great rest of the week.

P.S. Yes, forget trust falls — guac contests are a team-building activity at CB Insights. If you like making guacamole with a happy, humble, helpful, and hungry team, apply here.

P.P.S. What's your secret guacamole ingredient? Tell us and we'll send some CB Insights swag to the person with our favorite answer when we share our own recipes.

• $7.1B: Intuit, maker of services like QuickBooks and TurboTax, is set to acquire San Francisco-based credit scoring unicorn Credit Karma for $7.1B — a 78% increase on Credit Karma’s most recent private-market valuation in 2018. The service has amassed over 100M users, making it one of the world’s most popular fintech platforms. Check out more fintech unicorns, which may also become acquisition targets, in our latest State Of Fintech report. 

• $856M: Singapore-based “super app” Grab raised $856M, bringing its total disclosed funding to almost $9.7B. The SoftBank Group-backed company, which offers a wide range of services beyond its core ride-hailing offering, said that the new funding would be used toward expanding its payments services. We look at how Asia-based internet giants are creating the playbook for fintech super apps in this report.
   
• 452 unicorns: App analysis platform HeadSpin raised $60M at a valuation of almost $1.2B, making the California-based startup the latest entrant to the global unicorn club. See all 452 current unicorns on our real-time tracker.
  

• 3,000 jobs: Travel giant Expedia said that it would cut 3,000 jobs — about 12% of its workforce. The company had earlier said that it was looking to make cost savings of up to $500M.   
   

• $3B: This weekend’s upcoming leap day — an additional day added to the end of February every 4 years to correct for the duration of Earth’s orbit around the sun — is expected to cause a minor boost to quarterly results around the world. Australia, for example, is projected to see over $3B added to Q1 results from the extra day, according to the chief economist of KPMG Australia. 
   

• $3.50 per month: Americans would only expect about $3.50 a month in exchange for letting social media platforms like Facebook sell their contact information, according to a study by the Technology Policy Institute. The researchers found that users from other countries in the study would want significantly more. For instance, German-based users would look for more than twice as much as those in the US. Broadly, companies are thinking about privacy more than they used to, with  mentions of the term on earnings calls increasing significantly in the last 2 years. 

• 11 feet: Earth has a “mini-moon” that entered our orbit about 3 years ago, according to astronomers at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory. The stray asteroid is dramatically smaller than our main moon — measuring only around 11 feet in diameter — and could leave Earth’s orbit in the next few months. 
  

Supermarkets are beginning to deploy robots to scan shelves and report spills, but there’s 1 problem: humans don’t trust them.

This leads to occasional bullying, such as when 1 shopper swung a full bag of groceries to hit “Marty,” the 6-foot-tall, 140-lb robot developed by Badger Technologies. 

The solution? Googly eyes and robot birthday parties. 

At these “Marty Parties,” some customers come bearing gifts ranging from WD-40 lubricant to handmade cards and poems.